Speaker 1: So even some of the stuff that we think declines
Speaker 1: every time, we're starting to find ways around it. But
Speaker 1: Scott's really right. His point is you can sort of
Speaker 1: bypass a lot of the things that decline over time
Speaker 1: with sort of a flow mastery based protocol. And if
Speaker 1: you want to fight off Alzheimer's and dementia, we know
Speaker 1: that the two best ways to do it is lifelong
Speaker 1: learning and you need expertise in wisdom. Right, Hello, and
Speaker 1: welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today we welcome Stephen Cotler
Speaker 1: to the show. Stephen is the executive director of the
Speaker 1: Flow Research Collective. He's an reward winning journalist and one
Speaker 1: of the world's leading experts on human performance. Stephen is
Speaker 1: the author of eleven bestsellers, including the Art of Impossible,
Speaker 1: The Rise of Superman, Bold and Abundance. His work has
Speaker 1: been nominated for two poul Serprizes, translated into over fifty languages,
Speaker 1: and he has appeared in over one hundred publications. His
Speaker 1: latest book is called nar Country, Growing Old, Staying rad
Speaker 1: Our moderator for this live discussion was doctor Tory Higgins,
Speaker 1: the head coach of the Flull Research Collective. Doctor Higgins
Speaker 1: is a deeply passionate, empathetic, peak performance coach, consultant and
Speaker 1: educator whose coaching philosophy is rooted in the deep seated
Speaker 1: belief that everyone has the potential to achieve success and growth.
Speaker 1: In her private practice, she has had the opportunity to
Speaker 1: coach a diverse range of clientele, from mountaineers preparing to
Speaker 1: summit Mount Everest and K two to business leaders of
Speaker 1: Fortune five hundred companies. In this live discussion, I talked
Speaker 1: to Stephen Catler about creativity, skill mastering, and aging. Our
Speaker 1: society views aging as a process of decline, with our
Speaker 1: physical and mental capabilities worsening over time. Stephen Catler invites
Speaker 1: us to challenge our preconceived notions about aging by engaging
Speaker 1: in impossible activities. They cultivate mastery and creativity. When we
Speaker 1: are able to incrementally push past our limits, we change
Speaker 1: our mindset about growing old, which ultimately pro longs are longevity.
Speaker 1: We also touch on the topics of exploration, play, social connection, flow, neuroscience, wisdom,
Speaker 1: and embodied cognition. It's always a pleasure to jam with
Speaker 1: Stephen about these topics. We nerd out a lot in
Speaker 1: this discussion, as we always do, but I hope you
Speaker 1: learned something new, especially relevant to those who are after
Speaker 1: the age of forty and still want to stay rad So,
Speaker 1: without further ado, I bring you Steven Cutler. All right, welcome, Welcome,
Speaker 1: Thank you everyone for joining us. We are all rolling in.
Speaker 1: We are about to take a deep dive into the
Speaker 1: science find peak, performs, aging, skill, mastery, creativity, so much more.
Speaker 1: Who knows where we're going to go with these two.
Speaker 1: For those of you who don't know me, I'm doctor
Speaker 1: Tory Higgins. I'm the head coach at the Flow Research Collective,
Speaker 1: and I have the opportunity tonight to moderate what's sure
Speaker 1: to be a phenomenal, maybe sometimes ridiculous conversation between these
Speaker 1: two legends. We've got eleven time bestselling author, founder and
Speaker 1: executive director of the Flow Research Collective, and one of
Speaker 1: the world's leading experts in humor performance, Steven Coytler. Steven, Hey,
Speaker 1: how are you hi? Everyone? Thanks for joining us. See
Speaker 1: a lot of friends in the chat. We have a
Speaker 1: lot of friends. Thank you, Thank you all for showing up.
Speaker 1: It's nice to skip blonche and familiar faces and a
Speaker 1: bunch of new faces. So eloa to everybody. Awesome. We
Speaker 1: are also joined by none other than doctor Scott Barry Kaufman,
Speaker 1: also known as SBK. He's a cognitive scientist and a
Speaker 1: humanistic psychologist who explores the depths of human potential. He's
Speaker 1: a professor at Columbia University and the director of the
Speaker 1: Center for Human Potential, and he's authored ten books, most
Speaker 1: recently Choose Growth. So if you're keeping count, we're up
Speaker 1: to over twenty books between these two guys. He's also
Speaker 1: the host of the psychology podcast Hey SPK, how are
Speaker 1: you hey? Great to see you and great to be
Speaker 1: here today. Awesome, Well, thank you both for taking the
Speaker 1: time to hang out with all of us. We thought
Speaker 1: now would be a great time for a call about growth, pea, performance,
Speaker 1: aging creativity for a couple of reasons. Number one, because
Speaker 1: it's only February, we're still at the beginning of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty three, and since FRC is a peak performance research
Speaker 1: and training organization, we want to support as many people
Speaker 1: as possible in designing their next year of life to
Speaker 1: get as much of the good stuff out as possible.
Speaker 1: So this calls an excellent time to talk to world
Speaker 1: leading experts to gain some great recommendations on how to
Speaker 1: do just that. The second reason that this is great
Speaker 1: time and for a call on all these topics is
Speaker 1: that Steven's new book Our Country, Growing Old and Staying
Speaker 1: grad is coming out at the end of this month.
Speaker 1: And this is a book about goals, grit progression, especially
Speaker 1: in the second half of our lives. And you can
Speaker 1: think of this as a how not to book, how
Speaker 1: not to lose that brash fire, how not to give
Speaker 1: in to that cozy blanket of middle age, how not
Speaker 1: to go gently into that good night. So today Steven's
Speaker 1: gonna be sharing some of the peak performance aging lessons
Speaker 1: that he learned while writing and living in Our Country,
Speaker 1: and we're going to be exploring how these lessons aligned
Speaker 1: with sbk's work on self actualization, creativity, skill mastery. Let's
Speaker 1: get into it, Stephen. Can you kick things off just
Speaker 1: by unpacking the title of your new book, Our Country?
Speaker 1: What's it all about? For those who haven't heard me
Speaker 1: say it, n Our Country? Nar is short for gnarly.
Speaker 1: It is action sports slang for an action sports slang.
Speaker 1: As colorful as it is, is very precise because people
Speaker 1: are performing in like environments where shit goes wrong, you
Speaker 1: could die. So the language as colorful as it is,
Speaker 1: is actually very precise, and nar is defined and gnarly
Speaker 1: is defined as any environment, any situation high and perceived
Speaker 1: risk and high in actual risk. Country is any landscape
Speaker 1: or terrain fictitious or real. And the book is obviously
Speaker 1: about peak performance aging. And it turns out that n
Speaker 1: Our Country is both sort of a great description of
Speaker 1: our later years high and perceived risk and high in
Speaker 1: actual risk. And also, as I'm sure we're gon we're
Speaker 1: gonna kind of talk about along the way, it's a
Speaker 1: really good sort of way of thinking about the gritty
Speaker 1: mindset required to totally thrive during our later years. So
Speaker 1: that's the title. And in our Country, going all it's
Speaker 1: dang red. There we go. So can you talk a
Speaker 1: little bit so in this book you call just massive
Speaker 1: bs essentially on the slow rock theory of aging. Can
Speaker 1: you talk a little bit about some of the latest
Speaker 1: research in neuroscience that supports that thriving in our later
Speaker 1: years of life is actually possible. There's a botch of it.
Speaker 1: The big picture, I think where you always want to
Speaker 1: start with this, which is the dominant theory of aging
Speaker 1: of the for the twentieth century, was this long slow
Speaker 1: rock theory and the irony of the long slow rot.
Speaker 1: The idea behind the long slow rot theory is that
Speaker 1: all our mental skills and all our physical skills decline
Speaker 1: over time. There's nothing we can do to stop the slide.
Speaker 1: And it turns out none of that's true. In fact,
Speaker 1: the origin story for that is Freud. Something Freud writes.
Speaker 1: It's nineteen oh four. He's about to turn fifteen, and
Speaker 1: he's terrified, and he writes that don't I'm paraphracing, but
Speaker 1: he's don'ty tripsychotherapy and anybody over the age of fifty,
Speaker 1: their brains are too calcified quote unquote. Old people are
Speaker 1: no longer educable. Right. This is the origin of the
Speaker 1: old dog can't learn new tricks idea, and it's sort
Speaker 1: of the foundation of the long slow rut theory. And
Speaker 1: it turns out that we didn't know this until starting
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety five is when the data started piling up.
Speaker 1: None of it's true. Almost everything. There are some exceptions,
Speaker 1: but almost everything that we thought declined over time. We
Speaker 1: now know our user losing skills. So if you never
Speaker 1: stop training these skills, you get to hang on to
Speaker 1: them and even advance them far later in life than
Speaker 1: any of you thought possible. So that's sort of the
Speaker 1: big picture. And Scott, you just I'm aware that you've
Speaker 1: recently just finished in our country to chime in here,
Speaker 1: what was your initial tape? Because I love that Stephen
Speaker 1: is kind of flying in the face of this what
Speaker 1: we used to think about aging and at the progress,
Speaker 1: the progress that we make as we grow older. Yeah,
Speaker 1: thanks for this opportunity to offer some of my reflections
Speaker 1: on this book, because I have a lot of reflections
Speaker 1: on it when I read it. You know, you it's
Speaker 1: kind of book first all, you just read top to bottom,
Speaker 1: you don't, you know, there's no break like you're you're
Speaker 1: like on the edge of your seat to see how's
Speaker 1: he going to fall next? Or which bone? Which bone
Speaker 1: is he going to break? You know, because that's part
Speaker 1: of the story. But but there's something that really struck me.
Speaker 1: First of all, the book was was really inspiring to me.
Speaker 1: I'm not as old as Stephen, but I'm getting I'm
Speaker 1: catching up to him, and I'll be there soon. And
Speaker 1: even at my age, there are certain things that I
Speaker 1: have like limiting I know that I'm limiting mindsets, you
Speaker 1: know about certain things, and I don't want it. You know,
Speaker 1: I have certain things like, oh, well, you know what
Speaker 1: it's too old to do, as I'm too old to do.
Speaker 1: You know, it's too late to get back to being
Speaker 1: good at basketball. Friends, I used to play basketball in
Speaker 1: like high school, in middle school. And there's a lot
Speaker 1: of things. But so the book was very inspiring to me.
Speaker 1: But what struck me about Stephen's mindset is that he
Speaker 1: what I saw was an iterative process where he would
Speaker 1: have a gritty mindset and then he would face reality
Speaker 1: and then he would say, but this is the cool
Speaker 1: thing about Steven which really inspired me, is he would
Speaker 1: he kind of has this attitude like if I could
Speaker 1: sum up the whole book with one motto, I decided
Speaker 1: I would sum it up by saying, There's always tomorrow.
