Steven Kotler - Best-Selling Author & Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective | The Art of Impossible

Warmoan levels may be less of a problem than normal chemical levels, actually. Job remains serotonin in a couple of the neurochemicals to climb over time. That is true. This is where pharmacology gets interesting, but they're actually finding his SSRIs, which are actually terrible for depression, like a hammer for depression. Why does the impossible become possible? Steven Codler, a New York Times best-selling author, award-winning journalist and the executive director of the Flow Research Collective. His work has been translated into over 50 languages. If you want to treat depression, you may want to increase serotonin levels, but you want to do it in very specific parts of the brain. His flow, the secret to reducing cognitive decline. Flow is defined as an optimal state of consciousness, where we feel our best and we perform our best. When we say good performance, I don't mean any happier than getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. What role does technology play in human performance? What does it take to achieve the impossible? That's been the question I've spent 30 years trying to answer. Welcome to success story. I'm your host, Scott Clary. The success story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. They've supported the podcast for almost two years now. Obviously, if you have never used HubSpot or have ever heard of it, you're just turning into the podcast for the first time because I've spoken about HubSpot a lot. But HubSpot is a tool that you need if you are a business leader and now they're helping you incorporate AI into your processes. See, AI is eating the web as we speak and what that means for a business leader is this. The time to embrace AI technology is now because people like us automation helps us do more with less while continuing to meet and exceed those incredibly high business expectations we set for ourselves. It's basically magic or honestly as close as we're going to get as business leaders. And if you haven't tried HubSpot's new AI features, you have to do that. Content assistant and chat spot are two brand new tools that will immediately save you and your team tons of time. HubSpot's features run on chat GPT's tech to help you make compelling content and manage your CRM way faster than before. We're talking, ad copy, data analytics, workflow automations, all with the chat command. So head to HubSpot.com slash artificial dash intelligence. They might guess Stephen Kotler, a New York Times best selling author, award winning journalist and the executive director of the Flow Research Collective. He is one of the world's leading experts on human performance. He is the author of 11 best sellers out of 14 books, including the art of impossible. The future is faster than you think, stealing fire, the rise of Superman, bolt and abundance. His work has been nominated for two Pulitzer prizes, translated into over 50 languages and has appeared in over 100 publications including the New York Times magazine, Wired Atlantic Monthly, Wall Street Journal, Time and the Harvard Business Review. What role does technology play in human performance? The great question, and it's sort of my work has focused as a central question, what does it take to achieve the impossible? That's been the question I've spent 30 years trying to answer. Whenever you see the impossible, it comes as well. Okay, slide over statement. The vast majority of the time, when you see the impossible, you see the intersection at two things. You see somebody who figure out how to expand human capability. Usually that's going to involve flow and other aspects of cognitive peak performance or just peak performance. You also see people leveraging destructive technology. So half of my, especially accelerating to expect to have exponential technology, the idea is that Peter D. Amandis and I have written about in bold abundance in future sessions. In fact, then this was my beat as a journalist. I covered action sports and I covered neuroscience, but also my job for like 50 different publications was those moments that sci-fi became some science fact. I was the guy in the room. So how did you ask way off the air? How I met Peter D. Amandis? Long before the X Prize was anything but like a wild idea in Peter that he had just sort of announced to the world in whispers. I heard about it and I was like, oh my god, somebody's going to build a private spaceship. That sci-fi and I like, I wrote the first major story on the X Prize because I had like some insider knowledge, you know, very weird way and I knew everybody in the world put the X Prize wasn't going to work. But because of the weird world, I had just walked out of, I had done a very crazy aerospace story and about the guys trying to drive a car through the sound barrier on the face of the earth right and I covered this whole story and it was giant competition, you tech and my friend was the head engineer for one of the teams and him and all the other engineers they used to go drinking with them and they would sit the same thing over and over and over and over again. You just harder to drive a car through the sound barrier and earth than it is to put a rocket into orbit over and over. That was their metaphor. I heard it like 50,000 times and then my next story I hear about Peter and I go meet Peter everybody thinks he's crazy. Every, like I call all the aerospace companies, they say this dude does cuff nuts, he can't do it. I call NASA, they're like, oh, he's freaking crazy, don't even talk to him. But I'm literally talked to these top aerospace engineers for a month and they kept saying this is harder and they drove a car through the sound barrier on the surface of the earth. I watched it happen and I was like, well, if this is harder, somebody's going to do this and I believe them. And so when everybody else had Peter's crazy, I went, no, no, I think he's right. And that I started covering aerospace in the part that was one example. But one of the very world's first bionic I got turned on. The very first blind man who could see again, I was actually in the room as it got turned on. So over and over and over again, I put myself into this world where sci-fi becomes sci-fi. And you always see the same thing. You're seeing scientists figuring out a drop into flow and cook up some crazy, you know, use the boost in creativity and motivation that comes from flow to put this into practice. So it was really nicely nestled, especially if you're dealing like with entrepreneurs or innovators because they're very well versed in flow. Even if they don't have a language for it, they know what they do to drive themselves into flow. So for me, you know, I was learning about the athletics and one side, but I was like this great business study in like entrepreneurs and innovators with crazy ass ideas that nobody believes in dropping into flow and using the state to kind of like help push their their their tech along. And it was really so it was a really cool journey along the way. It's absolutely wild. Like the connection between flow and and doing things that are seemingly impossible, right? So I guess the question is flow required to to achieve this. Yeah, so it's a great question and there are there's there's no one answer. So the answer, well actually the answer is no, but there's a caveat. So if you in the easiest place to get this particular answer is in professional sports. And if you talk to players and or coaches, they will all say the same thing. You can win a single game championship level game without flow. You can do it. You can grit it out. You can tough it out. You can play your best. And in fact, come back to this with me. There's an it went. There's a day. There's always a day that comes when you have to perform at your best without flow. And then from a learning perspective, that's the day you're actually looking for. So that will come back to that in a second. But the answer to your question with green and coaches is you can do it once. You cannot win a seven game series without flow. In fact, I once wrote a piece. I don't remember where it was for maybe the Washington Post. And it was me and the former point guard from the University of Rhode Island basketball team. And we're talking about how in the final four in basketball, you can't win. You can win one of those games without flow. Maybe two. But there's it's a basketball is a game of my teams and flow. We've not the other team out of flow. Oh no. Now the other teams in flow, we got to get back in flow. Like it's literally the cognitive side of basketball is really amazing from that perspective. And so the thinking is you can't win an NBA championship, but you can win a Super Bowl, right? You could show up for one game and grid it out and just do it, but it's not repeatable and it's exhausting. So any of you has ever been through that experience. There were a cover is like four or five or six or seven times as long afterwards because it's so grueling flow provides among the things the neurochemicals do. You get a lot of pain relief. So in athletic activities, you're getting really, you know, there are 20 different endorphins in the brain, but the most common endorphin is 100 times more potent than medical morphine. So these are heavy painkillers. The brain produces naturally for us. You try doing something very physically challenging with no painkillers in your body. It's, first of all, there's a little trauma there. Also, in fact, one of the things that's in our country sort of towards the end of the book is a conversation I have with Larry Hamilton, the big wave surfer about something that I'd never known before, which is that you can have, you can get PTSD from success, from physical, like I was out there doing hard physically challenging things. I was doing them successfully. I was not crashing. I was not like I was pulling them all off, but the cumulative weight of all that fear at a certain point, like of going against pushing myself through a fear barrier day after day for like six months straight. By the end of it, there was like residual trauma, what psychologists talk about is allostatic load or allostatic overload, but literally I had low grade PTSD from success, which I didn't even know was possible until I ran this research. And is that because you're operating in flow state all the time and then did you know? No, no, no. No, it's, so it's a lot of it is you're not operating flow all the time, right? Understand, okay. You have to go, because if you're gonna, I talk myself out of Park ski, right? And it took six months, probably eight, five months. That man I showed, I skied 88 days. So 88 days I had to show up at the hill knowing I was there to do something that scared me to death and could possibly put me in the hospital. And it didn't matter that my, my formula was working. I was doing it. I was doing it successfully. I wasn't going to the hospital. I was accomplishing my goals, but it didn't change the fact that confronting fear day after day after day physical fear, um, I was not emotionally prepared for. And I think that the same thing is probably true. I think we have the same thing in say business challenges. I think part of like leveling up your game, because you can level up your game and then not believe it's real. You know what I mean? You sort of get to that place, you're like, I'm here, but I don't know if I belong here. And sort of like you have this, it's not quite PTSD, but there's a lot more anxiety that start to hurt your performance based around those sorts of, oh my God, I've got here so quickly. There's, I got lucky. There's no way this shit could