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#1940 Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks - Steven Kotler · The You Project

0:00
Speaker 1: I'll get a teen before we get under way today,
0:02
Speaker 1: a blatant plug for me. Upcome a new mentoring program.
0:06
Speaker 1: As you know, I do me best to keep the
0:08
Speaker 1: advertising for my own programs to a minimum on this
0:11
Speaker 1: show because I think it's kind of annoying. But fuck it,
0:13
Speaker 1: today I'm breaking my own rule. So on July thirty,
0:17
Speaker 1: my new eight week online mentoring Extravaganza kicks off. And
0:23
Speaker 1: I've created this program for people who want to get
0:25
Speaker 1: more out of their time, talent, genetics, potential, skills, career
0:32
Speaker 1: and resources what they've got at their disposal. People who
0:35
Speaker 1: want to move above and beyond the groundhog danus of
0:39
Speaker 1: unconscious repetition, of frustration, of self sabotage and overthinking and underdoing,
0:45
Speaker 1: and the destructive habits and rituals, and the crappy results
0:49
Speaker 1: and the perpetual waiting for the right time that never comes.
0:53
Speaker 1: We'll be unpacking the human experience from a psychological, emotional, sociological, physiological,
1:00
Speaker 1: call your body and behavioral perspective, and there'll be lots
1:03
Speaker 1: of room and time for interaction, conversation, and Q and A. So,
1:08
Speaker 1: if that doesn't sound terrible and you'd like to find
1:10
Speaker 1: out a little bit more about the program. Go to
1:14
Speaker 1: me website, me website and take a peek at the
1:17
Speaker 1: very detailed eight week overview. So just go to me
1:21
Speaker 1: dot com. Well, no it's not really, it's actually Craigharper
1:25
Speaker 1: one word dot net, click on education and see what's up. Alrighty,
1:29
Speaker 1: I'm with the show. I get a team. It's Harps
1:33
Speaker 1: and Tiff and Steve and it's the You Project. It's
1:36
Speaker 1: early in the am here in the thriving metropolis of Melbourne.
1:39
Speaker 1: It's four minutes past eight o'clock as we hit the
1:42
Speaker 1: go button. Hi, Tiff, how excited are you? I'm very excited.
1:45
Speaker 1: Craig Ethy Harper. You have a bit of a crush
1:48
Speaker 1: on our guests, and you've had him on your show
1:51
Speaker 1: a couple of times and you do rave Yeah, I do, yep,
1:55
Speaker 1: especially because he brought up the dogg os last time. Yeah,
1:58
Speaker 1: that's right, we're going to talk about it. So I
2:01
Speaker 1: feel like you have a crush on a couple of
2:03
Speaker 1: married men. I'm not sure that seems to be a thing.
2:07
Speaker 1: I don't I don't know. I think married inaccessible. Yeah,
2:11
Speaker 1: that's how I like them. That is that your strategy?
2:16
Speaker 1: It keeps me safe. It keeps you avoiding any kind
2:20
Speaker 1: of commitment or actual relationships. Yes, yep, I've been following
2:24
Speaker 1: much the same protocol for years, and you and I
2:26
Speaker 1: have successfully ducked and with any form of commitment or
2:29
Speaker 1: marriage or grown upness for a long time. Coler, how
2:34
Speaker 1: long have you been married? He doesn't know?
2:39
Speaker 2: Teen years, fourteen years, fifteen years?
2:42
Speaker 1: I can't.
2:43
Speaker 2: You got to do better than that and seven?
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Speaker 1: Are you interested? But it feels I'm sure it feels
2:49
Speaker 1: so fresh and new. You know, he's done one million interviews.
2:53
Speaker 1: No one has ever asked him off the top.
2:55
Speaker 2: I have to understand that the way we sustained our
2:58
Speaker 2: marriage for fifteen years is we too subscribe to they
3:01
Speaker 2: have a continent between you and your crush. Yeah, yeah,
3:06
Speaker 2: Now I read the book, Craig. You know it was
3:09
Speaker 2: a good how too, and we listened.
3:12
Speaker 1: You're welcome. You're welcome. Well, thanks for coming on the
3:15
Speaker 1: You project. You and I started a minor dialogue before
3:19
Speaker 1: we press the record button. But I love the stuff
3:22
Speaker 1: you do. I'm fascinated with your research and your writing
3:25
Speaker 1: and what what lit the fire for you in terms
3:31
Speaker 1: of being so interested in and obsessed maybe with human performance,
3:37
Speaker 1: was there an event. Was there something that happened or
3:40
Speaker 1: was it just part of who you are?
3:44
Speaker 2: We're a bunch of things that happened. It is definitely
3:47
Speaker 2: part of who I am. But the real like that
3:52
Speaker 2: the first time it went from you know me trying
3:55
Speaker 2: to like fix me and make life work a little
3:58
Speaker 2: better too. Oh, there's an interesting there's something going on
4:01
Speaker 2: here that I need to pay attention to. I started
4:05
Speaker 2: my career as a journalist and in the early nineteen nineties,
4:09
Speaker 2: and journalism is a fabulous career where they pay you
4:13
Speaker 2: to go learn about things you're curious about, and super
4:17
Speaker 2: curious about neuroscience, especially in the early nineties, because that
4:21
Speaker 2: was behavioral neuroscience, Like we were first starting to figure
4:25
Speaker 2: out how do people work, how do emotions work? Is
4:28
Speaker 2: consciousness something we can actually talk about out loud as
4:30
Speaker 2: a serious topic of science, all those kinds of questions.
4:33
Speaker 2: It was fascinated with those things simultaneously. On total opposite
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Speaker 2: side of the coin, I was obsessed with action sports
4:41
Speaker 2: and so surfing, skiing, rock climbing, snowboarding and the like,
4:44
Speaker 2: and I spent the better portion of a decade chasing
4:47
Speaker 2: professional athletes around mountains and across oceans, and if you
4:51
Speaker 2: know much about action sports in the nineteen nineties, it's
4:54
Speaker 2: often referred to as the so called era of impossible.
4:57
Speaker 2: We're more impossible, never been done, never going to be done.
5:00
Speaker 2: Feats than ever before got accomplished. And you know, it's
5:05
Speaker 2: one thing, I think to see a laired Hamilton serve
5:10
Speaker 2: one hundred foot wave on a screen, and you know,
5:13
Speaker 2: it's quite another when, like you go drinking with your
5:16
Speaker 2: friends on a Friday night and then on Saturday morning,
5:20
Speaker 2: I reason hungover and you go into the mountains and
5:22
Speaker 2: one of your friends does something that for all of
5:24
Speaker 2: recorded history, nobody's ever done and is not supposed to
5:27
Speaker 2: be done. It's a very different thing. And on top
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Speaker 2: of that, and you know this from your high performance background,
5:34
Speaker 2: this is not rocket science. But all the people I knew,
5:39
Speaker 2: especially in the early nineties when action sports just getting going,
5:41
Speaker 2: it was really a punk rock subculture. Especially I was
5:44
Speaker 2: in Tahoe, so that was really a mecca that most
5:47
Speaker 2: of the folks I knew didn't have a lot of education.
5:51
Speaker 2: I have a lot of money. They had really rough childhoods.
5:55
Speaker 2: A lot of the people I knew it came from
5:56
Speaker 2: really difficult broken home scenarios. They had no money, no education,
6:01
Speaker 2: broken homes, lots of risk taking, lots of substance abuse. Normally,
6:05
Speaker 2: put these things together in a community and people die
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Speaker 2: young or they go to jail. What they don't do
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Speaker 2: is reinvent what's possible for the species. So seeing all
6:15
Speaker 2: that up front, you know, first question what the hell
6:18
Speaker 2: is going on? So it really it went from personal
6:22
Speaker 2: interest to oh wow, this is a this is a phenomenon.
6:26
Speaker 2: And as journalists, you know, it took a while to notice. Yeah,
6:29
Speaker 2: but the journalists would get together there over a couple
6:31
Speaker 2: of years, we sit down and talk, and every conversation
6:34
Speaker 2: was we've hit the ceiling. It's not going to be
6:37
Speaker 2: there's no way people are going to start dying in
6:39
Speaker 2: droves that we can't go any farther this is. And
6:42
Speaker 2: it kept going and going and going, and eventually, you know,
6:45
Speaker 2: after four or five of those conversations, you start to
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Speaker 2: realize it's not going to stop, and something really unusual
6:50
Speaker 2: is happening. And that's where it started for me.
6:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, I feel like I love that. I feel like
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Speaker 1: psychology gets in the way of physiological potentials so much.