Speaker 1: And I think that is kind of like that could
Speaker 1: have been like the title of his book was there
Speaker 1: is always Tomorrow. Because I found Stephen would be like, oh,
Speaker 1: what's a fifty three year old doing? You know, he
Speaker 1: would have all the self critical beliefs and then he
Speaker 1: would reframe that and then in some cases you would
Speaker 1: try it and it turned out as self wiving beliefs
Speaker 1: were correct. Which is why I thought was awesome about
Speaker 1: this book is you know, a lot of times there's
Speaker 1: a lot of bullshit with the kind of these kinds
Speaker 1: of books where they say, oh, you can believe anything
Speaker 1: you want if you just put you know, the sea
Speaker 1: you know, or if you just attract it. No, Steven,
Speaker 1: what was cool about Stephen's mindset in this book is
Speaker 1: that he's always trying to push the limits to see
Speaker 1: what he can achieve, and he aware that even incremental
Speaker 1: progress matters. That even if like he dreams for the
Speaker 1: hut for the two hundred percent improvement and he gets
Speaker 1: like twenty five percent improvement, that day, he focuses on
Speaker 1: the twenty five percent improvement. And that's just something you know,
Speaker 1: No one, Steve's not paying me to say this, Like,
Speaker 1: this is just something I gleaned from reading the book,
Speaker 1: which has really inspired me. So yeah, I'll pause there,
Speaker 1: but that's something that really struck me from this book. Likewise,
Speaker 1: and I would love Stephen for you to double click
Speaker 1: a little bit more about because I think that you
Speaker 1: do talk a lot about the importance of being aware
Speaker 1: of your mindset around aging. That mindset plays a huge,
Speaker 1: huge role in peak performance aging so can you talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about your findings in that area. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think there's a bunch. So one of the oldest
Speaker 1: uh finding sort of where I think one of the
Speaker 1: plays in the field of people performantating sort of starts
Speaker 1: is the work of doctor Allen Langer, who's at Harvard
Speaker 1: and she back in the seventies's looking at at questions
Speaker 1: around priming and language and mindset and aging. And you know,
Speaker 1: she's really along with doctor gene Con, I think the
Speaker 1: god parents in the field of PEP performance agent are
Speaker 1: a lot of other people contribute, but those two are
Speaker 1: real heavyweights. And you know, one of Ellen's major points
Speaker 1: is that aging is not just a physical process. This
Speaker 1: is much lower. This is much a mental process as
Speaker 1: a physical process. And this leads to tons and tons
Speaker 1: and studies and mindset and what the end result is
Speaker 1: that we know a positive mindset towards aging, which is
Speaker 1: living back up and like the mindset of old. Once
Speaker 1: the voice in your head is Scott just sort of
Speaker 1: starts doing things like, oh you do of old? For
Speaker 1: this shit? That's the mindset of old. And it can
Speaker 1: set up early in your twenties, in your thirties and
Speaker 1: your forties, and we can talk a lot about why
Speaker 1: and where it comes from because it's it's weird, and
Speaker 1: it doesn't it comes from a good place, but it
Speaker 1: ends up having sort of really negative impacts later on.
Speaker 1: But one of the clearest findings is that a positive
Speaker 1: mindset towards aging, my best days are ahead of me.
Speaker 1: I'm really thrilled about. What's what's the second half of
Speaker 1: my life holds will produce an extra seven and a
Speaker 1: half years of health and longevity, healthy longevity. That's like,
Speaker 1: if you're obese and your choices and you've got a
Speaker 1: shitty mindset and your choices, do I lose weight or
Speaker 1: do I change your minds on my eydset? Change your mindset? Right,
Speaker 1: if you're a smoker, more important to change your mindset
Speaker 1: than quits. I mean, like it's literally one of, if
Speaker 1: not the most impactful thing. Now I want to I
Speaker 1: want to speak to something else. Because Scott went right
Speaker 1: there with what he was talking about. I think personally
Speaker 1: and not like I knew all this research, right, I like,
Speaker 1: there's twenty years of research into this book. I went
Speaker 1: into this experiment knowing all the science, but still like
Speaker 1: that long slow rot theory of age, you know, is
Speaker 1: really insidious, and I think it's really hard to escape.
Speaker 1: And Scott pointed out one of the things that I found,
Speaker 1: and like, you know, we we've been advocating in the
Speaker 1: PEO Performance Agent trainings that have sort of come out
Speaker 1: of this Gnar style adventures. I'm not saying everybody needs
Speaker 1: to learn how to parkski, that's what I did, right,
Speaker 1: But by choosing an activity that is supposed to be
Speaker 1: impossible for Scott to be basketball, you know, supposedly impossible
Speaker 1: for you. It's what it did to me is like
Speaker 1: whatever limiting beliefs I had about the second album My
Speaker 1: Life and what was possible when I started learning one
Speaker 1: eighties and three sixties and knows butter three sixties and
Speaker 1: that sort of stuff, These things that were supposed to
Speaker 1: be impossible for me to learn in my fifties, that
Speaker 1: my stagist exploded like it didn't have a chance in
Speaker 1: the face of reality. And in a sense, this is
Speaker 1: what I like about this is we you know, fir see,
Speaker 1: we often talk about the difference between gratitude and informations, right,
Speaker 1: and gratitude works really really well and affirmations don't work
Speaker 1: at all and they tend to back. And one of
Speaker 1: the reasons is the brain's got a built in bullshit detector.
Speaker 1: If you're running around going, you know, I am a millionaire.
Speaker 1: I'm a millionaire and a millionaire, and your brain is
Speaker 1: looking at you, going, buddy, you work at Walmart. Shut
Speaker 1: the fuck up? What are you talking about? Right? Like,
Speaker 1: it's totally demotivating. It's sort of the same thing in
Speaker 1: terms of mindset for me, you know, and so I
Speaker 1: found it useful to have this style challenge to explode it.
Speaker 1: And Scott, the thing about that that you pointed out,
Speaker 1: the last thing I'll say about this in my experience
Speaker 1: is that exploded mindset is what allowed me. You know,
Speaker 1: progress was really slow, and you want it to be slow.
Speaker 1: You want to go for it to be safe these
Speaker 1: kinds of adventures. You want to go one inch at
Speaker 1: a time, and progress really really slowly, and you were
Speaker 1: oftentimes like I would have to, I would come home
Speaker 1: and you know, I don't know if this is anybody else,
Speaker 1: but like self expectation has ruined more great days for
Speaker 1: me than anything. There are so many like I'll come
Speaker 1: to my right being really excited about what I'm going
Speaker 1: to write or I'll go to the ski area really
Speaker 1: excited about what I'm going to learn and nothing match
Speaker 1: it can possibly match my expectations. And that used to
Speaker 1: crush me, right, I used to come home really like frustrated.
Speaker 1: But now I have a different measuring stick and I'm like, no, no,
Speaker 1: it's one inch at a time. So while yeah, you
Speaker 1: didn't do this, this, this, or this, you did move
Speaker 1: this forward, and you did move this forward, and you
Speaker 1: did move this forward, and those are the real wins
Speaker 1: because it's one inch at a time. This is the
Speaker 1: story of peak performance, right one, whether it's peak performance
Speaker 1: or preak performance aging. It's goes slow to go fast,
Speaker 1: but it works a compound interest. But it's hard, even
Speaker 1: from the inside right to believe in compound interest. You
Speaker 1: really know it's going to work, it's hard to believe
Speaker 1: in it, Doctor Tory. Can I illustrate something, uh swear?
Speaker 1: Or just discuss the difference between the work. I've done
Speaker 1: a lot of research on narcissism, and I thought it
Speaker 1: might be helpful to point out the difference between narcissism
Speaker 1: and mastery. So this book and Steven's work is rounds mastery,
Speaker 1: and I just wrote down some adjectives I think to
Speaker 1: find both. So narcissism is fast, narcissism is immediate. You're
Speaker 1: always looking for immediate praise. You're always looking for immediate
Speaker 1: confirmation that you're great. Mastery is And I just wrote
Speaker 1: down some adjectives humiliating, ego, deflating, painful, meaningful, growth oriented, authentic,
Speaker 1: pride related hopefully, So the things you get from mastery
Speaker 1: are more of a mixed bag, but ultimately more rewarding
Speaker 1: and meaningful, and it's slower than narcissism. A lot of
Speaker 1: people prefer to take the narcissism root because they're lazy,
Speaker 1: in my opinion, but the ultimate reward is not as
Speaker 1: great by any stretch of the imagination. You might get
Speaker 1: some nicer immediate rewards, you know, like you fool someone
Speaker 1: you know into doing something for you or praising you.
Speaker 1: But in the long run, masteries where it's at. So
Speaker 1: I thought that would be useful to distinguish narcissism from mastery.
Speaker 1: I think it's incredibly useful. And I think that those
Speaker 1: are helpful differentiators when thinking about because I think something
Speaker 1: that you both said that it's really important that I
Speaker 1: want to highlight for everyone is that one of the
Speaker 1: ways that we can challenge this mindset of aging and
Speaker 1: this long slow rock theories to have an activity where
Speaker 1: we can actually practice and explore and grow and develop
Speaker 1: mastery experiences. Right. So, and I think that you know,
Speaker 1: at the heart of our country really is a focus
Speaker 1: on exploration and play utter in life, right, and so
Speaker 1: I want to talk about both of those things, exploration
Speaker 1: and play. Let's talk about exploration first. So can you
Speaker 1: both weigh in on the importance of exploration and how
Speaker 1: it relates to growth and peed performance aging. Yes, But
Speaker 1: I want to circle back on mastery because there's one
Speaker 1: more thing I want to say about mastery that's so
Speaker 1: important here. Mastery and the sense of control that we
Speaker 1: get and flow are two of the most positive feelings
Speaker 1: that are available to humans. And when we get super
Speaker 1: positive emotions, mastering control top of this list from a
Speaker 1: peak performance aging standpoint. That stimulates the production of T
Speaker 1: cells and natural killer cells. T cells are your immune system, right,
Speaker 1: they fight disease. Natural killer cells are the cells that
Speaker 1: target tumors and other six cells big causes of aging.
Speaker 1: So there's a mastery is you know, it's great for
Speaker 1: exploding his mindset it's great for life long learning. It's
Speaker 1: got a billion benefits. But like we started talking about
Speaker 1: the physiological impact of mindset, right, and here's another sort
Speaker 1: of mental physical connection that most like when they hear mastery.
Speaker 1: They don't think, oh shit, that's going to boost my
Speaker 1: immune system in a significant way, but it does all right. Now,
Speaker 1: from that to exploration, Curiosity is the foundational human motivator.
Speaker 1: It's the first it's the first most basic sort of
Speaker 1: human motivator, and it's so powerful. You get a lot
Speaker 1: of dopemine from exposure to novelty. We're hardwired for. We
Speaker 1: have a So here's the here's the real answer I'll
Speaker 1: give you, toy. We've got to go back to why
Speaker 1: do we get this mindset of old? So when we're young,
Speaker 1: we have it with seven primary emotions in all mammals.
Speaker 1: When we're young, we lean on what's known as the
Speaker 1: seeking system. This is our exploratory drives, right, curiosity, and
Speaker 1: we lean on the play system, right, and this is
Speaker 1: how we learn when we're young, and those systems come
Speaker 1: with certain neuro chemicals attached. Play is predominantly about endorphins.
Speaker 1: Seeking is really about nora epin effort and doubling, and
Speaker 1: these become the drugs that we're addicted to in our youth.
Speaker 1: And that these are strong I'm using strong language, but
Speaker 1: these are these are the pleasure chemicals that we most
Speaker 1: like and we're most attached to right and then we
Speaker 1: find most rewarding at what the mindset of old happens
Speaker 1: when you get stuff you mean, the seeking system has
Speaker 1: gone away. You get the stuff you want. I've got
Speaker 1: the right partner, I've got the right job, I've got
Speaker 1: the right apartment, I've got the right car, I've got
Speaker 1: the right style, or whatever it is. You have stuff
Speaker 1: that you want to protect, you want to conserve. When
Speaker 1: we do that, we get serotonin. We also get a
Speaker 1: little bit of endorphins, but not as much. We mostly
Speaker 1: get serotonin and oxytocin. These are different drugs. And the
Speaker 1: mise of old is what happens when the seeking system
Speaker 1: of the play system shut down. What we know about
Speaker 1: people performance aging is you want all seven of these
Speaker 1: systems active and fully functional, otherwise you have problems. And
Speaker 1: it's these internal addictions. We get addicted to, these rewards
Speaker 1: of safety and security and they and we do this
Speaker 1: because humans, it's important for human couples to say together
Speaker 1: to raise our children, right, Like, that's why it happens.
