Steven Kotler || Creativity, Skill-Mastery, and Aging

to the show. Stephen is the executive director of the Flow Research Collective. He's an reward winning journalist and one of the world's leading experts on human performance. Stephen is the author of eleven bestsellers, including the Art of Impossible, The Rise of Superman, Bold and Abundance. His work has been nominated for two poul Serprizes, translated into over fifty languages,

and he has appeared in over one hundred publications. His latest book is called nar Country, Growing Old, Staying rad Our moderator for this live discussion was doctor Tory Higgins, the head coach of the Flull Research Collective. Doctor Higgins is a deeply passionate, empathetic, peak performance coach, consultant and educator whose coaching philosophy is rooted in the deep seated belief that everyone has the potential to achieve success and growth.

In her private practice, she has had the opportunity to coach a diverse range of clientele, from mountaineers preparing to summit Mount Everest and K two to business leaders of Fortune five hundred companies. In this live discussion, I talked to Stephen Catler about creativity, skill mastering, and aging. Our society views aging as a process of decline, with our

physical and mental capabilities worsening over time. Stephen Catler invites us to challenge our preconceived notions about aging by engaging in impossible activities. They cultivate mastery and creativity. When we are able to incrementally push past our limits, we change our mindset about growing old, which ultimately pro longs are longevity. We also touch on the topics of exploration, play, social connection, flow, neuroscience, wisdom,

and embodied cognition. It's always a pleasure to jam with Stephen about these topics. We nerd out a lot in this discussion, as we always do, but I hope you learned something new, especially relevant to those who are after the age of forty and still want to stay rad So, without further ado, I bring you Steven Cutler. All right, welcome, Welcome, Thank you everyone for joining us. We are all rolling in.

We are about to take a deep dive into the science find peak, performs, aging, skill, mastery, creativity, so much more. Who knows where we're going to go with these two. For those of you who don't know me, I'm doctor Tory Higgins. I'm the head coach at the Flow Research Collective, and I have the opportunity tonight to moderate what's sure to be a phenomenal, maybe sometimes ridiculous conversation between these

two legends. We've got eleven time bestselling author, founder and executive director of the Flow Research Collective, and one of the world's leading experts in humor performance, Steven Coytler. Steven, Hey, how are you hi? Everyone? Thanks for joining us. See a lot of friends in the chat. We have a lot of friends. Thank you, Thank you all for showing up. It's nice to skip blonche and familiar faces and a

bunch of new faces. So eloa to everybody. Awesome. We are also joined by none other than doctor Scott Barry Kaufman, also known as SBK. He's a cognitive scientist and a humanistic psychologist who explores the depths of human potential. He's a professor at Columbia University and the director of the Center for Human Potential, and he's authored ten books, most recently Choose Growth. So if you're keeping count, we're up

to over twenty books between these two guys. He's also the host of the psychology podcast Hey SPK, how are you hey? Great to see you and great to be here today. Awesome, Well, thank you both for taking the time to hang out with all of us. We thought now would be a great time for a call about growth, pea, performance,

aging creativity for a couple of reasons. Number one, because it's only February, we're still at the beginning of twenty twenty three, and since FRC is a peak performance research and training organization, we want to support as many people as possible in designing their next year of life to get as much of the good stuff out as possible. So this calls an excellent time to talk to world leading experts to gain some great recommendations on how to

do just that. The second reason that this is great time and for a call on all these topics is that Steven's new book Our Country, Growing Old and Staying grad is coming out at the end of this month. And this is a book about goals, grit progression, especially in the second half of our lives. And you can think of this as a how not to book, how not to lose that brash fire, how not to give in to that cozy blanket of middle age, how not

to go gently into that good night. So today Steven's gonna be sharing some of the peak performance aging lessons that he learned while writing and living in Our Country, and we're going to be exploring how these lessons aligned with sbk's work on self actualization, creativity, skill mastery. Let's get into it, Stephen. Can you kick things off just by unpacking the title of your new book, Our Country? What's it all about? For those who haven't heard me

say it, n Our Country? Nar is short for gnarly. It is action sports slang for an action sports slang. As colorful as it is, is very precise because people are performing in like environments where shit goes wrong, you could die. So the language as colorful as it is, is actually very precise, and nar is defined and gnarly is defined as any environment, any situation high and perceived risk and high in actual risk. Country is any landscape or terrain fictitious or real. And the book is obviously

about peak performance aging. And it turns out that n Our Country is both sort of a great description of our later years high and perceived risk and high in actual risk. And also, as I'm sure we're gon we're gonna kind of talk about along the way, it's a really good sort of way of thinking about the gritty mindset required to totally thrive during our later years. So that's the title. And in our Country, going all it's

dang red. There we go. So can you talk a little bit so in this book you call just massive bs essentially on the slow rock theory of aging. Can you talk a little bit about some of the latest research in neuroscience that supports that thriving in our later years of life is actually possible. There's a botch of it.

The big picture, I think where you always want to start with this, which is the dominant theory of aging of the for the twentieth century, was this long slow rock theory and the irony of the long slow rot. The idea behind the long slow rot theory is that all our mental skills and all our physical skills decline over time. There's nothing we can do to stop the slide. And it turns out none of that's true. In fact, the origin story for that is Freud. Something Freud writes.

It's nineteen oh four. He's about to turn fifteen, and he's terrified, and he writes that don't I'm paraphracing, but he's don'ty tripsychotherapy and anybody over the age of fifty, their brains are too calcified quote unquote. Old people are no longer educable. Right. This is the origin of the old dog can't learn new tricks idea, and it's sort

of the foundation of the long slow rut theory. And it turns out that we didn't know this until starting in nineteen ninety five is when the data started piling up. None of it's true. Almost everything. There are some exceptions, but almost everything that we thought declined over time. We now know our user losing skills. So if you never stop training these skills, you get to hang on to them and even advance them far later in life than any of you thought possible. So that's sort of the

big picture. And Scott, you just I'm aware that you've recently just finished in our country to chime in here, what was your initial tape? Because I love that Stephen is kind of flying in the face of this what we used to think about aging and at the progress, the progress that we make as we grow older. Yeah, thanks for this opportunity to offer some of my reflections on this book, because I have a lot of reflections

on it when I read it. You know, you it's kind of book first all, you just read top to bottom, you don't, you know, there's no break like you're you're like on the edge of your seat to see how's he going to fall next? Or which bone? Which bone is he going to break? You know, because that's part of the story. But but there's something that really struck me. First of all, the book was was really inspiring to me. I'm not as old as Stephen, but I'm getting I'm

catching up to him, and I'll be there soon. And even at my age, there are certain things that I have like limiting I know that I'm limiting mindsets, you know about certain things, and I don't want it. You know, I have certain things like, oh, well, you know what it's too old to do, as I'm too old to do. You know, it's too late to get back to being good at basketball. Friends, I used to play basketball in like high school, in middle school. And there's a lot

of things. But so the book was very inspiring to me. But what struck me about Stephen's mindset is that he what I saw was an iterative process where he would have a gritty mindset and then he would face reality and then he would say, but this is the cool thing about Steven which really inspired me, is he would he kind of has this attitude like if I could sum up the whole book with one motto, I decided I would sum it up by saying, There's always tomorrow.