7:00
Speaker 1: In other words, our mind gets in the way of
7:02
Speaker 1: our possibilities, you know. And I've worked with athletes who
7:06
Speaker 1: are incredibly fucking gifted, and I've got more confidence and
7:10
Speaker 1: faith in their ability than they have. And some of
7:13
Speaker 1: them have gone on to tap into that, but some
7:15
Speaker 1: of them haven't. And then I've worked with other people,
7:18
Speaker 1: like I trained a lady for five Olympic Games. Her
7:23
Speaker 1: name is Jackie Cooper, and she's an aerial ski jumper,
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Speaker 1: five time world champion, and she would tell you herself
7:30
Speaker 1: not wildly gifted, but the most fucking incredible mindset ever.
7:36
Speaker 1: And you know, she went on to be the first
7:38
Speaker 1: woman to do a triple twisting triple back some assault
7:41
Speaker 1: in the world. And I heard from her six weeks
7:46
Speaker 1: ago and she's training for something I can't say a
7:48
Speaker 1: lot about because it's a tell TV thing over here.
7:52
Speaker 1: But she's forty nine and she hasn't trained thirteen years.
7:55
Speaker 1: And I started training her six weeks ago and she's
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Speaker 1: she wouldn't mind me saying this, but she's a fucking savage,
8:02
Speaker 1: and like it's still there. She's a fucking savage, and
8:07
Speaker 1: like it's like some flame just got reignited, you know.
8:12
Speaker 1: And here's this woman who hadn't trained since she was
8:15
Speaker 1: thirty six, she's now forty nine, and in six weeks
8:18
Speaker 1: her body has transformed, and I have to constantly hold
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Speaker 1: her back like most people. I have to coax and
8:25
Speaker 1: prod and push or a lot of people. But I
8:29
Speaker 1: need to make sure she doesn't kill herself in the process. Wow, incredible,
8:35
Speaker 1: it's incredible. But I feel like that's of course, that's
8:39
Speaker 1: the anomaly. But you know, I know for myself, Stephen,
8:45
Speaker 1: like I'm fifty nine, I grew up not great genetics,
8:49
Speaker 1: not great potential, not good, not athletically gifted, none of
8:52
Speaker 1: that stuff. And so for me that's the catalyst because
8:56
Speaker 1: like I was over two hundred pounds in in year
9:00
Speaker 1: eight at school and not not at all kids, and
9:03
Speaker 1: my name at school was Jumbo. And then I lost
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Speaker 1: all of this weight and I went from last in
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Speaker 1: every event to quite okay. So not a bad athlete,
9:12
Speaker 1: but not because of genetics, just because of work. And
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Speaker 1: for me, that opened the door on, oh wow, if
9:18
Speaker 1: I can do this with my body, what else can
9:20
Speaker 1: I do?
9:21
Speaker 2: Like?
9:21
Speaker 1: What else is? Like I went to a boys private boys' school,
9:25
Speaker 1: and we had to do compulsory cross country runs every week,
9:28
Speaker 1: and I came one hundred and thirtieth out of one
9:30
Speaker 1: hundred and thirty bois you didn't know that? Tif? Did you?
9:33
Speaker 1: Well done one hundred and thirtieth because I couldn't run,
9:37
Speaker 1: so I walked coming last. What's that you came first?
9:41
Speaker 1: I was excellent at coming last. But I trained and
9:45
Speaker 1: all of that stuff, and anyone can train. But yeah,
9:47
Speaker 1: that just opened the door on this curiosity for me
9:50
Speaker 1: around what is possible for us? So tell us a
9:55
Speaker 1: little bit about your latest book. Your latest book is
9:57
Speaker 1: called Na Country. I'm excited about that. It's about you
10:01
Speaker 1: exploring your add limits, your physiological and I guess psychological
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Speaker 1: limits as a as a fifty three year old trying
10:09
Speaker 1: to become in a late scale.
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Speaker 2: So yeah, in sort of a fit of madness for
10:15
Speaker 2: a bunch of really strange reasons that we don't have
10:18
Speaker 2: to go into at age fifty three, I took a
10:22
Speaker 2: bunch of sort of new theories from embodied cognition, flow science,
10:28
Speaker 2: and network neuroscience or neurodynamics, right and mashed them together.
10:35
Speaker 2: And most of these things are true in the lab.
10:39
Speaker 2: Are they true in the real world? Interesting question? But
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Speaker 2: if they are, it should be possible for older athletes
10:46
Speaker 2: to progress in seemingly impossible activities like park skin. Right.
10:50
Speaker 2: So I blended this together and I ran a really
10:54
Speaker 2: fun experiment where I basically tried to go from zero
10:57
Speaker 2: experience park skiin never you know, never really been in
11:00
Speaker 2: a train park before, can ski, but never really been
11:03
Speaker 2: in a train park before. Too intermediate in a single season,
11:06
Speaker 2: which is would be challenging for anybody, but for somebody
11:10
Speaker 2: the age fifty three. You know, most of the belief
11:15
Speaker 2: is that most of our physical skills decline over time.
11:17
Speaker 2: There's nothing we can do to slop the slide. There's
11:20
Speaker 2: church says no, that's not true. But you know, open question.
11:23
Speaker 2: The motor were window motor learning, window slam shut in,
11:28
Speaker 2: you know, around twenty five, things like that. All the
11:31
Speaker 2: new sciences hold on maybe not so fast, but so
11:35
Speaker 2: we put it to the test and I ran an
11:38
Speaker 2: experiment where took all these ideas, blended them together, you know,
11:43
Speaker 2: and had an incredibly successful season. Turned out I was
11:48
Speaker 2: my ski partner was using all the same stuff he
11:53
Speaker 2: got just as far as I got. And that caught
11:55
Speaker 2: our attention. I mean, two people as the smallest pilot
11:58
Speaker 2: studying history, but it caught our because both of us
12:01
Speaker 2: made like enormous progress in a single season. So last year,
12:06
Speaker 2: Winner of twenty twenty one, we took a group of
12:09
Speaker 2: seventeen older adults which is thirty to sixty eight, took
12:13
Speaker 2: the same core principles we used and in four days.
12:19
Speaker 2: This is a slight exaggeration. I can go into more detail,
12:22
Speaker 2: but we can. Four days. We taught them out of
12:23
Speaker 2: parkski and everybody got so much farther than we thought
12:29
Speaker 2: they were going to get. And so this is long
12:33
Speaker 2: led into a whole kind of peak performance aging research
12:37
Speaker 2: initiative and things like that. But the story of the
12:40
Speaker 2: ski experiments is told in Our Country, which is a
12:42
Speaker 2: book that comes out in February.
12:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's I'm looking forward to have just started
12:49
Speaker 1: because I got a preview copy. Thank you for that.
12:52
Speaker 1: And I love the fact that you are both the
12:55
Speaker 1: researcher and the researched. You are you're the project later
12:59
Speaker 1: and you the you're the subject. I love that. But
13:03
Speaker 1: but that's a good way to learn experientially but also
13:06
Speaker 1: to be able to collect daughter and do all the
13:08
Speaker 1: observational stuff along the way. Did you did you think
13:12
Speaker 1: that you would progress the why that you did? Like
13:14
Speaker 1: you must have had a level you got.
13:16
Speaker 2: You got to understand that. Like when I I saw
13:18
Speaker 2: how I did it is I started the season, I
13:20
Speaker 2: made a list of twenty tricks, and I said, okay,
13:22
Speaker 2: if you can learn these tricks of zero to intermediate,
13:25
Speaker 2: and then I wanted to be able to ski a
13:27
Speaker 2: fluid line through a kitty small and medium terrain park,
13:32
Speaker 2: be able to like on all the features, be able
13:34
Speaker 2: to do something cool and interesting off each of the features,
13:37
Speaker 2: and that and that to me was and I really
13:40
Speaker 2: when I like criticalists back in my head, I thought, okay,
13:43
Speaker 2: if this takes five years to accomplish, that's going to
13:46
Speaker 2: be a win. The thinking is this, Greg, so I
13:49
Speaker 2: should give you a little bit of Maybe I'll give
13:51
Speaker 2: you a little bit more backstory. You might have to
13:53
Speaker 2: tell you a story.
13:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right.
13:56
Speaker 2: So problem, as you know, at the center of my
14:00
Speaker 2: work is flow right, and the godfather of flow psychology,
14:05
Speaker 2: as me hih Chick, sent me high and passed away
14:09
Speaker 2: last October. We've known each other over a lot of years,
14:14
Speaker 2: not super well, but he's been incredibly gracious to me.
14:17
Speaker 2: Every time I had a question called him up, he's
14:20
Speaker 2: answered the phone and been really great and answer my questions.
14:24
Speaker 2: And right before COVID, I had heard he had a
14:31
Speaker 2: stroke and I wanted to see if he was okay.
