excellence, actually

Brad and Steve are solo for a throwback episode. First, they discuss Josh Kerr's mile world record: Kerr called his shot four months ago, named the time, named the meet, and then went and did it, fueled entirely, he says, by consistency and stacking days. Then: the World Cup. Brad and Steve dig into the moments that stuck: Haaland's cowboy boots and Katz's Deli pastrami as a lesson in competitive joy; Cape Verde's 40-year-old bus-driver-turned-goalkeeper as a lesson in belief; England's collapse as a lesson in what happens when you stop playing your game and start playing prevent. And a bigger question underneath all of it: why is a country of 330 million people still getting outplayed in soccer by nations the size of Buncombe County, North Carolina? There was a lot to learn from this last month of elite sports.
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It's natural to want to get rid of anxiety. It's uncomfortable, we worry that it holds us back from being our best, and we believe that those who perform at the highest levels have figured out a way to beat it. The bad news is that we can't just rid ourselves of anxiety. It's part of the human condition. The good news is that, despite the common misconception, elite performers experience anxiety all the time—they've just learned how to manage and even channel it in skillful and adaptive ways. So today's episode is all about providing you ways to accept anxiety (which, ironically, helps mitigate it, since resisting anxiety only makes it worse) and giving you the tools to make it work for you rather than against you.
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What is it like to race 21 days across France wearing little more than underwear, going over 50 miles an hour, burning 8,000 calories a day, in the shadow of the ever-present threat of a violent peloton crash? Brent Bookwalter did it four times, including the 2011 race that Cadel Evans won — one of the great team performances in the sport's history. He did it clean, in arguably the dirtiest era cycling has ever seen. Now retired after a 16-year career and working as a commentator and a mental performance coach, he joins us for a conversation that moves from the fascinating details of being a pro cyclist — the salaries, the eating, the four-hour hurt box, the 30ish hours on the bike a week— to the deeper questions of why anyone does it at all. He talks about overcoming a fractured tibia in the beginning of his career, the mental skills that got him through — breaking a 200-kilometer stage down to one kilometer at a time — and how he's navigating the hardest transition of his life — from an existence where every minute was optimized and accounted for, to figuring out who he is without the bike. One of the more honest conversations we've had about what excellence actually costs, and what it gives back.
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We've been sold a lie: that with the right systems, mindset, and tools, you can have it all — great career, present parent, devoted partner, thriving social life, passionate hobbyist. You can't. But that's not a bad thing! It's the sacrifices that give meaning to our lives. So today, we're exploring how to make hard choices with clarity and honesty. We discuss why we don't even like the word "sacrifice" to begin with, why your values are shaped more by your ecosystem than by you, how to figure out what you actually want (as opposed to what you've been told to want), two simple frameworks for navigating career and life trade-offs, what to do when two things you love are competing for the same time and energy, and why regret might not be such a bad thing after all.
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Brad and Clay Skipper first became friends over books — specifically, a DM about Brad's bookshelf. Today, they return to that origin with a show-and-tell on six books that have genuinely changed how they think about performance: a poet-philosopher on the tension between work, self, and relationships; a Buddhist nun on learning to stop fighting the inevitable; a tennis coach who figured out the mind-body problem 50 years ahead of everyone else; the psychologist who named flow; a philosopher who quit his tenure to fix motorcycles; and an artist who wrote a book about dropping out of the stream of productivity and did just that. Think of it like the world's most useful book report: we do all the reading, but you still get all the tools (and a handful of good summer book recommendations should you want to go deeper).
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