And I think that is kind of like that could have been like the title of his book was there is always Tomorrow. Because I found Stephen would be like, oh, what's a fifty three year old doing? You know, he would have all the self critical beliefs and then he would reframe that and then in some cases you would try it and it turned out as self wiving beliefs

were correct. Which is why I thought was awesome about this book is you know, a lot of times there's a lot of bullshit with the kind of these kinds of books where they say, oh, you can believe anything you want if you just put you know, the sea you know, or if you just attract it. No, Steven, what was cool about Stephen's mindset in this book is that he's always trying to push the limits to see what he can achieve, and he aware that even incremental

progress matters. That even if like he dreams for the hut for the two hundred percent improvement and he gets like twenty five percent improvement, that day, he focuses on the twenty five percent improvement. And that's just something you know, No one, Steve's not paying me to say this, Like, this is just something I gleaned from reading the book, which has really inspired me. So yeah, I'll pause there,

but that's something that really struck me from this book. Likewise, and I would love Stephen for you to double click a little bit more about because I think that you do talk a lot about the importance of being aware of your mindset around aging. That mindset plays a huge, huge role in peak performance aging so can you talk a little bit about your findings in that area. Yeah,

I think there's a bunch. So one of the oldest uh finding sort of where I think one of the plays in the field of people performantating sort of starts is the work of doctor Allen Langer, who's at Harvard and she back in the seventies's looking at at questions around priming and language and mindset and aging. And you know, she's really along with doctor gene Con, I think the god parents in the field of PEP performance agent are a lot of other people contribute, but those two are

real heavyweights. And you know, one of Ellen's major points is that aging is not just a physical process. This is much lower. This is much a mental process as a physical process. And this leads to tons and tons and studies and mindset and what the end result is that we know a positive mindset towards aging, which is living back up and like the mindset of old. Once the voice in your head is Scott just sort of starts doing things like, oh you do of old? For

this shit? That's the mindset of old. And it can set up early in your twenties, in your thirties and your forties, and we can talk a lot about why and where it comes from because it's it's weird, and it doesn't it comes from a good place, but it ends up having sort of really negative impacts later on. But one of the clearest findings is that a positive mindset towards aging, my best days are ahead of me.

I'm really thrilled about. What's what's the second half of my life holds will produce an extra seven and a half years of health and longevity, healthy longevity. That's like, if you're obese and your choices and you've got a shitty mindset and your choices, do I lose weight or do I change your minds on my eydset? Change your mindset? Right, if you're a smoker, more important to change your mindset than quits. I mean, like it's literally one of, if not the most impactful thing. Now I want to I

want to speak to something else. Because Scott went right there with what he was talking about. I think personally and not like I knew all this research, right, I like, there's twenty years of research into this book. I went into this experiment knowing all the science, but still like that long slow rot theory of age, you know, is really insidious, and I think it's really hard to escape.

And Scott pointed out one of the things that I found, and like, you know, we we've been advocating in the PEO Performance Agent trainings that have sort of come out of this Gnar style adventures. I'm not saying everybody needs to learn how to parkski, that's what I did, right, But by choosing an activity that is supposed to be impossible for Scott to be basketball, you know, supposedly impossible

for you. It's what it did to me is like whatever limiting beliefs I had about the second album My Life and what was possible when I started learning one eighties and three sixties and knows butter three sixties and that sort of stuff, These things that were supposed to be impossible for me to learn in my fifties, that my stagist exploded like it didn't have a chance in

the face of reality. And in a sense, this is what I like about this is we you know, fir see, we often talk about the difference between gratitude and informations, right, and gratitude works really really well and affirmations don't work at all and they tend to back. And one of the reasons is the brain's got a built in bullshit detector. If you're running around going, you know, I am a millionaire. I'm a millionaire and a millionaire, and your brain is

looking at you, going, buddy, you work at Walmart. Shut the fuck up? What are you talking about? Right? Like, it's totally demotivating. It's sort of the same thing in terms of mindset for me, you know, and so I found it useful to have this style challenge to explode it. And Scott, the thing about that that you pointed out, the last thing I'll say about this in my experience is that exploded mindset is what allowed me. You know, progress was really slow, and you want it to be slow.

You want to go for it to be safe these kinds of adventures. You want to go one inch at a time, and progress really really slowly, and you were oftentimes like I would have to, I would come home and you know, I don't know if this is anybody else, but like self expectation has ruined more great days for

me than anything. There are so many like I'll come to my right being really excited about what I'm going to write or I'll go to the ski area really excited about what I'm going to learn and nothing match it can possibly match my expectations. And that used to crush me, right, I used to come home really like frustrated. But now I have a different measuring stick and I'm like, no, no,

it's one inch at a time. So while yeah, you didn't do this, this, this, or this, you did move this forward, and you did move this forward, and you did move this forward, and those are the real wins because it's one inch at a time. This is the story of peak performance, right one, whether it's peak performance or preak performance aging. It's goes slow to go fast, but it works a compound interest. But it's hard, even

from the inside right to believe in compound interest. You really know it's going to work, it's hard to believe in it, Doctor Tory. Can I illustrate something, uh swear? Or just discuss the difference between the work. I've done a lot of research on narcissism, and I thought it might be helpful to point out the difference between narcissism and mastery. So this book and Steven's work is rounds mastery, and I just wrote down some adjectives I think to

find both. So narcissism is fast, narcissism is immediate. You're always looking for immediate praise. You're always looking for immediate confirmation that you're great. Mastery is And I just wrote down some adjectives humiliating, ego, deflating, painful, meaningful, growth oriented, authentic, pride related hopefully, So the things you get from mastery are more of a mixed bag, but ultimately more rewarding

and meaningful, and it's slower than narcissism. A lot of people prefer to take the narcissism root because they're lazy, in my opinion, but the ultimate reward is not as great by any stretch of the imagination. You might get some nicer immediate rewards, you know, like you fool someone you know into doing something for you or praising you. But in the long run, masteries where it's at. So I thought that would be useful to distinguish narcissism from mastery.

I think it's incredibly useful. And I think that those are helpful differentiators when thinking about because I think something that you both said that it's really important that I want to highlight for everyone is that one of the ways that we can challenge this mindset of aging and this long slow rock theories to have an activity where we can actually practice and explore and grow and develop

mastery experiences. Right. So, and I think that you know, at the heart of our country really is a focus on exploration and play utter in life, right, and so I want to talk about both of those things, exploration and play. Let's talk about exploration first. So can you both weigh in on the importance of exploration and how it relates to growth and peed performance aging. Yes, But I want to circle back on mastery because there's one more thing I want to say about mastery that's so

important here. Mastery and the sense of control that we get and flow are two of the most positive feelings that are available to humans. And when we get super positive emotions, mastering control top of this list from a peak performance aging standpoint. That stimulates the production of T cells and natural killer cells. T cells are your immune system, right, they fight disease. Natural killer cells are the cells that target tumors and other six cells big causes of aging.

So there's a mastery is you know, it's great for exploding his mindset it's great for life long learning. It's got a billion benefits. But like we started talking about the physiological impact of mindset, right, and here's another sort of mental physical connection that most like when they hear mastery. They don't think, oh shit, that's going to boost my immune system in a significant way, but it does all right. Now, from that to exploration, Curiosity is the foundational human motivator.

It's the first it's the first most basic sort of human motivator, and it's so powerful. You get a lot of dopemine from exposure to novelty. We're hardwired for. We have a So here's the here's the real answer I'll give you, toy. We've got to go back to why do we get this mindset of old? So when we're young, we have it with seven primary emotions in all mammals. When we're young, we lean on what's known as the

seeking system. This is our exploratory drives, right, curiosity, and we lean on the play system, right, and this is how we learn when we're young, and those systems come with certain neuro chemicals attached. Play is predominantly about endorphins. Seeking is really about nora epin effort and doubling, and these become the drugs that we're addicted to in our youth.

