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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Last Saturday night, the New York Knicks won the NBA Championship. It was an improbable, remarkable run, one of the best in NBA history. After going down 2-1 in the first round, they won 15 of their next 16 games, beating the Spurs 4 to 1 to win the title. Their point differential over that stretch was 283, the biggest in the history of the league. Most incredibly, the Knicks trailed all five games in the NBA finals by double digits. They lost the first five quarters by a total of 57 points. They won four of those five games, including a 29-point comeback in Game 4. Today, we're talking about not just what they did, but, more importantly, how they did it. It was a masterclass in excellence, with at least five tactical, concrete lessons that you can start applying in you own life right away. This one's a celebration—but it's also one of the most practical episodes we've ever done.

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Brian Koppelman has been writing great films and shows for 30 years — Rounders, Ocean's Thirteen, and Billions, to name a few. Now 60, he's working with as much energy as ever. He'll be back in the role of "Computer" on the hit show The Bear when it returns later this month, and he's three years into a powerlifting journey he began at 57 after almost fainting on a tennis court. When we think about the type of longevity worth aspiring to, we think of Brian Koppelman. Today, he talks about how his undiagnosed ADHD and curiosity shaped his successful career, tells the story of discovering Tracy Chapman while still a college student, and discusses making it through the painful writer's block that almost kept him from writing Rounders. Plus: what Michael Jordan can (and can't) teach us about greatness, separating success from external validation, and staying creative — and excellent — for a lifetime.

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Today, we discuss three moments from the past week that highlight a few of the key habits of truly excellent performers: what Victor Wenbanyama teaches us about caring deeply and being yourself; how the failed Enhanced Games highlights the importance of showing up to put in the work; and why a three-glasses-of-wine hangover proves being antifragile trumps optimization.

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Jim Ryun couldn't make his junior high basketball team, track team, or even his church baseball team. Two years later, he was the first high schooler to run a sub-four-minute mile. He'd go on to run a world record mile in 3:51, and compete in three Olympics. Now 79, he shares with us some of the best stories and wisdom: the time he ran a workout of four sets of 10x400 (doesn't recommend it), how he trained his mental discipline, how he handled the spotlight and media criticism, the best lessons he took from legendary coach Bob Timmons, why everyone needs "balcony people," and what he learned from being unfairly disqualified from the 1972 Olympics. It's a masterclass in excellence—actually.

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