[00:02:45] William Green: Brad is also a renowned coach to elite performers, including CEOs, entrepreneurs, and world class athletes, so he has a lot of practical, battle tested wisdom about how to operate successfully at the very highest levels. As you’ll hear in this conversation, Brad is extremely thoughtful about the kind of resilient, all weather mindset we need in order to adapt and thrive under any conditions.

[00:03:10] William Green: He talks in detail about the most effective habits and routines that can help us to thrive no matter what. And he makes a compelling case for maintaining a realistic yet hopeful attitude even in the most challenging circumstances, a mindset that the great psychologist and philosopher Viktor Frankl described as tragic optimism.

[00:03:30] William Green: I hope you find our conversation as helpful and grounding and empowering as I did. Thanks so much for joining us.

[00:03:42] Intro: You’re listening to the Richer, Wiser, Happier podcast, where your host, William Green, interviews the world’s greatest investors and explores how to win in markets and life.

[00:04:02] William Green: Hi folks, I’m absolutely delighted to be here today with our guest, Brad Stulberg. Brad is a leading expert on how to thrive amid change and disorder and disruption. He’s the author of two best selling books. First, The Practice of Groundedness, which I have here, which the subtitle is, A Transformative Path to Success That Feeds, Not Crushes Your Soul.

[00:04:23] William Green: And second, a more recent book, which is also excellent, which is called Master of Change, and the subtitle is How to Excel When Everything is Changing, including you. So, in many ways, this is a practical guide on how to excel in a world of disruption, and we’re seeing this on every side. Also, Brad is a coach.

[00:04:44] William Green: He works with high performers, including top executives, entrepreneurs, physicians, athletes, and the like. And it’s lovely to have you here, Brad. I’m really delighted to see you today.

[00:04:53] Brad Stulberg: It’s an honor to be here, William.

[00:04:55] William Green: We’re going to talk a lot about how to thrive amid change and disorder and uncertainty.

[00:05:01] William Green: And I wanted to start by asking you about your own experience of change in the last decade. Basically, I know that you’ve had a number of experiences that led you to see that change and disorder, as you write, not the exceptions, they’re the rules. What happened in the last few years before this book came out that in a way prepared you for this insight that really all of us are gonna have to learn to adapt to change because it’s not a glitch in the system it’s here to stay.

[00:05:30] Brad Stulberg: Yeah, so a multitude of factors. I think converged that led me to this question of Change in general or at least this topic of change to explore in my personal life. I left a very secure job and where I was on staff as a performance coach at one of the largest healthcare systems in the world to develop my own private practice in coaching and spend more time writing.

[00:05:54] Brad Stulberg: That coincided with a move across the country from the San Francisco Bay Area to Asheville, North Carolina. So from a major population center to a much smaller mountain town. I became a father for the first time and then again for the second time. I had a book become an international bestseller. For And I also had some writing projects that I was very hopeful for completely fail.

[00:06:18] Brad Stulberg: And then I experienced an injury that took me out of endurance sports, particularly running and triathlon that had been a very large part of my identity and how I saw myself. A condition in my calf really led to a very early premature retirement from all competitive endurance sports. And then of course, there were the societal changes, some of which are rather unique to being an American.

[00:06:43] Brad Stulberg: There’s the geopolitical shift, the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Then there’s the Corona 19 virus and pandemic. So I was living through all of these personal changes. Then these societal changes. And I shared my experience with colleagues, friends, neighbors, other folks in the community, and the first thing I got was a whole lot of empathy.

[00:07:07] Brad Stulberg: It wasn’t just me. So many people feel like the pace of change has really accelerated both in personal and professional and societally. I’m sure we’ll get into it. I have some hypotheses as for why people feel that way. But ultimately, I am someone that doesn’t really like change. I thrive when things are stable, and one of the first things that I learned in my research is that it’s not just me.

[00:07:28] Brad Stulberg: All living organisms thrive when we have stability. The second thing that I learned in my research is that the average adult goes through more than 35 major life changes. So there’s a paradox there, that we tend to feel our best when there’s stability, yet none of us really have stability. very much lasting stability in our life at all.

[00:07:45] Brad Stulberg: And I felt very much stuck between extremes of trying to deny and resist change and cling to stability, which just seemed to lead to restlessness and angst, versus completely throwing one’s hands up and saying, I’m just going to go with the flow and completely surrender, which isn’t really in my nature and is not in the nature of so many people.

[00:08:02] Brad Stulberg: And that really led me into this exploration of why we conceive of change the way that we do, how we got here, and might there be better tools and better frameworks and mental models for thinking about navigating change.

[00:08:14] William Green: Early in 2021, you started grappling with this question when you were listening to people talking about COVID and saying, well, let’s hope that at some point we can get back to normal.

[00:08:25] William Green: And you started thinking about the implications of that change, and it led you to think about different models for navigating change, one of which was homeostasis, and one of which was a term that you tapped into, a term that you think is a better model for understanding change, which is allostasis. Can you talk us through that?

[00:08:45] William Green: Because it’s an important intellectual framework for understanding that we actually have to think about change differently.

[00:08:53] Brad Stulberg: Yeah, that’s right. And before I do that, I forgot another just huge significant change that I underwent in the last decade. And that is, throughout my childhood and early adulthood, and even into middle adulthood, I had always, like, very sound mental health, and around the age of 30, I suffered a very severe clinical depression that really came out of nowhere and made me quite sick for the better part of a year.

[00:09:18] Brad Stulberg: So that was another just huge disruption that I could have never, never imagined, and that’s within that same chapter preceding this book of all this change. So it really was the good, the bad, the ugly, but everything just felt like it was constantly in flux and constantly shifting. So, wanted to throw that in because I think that’s important.

[00:09:35] Brad Stulberg: So homeostasis versus allostasis, homeostasis, my sense is that many if not all listeners of the podcast will have heard of this term, and it traces itself all the way back to the early 1600s, so long before we had any sort of quote unquote science, and really just to the beginnings of empiricism.

[00:09:55] Brad Stulberg: Meaning people in the community would observe something, and then they’d observe it again, and then they’d develop a theory around it, right? This is what’s just starting to happen at this time period. And homeostasis is a term that describes what people saw when those in the late 1600s got ill. So, most people would have a body temperature of around 98.6. And then you get sick, and you spike a fever. So your body temperature raises. As an immune system marshals a response. And this is long before we had antibiotics or antivirals. So, you got sick, you had a fever. And what would happen back then is, some people would die, and their body temperature never returned to normal.

[00:10:37] Brad Stulberg: And other people, over time, their body temperature would return to normal, they’d fight off the infection and they’d be healthy. So homeostasis describes change as a pattern of order or stability, then disorder or instability, in this case a fever, and then it says that a healthy system gets back to order as quickly as it can.

[00:10:54] Brad Stulberg: So it’s order, disorder, back to order. And what started out truly to describe a fever, over the last 500 years, talk about a scope creep. It became the prevailing mental model and framework for all change. So not just for human biology, but for human psychology. Not just on the individual level, but on the organizational level.

[00:11:15] Brad Stulberg: And now, you can spend time on the internet and say, how do I change my financial habits? How do I change my health habits? How do I lose weight? And the first page of all those SEO hits is going to be something about fighting against homeostasis. Or fighting against the natural urge to stay the same or go back to order.

[00:11:32] Brad Stulberg: So, that had been the prevailing model of how people think about change. And baked into that model is that change is inherently bad. Right? Because we want to move from disorder back to where we were, and the goal then is to resist change to avoid it, or when we’re faced with change, to immediately get back to stability.

[00:11:49] Brad Stulberg: Now, about 20 years ago, a cohort of cutting edge interdisciplinary scientists, largely based out of the University of Pennsylvania, they had a little bit of an epiphany, which is essentially, homeostasis, well, it describes what happens when you have a fever. It’s actually not a very good fit model for thinking about most other changes that we undergo.

[00:12:11] Brad Stulberg: And they did this big analysis of, both at the individual level, but then also at the organizational level, and even at the species level, how those that endure in weather challenges, what’s their path? What’s the model that they follow? And what they found is, they found this allostatic response. They coined this term allostasis, which essentially says that when faced with change, a healthy living system moves from order to disorder to reorder. So it’s true that we crave stability, but that stability is always somewhere new. We don’t go back to where we were. And I think the etymology of these words really elegantly sums up the story. So homeostasis comes from the Latin root homo, which means same.

[00:12:56] Brad Stulberg: And then stasis, which means standing. So it argues that we achieve stability by staying the same, right? That’s the goal. Stay the same, achieve stability. Allostasis comes from the Latin root allo, which means change or variable. And then stasis, which again means standing. So allostasis says that we achieve stability through change.

[00:13:17] Brad Stulberg: And it has this elegant double meaning which is that, one, it’s possible to be stable through change, and two, the way to be stable through change is through change, is by changing, at least to some extent. And those two different models really become these mindsets that totally transform how you approach uncertainty, change, and instability, right?