be real. You know what I mean? I remember the first, the very first time was my thirties that I successfully like started adding zeros to my income every month. You know what I mean? Like I was really moving the needle for the very first time. And I like after like six months, but I was just like, there's no way this shit could be real. I just got lucky. There's this is not like nothing like this. Guys like me don't make this kind of money. I'm like a punk rock kid from Cleveland. This isn't real. And yeah, that I think it took me like a year and a half to sort of get over that and get back to where I was. What does that actually do in terms of your ability to go into flow state and or the inner workings of your body when you have that, I guess it's imposter syndrome, it's the best. Well, yeah, so I want to say you hear a lot about imposter syndrome now. Overblown terms, I don't think there's any way you become successful without going through a period. Like you have to keep level and up. You have to keep punching up up your weight class, right? You're like there's no possible way to do that. If you do that and show up at this new level like I belong here, I'm the shit. Like you're a narcissist or an ego maniac and you're going to have those kind of problems. You know what I mean? Imposter syndrome is I think the natural way we we sort of grow that way. First of all, but the second thing I want to say is there's probably a bunch of cortisol, hormonal body inflammation, stress stuff that I'm not going to really talk about. I'm going to talk about the impact on a really key structure in the brain. Maybe my favorite structure of the brain, the anterior, single cortex, very near the center of a brain. It is the part of the brain that when you're facing a challenge, it makes the determination, threat or opportunity, threat or opportunity. And among, it's part of that. And what it really does is it says, if you have a lot of fear in your in the system, it wants you to be logical, linear. It doesn't want to try new things. It doesn't want to be creative. It wants to try something safe insecure. So in this happens all unconsciously. So the more fear you have in your system, the less creative you're going to be. And the less you'll lose your ability to learn, because nor up an effort, a little bit primes you for learning too much blocks learning almost entirely. So too much fear in the system, long time it kills all kinds of outside the box, real creative thinking. It also kills your mode squelches, your motivation squelches, your energy levels in the end leads to burnout. But the biggest hit is that when we get freaked out, we can know we lose the ability to think our way out of the situation, because the part of your brain that can sort of think outside the box and solve problems in a creative way is completely shut down. So for peak performance, I always say there's on a cognitive side, there's what we call the peak performance basics of the flow research collective. And on the cognitive side, you have to be constantly managing your emotions. So you have to have a daily way of keeping your nervous system in check. And the standard three best are a daily gratitude practice, a daily mindfulness breath work practice, a regular exercise. And five minutes to do a mindfulness practice, 11 minutes to breath work. And you have to exercise until it gets quite upstairs, when your lungs open up, which is signal that nitrous oxide has been released and stressed to almost flushed out of your system. It's usually 20 to 40 minutes depending on your fitness level. If you work with my company, for example, I ask my employees to do one a day for sure, and during stressful times like during COVID, you do three a day, because I need peak performing, fast learning, creative individuals. And I also promote inverted perspective. One of the things that is very challenging in a business environment, I think, is you don't ever hire one person, you actually hire two people, you hire the person they are when they're terrified, you hire the person they are when everything's great, right? And when they're terrified, that's a very different person. And you happen then if you're an entrepreneur, if you're an innovative, if you're in any of those fields where you're going to move fast and things are going to break, and there's going to be a lot of pressure, not knowing how a person functions when terrified is stupid. Like you're bringing somebody, you're bringing, you know, a time bomb into your organization. But how do you actually, how do you actually, so, so one of the things that I like, one of the things I like to do, yeah, when I, when I hire people, one of the things that I do is we, I put everybody through a series of tests, we're basically, you know, and one of them is an assignment, there's no possible way they can complete. It's not like it's not actually physically doable. I know they're going to fail. I want to see how they're going to fail, how they communicate with me when they get scared, when they realize that it's impossible, it's, you know, all those things, I want to see what they're going to do. So that's how I do it. Other people may do it other different ways, but I literally put, you know, people in, uh, and in fact, my CEO of the Flow Research Collective is the only person out of decades of doing these two people. He actually did it. Not, he didn't just like come to me and say, oh, this is impossible, which I've loved. He actually completely got the challenge, which is good. That's a good, that's why I hired him. I hired, yeah, I used to see, that's why I used to see you. Exactly. Uh, that's a, okay, so let's, let's back up a little bit because we're going into some topics, but I need to set, I need to set primers with people so they understand all the things that we're going to go into as well. Um, so walk back, um, where does your story with Flow start? Because then, oh, sorry, I, we're, we're, uh, this is not a two-part thing. I thought you were doing two-part things. They already do. No, no, no, no. So we can, we can, but I still, it's totally up to, it's totally up, it's totally up to you. So sorry. No, no, you're good, you're good, you're good, you're good. Do give me, I, I will, I will use the other stuff, but, um, just, whatever you walk through, like, of your origin with Flow. So where did we not, not speak for forms of Flow in general, and then we could talk about peak performance as well. So, uh, it's sort of a two-part organ story, but the, the clear organ story is, I became a journalist in the 90s, and there were two things I was fascinated with. I was fascinated with, uh, how do humans work? And I was really interested in neurobiology. Not, I felt psychology was squishy, it was subjective. I didn't, I didn't, it wasn't giving me the answers I wanted, and I found that people who were trying to sort of train themselves or train other people from psychology were making errors. I was interested in neurobiology, because it's mechanism. It's reliable, it's repeatable, it shows up, and everyone it's shaped by evolution. And neuroscience in the 90s was really cool, because like, up till then, nobody was focused on big questions. They were like, what are these cluster of neurons? And this portion of the brain do, and it's only in the 90s emotions. Where are they coming from? And how do they work? How does behavior work? How does consciousness work? These are like real topics, right? As I'm sort of like entering the, and this is the stuff that I'm super curious about. Simultaneously, I'm an Axisport athlete, and I'm fascinated with Axisports, and this is the birth of Axisports as a thing. The gravity game is the Axe Games, right? It's a deep punk rock subculture, I'm a punk rocker, I'm an Axisport athlete, I fit, right? And I'm covering it, and I'm living these communities, and I knew another about peak performance through my, the neuroscience side of my inquiry to know that like, there's certain things you look for in a community when you're about to see, like, a flowering peak performance. And in the 90s and action sports, what we saw, it's often referred to as the era of impossible. It's where more impossible feet got accomplished than ever before in history. And it's not just that people were doing the impossible. It's that they were, you know, doing the impossible. And then people were iterating upon it, like two days later, five days later, right? This thing that had been impossible, believed, you know, untouchable by humans. Somebody does it, and then somebody comes out and like, builds on it three days later, and that was happening in all the Axisports surfing skiing, rock climbing snowboarding. It's this great flowering, you know, potential unlike almost anything that's ever happened in sports history. And I mean, these communities, I'm living with them, these are my friends. And everybody I knew, like, they violated all the standard rules of common sensor out big performance. There was like, nobody had any education, nobody had any money. They all had shitty childhoods, broken homes and, you know, horror stories. Huge amounts of like risk taking on a daily basis. Huge amounts of substance abuse normally put those things in a community together, right? Like, what happens? People die younger than they go to jail. They don't reinvent what's possible for the human species. So what the hell am I looking at? Where is this coming from? Is part one? And when you start digging under the wooden doggan athletes, you start hearing stories of flow. Now, back in the 90s, when I was starting this work, especially like we were just starting to decode the neurobiology flow, which was my real passion. But we didn't even have one term for it. It was, were you in the zone? Was this runner's eye? You know, are you being unconscious? Are you in the pocket? Like, like, nobody knew is this a mystical experience, right? Like, spiritual community has a whole, you know, this enbouteus call it satore. The enbouteus have a different word for it. Roush is the German term. I mean, like, literally, like, there's this, you know, smorgasbord. It even chicks at me. Hi, the godfather of flow psychology. He starts out calling it the flow experience. It doesn't even get shortened to like, flow or, you know, until much later. So like, it's this wild time where we're trying to figure out what the hell we're looking at. What is it? Is it, you know, common and all of us all that stuff? And that was really where it started. And from that point on, you know, how does this work in the, in the body and the brain? And how do we get more of it? I asked that question first as a journalist. And then I asked it as an author in, you know, half a dozen books. And now in my current incarnation, I get to ask, it's a scientist because I, you know, at the flow research collective, I work with dozens and dozens and dozens of top neuroscientists and psychologists all over the world. The top institutions like Stanford, Imperial, Columbus, London, University of California, San Francisco, and University of California, San Diego, and Davis, et cetera. And, you know, we do actual, you know, hardcore research into it. And just to give you an idea of where things have gone from, like, where we started, to today, we just published a paper in a really great journal, Neuroscience and Biobehavior Reviews. And it's a hundred-page comprehensive look at what happens in the brain during flow state onset. So we now know exactly what happens step by step moment by moment, millisecond by millisecond in the brain as we transition into flow. The paper also compares flow, which is an all-expected consciousness to the psychedelic state, a different kind of altered state through