EPISODE #1026: Challenging Outdated Beliefs About Aging – Steven Kotler

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today's show is all about. Well, it's all about Steven Kotler, who's a friend and a fellow author and actually a Chihuahua rancher in one of his lives. But he's well known for writing about flow states, brain states, extreme athletics, and all sorts of other just really interesting, well crafted stories. And his new book is called Gnar Growing Old, Staying Rad. And Stephen and I have been friends for what, 10 years now?

Yeah, I think that's about right. Yep.

And at the very. Actually at the second biohacking conference, when I was starting this. This movement, they brought some giant toys, including a upside down swing that catapulted someone through the air onto a vendor's table. True story.

And not before hitting a woman in the head, then on the vendor's table.

Okay, that. That's a fair point. It was one of those things like. Like a strike and bowling where you get all of the pins at the same time.

It's true.

And the good news is, is that no. No one was injured, which is why we can joke about it. Everyone was. Okay, so we, we go way back. I've made him scream at 2 in the morning in hotel rooms with the electrical stimulation. And story. What I. The reason I wanted Stephen on here is in addition, just being an interesting, fun human to talk to. Is that his new book? And guys, if you haven't read one of Stephen's books, like, he's a great freaking writer. Like, the storyline in these, it. It's like you were even nominated, I think, for a Pulitzer for one of them, right?

Two. Two. Pulitzer. Only.

Only two. But did you win?

No, I haven't won. So. Yeah, I know. Loser.

So, yeah, these are, these are works, but this episode is about testing your limits and challenging yourself as you age. And as you guys know, part of biohacking is longevity, radical longevity. And part of it is cognitive performance and doing things you're not supposed to be able to do when you're 16 or 25. And it turns out if you do those right, you probably won't age as much anyway. One of the things that happens as normal humans age is they start putting in all these limitations and challenging beliefs and things like that. And some of that's hardwired. Doesn't mean you can't hack it, but it's hardwired. And some of it's really more software based. So Stephen's book is literally about that. It's what happens in your brain in the second half of your life. And by the way, fuck you, that's the second 3/4 of my life because I. I may have turned 27.7% recently, but.

But yeah, Peter, my good friend Peter D. Man, is of course, does the exact same thing and feels the exact same way as it was right here as well. Yeah. And by the way, by the way, I. All I have to say is, you know, the only point I make about all that side of this equation is most of us are going to be old, whatever the hell that means. Right. For a lot longer than our ancestors and probably a lot longer than we suspect. Like is that, you know, that we can all agree on. So.

Okay, we totally agree on that. And bottom line is, if you want to call it second half, second, whatever things do change over time, you can control how they change to a way greater extent than most people believe. But we do know things about synaptic pruning and all. And you go through in the book and you do the things you write about and we talk or you talk in the book and we are going to talk about some outdated beliefs about aging that kind of got started a long time ago and we just never fixed them.

You know what I call the traditional theory about aging, let's start here, is what I call the long slow rot theory. Right? It's the idea that our mental and physical skills decline over time and there's nothing we can do to stop this slide. And it actually starts with Freud. 19. I want to say it's 1903. It could be 1908. Freud is about to be 50 years old. He's terrified of getting older. And he writes that, don't even try psychotherapy with anybody over the age of 50. They can't learn anything anymore. You're wasting your time. So literally, and he's not even 50 yet. And then what's hysterical about it is Freud goes on to write three or four of his most famous works in his 60s, right? So, like, it's not even true for Freud, but that statement has remained with us. If you want to have the craziest experience you can have, go back to Harry Truman's founding statement in 1950 for the Social Security Administration. They had to send out a document basically to ever be invited to the meeting. And the document basically says, by the way, old people. Turns out our people too, they have all the same feelings and desires that you do. It's. It's a crazy document. And you know, this persists into the 90s, which is the 1990s, which is when it starts to wobble and what we have since learned has replaced it. And this is almost true across the boards. There are, there are obviously things that change as we age, but all the stuff we used to think declined over time. And you alluded to this, we now know it's all use it or lose it skills. And if you never stop training these skills, we can hold onto them and even actually expand them much later in life than anybody thought possible.

I, I think I just heard you say old people are lazy. Is that what you just said, Stephen?

I want to say that I think most people are dead before they're dead. That's, that's, that's, that's how I put it.