[00:13:39] Brad Stulberg: Because in one model, it’s inherently a threat, and the goal is to get back to where you were. And in the other model, it is just the first rule of thermodynamics, that things move towards chaos and entropy. And that we’re always existing in systems that are changing, and the goal isn’t to be stable by resisting change, that’s a fool’s errand, the goal is to be stable through the process of change, through those cycles of order, disorder, reorder.

[00:14:04] William Green: I think, curiously, and you tap into this in your book, this is something that spiritual traditions understood in a way that maybe science often didn’t. So, so right, you mentioned Richard Rohr, the Christian theologian who talked about going from order to disorder to reorder. I mean, I have a chapter in my book, Richer, Wiser, Happier, titled, Everything Changes.

[00:14:26] William Green: It begins with a famous quote from Shunryu Suzuki, the author of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, who said that everything changes is the basic truth for each existence. No one can deny this truth and all the teaching of Buddhism is condensed within it. And one of the things that he then went on to say later in that book, which is a terrific book, is he said if we cannot accept this teaching that everything changes we cannot be in composure and I was very struck when I was working on my book that this whole theme of change runs massively through investing so you have someone like Howard Marx saying.

[00:14:58] William Green: Well, okay. So if everything is in constant flux, including the economy and markets and industries and companies and our own lives, then actually somehow I have to accommodate myself to the reality that things are changing. I can’t just be in denial. And so that’s actually really helped him to become a multi billionaire.

[00:15:15] William Green: And likewise, Bill Miller, who was the greatest mutual fund manager of his generation said to me at one point, 20 something years ago, the world changes. This is the biggest problem in markets. And so I think what’s curious is that this whole theme of change, which seems kind of abstract, has actually run through spirituality for thousands of years, and has also run through investing in business, because it’s just the incredibly shaky quicksand on which our lives and businesses are built.

[00:15:44] William Green: And investments are constructed. And so my sense is just we have to accommodate ourselves to this reality, whether we’re trying to construct as Howard Marks would say, an anti fragile life for an anti fragile portfolio. Sorry for that long soliloquy, but does that raise any thoughts from you, Brad?

[00:16:02] Brad Stulberg: Oh, it does.

[00:16:02] Brad Stulberg: So the first is I unsurprisingly tend to agree with you. I think that in between disorder and reorder, There are often many opportunities. So if you’re an investor, that could be an opportunity to beat the market. That could be an opportunity to be a little bit ahead of what’s already priced in on the coming reorder.

[00:16:25] Brad Stulberg: If you’re an athlete that is undergoing an injury, that could be an opportunity to reshape your game, or to make adjustments to come back a different player. If you are in a relationship, whether it’s a business partnership or romantic partnership, a period of disorder can be a time for growth in the relationship if you can come back together.

[00:16:42] Brad Stulberg: Having learned from the challenge and in our personal lives when we’re in the midst of disorder, even though it can feel extremely uncomfortable and at times even mortifying and painful, the research shows that when we get to the other side of these challenges, we tend to derive some meaning and some growth from them.

[00:16:58] Brad Stulberg: So I think that it’s just whether we like it or not. Everything changes, as you said, like impermanence is just a basic rule of every ancient wisdom tradition, and it is the first rule of physics. So whether you look at it from a scientific angle or a spiritual angle, you come to the same place. And impermanence works both ways.

[00:17:18] Brad Stulberg: Sometimes it’s a cause of real challenge and distress, and sometimes it’s a cause of wonderful things. It’s just the air that we breathe. The other thing that I would say that I think is really interesting and this is a theme that is in my first book, The Practice of Groundedness. So I come from a family of investors.

[00:17:37] Brad Stulberg: I don’t know if you know that about me. I kind of broke the mold and went off and became an author and a coach. So my grandfather was an investor. My father’s an investor. My cousin took over the practice and has been trying to get me to, I guess he stopped about 10 years ago trying to get me to work with him.

[00:17:52] Brad Stulberg: So, I grew up around finance, and the concept of regression to the mean has always stuck with me, and how in an allostatic system you are going through these cycles of order, disorder, reorder, and sometimes the entire curve shifts in ways that are very hard to predict, they’re impossible to predict. But generally, there’s some signal amidst all the variance as the system progresses and moves towards change.

[00:18:16] Brad Stulberg: And I think that’s important to keep in mind. So at the same time that everything is always changing, there’s some kind of base stability. And then there’s these generational events that perhaps shift the entire curve. And I think navigating life well and navigating markets well probably depends on holding these competing ideas at the same time.

[00:18:35] William Green: Yeah and I think that’s one thing you’re very good at in your books and that we’ll come to later is you have this ability to hold contradictory or conflicting ideas in some sort of dynamic tension so it’s often yes and rather than either or so we’ll get to that later but I guess this is one of the great themes of that chapter everything changes where I was writing about Howard Marks is that in some ways you’re in real trouble because the future is unknowable and everything is changing and yet we have to make decisions about the future but investors and parents and where we’re living or what job to take or anything like that and on the other hand is how it would point out.

[00:19:11] William Green: You can look at the cycles of the past and you can see that there are certain things that repeat like patterns of human greed or over excitement and irrational exuberance and so. There are things that repeat, and there are things that are totally new, and this is one of the things that makes investing so unbelievably difficult and complex, because it’s hard to tell, like, is this really a new paradigm, or is it just the same old thing?

[00:19:33] William Green: So, anyway, I wanted to ask you really in some depth, about the various tools that we can use to navigate change, because you’re so practical about analyzing, how we can do this and giving us practical methods for doing this, but first I wanted really to get you to define the idea, the concept that’s really at the heart of master of change, which is this term rugged flexibility.

[00:19:57] William Green: Can you define what you mean about it and explain why we need to be both rugged and flexible, why we need these two opposing capabilities so that we can navigate this very uncertain changing world in a deft and robust way.

[00:20:13] Brad Stulberg: So to be rugged is to be determined, durable, very robust, Nassim Taleb would say anti fragile.

[00:20:22] Brad Stulberg: And to be flexible is to be soft and supple and to bend easily without breaking. And on its face, these are two opposite terms, right? But in my reporting and research for this book, what I found is that those individuals that are able to withstand change and grow from change, they’re not rugged or flexible, they’re rugged and flexible.

[00:20:45] Brad Stulberg: So they would score very high on both of these traits. And then you zoom out and you look at the empirical change for which is by far of the greatest magnitude. And that’s how you and I got here today, William, it’s evolution, the survival of the fittest and selection of species. Essentially, what happens on a scale of the planet is you have cycles of order where there’s stability and then disorder.

[00:21:09] Brad Stulberg: So there’s climate change, there’s a meteor, something happens to an apex predator, and the whole ecosystem shifts into disorder, and then there’s reorder, right? It comes out different. And you look at species that have survived over time for the longest durations, and what evolutionary biologists find is that those species are rugged and flexible.

[00:21:29] Brad Stulberg: Those are my terms. And evolutionary biologists would say they’re highly complex. But what this means is that there are parts of the species that are so central and core to what they are. That if those parts changed, the species would no longer be recognizable, it would be a new species. But outside of those central features and those core parts, what I call the basis of ruggedness, if you’re not extremely flexible on everything else, then you’re also going to get selected out.

[00:21:55] Brad Stulberg: So if you have no ruggedness and it’s all flexibility, then there’s really no center of gravity, there’s no you, there’s no strength. But if you’re so rugged across the board that you can’t be adaptable and you can’t be flexible on anything else, then when there’s a big change or when something shifts, you’re going to get selected out.

[00:22:11] Brad Stulberg: Or at an individual level, you’re going to suffer from anxiety and neuroticism. So I’m not interested in studying evolution at the planetary scale, but I think that our personal evolution and our organizational evolution or the evolution of a family, it reorder, stability, instability, new stability. And the way to work through those cycles is to know what’s core and what makes you who you really are as a person or if it’s as an investor, your principles, your philosophy, your philosophy of the market, and not to budge on those things, right?

[00:22:43] Brad Stulberg: Those are your sources of ruggedness. Those are the hills to die on, and then to be willing to be flexible and to adapt and to change on everything else. So really getting really clear on what are your core values, what are your guiding principles, and then what is merely habit that you can be willing to change on.

[00:22:58] Brad Stulberg: And this holds true at the level of how you would navigate change in a certain domain of life. So, as an athlete that gets injured, as somebody whose kids are moving out of the house, as someone that’s approaching retirement. But it also holds true as you think about your life as a whole, and just how you age and how you grow over time.

[00:23:16] Brad Stulberg: This notion of rugged flexibility, and it really solved my personal problem. of needing a new way to think about change. As I mentioned at the start of the book, and as I mentioned at the start of this conversation, I personally struggle with change. But I’m also a realist. I pride myself on seeing things sometimes too clearly.