And that these are strong I'm using strong language, but these are these are the pleasure chemicals that we most like and we're most attached to right and then we find most rewarding at what the mindset of old happens when you get stuff you mean, the seeking system has gone away. You get the stuff you want. I've got the right partner, I've got the right job, I've got the right apartment, I've got the right car, I've got the right style, or whatever it is. You have stuff

that you want to protect, you want to conserve. When we do that, we get serotonin. We also get a little bit of endorphins, but not as much. We mostly get serotonin and oxytocin. These are different drugs. And the mise of old is what happens when the seeking system of the play system shut down. What we know about people performance aging is you want all seven of these systems active and fully functional, otherwise you have problems. And

it's these internal addictions. We get addicted to, these rewards of safety and security and they and we do this because humans, it's important for human couples to say together to raise our children, right, Like, that's why it happens. We make this trade. You know, we have to be bonded from an evolutionary perspective for at least seven years to get our kids to and it's obviously a lot longer, but Undergather era, it was seven years that you needed to be together to get a kid to be able

to take care of himself. I don't understand why in the Hunter Gatherer or what everything could kill you kids got to seven and then they were fine, and now they get to like thirty and they're not fine. I don't I don't understand. But okay, subject of another book, different different, Yeah, So I mean I think that this

ties in beautifully actually to SBK. You talk in transcend you talk about really requiring courage to grow, and Steven you're to and leaving the safety of familiarity in order to grow, and Stephen you're talking about this elevated drive for security and stability as we grow older. So it seems like there's some tension there that it gets increasingly challenging to explore as we age. How do we reconcile?

What do we do? You just call I mean cultivate curiosity, cultivate play, all those things sort of really really matter and are really really useful. I mean, like, but again, another reason like a nar this style quest right, is it rekindles the seeking system. And I mean double mean is fun right, Like it's once you started blowing through your system again in a real way. I Mean. The other thing that I think you see with a lot of adults is they get their only doubamin from their

fricking cell phones. Right, it just comes in through their technology. It's a really cheap, not healthy I mean that we can go on and on about cell phones. Cell phones are really really really bad for your brain in general, but they're really bad for your brain over time. They actually dampen a lot of things that are already susceptible to a little bit of decline in older adults, and they make a lot of that stuff a lot worse. And it's a terrible way to get sort of domin.

Whereas like exploratory behavior, curiosity, different courageous behavior stuff Scott was talking about, trendscend really matters here and what are the recommendations because you've referenced it a little bit, but I think it would be great to go into a little bit more detail of this, this idea of approaching fear in this more incremental way that's kind of one inch at a time strategy. Can you speak to that a little bit. Yeah, it grew out of two things.

Grew out of the need to progress safely, right, Because the one thing that is remains semi true is that older adults take longer to heal than young people. Now, the research arounds like that is true until stem cells advance to the point that that's no longer true, and we're getting closer and closer with that research is probably in the next four or five years that that statement is no longer going to actually be true. But right

now it remains true. And even though we're in meticine, all our tools for dealing with injury have never been better. And one fact is that we're a lot tougher than we think we are, Like we just are physically, we're a lot physically tougher than we think we are on that safety matters. But the other thing is it's a flow thing, so close dates have triggers, right, And the most famous is the Challenge Skills Balance, which says flow follows focused and we get the most focused when the challenge,

the task slightly exceeds our skill set. Right, you want to stretch, but not stap. It's about a five percent gradient difference, right that we find the most flow in the challenge is about four or five percent greater than our skill set. What we started, What we realized is that we meaning the flow research collective people. I was

working with them on the people pformance eating stuff. Was that allostatic load, which is the impact of like trauma over time physiologically and psychologically shrinks this challenge skills balance and especially when you have lots lots of fear and when you have a lot of fear in your system.

When you have too much fear in your system, especially on the physical set, there's a big penalty, right, you can't generate maximum power, you fastwitch muscle response doesn't work as well, you're not as cognitively, you're not as creative, and so there's a big penalty for fear. And it's really easy, right, you get out of the challenge because sweet pot, you're moving into anxiety. You're overloaded. So we

realize that let's shrink it way way down. And our motto was one inch at a time, or go slow to go fast right. And in fact, when like when we took we Ryan Wicks and myself took these core ideas and used it to run our experiment and pop Performance Agent, where we took twenty adults and train them up in this stuff. Holding people back was the biggest thing we had to do. We had to calm like

they because the learning happened automatically. So people were like, oh my god, I can't believe I'm making this most progress learning this really and they got really excited lots of dope, I mean lots of lots of fun nuro chemistry and calming them down holding them back was really like that was a that we nobody got hurt, but it was because we kept reminding people like, hey, like even if you suddenly feel like Superman, remember that sweet spot is shrunken and you're not going to fix that

in a day, right like that, It's got to get fixed slowly, over over a longer period of time. Speaking speaking of ride Wick, so your training partner in our country, social exploration feels like a key component to growth and peak performance aging. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of social connections having a trading partner, having someone to maybe attempt these activities with. How key is that?

For me? It was huge? So one first first reason is huge, and Scott, I'm sure to speak to this, is that all those social bonding neural chemicals right are really we need social contact over time. It's really a fundamental component of peak performance aging. In fact, the only thing that matters almost as much as mindset, or as much as mindset, is having robust social connections. So what's

really important. Performance over time was massively important later in life, but it's really those neuro chemicals you're after and the right training partner you know, to me was really important for that because a lot of like a lot of the things that Ryan and I share is is it

like we have the same pathways into flow. So it was really easy for us to get into group flow, which was really important because I'm an introvert and I'm not like, I'm not the most social person in the world, so I want, I need to get like all the social stuff. Like if you go into the blue zones, these long lived communities we're sending some of the social

research first started showing up. They'll spend sometimes six hours a day on social connection, working with like family and friends, and right, I don't have that kind of time, and I don't like people that much. I'm an introvert. I want to be by myself. So if I can get into group flow, right, the shared I can get all that same neurochemistry and a condensed time frame, so from a time management perspective, and to like meet me where

I was. Because I'm introverted and I don't want all that much social contact, having the right training partner really matter. I can go on and on and on about that one, but I'll stop there and let me clarify something. But first, I think we should bring Ryan Wicks on stage. What do you think of that idea? I could work on that.

He just I could hear him gulf from here, but yes, I can work even just a second, let him wave and so just to put a face to you know, we're talking about him, So it might be good to bring him up here. There's something I would like to qualify though, because there's a lot of misconceptions about introversion, and one of the misconceptions is that somehow you don't

like people. And I think that's a misconception. Of introvers and I think it's helpful actually to distinguish between social connection, the need for social connection, and the need for social exploration. In my book Transcend, I actually queerly distinguished between the two needs and argue there are two separate needs that both have to be satisfied to a certain degree to

feel like your whole in some way. The thing with introverts is that they're less but their default, they're less into novel so social exploration it kind of scares them. It's not their thing as much as extroverts, but they are just as interested deep social connection is extroverts. There's no there's no statistically significant difference. No, I mean I misspoke. I'm a misanthrop No, you personally are, but I wanted to disquarify it's just me. Yeah, yeah, now that's just Stephen.

Actually is just a confluence of these personality traits. But but I do distinguish between the need for social exploration versus the need for high quality connections. And I think as we age it becomes more and more important for more social exploration because I think that when you do that, you start to realize life is over yet, Like we can get in this rut as we get older that like, oh my gosh, like is it is it over? Or are my best days behind me? You know, like those

kinds of questions we ask ourselves. But I think the big role of dopamine as we age is giving us hope. And I actually think if we force ourselves to get out of our bubbles and talk to lots of different people and things, actually that broadens our mind to think that maybe there are it stimulates new possibilities for us. One thing that's weird is I was telling you to

Paul Zach about this who's the oxytocin guru? My question was, if you're a nature so we know by the way, like you can get the same neural chemistry from petting a dog as from spending time with humans, right Like, so we know that, and there's study after study that. But Paul Zach and I was like, you know, if you're a nature lover, right, Joe, I say throughout the book in Our Country that some of my best friends are trees. I love being in forrest, I love being

in nature, and I really do feel that. And so our question was, if you're really really nature philic, can you get those same neurochemicals as social bonding neuro chemicals from time and nature. If you think that if you have that deep connection with nature. Our argument was, yes, but it had I know that we know of has measured it, so we don't. We don't like, I haven't seen data, but we're The thinking was, yet, well, there is there is research thing that spending time in nature

does increase serotonin. Yeah, serotonin, But isn't that about That's about fractal landscapes and being able to predict what happens next, and and that calms the brain down. But that's anything that activates the com and connect system in my eyes is bo thumbs up. I don't care where. I don't care where it's coming from. All right, are you are you mad at me for doing this? Ryan? Or are you happy I did this? No? I'm happy you did it. Yeah, blushing a little bit when you called out my name.