It's not laziness. It, like you said, you stopped using it and why you did that. Well, hey, that's my next book topic. Said mother Nature's wired you to do that. Doesn't mean you can't change it. But the idea of, of not doing things you don't have to do, that's kind of built in as conservation of energy. And so there's no moral problem with that. And if you allow that to run things, just like you allow your hunger to make you eat cheeseburgers all the time. And although actually cheeseburgers are probably better than Pop Tarts, come to think of it. So if you allow your hunger to make you eat vegan burgers all the time, that's just true junk food. And if, you know, you stay up all night, you never sleep, and you just don't take care of yourself because you're just being lazy about self care, then you probably are going to be lazy when you're older. But if you do a little bit of self care ahead of time and you keep pushing yourself and build those habits that you talk about, you might be dangerous. And the way you open up the book is awesome. It's. To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art. I make danger coffee. Okay. I'm all about being dangerous. Who knows what I might do? I can do whatever I want. And you might not like it, but I have the power. And I love that. That quote. Why did you pick that quote by Charles Bukowski?

Well, the book, the book is a experiment in peak performance aging. Right. The idea underneath the book is as you sort of pointed at the old idea, right. Long slow rot theory is can't teach an old dog new tricks. And I was doing a ton of work in flow science Right. My core field in network neuroscience, which, you know, neural dynamics directly, that's how we approach flow anyways, and embodied cognition. And I'm learning and learning and this is 20 years of work and all of it says, hey, wait a minute. If you apply these ideas, you should be able to like, really learn difficult, physical, challenging activities very late in life. And so I decided to try to teach myself how to park, ski, park. Skiing is the discipline in skiing that involves jumps, doing tricks off jumps and on rails and boxes and wall rides. Very acrobatic, it's very dangerous. And the general thinking is you haven't Learned it by 35, don't bother, right? It's very, very difficult. Over 40 or 50, it becomes downright impossible. And so of course, I tried to get good in my 50s, but it's a. Action sports are about creative self expression. On the mountain, it's, you know, most absent sport athletes, especially in the generation that I came up with, thought of themselves as artists as much as they thought of themselves as athletes. And for sure, my approach to skiing has always been right. And skiers use the word steezy. It's a blend of stylish and easy. It's the ultimate right. In action sports, you want to be steezy, you want to be really, really stylish, but don't look like you're expending a whole lot of effort doing. And you know, to do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art, as Bukowski said. I think in his case he was talking about drinking bourbon, but he did it with a lot of style.

There's a corollary to the early days of computer hacking. So back in the 90s, when you were figuring all this stuff out, I was a cyberpunk, you know, mirrored shades, leather jacket, and breaking into systems that you're not supposed to break into. But the idea of making it look easy and, you know, taking over someone else's system in a way that's creative and I'm just going to say stylish. According to the hacker ethos, it's the same thing. It's this idea that you did it with beauty. Like an Olympic diver going into the water with no splash. Like, how did that happen? It's that effortlessness. I want aging to look like that for me and for everyone, to be perfectly honest. And you're working on that too. Although I have to ask you this. I wasn't planning on doing it here in the interview, but we're friends, okay. I talked about you screaming at 2am in a hotel room. Remember that? Okay, so what happened is you screwed up your shoulder doing some sort of ridiculous skiing into a tree or something. I don't remember what caused the injury, but it was hurting for nine months, Right?

I think it was a rotator cuff.

It was. So. So I took my crazy Russian prototype electrical stimulation device and I slapped it on there, and I had you do the motion while I was putting you under an insane load, way more than your body would ever think was. Was rational and showed your body it could do the movement. And magically it stopped hurting. And the next morning, like, oh, my God, I have full range of motion. Like, what happened? But you did scream, because that was the body going, I'm not going to do it. And you saying, actually, you are going to do it. And. And it was fixed. But you had pain for nine months because you do crazy stuff, Stephen. Like. Like, I mean, I don't care if you're 20 or if you're 50 doing your triple flips on skis, getting traumatic brain injuries.