Speaker 1: We make this trade. You know, we have to be
Speaker 1: bonded from an evolutionary perspective for at least seven years
Speaker 1: to get our kids to and it's obviously a lot longer,
Speaker 1: but Undergather era, it was seven years that you needed
Speaker 1: to be together to get a kid to be able
Speaker 1: to take care of himself. I don't understand why in
Speaker 1: the Hunter Gatherer or what everything could kill you kids
Speaker 1: got to seven and then they were fine, and now
Speaker 1: they get to like thirty and they're not fine. I
Speaker 1: don't I don't understand. But okay, subject of another book,
Speaker 1: different different, Yeah, So I mean I think that this
Speaker 1: ties in beautifully actually to SBK. You talk in transcend
Speaker 1: you talk about really requiring courage to grow, and Steven
Speaker 1: you're to and leaving the safety of familiarity in order
Speaker 1: to grow, and Stephen you're talking about this elevated drive
Speaker 1: for security and stability as we grow older. So it
Speaker 1: seems like there's some tension there that it gets increasingly
Speaker 1: challenging to explore as we age. How do we reconcile?
Speaker 1: What do we do? You just call I mean cultivate curiosity,
Speaker 1: cultivate play, all those things sort of really really matter
Speaker 1: and are really really useful. I mean, like, but again,
Speaker 1: another reason like a nar this style quest right, is
Speaker 1: it rekindles the seeking system. And I mean double mean
Speaker 1: is fun right, Like it's once you started blowing through
Speaker 1: your system again in a real way. I Mean. The
Speaker 1: other thing that I think you see with a lot
Speaker 1: of adults is they get their only doubamin from their
Speaker 1: fricking cell phones. Right, it just comes in through their technology.
Speaker 1: It's a really cheap, not healthy I mean that we
Speaker 1: can go on and on about cell phones. Cell phones
Speaker 1: are really really really bad for your brain in general,
Speaker 1: but they're really bad for your brain over time. They
Speaker 1: actually dampen a lot of things that are already susceptible
Speaker 1: to a little bit of decline in older adults, and
Speaker 1: they make a lot of that stuff a lot worse.
Speaker 1: And it's a terrible way to get sort of domin.
Speaker 1: Whereas like exploratory behavior, curiosity, different courageous behavior stuff Scott
Speaker 1: was talking about, trendscend really matters here and what are
Speaker 1: the recommendations because you've referenced it a little bit, but
Speaker 1: I think it would be great to go into a
Speaker 1: little bit more detail of this, this idea of approaching
Speaker 1: fear in this more incremental way that's kind of one
Speaker 1: inch at a time strategy. Can you speak to that
Speaker 1: a little bit. Yeah, it grew out of two things.
Speaker 1: Grew out of the need to progress safely, right, Because
Speaker 1: the one thing that is remains semi true is that
Speaker 1: older adults take longer to heal than young people. Now,
Speaker 1: the research arounds like that is true until stem cells
Speaker 1: advance to the point that that's no longer true, and
Speaker 1: we're getting closer and closer with that research is probably
Speaker 1: in the next four or five years that that statement
Speaker 1: is no longer going to actually be true. But right
Speaker 1: now it remains true. And even though we're in meticine,
Speaker 1: all our tools for dealing with injury have never been better.
Speaker 1: And one fact is that we're a lot tougher than
Speaker 1: we think we are, Like we just are physically, we're
Speaker 1: a lot physically tougher than we think we are on
Speaker 1: that safety matters. But the other thing is it's a
Speaker 1: flow thing, so close dates have triggers, right, And the
Speaker 1: most famous is the Challenge Skills Balance, which says flow
Speaker 1: follows focused and we get the most focused when the challenge,
Speaker 1: the task slightly exceeds our skill set. Right, you want
Speaker 1: to stretch, but not stap. It's about a five percent
Speaker 1: gradient difference, right that we find the most flow in
Speaker 1: the challenge is about four or five percent greater than
Speaker 1: our skill set. What we started, What we realized is
Speaker 1: that we meaning the flow research collective people. I was
Speaker 1: working with them on the people pformance eating stuff. Was
Speaker 1: that allostatic load, which is the impact of like trauma
Speaker 1: over time physiologically and psychologically shrinks this challenge skills balance
Speaker 1: and especially when you have lots lots of fear and
Speaker 1: when you have a lot of fear in your system.
Speaker 1: When you have too much fear in your system, especially
Speaker 1: on the physical set, there's a big penalty, right, you
Speaker 1: can't generate maximum power, you fastwitch muscle response doesn't work
Speaker 1: as well, you're not as cognitively, you're not as creative,
Speaker 1: and so there's a big penalty for fear. And it's
Speaker 1: really easy, right, you get out of the challenge because
Speaker 1: sweet pot, you're moving into anxiety. You're overloaded. So we
Speaker 1: realize that let's shrink it way way down. And our
Speaker 1: motto was one inch at a time, or go slow
Speaker 1: to go fast right. And in fact, when like when
Speaker 1: we took we Ryan Wicks and myself took these core
Speaker 1: ideas and used it to run our experiment and pop
Speaker 1: Performance Agent, where we took twenty adults and train them
Speaker 1: up in this stuff. Holding people back was the biggest
Speaker 1: thing we had to do. We had to calm like
Speaker 1: they because the learning happened automatically. So people were like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, I can't believe I'm making this most
Speaker 1: progress learning this really and they got really excited lots
Speaker 1: of dope, I mean lots of lots of fun nuro
Speaker 1: chemistry and calming them down holding them back was really
Speaker 1: like that was a that we nobody got hurt, but
Speaker 1: it was because we kept reminding people like, hey, like
Speaker 1: even if you suddenly feel like Superman, remember that sweet
Speaker 1: spot is shrunken and you're not going to fix that
Speaker 1: in a day, right like that, It's got to get
Speaker 1: fixed slowly, over over a longer period of time. Speaking
Speaker 1: speaking of ride Wick, so your training partner in our country,
Speaker 1: social exploration feels like a key component to growth and
Speaker 1: peak performance aging. Can you talk a little bit about
Speaker 1: the importance of social connections having a trading partner, having
Speaker 1: someone to maybe attempt these activities with. How key is that?
Speaker 1: For me? It was huge? So one first first reason
Speaker 1: is huge, and Scott, I'm sure to speak to this,
Speaker 1: is that all those social bonding neural chemicals right are
Speaker 1: really we need social contact over time. It's really a
Speaker 1: fundamental component of peak performance aging. In fact, the only
Speaker 1: thing that matters almost as much as mindset, or as
Speaker 1: much as mindset, is having robust social connections. So what's
Speaker 1: really important. Performance over time was massively important later in life,
Speaker 1: but it's really those neuro chemicals you're after and the
Speaker 1: right training partner you know, to me was really important
Speaker 1: for that because a lot of like a lot of
Speaker 1: the things that Ryan and I share is is it
Speaker 1: like we have the same pathways into flow. So it
Speaker 1: was really easy for us to get into group flow,
Speaker 1: which was really important because I'm an introvert and I'm
Speaker 1: not like, I'm not the most social person in the world,
Speaker 1: so I want, I need to get like all the
Speaker 1: social stuff. Like if you go into the blue zones,
Speaker 1: these long lived communities we're sending some of the social
Speaker 1: research first started showing up. They'll spend sometimes six hours
Speaker 1: a day on social connection, working with like family and friends,
Speaker 1: and right, I don't have that kind of time, and
Speaker 1: I don't like people that much. I'm an introvert. I
Speaker 1: want to be by myself. So if I can get
Speaker 1: into group flow, right, the shared I can get all
Speaker 1: that same neurochemistry and a condensed time frame, so from
Speaker 1: a time management perspective, and to like meet me where
Speaker 1: I was. Because I'm introverted and I don't want all
Speaker 1: that much social contact, having the right training partner really matter.
Speaker 1: I can go on and on and on about that one,
Speaker 1: but I'll stop there and let me clarify something. But first,
Speaker 1: I think we should bring Ryan Wicks on stage. What
Speaker 1: do you think of that idea? I could work on that.
Speaker 1: He just I could hear him gulf from here, but yes,
Speaker 1: I can work even just a second, let him wave
Speaker 1: and so just to put a face to you know,
Speaker 1: we're talking about him, So it might be good to
Speaker 1: bring him up here. There's something I would like to
Speaker 1: qualify though, because there's a lot of misconceptions about introversion,
Speaker 1: and one of the misconceptions is that somehow you don't
Speaker 1: like people. And I think that's a misconception. Of introvers
Speaker 1: and I think it's helpful actually to distinguish between social connection,
Speaker 1: the need for social connection, and the need for social exploration.
Speaker 1: In my book Transcend, I actually queerly distinguished between the
Speaker 1: two needs and argue there are two separate needs that
Speaker 1: both have to be satisfied to a certain degree to
Speaker 1: feel like your whole in some way. The thing with
Speaker 1: introverts is that they're less but their default, they're less
Speaker 1: into novel so social exploration it kind of scares them.
Speaker 1: It's not their thing as much as extroverts, but they
Speaker 1: are just as interested deep social connection is extroverts. There's
Speaker 1: no there's no statistically significant difference. No, I mean I misspoke.
Speaker 1: I'm a misanthrop No, you personally are, but I wanted
Speaker 1: to disquarify it's just me. Yeah, yeah, now that's just Stephen.
Speaker 1: Actually is just a confluence of these personality traits. But
Speaker 1: but I do distinguish between the need for social exploration
Speaker 1: versus the need for high quality connections. And I think
Speaker 1: as we age it becomes more and more important for
Speaker 1: more social exploration because I think that when you do that,
Speaker 1: you start to realize life is over yet, Like we
Speaker 1: can get in this rut as we get older that like,
Speaker 1: oh my gosh, like is it is it over? Or
Speaker 1: are my best days behind me? You know, like those
Speaker 1: kinds of questions we ask ourselves. But I think the
Speaker 1: big role of dopamine as we age is giving us hope.
Speaker 1: And I actually think if we force ourselves to get
Speaker 1: out of our bubbles and talk to lots of different
Speaker 1: people and things, actually that broadens our mind to think
Speaker 1: that maybe there are it stimulates new possibilities for us.
Speaker 1: One thing that's weird is I was telling you to
Speaker 1: Paul Zach about this who's the oxytocin guru? My question was,
Speaker 1: if you're a nature so we know by the way,
Speaker 1: like you can get the same neural chemistry from petting
Speaker 1: a dog as from spending time with humans, right Like,
Speaker 1: so we know that, and there's study after study that.