First it started with Torri and then uh and then you followed. But I know I'm glad to be here. He's exciting. Yeah, this is exciting. This is one of Stephen's human friends, since most of his friends apparently are trees and dogs, so Ryan is among the small Scott longtime friend. Got it's two perfect an end of two.

So I actually think that Ryan being here is a perfect segue to what you were just talking about, Scott about social exploration later in life, and Stephen you talk about this theme of actually looking for and acquiring replacement friends. And for those of you who can't see us right now, who are just listening, Ryan and Stephen are not the same age, right, Yeah, this is uh this, I mean, this shows up. Man. It's everybody's work, it really is.

Anybody who sort of worked on aging. We tend to make friends in our generation and meaning everybody tends to die together. And if you're doing peak performance aging work and you're gonna outlive a lot of people, if you don't make re what they literally they don't like this term anymore, what they used to call replacement friends, it gets remarkably lonely. And you know, I tell this story. I have a dear friend who was one of the brightest minds of the twentieth century, really genius. He's now

very very old. Every single one of his friends are dead, and he was Scott will relate to this or get what I t But there's a certain kind of like thinker. In the nineteen seventies, there was a kind of systems thinking, cybernetic systems thinking that it doesn't exist anymore, but it was very particular. This is like a generation of thinkers that this man was part of. And he at one point, like during COVID, I think his last living friend had died.

He's like he was taking to him. He's like, well, first of all, he's like really happy that I call it, because he's like, I don't nobody else calls me. I don't have any other friends. And he said one of the things he said to me is there's nobody left on the planet who thinks like me. And I was like, it's sort of like it was one of those like stunningly weird moments where I was like, oh wow, that's actually like heavy, that's wild, and so replacement friends really matter.

And the other the flip side of this, the inverse, is that those cultures where people are exceptionally long lived, right the so called blue zone, but really any any any culture where people live a very long, healthy time.

One of the things that underpins those sieties across across generational friendships like young people friends with old people, old people friends with young people really really really matters for kind of healthy functioning societies and healthy agent Yeah, that's really I think it's one of the reasons why I've always been attracted to action sports, right because they happen in these environments where all different ages of athletes are contributing right to the over kind of the overall feel

of that day, whether it be in a terrain park on the mountain, in a skate park, in a surf break,

you know, at your local crag. I think action sports just very naturally, you know, the cultures that have evolved with those those specific activities are very inclusive of all ages, and it just seems that, you know, regardless of your skill set, everyone kind of has the opportunity to contribute to something, you know, esthetically with their attitude, you know, with their creativity, how they're interpreting the terrain or I

love it. Ryan, Can I tell you about a finding we just we just found that we're we're submitting the paper. It's been accepted, so it'll be out. It'll be out. So I'm telling you find a finding that we just found that that isn't published yet. It'll be out soon

to our surprise. We looked at the six dimensions of curiosity and trying to in trying to predict creative achievement in life, and we looked across many domains, including sports, and we found that out of all the dimensions of so there's a lot of dimensions of curiosity, there's like there's deprivation reduction. You know, you're you're driven to reduce deprivations. There's joyous exploration. Actually I predicted joyous exploration would be

the biggest predictor, there's stress tolerance, et cetera. We found, to our surprise, the biggest one was thrill seeking. And we did not expect that. No one's ever found that in the literature. That and when we looked at the items, it's not the kind of thrill seeking that's like that's like psychopath thrills. It's well, if you look at the items, the items actually have a lot to do with mastery

getting a thrill from mastery. So when you actually look at the items on the thrill seeking curiosity questionnaire that Todd Caashton, he's a co author on this paper, developed, the kind of items are things like I'm really attracted to the unknown, I'm really attracted to to overcoming something that is a little scary and so anyway you can

just make me think of that. When you talked about your attraction to advent to adventure sports and things like that, I think you probably would score high in this facet. What do you think, Ryan, I think I would. I look forward to taking it. Yeah, yeah, I'll give you the test. Yeah sure, sure. And I think you're both really pointing out some kind of key factors for people

to be thinking about. Because I'm hoping that as people were listening to all of you, that they're starting to think about what activities in their life could they start adopting to explore to grow to develop mastery experience. I think these factors are really helpful to start identifying those. I think it'd be also helpful to think about what are some of the key components to finding a helpful training partner to embark on these types of activities with.

Because Steve and I know you talk a lot about why Ryan was a great training partner for you. What are some of the factors that people should be kind of weighing out to help identify these partners. To me that it was at least three things mattered the most.

You can't ignore that, like psychological safety safety in general, Like right and I have a long history of skiing together, and oftentimes so I'm prone to vertigo due to like inner ear stuff, and the world will start spinning and oftentimes, like I'll be in really gnarly situations in the world will be spinning in my muscle control has gone and everything's gone, and I'm so bullheaded. I'm focused on, like

how do I ski this thing? And around I'd be like, body, buddy, let's just come back later, Like come not now, Let's let's like because you can see what might have like long before I do. So, Like one thing is you know the right training partner, uh, keeps you safe, helps you stay safe even the face of yourself. But the two things that matter I think the most with Ryan may one we have we have the same learning preferences, learning styles. And I'm not talking about the wildly disproved

idea of like visual kinesthetic grauditory learners. That's not what I'm talking about. Uh. What I'm talking about is like Ryan and I are both a little introverted. We like learning in private. We don't want to be ski under the chair lift very often we want to go off where nobody can see us. We like the same terrain styles, we like the same kind of adventure. We're in roughly the same shape physically, so we can do similar Like

all of that is very very similar. Also, we have the same warm ups like path into flow, and this is really different from the action sport athletes. I know a ton of athletes who want to as soon as they get to the mountain and they want to go to the hardest terrain they can find and that's where they want to start. That is not like I have a very slow, like four or five run warm up that we both use and it works really well for both of us. And it doesn't we don't take risks

physical risks until we're already sort of inflow. That's never sort of what we're using to get into flow. So I found that like path and to flow really matters, learning style really matters, psychological safety really matters. It's probably a ton more, but to me, I think those were the big three. Yeah, if I could add one fun one to that, Stephen is that you know very early on. I think what I found in Stephen was just in pattern recognition, right, the aesthetic of what we were looking

to achieve on snow. You know, what we were looking to emulate on snow was very similar. And yeah there's over goals too, right yeah right, yeah yeah yeah. Stylistically, like both of our approach to park skiing is not it's weird, it's off kilt or from the from the normal, uh, from what normally people try to achieve in terrain parks and much more creatively based. But it's more about the creative interpretation of terrain features rather than like how many

spins or flips can you throw? I think these are super helpful. I think tangible takeaways for people to start trying to maybe identify some of these people in their life that might be good Narquest training partners. I want to Scott, you got a briefly touched you said the word creativity. I want to go there. This is a huge feature of nar country as well, and so I'm actually going to read a quote from our country here, Stephen. You write that as we get older quote, there are

fundamental shifts in how the brain processes information. In simple terms, our ego starts to quiet and our perspectives starts to widen. Whole new levels of intelligence creativity, empathy, and wisdom open up as a result. Key downstream skills like critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, communication, cooperation, and collaboration all have the potential,

if properly cultivated, to skyrocket in our other years. So Stephen, I would love for you to talk about these superpowers, particularly how creativity changes across the lifespan and what factors by influence some of these changes in just a second.