It's a fair point. Yeah, but you. Let's let me back up and talk about one thing, and then I'm going to answer that question. We took this idea, you know, and I use this sort of methodology to try to teach myself how to parts me. I literally said. I said, if it takes five years. And we could talk about why I was doing that. It actually, all that. A lot of that grew out of a conversation I had with me. I should be high. And the last conversation I ever had with him before he passed away, but I was like, I was gonna learn. It doesn't care how long it took. And I created a list of 20 tricks, and I figured if it took me five years, whatever great, fantastic I did in a season, which shocked me. Now my ski partner, who is 20 years younger and a former actual sponsored athlete who had had a terrible injury and came back to the sport at the same time I started to learn it, he was using the same methodology. He got incredibly far. That was cool. But as you know, that's like the world's smallest pilot study, right? There's two people. But this past winter, we took the same methodology. We took 17 older adults, ages 30 to 68, and in four sessions on the mountain, again taught them how to park ski. The goal wasn't actually teach them how to do tricks. We broke. We break park skiing into the eight foundational motions. And the goal was to get them to be able to creatively interpret terrain features as a faster path into flow the flow takes care of the progression and the trips, trip and all that. Right. And so it's like a one inch at a time. Go slow to go fast. Just teaching people how to creatively interpret the mountain. Because creativity, that pattern recognition is a flow trigger. And that's, that's what I did. That was the goal. And if you actually go to the webpage for the book, which is www.narcountry.com, you'll see there's a tab that says Peak performance Aging experiment. You can click it and watch the video. We made a huge video about the experiment. You can read the white paper. So while you are right and I am crazy and I do am more than willing to hurt myself in the name of research and like, you're totally right. Yeah, that's what I was gonna say is that's both of us. That is both of us. We like, you know. But I always say, like, well, first rule for Stephen is if it works for me, it's probably not gonna work for you. Right. I come. The reason I'm uninterested in psychology has always been it's squishy, it's subjective. And what works for you is not going to work for me because of a lot of reasons how personality gets set up, connections to genetics and early childhood experience. But if you can get to the level of neurobiology, evolution shapes that is shared by all humans and that will work for everybody. So that was the approach we took here and so far. And we obviously, we then took it out of action sports and ran like 500 subjects through the protocol and got really big performance improvements in their lives as well in, you know, the latter half of their lives. So we've got a lot of confidence that, that it works outside of me. But yeah, I am willing to do. I, I am willing to dang myself up a little bit in the name of research.

Got it. And I, I don't know that's the best anti aging path because what often happens with just normal humans who aren't wired the way you and me are is that, you know, you do something, you, you get an injury and it stops you from exercising. And then you get frail hips and you get sarcopenia because it's, it's hard to heal them. And there's times you can push through it and there's times when it's actually just an injury. And I, I kind of wish when I was younger and, and going really hard on stuff, even though I was obese and unhealthy, I, I don't I, I don't think the three knee surgeries I had before I was 23 have served me well as I aged.

I. But you. Okay, so, but you know, a couple of things. One, of course they have not served you well. Right. Like I've broken 87 bones. Like I can tell you what the weather is going to be, you know, three days out. You know what I mean?

Exactly.

That said, and you know this too, and at the end of the book, I and I start experimenting with like third generation regenerative medicine. What, what work, what we have around a day. And while I think there are ridiculously silly claims being made around stem cells and things like that, if you're dealing with tissue injuries, soft tissue, if you're dealing with muscles, tendons and even some bone stuff, no, regenerative medicine has actually finally grown up. Like it's, it's sort of, it's, it works finally. Like I've been working with it and playing with it and researching it and studying and writing about it since really the night late 90s. And it wasn't, it was a joke then. And it was a joke even into like around 2015. It started to get a little bit better. And you know, in the past decade you're looking at like real actual legitimate advancements. And the stuff I play with in the book isn't even, you know, and you know this too, it's not even the cutting edge as like I was writing about the stuff in the book, a friend of mine blows out her acl. They take stem cells out of her hip, spin them like they're going to PRP the stem cells and right. And shoot it back and regrow her ACL in five months and she's skiing again. And this is a top level skier. So top athletes used to be a year, like two years ago, three years ago, you're obj playing football. It's a year and a half recovery from that same problem. And now she's back skiing at a like top level after five months. That's crazy, crazy progress. And as you know, this stuff is starting to get democratized so cost is coming down. You're, you know, in America. Like my mom just had PRP and her insurance covered it. Now PRP is not cutting edge. It's like where the field was five, six years ago, but, or eight years ago, but it works and her insurance is now covering it. Right. So like that's, that's getting interesting on that front. But the point I want to make on all this, because you've Touched on it a couple times, and I want to just go back and hit it because it's certainly. I certainly stumbled it on. You can rock till you drop pretty much. But one of the clearest things that we see is peak performance. Aging starts young. I mean, you. If you can, right? You can make interventions in your 60s and 70s and 80s, and they're going to work and you're going to get results. But. But in our research, we found stuff. There's dietary stuff that they think starts to matter in your 20s and certainly from an adult development. So one of the things this is covered in the book, and I'm just going to say it now because I know you were going to go there, but I'm going to spare you the pain.

Do it.