Speaker 1: But Paul Zach and I was like, you know, if
Speaker 1: you're a nature lover, right, Joe, I say throughout the
Speaker 1: book in Our Country that some of my best friends
Speaker 1: are trees. I love being in forrest, I love being
Speaker 1: in nature, and I really do feel that. And so
Speaker 1: our question was, if you're really really nature philic, can
Speaker 1: you get those same neurochemicals as social bonding neuro chemicals
Speaker 1: from time and nature. If you think that if you
Speaker 1: have that deep connection with nature. Our argument was, yes,
Speaker 1: but it had I know that we know of has
Speaker 1: measured it, so we don't. We don't like, I haven't
Speaker 1: seen data, but we're The thinking was, yet, well, there
Speaker 1: is there is research thing that spending time in nature
Speaker 1: does increase serotonin. Yeah, serotonin, But isn't that about That's
Speaker 1: about fractal landscapes and being able to predict what happens next,
Speaker 1: and and that calms the brain down. But that's anything
Speaker 1: that activates the com and connect system in my eyes
Speaker 1: is bo thumbs up. I don't care where. I don't
Speaker 1: care where it's coming from. All right, are you are
Speaker 1: you mad at me for doing this? Ryan? Or are
Speaker 1: you happy I did this? No? I'm happy you did it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: blushing a little bit when you called out my name.
Speaker 1: First it started with Torri and then uh and then
Speaker 1: you followed. But I know I'm glad to be here.
Speaker 1: He's exciting. Yeah, this is exciting. This is one of
Speaker 1: Stephen's human friends, since most of his friends apparently are
Speaker 1: trees and dogs, so Ryan is among the small Scott
Speaker 1: longtime friend. Got it's two perfect an end of two.
Speaker 1: So I actually think that Ryan being here is a
Speaker 1: perfect segue to what you were just talking about, Scott
Speaker 1: about social exploration later in life, and Stephen you talk
Speaker 1: about this theme of actually looking for and acquiring replacement friends.
Speaker 1: And for those of you who can't see us right now,
Speaker 1: who are just listening, Ryan and Stephen are not the
Speaker 1: same age, right, Yeah, this is uh this, I mean,
Speaker 1: this shows up. Man. It's everybody's work, it really is.
Speaker 1: Anybody who sort of worked on aging. We tend to
Speaker 1: make friends in our generation and meaning everybody tends to
Speaker 1: die together. And if you're doing peak performance aging work
Speaker 1: and you're gonna outlive a lot of people, if you
Speaker 1: don't make re what they literally they don't like this
Speaker 1: term anymore, what they used to call replacement friends, it
Speaker 1: gets remarkably lonely. And you know, I tell this story.
Speaker 1: I have a dear friend who was one of the
Speaker 1: brightest minds of the twentieth century, really genius. He's now
Speaker 1: very very old. Every single one of his friends are dead,
Speaker 1: and he was Scott will relate to this or get
Speaker 1: what I t But there's a certain kind of like thinker.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen seventies, there was a kind of systems thinking,
Speaker 1: cybernetic systems thinking that it doesn't exist anymore, but it
Speaker 1: was very particular. This is like a generation of thinkers
Speaker 1: that this man was part of. And he at one point,
Speaker 1: like during COVID, I think his last living friend had died.
Speaker 1: He's like he was taking to him. He's like, well,
Speaker 1: first of all, he's like really happy that I call it,
Speaker 1: because he's like, I don't nobody else calls me. I
Speaker 1: don't have any other friends. And he said one of
Speaker 1: the things he said to me is there's nobody left
Speaker 1: on the planet who thinks like me. And I was like,
Speaker 1: it's sort of like it was one of those like
Speaker 1: stunningly weird moments where I was like, oh wow, that's
Speaker 1: actually like heavy, that's wild, and so replacement friends really matter.
Speaker 1: And the other the flip side of this, the inverse,
Speaker 1: is that those cultures where people are exceptionally long lived,
Speaker 1: right the so called blue zone, but really any any
Speaker 1: any culture where people live a very long, healthy time.
Speaker 1: One of the things that underpins those sieties across across
Speaker 1: generational friendships like young people friends with old people, old
Speaker 1: people friends with young people really really really matters for
Speaker 1: kind of healthy functioning societies and healthy agent Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: really I think it's one of the reasons why I've
Speaker 1: always been attracted to action sports, right because they happen
Speaker 1: in these environments where all different ages of athletes are
Speaker 1: contributing right to the over kind of the overall feel
Speaker 1: of that day, whether it be in a terrain park
Speaker 1: on the mountain, in a skate park, in a surf break,
Speaker 1: you know, at your local crag. I think action sports
Speaker 1: just very naturally, you know, the cultures that have evolved
Speaker 1: with those those specific activities are very inclusive of all ages,
Speaker 1: and it just seems that, you know, regardless of your
Speaker 1: skill set, everyone kind of has the opportunity to contribute
Speaker 1: to something, you know, esthetically with their attitude, you know,
Speaker 1: with their creativity, how they're interpreting the terrain or I
Speaker 1: love it. Ryan, Can I tell you about a finding
Speaker 1: we just we just found that we're we're submitting the paper.
Speaker 1: It's been accepted, so it'll be out. It'll be out.
Speaker 1: So I'm telling you find a finding that we just
Speaker 1: found that that isn't published yet. It'll be out soon
Speaker 1: to our surprise. We looked at the six dimensions of
Speaker 1: curiosity and trying to in trying to predict creative achievement
Speaker 1: in life, and we looked across many domains, including sports,
Speaker 1: and we found that out of all the dimensions of
Speaker 1: so there's a lot of dimensions of curiosity, there's like
Speaker 1: there's deprivation reduction. You know, you're you're driven to reduce deprivations.
Speaker 1: There's joyous exploration. Actually I predicted joyous exploration would be
Speaker 1: the biggest predictor, there's stress tolerance, et cetera. We found,
Speaker 1: to our surprise, the biggest one was thrill seeking. And
Speaker 1: we did not expect that. No one's ever found that
Speaker 1: in the literature. That and when we looked at the items,
Speaker 1: it's not the kind of thrill seeking that's like that's
Speaker 1: like psychopath thrills. It's well, if you look at the items,
Speaker 1: the items actually have a lot to do with mastery
Speaker 1: getting a thrill from mastery. So when you actually look
Speaker 1: at the items on the thrill seeking curiosity questionnaire that
Speaker 1: Todd Caashton, he's a co author on this paper, developed,
Speaker 1: the kind of items are things like I'm really attracted
Speaker 1: to the unknown, I'm really attracted to to overcoming something
Speaker 1: that is a little scary and so anyway you can
Speaker 1: just make me think of that. When you talked about
Speaker 1: your attraction to advent to adventure sports and things like that,
Speaker 1: I think you probably would score high in this facet.
Speaker 1: What do you think, Ryan, I think I would. I
Speaker 1: look forward to taking it. Yeah, yeah, I'll give you
Speaker 1: the test. Yeah sure, sure. And I think you're both
Speaker 1: really pointing out some kind of key factors for people
Speaker 1: to be thinking about. Because I'm hoping that as people
Speaker 1: were listening to all of you, that they're starting to
Speaker 1: think about what activities in their life could they start
Speaker 1: adopting to explore to grow to develop mastery experience. I
Speaker 1: think these factors are really helpful to start identifying those.
Speaker 1: I think it'd be also helpful to think about what
Speaker 1: are some of the key components to finding a helpful
Speaker 1: training partner to embark on these types of activities with.
Speaker 1: Because Steve and I know you talk a lot about
Speaker 1: why Ryan was a great training partner for you. What
Speaker 1: are some of the factors that people should be kind
Speaker 1: of weighing out to help identify these partners. To me
Speaker 1: that it was at least three things mattered the most.
Speaker 1: You can't ignore that, like psychological safety safety in general,
Speaker 1: Like right and I have a long history of skiing together,
Speaker 1: and oftentimes so I'm prone to vertigo due to like
Speaker 1: inner ear stuff, and the world will start spinning and oftentimes,
Speaker 1: like I'll be in really gnarly situations in the world
Speaker 1: will be spinning in my muscle control has gone and
Speaker 1: everything's gone, and I'm so bullheaded. I'm focused on, like
Speaker 1: how do I ski this thing? And around I'd be like, body, buddy,
Speaker 1: let's just come back later, Like come not now, Let's
Speaker 1: let's like because you can see what might have like
Speaker 1: long before I do. So, Like one thing is you
Speaker 1: know the right training partner, uh, keeps you safe, helps
Speaker 1: you stay safe even the face of yourself. But the
Speaker 1: two things that matter I think the most with Ryan
Speaker 1: may one we have we have the same learning preferences,
Speaker 1: learning styles. And I'm not talking about the wildly disproved
Speaker 1: idea of like visual kinesthetic grauditory learners. That's not what
Speaker 1: I'm talking about. Uh. What I'm talking about is like
Speaker 1: Ryan and I are both a little introverted. We like
Speaker 1: learning in private. We don't want to be ski under
Speaker 1: the chair lift very often we want to go off
Speaker 1: where nobody can see us. We like the same terrain styles,
Speaker 1: we like the same kind of adventure. We're in roughly
Speaker 1: the same shape physically, so we can do similar Like
Speaker 1: all of that is very very similar. Also, we have
Speaker 1: the same warm ups like path into flow, and this
Speaker 1: is really different from the action sport athletes. I know
Speaker 1: a ton of athletes who want to as soon as
Speaker 1: they get to the mountain and they want to go
Speaker 1: to the hardest terrain they can find and that's where
Speaker 1: they want to start. That is not like I have
Speaker 1: a very slow, like four or five run warm up
Speaker 1: that we both use and it works really well for
Speaker 1: both of us. And it doesn't we don't take risks
Speaker 1: physical risks until we're already sort of inflow. That's never
Speaker 1: sort of what we're using to get into flow. So
Speaker 1: I found that like path and to flow really matters,
Speaker 1: learning style really matters, psychological safety really matters. It's probably
Speaker 1: a ton more, but to me, I think those were
Speaker 1: the big three. Yeah, if I could add one fun
Speaker 1: one to that, Stephen is that you know very early on.
Speaker 1: I think what I found in Stephen was just in
Speaker 1: pattern recognition, right, the aesthetic of what we were looking
Speaker 1: to achieve on snow. You know, what we were looking
Speaker 1: to emulate on snow was very similar. And yeah there's
Speaker 1: over goals too, right yeah right, yeah yeah yeah. Stylistically,
Speaker 1: like both of our approach to park skiing is not
Speaker 1: it's weird, it's off kilt or from the from the normal, uh,
Speaker 1: from what normally people try to achieve in terrain parks
Speaker 1: and much more creatively based. But it's more about the
Speaker 1: creative interpretation of terrain features rather than like how many
Speaker 1: spins or flips can you throw? I think these are
Speaker 1: super helpful. I think tangible takeaways for people to start
Speaker 1: trying to maybe identify some of these people in their
Speaker 1: life that might be good Narquest training partners. I want
Speaker 1: to Scott, you got a briefly touched you said the
Speaker 1: word creativity. I want to go there. This is a
Speaker 1: huge feature of nar country as well, and so I'm
Speaker 1: actually going to read a quote from our country here, Stephen.
Speaker 1: You write that as we get older quote, there are
Speaker 1: fundamental shifts in how the brain processes information. In simple terms,
Speaker 1: our ego starts to quiet and our perspectives starts to widen.
Speaker 1: Whole new levels of intelligence creativity, empathy, and wisdom open
Speaker 1: up as a result. Key downstream skills like critical thinking,
Speaker 1: problem solving, creativity, communication, cooperation, and collaboration all have the potential,
Speaker 1: if properly cultivated, to skyrocket in our other years. So Stephen,
Speaker 1: I would love for you to talk about these superpowers,
Speaker 1: particularly how creativity changes across the lifespan and what factors
Speaker 1: by influence some of these changes in just a second.