some overlap, but a lot of difference and traumatic stress. Another altered state, some overlap a lot of difference. And so not only do we have a map of sort of what goes on in the brain and flow, and as we transition into it, we can compare this altered state to other altered states. And so it's really, it's gotten, there's a lot to do, but we've gotten, you know, we've gotten a lot firmer on what we're looking at and what we think about when we talk about flow. If you are building a company, if you're a marketer or somebody selling something, an entrepreneur, founder, CEO, you are hyper focused on trying to figure out which customers want to buy your product or service. But the marketing world changes so damn quickly. Traditionally, as marketers, we've always relied on third-party cookies. This helps us understand what potential customers might be interested in. But third-party cookies are going away and marketers are really trying to figure out what's next. And this is why I'm super excited to be partnered up with a company called Netline that's solving for this. Now, as third-party cookies go away, one idea that's been floating around is something called intent data. It's kind of a way to guess what an entire company might want to buy. You can see how that could be useful if you're an entrepreneur trying to sell something. But it's a little like trying to guess what everybody in a movie theater is going to want from the concession stand. It's broad and not precise enough. Now, imagine if we can get specific insights from an individual in the movie theater. This is what Netline is creating for us. This is what we call buyer-level intent data. And as somebody building a company, as somebody marketing or selling something, it is super important. You understand this. Buyer-level intent data helps eliminate the guesswork. But up until recently, it's been considered more of a dream than a reality. But Netline's developed a new tool called Intentive that makes this possible. And some of the biggest marketers myself included have had a sneak peek and they are incredibly excited about how it could change the marketing game. So, if you're getting into the marketing world, if you're building a company and you want to say ahead, you can sign up for the Intentive waitlist. They have also released a book that teaches you about buyer-level intent data, how to use it. The book's called The Proof is Out There. Discover true buyer-level intent data. Please check out the show notes and get the PDF. It's absolutely free. It's a great way to see where the future of marketing is heading. And trust me, this is something that you cannot afford to miss out on or not understand. And do you feel that flow is the key to performance, especially in your new book, you actually speak about in the later half of someone's life how to maintain an optimized performance. So, in our country, I'd like you to walk through how that came about. But then, is flow the secret to reducing cognitive decline, Alzheimer's dementia without genetic precursors, even accelerating in physical tasks. Is there some connection to these two? So, yeah, let me pull back. Give you a big picture statement about, we'll just stay on cognitive peak performance for a second. And then, let me move into the answer to your question. So, flow is defined as an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best. That is not an understatement, right? The list of skills that flow magnifies is extraordinary. Motivation, productivity, learning, creativity, collaboration, cooperation, empathy, wisdom, happiness, well-being, overall life satisfaction. The reason is quite simply this. When we say peak performance, I'm donating fancier than getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. What is that biology? Is essentially the question you asked? Is it just flow? The answer is no, it's not just flow. From a cognitive side, when we talk about peak performance, there's four categories. Inside of each of those categories, there's a big long list of skills, but there's a category under the heading of motivation. And this is extrinsic motivation, stuff will work hard in the world to get intrinsic motivation, passion, purpose, autonomy, and goals and grit. So, that's all under the heading of motivation. There's a similar subset of stuff under the heading of learning, creativity, and flow. And the way to think about these categories is when you face any challenge, motivation gets into the game. Learning allows you to keep on playing, continue to play, creativity allows you to steer. And especially if you're interested in the kind of stuff that the work I do on, and possible, how do you get there? Where is it exactly? Challenges or creative challenges? You need the creativity to steer and find the flow, which is the optimal performance. It's not we hardwire all of these, or excuse me, how we turbo boost all of these results, sort of beyond all reason, like the patient. That's on the cognitive side. Now on the physical side, flow does. It deadens, pain, it amplify strength, fast twitch, muscle response, a couple other things get amplified in flow. So there's a big physical impact as well, but the bigger boost is cognitive. Now, you asked a peak performance agent question. I have been studying peak performance aging for almost as long as I've been studying flow for two reasons. One, me had to accept me high as the godfather of flow psychology. Every, you know, so we wrote a book called flow. What they don't realize is he actually started his career in creativity, and then he moved to immediately, he did some flow work, creativity, and he never stopped working on flow, but he went right into adult development. Why? Because flow is the engine for adult development. How do we grow as people? Flow is woven into that equation. So all of this work sort of sits in the heart of my field. The other thing is my wife and I for 20 years now have done hospice care work for dogs, and we specialize in worst of the worst cases. So if you are a three-legged, one-eyed Chihuahua with an abusive past, cancer heart disease, liver failure, and bad flatulence, you are our dog. And we've developed a very amazing sort of healing methodology. There's a sort of a global movement of double canine lifespan. We are deeply involved in that. There are some people doing really crazy whizz-bang genetic engineering stuff. That's not what we do. We work with evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology and some flow science. And that's the work we do, but we're very, very successful at it. It turns out the same stuff that works in dogs, also works in humans, and this is very well established as well. But my point is I've been in this field for a very, very long time. What happened and what is at the center of our country is for reasons we can get into, if you want to go there, but at long story short, their traditional story of aging, what I like to call the long slow-rot theory is that all of our mental and physical skills decline over time and there's nothing we can do to stop this line. That is the standard theory on aging. And most of us believe either that's true or some version of that is true, and it turns out none of it's actually true. And there's a wild pile of research that starts in the 1990s and goes through now that establishes all of this very, very clearly. So if all this stuff we used to think fades away over time, there's nothing we can do about it. We now know that all users are losing skills. So on the physical side and on the mental side, if we properly train all of these skills, we can hold on to them and even advance them much later in life than anybody thought fast will. Now you asked a question about flow. So let me talk about, let me bring it back to your original question. Cognitive Client is a great place to talk about this. So we used to believe Cognitive Client isn't happened. Well, we're going to get all this happens. We're going to get dementia and there's nothing we can do about it. And certain aspects of certain changes in brain function that that do happen, right? Certain things biologically. But it turns out that a lot of things that happen biologically, nobody's actually linked to cognitive decline. So yes, there are changes in brain function. We also, and this is Gene Cohn's work, predominantly the founder, the godfather of geriatric psychiatry, sort of the founder of people performance aging, he discovered that as we move into our 50s, there are because of shifts in the brain, we gain access to what I call a suite of cognitive superpowers. Whole new levels of intelligence open up, stuff we cannot get access to before, ways of thinking, ways of abstract reasoning, problem solving, you get whole new levels of creativity as well, including divergent thinking that's outside the box, really creative stuff that gets amplified wisdom, which is a very specific neurobiological trait also gets amplified and empathy. So all these things happen. Now back to the flow thing, if you want to stave off cognitive decline, you need to develop two things, expertise and wisdom. And why is this? It's because the brain continues to produce neurons until we die. In fact, parts of the brain will produce 700 new neurons a day up until very, very late in life. That keeps, that keeps going. If you do all the right stuff, where those neurons are mad. So a lot of the insults of aging are very local, right? This part of the brain gets weak, right? These kinds of shifts happen and most of the damage is in the prefrontal cortex. The newest structure from evolution of perspective in the brain is where most of the damage takes place. It's the first door road. Stuff that's older and deep in our brain, that stays there. So how do you preserve the prefrontal cortex? Wisdom and expertise. Wisdom and expertise create very diverse neural networks. They're not localized in one part of the brain. They're all over the brain. So you're birthing a lot of new neurons and you're creating a lot of redundant diverse networks. And there's, so there's crazy studies on this over and over and over. The most famous is probably the, the sisters of Notre Dame. And this is one of the places this research started back in the 90s. This is a group of sisters and they were, they were very interested. They're very, first of all, they're very into education. So they liked this research and they were very interested in people, performance agents or successful agents. So they like this research. And it's a very cohesive group, right? They all live the same. They eat the same foods. They do the same thing. So really good for science. And they all donated their brains to science for autopsy after death. So bonus. And they started giving them cognitive tests and physical tests every, you know, every year over long stretches of time. And what they started to realize is that sisters were dying. And when they'd autopsy their brain, they would find brains were fully dimensioned. Alzheimer's like paying hell was a plaques and the brain was totally educated. And yet during life, they showed no symptoms of Alzheimer's and dementia. Not. And they were performing on these cognitive tests incredibly well. And there's, this study gets repeated over and over and over again. We see the same thing again and again. But it's when we start to figure out that certain lifestyle things. Sisters got a lot of exercise. So that's the foundation of a white exercises neuro protective against cognitive. It's it starts sort of there. But it's wisdom and expertise that is really what you see more than anything else. The sisters are deeply committed to lifelong learning. It's baked into what they do in the world. They're teachers, they're educators. And