14:34
Speaker 2: And I had also they had just published a number
14:37
Speaker 2: of sent me high textbooks on flow and adult development,
14:40
Speaker 2: a couple of things like that. I've been reading them,
14:43
Speaker 2: and I knew he was an avid outdoorsman. He has
14:47
Speaker 2: lives in Montana, hikes a lot. I knew he did
14:50
Speaker 2: early flow research on rock climbers and did some mountaineering,
14:53
Speaker 2: and I knew a bunch of his students would tell
14:56
Speaker 2: stories about how he'd come back from weekend adventures with
14:59
Speaker 2: like bruises on his face from like climbing accidents and
15:02
Speaker 2: things like that. And I'm reading a bunch of material
15:05
Speaker 2: that was first translated out of Battalion's never appeared in
15:08
Speaker 2: English before, and it started to down him. And this
15:10
Speaker 2: guy was a much more serious action sport athlete than
15:13
Speaker 2: he ever let on, and I started to wonder. I
15:15
Speaker 2: was like, if you listen to his ted talk, he
15:17
Speaker 2: discovered flow while in a concentration camp during the war
15:22
Speaker 2: and then did all this early work on artists, and
15:24
Speaker 2: that's the story he tells. And I started to wonder,
15:27
Speaker 2: is that really the truth. I started to wonder, did
15:30
Speaker 2: you not start going into the mountains and having these
15:32
Speaker 2: really radically weird experiences like most actions sport athletes myself included,
15:36
Speaker 2: But back in the sixties and seventies, there was no
15:38
Speaker 2: possible way and even to take you seriously if you
15:41
Speaker 2: were talking about like flow and rock climbers and things
15:44
Speaker 2: like that, and that was So I called him up
15:46
Speaker 2: to ask him this question, right, basically like, hey, where
15:49
Speaker 2: you lying in your ted talk and this other stuff
15:51
Speaker 2: and is this the right? So I asked him my question,
15:54
Speaker 2: and there's this enormous pause, like a minute goes by
15:58
Speaker 2: and two minutes go by, and I'm like, oh my god,
16:00
Speaker 2: did I just mortally offend like the Godfather was like
16:04
Speaker 2: ology in my hair on my frown. Shit, And suddenly
16:08
Speaker 2: IDA know he says, you got to be careful. And
16:12
Speaker 2: at this point I'm thinking, oh shit, what happened to
16:14
Speaker 2: his brain? Right, chick Cepty has lost the plot, like
16:17
Speaker 2: he doesn't even know what's going Oh shit, what am
16:19
Speaker 2: I going to do? And I sort of pause and
16:21
Speaker 2: after be like thirty forty seconds, I'm like, well, Mike,
16:25
Speaker 2: what do you mean? I gotta be careful? He's like,
16:29
Speaker 2: you do something your whole life or flow, then you
16:33
Speaker 2: get to be my age and forget about climbing mountains.
16:36
Speaker 2: I can barely get out of bed. You need a
16:39
Speaker 2: backup plan. You got to be careful. And it like
16:43
Speaker 2: it blew my mind. It was first of all, I
16:45
Speaker 2: thought it was incredibly kyd right. It was literally like
16:47
Speaker 2: one flow junkie to another, like have a backup plan,
16:51
Speaker 2: and it really resonated. I've been studying peak performance, aging
16:54
Speaker 2: and all these other things for a while and I've
16:58
Speaker 2: done a lot of work in and around these fields,
17:00
Speaker 2: but it never coalesced. And I was like, Okay, I
17:03
Speaker 2: need a backup plane. And my skin is my favorite
17:05
Speaker 2: activity on a planet. But I'm a big mountain skier.
17:08
Speaker 2: I go really fast down gnarly stuff and that's what
17:12
Speaker 2: drops men to flow, and that's not that may not
17:15
Speaker 2: be sustainable. And I figured if I could learn how
17:18
Speaker 2: to park ski. It wasn't interested in being like Alex
17:21
Speaker 2: Hall and winning in the Olympics or anything like that.
17:23
Speaker 2: I wanted to explore a whole new catalog possible motions
17:27
Speaker 2: because creativity, novelty, unpredictability, and risk these are all flow triggers.
17:32
Speaker 2: So if I could develop a skill set zero to
17:35
Speaker 2: intermediate and intermediate like, you can sort of decrease some
17:39
Speaker 2: of the danger because the random shit stops starts going wrong,
17:42
Speaker 2: and I would just have a million more entrances and
17:44
Speaker 2: to flow in my favorite activity in the world. That
17:47
Speaker 2: was my idea of a backup line. That was my goal.
17:49
Speaker 2: And I figured if it took five years, what it mattered.
17:52
Speaker 2: I'd be sixty years old, but this would be this
17:54
Speaker 2: would still work for me. I made so much progress
17:58
Speaker 2: in this season. It was jaw dropping, Like I tipped
18:00
Speaker 2: off all the tricks on my trip list went farther
18:03
Speaker 2: than that had never progressed. I'm not a naturally gifted athlete.
18:08
Speaker 2: I had an incredibly business schedule. I've got a very
18:12
Speaker 2: broken body. I've broken almost eighty over eighty bones along
18:15
Speaker 2: the way.
18:16
Speaker 1: I had bones. What have you been doing?
18:19
Speaker 2: I chased professional athletes around because I'm a writer. I'm
18:22
Speaker 2: a writer. Let's get clear. Yeah, I broke my life
18:30
Speaker 2: phone along the way.
18:32
Speaker 1: There's not a lot left, dude, It's true.
18:38
Speaker 2: After so, I mean, but my point was I started
18:42
Speaker 2: pretty far behind the curve, right, Yeah, A lot didn't
18:45
Speaker 2: want any more surgery, like it was really like yeah,
18:48
Speaker 2: and it was shocking how far I got and it
18:52
Speaker 2: was only watching my ski partner Ryan make the same progress.
18:57
Speaker 2: I was like, it was really noticeable and him, yeah,
19:01
Speaker 2: it's like this doesn't, this doesn't. This is really accelerated.
19:04
Speaker 2: In fact, I learned something that I didn't actually know
19:07
Speaker 2: about performance, which is I was doing really terrifying scary stuff.
19:12
Speaker 2: It was all very successful, right, there was nagging injuries
19:14
Speaker 2: and fallows and whatever. But I ended up with PTSD
19:19
Speaker 2: from the success so many scary things, like I was
19:22
Speaker 2: pushing above my comfort zone time after time after time.
19:26
Speaker 2: At a certain point, there was so much a cumulative
19:28
Speaker 2: residual like it started, you know, start response got jacked
19:32
Speaker 2: up to eleven night sweats, all of it like full
19:36
Speaker 2: blown PTSD, and it was from success. I didn't even
19:38
Speaker 2: know that was possible. I literally uh. I called Laired Hamilton,
19:42
Speaker 2: the big wave Surfer, and I was Lair, this is
19:45
Speaker 2: what's happening to me? Does this happen? He's like, oh, yeah,
19:47
Speaker 2: that that actually happens. You could go out have a
19:49
Speaker 2: great day at Chopu and come back and have a
19:52
Speaker 2: low grade PTSD even if you surfed every way. It's
19:55
Speaker 2: actually I had no idea.
19:59
Speaker 1: Were they people were the external experts observing you. There
20:04
Speaker 1: are people that you were talking to, Well, well, was
20:08
Speaker 1: anyone going make you're fifty three? I'd be ridiculous. Yeah,
20:12
Speaker 1: I mean, come on, sensible.
20:14
Speaker 2: Every you know, depending on who you asked, right, like,
20:19
Speaker 2: it was either one of the strangest midlife crisis or
20:24
Speaker 2: you get yourself totally like lost my mind. Yeah, everybody,
20:28
Speaker 2: I mean every people were like nuts. My friends who
20:30
Speaker 2: had known me a really long time. I mean the
20:32
Speaker 2: first question I had so many people's mouths were how
20:34
Speaker 2: many bones have you broken so far? Like over and
20:36
Speaker 2: over and over again. And it was only that was
20:40
Speaker 2: one of the reasons we ran the experiment with like
20:43
Speaker 2: you know, seventy and older adults who made a video
20:45
Speaker 2: of it. We've got, you know, all all kinds of
20:47
Speaker 2: stuff because it was kind of shocking and in fact,
20:53
Speaker 2: this is in the book, but like two thirds of
20:55
Speaker 2: the way through my adventure, I I literally I brought
21:01
Speaker 2: in like a top level ski instructor to skw with
21:05
Speaker 2: me and see how I was doing, because I you know,
21:07
Speaker 2: I couldn't rate my abilities. I didn't trust my ski partner,
21:10
Speaker 2: and you know, I wanted an outside person, and you know,
21:14
Speaker 2: he basically confirmed our conclusions and always spawned the videos
21:17
Speaker 2: and everything else, which like, you know, it still looks
21:20
Speaker 2: like I'm a beginner, per skier, you know what I mean,
21:23
Speaker 2: Or like it doesn't look fancy, it doesn't look like
21:26
Speaker 2: anything you would say on the videos. But I got
21:29
Speaker 2: pretty far, and I got a lot farther than any
21:31
Speaker 2: of you thought somebody my age was supposed to get.