So Gene cone, who is one of the pioneers of peak performance aging, has sort of invented the field of geriatric psychiatry, which wasn't a field until he came along, literally, because we. We didn't think old people, like, were psychologically treatable, right? Like Freud said. No. And it took till 1973. When Gene Kong comes along, he's the first guy to say, hey, wait a minute, maybe this isn't true. Let's run some experiments and see. Anyways, he discovers that rather than, like, an inevitable cognitive decline because of a bunch of different neurobiological changes, if we get it right, and we're going to come back to what that is, because that was the point I was going to make. In our 50s, we gain access to, like, whole new thinking styles, right? New levels, really radical new levels of intelligence, new levels of creativity, like, and really deep, divergent thinking. The hardest parts of creativity get massively increased in our 50s. And then you get empathy and wisdom. And wisdom. Wisdom is the coolest trait in the world because if you want to stave off cognitive decline, fight off Alzheimer's and dementia, you need lifelong expertise and you need lifelong wisdom. Because they're right. They're big networks in the brain, and they're impervious to cognitive decline. Basically, like diseases like Alzheimer's, dementia. They tend to target individual areas. And if you've got these very dispersed neural nets holding your information, a lot more protected. But what does it mean to get it right? So adult development tells us that if you actually want those superpowers in your 50s, by 30, you have to solve the psychological puzzle of identity. You got to figure out who the hell you are in the world by 30, and by 40, it's match fit, right? If you can't, if there's not A match between who you are, your values, your beliefs, and how you make a living or spend the bulk of your time. Right? If you're not living with passion, purpose and flow, you got massive problems. And 50s. This is the weird one. This came out of the Harvard Adult development study, the 100 years to the adult Development. They were the first to notice it in the 50s. You have to forgive those who have done you wrong. Self forgiveness, you gotta like sit down other. Because otherwise the wisdom, the empathy, which is about seeing things from other people's perspectives and all that other stuff. If you can't forgive yourself and forgive other people, that's gonna end up blocked. And then in your fifth, the thing.

Is you can do that in your 20s. Like that's my whole 40 years of Zen thing is about forgiveness. And it's just, it's a teachable skill I'm working to get in High School.

40 years is then you, I mean, you don't even go with that loving kindness meditation, right? Richie Davidson Madison has been looking at this for 30 years. We have so much data on compassion meditation. And I don't know if you know this, this is really cool. They tested focused meditation against loving kindness meditation for telomere attrition. And it turns out focus meditation won't protect your telomeres at all. But loving kindness meditation actually prevents telomere attrition, telomere decline for some reason that nobody, nobody can figure out the neuro of this quite yet. But it's really interesting.

It is really interesting. I see all kinds of markers improve when people learn it. I just found it was a lot easier to go all the way in with loving kindness when I have a lie detector telling me when I'm not doing it right now. I agree, you can do loving kindness all by yourself. I'm just saying don't wait.

That's for damn sure.

I work with 20 year olds all the time, or say 20 to 30s, not just in neurofeedback, just in chatting and talking and sharing stuff. When they get it, it's easier because skill acquisition is kind of easy in your 20s. You can still learn languages. And if you teach people a provable skill and it's like a handstand, but you're just doing it with your nervous system, man. The upgrading of the future comes from getting high school students and college students to get that loving kindness in. Because in all this shit that we go through in our 20s and 30s, you can like a third, if you.

Can put down a lot of the. There's A lot there. I talk about this a lot in the book. There's a lot of. There's a lot of shame along the way. That is. That is a tricky one. Really, really insidious in terms of what it does to human development and growth and emotional regulation and a whole bunch of stuff like that. So it is.

And telomeres and dendrites and cortisol and all the other.

Yeah. And you can set up patterns of inflammation in your 20s that are really problematic in your 50s and 60s because most of aging comes down to inflammation. I lost my ability to speak. There's language there for half a second. But you get what I was trying to say.

It was the pot. So speaking of that, you're still as big a fan of cannabis as you were last year.

I talk about cannabis in the book. It's a. It's. It's a very. It's a very. So. And it's a very potent pain reliever and good for inflammation. Recently I published a paper in neuroscience and Bad behavior reviews with. With three other neuroscientists on the flow state onset. What happens in the brain during the first. As we move into flow. And it's the first paper that has a full, detailed look at the endocannabinoid system and the role it plays in flow. So we are getting closer and closer and closer to sort of nudging at the relationship between flow and marijuana, though there's still a ton of work left to get actual, real answers.

There is. And also, Daniel Amen's got some pretty interesting looks at blood flow in the brain on cannabis that are pretty disturbing. So I think it's the right strain and the right delivery mechanism for the right biology at the right time to create the right state that it's a precise targeting thing. And like you said, we don't have all the science, but it certainly does some good stuff.