[00:23:33] Brad Stulberg: And I saw that, like, everything changes. But I didn’t like the idea of not having a center of gravity. And rugged flexibility for me is a construct that solves that, because it gives you permission to be rugged and to define yourself by something and to have a ground that you stand on, while at the same time asking yourself to practice massive flexibility around those core features.

[00:23:55] William Green: I want to talk in some depth with you about various practical tools and practices and strategies to develop rugged flexibility in our daily life. Because this is going to help our listeners a great deal as investors. As family people as people constructing a career in our approach to our health everything really and so i want to go through in some detail there is tools that you’ve written about not only in this latest book but also actually in your previous book and on your podcast you’ve talked about it and I’ll include a lot of these sources and resources in the show notes you mentioned core values a minute ago.

[00:24:33] William Green: Obviously, that’s really an important aspect of this is figuring out what you really stand for in the beginning. So that’s going to guide you. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of core values as a kind of north star to guide you through these challenges and changes and disruptions, and also then give us a sense of what actually is a smart process for establishing or clarifying what our values might be?

[00:24:59] Brad Stulberg: Core values are your guiding principles or the qualities to which you aspire. So these are the things that are most important to you. A few examples are health, creativity, compassion, strength, kindness, wisdom, intellect, rigor, integrity, spirituality, family, reason, so on and so forth. And a whole lot of psychology research shows is that when you have about anywhere from two to five core values, and when you’re acutely aware of what those are and also how to practice them, you tend to feel less stress when you are under threat or when there’s challenges or changes.

[00:25:44] Brad Stulberg: And you also tend to navigate change better because you have essentially a compass. You have your core values to help guide you. So, the value of knowing your core values is that when you’re faced with change and when it feels like everything around you is in flux and shifting and the ground that you’re standing on is swept out from under you, if you know your core values, you can ask yourself, what would the creative thing to do be here?

[00:26:05] Brad Stulberg: What would someone who values integrity do? What would someone who values wisdom do in this situation? And then those core values become a rudder to help guide you through the unknown. In terms of a process for deducing one’s core values, this lies at the heart of something called acceptance and commitment therapy, which was really developed in first to help individuals through depression.

[00:26:26] Brad Stulberg: But since then there’s been hundreds, even now thousands of studies showing that it’s a good model for human flourishing and well being beyond the absence of illness. And within acceptance and commitment therapy, the basis is very simple, which is see clearly and accept what’s happening, and then commit to acting in alignment with your core values.

[00:26:43] Brad Stulberg: Now, simple doesn’t mean easy, and the practice of this is quite challenging. So the first step is to determine one’s core values. In the book, I list a hundred example core values just to get folks started with brainstorming. But the method that I find works best is to group like terms. So go through a list, and maybe you have twenty terms.

[00:27:01] Brad Stulberg: Again, you want to get down to 3 to 5, even 2 to 5, and then you take those 20 terms and you start to put them in groups based on similarities. And what most people find is you’ve got somewhere between 2 to 6 groups that are pointing at a somewhat condensed theme, and then you want to find the right word that represents that theme, and then you want to define it in real concrete terms, because core values, they shouldn’t just be something.

[00:27:23] Brad Stulberg: It is on a poster at your office, or if it’s on a little sticky note on your mirror, they should have some teeth. You should be able to practice them. And that way, they become a basis for stability in your day to day life all the time. And particularly when things are changing, you can look back to your core values to help guide you into the unknown.

[00:27:40] Brad Stulberg: I think a story of this, that really brings this to life, is that of the tennis star Roger Federer, who’s known, obviously for his greatness in tennis, really for his greatness in sport, but also for his longevity. So, Federer played well into his late 30s, even early 40s. In a sport where prior to him, most people would peak and retire before they hit 32.

[00:28:01] Brad Stulberg: And Roger Federer, he came before LeBron James, before Tom Brady, before Serena Williams. He was really the first power sport athlete to redefine aging and longevity in sport. What a lot of people don’t know about Roger Federer, is that between the ages of 33 and 36, he didn’t win a single tournament. Not a single tournament.

[00:28:21] Brad Stulberg: So you look back at articles written about Federer during that time period, and everyone in the tennis community, all the critics, they said that the change that comes for every tennis player aging finally caught up to Roger. And it was time to retire. And just the fact that he made it to 33 being world class, right?

[00:28:39] Brad Stulberg: Like, 33, you’re a dinosaur in that sport. So, what did Federer do? For the first year and a half of his slump, he essentially followed a homeostasis model to change. He tried to get back to where he was. So he just kept beating his head against the wall and said, I’m the greatest player of all time. I still want to keep playing tennis. I think I can.

[00:28:57] Brad Stulberg: What happened? He repeatedly got injured and underperformed. And then, about a year and a half into this journey of underperformance and injury, he had this epiphany that essentially said he’s not the same player he was. He has aged. And Federer steps back and does something that is so hard for an athlete to do.

[00:29:13] Brad Stulberg: And he separates what his core values are, which for him in this context, competition, mastery, and the love of the game of tennis, from what’s habit. And for him, what habit was, was a Wilson racket, playing at the baseline, a two handed backhand, training seven days a week. So Federer says, I want to hold on to my core values.

[00:29:33] Brad Stulberg: Those are my sources of ruggedness. I want to keep playing tennis, I want to keep competing, and I want to keep moving down the path of mastery. But in order to do that, he realized he has to be flexible on everything else. So he completely reinvents his game. He learns a one handed backhand to take speed off the ball.

[00:29:49] Brad Stulberg: He starts playing at the net more, which has the effect of shortening points, so he doesn’t have to run back and forth on the baseline against the younger kids. He completely overhauls his training schedule to allow more time for rest and recovery. And then he even changes his racket, right? So he had used the same racket since he’s 15.

[00:30:05] Brad Stulberg: Made him the greatest tennis player ever at the time. And he adopts a new racket that has brand new technology that all the younger kids are using. And the result of this is at age 37, he has the best winning percentage of his career. He wins two major championships. He reclaims a top three ranking in the world.

[00:30:21] Brad Stulberg: And then he continues to play well until he hits 40. So to me, that’s this beautiful example of knowing your core values, your sources of ruggedness, the hills you’re going to die on, using them to help determine your next moves during change, but then being very flexible on everything else. And when I was writing the book, I looked at tape of Federer playing when he was 26, and then again when he was 38, and on the one hand, he’s the same Roger Federer.

[00:30:45] Brad Stulberg: And on the other hand, he’s completely different, and I think that that’s what rugged flexibility is all about. Over time, you are the same William as you were 20 years ago, but you’re also very different. And that gets to kind of the intellectual question at the heart of the book in those wisdom traditions is, what does it mean to have a sense of self when our very senses of selves are always changing?

[00:31:03] Brad Stulberg: And I think it can make a rational Western brain explode, but the answer is both and I’m both the same and I’m different. And Federer is someone that used those core values, that source of ruggedness, to navigate the unknown and to ultimately lead himself to a reorder that worked in service of his core values.

[00:31:20] William Green: And one of the practices or tricks that you talk about in the conclusion of The Master of Change is actually developing a fluid sense of self. It’s clearly related to what you were just talking about with Federer. Can you expand a little bit on that? And I know that it had a lot also to do with what happened to you when you had an injury and had to stop playing a sport that had obviously been a huge part of your identity.

[00:31:46] William Green: Can you give us a sense of why having a fluid sense of self, a, what it is, and b, why it would actually be helpful in enabling us to adapt to change?

[00:31:57] Brad Stulberg: A fluid sense of self essentially asks you to view your identity not as something that is completely static, but not as something that is completely amorphous either.

[00:32:08] Brad Stulberg: Rather, to create an identity around your values. And define those values at a fairly broad level and then be willing to shift within that structure. So that’s very conceptual. For example, I, for a long time, had defined myself as a runner. That was a central part of my identity. Then I had this injury and I could no longer run.

[00:32:28] Brad Stulberg: And I had orthopedic surgery. I mean, I went to Wyoming for this special treatment. After the normal treatment failed, I gave it my all and it didn’t work. What I’ve learned is that my value isn’t actually running. What I liked about running was having objective goals that I could chase, and community. And I also liked using my body and challenging myself.

[00:32:49] Brad Stulberg: But that’s not running, that’s mastery, that’s community, and that’s being an athlete. And if I could define my identity as someone that values mastery and athleticism and community, then losing running is not a loss of identity. It’s a shift in how I express that part of my identity, but it doesn’t feel like a loss of who I am.

[00:33:08] Brad Stulberg: So when I see people and I hear people identify very closely with a specific activity, I urge them to think about, is it really the activity that is core to who you are, or is it something that is maybe a layer or two deeper? This very much relates to a framework in the book that was first developed by the humanist philosopher Eric Fromm, having versus being.