But for those of you that just leaned in hearing that you can essentially get superpowers as you age, reminder, go to the call to action button, get your hands on the how to guide for peak performance aging, and just a massive suite of tools to ensure that you know how to apply this cutting age science in your own life to cultivate and access the superpowers that we're about to explore. By three books came thousands of dollars worth of these peek performance tools. Don't sleep on this,

all right. So Claire Goodridge, my colleague is in is in this chat, and we all love Claire. She's a good friend here and she's really good at finding articles really quickly, so I'm hoping she can find a link to put in there a free resource that from my web page that we I published an article with Martin Selgman. Yeah, okay, this is the great activity. Find this article. So we put together all the research we're talking about. It's called creativity aging, what do we still have left when we're

old or whatever? And it really goes through systematically and looks at every kind of facet and and it dovetails so nicely with all the things you just mentioned. That was our conclusion as well. All yeah, also creativity and agent. This is the best article, my favorite article. Yeah, yeah, so find let's find this article, Clara, We're all rooting for you. I've got somewhere on my computer, but I don't know where it is. Look like like Google Kaufman

did she feel? Casey Maxwell found it? And also Marie Foergillard was a call thron that as well. I want to give her credit. She did her whole dissertation under Martin Selman on creativity. But anyway, what is so striking is is the confluence of these findings that, yes, we do tend to see that fluid reasoning skills do show a bit of a decrement as we get older, But those fluid reasoning skills really don't matter when you're in

the full state. And I think this is the point that Steven's making here is that if we can arrange our lives to be more in a in a kind of state of food, that's drawing on our crystallized intelligence and drawing on our like our our large our wisdom, our large storehouse of knowledge. All the experiences we've built up in our lives are episodic. Memory doesn't just peer as we get older. It gets a little harder access

to this when we get dementia. That that's true. But barring dementia, you know, being able to get a full state that accesses all those goodies and doesn't tap into the fluid reasoning system you can cut aside step aging to a very large extent. Well, and the other the other thing that's really interesting. So one of the things they do this really cool thing in the article where

that there's a table. It's maybe my favorite favorite table in any in anything I've seen on aging, where you list they're like, sort of this is these are all the skills that go into creativity. These are the ones that decline over time, and these are the ones we gain over time. Right, And the list of things that decline is really ultimately short. It's like eight items long if I have from I'm correct, and the list of

what we gain is is a lot longer. But one of the things that is on the list of declines I believe was task switching, right. And so here's the thing interesting it was doctor Adam Gazali is that you see usf and we do a lot of work with the flours, which collective hit the cover of Nate Sure a bunch of years ago because he figured I created a video game. Is now it's the only it's been approved by the FDA for the treatment of cognitive decline and older adults. The only video game that's ever been

approved is a medicine. And it's like twenty minutes a day, three times a week. And what it actually focused on is test switching, this very thing which does decline over time. But it turns out he found a way to train it. It's tricky to train, so even some of the stuff that, like we know it declines over time, you can still train some of that stuff up. Here's something even wilder on the fluid intelligence tip that Ryan and I were We were actually meeting with some experts on this week.

So fluid intelligence is one of the reasons it goes away is because processing speed slows down because myelination, right, white matter insulation in the brain's wires declines over time. There's starting to be some proven we think this may be true. So what people don't often realize is that bone health and bone density is directly tied to brain stuff over time because the bones are your nutrient and mineral storehouses where the body stores and if you think

about it, brains run, among other things, on calcium. Right. There's nothing in the brain that happens without calcium. Where do you think it comes from? Bone minerals and some of the only stuff that crosses the blood brain border. So that there's now new proof or new evidence or pointing in that direction that if we can increase bone density over time, then there are a lot of ways

to do this. Now, some of the processing speed, some of the stuff that we think declines over time that might actually be a bone problem, not a brain problem. And we've figured out how to improve bone density over time that's really trainable at this point. So even some of the stuff that we think declines every time, we're starting to find ways around it. But Scott's really right. His point is you can sort of bypass a lot of the things that decline over time. Was sort of

a flow mastery based protocol. And if you want to fight off Alzheimer's and dementia, we know that the two best ways to do it is lifelong learning, and you need expertise and wisdom. Right, Mastery and wisdom are the two best ways to build up cognitive reserve, which is what protects against Alzheimer's dimension and cognitive decline. Yeah. I mean, I love everything you just said, Stephen, and it just makes me think of the old debate on intelligence versus expertise.

I remember when I was really young, there are a lot of things the gifted kids could do that quickly at first that took me a little bit longer to do. Like I remember we all had we all played tetris at lunch together, and I'm like, oh, the different kids always met me. But you know, the more expertise you gain, the more intelligence you start to look. And I don't think it's fooling anyone. I think it's real intelligence. It's

just a different kind of intelligence. But I always found that through my own deliberate, hard way to learn things and to build up automatic skills, automaticity, I could get to a point where I started to overtake the gifted kids. And it just raises lots of deep, profound questions in my view about what is giftedness? Then? What is the real nature of giftedness? Is there only one way to be gifted? The processing speed issue is that the only way?

You know? Do you have to have high processing speed to be get gifted human? Or can you really? Like? And and and I like, I'm in the room, Like, if you're puzzle solving in the room, I'm probably not

the guy you want in the room. But if I can sleep on it, if you want to give me the problem, let me go home and sleep on it and wake up in the morning, I'm the guy you want in the room, right, and you are too, so like that like so some of this stuff on processing speed is really weird because if you're looking at like solutions people need to come to to sleep on it, versus like people who have really fast minds, like you're often going to take the solutions from the folks who

need to sleep on it. I don't like we're measuring. It's a weird thing there are certain situations where that's an amazing, amazing ability, but it's much more limited, I think than you know. Well, I now, I don't have to tell you this. You did battle against. This is the first thirty year career. This was this was your cross to bear. This is exactly why I'm resonating so

much with this conversation with your book. In this conversation is I think that we undervalue wisdom so much in our schools, and we overvalue quick thinking as opposed to deeper, reflective thinking. This is the Yeah, you're appore right, twenty i'd say twenty five years scientifically been trying to rail against that outdated model of learning and potential. So it really resonated with a book because it just gets to the heart of this with the aging thing as well.

You know, it's very easy to just say as we age, we get less intelligent. But if we include things like expertise and deep sk and mastery into the picture, I think the picture looks different as you show, Steven. So that's why it's a really profound conversation myself, Cory, really quick, I wanted to ask Steven just on that tip of wisdom, Stephen,

it's not just a quality, right, Wisdom has a neurobiology. No, it's so uh if we've ever doing our research for us, look up dill Up Jest who's at UCSD and some of his work on wisdom. I like, I like his work sort of the best. But wisdom is a is a very clear, definable neurobiological treat In fact, since this is an FRC thing, you know, Chicks Set Me High did a ton of work on wisdom, and uh, let me pull up. I've got it. I'm gonna find a

quote for you. It's gonna take me a second to do this, so, but Chick sent Me High is one of the most amazing quotes on wisdom. And he points out and I always he's like, look, if you kind of assess wisdom, you gotta make sure that the people enjoy their life. Like if they're not enjoying their life, if you don't like, if you don't look at them and go, oh my god, they're having a blast. He's like,

there's no way can call them wise. They're a lot like if that's not wise, if there's not it isn't a high quality life that like, you know, and he points out, I'll find the quote in a second. But he points out that there's a foundation. Joy is a fundamental component of wisdom, and it's got to be it shows up in the living and the approach. And I think that's so so, so so so key is a point that Okay, so you guys, talk amongst yourself and give me a second to find this quote. I think a

big part of wisdom. By the way, let me let me just distinguish intelligence from creativity. First of all, Okay, I'm gonna give you a bunch of diffinite quick definis. Intelligence is the capacity and ability to discern what is Imagination is the ability capacity to discern what could be. Creativity requires both intelligence and imagination. And then what is wisdom? Okay,

that's next level shit right there. Wisdom is the integration of all that in a way actually that allows us to transcend the ordinary dichotomies we see in our society. So actually, I see wisdom as a way of being able to have what Matt Abraham Aso called dichotomy transcendence. And and this relates a lot to Stephens's mindset of you know, screwed. I'm not going to take the standard sort of way of conventional way of limits of thinking. I'm not going to think either or about it. I'm

going to think yes, and I think yes. End thinking is wisdom very much. So, you know, being able to say it's not you're either forty or you're sixty. You are either a forty year old abilities or sixty year abilities. You're either good versus evil. I mean, you can transcend and come up. You know, it's not like everything is either one or the other. You know, Wisdom to me is being able to have that kind of dichotomy transcendence.