I want to jump back to something you said earlier, because you were right on. On something. And I wanted to layer in a detail. So one we were talking. You started talking about mindset and aging, which is, you know, one of the topics that's in the book. And the work on mindset and aging is, you know, is stunning. Right. Ellen Langer at Harvard was the first person sort of through that door. But we now there' so many studies that show this. But, for example, the correlation between longevity and mindset is wild. The Ohio Longitudinal Study of Retirement and Aging, which is the most thorough look at mindset. It's 20 years, couple thousand people, proper mindset towards aging, which is literally, I believe the second half of my life is filled with interesting possibilities and I'm excited about it. That's the proper mindset, adds an extra seven and a half years to your life. So that's stunning. The other thing I want to say on this one, because it sort of dovetails in with the. Some of the peak performance aging starts youngest and this stuff. So that you were talking about when we're younger, right, we all know that. That neurochemicals, that was especially the pleasure chemicals, the reward chemicals are addictive, super addictive, right? And when we're younger, it's predominantly. We're run by the seeking system and the play system. Those are the biggest drivers. And that's predominantly dopamine and norepinephrine with a little bit of endorphins. Once we get to. And this is where I think the mindset of old, quote unquote, actually starts. Once you start to get like, you have the job you want in your. Let you go into your 30s or you find the partner you want, or you start to have a family and kids, the neurochemicals you have, we switch our addictions, right? We go from dopamine and norepinephrine, the seeking system, to serotonin, oxytocin, and really endorphins. These are all safety and security. These are about protecting what you have, not going out and getting more. Right. Those serotonin is the common chemical. I'm happy with what. With what I have. I'm satisfied. And if you want to really thrive in the remainder of your days, however many days there are, and according to Dave, there are a lot of days you have to reboot the seeking system and the play system.

Oh, how do you do that?

Literally, you literally. I mean, curiosity, passion, purpose, all the things that reproduce dub. And you still want all the other stuff, right? Pre performance aging sort of demands all of your reward neurochemistry sort of working together. You also have to, like, get a grip on the reward neurochemistry. You can't let it be quite as addictive as it was in your youth a little bit. So there's a little. What does that mean? I think it means more emotional regulation is what it means. I'll give you. I'll give you a classic example, My own mistake in my nar country adventure, which is I started making so much progress, right? I came to Parski in my 50s. I thought it was. I thought it was a long shot at best. And the thing that we designed worked so well. The progress itself was really addictive. I rebooted that sort of seeking desire in a difficult physical activity where I had a little bit of a fixed mindset around and shifted it so they had a growth mindset. The progress is really addictive. I wasn't mentally prepared for it, and the addictive progress kept me. I injured myself a little bit on this adventure, but that was. It was because I wasn't taking enough recovery days. Like, I knew what I should be doing, but, like, I rebooted the seeking system. It was so pleasurable. I was, you know, I couldn't. I couldn't. I wasn't even paying attention. So that's what I mean. Like, there's a little bit of emotional regulation that. That matters because, you know, when you're young and you skip recovery days, it's one thing, but it's. If you're trying to do this kind of stuff, you know, over 50, when it's a little harder to recover, takes a little bit longer, then you have to be cautious around that. That's what I mean.

How does one really go about doing that? So I. I don't understand the problem. I've always had, I don't know, fifth grade curiosity about everything, which gets me into all sorts of trouble, but also makes me creative. Like, it. It's a personality attribute or something. But clearly, based on your research and based on what I see, people do lose their curiosity and they lose their zest for life. And I feel like a lot of times we'll just give them some thyroid and some testosterone and magically it comes back. Well, or address dopamine with aldepranil and it comes back. But is there something else going on in there?

You are not right. You are not wrong. There is. There's neurochemical decline over time. And it turns out there's actually a good use for ssri. Right. Like, they're terrible for depression. Right. Because they're blunt instruments and they globally raise serotonin levels. And that's not how depression really works in the brain. But serotonin levels do drop over time. So it turns out that low dose SSRIs in people over 75 actually has a huge impact for exactly the same reasons. You're talking about Daniel Levitin. Daniel Levitin writes a lot about this. The neuroscientist in his book Successful Aging. He talks a lot about that.

Yep. In fact, my favorite one, L. Depranil. It's not even ssri. It's an MAO inhibitor, but it increases dopamine sensitivity. And you use low doses of that. It's a classical anti aging hack.

What? L. Deprevil, I've never even heard of it.

L. Depranil or Selegiline is another name for it. But you use, even when you're younger, you can use one or two drops of it. And your dopamine systems just wake up and as you age, you add one more drop for every 10 years that you take every day. And as long as you're not doing DMT or something, because it'll inhibit that. It is a massively potent brain anti aging and performance enhancing substance that just gets forgotten about because things get trendy. So we're all about the NAD right now. But honestly, L. Dopanil is cheaper. It works on an entirely different system. But for the kind of stuff we're talking about, it's an antidepressant that you take more of as you age, that keeps dopamine sparkly.