it's how they live. So like they're building up expertise all the time. What's the difference between wisdom and expertise? Wisdom is like, expertise is all the stuff you're learning consciously. I'm reading a book. I'm learning algebra. Wisdom is the, oh, I'm watching the group. And it seems like there's these nonverbal, you know, social dynamics that you're observing. You can't quite name, but you're learning what they are and how to figure them out in emotional intelligence stuff. That's all the wisdom stuff. And it's different parts of the brain that do it. So those things are neuro protective against cognitive decline. Here's what matters for flow. When we move into flow, one learning is massively amplified. US Department of Defense found that soldiers in flow learn 240 or 500 percent faster than normal. So you've got a huge spike in learning and flow naturally for neurobiological reasons. We can talk about it expands empathy. Our ability to see things from other people's perspective expands naturally in flow. This is the foundation of like that wisdom we were talking about. So flow amplifies expertise. Our ability to get better at things and these neuro protective and it amplifies wisdom. Here's where let me tie this all together in a bun for you. So when I said earlier, chick sent me a high work on flow and it started the adult development and flow is how we become adults because when we're in flow, we can only get into flow by using our skills to the utmost. You got to like whatever you know, you're going to push on it and push it to the edge of your abilities. You're going to be a little outside your comfort zone, right? What happens when we do that? We grow, we learn, we get, we come back from that more adaptive, more complex, more wisdom, more expertise. So what's interesting is flow is, I don't, chick sent me a high seem to argue that flow is the only driver of adult development in the end. He came to that conclusion and I'm not sure I'm going to take, I'm going to say it's the one of the major drivers of adult development. But what's cool about it is it doesn't only teach us how to become better adults and help us grow up. It actually helps us become great later in life because it protects us against the ravages of age. So that those are, I mean there, and I can go, I can sort of go on and on and on about flow and adult development. But I'm going to shut up now just so I don't talk your head off. Or it's my friend Lizzy once said, are you calling me to talk my face off? No, no, no issue, no issue. There's no issue, it may be a known issue, but there's no issue here. So when I, I'm curious about a couple things now. So first we spoke about like, so we have learning and wisdom which sort of prevent cognitive decline, plus there are some physical activity markers and and thresholds that you should maintain to also prevent cognitive decline. And I think it's very easy for people to understand how do I continue to learn? How do I continue to? I'm sure that the that if somebody was like, okay, I'm, I'm not working anymore, but I can still, you know, proactively. So yeah, yeah. Okay, so this is really cool because this is right in the heart of our research into flow and trauma and the differences. Okay. And I, I talk, I hinted at a lot of this stuff along the way. So, but I have to start with flow states to have triggers. So if you would like more flow in your life, what do you do? Right? I was going to ask that, but I also wanted to ask, so maybe I'll tell you what I was curious about and tell me if it's relevant enough or not. I'm going to ask, okay, how do you measure, how do you measure learning? And are there, are there leading, not leading indicators, but activities you can do to progress your wisdom as well? Because you said those are the two most important things. Yeah. Okay. So I. Yes, this is the right. Let me just keep going because I was only going to stand flow for half a second, um, flow states have triggers. Pregenitiously lead to more flow. And the most famous is known as the challenge skills balance. And when I talked about chicks set me high in adult development, I referenced this row is actually talking about. So flow follows focus. It shows up when all over attention is in the right here right now. So there are 26 discovered triggers of flow. There are way more, but that's what they do. They drive attention to the now. The most famous of the challenge skills balance. It says we pay the most attention to the now when the challenge that has to hand slightly exceeds our skill set. So you want to stretch, but not snap, right? That's what I was talking about. So nobody's been able to put an exact number on what's the difference between challenge and skills, right? But years ago, chicks set me a high put in a Google mathematician came up with 4% as the average number. Now, 4% is a little tricky. If you're shy, you meet your timid, you're outside your comfort zone. So 4% you're already like, I'm a little uncomfortable here. What's going on? But if you're a hard charging type A type, 4% is problematic because you're like, what the fuck? Like, I want to challenge as 50% greater. And those high, those what psychologists call higher goals are great for motivation. Like you get an 11 to 25% boosted motivation for properly said higher goal. So it's great. You just have to chunk it down. So what's right in front of you is about 4%. Now you asked about learning and older adults. Turns out, allostatic load is a concept I mentioned earlier. Allostatic load is literally the impact physiologically and psychologically of all our residual trauma. Like all this shit that beats us up along the way, it impacts our physiology and impacts our psychology. And what we realized is it impacts the challenge skills balance and older adults. So what is normally 4% shrinks down to about 1%, depending on where you are. So one of the secrets to it is shrinking challenges even further. So I took on my, that our country was, could I learn to park ski at age 53? And standard thinking is this is an impossible challenge. You cannot do this at age 53 for all these 17 different biological reasons. And I was saying, wait a minute, based on these studies and all these things, the super hours of aging, all this stuff that I'm looking at, you guys are wrong, right? And, but nobody had actually taken these studies out of the lab and into the rural world and said, okay, I'm going to put my ass up alive and see what happens. And that's what I did. And, uh, and I got enormous amazing results. And one of the things we did is we shrunk the challenge skills balance. And I went 1% at a time instead of 4% and I went and I went so slowly, it was amazing. Like it's some of the early days when like I walked off the mountain saying that was victory is was silly, but it worked remarkably well. And so, and I, and the point I want to make beyond this is just because I ran this cool experiment myself doesn't mean a damn thing to anybody else. What matters to other people is first I had a ski partner and he was 20 years younger than me, former sponsored athlete who had gotten very, very injured and walked away from the sport and he decided to come back. He's using my same learning protocol and it's more than just 1% at a time like that stuff. There's a little more going on, but he made amazing progress. And so much so that we went back the following season and we took 17 older adults and used the exact same photo protocol and snowboarders and skiers. Most of them were intermediate level ages 30 to 68. So, big sprang of older adults and we taught them how to park. We told you the same protocol and also taught them how to park ski. I had to go into the protocol, but then we took it out of park skiing and snowboarding and ran the same experiment with a couple hundred older adults and had them just like use it regularly. So, my point is it worked very, very well for large groups of people, right? That's sort of the story told in our country at least the front end of those experiments. And if you want to, if you go to our country.com, the website for the book, if you click on peak performance aging experiment or in our country experiment, you can see the video and read the white paper we wrote about the experiment so there's all this is you can check it out for yourself. But I was going to have to tell you. That will be outlines the protocol that you actually deployed to help people learn new skills. No, so what we did is, let me just go, because this is useful for people because it helps. One, we had, the protocol was simply this. We took park skiing, which is a hugely complicated, dangerous acrobatic thing is that there are only eight foundational skills in park skiing. Crouching, slashing, grinding, moving your body in a 180, moving your body in a 360 and doing a move called the shifty. And so what we did is we taught people two new movements a day. The goal wasn't go into the drain park and throw tricks. It was go into the drain park and play with these new body movements. We had an embodied cognitive approach to learning. Different learning style won't go into that, but literally play with these two movements a day. The playing with the new movements will for reasons we can go into if you want, drop you into flow and the flow amplifies the learning and you're going to end up learning tricks along the way. How did we measure it? You asked how I measured learning in this experiment. We used, we videotaped everything. So there's a standard way we judge success and freeskiing competitions, right? It's a so-called paved criteria, progression, amplitude, difficulty, et cetera, et cetera. And we literally had a panel of judges who judge freeing competitions and other physical things. And we rated, and we gave them a bunch of track physiological measures and flow as there's a bunch of other stuff like that. But literally, we did a standard video review of freeskiing. And what was cool is if you just want to talk about learning and progression, we saw a 26% 0.5% increase in learning on all five of these criteria from the first training session to the fourth, which is kind of amazing when you're talking about people who had no park skiing experience whatsoever. Lots of fear, right? We're just intermediate athletes in thing to see a 26.5% increase was, it's significant. So lots, lots of learning. You ask the second half of your question, what can you do about Winston? This is a really easy, this is a really easy one. There's 30 years of data on loving kindness meditation, compassion meditation. So it's a very specific kind of focused meditation. This is when Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin, my own moderate go badgers teamed up with the Dalai Lama, and they spent 30 years doing research on monks and what goes on in their brains, they were using compassion meditation. So we know so much about this. And just as a side note, of all the things you can do, if you're interested in people's performance aging, they recently did a study where they compared loving kindness meditation versus focus meditation, and they looked at among other things, telomere attrition. So one of the reasons we age, there are nine known causes of aging. One of them is telomere attrition. What is a telomere? You have a chromosome, right? And it's constantly repeating itself. The chromosome has a cap on the end, like bumpers on a card to protect the chromosome. Those are your telomeres. They, as genes, copy themselves, they get smaller and smaller and smaller. At a certain point, the cell stops functioning at either, then you have problems. So they literally found that six weeks of loving kindness meditation versus regular focus meditation actually decreases