I don't know if that's a couple of things on wisdom. Also, one of the things that I always talk about, and this is this is not a definition. This is just a practical way to think about sort of how it splits up. And this is not one hundred percent, but it's generally accurate. Expertise is what we learn consciously. Wisdom

is what we learn non consciously. Right, So you go into the lecture and the lecture is on dealing cards, so you're learning that consciously how to deal card, but you're also learning what's the power dynamic in the room and who's sitting like all that's non conscious. Okay, this is. And by the way, this is Chick sent me high, and chickset me high. So it's me I Chick sent me high, and his wife Isabella chaxa Hi, an essay

they wrote together on wisdom. It is essential to remember that the pursuit of wisdom and its deployment thrive on joy. The best recipe for the spread of wisdom is the deployment of curiosity. Respect for the best accomplishments of the past, couple with the burning desire to improve on them, and all of this within a conception of self that extends

to other people the planet beyond. When these elements aren't a joyful immersion, the complexity of life is likely to ensure an openness to experience, a willingness to delve deepened issues of concern to self and others. If such an attitude develops far enough, then understanding life becomes increasingly rewarding in itself. The person will be seen as wise, and

his or actions will also be considered wise. And what I like about that is what they're saying is the development of wisdom itself is a form of mastery and its own reward. Wisdom, like mastery, becomes its own reward and without if wisdom is in its own reward, you don't get the title of wise. And I think that's really that's sort of cool. I like that. I like how they thought about that. That is so interesting. So do you think that there can be no conscious forms

of wisdom? No? I do think there are a lot of conscious forms of wisdom. But I think that, like, if you look at the even if you look at the neurobiological systems that are involved in STO wisdom, it's a lot of it is stuff that shows up more and like non conscious learning and knowledge. Yeah, the phrase of that in the field is called tacit knowledge knowledge exactly.

That is so interesting, you know, you know, I did my dissertation on implicit learning and how that was unrelated to i Q type intelligence, that unconscious intelligence was a thing that should have been that should be more studied in the field. That'd be super interesting to see how that relates to explicit wisdom. Anyway, that's just the nerd in me. That's just the nerd in me wondering what

the what the it's that? No, it's interesting and it uh I think also, uh, you know, it's harder to verbalize the stuff we learned non consciously often right, also, which is interesting because it makes me wonder is wisdom more of an embodied is it? Is it distribute? Is it? Is it distributed? Right? There's a lot to work on wisdom in the brain, but if it's very non conscious, it's also probably very embodied. And like what is the

embodied Like what is the embodied side of wisdom? Is another geeky, weird ass question that brings and then and then and out of our body. You know, how to other minds influence you know, the extended mind hypothesis, that's if you want to open them in other can of worms? You know, how do how do the minds of others

influence our embody? Cognition is subtly and so in ways we're not aware of, you know, nonconsciously, Like our conversation right now, you're influencing me in lots of ways I'm not fully able to articulate, you know, And then I could say something that sounds wise and then not give credit to the fact that it was really the emergent interaction between all four of these minds in the room today.

You know, you know what, that's what narcissists do. By the way, narciss are really good at whatever thought into their enters their head. They're like that that's brilliant and ignoring the fact that it takes so much. They've read so much, they've weren't so much from others. You know, it's like, you know what I mean, Stephen, No, I like that. I like the idea of even when you say something brilliant in a conversation, recognizing that it's no

merging property of the folks you're talking to. I never I hadn't thought of it that way. But that's really smart and you know, humble in a way that I that I that I like and I probably but we're scientifically accurate as well. Yeah, I mean, like when we when we get riff and Steven, you know, we even do it for text messaging sometimes when we get riffing, I don't think it's easy to discern which one of us independent with the other is is more had a

more brilliant text? You know, it's we're in the flow that the means where flow comes in My my man, you know, if you can get group flow. Well, it's also like I know of you know, all this kind of stuff. Jazz I noticed this all the time. We were talking about good partners. Like one of the reasons Ryan and I work so well again, and one of the reasons Scott and I are such good friends welaugh a lot together. And one of the things that I

always pay attention to is laughing a lot together. Even so, like for the guy who's telling the joke, or the for the person telling the joke. Sorry guy, by the way, Sorry, it's a gender neutral term. When I use it, I don't I don't mean it in a in a masculine way.

I really it's just neutral to me. But I noticed that, like the ability to laugh easily makes funny people funnier, right, So if you're funny, people are not around people who laugh easily, they're less funny, right, Like the laugh there, something about the comedic mind is dependent upon the laughter of others, even though you like laughter looks so much like the reaction to the funny, but it's also stimulating the fun like it's it's a circular thing, and one

is not possible with the other, even in the thing where you totally give credit to the person being funny, and you never actually give credit to the person laughing. But the truth of the matter is like, you can't do it without it. Try to be funny around people who aren't laughing. You can keep cracking those like. It doesn't work. The brain stops being doing what it does that makes you funny. It's an antior saying of the

cortex thing. But we're not going to go there. We promise people who is going to get nerdy and we're going to take a deep dive. So here we are, so something no doubt, I love it, I'm here for it. Something we haven't talked about that I promised we'd circle back to. That really is a vehicle for a lot of what we were just talking about, creativity, unconscious learning. The experience of joy is play, and play is a huge theme in our country. So can we talk a

little bit. We haven't talked about dynamic deliberate play. What is it? Let's talk about it. Why is it important? So dynamic deliberate play is usually important for people performance aging. Let's just define the term dynamic is a fancy way of saying. So we talked about user to lose its skills earlier. Right on the physical side, if you want to sort of hold on a physical functionality, there's five

things stamina, strength, balance, agility, and flexibility. When somebody uses the word dynamic, it is literally shorthand for all five of those functional fitness skills. Right, That's just it's a simple way of saying all five of those things are present. And deliberate play is you've all heard about deliberate practice. It's ANDREWS. Erickson's brilliant research into expertise, and it turns

out deliberate practice is great. It's deiplate. Practice is repetition with incrementual advancement, and it's great for learning very specific kinds of skills. But in general, deliberate play, which is outperformance deliberate practice. Deliberate play is repetition without repetition, or repetition with improvisation. You do what you just did, but you improve a little bit on top of it, and it's playful. What's the big deal but one deliberate practice.

I always say this, with deliberate practice, there's only one right answer. You do this thing you used to do and you get it a little bit better, and that everything else is wrong. So there's three under and sixty five degrees. Three hundred and sixty four degrees are wrong. There's one degree of right with deliberate play repetition. Without repetition, there's only one thing where you could be wrong, which is you do the same thing you just did. Everything

else is a right answer. There's no shame, there's no self consciousness, there's no embarrassment. So, first of all, older adults, one of the things we know, there's this rumor that there's a motor skills learning window that slams shut after childhood, and like a lot of things around aging, yes and no, there is a motor learning window, and it does start, it does close, but only in very particular ways. What really changes is how we learn. Kids learn through playing.