[00:33:30] Brad Stulberg: And having is when you define yourself by what you have. So I have this skill set, I have this income, I have this house, I have this child, I have this relationship. And what Fromm points out is that well everything that you have is going to change, and at some point it will probably be taken away. So if you define yourself by what you have, it’s a very precarious way to construct an identity.

[00:33:51] Brad Stulberg: Whereas, if you define yourself by who you are, or what he called your being orientation, what I call your core values, no one can take those away from you. And a common question that I get, listeners might have, is, well, what if your core values change? That’s totally normal, but even then, it’s your old core values that lead you to your new ones.

[00:34:09] Brad Stulberg: And your sense of self and your sense of identity, it becomes more fluid. It almost becomes like this evolving process over time versus this static thing that you’re always trying to protect or hold on to. Another framework in the book that so many professionals in particular have found really helpful around identity is this notion of diversifying your sense of self.

[00:34:29] Brad Stulberg: So in investing, my limited understanding is that it’s a pretty foundational rule is that barring very interesting circumstances, you generally want to diversify your portfolio to at least some degree. And the reason for that is if all your assets are in one class and something unforeseen happens to that asset class, you’re SOL, you’re in for it, you’re in big trouble.

[00:34:48] Brad Stulberg: Yet with our identities, so often, we throw our entire sense of self into one asset class. And that can be the investor, the parent, the athlete, the leader of a company. And if there’s a change in that area of our life, especially if it’s a negative one, it can feel like an attack on our entire sense of self.

[00:35:06] Brad Stulberg: And if that’s the only way that we define ourself, then we’re in for trouble, right? So much like we diversify our investment holdings, I argue in the book, it’s actually good to diversify your sense of identity a little bit. To have multiple sources of meaning in one’s life, so that if you take a hit in one area of your identity, you can lean on the others for strength.

[00:35:28] William Green: Yeah, this is such an important idea, and I, I mean, to give you a couple of very, listeners, a couple of very real world examples. In the epilogue of my book, I write about this great investor, Jason Karp, who had been this unbelievably successful hedge fund guy. He’d started out working for Steve Cohen and had just like ridiculously good results and then ended up running his own hedge fund, had the fastest ever startup of any hedge fund.

[00:35:52] William Green: And then things started to go badly. And I remember interviewing him at the time. And he said to me, I didn’t really know what to do when this started to go wrong because I’d never failed at anything. And his whole identity suddenly was in turmoil, and what’s kind of amazing about Jason, who I’ve interviewed on the podcast, is he managed to reorient his whole life and reinvent himself in a kind of spectacular way.

[00:36:17] William Green: But I’ve seen that kind of disintegration, also actually in my own life. I was editing the European, Middle Eastern, and African editions of Time Magazine. And then got laid off in the middle of the financial crisis and suddenly you’re like, wait a second, I’ve been working 70, 80 hours a week at this thing I’m really good at and now it’s gone.

[00:36:35] William Green: And instead of getting to interview presidents and prime ministers, you’re like, well, actually, so what am I now? And so having actually to be like, well, I’m a father and a husband and a writer and all of these, it’s really hard, that kind of dissolution of the ground on which you stand. So I think this idea of actually finding, a, having, as you put it, a fluid sense of self, but b, diversifying where you’re going to get your meaning from is really important.

[00:37:01] William Green: A metaphor that I like to use is to think of identity like a house. So if you have a house and it only has one room in it, and that one room catches fire or floods, you’re screwed. It’s going to be very discombobulating. You’re going to have to move out of the house altogether. Whereas, if you have a house and it has multiple rooms in it, and one room catches fire or floods, you can go into the other rooms to seek refuge while you figure out the fire or flood.

[00:37:26] Brad Stulberg: And, if we think about our identities the same way, we can have multiple rooms in our identity house. There can be the investor room, the spouse room, the parent room, the community member room, the athlete room, the book lover room, the travel room. Infinite options. It’s just so important that we have more than one room, because at some point or another, all the rooms are going to experience turmoil.

[00:37:48] Brad Stulberg: But odds are they’re not all going to experience turmoil at the same time. So then you get to seek refuge in these other places within your identity house. And a couple of things to be really explicit about, I don’t argue for balance. I’m not saying that the room should be the same size. I’m not saying that you should spend the same amount of time in every room.

[00:38:05] Brad Stulberg: I actually think that it’s very good to prioritize and to say these are the rooms that for this season of life I want to be all in on and spend a disproportionate share in those rooms. I just don’t think that you should let any rooms that are core to who you are get moldy because you never know when you’re going to need them.

[00:38:21] Brad Stulberg: The second thing that I would say about this metaphor is that, and I alluded to this, when I’ve interviewed people that are towards the end of their careers or that have retired and that have done really well and also have been highly fulfilled and satisfied. It’s not only their career, but their life and they’ve done it the right way.

[00:38:39] Brad Stulberg: So they’re not athletes that have doped. They haven’t engaged in fraud. They’ve really had good integrity on their path to success. What I find is that if you zoom in at any one juncture of their life, they look very unbalanced. But if you zoom out and look across their whole life. They look quite balanced.

[00:38:58] Brad Stulberg: So they have different seasons for different emphases in their life, and what they’re good at is they just never let the important rooms get moldy. So maybe there’s a season where you’re going all in on your career, but that marriage room is still really important. You can’t let it get moldy. Doesn’t mean that you have to emphasize it all the time, but you’ve got to figure out what’s the minimum effective dose to maintain that room so that when the season of my life shifts, it’s still there for me.

[00:39:24] Brad Stulberg: I haven’t let it go to crap. So I just can’t emphasize enough how important it is to define the rooms in your identity house to be really clear about what ones you’re emphasizing and why and just to make sure that you never completely ignore any other important ones.

[00:39:38] William Green: I think there’s such an important idea because I look at so many of the great investors who’ve ended up divorced or with kids who don’t talk to them.

[00:39:46] William Green: And I don’t know, I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who’s in a very high powered, very intense job and he’s just let us help. Just fall apart because he doesn’t want to neglect his kids. It doesn’t want to neglect his spouse, and he’s got unbelievable responsibility and deadlines at work.

[00:40:03] William Green: So he’s just wrecked his body. So yeah, this idea really resonates for me pretty deeply. I wanted to move us to another really important tool or practice or in this case a mindset, which you describe as a crucial life skill, which is the mindset of tragic optimism. Can you talk about this idea that originally comes from Viktor Frankl and this famous essay of his, The Case for Tragic Optimism, because I think it’s very distinctive also to your way of viewing life and the universe.

[00:40:32] Brad Stulberg: I’m so glad you asked. Frankl is most known for his book Man’s Search for Meaning, which he wrote most of it he composed in his mind while he was in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. And then he survives the holocaust, so many of his family members and friends are murdered by the Nazis, and he comes out and he publishes this work called Man’s Search for Meaning.

[00:40:54] Brad Stulberg: The first half of which is his memoir, I’d say, or close to memoir, and in the second half he really develops what becomes existential psychotherapy. So it’s this groundbreaking work, and any psychology major in university has read this book. But then he puts out this much lesser known essay later on called The Case for Tragic Optimism.

[00:41:12] Brad Stulberg: And in it, Frankl argues that to be a human is to live a very tragic life. And he says that there’s no way around this. It’s inevitable. Even the greatest human life has tragedy. And he defines these three tragedies that everyone faces. The first is physical pain. Because we’re made of flesh and bone.

[00:41:30] Brad Stulberg: Nobody gets out of life without experiencing physical pain. The second is heartbreak and disappointment. And that is because we have these big prefrontal cortices in our brains that allow us to make all these wonderful plans. And sometimes the plans don’t work out, and we’re frustrated. And then the third tragedy is that, as far as we know, we’re the only species that’s keenly aware of our own mortality.

[00:41:52] Brad Stulberg: So that we are going to die, and everyone we love is going to die. And Frankel says there’s no reason to bury our head in the sand, or to deny these. We have to accept that these are the tragedies inherent to being a human being. And yet, and yet, the work of a mature adult is to understand these tragedies and to maintain optimism and hope, not in spite of those tragedies, but almost because of them.

[00:42:16] Brad Stulberg: Because we know that life is going to be full of tragedy, we have a responsibility to ourselves to maintain optimism and hope and to find joy too. And it doesn’t have to be this or that. It doesn’t have to be happy or sad, tragedy or optimism. It can be tragic optimism. We can accept the suffering in ourselves and in the world, while at the same time maintaining hope for ourselves and hope for the world.

[00:42:40] Brad Stulberg: And I just think that, though Frankl first wrote about this in the 1970s, it could not be more prescient and more timely now. I see it all the time. You log on to any part of the internet, and it’s not long before you have these two extremes. One extreme I’m going to call the toxic positivity or the Pollyanna extreme, which is everything’s great.