21:33
Speaker 2: And you know, again, like in our study, I saw
21:35
Speaker 2: sixty five year olds and sixty eight people who were
21:37
Speaker 2: a decade to more older than me, make you know,
21:41
Speaker 2: the same progress. My feeling actually in this I think
21:44
Speaker 2: was proved out in our experiment was I'm actually such
21:47
Speaker 2: a bad athlete that I figured if my progression was
21:50
Speaker 2: this fast, if other people took these concepts and applied them,
21:54
Speaker 2: they were actually going to go farther faster, which is
21:56
Speaker 2: sort of turned out to be the case.
22:00
Speaker 1: Well, me, I think a lot of the problem around
22:03
Speaker 1: aging and the way that people age in terms of
22:07
Speaker 1: you know, their physiology, function, performance, even you know, immune
22:12
Speaker 1: system and health state overall is more about the expectation,
22:16
Speaker 1: you know, in that like this, I don't know, I'm
22:20
Speaker 1: sure The same term exists in America, but in Australia
22:23
Speaker 1: there's this term age appropriate behavior. I'm like, fuck your
22:27
Speaker 1: age appropriate, right, stick your age appropriate up your ass.
22:31
Speaker 1: It's like, you know, and so we get we get
22:34
Speaker 1: to a point where some people start to rationalize what
22:37
Speaker 1: they're doing or what they think they should do, based
22:41
Speaker 1: purely on a fucking number on a calendar, rather than
22:45
Speaker 1: how do you feel? What do you want to do?
22:48
Speaker 2: It's you know, if you go into the research, and
22:51
Speaker 2: I'm sure you're familiar with some of this, but I mean,
22:53
Speaker 2: for example, Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer spent most of her
22:57
Speaker 2: career working on mind set and aging, you know, and
23:02
Speaker 2: the link between mind, body and physiology. But her results
23:06
Speaker 2: have been backed up. In fact, the craziest study it's
23:09
Speaker 2: the Ohio Longitudinal Study of Retirement and Agent twenty year
23:17
Speaker 2: study and on the impact on mindset on aging and
23:22
Speaker 2: the power of mindset and having what's the impact of
23:24
Speaker 2: having a positive attitude towards aging meaning I believe that
23:28
Speaker 2: the second half of my life is going to be
23:29
Speaker 2: filled with you know, exciting possibilities and thrilling et cetera,
23:33
Speaker 2: et cetera. It results in an on average, an extra
23:37
Speaker 2: seven and a half years of longevity and significant health
23:41
Speaker 2: uptick along the way. And this is not surprising if
23:44
Speaker 2: you look at the data that comes out of flows
23:46
Speaker 2: science and out of some of some of the just
23:49
Speaker 2: like pre performance science, a passion, purpose and flow. If
23:53
Speaker 2: you if you live with passion, purpose and regular access
23:56
Speaker 2: to flow, that also puts another seven years on your life. Now,
24:01
Speaker 2: what I don't know is can these be cumulative or
24:04
Speaker 2: is like mindset and passion, purpose and flow? Are we
24:07
Speaker 2: looking at something that is being sandwiched together? Are these
24:10
Speaker 2: different phenomenon that I mean? And can you get fourteen years? That?
24:14
Speaker 2: I don't know? But and the studies are real, you know,
24:18
Speaker 2: and there, as you probably know from your work in
24:21
Speaker 2: neuroscience neuromminology with the mind body connection lengths at this
24:26
Speaker 2: point are really starting to figure out, you know, how
24:29
Speaker 2: that's working and where that's coming from. And you know
24:32
Speaker 2: Ellen Langer's point and the way she phrases it is
24:37
Speaker 2: what people don't realize is that aging is at least
24:40
Speaker 2: partially a mental event that is reversible, right, And that
24:45
Speaker 2: was a lot of what she discovered is a shift
24:47
Speaker 2: in mindset. It's like you know, as you probably know,
24:52
Speaker 2: from the background of physiology in the twentieth century, we
24:55
Speaker 2: thought every single physical and mental skill went off the cliff.
24:59
Speaker 2: It's the like long slow rot area of aging. Right,
25:03
Speaker 2: and between ninety five and we discovered sort of cognitive
25:07
Speaker 2: reserve and the union if you had Alzheimer's and dementia,
25:10
Speaker 2: if you have a healthy cognitive reserve, you can function normally,
25:14
Speaker 2: you know, up until death. Right. So that was the
25:16
Speaker 2: first chack of the honor. But now it's every one
25:19
Speaker 2: of these skills is a user to lose its skill. Right.
25:22
Speaker 2: We used to think went away for a VO two
25:24
Speaker 2: max is the great example, right forever it was falls
25:27
Speaker 2: off a fricking cliff. There's nothing you can do about it.
25:29
Speaker 2: And now we've got octogenarian you know, triathletes with the
25:33
Speaker 2: VO two max of thirty five year olds. And the
25:35
Speaker 2: data is that it's been well measured and well documented
25:38
Speaker 2: and you know, things like that, and they're you know,
25:40
Speaker 2: I don't know if you've seen this or not. Some
25:42
Speaker 2: of the triathlete results, especially in the distance runners. They're
25:46
Speaker 2: now seeing people over fifty and over sixty start to
25:49
Speaker 2: coming radically outperform the younger folks and they're not even
25:53
Speaker 2: exactly sure why it's happening, but that's really interesting. And
25:58
Speaker 2: certainly last thing I'll say is, I don't know if
26:00
Speaker 2: you're familiar with the work of geriatric psychologist Gene Coney,
26:05
Speaker 2: sort of the godfather peak performance aging. He basically discovered
26:09
Speaker 2: as we come into our fifties and sixties, we gain
26:11
Speaker 2: access to legitimate cognitive superpowers, whole new levels of thinking,
26:16
Speaker 2: open up different thinking styles again, empathy and wisdom, and
26:19
Speaker 2: a whole bunch of other really useful greats come on,
26:24
Speaker 2: like really don't even come on mindfully until our fifties
26:27
Speaker 2: or sixties. So it's getting me. I think it's getting
26:30
Speaker 2: really interesting in the field.
26:34
Speaker 1: I love this message, and not just because because I'm old.
26:36
Speaker 1: But you know, I've said this before to people. I
26:39
Speaker 1: feel like, at fifty nine, my brain is better than
26:43
Speaker 1: when my cognitive function, memory, my ability to you know,
26:48
Speaker 1: resolve conflict, create, you know, pay attention, be focused, be disciplined,
26:54
Speaker 1: b in the moment, it's better than when I was
26:55
Speaker 1: twenty nine. And I think, you know, part of that's
26:59
Speaker 1: because I've kind of been a lifelong learner and I
27:01
Speaker 1: don't keep pushing. But you know, one of the things
27:04
Speaker 1: that irks me, is you know this arbitrary kind of
27:12
Speaker 1: voice that gets pumped out that, oh well, from twenty
27:15
Speaker 1: five years of age, this starts to decline one percent
27:19
Speaker 1: per year. You're losing muscle mass and bone densities and
27:22
Speaker 1: all of these things that just gets spoken as gospel
27:27
Speaker 1: while not actually saying. For many people typically if they
27:32
Speaker 1: don't do anything, this is what happens. However, if you
27:37
Speaker 1: live weights, if you run, if you stimulate your brain,
27:40
Speaker 1: if you fucking think, if you study, if you have
27:43
Speaker 1: an active lifestyle, if you eat less shit, if you
27:45
Speaker 1: move more, if you don't have thirty beers that you know,
27:48
Speaker 1: there are so many things that we can do, but
27:52
Speaker 1: that doesn't get mentioned well.
27:54
Speaker 2: And I mean it's what's funny is a bunch of things.
27:57
Speaker 2: The proof more and more Kelly slip right, he's winning
28:00
Speaker 2: surf titles, Tom Brady, et cetera. So the examples are
28:04
Speaker 2: way more visible. But I'll tell you a funny story.