Adults stop learning through playing. They learn through grinding basically, and grinding produces a lot less neurochemistry when we play. Play is directly tied to our orphan system. The paraocle gray, which produces most of the endorphins in the brain, gets really activated by play. Endorphins are really powerful drugs. Not only they feel good, they use the amplify learning. Right, So if you get this, you learn faster. With deliberate play, a lot of the negative stuff sort of gets out

of the way. There's a lot more space to be right. In a deliberate play environment, that motor learning window opens back up, and it's just fucking fun, right, and like it's just fun. And by the way, positive emotions lower stress, increase the production of T cells and natural killer cells, so like really really good anti aging medicine as well. I'll stop there. No, Steven, look, did you coin that

deliberate play because that's brilliant. No, it's Scott actually shows up in the literature back in it's old it's like nineteen seventy nine. I think it's the first first citing in the literature that I've found. It sort of went out of fashion for a while. It shows up again recently, more in the embodied cognitive literature of embodied cognition now than kind of a lot of other places. But it's actually a fairly old idea, and it actually made me wonder.

It's too bad that Anders passed away, because I would ask him. Made me wonder if he got the idea for deliberate practice from this deliberate play idea. I doubt it too, but it like it's been in the literature for a while actually, so it's brilliant. I think we need to bring it back like in a more mainstream way,

one hundred percent. I love it. One of my biggest ongoing friendly tensions with Andres Erickson was this idea that deliverate practice fully explains and accounts for creative thinking and creative behavior. And I try to make the point that most of the work he did on deliver practice only applies to well structured domains where cost not ill structured to means, which is a lot what you focus on

in the book. I wrote an article if if someone can google this and put the link in h for Scientific American, it's called creativity is much more than ten thousand hours of deliberate practice. I think that really pissed oners all. I mean, me and him were friends. You know, it's you know, but there was this old no tension. So funny I have to tell you funny andrews ericson story. I'm me piece, I'm at and peace. I met him

at the Santa Fe Institute. And if you read the Rise of Superman, you know they're like, there's three or art and possible. There's three big challenges to andrews Ericson's work. Is the first was mounted by him in reaction to Malcolm Gladwell's work where he was like, look, it's not across the board, it's only in certain really structured environments.

David Epstein in the brilliant book Range mounts a challenge and then all the flow research says, wait a minute, you can get to mastery using flow a lot faster than that than as long as deliberate practic just takes right. And I'm in the bathroom at the Santa fe Institude of this conference on big Performance that he's at, I'm in a stall and I said, they I hear this voice. It says, I hear you got a problem my research. And there's literally nobody else in the bathroom. And I

was like, wait, what's going the hell's going on? And I was like is that literally? And and I sort of like puked by out of the stall. And he was laughing, and I was like, oh, you're messing with me. I get it. That is so funny and funny. It was funny. He is very funny, David. If someone can find my recent chat with David Epstein on greatness on my podcast in a respectful way, we both really dive deep into this topic. And so for people who want

to actually go even deeper. There are a lot of nuances around it, but he was really really convinced that, uh, door practice explained everything about learning, learning acquisition, you know, and uh and it just depends and it just it depends on the field in a lot of ways. I couldn't imagine Stephen making the kind of progress you did

without deliberate play. Oh, I don't think it's possible, because the thing with deliberate practice is especially trying to learn something like like park skiing, where like when you make an error, when you don't get it right, often it comes with consequences, right, like he was working on like violinists and concert musicians and mathematicians were like, you get something wrong and it sounds bad, or there's an error in your math. But when I fuck up park skiing,

I fall down and it hurts. So like repetition, you know, with incremental advancement is the only way forward. Then I have to like, you can't do it with stuff where there's physical where we're wrong means it could hurt. It doesn't work that way. You have to like I often find that that Ryan and I have this joke. The easiest way not to learn a skill on a given day while skiing is to claim you're going to learn that skill. At the front end of the day, you

will learn a million other things. You'll learn seventeen other things, but the thing you came to learn, it doesn't work because there's too much expectation, there's too much pressure. I'm amazed when it comes to deliberate practice that he actually even got the results he got because like the people personality types that fit that deliberate practice model, it's such a narrow bandwidth of people. It's amazing to me that he got those results. I always wonder about, like where

did you recruit your subjects? Well, how did you right? Like those are the questions I started, and the answers are. You know, he's very tightly controlled experimental procedures, which he thought was the only way to study this. And you know the lineages. Both of us studied with Herb Simon. I was Herb Simon's last research assistant before he passed away, and he and I do not know that you worked with a lot of giants. But I've been blessed to

have great mentors in my career one hundred percent. I've been blessed. But yeah, Carnegie Mellon, and that's where Andre's around these original studies. Was it Carnegie Mellon two three decades before I arrived at Carnegie Mellon, But very very tightly controlled situations where you take all the noise but out of it. But in real life, the noise is where the creativity is. So in a way, you're kind

of like controlling for creativity. You know, I never quite put that way, but yeah, So play obviously a huge reason why you made so much progress. Another piece you just touched on that I'd love to double click there, Stephen, is embodied cognition that played a major role in why you were able to be so successful. Can you talk

about that? Well, God, we could go on for Okay, So one shameless SBK plug if you're if you're unfamiliar with in buying cognition, you're looking for a way in Annie Paul Murphy's The Extended Mind is probably the best book, but sbk's interview with Annie Paul Murphy is the best interview she's given on that book. That she's really smart. His interview with her is particularly great. Embody cognition is just simple, simple idea. We're not heads on sticks. The

brain is fully embedded in our body. To take it one step further, the body is fully embedded in the environment. And as we were talking about this with laughter a minute ago, like it's a combination of all these things, but like we're in body cognition. Matter to us was a couple of things. There was a learning protocol that we utilized to teach people how to park ski. Let me just sort of walk you through it, because this

is the best way to answer this question. So our learning protocol was based on this one inchet of time thing. And I wasn't trying to teach anybody tricks. Tricks are too difficult. Well were we took park skiing and snowboarding broke in eight foundational movements. There's more movements, like there's a couple of others, but it's basically eight movements. A crouch, a jump, a slash, a grind, a three sixty one to eighty and skiing, switcher backwards, a riding back. So right,

those are the foundational emotions. We would do two a day, and our idea was we're going to introduce new movement patterns which allow you to creatively interpret the train features. Anybody who studies. Flow knows that creativity is a flow trigger, and so we'd given people tools that allowed them creatively

interpret and safely interpret train features. Right, go one inch at a time, don't do anything you can't do, just build playfully on what you can do, and those creative actions will drop you into flow flow massively amplifized learning. That's what took care of learning, teaching people tricks, right, how did we do instruction? So one embody cognition says that anything you learn while moving, you'll learn faster. So you want to learn a foreign language, add a wild

gesture to each word. You'll learn it much faster because we're embodied systems. In fact, one of my favorite findings ever out of embody cognition is infants. If you pair when an infant points something, if a mother then names it, the combination of the mother naming it and the infant pointing the infant will adopt the word into their vocabulary within two months. But if it doesn't happen, they may not learn it at all. And so there's this whole

thing now about gesture poverty. It turns out low income communities they tend to gesture lest then in more affluent communities, and gesturing is primordial language we learn. We think first in gesture and then it becomes words. And if you limit gestures in infants, they do their minds don't become as complexity. There's now all these programs where they go into low income communities and they literally just teach parents how to gesture more because it expands the intelligence of

the children. These are all embodied cognitive findings. One of the things that we did is we just sort of update. We took all this and updated old ideas that are around in the inner game of tennis, the inner game

of skiing about learning and mirror nerons. And Ryan and I would play fall the Leader games around the mountains, so he would do something and I would try to do what he did, and if if it was too advanced for me, I would just dial it back and do you know a lesser version of that same move right in a playful manner, or vice versa. And when we brought other people into this adventure, we did these

follow the leaders style learning. Simply put, when you watch, when you're doing that, when you watch somebody perform a skill, your brain run, your mirrorrons will run. The exact same physical program, and most people don't know this. You literally get a signal, can it an interiorceptive signal of whether or not you have that movement. You'll get a little bit of dope, mean if your body can perform the movement, and you'll get a little bit of ore up and