Speaker 1: But for those of you that just leaned in hearing
Speaker 1: that you can essentially get superpowers as you age, reminder,
Speaker 1: go to the call to action button, get your hands
Speaker 1: on the how to guide for peak performance aging, and
Speaker 1: just a massive suite of tools to ensure that you
Speaker 1: know how to apply this cutting age science in your
Speaker 1: own life to cultivate and access the superpowers that we're
Speaker 1: about to explore. By three books came thousands of dollars
Speaker 1: worth of these peek performance tools. Don't sleep on this,
Speaker 1: all right. So Claire Goodridge, my colleague is in is
Speaker 1: in this chat, and we all love Claire. She's a
Speaker 1: good friend here and she's really good at finding articles
Speaker 1: really quickly, so I'm hoping she can find a link
Speaker 1: to put in there a free resource that from my
Speaker 1: web page that we I published an article with Martin Selgman. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: this is the great activity. Find this article. So we
Speaker 1: put together all the research we're talking about. It's called
Speaker 1: creativity aging, what do we still have left when we're
Speaker 1: old or whatever? And it really goes through systematically and
Speaker 1: looks at every kind of facet and and it dovetails
Speaker 1: so nicely with all the things you just mentioned. That
Speaker 1: was our conclusion as well. All yeah, also creativity and agent.
Speaker 1: This is the best article, my favorite article. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so find let's find this article, Clara, We're all rooting
Speaker 1: for you. I've got somewhere on my computer, but I
Speaker 1: don't know where it is. Look like like Google Kaufman
Speaker 1: did she feel? Casey Maxwell found it? And also Marie
Speaker 1: Foergillard was a call thron that as well. I want
Speaker 1: to give her credit. She did her whole dissertation under
Speaker 1: Martin Selman on creativity. But anyway, what is so striking
Speaker 1: is is the confluence of these findings that, yes, we
Speaker 1: do tend to see that fluid reasoning skills do show
Speaker 1: a bit of a decrement as we get older, But
Speaker 1: those fluid reasoning skills really don't matter when you're in
Speaker 1: the full state. And I think this is the point
Speaker 1: that Steven's making here is that if we can arrange
Speaker 1: our lives to be more in a in a kind
Speaker 1: of state of food, that's drawing on our crystallized intelligence
Speaker 1: and drawing on our like our our large our wisdom,
Speaker 1: our large storehouse of knowledge. All the experiences we've built
Speaker 1: up in our lives are episodic. Memory doesn't just peer
Speaker 1: as we get older. It gets a little harder access
Speaker 1: to this when we get dementia. That that's true. But
Speaker 1: barring dementia, you know, being able to get a full
Speaker 1: state that accesses all those goodies and doesn't tap into
Speaker 1: the fluid reasoning system you can cut aside step aging
Speaker 1: to a very large extent. Well, and the other the
Speaker 1: other thing that's really interesting. So one of the things
Speaker 1: they do this really cool thing in the article where
Speaker 1: that there's a table. It's maybe my favorite favorite table
Speaker 1: in any in anything I've seen on aging, where you
Speaker 1: list they're like, sort of this is these are all
Speaker 1: the skills that go into creativity. These are the ones
Speaker 1: that decline over time, and these are the ones we
Speaker 1: gain over time. Right, And the list of things that
Speaker 1: decline is really ultimately short. It's like eight items long
Speaker 1: if I have from I'm correct, and the list of
Speaker 1: what we gain is is a lot longer. But one
Speaker 1: of the things that is on the list of declines
Speaker 1: I believe was task switching, right. And so here's the
Speaker 1: thing interesting it was doctor Adam Gazali is that you
Speaker 1: see usf and we do a lot of work with
Speaker 1: the flours, which collective hit the cover of Nate Sure
Speaker 1: a bunch of years ago because he figured I created
Speaker 1: a video game. Is now it's the only it's been
Speaker 1: approved by the FDA for the treatment of cognitive decline
Speaker 1: and older adults. The only video game that's ever been
Speaker 1: approved is a medicine. And it's like twenty minutes a day,
Speaker 1: three times a week. And what it actually focused on
Speaker 1: is test switching, this very thing which does decline over time.
Speaker 1: But it turns out he found a way to train it.
Speaker 1: It's tricky to train, so even some of the stuff that,
Speaker 1: like we know it declines over time, you can still
Speaker 1: train some of that stuff up. Here's something even wilder
Speaker 1: on the fluid intelligence tip that Ryan and I were
Speaker 1: We were actually meeting with some experts on this week.
Speaker 1: So fluid intelligence is one of the reasons it goes
Speaker 1: away is because processing speed slows down because myelination, right,
Speaker 1: white matter insulation in the brain's wires declines over time.
Speaker 1: There's starting to be some proven we think this may
Speaker 1: be true. So what people don't often realize is that
Speaker 1: bone health and bone density is directly tied to brain
Speaker 1: stuff over time because the bones are your nutrient and
Speaker 1: mineral storehouses where the body stores and if you think
Speaker 1: about it, brains run, among other things, on calcium. Right.
Speaker 1: There's nothing in the brain that happens without calcium. Where
Speaker 1: do you think it comes from? Bone minerals and some
Speaker 1: of the only stuff that crosses the blood brain border.
Speaker 1: So that there's now new proof or new evidence or
Speaker 1: pointing in that direction that if we can increase bone
Speaker 1: density over time, then there are a lot of ways
Speaker 1: to do this. Now, some of the processing speed, some
Speaker 1: of the stuff that we think declines over time that
Speaker 1: might actually be a bone problem, not a brain problem.
Speaker 1: And we've figured out how to improve bone density over
Speaker 1: time that's really trainable at this point. So even some
Speaker 1: of the stuff that we think declines every time, we're
Speaker 1: starting to find ways around it. But Scott's really right.
Speaker 1: His point is you can sort of bypass a lot
Speaker 1: of the things that decline over time. Was sort of
Speaker 1: a flow mastery based protocol. And if you want to
Speaker 1: fight off Alzheimer's and dementia, we know that the two
Speaker 1: best ways to do it is lifelong learning, and you
Speaker 1: need expertise and wisdom. Right, Mastery and wisdom are the
Speaker 1: two best ways to build up cognitive reserve, which is
Speaker 1: what protects against Alzheimer's dimension and cognitive decline. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1: I love everything you just said, Stephen, and it just
Speaker 1: makes me think of the old debate on intelligence versus expertise.
Speaker 1: I remember when I was really young, there are a
Speaker 1: lot of things the gifted kids could do that quickly
Speaker 1: at first that took me a little bit longer to do.
Speaker 1: Like I remember we all had we all played tetris
Speaker 1: at lunch together, and I'm like, oh, the different kids
Speaker 1: always met me. But you know, the more expertise you gain,
Speaker 1: the more intelligence you start to look. And I don't
Speaker 1: think it's fooling anyone. I think it's real intelligence. It's
Speaker 1: just a different kind of intelligence. But I always found
Speaker 1: that through my own deliberate, hard way to learn things
Speaker 1: and to build up automatic skills, automaticity, I could get
Speaker 1: to a point where I started to overtake the gifted kids.
Speaker 1: And it just raises lots of deep, profound questions in
Speaker 1: my view about what is giftedness? Then? What is the
Speaker 1: real nature of giftedness? Is there only one way to
Speaker 1: be gifted? The processing speed issue is that the only way?
Speaker 1: You know? Do you have to have high processing speed
Speaker 1: to be get gifted human? Or can you really? Like?
Speaker 1: And and and I like, I'm in the room, Like,
Speaker 1: if you're puzzle solving in the room, I'm probably not
Speaker 1: the guy you want in the room. But if I
Speaker 1: can sleep on it, if you want to give me
Speaker 1: the problem, let me go home and sleep on it
Speaker 1: and wake up in the morning, I'm the guy you
Speaker 1: want in the room, right, and you are too, so
Speaker 1: like that like so some of this stuff on processing
Speaker 1: speed is really weird because if you're looking at like
Speaker 1: solutions people need to come to to sleep on it,
Speaker 1: versus like people who have really fast minds, like you're
Speaker 1: often going to take the solutions from the folks who
Speaker 1: need to sleep on it. I don't like we're measuring.
Speaker 1: It's a weird thing there are certain situations where that's
Speaker 1: an amazing, amazing ability, but it's much more limited, I
Speaker 1: think than you know. Well, I now, I don't have
Speaker 1: to tell you this. You did battle against. This is
Speaker 1: the first thirty year career. This was this was your
Speaker 1: cross to bear. This is exactly why I'm resonating so
Speaker 1: much with this conversation with your book. In this conversation
Speaker 1: is I think that we undervalue wisdom so much in
Speaker 1: our schools, and we overvalue quick thinking as opposed to deeper,
Speaker 1: reflective thinking. This is the Yeah, you're appore right, twenty
Speaker 1: i'd say twenty five years scientifically been trying to rail
Speaker 1: against that outdated model of learning and potential. So it
Speaker 1: really resonated with a book because it just gets to
Speaker 1: the heart of this with the aging thing as well.
Speaker 1: You know, it's very easy to just say as we age,
Speaker 1: we get less intelligent. But if we include things like
Speaker 1: expertise and deep sk and mastery into the picture, I
Speaker 1: think the picture looks different as you show, Steven. So
Speaker 1: that's why it's a really profound conversation myself, Cory, really quick,
Speaker 1: I wanted to ask Steven just on that tip of wisdom, Stephen,
Speaker 1: it's not just a quality, right, Wisdom has a neurobiology. No,
Speaker 1: it's so uh if we've ever doing our research for us,
Speaker 1: look up dill Up Jest who's at UCSD and some
Speaker 1: of his work on wisdom. I like, I like his
Speaker 1: work sort of the best. But wisdom is a is
Speaker 1: a very clear, definable neurobiological treat In fact, since this
Speaker 1: is an FRC thing, you know, Chicks Set Me High
Speaker 1: did a ton of work on wisdom, and uh, let
Speaker 1: me pull up. I've got it. I'm gonna find a
Speaker 1: quote for you. It's gonna take me a second to
Speaker 1: do this, so, but Chick sent Me High is one
Speaker 1: of the most amazing quotes on wisdom. And he points
Speaker 1: out and I always he's like, look, if you kind
Speaker 1: of assess wisdom, you gotta make sure that the people
Speaker 1: enjoy their life. Like if they're not enjoying their life,
Speaker 1: if you don't like, if you don't look at them
Speaker 1: and go, oh my god, they're having a blast. He's like,
Speaker 1: there's no way can call them wise. They're a lot
Speaker 1: like if that's not wise, if there's not it isn't
Speaker 1: a high quality life that like, you know, and he
Speaker 1: points out, I'll find the quote in a second. But
Speaker 1: he points out that there's a foundation. Joy is a
Speaker 1: fundamental component of wisdom, and it's got to be it
Speaker 1: shows up in the living and the approach. And I
Speaker 1: think that's so so, so so so key is a point
Speaker 1: that Okay, so you guys, talk amongst yourself and give
Speaker 1: me a second to find this quote. I think a
Speaker 1: big part of wisdom. By the way, let me let
Speaker 1: me just distinguish intelligence from creativity. First of all, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna give you a bunch of diffinite quick definis.
Speaker 1: Intelligence is the capacity and ability to discern what is
Speaker 1: Imagination is the ability capacity to discern what could be.