or stops telomere attrition. So not only does this stuff actually help train up wisdom, it transits telomere attrition. What happens? And so when you talk about wisdom, when you talk about seeing things from other people's perspectives, that's actually a part of the brain called the temporal prow of junction. It does perspective taking. So, and it does like extreme, so when you have an out-of-body experience, that is the brain's way of giving you a radically new perspective. So you why do people have out-of-body experiences like, the first one I ever had, I went skydiving, jumped out of a plane, jumped right out of my body, and I was like, what the hell is going on? Why? It's literally the temporal prow of junction, which does perspective, both physical and psychological, saying, oh crap, you just jumped out of an airplane, you're going to die. Let's change your physical perspective radically. So maybe you could find a solution that'll keep you alive. That's what's happening when we have out-of-body experiences or one of the things that's happening. And this is all extremely well-documented. In fact, there's a team in Switzerland, like Peter Breuer, I want to say, or Olaf Blanc, I can't remember whose lab it is, where they have a VR simulation that can bring us out-of-body experiences in you. So you're going to have this experience yourself, but we've gotten really good at where they come from and what they happen, but it's the temporal prow of junction going, hey, where this is the same body of brain that does wisdom. And so when you get to walk a mile and somebody else's moccasins, when you start to see things from other people's perspectives, it's the temporal prow of junction getting more active, expanding, when more in flow, this automatically happens. Our sense of self disappears in flow, right? It's one of the things that defines flow. We know why this happens. It changes in the prefrontal cortex and certain brain activity that dissolves the network that produces our sense of self. The same time, the temporal prow of junction in the part of our brain that allows us to see things from other people's perspectives gets hyperactive. So when we are in flow, why do we gain automatically wisdom and empathy? It's this construct that's teaching the brain to see things from other people's perspectives, which is incredibly, incredibly useful, but it's happening automatically in flow and it's happening when we do love and kindness meditation. So, go ahead, sorry, go ahead. No, go ahead. And just if you've never done love and kindness meditation before, it's a little odd. It's very, I was very resistant to it for years. I've meditated for 30 years, but I was like, love and guidance meditation is just like praying for somebody else. I don't think this is going to work. Like, really? Are you kidding? Like, I just didn't buy it. But the data got to the point that it got so overwhelming that I was like, Steven, like, you're reading all this stuff because you're just being a moron. And when I got into writing about peak performance aging and trained people in it, and I needed a tool, I was like, oh my god, it's got to be loving kindness meditation. It's the single most effective thing for it. It calms you down to us all the like, you know, stress release stuff you want, plus any any kind of meditation amplifies our focus, which will automatically help produce more flow in your life. And you get, you know, teal and mirroredrition and all these other wisdom benefits. So, it's really cool. And I like the University of New Hampshire, actually, has you go online in there? They've got a positive psychology part, but they have a loving kindness meditation script online that I like better than it's, first of all, it's neutral, it's not denominational, it's not spiritual. It's not like, it's just I, and what's cool about loving kindness meditation that I didn't realize is it's so much easier than every other guy you've ever done, because it's a freaking script. And you run a script and you got to feel certain things and think a certain way while you're running the script, but when you get lost in your mind wanders, you're like, oh, my mind wandered, I go, where did I, where was I in the script? Let me pick up from where I left off. And after 12 minutes, it's freaking done. Like it's so overly simplified. It's so simple. In fact, here's the craziest thing you can do loving kindness meditation effectively while walking your dog or driving a car. Unlike other kinds of meditation, because it's this script, and you can sort of have focus, it's really a very, very, very cool tool. It's very, we've gotten a lot of success with it in teaching that. And if you're interested in focus breathing, I still think box breathing is the best thing to learn, both of which, because they give you a lot of shit to do. And so if you're a lousy meditator, your focus is hard for you, or this isn't your thing, which I've been making for 30 years, but I fall into that category, right? It's not my thing. I just know how great it is for my brain. So I do it every day, but it's still not my thing, even after 30 years of it. And I have to tell you, at one point, it was so not my thing that I actually got into a brain scanner. So the world's the experts, and I was like, have I doing it right? Just tell me if I'm doing it right, because like my friends are doing it, and they're coming back with like tails of like meeting Norse gods and having this, and I'm just like, I'm just doing this thing. Like I can shut my brain off, I can stay here, I can focus, I can do it for an hour and a half, you know, I can do all this stuff, but like really? This is so like, I have to, I have to have somebody out the outside saying, yeah, yeah, you're doing it right. Your brain is doing what the monks brains are doing. You just don't have the emotional experience that most people have with it, which I'm I want to talk about the Kelly Road show. I do not take my podcasts recommendations lightly, but I have truly admired Kelly's journey from the get-go. She was a fresh employee at a Fortune 500 received seven promotions in eight years, all this while building a company that blossomed into an eight-figure empire. Today, she's a best-selling author, top-ranked podcaster, the proud owner, and co-owner of six thriving companies. And let's not forget, she's an ink 500 awardee proving that growth isn't just a goal. It is a lifestyle. Now, her podcast, the Kelly Road Show, dies deep into business growth strategies, specifically targeted for those hitting the six and seven figure mark, but it's not all business. She also explores the habits, mindset and disciplines of the world's most successful people. It's a podcast. It's perfect whether you're just getting started or you're trying to up level your success game. But here's a deal kicker for me. She is a super mom and a wife. She embodies the truth that you don't have to sacrifice your home life for success. She believes and shows that life-changing wealth, wild success, a happy marriage, and fulfilling home can coexist. That is goal. So tune in to the Kelly Road Show on Apple Spotify. Wherever you get your podcasts, trust me. It's time well invested. That's amazing. No, I appreciate you going into like such detail on this because the average person who meditates, I've never heard this level of explanation as to why you should meditate or why why you should even and by the way, let me let me let me actually take let me take it one step further for you because this is another thing most people don't know. If you want creativity, creativity can be enhanced by meditation. Only if you're doing open senses of a pasta or love and kindness meditation, what are you doing? A focused meditation, you're actually training your brain to think convergently, to be logical and linear and focus and put ideas together. But open senses is I'm letting all this stuff flow in through my senses, usually in open eye like it's all coming in, but I'm not judging anything, that actually trains up creativity. So what's cool about meditation work and this is also on the physical side, we could have the same conversation about like if you want to preserve certain kinds of cognitive function, is it better to be cardio or weight lifting or like it's really specific. That's what's happened over the past 30 years. It's not just we learn that the old theory about aging, for example, is wrong. It's that we've gotten really prescriptive. And funny, I think the last bit that I want to, there's two bits here that are we're saying out loud about people's performance aging. You can pick which way you want to go into. But one, the big levers are cognitive. Most people think the big levers are like pharmaceutical or nutraceutical or doctor prescribed and they're not. Like the data is really, really clear. You pick performance aging, demands challenging social creative activities, way more than it demands uphill or anything you could take. And if you're challenging social and creative activity involves, I'm going to use a bunch of big words here that actually means something specific, dynamic deliberate play, that's the actual recipe. And if you want to take it one step further, people's performance aging is about challenging creative social activities that demand dynamic deliberate play and novel outdoor environments. That's the exact formula how you have for the performance aging. There is not a drug supplement or anything near there is the first thing. Second half of that equation, you can choose where we go. We can go both, you want. People's performance aging starts young. We can rock till we drop pretty much. The research is really clear. And interventions at any age really matter. There's really cool data. What happens when you start training VOMAC, VO2 max in your 80s, like cool data all the way up. In fact, the biggest lift you can get later in life is if you're totally a sedative couch potato who's totally decaying away and you literally just, the intervention is I'm going to start taking the stairs instead of like riding the elevator. Like the little small interventions from totally that's where you get some of the biggest lift. But the research is really clear. There's a bunch of stuff that you need to do in your 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s to really thrive in the second half of your life. So the two things, the points I want to make is most people are approaching aging wrong and people performance aging starts young. So both are counterintuitive to how we normally think about it, but both are very, very true. I would even make an argument that most people don't think about it. They don't really think about it, especially at a young age. I mean, I don't know when you are conscious of your age. So what? Yeah, it's not 20. No, it's not 20. Well, we know that mortality. So we, one of the interesting things that Ernest Becker figured this out, back in the 90s, he wrote a very famous book that one of the police are called the denial of death, that says, but you know, our fear of mortality is one of the largest drivers of human behavior. And what the research shows is that is true, but awareness of that, depending on your upbringing, of course, and depending on how much death you're around, of course, but it usually comes online in your 40s and your 50s. And like so that fear that has been unconscious for most of your life and governing behavior at a deep level becomes much more conscious in your 40s and your 50s. So that's the natural adult development evolution of it, but it seems like you want to start paying attention to your 20s. And by the way, like, oh my God, did I do everything wrong? Like, now I'm doing what I know. Oh my