effort and fear if you can't. And this happens every time we watch people perform. So we just took that this embodied mirror in oural system. Right, we're great ape. Humans are great apes. We learned through imitation. This is the system that's underneath it, and we just used it as our primary learning tool. We kept a lot of the verbal instruction out of it because that just clouds up the prefrontal cortex, keeps you out of flow, keeps you thinking, keeps you conscious, does a whole bunch of

stuff that blocks learning and blocks flow. And we let the flow state sort of and the our embodied cognitive skills sort of take candibal learning for us. I'm imagining an fMRI machine scanning the brain and shilling like a cloud vaporized over the prefrontal cortex. Like you said, clouds the prefune. I'm imagining what that would look how that would look on an fMRI scanner. I love this. I got nothing funny to say. I'm looking for something funny to this, Scott, I got nothing funny, but give me

a couple of minutes. I'll find something smart ass to say, no pressure, no pressure. Well, so we've been kind of circling around flow. You've referenced it lots of times. It's not an evening with the Flow Research Collective without us at least having one question about flow. So can you talk a little bit because I saw this in the chat a few times, how does aging impact the frequency

or intensity of flow experience? So? This is awesome. This is awesome because it's literally me Hi Chick sent me High's last study, published posthumously was probably you did it with Gen Knackamoor and somebody else. I'm forgetting who the third person is and his question And this was so a lot in our country grew out of grew out of my last conversation with me Hi Chick sent me High before he died, and it was about peak performance aging.

And at the time of the conversation I didn't like he had written about aging a lot because flow is one of the engines of maturation and adult development. But it didn't sort of dawn on a lot until I saw this study. His last study was on flow pronus over time. He wanted to know do we stay as hungry is eager for flow late in life as we

are as it is constant? And what he found is that flow proneness and our desire for flow and all that stuff stay is constant until the body starts to decay in such a way that you can no longer use your body to get into flow. And that's the only time it shifts. And in his research it was like late eighties because that's as like that was the upper edge of the study group and that's when bodies

start falling apart. But that's really more of a reflection of where like current medical science is and and and kind of longevity technology and long deevity science than anything about flow. I think as we sort of extend the healthy unian life span out a little bit farther, flow promness is going to stay right up there. And Mike felt sort of the same way, which he insinuated in that like last conversation we had, and how does this all, how does this all relate to well? Being sense of

purpose fulfillment later in life. Because I know, Scott, you talk a lot about peak experiences in transcend as well. So what does this mean for the second half of life. Well, I think that's right, that's just it. I talk about peak experiences. I focus more on that than peak performance. And I think that at the end of the day, we probably spend more of our our twenties to forties

obsessed with peak performance. And I think as we get older, we start to care more about the experiences in our lives. We care less about out competing others. We care less about our social status, our ego, our you know, are leveling up, and more about flow, more about staying in the moment and finding what we're doing whatever it is meaningful. When you start to have a very meaningful conversation with someone, it's not helpful to frame it in terms of did

I peak performance? When I'm having a conversation with doctor Tory, did I dominate Tory in that conversation? What would that mean? You know, what would that mean? Why would that be valuable? If I dominate Tory in our conversation about something beautiful and meaningful. You tell me that that way of thinking just doesn't make sense. And but I Scot I always thought of I mean when I talk about peak performance, to me, it's just getting our biology to work for

us rather than against us. I don't see it as dominating, right, I see it as like working with our biology. I get your point on this, and your point is your point isn't like it's smart and it's right. And I mean one of the things that's interesting about all of it is one of the I think the big mistakes that people make about adulthood is they believe it's going

to get easier. Some like it's it's which is like, I don't know why so many of us have this feeling that like maybe it's just because we think we're going to get bet like mastery increases over time, so life is going to get easier. I don't think it gets any easier because even a master increases, you keep increasing the challenge level, you know, or that shit's going

to keep you happening. It doesn't seem to get easier, but you're it definitely gets more meaningful, right, And that's the And certainly we know Tori answer your question, like even from blueson research successful aging research over and over and over again. You want to enjoy the second half of your life, you have to live a passion, purpose and flow, right, Like, that's that's just really, really, really clear.

But one of the other things about passion, purpose and flow, I think, is it you know that lays down that deeply meaningful life. I don't think life gets easier, and I think the idea is really dangerous, Like telling yourself that it's going to get easier, You're just going to find yourself really frustrated with what life is offering you over time. But it is definitely going to get more meaningful, and that's huge. Yeah. Absolutely, what I was saying is

is quite consistent with the spirit of your book. There was a I wish I was trying to find the precise passage, but there's a moment I thought was so cool in the book where you found that that sort of peak performance part of you was actated when you were with someone I believe it probably was with Ryan. You're like, how could I ever compete with with someone twenty years younger me? And then you said, and then I decided to just chill the fuck out and just

enjoy the moment. What do you remember the passage I'm talking about. I know, I know what you're talking about. Yeah, yeah, I definitely because I mean, look, I'm foundationally a very competitive person. I'm competitive about everything. Like in general, I'm very competitive. I just tend to be mostly competitive myself, right, well more than else. And when I find myself competitive with other people, like, first of all, it's allowed, it's not gonna work for me, right, Like Ryan's a much

more gifted ad than I am. He's gonna win. You know, I just thought it was a beautiful moment in the book, perfectly illustrating. You know, a lot of the principles I try to teach people in our self actualization coaching program is just focus on your own self actualization. What does it even mean to sell factualize someone else's self? And why would you want to do that? And so much, so much that jumped out to me. There is part

of pea performance aging isn't dominating. It's about setting goals that are growth oriented, right, that develop those master experiences that invite these opportunities to explore and be creative. You nailed it, You absolutely nailed it. Yeah. Yeah, So in our last few moments, any any key takeaways or insights from the book that we haven't covered that you want to drop on our audience, even just to tease a little bit anywhere that we haven't covered. Man, we covered

so much ground today. This this might have been one of our best Stephen conversations on one of these these these that it was usually fun. The only thing I want to say, uh, that I don't think we covered but and I wanted to talk a little bit about it is we talk a little about the superpowers of aging. You tore you read that quote right, the Collie of

changes in the brain. And what we didn't talk about is, uh, there are moderators, certain things that you have to do each decade and other to unlock those super hours of aging, and in our fifties, if you really want access to them, you needue creativity. It's the creative thinking that actually teaches the brain. Kind of this multi perspectable thinking. All all the changes in brain function are really unlocked. And this was this was very much gene cones versert are really

unlocked by creative thinking. So creativity expands in adulthood, especially in our later years a lot. But it's also you need creativity to unlock it. We see sort of the same thing and flow, right, where creativity is a flow trigger and flow produces more creativity and they feed on itself. There's a there's a sort of a feedback loop or an oscillation. But you definitely see that with piag performance aging.

And that's the only thing that I wanted, wanted to mention earlier in the conversation and get a chance to mention. So now my work here is done, is done, and I must and I will end. I will peace out by saying, you know, creativity when that can seem like such a I don't know, a daunting word to some people, but I viewed as a way of being. I viewed as an attitude in life, that a spirit, a creative spirit.

And yeah, I think that's a lot what we're talking about today and a lot of what well Steven's book illustrates is this creative spirit that he just pervaded everything that he did with trying to uh defy age conventions, and that's creativity. That's a that's a way of being, you know. So I think if people can think of it more that way and something just you know, like do you have creativity or you don't have creativity? You know, it's it's just it's it's it's a way of showing

up to the world in your own existence. And I just want to thank you, uh doctor, thank you, Doctor Tory, Thank you Ry, thank you for let Is drag you onto the podcast Sky. Thank you so much, man, it was an honor. N Doctor Notorious Sbka. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at thus Psychology podcast dot com. We're on our YouTube page, The Psychology Podcast.

We also put up some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check that out. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more mind, brain behavior and creativity.