28:08
Speaker 2: One of the first one of the first questions that
28:12
Speaker 2: performed for me around peak performance agent because I was
28:14
Speaker 2: studying peak performance and flow and that was my work
28:17
Speaker 2: and I twenty five years ago I was going to
28:23
Speaker 2: write I write novels every now and again. I wanted
28:25
Speaker 2: to write a story about a cat burglar. There's this
28:28
Speaker 2: really cool so chicks at Me High in some flow
28:31
Speaker 2: research that nobody's ever seen, but it's really cool. Him
28:34
Speaker 2: and a guy named Kevin Murthoon. They figured out that
28:36
Speaker 2: most of the standard things that juvenile delinquents do, fightings, graffiti, chocolate,
28:42
Speaker 2: those sorts of things aren't really about moral transgressions. They're
28:45
Speaker 2: about kids trying to tune the challenge skills, balance and
28:50
Speaker 2: use risk and thrill to drop into flow. And it's
28:53
Speaker 2: really about finding their way into flow and much much
28:57
Speaker 2: more than like moral transgressions. And I thought that was
28:59
Speaker 2: a really neat theory and I'd have a grown up
29:01
Speaker 2: version cat burglar whatever. And my cat burglar had to
29:04
Speaker 2: steal something, so I was like, well what should she steal?
29:07
Speaker 2: And I started kind of figure out what's cool, what
29:10
Speaker 2: hasn't showed up in a lot of books before. And
29:12
Speaker 2: musical instruments, rare musical instruments is what I settled on.
29:15
Speaker 2: And I was like, okay, who made the rarest musical
29:18
Speaker 2: instruments in history? Where you know, got into the tables
29:22
Speaker 2: and found out strata varius do my mind had made
29:25
Speaker 2: fifty percent of all the rarest musical instruments in history,
29:28
Speaker 2: like one, dude, fifty percent. That's like one painter, and
29:31
Speaker 2: it's fifty percent of the most expensive painting. It's a
29:34
Speaker 2: really strange thing. And I started, I was like, Okay,
29:36
Speaker 2: this is fascinating. Forget the cat burglar, let me learn
29:39
Speaker 2: more about strata areas. And then I learned that he
29:42
Speaker 2: made two of the most famous and priceless musical instruments
29:44
Speaker 2: in history when he was ninety two years old, and
29:48
Speaker 2: I went, wait a minute. Everything I was told to
29:51
Speaker 2: climbs fast, which muscle response, fine, motor decks, all this stuff.
29:56
Speaker 2: There's no way in seventeen thirty six, a ninety two
30:01
Speaker 2: year old guy makes two of the rarest and most
30:03
Speaker 2: of the music leaderships in history. Unless something's wrong right,
30:06
Speaker 2: unless he's a total exception to every rule, something's got
30:10
Speaker 2: to be wrong with what we know about people performance agent.
30:12
Speaker 2: It was one of the first times or agents that
30:15
Speaker 2: I started to look at that go wait a minute,
30:17
Speaker 2: this data doesn't like that doesn't make any sense. What's
30:20
Speaker 2: going on.
30:22
Speaker 1: I think there's a big gap between what is typical
30:26
Speaker 1: and what is possible and that's what you're fascinating. That's
30:29
Speaker 1: what I'm fascinated with. That's what our listeners are fascinated with.
30:32
Speaker 1: Is Yeah, I know most people do this and most
30:35
Speaker 1: people live this way. I followed Tony Hawk on Instagram
30:40
Speaker 1: because I'm basically twelve, and he broke his You know
30:45
Speaker 1: who he is, of course, tif do you know who
30:46
Speaker 1: Tony Hawk is? You're you're not meant to. He's the
30:49
Speaker 1: greatest skateboarder.
30:51
Speaker 2: Is tell you a very funny Tony story and I'm
30:55
Speaker 2: going to let me continue.
30:56
Speaker 1: No, no, you tell your holy turn thirty.
30:59
Speaker 2: Yeah it's thirty. The same year Laird Hamilton, big Waves Sover,
31:02
Speaker 2: turned thirty and Sean Palmer, one of the early pro snowboarders,
31:06
Speaker 2: turned thirty one. ESPN sent me to do a story
31:11
Speaker 2: on all three guys and they called it Grandpa's over
31:15
Speaker 2: the Hills, like literally, like I still have the story.
31:19
Speaker 2: It's called Grapas. Mind you, Tony has yet to throw
31:22
Speaker 2: the nine hundred, so that's still the calm. He's also
31:25
Speaker 2: has yet to found a billion dollar video game empire.
31:29
Speaker 2: Laird hasn't surfed the millennium waves, so still in his teacher,
31:32
Speaker 2: who's going to change the entire history of surfing, right.
31:35
Speaker 2: It's just I look back on it and it just
31:37
Speaker 2: cracks me up because they're all, as you know, still active,
31:41
Speaker 2: they're all older than me, and they're all still kicking ass.
31:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're amazing. And well, anyway, as you know Tony
31:49
Speaker 1: Broke's leg about I don't know, it would be about
31:52
Speaker 1: sixteen weeks ago or something now. And it was interesting
31:56
Speaker 1: because I saw that, I saw that kind of report
32:00
Speaker 1: and I went, oh, I wonder, I wonder what he'll
32:03
Speaker 1: do now, Like, I know he won't stop skating, but
32:06
Speaker 1: you know, I'm like, well, I hope he looks after himself,
32:10
Speaker 1: and I hope he recovers and rehabs, you know, And
32:14
Speaker 1: he was skating with a broken leg, I mean just
32:18
Speaker 1: just kind of pushed himself along literally like a week later,
32:21
Speaker 1: and he's sixteen weeks later now he's back doing tricks
32:24
Speaker 1: and you know, he's still recovering and he's still rehabbing.
32:27
Speaker 1: But the human body is incredible. And you know, when
32:33
Speaker 1: I think, is it for you and for most people
32:37
Speaker 1: in terms of exploring our outer limits, in terms of
32:40
Speaker 1: what's possible for us physically, is it more of a
32:44
Speaker 1: psychological or physiological process. It feels largely psychological with a
32:52
Speaker 1: physiological outcome.
32:55
Speaker 2: I yeah, I think it's I mean, don't could me wrong?
33:00
Speaker 2: You got to train like mad and you know what
33:03
Speaker 2: I'm mean to do some of this stuff, But no,
33:08
Speaker 2: it's all psychological, or most of it is psychological, even
33:12
Speaker 2: some stuff. I'll here's one of the things that I
33:15
Speaker 2: learned along the way, just to give you a random example.
33:20
Speaker 2: So short version is, I learned that a lot of
33:24
Speaker 2: the feeling like I'd wake up mid season and I'd
33:27
Speaker 2: be like, feel wrecked. Just oh my god, I can
33:30
Speaker 2: barely move. I don't want to go to the mountain anything,
33:32
Speaker 2: but like, gott to hike my dog. So I ticked
33:35
Speaker 2: the dog for a walk in through the mountains, and
33:37
Speaker 2: you know, forty five minutes later, come back. Why not
33:40
Speaker 2: stretch a little bit, feel a little bit better, go
33:42
Speaker 2: to the mountains and start skiing, start pushing, and something
33:49
Speaker 2: everything melts away. And I started to realize that a
33:51
Speaker 2: lot of the so called feelings, body aches, that sort
33:56
Speaker 2: of stuff that we associated with feeling our age are
33:58
Speaker 2: really literally a performing anxiety. And once I sort of
34:02
Speaker 2: pushed myself and pushed through that performance anxiety, my body
34:05
Speaker 2: may comeback. And so many of the most spectaculary days
34:08
Speaker 2: of my season, days where I would accomplish two or
34:10
Speaker 2: three tricks on a trick list or really push things,
34:13
Speaker 2: started out where I woke up feeling like, oh my god,
34:16
Speaker 2: I can barely move, I'm old. I feel old, and like,
34:20
Speaker 2: I mean, like so wrong planet thing. And you know,
34:24
Speaker 2: I found that really interesting along the way, And certainly
34:29
Speaker 2: one of the best parts about it is certainly flow
34:33
Speaker 2: helps with that one, right, because a bunch of the
34:35
Speaker 2: neurochomicals that und up in the state are really potent
34:37
Speaker 2: pain or lievers, and they also reduce a lot of inflammation.
34:41
Speaker 2: And one thing for sure, most of the cause, if
34:44
Speaker 2: not all, the causes of agent are linked to information body,
34:48
Speaker 2: so by its nature, you know, flow is useful in
34:52
Speaker 2: that way as well.
34:54
Speaker 1: M I think, what a lot of what you do,
34:57
Speaker 1: maybe without even in tending it is it's this metacognitive challenge.