God. Like, wow, I probably shouldn't have dragged that much booze and done all those. No, you know, not, I mean, it's valid. And I was actually going to ask, I was going to ask about all these external factors on on both sides. So the like the party drugs and the alcohol, how does that impact? But also what do new tropics and all these other types of things that are pharmaceutical? How did they impact state peak performance? Here's what I'm going to hear broad spectrum answer to that is from a, you can ask the same question about diet also. What I everything I'm saying is true on diet. It's true for nutraceuticals supplements, you know, and most, most medicines. Everybody's system is individual. There is no one thing that works for everybody. It's, it's a lie. Like, it's just a flat out lie. In fact, there is no one thing that is going to work for you in your 20s, 30s, 40 feet, like we change too much. It's a living moving target. So, you know, let's take something that I actually believe in that works anti-inflammatory. So most, there are nine non-conscious of aging, inflammation is at the root of all of them. So anything to do to decrease inflammation is great. Now, there's a ton of anti-inflammatory supplements that are available. Tumeric is one that that I like, but they're again, they're all very individual, right? But here's the thing. None of them, none of them are as effective as petting a dog for eight minutes a day or doing 11 minutes of mindfulness or having a good conversation with your wife or spot. Like, literally like, you've got to compare them against other things. If you're doing them and you're doing all the cognitive stuff and the physical stuff, sure, you're getting an extra micro boost, but this is, everybody's lazy. They don't want to do the cognitive stuff. They don't want to do the physical stuff. They want the pill. And when you look at the pill and actually compare it to other things, look at the comparison studies. It's cuckoo. Like, you would never, you wouldn't go for the nutraceuticals. You'd be reaching for the cognitive stuff. In fact, let me give you another example. If you want to, uh, peep performance aging, which do you think is more important that you get rid of your obesity or you have regular social connection? Hmm. All right. Well, I would say, I would say most people like, the social connection is right. Yeah, most people actually say obesity. When I've asked that question, you got it. You got it right. But most people are like, oh, yeah, you can't be ridiculous. I had to pause for a second because it does make, you know, you. So let me, let me, let me give you of the like mind body peep performance aging connections is a little bit of a tangent, but it's my favorite of the facts and it's really well established. Um, this work originally comes out of Ellen Langer's lab at Harvard, but it's been worked on by every and it goes days back to the 70s. So a positive mindset towards aging, I believe the second half of my life is filled with potential and possibility. And I can do anything. Um, is so so powerful intervention. It will add seven and a half years to your life. This is one of the most well established facts in peak performance aging. In fact, the first thing you have to change is your mindset. Um, if you can, um, it tends to be, it tends to be very, very fixed, but like the Ohio study of law and longitudinal study of aging and retirement. Sorry, 1975 went to 1995, tracked over 1,000 people, look specifically at mindset. This is where that number first shows up. A lot of people are looking in mind and they're going, oh, wow, it has a huge impact on health and longevity and blah, blah. Um, and that was the first time we got a number, we put a number on it. Similarly, let me actually break into a flow tangent here. Flow is phenomenal for peak performance aging, uh, for a lot of other reasons, but I talk about stress relief. So when we move into flow, we get feelings of mastery, right? Because we've talked about skill acquisition mastery and control. We don't feel peak performance on the inside. We feel, oh my god, I can control things. I can't know how I'm really control. Well, I'm playing basketball on the fricking hoop looks as big as a loop. Oh, I'm writing and my verbs are doing things. My verbs don't normally be right. Like I'm running a business meeting and fuck everybody's got great ideas and they're all getting along, right? Like what's going on? That's what happens in flow. I'm in control of things I can't normally control. The two most important feelings as we age are feelings of mastering control. When we feel mastering control, these are the two most powerful positive feelings that humans can get. They boost the production of T cells and natural killer cells. T cells fight disease. Natural killer cells fight tumors in six cells. So what I like to say is flow because it underpins meaning and happiness and well-being. It's not just how we get a life that's more meaningful. It's how we get a whole lot more life that's more meaningful. So you start stacking these cognitive interventions, mindset, flow, creative, social, like this is really how you spend. There's some dietary stuff, right? There's really great evidence that says if you eat a cup of nuts a day, you can add an extra three years to your life. They don't talk about all the other things you're not supposed to eat and does this work for everyone and what kind of nuts exactly. But there's stuff on the physical side that will help but the big interventions are usually, you know, these psychological cognitive interventions. I don't want to interrupt. I'm done. I'm done. This is a pause. This is the rare, this is the rare pause in the Stephen Collar model log, right? You guys take advantage of this man. It's got dive in there. So you're just going to have to hold it in edgewise. No, I'm taking it all in and now I'm thinking about all the different parts of my life that are not optimized. I mean, I'm pretty sure that's pretty normal when somebody let me let me go back into something that I said earlier that's probably worth breaking out, which is dynamic deliberate dynamic deliberate play. I said, oh, that's right. Okay. What the hell is that? So all of our physical skills are user lose its skills. So you have a choice. You can either on a weekly basis, literally on a weekly basis, God and Trank Strength and then God and Trank stamina and then God and Trank balance and flexibility and agility or you can find a single activity that trains all of them. Let me give you an example. When and this does not actually sports are actually better than regular sports for peak performance aging. We could talk about why but literally when they stack rank, what are the best sports for like what should you do to stay young? Number one is tennis. Number two is bad mid. The stuff that most people do like going to the gym or running on a treadmill or even running on the street or riding your bike actually are way down on the list in terms of in terms of their benefits and dynamic activities. Action sports are actually better than things like tennis or bad mid or whatever but they train all of those skills at once. So they're like what if the flow research collective, I always say we should ever be training super freaking busy. So we want to look for multi-tool solutions, single tools that solve multiple problems at once, right? Action sports or sports like these dynamic activities work the best. What does deliberate play? What does that mean? Every is heard of deliberate practice. This is Anders Erickson's. This is the 10,000 hours of I'm going to do the same thing with slight incremental advancement and that's how I become an expert and it is true that is one way to become an expert. It is slow and it is a lot slower than deliberate play. Deliberate play is literally repetition without repetition. It's repetition with improvisation. So you know I last time I went off this jump on skis I threw a 360. This time I'm going to try and nose butter 360 or a repetition doing the same thing but you're improvving a little bit or it could be like last time I took a 360 but this time I don't like I don't feel that good. I'm not that into it so I'm actually going to dial it back and throw 180 or a sliding spin 360 where I never leave the ground right. It gives you a lot more freedom in there and play means I don't care about the outcome right and a bunch of other other things that are really important for emotional management but if we get it right learning rates go through the roof, flow goes through the roof and you're training up all the physical skills in a single swoop that you trained for peak performance aging and because it's dynamic one of the biggest problems that we have as humans in our bodies as we age is stuff goes wrong we break things along the way and we don't when we recover we compensate right like you break your left ankle as you're recovering your right leg gets stronger you start to use different muscles in your leg you left ankle over time and what you don't realize is that's compounding over time and it's going to start to affect your knee and your hip and your gait and your balance and all that stuff and the biggest problem is we have two kinds of muscles we have prime movers my quads my chest and we have our stabilizer muscles and as we age your prime movers will take over they'll start doing all of the work and your stabilizer muscles will start to atrophy and so you'll go that's this is what happens when you start like you take up a new sport and suddenly you you tear your hip flexor and you didn't even know you had a hip flexor let alone you know five different hip flexor muscles or you you know you start lifting heavy and sure your all your shoulder muscles can handle it but you tear this like really rear rotator cuff muscle in the middle of your back that you didn't even know you have what they held into stabilizer muscle and it's atrophy so properly properly done dynamic deliberate play doesn't allow you to take muscle doesn't you have to have your stable muscles active otherwise you're you're sort of injured yourself right so you end up one you expose some weaknesses which are always great because train them up and and two it's sort of like one-stop-shopping for a lot of the problems you get as an older adult and let me add the final thing I said here why are actually sports so much better than like bad midtertimes for the next question one of the main news is this so I mentioned earlier that neurogenesis birth and new neurons right you want to preserve brain health that matters where do most of the neurons that get born and the adult brain come from they have a campus what is the epicampus it's a Latin word for the seahorse so it's a little part of the brain that shape like a seahorse um and it's deep in your temporal lobe and it's the part of your brain that want it does most long-term memories are created there they move elsewhere in the brain but they're created there but what kind of memories are really created there location the epicampus does place it does location does where it is from an evolutionary perspective you've got to remember where you were when critical stuff happened right so the epicampus is packed with what are called grid cells or place cells things that help us remember where we are when things happen so what is the best way to birth new neurons in the epicampus it's to use it for what it was designed to do to have novel emotional experiences in the outdoors that's what it was designed to do from evolution or perspective what happens when we're doing action sports you're skiing or you're riding a mounted bike or etc etc you're having novel emotional experiences in the outdoors