[00:43:02] Brad Stulberg: Don’t bother me. You know, I figured it out. I don’t want to hear about your problems. Life is good. Why are you possibly complaining? There’s never been a better time to be a human. And the other extreme is what I’m going to call the nihilism or despair extreme, which says that everything is broken.

[00:43:17] Brad Stulberg: Society’s unraveling. All these systems and structures are so backwards that what can me, little individual, do? And then you just fall into despair and nihilism. On its face, these are polar opposites. But, when you think about it, they actually have one thing in common, which is, in a way, they’re kind of easy to adopt as mindsets, because they absolve you of needing to do anything.

[00:43:39] Brad Stulberg: So if everything is great always, and you don’t want to hear about any of the world’s problems, well then, there’s nothing to work on. There’s nothing to make better. If everything is so terrible, and so broken, and so structurally broken, that anything you do is pointless, well then why would you act? So both toxic positivity and nihilism or despair, they absolve you of any responsibility to take action.

[00:44:00] Brad Stulberg: And what Frankl would say, and what I argue, is that it is our job, and they’re very seductive these extremes, but it is our job not to fall into one of those extremes, and to hold our ground in the middle. And really embrace tragic optimism to realize that there is a lot that’s broken about the world and there is a lot that needs improvement and there is a lot that feels so overwhelming.

[00:44:20] Brad Stulberg: And if we can maintain hope, we do have some agency to make our lives better and to make the world better. And so often you see extremes, you know, pull yourself up by the bootstraps. It’s all personal responsibility versus everything structural. And all that matters is what zip code you’re born into in any reasonable person will tell you it’s both of those things matter.

[00:44:38] Brad Stulberg: Both accountability and personal responsibility and individual behavior is very important. And what zip code you’re born into is very important. And I just think that there’s such a lack of nuance and extreme, especially on the internet, but really it’s pervaded so much of the discourse in the Western world.

[00:44:55] Brad Stulberg: Where it feels like you have to choose into these extremes when reality is messy and somewhere in the middle and I think tragic optimism is just such a wonderful concept for embracing that messiness and for being a realist without falling into despair.

[00:45:10] Brad Stulberg: There’s a beautiful line that you quote in the master of change that’s from an interview that Bruce Springsteen did when he was 71 with the Atlantic where he talked about the heart of wisdom.

[00:45:20] Brad Stulberg: Amounting to learning, quote, to accept the world on its terms without giving up the belief that you can change the world. That’s a successful adulthood. The maturation of your thought process and very soul to the point where you understand the limits of life without giving up on its possibilities. It’s a wonderful insight and I remember actually years ago when I was living in London going to see Springsteen in a concert at Wembley Stadium and he came on so many times, I mean for so many encores, I think it must have lasted the best part of four hours.

[00:45:47] Brad Stulberg: And the highlight for me was, I guess it was the wrecking ball tour. And there was this moment where you see this aging guy with this broken body and this raspy voice, basically singing, give me your best shot. And you just had this defiant sense of this guy. Who accepted the fact that he was that he had a lousy childhood that his body was break down his voice is breaking down that he was in pain but there was something kind of triumphant and exultant about the fact that he just kept coming back amid the pain so I think he kind of embodies that spirit actually of tragic optimism.

[00:46:20] Brad Stulberg: Oh, 100%. Another way to think about it in simple terms is like, you can’t fix a broken world if you become a broken person. And to resign yourself to a broken world, in my opinion, is just one, it’s not very helpful and two, it doesn’t make for a great existence. And if you let that spiral, it can very quickly become depression.

[00:46:37] Brad Stulberg: So I think that tragic optimism is, again, it’s a way to live in between these extremes and to accept reality without spiraling. Another thing on Bruce Springsteen that’s really interesting is, so there’s a new singer songwriter and really kind of has become a pop star. His name is Zach Bryan. I think he’s only 25 and a half, maybe 26 years old.

[00:46:59] Brad Stulberg: And I think his music’s very catchy. But it’s not great, like, I don’t know, maybe I’m dating myself, he’s just kinda like, he hasn’t lived that much, whatever. But he’s selling out arenas, millions of downloads on Spotify, and it’d be very easy to see someone like Bruce Springsteen be a curmudgeon, and kinda say, I don’t know about this guy.

[00:47:18] Brad Stulberg: But Bruce Springsteen just did a collaboration with him. At 74 maybe? And I think, like, that also embodies this kind of tragic optimism, where you could sit there and complain about how the music industry, how everything’s gone to streaming, and how you have to look a certain way and be good on TikTok to be popular, right?

[00:47:36] Brad Stulberg: Zach Bryan got started by posting all these one minute videos of him playing. And it’d be so easy to fall into just, like, being grumpy and shunning that, but instead Springsteen goes and does a collab with him. And I think, like, that’s really cool, and I’m much younger than 74, and I look to that, and I hope that when I’m 74, I have that kind of open heart and open mind that Bruce Springsteen has.

[00:47:56] Brad Stulberg: Bill Walton, recently passed away. What an example of someone that lived with tragic optimism. So these examples are out there and they tend to be people that we all admire, yet it’s very hard to go through life with that sort of attitude.

[00:48:10] William Green: Another practice that you talk about that’s very important that I want to break down a little bit is you talk about why it’s so helpful to lean on routines and rituals to provide stability during times of disorder.

[00:48:21] William Green: Can you talk a little bit about the importance of routines when we’re dealing with chaos because I write in my book there’s a chapter on habits of high performance and one of the things that’s very distinctive about the most successful investors is they’re obsessed with their habits, their routines.

[00:48:37] William Green: There’s a point in the book where I quote a friend of mine, Ken Schubin Stein, who was a very successful investor, who then became a neurologist, and he talks about how basically the four habits he keeps coming back to in times of chaos, basically exercise, sleep, good nutrition, and meditation, because it’s like those are the four that we know are great for cognitive health and cognitive function.

[00:48:59] William Green: You’ve thought very deeply about this whole area of routines and rituals. Talk us through this, how we should think about routines, what are the best routines that we should start to adopt, and also your philosophy of being quite dismissive of the movement towards optimization, which we’re seeing with everyone from Huberman to Peter Attia, and you’re gonna be too polite to name names, so I’m naming them for you.

[00:49:25] Brad Stulberg: All right, this is a loaded question and a good question. So, first off, I love your friends for categories. The only one that I would consider adding, and my guess is he or she would agree with me, is the importance of community, in making, gathering with people that matter to you, whether that’s your family, colleagues, friends, a cornerstone of your routines.

[00:49:43] Brad Stulberg: All right, so square one, why are routines important? A little bit of neuroscience. Our brains are predictive. They are always trying to predict what’s going to happen next. And for very good reason. There’s so much stimulus in the world. Our brains couldn’t think a step or two ahead. We would never make our way through the day.

[00:50:00] Brad Stulberg: I mean, imagine if we’re having this conversation and I’m predicting that you’re going to listen and then respond. But if my brain couldn’t do that, and my brain wasn’t sure if you were going to hang up the call, if there was going to be an asteroid through the window, if you were going to save it the interviews going terrible, like, it would never work.

[00:50:15] Brad Stulberg: So, even when we don’t realize it, our brains are making predictions about what’s going to happen next. And in times of change, in uncertainty and chaos, it becomes very hard to predict what’s going to happen next. What a routine allows us to do is allows us to carve out this one or two or three areas of our life, however many components we have of our routine, where we can make a prediction, I’m going to go for a run in the morning, I’m going to make my afternoon coffee at two, I’m going to sit down and pray or meditate or read or journal in the evening.

[00:50:44] Brad Stulberg: That has a very high likelihood of coming true. And that is so satisfying for our brain. At a neurochemical level, to make a prediction and to have it come true. It’s a part of our life that we have some control over. So that is the number one important value of a routine. Now, what that means is, what the routines are don’t matter as much as the fact that we have them.

[00:51:07] Brad Stulberg: Right? For you it might be listening to ACDC, for me it might be meditating to the heart of the Buddha’s teaching. It doesn’t matter. As long as you have that thing and you do it at the same time, and your brain starts to associate that thing with a sense of control and predictability in your life, then it’s good.

[00:51:21] Brad Stulberg: It works. There are a few caveats, and I’m going to go very closely to what your friend that became the neurologist said. We do know, based on decades of science, that there are a few somewhat universal elements that can become routines that are helpful for just about everybody that tries or applies them.

[00:51:38] Brad Stulberg: And, first and foremost, exercise. Physical activity is the number one modified behavior for both physical health, mental health, and cognitive health. Number two would be community, some sort of social life, a social gathering that’s ritualized. Again, that can be a family dinner, that can be going to church or synagogue, that can be getting together with friends to play poker once a month.

[00:52:01] Brad Stulberg: Doesn’t matter what it is, but something that you can look forward to that happens on a regular interval that involves other people. Our species evolved in tribes, we’re a very social species. That’s what allowed us to survive predators like lions, is that a bunch of humans are smarter than one lion, or a tribe of lions, or a pack of lions, I should say.