Speaker 1: Creativity requires both intelligence and imagination. And then what is wisdom? Okay,
Speaker 1: that's next level shit right there. Wisdom is the integration
Speaker 1: of all that in a way actually that allows us
Speaker 1: to transcend the ordinary dichotomies we see in our society.
Speaker 1: So actually, I see wisdom as a way of being
Speaker 1: able to have what Matt Abraham Aso called dichotomy transcendence.
Speaker 1: And and this relates a lot to Stephens's mindset of
Speaker 1: you know, screwed. I'm not going to take the standard
Speaker 1: sort of way of conventional way of limits of thinking.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to think either or about it. I'm
Speaker 1: going to think yes, and I think yes. End thinking
Speaker 1: is wisdom very much. So, you know, being able to
Speaker 1: say it's not you're either forty or you're sixty. You
Speaker 1: are either a forty year old abilities or sixty year abilities.
Speaker 1: You're either good versus evil. I mean, you can transcend
Speaker 1: and come up. You know, it's not like everything is
Speaker 1: either one or the other. You know, Wisdom to me
Speaker 1: is being able to have that kind of dichotomy transcendence.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's a couple of things on wisdom. Also,
Speaker 1: one of the things that I always talk about, and
Speaker 1: this is this is not a definition. This is just
Speaker 1: a practical way to think about sort of how it
Speaker 1: splits up. And this is not one hundred percent, but
Speaker 1: it's generally accurate. Expertise is what we learn consciously. Wisdom
Speaker 1: is what we learn non consciously. Right, So you go
Speaker 1: into the lecture and the lecture is on dealing cards,
Speaker 1: so you're learning that consciously how to deal card, but
Speaker 1: you're also learning what's the power dynamic in the room
Speaker 1: and who's sitting like all that's non conscious. Okay, this is.
Speaker 1: And by the way, this is Chick sent me high,
Speaker 1: and chickset me high. So it's me I Chick sent
Speaker 1: me high, and his wife Isabella chaxa Hi, an essay
Speaker 1: they wrote together on wisdom. It is essential to remember
Speaker 1: that the pursuit of wisdom and its deployment thrive on joy.
Speaker 1: The best recipe for the spread of wisdom is the
Speaker 1: deployment of curiosity. Respect for the best accomplishments of the past,
Speaker 1: couple with the burning desire to improve on them, and
Speaker 1: all of this within a conception of self that extends
Speaker 1: to other people the planet beyond. When these elements aren't
Speaker 1: a joyful immersion, the complexity of life is likely to
Speaker 1: ensure an openness to experience, a willingness to delve deepened
Speaker 1: issues of concern to self and others. If such an
Speaker 1: attitude develops far enough, then understanding life becomes increasingly rewarding
Speaker 1: in itself. The person will be seen as wise, and
Speaker 1: his or actions will also be considered wise. And what
Speaker 1: I like about that is what they're saying is the
Speaker 1: development of wisdom itself is a form of mastery and
Speaker 1: its own reward. Wisdom, like mastery, becomes its own reward
Speaker 1: and without if wisdom is in its own reward, you
Speaker 1: don't get the title of wise. And I think that's
Speaker 1: really that's sort of cool. I like that. I like
Speaker 1: how they thought about that. That is so interesting. So
Speaker 1: do you think that there can be no conscious forms
Speaker 1: of wisdom? No? I do think there are a lot
Speaker 1: of conscious forms of wisdom. But I think that, like,
Speaker 1: if you look at the even if you look at
Speaker 1: the neurobiological systems that are involved in STO wisdom, it's
Speaker 1: a lot of it is stuff that shows up more
Speaker 1: and like non conscious learning and knowledge. Yeah, the phrase
Speaker 1: of that in the field is called tacit knowledge knowledge exactly.
Speaker 1: That is so interesting, you know, you know, I did
Speaker 1: my dissertation on implicit learning and how that was unrelated
Speaker 1: to i Q type intelligence, that unconscious intelligence was a
Speaker 1: thing that should have been that should be more studied
Speaker 1: in the field. That'd be super interesting to see how
Speaker 1: that relates to explicit wisdom. Anyway, that's just the nerd
Speaker 1: in me. That's just the nerd in me wondering what
Speaker 1: the what the it's that? No, it's interesting and it
Speaker 1: uh I think also, uh, you know, it's harder to
Speaker 1: verbalize the stuff we learned non consciously often right, also,
Speaker 1: which is interesting because it makes me wonder is wisdom
Speaker 1: more of an embodied is it? Is it distribute? Is it?
Speaker 1: Is it distributed? Right? There's a lot to work on
Speaker 1: wisdom in the brain, but if it's very non conscious,
Speaker 1: it's also probably very embodied. And like what is the
Speaker 1: embodied Like what is the embodied side of wisdom? Is
Speaker 1: another geeky, weird ass question that brings and then and
Speaker 1: then and out of our body. You know, how to
Speaker 1: other minds influence you know, the extended mind hypothesis, that's
Speaker 1: if you want to open them in other can of worms?
Speaker 1: You know, how do how do the minds of others
Speaker 1: influence our embody? Cognition is subtly and so in ways
Speaker 1: we're not aware of, you know, nonconsciously, Like our conversation
Speaker 1: right now, you're influencing me in lots of ways I'm
Speaker 1: not fully able to articulate, you know, And then I
Speaker 1: could say something that sounds wise and then not give
Speaker 1: credit to the fact that it was really the emergent
Speaker 1: interaction between all four of these minds in the room today.
Speaker 1: You know, you know what, that's what narcissists do. By
Speaker 1: the way, narciss are really good at whatever thought into
Speaker 1: their enters their head. They're like that that's brilliant and
Speaker 1: ignoring the fact that it takes so much. They've read
Speaker 1: so much, they've weren't so much from others. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like, you know what I mean, Stephen, No, I
Speaker 1: like that. I like the idea of even when you
Speaker 1: say something brilliant in a conversation, recognizing that it's no
Speaker 1: merging property of the folks you're talking to. I never
Speaker 1: I hadn't thought of it that way. But that's really
Speaker 1: smart and you know, humble in a way that I
Speaker 1: that I that I like and I probably but we're
Speaker 1: scientifically accurate as well. Yeah, I mean, like when we
Speaker 1: when we get riff and Steven, you know, we even
Speaker 1: do it for text messaging sometimes when we get riffing,
Speaker 1: I don't think it's easy to discern which one of
Speaker 1: us independent with the other is is more had a
Speaker 1: more brilliant text? You know, it's we're in the flow
Speaker 1: that the means where flow comes in My my man,
Speaker 1: you know, if you can get group flow. Well, it's
Speaker 1: also like I know of you know, all this kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. Jazz I noticed this all the time. We
Speaker 1: were talking about good partners. Like one of the reasons
Speaker 1: Ryan and I work so well again, and one of
Speaker 1: the reasons Scott and I are such good friends welaugh
Speaker 1: a lot together. And one of the things that I
Speaker 1: always pay attention to is laughing a lot together. Even so,
Speaker 1: like for the guy who's telling the joke, or the
Speaker 1: for the person telling the joke. Sorry guy, by the way, Sorry,
Speaker 1: it's a gender neutral term. When I use it, I
Speaker 1: don't I don't mean it in a in a masculine way.
Speaker 1: I really it's just neutral to me. But I noticed that,
Speaker 1: like the ability to laugh easily makes funny people funnier, right,
Speaker 1: So if you're funny, people are not around people who
Speaker 1: laugh easily, they're less funny, right, Like the laugh there,
Speaker 1: something about the comedic mind is dependent upon the laughter
Speaker 1: of others, even though you like laughter looks so much
Speaker 1: like the reaction to the funny, but it's also stimulating
Speaker 1: the fun like it's it's a circular thing, and one
Speaker 1: is not possible with the other, even in the thing
Speaker 1: where you totally give credit to the person being funny,
Speaker 1: and you never actually give credit to the person laughing.
Speaker 1: But the truth of the matter is like, you can't
Speaker 1: do it without it. Try to be funny around people
Speaker 1: who aren't laughing. You can keep cracking those like. It
Speaker 1: doesn't work. The brain stops being doing what it does
Speaker 1: that makes you funny. It's an antior saying of the
Speaker 1: cortex thing. But we're not going to go there. We
Speaker 1: promise people who is going to get nerdy and we're
Speaker 1: going to take a deep dive. So here we are,
Speaker 1: so something no doubt, I love it, I'm here for it.
Speaker 1: Something we haven't talked about that I promised we'd circle
Speaker 1: back to. That really is a vehicle for a lot
Speaker 1: of what we were just talking about, creativity, unconscious learning.
Speaker 1: The experience of joy is play, and play is a
Speaker 1: huge theme in our country. So can we talk a
Speaker 1: little bit. We haven't talked about dynamic deliberate play. What
Speaker 1: is it? Let's talk about it. Why is it important?
Speaker 1: So dynamic deliberate play is usually important for people performance aging.
Speaker 1: Let's just define the term dynamic is a fancy way
Speaker 1: of saying. So we talked about user to lose its
Speaker 1: skills earlier. Right on the physical side, if you want
Speaker 1: to sort of hold on a physical functionality, there's five
Speaker 1: things stamina, strength, balance, agility, and flexibility. When somebody uses
Speaker 1: the word dynamic, it is literally shorthand for all five
Speaker 1: of those functional fitness skills. Right, That's just it's a
Speaker 1: simple way of saying all five of those things are present.
Speaker 1: And deliberate play is you've all heard about deliberate practice.
Speaker 1: It's ANDREWS. Erickson's brilliant research into expertise, and it turns
Speaker 1: out deliberate practice is great. It's deiplate. Practice is repetition
Speaker 1: with incrementual advancement, and it's great for learning very specific
Speaker 1: kinds of skills. But in general, deliberate play, which is
Speaker 1: outperformance deliberate practice. Deliberate play is repetition without repetition, or
Speaker 1: repetition with improvisation. You do what you just did, but
Speaker 1: you improve a little bit on top of it, and
Speaker 1: it's playful. What's the big deal but one deliberate practice.
Speaker 1: I always say this, with deliberate practice, there's only one
Speaker 1: right answer. You do this thing you used to do
Speaker 1: and you get it a little bit better, and that
Speaker 1: everything else is wrong. So there's three under and sixty
Speaker 1: five degrees. Three hundred and sixty four degrees are wrong.
Speaker 1: There's one degree of right with deliberate play repetition. Without repetition,
Speaker 1: there's only one thing where you could be wrong, which
Speaker 1: is you do the same thing you just did. Everything
Speaker 1: else is a right answer. There's no shame, there's no
Speaker 1: self consciousness, there's no embarrassment. So, first of all, older adults,
Speaker 1: one of the things we know, there's this rumor that
Speaker 1: there's a motor skills learning window that slams shut after childhood,
Speaker 1: and like a lot of things around aging, yes and no,
Speaker 1: there is a motor learning window, and it does start,
Speaker 1: it does close, but only in very particular ways. What
Speaker 1: really changes is how we learn. Kids learn through playing.
Speaker 1: Adults stop learning through playing. They learn through grinding basically,
Speaker 1: and grinding produces a lot less neurochemistry when we play.
Speaker 1: Play is directly tied to our orphan system. The paraocle gray,
Speaker 1: which produces most of the endorphins in the brain, gets
Speaker 1: really activated by play. Endorphins are really powerful drugs. Not
Speaker 1: only they feel good, they use the amplify learning. Right,
Speaker 1: So if you get this, you learn faster. With deliberate play,
Speaker 1: a lot of the negative stuff sort of gets out
Speaker 1: of the way. There's a lot more space to be right.