35:05
Speaker 1: Is I think you challenge people to think about how
35:09
Speaker 1: they think, like their existing cognitive default setting, like the
35:13
Speaker 1: way that we think about the world and ourselves in
35:16
Speaker 1: the world, and what is normal and what is good
35:18
Speaker 1: and what is possible? And I think that you know,
35:24
Speaker 1: because there isn't an inevitability for most people of thinking
35:28
Speaker 1: a certain way as they age. So my question is
35:33
Speaker 1: how do we I mean, you can't will yourself to
35:36
Speaker 1: think differently, You can't sit on the couch just changing
35:41
Speaker 1: the way that we think and our beliefs and our
35:43
Speaker 1: expectations of ourself. Do you think that's a byproduct of
35:47
Speaker 1: just doing shit that we haven't done and trying stuff
35:50
Speaker 1: and falling down and getting up.
35:54
Speaker 2: Versus so.
35:58
Speaker 1: Versus, you know, just yeah, I mean I always say, like,
36:01
Speaker 1: reading your book is good, Reading your book is good,
36:05
Speaker 1: and it's going to blow people's mind and open doors
36:07
Speaker 1: and but but what's on top of that? Yeah?
36:10
Speaker 2: I mean, first of all, yeah, I think you if
36:15
Speaker 2: you're wired at all like me, Like I'm cynical and skeptical.
36:19
Speaker 2: I'm a journalist and a scientist, you know what I mean,
36:23
Speaker 2: Like I aid to doubt everything in a sense, and
36:27
Speaker 2: I always tell people like, don't take my work for it,
36:30
Speaker 2: you know what I mean? Like I I always say,
36:33
Speaker 2: peak performance is nothing more or less than getting our
36:35
Speaker 2: biology to work for us rather than against us. And
36:38
Speaker 2: it's that we like to see the flow research collective
36:41
Speaker 2: of our work is on the neurobiology of peak performance,
36:44
Speaker 2: because psychology is squishy and it's individual shaped by genetics
36:47
Speaker 2: and early childood experiments. But the neurobiology is shaped by
36:50
Speaker 2: evolution and shared by all of us, and we all
36:54
Speaker 2: have it. And so there are you know, there are
36:57
Speaker 2: on the couch tools reframing right of reframing is an
37:00
Speaker 2: incredibly powerful pig performance tool that you know, you can
37:05
Speaker 2: start using before you're running the experiments in your own life.
37:08
Speaker 2: But I think the whole point is to take this
37:11
Speaker 2: information it's based on science that works for all of us,
37:15
Speaker 2: and go out and run the experiment in your own life.
37:19
Speaker 2: You know, see what's actually possible. That's when it gets
37:21
Speaker 2: That's when you're really going to believe it. You'll I
37:23
Speaker 2: always say, you know, at the flow reas of collective
37:26
Speaker 2: we hin a ton of people, right, tens of thousands
37:31
Speaker 2: of thousands of people in one hundred and thirty countries,
37:33
Speaker 2: and the hardest thing there are two things that are
37:37
Speaker 2: really difficult. And it's one of the reasons actually, as
37:40
Speaker 2: you'll notice in our country is sort of written as
37:42
Speaker 2: a performance diary, and one of the reason it goes
37:45
Speaker 2: day by day to the season, and this is one
37:48
Speaker 2: of the reasons. This is exactly the reason. The two
37:50
Speaker 2: lessons that are the hardest for me to get anybody
37:54
Speaker 2: to understand that you have to discover for yourself. One,
37:57
Speaker 2: hard work works right, and most people I don't even
38:02
Speaker 2: know if they most people are willing to work hard,
38:04
Speaker 2: they don't actually know what it looks like, what like
38:07
Speaker 2: smart hard work really looks like. I've noticed. The second
38:10
Speaker 2: thing that I've found is really difficult for people to
38:12
Speaker 2: understand until they've had the experience, is that peak performance
38:17
Speaker 2: you know, leaning on in our biology, performance always works
38:20
Speaker 2: like compound interest, and until you know a little bit today,
38:23
Speaker 2: a little bit tomorrow, a little bit the next day,
38:25
Speaker 2: and the real result, I mean, you'll get spectacular interesting
38:29
Speaker 2: results soon. But like the mind blowing I can't believe
38:33
Speaker 2: where I am, Like what the hell happened in my life?
38:36
Speaker 2: That's a year or two, you know what I mean.
38:37
Speaker 2: You've got to stick with it, but it gets exponential.
38:41
Speaker 2: It's really hard if you're at the front end of
38:44
Speaker 2: that and haven't had that experience, especially if you don't
38:46
Speaker 2: have flows sort of turbo boosting performance and learning and
38:49
Speaker 2: all that stuff on a regular basis. It's hard to
38:52
Speaker 2: understand that. So one of the goals of the book
38:55
Speaker 2: was just to try to show people what that looks
38:57
Speaker 2: like rather than just try to talk about it because
39:01
Speaker 2: it doesn't you know, So.
39:04
Speaker 1: Did you get any architecture, sorry, Stave? Did you get
39:07
Speaker 1: any feedback from people you know in the space who
39:11
Speaker 1: more advanced than you and more experienced than you that
39:14
Speaker 1: kind of saw what you did and went, that's fucking impressive.
39:18
Speaker 2: So here's what I did because I had to, like,
39:22
Speaker 2: this was the fairest thing I could do. So there
39:24
Speaker 2: is a park free style skiing commentator. His name is Nick.
39:29
Speaker 2: He goes by steep Steep on YouTube. He does now
39:32
Speaker 2: he commentates for red Bull and you know other stuff.
39:35
Speaker 2: He does mountain biking too, but skiing and park skiing
39:38
Speaker 2: is his thing. And he was he was on the
39:42
Speaker 2: Canadian Free Scout team and broke his back and when
39:44
Speaker 2: he was recovering from the broken back that he launched
39:46
Speaker 2: this channel and you know, it blew up and now
39:49
Speaker 2: he's all over the place. So halfway through my experiment,
39:55
Speaker 2: I didn't know him, but I took all the footage
39:57
Speaker 2: that we had. We had shot a bunch of footage
39:59
Speaker 2: you may, and I called them up and I said look,
40:01
Speaker 2: I said, I need somebody to explain what freestyle skiing
40:05
Speaker 2: and park skiing is to my readers, right, and I
40:08
Speaker 2: also need somebody to put what I'm doing in context.
40:12
Speaker 2: I was like, this is the footage, make a video.
40:15
Speaker 2: I need you to explain what freestyle skiing is and
40:17
Speaker 2: put what I'm doing in context and tell the fucking truth.
40:20
Speaker 2: If you need to make fun of me, make fun
40:21
Speaker 2: of me. I don't like whatever. You know, have that.
40:25
Speaker 2: So we made that. That's getting released on the website
40:28
Speaker 2: for the book. At the same time the book comes out,
40:31
Speaker 2: there's also you know, there's video of me skiing, you know,
40:35
Speaker 2: so you can see it in there's video of the experiments.
40:37
Speaker 2: You can see what it looks like. And so yeah,
40:42
Speaker 2: we you know, we we did. You know, we checked
40:45
Speaker 2: ourselves that way as much as possible.
40:48
Speaker 1: What was his critique, If you can tell us what
40:51
Speaker 1: do we need?
40:52
Speaker 2: I mean, he he uh, he actually couldn't believe how
40:56
Speaker 2: far I got and he couldn't like, he couldn't believe
40:58
Speaker 2: I was doing it at fifty three and uh, because
41:03
Speaker 2: the thing about park skiing is every inch churps. It's
41:09
Speaker 2: just like like you hit the ground, you hit metal
41:12
Speaker 2: objects you hit like it's just every inch it can
41:15
Speaker 2: be really difficult. And he I think he recognized that,
41:19
Speaker 2: but no, he was. He was people folks have been impressed.
41:23
Speaker 2: I'm not impressed by the way. Let me be clear,
41:25
Speaker 2: I'm not where I want to be at all. Like
41:28
Speaker 2: the videos and like the things of me screaming, I'm
41:30
Speaker 2: I have a problem with it. It's like I want to,
41:33
Speaker 2: you know, I want to compare myself to Alex Hall
41:36
Speaker 2: or you know, top Parks, Gears or whatever. Like I'm
41:38
Speaker 2: unwilling to accept that I'm an intermediate on the learning
41:41
Speaker 2: curve and not you know. So it's very It's really
41:46
Speaker 2: it's funny because everybody loves the videos and I I'm like, okay,
41:50
Speaker 2: you know all right, like I did it, and like
41:52
Speaker 2: it's fair and it's honest, it's truthful. But like god,
41:55
Speaker 2: I wish it looked like this instead of like what
41:58
Speaker 2: you know?
41:59
Speaker 1: Of course, do you think that I've asked a couple
42:02
Speaker 1: of people this question. I wonder what your answer is.
42:05
Speaker 1: Do you think that ambition and drive can coexist with
42:09
Speaker 1: contentment and satisfaction?
42:12
Speaker 2: Yes, but I did not until three or four years ago.
42:17
Speaker 1: Right what happened?