[00:52:19] Brad Stulberg: So it’s very much in our hardwiring during times of challenge to gravitate towards community. Sleep is really important. However, there’s a lot of nonsense out there about sleep. So if you take these supplements, if you track your heart rate variability. There’s some guy out there that’s now tracking the strength of his erections during his sleep.

[00:52:36] Brad Stulberg: It’s a sign of his health. His name is Brian Johnson. I’m happy naming his name because I think he’s out of, like, insane. But a lot of people like him, and you can disagree. However, the research shows that the more that we worry about sleep, the harder it is to sleep. So, if you turn sleep into something to excel at. Then what is supposed to be the most restful, restorative part of your day sleeping now becomes something to win at or a metric to chase?

[00:53:01] Brad Stulberg: Well, of course it’s going to be harder to sleep. So I think that sleep is the byproduct of irregular physical activity throughout your day of making sure that you’re not lonely, because we know that people who feel isolated and lonely, they don’t sleep well. And then I would add, nutrition is really important.

[00:53:18] Brad Stulberg: But there, there’s all these different diets and it’s really just about avoiding highly processed foods. I want to loop back because I know you have a very heady, intellectual audience. People might say like, what’s Brad talking about? Social isolation and sleep. Right, because I didn’t say like you need to take your magnesium to sleep better.

[00:53:33] Brad Stulberg: I said, if you’re feeling lonely, that could be driving poor sleep. And the reason for this is fascinating because again, we evolved in tribes. So early, early on in our species history, right? When we’re turning from these hairy primates that look closer to a gorilla or an ape to what we now view as a human.

[00:53:49] Brad Stulberg: If you were alone. You can never fall asleep because you could be picked off by a mountain lion or by a predator, right? Literally, if you lost the tribe and fell asleep on the savannah, you’re dead. You wouldn’t survive long enough to pass on your DNA. But if you were in a tribe, and you had strength in numbers, well then you could rest and you could sleep because you knew that you weren’t alone and isolated.

[00:54:10] Brad Stulberg: And that still carries forth to today. The number one. The reason that social isolation is so detrimental to our health is because it raises our blood pressure and causes poor sleep. Isn’t that fascinating? But it makes total sense. Because if you’re alone, you’re anxious, and you always are on guard.

[00:54:24] Brad Stulberg: You’re always on the lookout so you don’t sleep well. So, for me, the big two are movement and community, and then I would put nutrition. And yeah, I think a lot of the other stuff around routine is very highly individualized. And I think anyone that tells you that there’s this one supplement or this one breathing exercise or this one way to do something to have a routine that helps performance, I’d almost bet my bottom dollar that they’re selling that one thing.

[00:54:47] William Green: I wrote a length in my book about simplicity and the simplicity, really the sophistication that goes, when you’re basically so, you understand a topic so deeply that you can simplify and distill it down to its essence. I actually, I had done a lot of work as a ghostwriter and editor on a book about longevity and the like, which had been a number one bestseller a few years ago.

[00:55:11] William Green: Not that I’m a paragon of good health or anything, but I’ve done a lot of reporting on this, and one of the things that really deeply resonated for me that I quoted in a footnote of my book was something where Dean Ornish, the father of lifestyle medicine, was talking to me about what he’d figured out from 40 years of research into everything that worked to reverse heart disease and diabetes and all of these things, and he said, really, I can sum it up in eight words, and he said, eat well, move more, stress less, love more.

[00:55:40] William Green: And really if you want, yeah, it’s an amazing sentence. If you unpack each of those things, really, it’s eat well is more about, you know, having more green stuff, more vegetables and the like move more. As you say, you know, in a lot of your writing, you talk about just moving 30 to 45 minutes a day in any way that you’ll do consistently doesn’t really matter that much stress less.

[00:55:59] William Green: So anything from breathing techniques to meditation, meditation, meditation. And love more which is the importance of community and so I just thought that was a beautiful example of the reduction of this incredibly complex subject to something that was essential and true you’ve written a lot on your website and on your blog and talked about on your podcast about.

[00:56:19] William Green: The bizarre things that people do to kind of sell us on great complexity and it’s complicated because our audience these are high performers we want to perform at the top level but you point out you know that all of these things like you know jocko willink and human sort of saying we should do this factory reset by you know having hot saunas and then cold and then hot saunas again and cold and doing it again and again, or, you know, Huberman talking about getting lots of morning sunlight, or selling AG1 and measuring our VO2 max, as Peter Attia would talk about, or wearing the aura ring, or the whoop strap, or a continuous glucose monitor, or light blocking glasses, or whatever.

[00:56:56] William Green: It’s interesting, and it’s saleable, and I think if you’re an incredible top performer, maybe some of this stuff is valuable, but I think it’s so, I don’t know, I bought a lot of these things while I was reporting that book. And I don’t use any of them anymore. The only thing I think I continued to use was this really weird gadget that you strap onto your arm.

[00:57:19] William Green: What was it called? It’s called an Apollo Neuro that vibrates. And it was developed, I think, at the University of Pittsburgh for people with post traumatic stress disorder. And for some reason, I find it unbelievably soothing, and when I lost it for several months or it didn’t work for several months, I remember finding it again and putting it on and just, I almost like burst out crying, I was so happy that I had it back on, it was like finding an old friend again.

[00:57:39] William Green: So if all of those things that I used, you know, I have masses of AG1 sitting in my fridge, untouched, I don’t know, my aura ring sitting beside the bed, unused, and I, I don’t mean to insult anyone, but I think this gets at something really important, do you have any thoughts about what I just said?

[00:57:54] Brad Stulberg: I do. So it’s funny timing. I just had an op ed published in the New York Times, the Sunday Times, on this very topic. And I’m going to quote from it. I say that over the last decade, I’ve studied excellence and I’ve worked with some of the world’s best performers in the process. And this is true.

[00:58:11] Brad Stulberg: I’ve worked with Ironman world champion, NBA dynasty teams, really the best of the best when it comes to performance. And what makes a professional athlete or an Olympian great, it’s not waking up at 5am to cold plunge and gaze at the sun. I mean, none of them do it. I’ve never worked with an elite performer that’s worried about a morning cold plunge and low angle sunlight, not one.

[00:58:33] Brad Stulberg: But what they all have in common is a relentless focus on the fundamentals of their craft, executing those fundamentals with ruthless consistency for years. Adopting the right mindsets and surrounding themselves with the right people. And then having the right genetics is also really important. And that’s it.

[00:58:50] Brad Stulberg: So I think that actually when you look at the tippy top, no one is engaging in any of these kind of cockamamie health things, because they don’t have the time to do it. They’re focused on nailing the fundamentals. And I think what happens is I had a conversation about this with Morgan Housel, who I’m sure your audience knows of Psychology of Money and same as ever.

[00:59:08] Brad Stulberg: And then I talked to my cousin who I’m very close with, who I mentioned runs a very successful financial advisory practice. And I think that the trap that investors face is you don’t have time to sit around and evaluate these claims and you want to be on the cutting edge and you want to be a peak performer.

[00:59:22] Brad Stulberg: But what I say to them is it’s no different than all the cockamamie investment advice that goes around. And this stuff comes in cycles, and right now we’re in a health and longevity cycle. 15 years from now, we might be back in a cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme. Here’s 10 ways to beat the market in 10 days if you buy my online course schedule.

[00:59:42] Brad Stulberg: And because you have domain expertise, you can look at that and you can say, no, no, no. The way to become a great investor and to amass wealth is, I don’t know, because I’m not a great investor, but presumably there’s a set of fundamental principles that are rather boring and you have to adhere to them for a very long time.

[00:59:56] William Green: Yeah, for example, value a business and buy it for much less than it’s worth. You know, Joe Greenblatt has said to me, that’s the essence of all investing.

[01:00:04] Brad Stulberg: Move your body every day, love more, and avoid ultra processed foods. That’s it. But people don’t want to hear that because it seems too simple. And I think that it’s important to also note, in this health and longevity space, I mean, I’ve never met Andrew Huberman in person.

[01:00:18] Brad Stulberg: I’ve never met Peter Attia, so I can’t judge them.

[01:00:21] William Green: And they’re both brilliant. I don’t mean to knock them. I mean, they’re gifted people.

[01:00:24] Brad Stulberg: They’re very gifted communicators. And there is a kernel of truth to all of that. Like, getting outside early in the day, and getting natural light, is undoubtedly helpful for one’s circadian rhythm.

[01:00:36] Brad Stulberg: No one would argue that. However, the notion of low angle morning sunlight, it has to be a certain angle, and it has to be within 90 minutes of your waking up, that’s extrapolated from five studies that looked at mice. There’s no evidence that it makes a difference, especially if you’re stressing about it and you’re waking up earlier than you would in forfeiting sleep or if you’re forfeiting exercise.