Sparkly, right.

And that alone would address what you're talking about.

I mean, by the way, the. You don't even have like. So Gene Cohn is the one who started figuring this out. He figured out that in our 50s there's another gateway to adult development, which is creativity. So while we get creativity and intelligence, all these things over 50 because of neurobiological changes to really gain all the access to it, that's the hack in your 50s. If, and, and the point you. I'm wired like you. You know that like we're, I'm insanely curious, it doesn't go away.

And childish, immature sense of humor. I mean, we're soul brothers.

All those things. Very attractive, Very, very true. And create. You want creativity. I mean, that's what you said. Like, how do you reboot it? Like really start training up creativity in your 50s. And usually that's about, you know, I always tell people the easiest way to train creativity is to stop buying your culture. You can't buy culture anyways. You go to a restaurant, I love this with foodies. They go to a restaurant, they think they're having a cultural experience. And I'm like, the only person who's having a cultural experience are the people in the kitchen who are cooking the food. They're having a cultural experience. You, on the other hand, on the outside, are buying your culture. Stop buying your culture. Start creating your own culture. That's what nurtures this in a really, in a really deep way.

This is from the Upgrade collective. Deborah. Thank you. But I'm just going to read it directly because it's that good? What else can we do to age well besides smoke weed, jump off mountains and forgive people? She just, she summed up your life's work in that question.

Reliable access to flow, okay, Is, you know, certainly matters over time, it. So let's, let's just go back to the, the user to lose it skills, right? So it's one. On the physical side, you. And you have to train. You can preserve significant amounts of strength, stamina, flexibility, agility, balance, long into life. But those are five different categories, and they roughly need, they all sort of need to be trained simultaneously. You can put them together into certain activities, but you can't skimp on any of those. And with things like balance and agility, you have to, you have to be smart about it. Because as we age, we have prime mover muscles are big, big thick muscles, and we have stabilizer muscles. And what happens is the prime movers, we, whenever we have bodily injuries or whatever, when we're healing around that stuff, right? You break your left foot, ankle, and as you're healing, your right leg gets a little stronger. Your left leg learns to compensate for the injury. And that doesn't tend to get fixed over time. It tends to magnify. And as a result, a lot of our prime movers take over and our stabilizers stop doing work. This is one of the reasons that falls increase 40, 50, 60%, you know, over 50. It's this issue and it's just about knowing how to train and being able to train, you know, all of those things at once. So, um, that's what has to happen on, on the physical side, cognitive performance, you know, as, as we said at the beginning, lifelong learning is, is foundational to stave off cognitive decline. If for no other reason than expertise and wisdom are both like the, the two things that are actually neuroprotective against cognitive decline. And those are the skill sets you're. You're aiming for. So then we talked about all the gateways of adult development that you sort of need to pass through. And then, you know, everybody's. We know this, right? And we. There are like, there are, you know, really basic lifestyle factors, right? Older adults who engage in challenging social and creative activities that produce feelings of mastery and control are the ones who thrive the most. And mastering control are really actually key both of those feelings, those emotions. There's a lot of neuroimmunology work that show they both increase T cells and killer T's or natural killer cells, right? So, and this is one of the reasons flow matters. Over time Flow is, from a scientific perspective, one of the things that flow does. We now believe it's the evolutionary signal of mastery. I. It's the brain's way of saying, hey, you've mastered this thing, you've learned it. Because knowing when you're good at skills is important from an evolutionary perspective. So one, you get that feeling of mastery directly from flow. And one of the core characteristics of flow is it produces a sense of control. And these are usually important. I mean, even Ellen Langer, who I mentioned earlier, the queen of mindset, her very first famous study on perceived control back in the 70s, right? This is one of those famous. This is the, this is the study that blew, that changed everything we thought about aging. It was. She took a group of, that she was hired to make life better for people in a retirement home. She took a group of 16 folks, divided them into two groups that both got the same interventions. They both got plants in their room, more movie time and more social time, right? And the difference was one group, they had to take care of their plants. They got to choose what movies they were going to watch and they got to choose when they were going to have more social time. The other group, the nurses, took care of their plants and they got more movies, but they picked the group movie and they got more social time. But everybody, it was a Tuesday at four and a year and a half later, the group that had perceived control because they didn't have a whole lot more control over their life, they just had this increase in perceived control. Every single health metric you could possibly imagine was through the roof. But the craziest one was they were twice as likely to be alive. That's the, that was the biggest difference.