42:18
Speaker 2: I did not. It took me a really long time,
42:22
Speaker 2: and it really I mean, this is a sort of awful,
42:28
Speaker 2: wonderful thing to say out loud, and I'm deeply grateful.
42:30
Speaker 2: But I like I worked. I was very very poor
42:33
Speaker 2: for a very very long time. You know, I do
42:35
Speaker 2: work very very hard. But I'm finally doing exactly what
42:39
Speaker 2: I want to do in the world all day long, right,
42:42
Speaker 2: I'm doing the research I want to, you know. But yes,
42:45
Speaker 2: there's some you know, altruistic causes. I wish I could
42:48
Speaker 2: advance a lot farther and faster than I am. But
42:50
Speaker 2: as a general rule, like my days are spent doing
42:53
Speaker 2: exactly what I feel most useful I'm built for, and
42:57
Speaker 2: that is and in what it allows me. It doesn't.
43:00
Speaker 2: It never got I don't know if you've discovered this.
43:03
Speaker 2: I think one of the things that was hardest for
43:06
Speaker 2: me to learn is it doesn't get easier. I somehow
43:09
Speaker 2: thought it was going to get easier, you know what
43:11
Speaker 2: I mean. You get better at it, for sure, and
43:16
Speaker 2: it's much more fulfilling and meaningful, but it is no easier.
43:21
Speaker 2: In fact, it's probably harder. And I was shocked by that.
43:24
Speaker 2: I was shocked. I was like, are you kidding me.
43:27
Speaker 2: I want my money back, seriously, I want to talk
43:32
Speaker 2: to management. But it turns out, you know, life, satisfaction
43:39
Speaker 2: and meaning, those those things start rising in a way
43:42
Speaker 2: that I did not expect, and that's that's kind of
43:46
Speaker 2: fun and interesting.
43:47
Speaker 1: Did I stay hard because you keep turning up the
43:50
Speaker 1: volume on the skill level or yes, you know, yeah,
43:56
Speaker 1: it's it's hard because you might get hot.
44:00
Speaker 2: Well, So one flows data triggers right preconditions the lead
44:04
Speaker 2: to flow, and the most famous is the Challenge Skills Balance.
44:07
Speaker 2: It says, if you want to drop into flow the
44:10
Speaker 2: easiest way and the challenge that hask needs to slightly
44:12
Speaker 2: exceed your skill sets, you want to stretch but not snap.
44:15
Speaker 2: Chickst me high, by the way, has argued. People are
44:18
Speaker 2: aware of this. He does it really eloquently in a
44:21
Speaker 2: couple different books. His book Optal Experience is the one
44:24
Speaker 2: where he's clearest about this. He believes flow is literally
44:27
Speaker 2: the mechanism of the adult development. It is what propels
44:31
Speaker 2: us forward because we are pushed on our skills and
44:34
Speaker 2: on the other end of it, that's expertise, that's wisdom,
44:39
Speaker 2: and it makes us more adaptive as organisms. And it's
44:42
Speaker 2: this cycle that we build upon continuously. He makes a
44:45
Speaker 2: very elegant argument, and there's a bunch of sort of
44:48
Speaker 2: different research coming out of different aspects of neurobiology that
44:52
Speaker 2: back his argument up. And I think we're trying to
44:54
Speaker 2: do some research on it at the Flow Research Collective too,
44:57
Speaker 2: because we think he's right. But it definitely like, I'm
45:01
Speaker 2: a flow junkie. So I'm going to keep you know,
45:04
Speaker 2: I'm going to keep pushing, and you know I do it,
45:07
Speaker 2: and even you know, I always say in my books
45:09
Speaker 2: there's always a communication challenge, right, like the thing I
45:12
Speaker 2: want to tell you, but I always there's always some
45:17
Speaker 2: other challenge that I set for myself because I like
45:20
Speaker 2: it when I have to like this. I need my
45:22
Speaker 2: books to scare me a little bit, you know what
45:24
Speaker 2: I mean. It helps hold my attention, and I want
45:27
Speaker 2: to push on myself. And so every book I write,
45:30
Speaker 2: I'll push on the writing style or I'll push on
45:33
Speaker 2: the something or other, and you know, just just stretch myself.
45:36
Speaker 2: And you know, I sort of I do that, do
45:39
Speaker 2: that and everything. I just but to me, I just
45:45
Speaker 2: feel like I've got a lot of unfinished business. So
45:47
Speaker 2: until it starts to feel finished, you know what, I mean,
45:50
Speaker 2: I can't stop pushing because I'm not done.
45:53
Speaker 1: Does your work feel like work?
45:55
Speaker 2: No, it's never felt like work. I mean it's you know,
45:59
Speaker 2: I it. It took me a while to realize that.
46:02
Speaker 2: I say this when I when I train other writers
46:04
Speaker 2: or other creators, it took me a while they realize
46:06
Speaker 2: that you're always going to be somebody's bitch. There's always
46:09
Speaker 2: it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how big you get,
46:13
Speaker 2: where you are, how much moscle you have, how much
46:15
Speaker 2: you were, You're gonna work for somebody sooner later. And
46:18
Speaker 2: the truth of the matter is the funniest thing is
46:21
Speaker 2: even in like the parts of my life where like
46:23
Speaker 2: I've been very successful my writing, you get to the top,
46:27
Speaker 2: and one trust me when I tell you published doesn't
46:30
Speaker 2: really care, like they got they got a dozen to me.
46:32
Speaker 2: But like then you end up with a fan base
46:36
Speaker 2: and holy shit, are they tough right, Like they like
46:40
Speaker 2: what you do and they don't love it when you
46:41
Speaker 2: debates too far for you know what I mean. And
46:43
Speaker 2: for a guy who's always wants to push in new directions,
46:46
Speaker 2: that's an interesting thing. But it took me a little
46:48
Speaker 2: while to figure out like that equation A little bit.
46:53
Speaker 2: It took me so like I'm trained as a poet.
46:57
Speaker 2: I'm an old school punk rocker. I didn't know I
46:59
Speaker 2: had to taught in business, you know, the whole way up.
47:03
Speaker 2: And I've just I was involved in like twenty seven
47:05
Speaker 2: startups along the way, so I like, I saw a
47:08
Speaker 2: lot of what didn't work. I saw a lot of
47:10
Speaker 2: what you know, that sort of stuff. It took a
47:13
Speaker 2: while to figure that stuff out. And so you know
47:15
Speaker 2: now still even in business, the challenges are really interesting,
47:18
Speaker 2: and I'm like, Okay, you know, what else can we do?
47:21
Speaker 2: My company just got named one of the two hundreds
47:25
Speaker 2: of or one of the fastest growing companies in America. Great, check,
47:28
Speaker 2: what else can we do? Let's keep going?
47:31
Speaker 1: That's amazing. I have a random question. Then, this is
47:34
Speaker 1: the exercise physiologist in me, and I could I would
47:38
Speaker 1: not ask a lighty this, but I'll ask you what's
47:41
Speaker 1: your hot and white.
47:45
Speaker 2: When now five one hundred and fifty one pounds?
47:52
Speaker 1: Oh wow? So what's that six seventy sixty guys? Oh,
47:56
Speaker 1: you're a lot. You're an athlete, you're an endurance athlete.
48:00
Speaker 2: I'm really not boom you could be, but I really,
48:05
Speaker 2: I'm really actually not. People look at me. It's funny
48:07
Speaker 2: because I can. I'm an extreme actomorph. So the hardest
48:10
Speaker 2: thing for me to do is gain weight, and I
48:12
Speaker 2: will lose like ski sees now lose ten to twelve pounds.
48:17
Speaker 2: And by the end of ski season, when I like
48:19
Speaker 2: go give speeches or things like that, you always people
48:22
Speaker 2: are very polite about that. Come up you like, so
48:25
Speaker 2: you're a runner.
48:30
Speaker 1: You know, I'm a pal lift dude. What I will
48:34
Speaker 1: tell you.
48:34
Speaker 2: The true story, true story. When I graduated high school,
48:38
Speaker 2: I was nineteen years old or I was one hundred
48:41
Speaker 2: and thirty eight pounds in the same height as I
48:43
Speaker 2: am now. And one of the one of the you know,
48:48
Speaker 2: one of the great things for me is it took
48:50
Speaker 2: me like ten years to actually like put on muscle
48:54
Speaker 2: and get I worked from one hundred and thirty nine
48:55
Speaker 2: up to one hundred and seventy through weightlifting. But I
48:59
Speaker 2: remember maybe Tiffany I mentioned that. I think I said
49:03
Speaker 2: this to you when we were talking, right, I was
49:05
Speaker 2: five years into lifting weights. I was working out in
49:08
Speaker 2: my gym in San Francisco and this big dude walk Saturday.