[01:00:59] Brad Stulberg: Peter Attia and VO2max. VO2max, it’s great to have a good VO2max, of course, but how do you get a good VO2max? There’s no special program, you just move your body more, you exercise. So I think that what a lot of these communicators have done is they’ve latched onto these kind of complex scientific sounding terms that are proxies for very boring behaviors, and then people get very caught up in the science that sounds sexy and the bright and shiny objects in the new device, but at the end of the day, For health, again, it’s regular exercise, avoid ultra processed foods, the combination of those two things ought to result in a body weight that is not obese, because that’s what we’re talking about here, having community, not using tobacco products, and then if you’re going to drink, do so in moderation, and if you can’t drink in moderation, then abstaining altogether.

[01:01:49] Brad Stulberg: That’s it. Like, there’s nothing else really matters. Now if you want to be a great performer in a physical attribute, well then you have to pick your sport and you have to train for that sport. No different than how you develop mastery or domain expertise in anything. And the last thing I’ll say to loop back to something you said earlier, I couldn’t agree more.

[01:02:07] Brad Stulberg: The way that I like to think about mastery is you go from simple to complex, back to simple. So when you’re brand new to something, everything’s simple. How do you deadlift 600 pounds? Well, you take all this weight and you lift the bar up off the ground. And then, you get into complexity. There’s switch grip versus overhand grip.

[01:02:23] Brad Stulberg: There’s pushing into the ground versus pulling. There’s sumo versus conventional. There’s pause deadlifts that you can do in your training. Do you need bigger quads or do you need stronger hip flexors? And on and on and on. And you can spend six years just reading about moving a bar from the ground to your hips.

[01:02:38] Brad Stulberg: And then after those six years, how do you deadlift? You just pick the bar up. So it goes from simple to complex back to simple.

[01:02:45] William Green: Yeah, it’s very profound this idea and I write a lot about it in that chapter on simplicity and quote Josh Waitzkin who’s also a master of this idea. Taking it talks about the mastery of very simple techniques that usually it’s not something very complex that accounts for success. It’s the mastery of a very simple technique.

[01:03:03] William Green: So another thing just to change subject. That’s very important in terms of building this kind of rugged flexibility so that we can handle change and disorder well Is controlling our reaction to things, because as we know from stoic philosophy, we can’t control what happens to us always, but we can control how we respond.

[01:03:23] William Green: One of the things that you talk about that’s a very practical technique in Master of Change is what you call the four P’s technique. Can you explain how you use this technique in a way to become less reactive so that we’re not controlled what happens because this really affects us as investors. When the market’s getting hit and we are likely to do something stupid, or when we’re getting overexcited or when we’re in a fight with our kid or our spouse or whatever it is, I often think that these kind of, these hinge moments day or our week or our life really kind of define whether we are gonna be okay or not. How we handle these moments, that could go either way.

[01:04:04] Brad Stulberg: So we are programmed as a species, it’s our genetic inheritance to be very reactionary. And the reason for that is for over 99 percent of humankind, we didn’t live in a modern world of computers and email. We didn’t even live in civilized society, right?

[01:04:21] Brad Stulberg: We lived on the savannah. And there were snakes at our feet, and there were lions over the horizon. If you see a snake or a lion, you do not want to be very thoughtful. You don’t want to deliberately respond, you want to react, right? You want to get out of dodge. Where I live in North Carolina, there’s tons of snakes and bears.

[01:04:37] Brad Stulberg: So I see big snakes and bears at least once a week when I’m out hiking. Even though I’ve seen them, now, a hundred times, my blood pressure goes up and there’s no thinking involved. I just jolt. And that’s good, we’re programmed to jolt because our survival depends on it. In circumstances when we’re dealing with snakes and bears, but when we’re dealing with a stock market, or a crying six year old, or a teenager, or a spouse, generally speaking, jolting doesn’t make sense.

[01:05:02] Brad Stulberg: What ends up happening is we snap on someone or we make a poor decision and then we regret it later. So, how do you shift from a reactive mode and how do you overcome millennia of evolution that primed us to react and get into a more responsive mode where there’s more space, more thoughtfulness, you can be more deliberate.

[01:05:18] Brad Stulberg: Many philosophers have said that our humanity lies in the space between stimulus and action. So, something happens and what we do about it, the space between that, that’s where our humanity lies. That’s where our wisdom, our ability to make decisions lies. Four Ps. First, pause and just do nothing.

[01:05:37] Brad Stulberg: Take a couple deep breaths. Name the sensations that you’re experiencing. Psychologists call this affect labeling. I’m feeling angry, I’m feeling frustrated, I’m feeling overwhelmed, I’m feeling restless. I’m feeling tightness in my brow, I’m feeling my fist clench, I’m feeling heat in my chest, I’m feeling a pit in my stomach, I’m feeling butterflies, I’m feeling excited.

[01:05:57] Brad Stulberg: Name the emotion, name the actual physical sensation. What this does is by naming it, you no longer are it. So you put some space between yourself and the situation, or yourself and the emotions that you’re experiencing, and already you’ve diffused that reaction. Then you want to process, what’s actually happening here?

[01:06:15] Brad Stulberg: What’s going on? What does it mean for me? What pattern recognition can I draw on? What would happen if I wait until tomorrow to do something about this? What would happen if I do what my first instinct is? How might that play out a week from now? A month from now? How would I feel about that? Only then do you make a plan and say, given my resources, my capabilities, my skills, my patterns, given my values, here’s how I think I want to move forward, and then you execute on that plan and you proceed.

[01:06:39] Brad Stulberg: So, you pause, you process, you plan, and then you proceed. And what that does is it creates space, right? Because the opposite is you panic and you pummel ahead.

[01:06:49] William Green: Yeah. And if people want to learn more about this, I would definitely recommend that they go back and listen to my episodes with Daniel Goleman, the author of Emotional Intelligence, who also has thought a great deal about how to respond in these moments.

[01:07:01] William Green: And obviously meditation is huge in expanding that space between stimulus and response. It sort of puts things in slow motion a little bit.

[01:07:10] Brad Stulberg: And if I may interject real quick, because I think that I share this with Daniel, the goal isn’t not to feel the reactionary sensations. The goal is just not to act on them.

[01:07:20] Brad Stulberg: I think it’s very hard without taking massive amounts of sedatives to overcome that evolutionary hardwiring to feel reactivity. And I think if you judge yourself for feeling that way, you’re always going to be judging yourself. What matters is that you don’t act on it. So you can feel that reactivity, and sit with it, and let it calm down, and then move forward.

[01:07:42] Brad Stulberg: And I think this is, seems somewhat small, but it’s very important. Because often a lot of people say, I keep feeling reactionary, I must be doing something wrong, I’m not meditating enough. Or, why am I so high stressed? And it’s because, well, you’re constantly in stressful situations. And it’s okay to feel a stress response.

[01:07:58] Brad Stulberg: Actually, if the stress response is shut down, then I’m worried. That’s like chronic fatigue or a chronic stress state. You want to feel that initial jolt and then you don’t act on it and you want it to come down really fast. So it’s not about getting rid of that initial jolt. It’s about not immediately letting it take over and tell you what to do.

[01:08:18] William Green: As you mentioned at the start of our conversation, you were totally blindsided a few years ago, I think this is back in 2017, by a period of depression and obsessive compulsive disorder, and you wrote in the book, it was a chaotic and bottomless spiral of pain and terror, really for about eight months.

[01:08:37] William Green: And I wonder if you could talk a little about what you learned from that experience, that also is really important in terms of Developing an ability to deal with adversity, because you write in the book about self compassion, surrender, acceptance, leaning on others, and the like. Can you use that experience to talk about some of these other tools for building resilience, really in times where everything kind of goes to hell?

[01:09:05] Brad Stulberg: Sure. So, the first thing is to recognize when you’re in one of those times. I’m sure I’m going to miss some examples, but the big ones that come to mind are severe physical illness, severe mental illness, and grief. Those are the big three. And when you’re experiencing something like that, the worst thing that you can do is try to immediately grow or find meaning in the experience.

[01:09:29] Brad Stulberg: It’s like the other 99 percent of the time. Practice gratitude, write down what you’re grateful for, have a growth mindset, be really gritty, all those things. But the worst thing to do to someone that is in acute pain, be it physical or mental, or who’s just lost a partner or a child, is to go to that person and say, well, what are three things you’re grateful for?

[01:09:50] Brad Stulberg: That would be the most tone deaf possible thing. And why? Because then you judge yourself, because you start to say, well, I don’t feel grateful for anything. Because So now not only am I going through grief or depression or chronic pain, but I can’t even do what all these self help people tell me to do. I can’t feel grateful for something really must be broken and wrong.

[01:10:07] Brad Stulberg: When the reality is, no, it sucks to go through grief and to have that kind of physical or psychological distress. And there are periods of life when things aren’t meaningful. I mean, there’s very little meaning to losing a child. It’s an extreme example, but sometimes things just suck. And I think to be able to say that and to be able to name that, even if you’re an uber optimistic growth oriented person in all the other times of your life.