you're using your brain exactly the way it was designed to use so what happens is not only do you get more neurogenesis more nerve rate it doesn't just like give you the standard you get more and you get to hold on to other neurons that would be dying off from far longer so it sounds like it sounds crazy until you start looking at it from those perspectives and by the way this is not news to anybody the longest lived community in America some iconic Colorado home to veil beaver creek aspen outdoor lovers two and three are our pitkin and eagle also in Colorado they're all like mechas of action sports so there are some other longer lived communities in America and they live longer reasons there's a there's a loma linda california community that's a blue zone community and it's a seventh day Adventist community and they certain dietary things and social things and creative that they do actually works but it's also it's california it's a surf community you know bike and community you know take your pick community so you see a lot of very very long live people in in these communities in fact that was one of the things that happened to me that led to our country I called it I used to I had a name for it I called it getting geysered there was this really weird experience I was living in New Mexico and I would ski at either the Santa Fe ski area or Tauce and then I would come every spring since I lived in a squaw valley which is now palisades Tahoe in the early 90s I come back to that area for me so I've been doing this for years so I would ski and the Santa Fe ski area is this like little ski area that's directly above Santa Fe which is predominantly retirement community Tauce is a ski area that like you go to if you're a really hardcore outdoor athletes and narrowly ski area and people there are outdoor athletes squaw valley you go to if you're an action sports athlete and what would happen is I'd go to the Santa Fe ski area nobody can see how old you are in a chair if you've got a helmet goggles and a mask and I'd be talking to people who were clearly 20 or 20 years younger than me or 30 years younger than me I'd be like hey did you ski the bumps over there you checked out this clip for what's the park like and I kept getting I don't do that I'm too old for that shit my knees stopped it blah blah and I was like oh my god you know everywhere I went I was like holy shit all these people are dead before they're dead what's going on and the reason it caught my attention is I'd go to Tauce the age bracket of the skiers has not changed it's the same group of people in Tauce they're outdoor athletes they're charging so all these people are like I have height kachina peak 11 times today and ski these gnarly big mountain lines I'd never be like I will be going into the drain park oh no I'm too old for that shit but I will ski right and I was like I don't get what's going on right like and then I would go to Tau and the action sport athletes and I'd be with a group of professional athletes who would be chasing each other around the mountain with cheering park and invariably the guy leaving the charge of my friend Tom Day who is 60 some years old right like so like there's a troop of like 30 professional athletes in a line and the guy at the front of the line is the oldest dude out there and they all think of those houses action sport athletes and they're doing everything off jumps and what I started to realize is this is a mindset this is no difference between any of these people but their mindset Santa Fe they think of those houses retirees so they act like retirees you go to Tauce they think of those houses outdoor athletes but they can't do the acrobatic flipping spinning stuff but like they can still charge into their 80s like I'll go to Tauce and I'll get height into the ground like height and skiing to the ground by guys in their 70s there's literally like I remember a day where I got so tired that we skied a line to enter it you know to go around like this 80 foot cliff and I was so tired my vision wobbled as I made the move and I almost went over the cliff and the guy was following was I was 40 something at the time I was following a 66 year old guy and he was fine he had been hiking with me all day and I was like what the hell is going on you know so it's like it's constantly seeing that stuff up close that makes you go that was what sort of started leading me towards this stuff where I was like something's wrong like whatever we think about like aging it's not it doesn't look right like when you get into these worlds it doesn't look right the people stories people are telling isn't matching the reality or the data when I actually start learning experiments can I ask one question just on on like physically we've spoken a lot about like cognitive and and mental aging but then we sort of dovetailed into physical but the one thing that I have a question of a physical what about like even hormone levels that change over time and these types of things that so inverse and thanks have a big impact so it's interesting hormone levels may be less of a problem than neurochemical levels actually okay so dopamine serotonin and a couple of the neurochemicals decline over time that that that is true and so what they're finding and this is where pharmacology gets interesting what they're actually finding is SSRIs which are actually terrible for depression right they're like I like I am over depression they work occasionally for certain people really well with most building they don't work really well but in terms of peak performance aging they're phenomenal and the reason is so if you want to treat depression you may want to increase serotonin levels but you want to do it in very specific parts of the brain you give I give you an SSRI it increases serotonin everywhere in the brain turns out as we age serotonin levels drop overall so increasing it everywhere in the brain really works well so a little bit tiny little bit of SSRIs tend this is so that this isn't the cutting edge of peak performance aging the thing I want to say about the physical side and the hormone side and the regenerative medicine is actually starting to get ready for prime time I've been working with it and studying it and writing about it reporting on it for 20 years and it's been a lie under the layman what that means so regenerative medicine is the regrowth of bones tissues organs tendons right it's usually stem cells and those kinds of tools to rebuild our body from the inside out that's what regenerative medicine is back in the 90s when the field gets started it's hormone replacement therapy it's testosterone in the hand alone and all that right so that's that TRT old man so that that's generation one generation two is PRP platelet plasma rich platelet therapy right which is essentially a crude way to get at stem cells and now stem cells are kind of a wildly tool but exosomes and placental matrix exosomes are literally what stem cells produce they're very safe they stay in place all the problems with stem cells are not associated with exosomes the problem with exosomes is they're very expensive and here's the thing about regenerative medicine people have to know this is the thing about all the longevity signs stuff and anybody tells you different they're they're they're selling you something and be very cautious we have gotten to the point that we are very good at ligaments and tendons and we're starting to get better at bones right we are not yet at organ replacement we are not yet at cancer heart is we're getting there right and it's this certain happened but like the physical the bones the ligaments the tendons I got a physical and like we're getting better at that stuff in a lot of interesting ways beyond that the rate of change in the rate of development the rate of growth is amazing but and I'm not saying I don't experiment out beyond that I do but I'm experimenting with my body and experimenting with my health and I'm just checking stuff out to see what works and what doesn't and you know I don't mind doing that and I don't mind the risk but not for everyone and you you know and I so the other thing you're hearing like the longevity signs community you hear all these very hyped up promises about stuff and I think you should absolutely play with it experiment with it try it run this day if you want if you're wired that way but know that like this is where the science is really at bones and tendons and ligaments and bones are like we are literally I broke my back a year and a half ago not actually part skiing I broke it training over the summer um skateboarding and weightlifting and I was being stupid and um I used stem cells and peptides and a bunch of other kind of physical tools and it took about a year and a half but like you can now I broke my back that used to be a year or not ever coming back from this um and I I came back for you know and I'm now lifting more than I did before my back breaks you know all that stuff I'm totally back you and it took it was very expensive you know and that sort of stuff the good news is with like when I for 10 years ago when you were getting played a PRP it was like a 10 to 20 thousand dollar procedure unless you were in New Mexico uh that's a legal law thing um don't ask or you can ask but it doesn't matter um but uh uh uh now my mom just had it for her shoulder she's in her 80s and her insurance covered it so like cutting edge you know 2015 is now Medicare Medicaid mm-hmm and are there you know you speak about using this to uh fix your back and now that it's advanced the level where you can actually use peptides and other things um but this is what like bodybuilder's abuse right as it's something it's like the it's all the okay so yeah I will tell you before you before you say bodybuilder abuse it uh take my name and type student call out there sympathy for the devil into Google or pick up my book tomorrow then the subtitle of that article is why everything you know about steroids is wrong so so curious so how yeah yeah let me just here's the story uh I'm it's early 2000 or 2001 and um my editor at the LA Weekly calls me up and he says dude Jose can say go just published this book and he said steroids are the wonder drug and tomorrow you got into a story on this this is you're up your alley I was like dude I was like everybody knows I've been a wait left already by that point for about 10 years I was like everybody knows steroids are bad for you and on top of it I fucking hate baseball don't give me this story like I like nothing could be worse for me like this is not my sports these guys are wrong blah blah blah and he said those magic words I'll pay you to do the research okay I'm all in right so I spend three to four months in that world at the front end and like it's old fun house because everything I thought I knew about steroids was wrong like every bit of information that I had been told about steroids um was wrong now that's that said um including by the way like long-term studies of problems in chronic bodybuilder you know what I mean like they were all these when they finally actually went and did the studies they they find a lot less uh of the negative stuff than most people think now I'm not as you all know the success story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network they have incredible podcasts so please go check out the roster but one of my favorite shows is Nudge hosted by Phil Agnew you just have to understand that some of the smallest changes can have the biggest impacts on your life and on Nudge this is what Phil goes through he speaks about evidence back tips to help you kick bad habits get a raise grow a business every single episode is bite sized 20 minutes comes packed