Speaker 1: In a deliberate play environment, that motor learning window opens
Speaker 1: back up, and it's just fucking fun, right, and like
Speaker 1: it's just fun. And by the way, positive emotions lower stress,
Speaker 1: increase the production of T cells and natural killer cells,
Speaker 1: so like really really good anti aging medicine as well.
Speaker 1: I'll stop there. No, Steven, look, did you coin that
Speaker 1: deliberate play because that's brilliant. No, it's Scott actually shows
Speaker 1: up in the literature back in it's old it's like
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy nine. I think it's the first first citing
Speaker 1: in the literature that I've found. It sort of went
Speaker 1: out of fashion for a while. It shows up again recently,
Speaker 1: more in the embodied cognitive literature of embodied cognition now
Speaker 1: than kind of a lot of other places. But it's
Speaker 1: actually a fairly old idea, and it actually made me wonder.
Speaker 1: It's too bad that Anders passed away, because I would
Speaker 1: ask him. Made me wonder if he got the idea
Speaker 1: for deliberate practice from this deliberate play idea. I doubt
Speaker 1: it too, but it like it's been in the literature
Speaker 1: for a while actually, so it's brilliant. I think we
Speaker 1: need to bring it back like in a more mainstream way,
Speaker 1: one hundred percent. I love it. One of my biggest
Speaker 1: ongoing friendly tensions with Andres Erickson was this idea that
Speaker 1: deliverate practice fully explains and accounts for creative thinking and
Speaker 1: creative behavior. And I try to make the point that
Speaker 1: most of the work he did on deliver practice only
Speaker 1: applies to well structured domains where cost not ill structured
Speaker 1: to means, which is a lot what you focus on
Speaker 1: in the book. I wrote an article if if someone
Speaker 1: can google this and put the link in h for
Speaker 1: Scientific American, it's called creativity is much more than ten
Speaker 1: thousand hours of deliberate practice. I think that really pissed
Speaker 1: oners all. I mean, me and him were friends. You know,
Speaker 1: it's you know, but there was this old no tension.
Speaker 1: So funny I have to tell you funny andrews ericson story.
Speaker 1: I'm me piece, I'm at and peace. I met him
Speaker 1: at the Santa Fe Institute. And if you read the
Speaker 1: Rise of Superman, you know they're like, there's three or
Speaker 1: art and possible. There's three big challenges to andrews Ericson's work.
Speaker 1: Is the first was mounted by him in reaction to
Speaker 1: Malcolm Gladwell's work where he was like, look, it's not
Speaker 1: across the board, it's only in certain really structured environments.
Speaker 1: David Epstein in the brilliant book Range mounts a challenge
Speaker 1: and then all the flow research says, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: you can get to mastery using flow a lot faster
Speaker 1: than that than as long as deliberate practic just takes right.
Speaker 1: And I'm in the bathroom at the Santa fe Institude
Speaker 1: of this conference on big Performance that he's at, I'm
Speaker 1: in a stall and I said, they I hear this voice.
Speaker 1: It says, I hear you got a problem my research.
Speaker 1: And there's literally nobody else in the bathroom. And I
Speaker 1: was like, wait, what's going the hell's going on? And
Speaker 1: I was like is that literally? And and I sort
Speaker 1: of like puked by out of the stall. And he
Speaker 1: was laughing, and I was like, oh, you're messing with me.
Speaker 1: I get it. That is so funny and funny. It
Speaker 1: was funny. He is very funny, David. If someone can
Speaker 1: find my recent chat with David Epstein on greatness on
Speaker 1: my podcast in a respectful way, we both really dive
Speaker 1: deep into this topic. And so for people who want
Speaker 1: to actually go even deeper. There are a lot of
Speaker 1: nuances around it, but he was really really convinced that, uh,
Speaker 1: door practice explained everything about learning, learning acquisition, you know,
Speaker 1: and uh and it just depends and it just it
Speaker 1: depends on the field in a lot of ways. I
Speaker 1: couldn't imagine Stephen making the kind of progress you did
Speaker 1: without deliberate play. Oh, I don't think it's possible, because
Speaker 1: the thing with deliberate practice is especially trying to learn
Speaker 1: something like like park skiing, where like when you make
Speaker 1: an error, when you don't get it right, often it
Speaker 1: comes with consequences, right, like he was working on like
Speaker 1: violinists and concert musicians and mathematicians were like, you get
Speaker 1: something wrong and it sounds bad, or there's an error
Speaker 1: in your math. But when I fuck up park skiing,
Speaker 1: I fall down and it hurts. So like repetition, you know,
Speaker 1: with incremental advancement is the only way forward. Then I
Speaker 1: have to like, you can't do it with stuff where
Speaker 1: there's physical where we're wrong means it could hurt. It
Speaker 1: doesn't work that way. You have to like I often
Speaker 1: find that that Ryan and I have this joke. The
Speaker 1: easiest way not to learn a skill on a given
Speaker 1: day while skiing is to claim you're going to learn
Speaker 1: that skill. At the front end of the day, you
Speaker 1: will learn a million other things. You'll learn seventeen other things,
Speaker 1: but the thing you came to learn, it doesn't work
Speaker 1: because there's too much expectation, there's too much pressure. I'm
Speaker 1: amazed when it comes to deliberate practice that he actually
Speaker 1: even got the results he got because like the people
Speaker 1: personality types that fit that deliberate practice model, it's such
Speaker 1: a narrow bandwidth of people. It's amazing to me that
Speaker 1: he got those results. I always wonder about, like where
Speaker 1: did you recruit your subjects? Well, how did you right?
Speaker 1: Like those are the questions I started, and the answers are.
Speaker 1: You know, he's very tightly controlled experimental procedures, which he
Speaker 1: thought was the only way to study this. And you
Speaker 1: know the lineages. Both of us studied with Herb Simon.
Speaker 1: I was Herb Simon's last research assistant before he passed away,
Speaker 1: and he and I do not know that you worked
Speaker 1: with a lot of giants. But I've been blessed to
Speaker 1: have great mentors in my career one hundred percent. I've
Speaker 1: been blessed. But yeah, Carnegie Mellon, and that's where Andre's
Speaker 1: around these original studies. Was it Carnegie Mellon two three
Speaker 1: decades before I arrived at Carnegie Mellon, But very very
Speaker 1: tightly controlled situations where you take all the noise but
Speaker 1: out of it. But in real life, the noise is
Speaker 1: where the creativity is. So in a way, you're kind
Speaker 1: of like controlling for creativity. You know, I never quite
Speaker 1: put that way, but yeah, So play obviously a huge
Speaker 1: reason why you made so much progress. Another piece you
Speaker 1: just touched on that I'd love to double click there, Stephen,
Speaker 1: is embodied cognition that played a major role in why
Speaker 1: you were able to be so successful. Can you talk
Speaker 1: about that? Well, God, we could go on for Okay,
Speaker 1: So one shameless SBK plug if you're if you're unfamiliar
Speaker 1: with in buying cognition, you're looking for a way in
Speaker 1: Annie Paul Murphy's The Extended Mind is probably the best book,
Speaker 1: but sbk's interview with Annie Paul Murphy is the best
Speaker 1: interview she's given on that book. That she's really smart.
Speaker 1: His interview with her is particularly great. Embody cognition is
Speaker 1: just simple, simple idea. We're not heads on sticks. The
Speaker 1: brain is fully embedded in our body. To take it
Speaker 1: one step further, the body is fully embedded in the environment.
Speaker 1: And as we were talking about this with laughter a
Speaker 1: minute ago, like it's a combination of all these things,
Speaker 1: but like we're in body cognition. Matter to us was
Speaker 1: a couple of things. There was a learning protocol that
Speaker 1: we utilized to teach people how to park ski. Let
Speaker 1: me just sort of walk you through it, because this
Speaker 1: is the best way to answer this question. So our
Speaker 1: learning protocol was based on this one inchet of time thing.
Speaker 1: And I wasn't trying to teach anybody tricks. Tricks are
Speaker 1: too difficult. Well were we took park skiing and snowboarding
Speaker 1: broke in eight foundational movements. There's more movements, like there's
Speaker 1: a couple of others, but it's basically eight movements. A crouch,
Speaker 1: a jump, a slash, a grind, a three sixty one
Speaker 1: to eighty and skiing, switcher backwards, a riding back. So right,
Speaker 1: those are the foundational emotions. We would do two a day,
Speaker 1: and our idea was we're going to introduce new movement
Speaker 1: patterns which allow you to creatively interpret the train features.
Speaker 1: Anybody who studies. Flow knows that creativity is a flow trigger,
Speaker 1: and so we'd given people tools that allowed them creatively
Speaker 1: interpret and safely interpret train features. Right, go one inch
Speaker 1: at a time, don't do anything you can't do, just
Speaker 1: build playfully on what you can do, and those creative
Speaker 1: actions will drop you into flow flow massively amplifized learning.
Speaker 1: That's what took care of learning, teaching people tricks, right,
Speaker 1: how did we do instruction? So one embody cognition says
Speaker 1: that anything you learn while moving, you'll learn faster. So
Speaker 1: you want to learn a foreign language, add a wild
Speaker 1: gesture to each word. You'll learn it much faster because
Speaker 1: we're embodied systems. In fact, one of my favorite findings
Speaker 1: ever out of embody cognition is infants. If you pair
Speaker 1: when an infant points something, if a mother then names it,
Speaker 1: the combination of the mother naming it and the infant
Speaker 1: pointing the infant will adopt the word into their vocabulary
Speaker 1: within two months. But if it doesn't happen, they may
Speaker 1: not learn it at all. And so there's this whole
Speaker 1: thing now about gesture poverty. It turns out low income
Speaker 1: communities they tend to gesture lest then in more affluent communities,
Speaker 1: and gesturing is primordial language we learn. We think first
Speaker 1: in gesture and then it becomes words. And if you
Speaker 1: limit gestures in infants, they do their minds don't become
Speaker 1: as complexity. There's now all these programs where they go
Speaker 1: into low income communities and they literally just teach parents
Speaker 1: how to gesture more because it expands the intelligence of
Speaker 1: the children. These are all embodied cognitive findings. One of
Speaker 1: the things that we did is we just sort of update.
Speaker 1: We took all this and updated old ideas that are
Speaker 1: around in the inner game of tennis, the inner game
Speaker 1: of skiing about learning and mirror nerons. And Ryan and
Speaker 1: I would play fall the Leader games around the mountains,
Speaker 1: so he would do something and I would try to
Speaker 1: do what he did, and if if it was too
Speaker 1: advanced for me, I would just dial it back and
Speaker 1: do you know a lesser version of that same move
Speaker 1: right in a playful manner, or vice versa. And when
Speaker 1: we brought other people into this adventure, we did these
Speaker 1: follow the leaders style learning. Simply put, when you watch,
Speaker 1: when you're doing that, when you watch somebody perform a skill,
Speaker 1: your brain run, your mirrorrons will run. The exact same
Speaker 1: physical program, and most people don't know this. You literally
Speaker 1: get a signal, can it an interiorceptive signal of whether
Speaker 1: or not you have that movement. You'll get a little
Speaker 1: bit of dope, mean if your body can perform the movement,
Speaker 1: and you'll get a little bit of ore up and
Speaker 1: effort and fear if you can't. And this happens every
Speaker 1: time we watch people perform. So we just took that
Speaker 1: this embodied mirror in oural system. Right, we're great ape.