[01:10:32] Brad Stulberg: There might be times in your life when things just suck, and that’s okay. And the smartest thing to do, the real growth, is just letting things suck. There doesn’t have to be any meaning associated with it. Sometimes things just suck. Now what’s fascinating is the research shows that often, not all the time, but often, you get to the other side of these experiences and one year later, five years later, a decade later, you look back on them and maybe you’ve grown and maybe you’ve derived some meaning from them.

[01:10:58] Brad Stulberg: But when you’re in the thick of the challenge and the thick of the pain, just letting showing up and surviving be enough, like that’s it. So sometimes things can just suck and that’s okay. What tools can help? Nothing is more important than community and leaning on others for support. Study after study of resilience shows.

[01:11:15] Brad Stulberg: That it’s much less an inside game and much more an outside game. It’s about being able to ask for help, to lean on a community for support, and then to take that help, to receive it. Voluntary simplicity. Something that you’ve thought a lot about. When things in life feel chaotic and out of control.

[01:11:32] Brad Stulberg: Simplify wherever possible, right? If showing up and getting through is going to be a real challenge, make showing up and getting through as easy as you can. So instead of looking to add solutions, look to subtract things that are causing you additional distress. Surrender is really important. There are times when problem solving and fixing really work in our favor.

[01:11:53] Brad Stulberg: But there are also times when problem solving and fixing get in the way. Because we are not in a position to fix something or to solve the problem. And it’s so hard for driven Type A people that have been hyper successful to eventually at some point let go and realize, I can’t fix this. Maybe this thing is unfixable, and it’s only when we surrender and when we do that that we start to give ourselves a chance to get a little bit better because we stop getting in our own way.

[01:12:19] William Green: I wanted to ask you one last thing, which is, you have two kids, right? You have, I think, a six or seven year old Theo and a one year old, I think, Lila, who’s excellently named after a Robert Persich novel. When you think about all of the change and uncertainty and disorder they’re liable to face as adults, whether it’s climate change or political extremism or artificial intelligence, all the things that scare the hell out of us.

[01:12:45] William Green: What are you trying to model to prepare them? I mean, what can we do when we’re trying actually to model the kind of qualities? That our kids, the people around us, are going to need in order to deal with really what we know is going to be probably accelerating disorder and change rather than a return to some more peaceful era that we dream of.

[01:13:09] Brad Stulberg: I hope to model focusing on what we can control and trying not to waste energy worrying about what we can’t. Tragic optimism. And not being blind to all the tragedy, but also not letting all that tragedy turn into despair or nihilism. And then self compassion and self discipline. In an age appropriate level, right now, for my 7 year old, I think that’s the most practical.

[01:13:33] Brad Stulberg: Which is, you can do really hard things, and you should try to do really hard things. And, you need to be kind to yourself, because the only way it’s going to be sustainable to keep showing up and doing hard things is if you don’t beat yourself up when you fail. He had, earlier this year, his first strikeout in Little League Baseball, because it used to be T Ball, where you don’t strike out, and he was devastated.

[01:13:57] Brad Stulberg: He’s a very competitive kid, he’s crying, and I remember my gut reaction was to say Theo, don’t cry. But I didn’t. What I said is, Theo, it sucks that you just struck out. And the reason that you’re sad is because you care so much about hitting the ball and being a good teammate, and you try so hard and you really wanted to hit it.

[01:14:16] Brad Stulberg: And sometimes, even the things that we practice and we try really hard and we want, they don’t go our way, and you strike out. Sometimes it happens in baseball, it’s gonna happen in basketball, you’re gonna miss shots, it’s gonna happen with friends. And it’s okay to feel sad and it’s okay to cry right now.

[01:14:30] Brad Stulberg: And, you’re gonna get another shot, and you’re gonna get another at bat, and you can go back in there and try again. And then, of course, like many parents, we talked about how the best hitters, you know, they hit 300. They miss 7 times, and they hit at 3. But really, overriding that gut reaction to be like, don’t cry.

[01:14:46] Brad Stulberg: And replacing that with like, you care deeply, and that’s why this hurts, and that’s okay. And, you don’t have to beat yourself up. You can be sad, but you shouldn’t feel guilty or ashamed, because you’re trying to do something really hard, which is hit a baseball. And I think that, more than anything, that’s what I want to teach Theo, and Lila as she ages, and it becomes appropriate in various contexts of their life.

[01:15:08] William Green: Thank you so much. Brad, it’s been a real treat chatting with you, and, and luckily we have so many things left over to talk about, though I’m gonna have to talk to you again down the road. But, thank you, I really appreciate it.

[01:15:17] Brad Stulberg: Thank you, William. It’s been a great pleasure. Nice to see you.

[01:15:21] William Green: Alright, folks, thanks so much for joining me for this conversation with Brad Stulberg.

[01:15:25] William Green: If you want to learn more from Brad, I would definitely encourage you to check out two of his books that I found very helpful. One is titled Master of Change, and the other is titled The Practice of Groundedness. Personally, if I’m honest, I’ve found the last few days pretty intense and challenging, partly because I’m recording this one day before the U. S. presidential election, and partly, I guess, because, yesterday a fire wrecked the home of a very nice older couple living a couple of doors away from me. So I’ve been thinking a lot about this question of how you maintain some degree of calm and equilibrium amid the maelstrom of life. So I wanted to share with you one exercise from the practice of groundedness, Brad’s book, that I hope you can use if, like me, you’re not finding this the easiest time in your life to maintain a sense of peace and calm.

[01:16:18] William Green: Brad describes this practice as a way to cultivate the lens of a wise observer. So I’m going to read you this page from Chapter 2 of his book, The Practice of Groundedness. And, so excuse me if it takes a minute or so. He says, rather than being so involved in whatever you are experiencing, it can be useful to step back and view it from afar.

[01:16:39] William Green: This helps create space between yourself and your situation so that you can accept it and view it more clearly. The lens of a wise observer can be cultivated via formal practice and also by developing tools you can call upon in everyday life. So then he starts with a description of what he calls formal practice, and it goes like this.

[01:16:58] William Green: He says, sit or lie down in a comfortable position, set a timer for anywhere between 5 and 20 minutes. Close your eyes and focus on your breath. You can concentrate on the sensation of air moving in and out of your nostrils, the rising and falling of your belly, or any other place in your body where you feel it.

[01:17:17] William Green: Whenever your attention drifts away from your breath, simply notice that it has drifted, and bring it back to the breath, without berating yourself for getting distracted. Once you settle in, perhaps after a minute or two, though sometimes longer, imagine yourself as a life force that is separate from your thoughts, feelings, and circumstances.

[01:17:38] William Green: Imagine you are awareness itself, the canvas upon which all of your thoughts, feelings, and circumstances arise, the container that holds everything. You can also imagine your awareness as a blue sky, and anything that pops up as clouds floating by. Look through this lens of awareness to see your thoughts, feelings, and circumstances.

[01:17:59] William Green: It may start to feel as if you are watching a movie, instead of being in it. When you get distracted or caught up in your experience, note it without judging yourself and then return to concentrating on the sensation of your breath moving through your body. Once you’ve stabilized your awareness on your breath, go back to viewing your thoughts and feelings from afar.

[01:18:21] William Green: Let this awareness become a vessel to hold whatever it is you are grappling with. From this space, you can accept and see situations clearly, and thus make wiser decisions. The result of adopting this perspective is similar to the observer effect in quantum physics. When you change your relationship to what you are observing, the nature of what you are observing changes.

[01:18:42] William Green: In this case, challenges go from being permanent and insurmountable to impermanent and manageable. Keep practicing. You might notice the stronger the thought, feeling, urge or situation, the harder it is to maintain space between it and your awareness of it. But just a single degree of separation goes a long way.

[01:19:02] William Green: The more you practice, the more separation you’ll be able to create and the faster you’ll be able to zoom out when you find yourself converging with a challenging experience. The more you strengthen the perspective of a wise observer in formal practice, the more available it will be to you in daily life.

[01:19:19] William Green: Anyway, so there it is. That’s a page or so from Brad Stulberg’s book, The Practice of Groundedness. It comes from chapter two, which is titled, Accept Where You Are to Get Where You Want to Go. I hope that it gives you a taste of his work and hopefully inspires you to buy his books and read more of his writing.

[01:19:37] William Green: I’ll be back very soon with some more terrific guests, including a famous British investor named Terry Smith, and a legendary American investor named Bill Priest, who’s best known as a member of the Barron’s Roundtable. In the meantime, please feel free to follow me on X at WilliamGreen72 and connect with me on LinkedIn.

[01:19:56] William Green: As always, do let me know how you’re liking the podcast. I’m always really happy to hear from you until next time. Take good care and stay well.

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