with practical advice from some of the most prolific entrepreneurs behavioral scientists in the world and it's the UK's fastest growing business podcast I definitely recommend you go check it out you should listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcast thank you I'm thinking of large organs liver so yeah though most of those think yeah the liver so the liver for example this is great yeah liver is great liver is a great example because it's been so long ago that this and this is not this isn't what our country is about and this isn't my area anymore but liver you have done it on the one thing that I remember so I want to tell just the reason I think it's interesting is because if somebody's trying to have a better life in the back half of their life you know after 50 yeah and by the way thinking about all this time by the way I'm not saying don't get your testosterone tested and and you know improve your testosterone levels that can make a huge difference for some people and there's literally nothing wrong with it what I will tell you is as somebody who spent three years experimenting with testosterone growth hormone and all that side of it is if you're not going to get the effects you think you're going to get you're going to get most of those hormones actually help you recover faster they don't actually do much for strength the things you think you're going they're going to do now if you want to start stacking underloans you know you can get you know you can get to Arnold but my point is the stuff is effective it's just not as effective as a bunch of other stuff right you can play there my problem is like every spends all their time that they spend all their money that they're going looking for the magic pill and the stuff we can do cognitively and physically is a much bigger lever is my point but the liver point is that wasn't actually about the steroids that was about they used to there was an oral coding one of it was one of the steroids they were taking orally and it was they want they had to code it in something to get it to steroids to pass through the stomach so they could actually get into your system and the coding actually was terrible for your liver and that was the problem that was where the liver thing was coming from there are other other other issues and there are I mean you're still your genitalia is going to shrink you're going to develop breasts you know what I mean like those things are going to happen they stop happening the minute you stop taking you know you bodybuilding doses and they're not going to happen if you take low doses at all in fact there's almost no side effects from from the low dose stuff but like I don't find them the mirror I didn't find the mirror I didn't find more energy I didn't find more strength I didn't like all of them and I was like what am I what am I doing here like compared to other other interventions this is a waste of time was was ultimately my my feeling but I will also say I think everybody's very individual with that stuff so this is what I mean with like there's no one size fits all and if you go down this rabbit hole it's a long deep rabbit hole for maybe you're going to get it right maybe you're going to figure out what the exact cocktail is for your body at this particular moment in time but you're missing the easy big levers that are available to all of us I love it okay um this was this was amazing I really appreciate I appreciate you Steven like this was a great great talk we could do more but I'm going to cap this one and then I'm going to do I'm going to do more in the future with you because we only wanted to one it's fine well a lot of topics but very very very isolated like like subject that supplies to a certain group of people but there's so many other like communities that we could talk about the lessons that you've uncovered over your career and we're talking about an aging population but I want to like I would love to talk about athletes academics like executives like decision-making and all these yeah it's got to say yeah you know you know you know how to read you clearly at this point we know how to get done with my people so uh let me get through like the next six months of I'm on I'm on I'm talking about in our country for a living yeah and then I'm more than happy to come on and just talk sort of general people performance and two things one thing why don't I leave everybody with one gift which is we can talk about flow peak performance you may want more flow in your life so free gift for everybody there are six known major blockers of flow um things that like we're all prey to and I got so tired of talking about them that we just built a giant dysdiagnostic so if you go to www.flowblocker.com it's a free diagnostic anybody anybody can take it and we will email your results with a very detailed step-by-step here's your issue and and by the way what I have discovered personally is most of us we've got one big one and then there's like a second one so I would tell you like take it work on the the big thing and then come back like a month later take it again because usually I find that like we've got like this is our primary thing that we're screwing up on and then once we get that fixed there's like a secondary one this sort of like buried under the hood that that is now kicking us in the ass so I found that a lot true in my life also so um but that's if you want more flow in your life if you want to learn more about the flow research collective um flowblocker.com will get you that study at flowresearchcollective.com there's so many free videos you know and training stuff and take your pick good no amazing I appreciate okay where do people go to get in our country website. Yeah so you can get it yeah you can get it anywhere but go to www.narcountrynar gnarcountry umnar short for gnarly right um I don't know if you did we let me give you 36 done where the title comes from because you'll laugh. I was actually gonna ask. Let me ask last question because I forget um so gnar gnar is action sports slang for gnarly short for gnarly well most people don't realize they you know they may have seen fast times at Ridge Von Huy gnarly bra they don't realize that gnar action sports athletes as a general rule despite the crazy wild colorful slang are very very literal they're really literal people at gnar gnarly or gnar means a very specific thing it means high in perceived risk and high in actual risk so gnar country is any territory landscape or terrain so gnar country is both a really great description of our later years high in perceived risk high in actual risk and as it turns out what should be clear from this discussion a really killer description of the gritty mindset you need to thrive during those later years so it's actually it's actually a very specific thing so gnarcountry.com we have I think it's $7,150 with a free and very amazing peak performance training bonuses um you got if you pre-order the book you you help me out help me make the best of my lesson as a way of saying thank you um there's really an amazing suite of training tools there for everybody yeah I was checking it out before before we hopped on and it's it's uh significant right is I always like to say that like I hate marketing really makes my skin crawl so I I combat it by like I just want to tell you about the thing that I'm trying to pimp and then I want to make it really then I want to make it make it really easy like I want to do good things for you along the way and tell you about those and then get out of the way like yeah I've done my part that is the best marketing that's right I can't hurt some marketing I'm just wired I'm allergic to it if I walk in a clothing store a sporting goods store and somebody's salesperson is in my face can I help you I turn around and leave I literally like no no you can't freaking help me you can leave me alone you could go away and not sell me anything I'm an old school punk rocker we hate being sold I agree I 100% agree um what what uh what socials do you want to drop uh drop well uh Instagram is a ton of fun for me um and uh and we drop a lot of great peak performance stuff on Instagram um so that's uh that's probably the best place to follow me and Stephen Kotler.com is also the place to get me and okay so let me give you the proper uh Instagram is at Stephen Kotler um okay perfect as well I just had to double check too yeah because there's actually yeah by the way that was me too and then Instagram decided I wasn't a real person and I couldn't like it didn't there was nothing I could do I called them my staff went in there we're like here's his birth certificate here's his driver's license here's all the books he wrote like this is really him and yeah so if if anybody out there is listening it knows how to get to Instagram we'd like to encourage those two together because I'm actually really me on both those we don't know what to do I'm feeling a little schizophrenic of my social media presence you have for real we might we might call that 2023 or 2022 that might that might just be life in 2022 but you know um okay and then uh last question I ask everyone and next time you come on I'll ask you the same thing um so you've had an incredible career um obviously written many books um I mean you've been successful in a significant amount of different things I'm not gonna itemize your entire resume here but the point is after all of this at this age in your life what does success mean to you that's interesting what does success mean to me um that's I don't hmm what success really means to me is that um I am living with passion and purpose and flow and you know I like I am doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing it and nothing else I don't think of like everything else this is the difference between I would say how do you know a real creative versus you know some of you sort of writing a book for for other reasons and there are like lots of reasons to write a book but like how do you tell apart and creatives are always about the next creative I'm about the creativity I'm about like I want to be writing the book so like now that the book is coming out I like whatever happens to an arc like I'll show up I'll talk to you about it I'm excited about it and I'll do the work but what happens in the world is none of my business that doesn't involve me I'm about the creative project I'm about that so like my success is that I'm moving from like really interesting and moving and powerful project one after another I like I like the fact I you know I said really really hard standards for achievement because I don't think you know if you if you're not aiming to be best in the world at something what do you do it like I don't if I'm gonna do something I want to be the best in the world at it so I may never get there I always tell people I want to be the greatest writer in the history of the universe now I don't think that's actually a thing but it doesn't change the fact that I want to be the greatest writer in the history of the universe right like if there's a secret or galactic award for that I'd like it I got it that's perfect that's perfect um okay so that's how that's how I close them out so yeah I don't know I'm gonna think about it but I have to say that I've been on like every time I'm on with Mike Jervé he asked me what I think Mastery is and Mastery I've gotten a very good definite like I the first time he asked me I loved it like I just did with you and now this thing is gonna eat at me like what do I actually mean by six it's gonna eat at me you're gonna get like a book is gonna come out of it now it's a good it's gonna change but like it's so next time you ask me I'll have a better answer