49:11
Speaker 2: It just like sort of punches me and the children's
49:13
Speaker 2: like stick with it, buddy, You'll get there. Eventually. We
49:17
Speaker 2: all put on muscle. Though I was I was so enraged, Like, dude,
49:21
Speaker 2: five years there, You're like five fucking years I've been
49:26
Speaker 2: doing this.
49:28
Speaker 1: That that is hilarious when you.
49:30
Speaker 2: Tell me the story about the woman who like just
49:32
Speaker 2: got to beast mode in six weeks. Yeah, lucky her.
49:38
Speaker 1: A bit. There's a bit of genetics and that. Now
49:42
Speaker 1: there's a bit of This is a hard question and
49:45
Speaker 1: silly question. I'm just interested because it's luck asking a
49:48
Speaker 1: parent which of their kids is their favorite, but not
49:53
Speaker 1: necessarily what is apart from your new book, which is
49:57
Speaker 1: called Knock Country everyone add in February next year. Apart
50:01
Speaker 1: from that, not what is the best book, but what
50:05
Speaker 1: is your favorite book that you've written, and why if
50:09
Speaker 1: there is one, Like just on a personal level, what's
50:13
Speaker 1: the book that either you're most proud of, or you
50:15
Speaker 1: learned the most in, or you have the deepest connection with.
50:23
Speaker 2: It's interesting that both Tomorrowland and are Impossible are like
50:26
Speaker 2: there's like thirty years of research either, but they neither.
50:29
Speaker 2: It's either Rise of Superman, which is the book I
50:32
Speaker 2: wrote about action sports, and it's the reason is I
50:36
Speaker 2: think it's got the best writing. Yeah, it's the best
50:40
Speaker 2: example of art. And what I mean by that is literally,
50:43
Speaker 2: I can It's hard to read your old books, but
50:46
Speaker 2: I can make up Rise of Superman and I can
50:48
Speaker 2: get through like eighty or ninety or one hundred pages
50:50
Speaker 2: and sort of like before something catches me and I
50:53
Speaker 2: go off, Fuck, what what I do with that paragraph?
50:55
Speaker 2: You know what I mean?
50:55
Speaker 1: Yeah?
50:56
Speaker 2: And that's that is amazing. And the tip of them
51:00
Speaker 2: is I think the book I'm proud of Steff because
51:02
Speaker 2: it required a lot of bravery that's totally invisible now
51:06
Speaker 2: and you can't see it. But West did Jesus, which
51:10
Speaker 2: was a book. It was one of my first books.
51:12
Speaker 2: It was my first book on these topics. It was
51:14
Speaker 2: really about the intersection of surfing as a trigger for flow,
51:18
Speaker 2: really the neurobiology of spirituality, uh and in neuroscience so like,
51:25
Speaker 2: but I wrote it so early, there was nobody was
51:29
Speaker 2: doing this work right. Nobody would like it was ridiculous.
51:32
Speaker 2: This was, you know, trying to write about the science
51:34
Speaker 2: of spirituality could have been a career, and trying to
51:38
Speaker 2: write about like spiritual experiences and surfing with the neurobiology,
51:42
Speaker 2: like I thought to myself of this goes fucking wrong,
51:45
Speaker 2: I'm gonna be like I'm going to write Jonathan Livingston's
51:48
Speaker 2: Seagull for you know, like it's the poor man's Jonathan
51:51
Speaker 2: living signal I to be done as a serious journalist,
51:53
Speaker 2: as a science writer, like I don't great. It was
51:59
Speaker 2: gradually greatly over excenterated, like my impact on the world
52:03
Speaker 2: in terms of like what he cared about what that
52:05
Speaker 2: book did. But at the time for me, as a
52:09
Speaker 2: guy like especially coming up as first a journalist and
52:12
Speaker 2: then a science journalist and really a self taught science journalist,
52:17
Speaker 2: to write a book about neuroscience with like you know,
52:22
Speaker 2: not with new ideas, but it was a big that
52:25
Speaker 2: was a hard leap for me. I was as a journalist,
52:28
Speaker 2: I was taught to stay in the sidelines right like
52:31
Speaker 2: I don't have an opinion, I covered the opinion right
52:34
Speaker 2: like it was. So I had to switch roles. I
52:36
Speaker 2: had to make myself more visible and part of the story.
52:39
Speaker 2: I'd do a bunch of stuff, And I also had
52:42
Speaker 2: to solve a bunch of writing problems that I never
52:45
Speaker 2: in the first decade of my career as a novelist,
52:48
Speaker 2: I couldn't solve or as a journalist for that point,
52:51
Speaker 2: so like the writing was a big step forward. It's
52:54
Speaker 2: really fun to this day. I think there's probably a
52:59
Speaker 2: copy of West to Jesus in almost every surf shack
53:02
Speaker 2: in the world, and for some people they might want
53:06
Speaker 2: different kinds of like that's what I need, Like if
53:09
Speaker 2: there's a copy of like my books that again, like
53:11
Speaker 2: most of the surf shacks in the world, I sort
53:13
Speaker 2: of did my job. I'm glad. So that's it's one
53:18
Speaker 2: of the two.
53:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, I love it. Rise of Superman was brilliant. You
53:22
Speaker 1: know who loves that book and talks about it quite
53:25
Speaker 1: a lot is only the biggest podcaster on the planet
53:28
Speaker 1: is Rogan. He loves that book. He's spoken about it
53:31
Speaker 1: many times.
53:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's Joe's Joe's been really nice. He's great. By
53:36
Speaker 2: the way, that that man you want to talk about
53:38
Speaker 2: an intense podcast, he does not. He may be a comedian,
53:41
Speaker 2: he does not suffer fools. Gladly, no step it into
53:45
Speaker 2: the rig. Yeah, if you watch the podcast they did
53:48
Speaker 2: with Joe, there's a point about an hour and fifteen
53:51
Speaker 2: minutes in where he stops and looks at me and goes, oh, wow,
53:55
Speaker 2: you're an interesting dude, you've done some stuff and it
53:58
Speaker 2: was really the first white and like where something. He's like, Oh,
54:02
Speaker 2: I'm going to take you seriously down. You're right, and
54:04
Speaker 2: I was like, it's a it was a dead area.
54:10
Speaker 1: Did you did you Did you do any prep for that? Nothing?
54:15
Speaker 1: I don't know what.
54:16
Speaker 2: Okay, So here's this horrible storied. I apologies to Edward involved.
54:22
Speaker 2: I don't watch podcast don't listen to podcasts. Like if
54:26
Speaker 2: I got free time, I read neuroscience text. So I
54:29
Speaker 2: had no idea who Joe Rogan was. So as we
54:36
Speaker 2: were going there.
54:37
Speaker 1: You've been living under a rock, bro.
54:38
Speaker 2: But my good friend Michael Ward, who's my editor, came
54:41
Speaker 2: with me and on the way he's like, you know,
54:44
Speaker 2: he's a big deal. And I was like what do
54:46
Speaker 2: you mean. He's like, oh yeah, I want to sit
54:48
Speaker 2: in like he's that And I was like, you want
54:50
Speaker 2: like Michael knows everybody, you know what I mean? You
54:53
Speaker 2: know you can pause that. It was like you want
54:55
Speaker 2: to sit in? That was the first A league. I
54:57
Speaker 2: was like, where the hell am I going? What is this? Yeah?
55:01
Speaker 2: I literally apologized to Joe and his crew. I had
55:05
Speaker 2: no idea. I walked into Joe Brogan totally blind. I
55:10
Speaker 2: didn't realize it was gonna be a four and a
55:11
Speaker 2: half hour marathon where you don't go to the bathroom
55:14
Speaker 2: and you.
55:15
Speaker 1: Like, you know, yeah, speaking of endurance events, going on
55:20
Speaker 1: Joe Rogan is without doubt one of the greatest bloody
55:24
Speaker 1: interview endurance events of all time. Stephen, I really appreciate
55:29
Speaker 1: talking to you. I would love to get you back.
55:31
Speaker 1: I've got so many more things I want to ask you,
55:33
Speaker 1: but we appreciate you having a chat with us. Good
55:37
Speaker 1: luck with the new book. There's so many books everyone
55:40
Speaker 1: go and check go and check them all out. But
55:42
Speaker 1: the new one is out soon. Nah Country, I'm excited
55:45
Speaker 1: to read it. Stay there. We'll say goodbye off air,
55:49
Speaker 1: but for the moment, thanks so much for being on
55:51
Speaker 1: the You project.
55:52
Speaker 2: We appreciate you my pleasure.
55:54
Speaker 1: Thank you, Craig, Thank you Tiffany, Thanks Steven, Thanks tiff
55:58
Speaker 1: Thanks guys,