I truly think that's why we still have voting receive control because it, it gives people the perception of having control, which makes them happier and longer lived. Even though, let's face it, you have absolutely no control over whatever crackhead is running the White House right now or at any time in, in the past or the history. You actually have no control. But the perception that you have control probably does something neurobiologically that's valuable for humans, which is why we keep.

This is very brave new world. This is very brave new world. We're going to give them SOMA and. But you're not wrong, but you are certainly not wrong about that. And certainly for health and longevity, perceived control really matters. And control really matters and flow because it, the feeling control is built into it. This is one of the reasons flow matters so much as we Age and I like a lot of people, Mihacs at Mihaly, the Godfather, Flow Psychology. He really spent the bulk of his career focusing on questions of adult development and flow. That's in fact the last paper he published before he died was on. Did flow proneness change over time? What changes? And you know, this is a. This is a moving target variable. If you look at the data, it's only when bodies really start to break down and you can no longer kind of do the same thing to get into flow, that it starts to taper off a little bit. So that changes obviously, like you go back 20 years ago, that was in people's 70s because that was when we tailed off. And now if you look at it, it's late 80s. So like it keeps getting pushed out as we live longer and as we remain in health and vitality longer. So it doesn't seem to drop off at all. And Csikszentmihalyi argued in two or three of his books that flow is the actual engine of adult development, which I tend to agree with.

That's a big statement.

Well, this is what you. This is how you need to think about it. When we. So flow states have triggers. The most famous the challenge skills balance. Right. We get into the flow when we're through focus, and we pay the most attention to the focus, to the task at hand, when the challenge slightly exceeds our skill set. Right. So you want to stretch but not snap. When you're doing that, you're using your skills to the utmost. So when you get into flow, this is why flow amplifies. You're getting learning, you're getting growth, you're coming out the other end, you're a more complex and adaptable person. And flow also automatically expands perspective and empathy. So wisdom. So a lot and. Right. So a lot of the traits we associate with adult development are automatically expanded. I mean, this is. It happens because of, you know, how empathy and wisdom. A lot of that is in the temporal parietal junction and which gets really active and flow. And this is why we see things from other people's perspectives and why we become one with everything in extreme macro flow states. It's the same mechanism. Right. But all that happens in flow. I don't with chicks at my high statement. I, I tend to agree with him. I want to study it. We've been trying to figure out can we run better experiments and things like that. He came at it from a psychological standpoint and the psychology definitely holds up. Does it hold up neurobiologically? Is an open question and I'd like to do more work on that. And we're thinking about it at the collective right now.

I'd like to see the results of that as well. And all right, let's say that you're 90, smoke weed, jump off mountains. What does a 90 year old do for flow? Like, there are slowing of brain cells in most people. So like, what's the safe way to do this?

Yeah, no, I mean, so let me tell you where this all started. This, I've been studying this stuff and you know, I mean, as you know, I do my work with Chihuahua is we do a hospice care dog sanctuary and we've been massively successful at extending the lives of dogs. So one of the first things I started to realize when, when the quote unquote lifestyle factors caught my attention, it wasn't like I thought the Blue Zone research was particularly spectacular. It was that when I looked at the Blue Zone research and I looked at all the other lifestyle stuff, I realized we had done very similar things for the dogs. And we were taking dogs with late stage heart disease and cancer and getting three to five more healthy active years based on sort of lifestyle interventions and no real extreme medical interventions. Because when you have the volume of animals that we work with, you can't. There was no way to afford those kinds of medical interventions. Especially when we were starting out, we were getting crazy results that. Right. It started with, holy shit, what's going on with our dogs? And is this even possible in humans? And I started looking in humans and I went, oh, wow, they've all. They've discovered very, very similar things. That said right before COVID it was the last com. So Mike passed away in October of 2021. And. But I talked to him in, I want to say July of 2020. And I called him up to ask him a funny question. I called him up because they had translated One, he had had a stroke and I wanted to make sure he was okay. And two, they had translated a bunch of his work early interviews out of Italian and into English. And I was reading them and there was all this stuff about early Yosemite. I knew he was a rock climber and a mountaineer and sort of an outdoor athlete. But like there was, he was quoting like naming like hardcore Yosemite Valley rock climber names that I was like, oh, he would only know these people if he was really, really serious. So I called them up and I was sort of kidding him and I said, Mike, you know, I know in your TED Talk you talk about you know, stumbling upon flow in a concentration camp during World War II. And then your original work was on artists, but in between, you were a very serious rock climber. And tell me the truth. Were you getting into deep flow states out in the mountains and just didn't know how to talk about it with academics, so you started writing about it with artists? And there's this huge pause. Like, enormous. Like 30 seconds go by. A minute goes by, and I'm. Minute and a half. And I'm thinking to myself, holy shit. I've offended, like, you know, this man who's alleged to me, holy crap, I've totally offended him. Wow. And suddenly he says, stephen, you gotta be careful. Oh. And at this point, I think to myself, holy. Is he, like, lost the plot? What's he talking about? I gotta be careful. Like, wow. And I'm like, well, Mike, what should I be careful about? He said, well, Stephen, you do something your entire life for flow, and then you get to be my age and forget about climbing mountains. Some days I can barely get out of bed. You need a backup plan. You gotta be careful. There you go. So. So. Right. I. My primary flow activity is skin. It's always been my primary flow activity. Up till before Nar Country, I was a big mountain.