Speaker 1: Humans are great apes. We learned through imitation. This is
Speaker 1: the system that's underneath it, and we just used it
Speaker 1: as our primary learning tool. We kept a lot of
Speaker 1: the verbal instruction out of it because that just clouds
Speaker 1: up the prefrontal cortex, keeps you out of flow, keeps
Speaker 1: you thinking, keeps you conscious, does a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: stuff that blocks learning and blocks flow. And we let
Speaker 1: the flow state sort of and the our embodied cognitive
Speaker 1: skills sort of take candibal learning for us. I'm imagining
Speaker 1: an fMRI machine scanning the brain and shilling like a
Speaker 1: cloud vaporized over the prefrontal cortex. Like you said, clouds
Speaker 1: the prefune. I'm imagining what that would look how that
Speaker 1: would look on an fMRI scanner. I love this. I
Speaker 1: got nothing funny to say. I'm looking for something funny
Speaker 1: to this, Scott, I got nothing funny, but give me
Speaker 1: a couple of minutes. I'll find something smart ass to say,
Speaker 1: no pressure, no pressure. Well, so we've been kind of
Speaker 1: circling around flow. You've referenced it lots of times. It's
Speaker 1: not an evening with the Flow Research Collective without us
Speaker 1: at least having one question about flow. So can you
Speaker 1: talk a little bit because I saw this in the
Speaker 1: chat a few times, how does aging impact the frequency
Speaker 1: or intensity of flow experience? So? This is awesome. This
Speaker 1: is awesome because it's literally me Hi Chick sent me
Speaker 1: High's last study, published posthumously was probably you did it
Speaker 1: with Gen Knackamoor and somebody else. I'm forgetting who the
Speaker 1: third person is and his question And this was so
Speaker 1: a lot in our country grew out of grew out
Speaker 1: of my last conversation with me Hi Chick sent me
Speaker 1: High before he died, and it was about peak performance aging.
Speaker 1: And at the time of the conversation I didn't like
Speaker 1: he had written about aging a lot because flow is
Speaker 1: one of the engines of maturation and adult development. But
Speaker 1: it didn't sort of dawn on a lot until I
Speaker 1: saw this study. His last study was on flow pronus
Speaker 1: over time. He wanted to know do we stay as
Speaker 1: hungry is eager for flow late in life as we
Speaker 1: are as it is constant? And what he found is
Speaker 1: that flow proneness and our desire for flow and all
Speaker 1: that stuff stay is constant until the body starts to
Speaker 1: decay in such a way that you can no longer
Speaker 1: use your body to get into flow. And that's the
Speaker 1: only time it shifts. And in his research it was
Speaker 1: like late eighties because that's as like that was the
Speaker 1: upper edge of the study group and that's when bodies
Speaker 1: start falling apart. But that's really more of a reflection
Speaker 1: of where like current medical science is and and and
Speaker 1: kind of longevity technology and long deevity science than anything
Speaker 1: about flow. I think as we sort of extend the
Speaker 1: healthy unian life span out a little bit farther, flow
Speaker 1: promness is going to stay right up there. And Mike
Speaker 1: felt sort of the same way, which he insinuated in
Speaker 1: that like last conversation we had, and how does this all,
Speaker 1: how does this all relate to well? Being sense of
Speaker 1: purpose fulfillment later in life. Because I know, Scott, you
Speaker 1: talk a lot about peak experiences in transcend as well.
Speaker 1: So what does this mean for the second half of life. Well,
Speaker 1: I think that's right, that's just it. I talk about
Speaker 1: peak experiences. I focus more on that than peak performance.
Speaker 1: And I think that at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: we probably spend more of our our twenties to forties
Speaker 1: obsessed with peak performance. And I think as we get older,
Speaker 1: we start to care more about the experiences in our lives.
Speaker 1: We care less about out competing others. We care less
Speaker 1: about our social status, our ego, our you know, are
Speaker 1: leveling up, and more about flow, more about staying in
Speaker 1: the moment and finding what we're doing whatever it is meaningful.
Speaker 1: When you start to have a very meaningful conversation with someone,
Speaker 1: it's not helpful to frame it in terms of did
Speaker 1: I peak performance? When I'm having a conversation with doctor Tory,
Speaker 1: did I dominate Tory in that conversation? What would that mean?
Speaker 1: You know, what would that mean? Why would that be valuable?
Speaker 1: If I dominate Tory in our conversation about something beautiful
Speaker 1: and meaningful. You tell me that that way of thinking
Speaker 1: just doesn't make sense. And but I Scot I always
Speaker 1: thought of I mean when I talk about peak performance,
Speaker 1: to me, it's just getting our biology to work for
Speaker 1: us rather than against us. I don't see it as dominating, right,
Speaker 1: I see it as like working with our biology. I
Speaker 1: get your point on this, and your point is your
Speaker 1: point isn't like it's smart and it's right. And I
Speaker 1: mean one of the things that's interesting about all of
Speaker 1: it is one of the I think the big mistakes
Speaker 1: that people make about adulthood is they believe it's going
Speaker 1: to get easier. Some like it's it's which is like,
Speaker 1: I don't know why so many of us have this
Speaker 1: feeling that like maybe it's just because we think we're
Speaker 1: going to get bet like mastery increases over time, so
Speaker 1: life is going to get easier. I don't think it
Speaker 1: gets any easier because even a master increases, you keep
Speaker 1: increasing the challenge level, you know, or that shit's going
Speaker 1: to keep you happening. It doesn't seem to get easier,
Speaker 1: but you're it definitely gets more meaningful, right, And that's
Speaker 1: the And certainly we know Tori answer your question, like
Speaker 1: even from blueson research successful aging research over and over
Speaker 1: and over again. You want to enjoy the second half
Speaker 1: of your life, you have to live a passion, purpose
Speaker 1: and flow, right, Like, that's that's just really, really, really clear.
Speaker 1: But one of the other things about passion, purpose and flow,
Speaker 1: I think, is it you know that lays down that
Speaker 1: deeply meaningful life. I don't think life gets easier, and
Speaker 1: I think the idea is really dangerous, Like telling yourself
Speaker 1: that it's going to get easier, You're just going to
Speaker 1: find yourself really frustrated with what life is offering you
Speaker 1: over time. But it is definitely going to get more meaningful,
Speaker 1: and that's huge. Yeah. Absolutely, what I was saying is
Speaker 1: is quite consistent with the spirit of your book. There
Speaker 1: was a I wish I was trying to find the
Speaker 1: precise passage, but there's a moment I thought was so
Speaker 1: cool in the book where you found that that sort
Speaker 1: of peak performance part of you was actated when you
Speaker 1: were with someone I believe it probably was with Ryan.
Speaker 1: You're like, how could I ever compete with with someone
Speaker 1: twenty years younger me? And then you said, and then
Speaker 1: I decided to just chill the fuck out and just
Speaker 1: enjoy the moment. What do you remember the passage I'm
Speaker 1: talking about. I know, I know what you're talking about. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I definitely because I mean, look, I'm foundationally a very
Speaker 1: competitive person. I'm competitive about everything. Like in general, I'm
Speaker 1: very competitive. I just tend to be mostly competitive myself, right,
Speaker 1: well more than else. And when I find myself competitive
Speaker 1: with other people, like, first of all, it's allowed, it's
Speaker 1: not gonna work for me, right, Like Ryan's a much
Speaker 1: more gifted ad than I am. He's gonna win. You know,
Speaker 1: I just thought it was a beautiful moment in the book,
Speaker 1: perfectly illustrating. You know, a lot of the principles I
Speaker 1: try to teach people in our self actualization coaching program
Speaker 1: is just focus on your own self actualization. What does
Speaker 1: it even mean to sell factualize someone else's self? And
Speaker 1: why would you want to do that? And so much,
Speaker 1: so much that jumped out to me. There is part
Speaker 1: of pea performance aging isn't dominating. It's about setting goals
Speaker 1: that are growth oriented, right, that develop those master experiences
Speaker 1: that invite these opportunities to explore and be creative. You
Speaker 1: nailed it, You absolutely nailed it. Yeah. Yeah, So in
Speaker 1: our last few moments, any any key takeaways or insights
Speaker 1: from the book that we haven't covered that you want
Speaker 1: to drop on our audience, even just to tease a
Speaker 1: little bit anywhere that we haven't covered. Man, we covered
Speaker 1: so much ground today. This this might have been one
Speaker 1: of our best Stephen conversations on one of these these
Speaker 1: these that it was usually fun. The only thing I
Speaker 1: want to say, uh, that I don't think we covered
Speaker 1: but and I wanted to talk a little bit about
Speaker 1: it is we talk a little about the superpowers of aging.
Speaker 1: You tore you read that quote right, the Collie of
Speaker 1: changes in the brain. And what we didn't talk about is, uh,
Speaker 1: there are moderators, certain things that you have to do
Speaker 1: each decade and other to unlock those super hours of aging,
Speaker 1: and in our fifties, if you really want access to them,
Speaker 1: you needue creativity. It's the creative thinking that actually teaches
Speaker 1: the brain. Kind of this multi perspectable thinking. All all
Speaker 1: the changes in brain function are really unlocked. And this
Speaker 1: was this was very much gene cones versert are really
Speaker 1: unlocked by creative thinking. So creativity expands in adulthood, especially
Speaker 1: in our later years a lot. But it's also you
Speaker 1: need creativity to unlock it. We see sort of the
Speaker 1: same thing and flow, right, where creativity is a flow
Speaker 1: trigger and flow produces more creativity and they feed on itself.
Speaker 1: There's a there's a sort of a feedback loop or
Speaker 1: an oscillation. But you definitely see that with piag performance aging.
Speaker 1: And that's the only thing that I wanted, wanted to
Speaker 1: mention earlier in the conversation and get a chance to mention.
Speaker 1: So now my work here is done, is done, and
Speaker 1: I must and I will end. I will peace out
Speaker 1: by saying, you know, creativity when that can seem like
Speaker 1: such a I don't know, a daunting word to some people,
Speaker 1: but I viewed as a way of being. I viewed
Speaker 1: as an attitude in life, that a spirit, a creative spirit.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I think that's a lot what we're talking
Speaker 1: about today and a lot of what well Steven's book
Speaker 1: illustrates is this creative spirit that he just pervaded everything
Speaker 1: that he did with trying to uh defy age conventions,
Speaker 1: and that's creativity. That's a that's a way of being,
Speaker 1: you know. So I think if people can think of
Speaker 1: it more that way and something just you know, like
Speaker 1: do you have creativity or you don't have creativity? You know,
Speaker 1: it's it's just it's it's it's a way of showing
Speaker 1: up to the world in your own existence. And I
Speaker 1: just want to thank you, uh doctor, thank you, Doctor Tory,
Speaker 1: Thank you Ry, thank you for let Is drag you
Speaker 1: onto the podcast Sky. Thank you so much, man, it
Speaker 1: was an honor. N Doctor Notorious Sbka. Thanks for listening
Speaker 1: to this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like
Speaker 1: to react in some way to something you heard, I
Speaker 1: encourage you to join in the discussion at thus Psychology
Speaker 1: podcast dot com. We're on our YouTube page, The Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 1: We also put up some videos of some episodes on
Speaker 1: our YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check
Speaker 1: that out. Thanks for being such a great supporter of
Speaker 1: the show, and tune in next time for more mind,
Speaker 1: brain behavior and creativity.