Yeah.

The only way I got into flow was charging down really big, gnarly, scary lines. And I knew if that was my main source of flow as I aged to something, I was absolutely right. I'm screwed. Why did I start park skiing? That seems totally crazy, but I figured if I could get to intermediate, it was going to be dangerous going zero to intermediate. But at intermediate, you can sort of check your progression. There's much less randomness. And I would have all these millions of ways to creatively interpret the mountain. I wouldn't have to use risk as a flow trigger. I could use creativity and creative and embodied movements and all these other things. So I would have a million more entrances into flow over time. That was the entire narcountry adventure. That was exactly where the only human.

Being is, like, you know, this bombing down these dangerous runs, it might be a problem. I'll just learn park skiing to be less risky. But like that. That's a uniquely Stephen Kotler thing to do for the rest of us.

But you see the logic.

I do see your logic. But for the rest of us mere mortals, might I. Might I suggest sex as a way to get into flow that you can do as you age, that you're less likely to be injured even if you're very like park sex maybe. I don't know what, what you're into.

But by the way, I've also, I'm, I'm also teaching myself how to play piano.

Okay, that's a good flow. Or chess probably too, right, Parks?

I haven't gone back to chess. But I will tell you what I am doing, what I have been doing. I got so frustrated. There's gaps in my math and as you know, in neuroscience you can't really have gaps in your math. I got so frustrated, I've gone all the way back. I started with Algebra 1 and I'm literally like working my way all the way through because I was sick of it. I was like, you know what, first of all, this is good for my brain as I age. And second of all, I'm annoyed that there's something here I don't understand and I don't know and I was just tired of it. So test. Maybe will be the next decade. But these days it's been calculus.

So you're doing calculus for flow. You're, you're like the weirdest jock nerd combination that's ever been made. You realize that, right?

Well, I'm an artsy jock nerd.

Okay, that, that's a fair point. So a jock nerd with a ponytail. I, I take it back.

You're the one with the ponytail.

I, I, I, I own it. Although I'm probably not a jock. I just like to do the minimum necessary to look and feel like a jock without having to have the big ego. Now I'll be straightforward. I like going for hikes in the mountains. I like beauty. I like certain physical activities. But I don't want to go to the gym and practice dribbling. Soccer right now, it's just not very high in my list of how I could spend my time. So if I can acquire those skills or the physical results of those skills in 1% of the time, I'm going to do that. And I'll spend the rest of time going into flow state in other ways that serve me.

But I want the world. Here's the thing, I want to. All that is true. All of that is right. Here's the point I make at the very end of the book, which is that action sports are actually anti aging medicines in very specific ways. One is action sports, and I'm not telling people, learn to park ski. There's a billion action sports to choose from, but they all demand strength, stamina, flexibility, agility and balance. You get all the user loser skills in one activity. You Also, if you want to protect cognitive function, what do you want? You want neurogenesis? Do you want to birth new neurons and create new neural networks? That's how you're going to protect against cognitive decline. Most of the neurons in the adult brain that are born go up in the hippocampus, right? Even the very late in life, you're birthing 700 new neurons in the hippocampus a day, basically up to the point we die. But what are those neurons? What does the hippocampus do? It does predominantly mapmaking. That's grid cells and place cells. So if you really want to preserve cognitive function, you want to basically use the hippocampus in the way that evolution designed it. You want novel, challenging experiences in outdoor environments, because that's. The brain was designed in an evolutionary sense where hunter gatherers for a very long time remember where you are when important shit happen, right? Like, that's what our brain is designed to do. Very much so. Action sports by. I'm not saying you have to go out and learn how to park, ski, but you want to go do your hikes outside in novel outdoor environments. I don't know if you've seen this. They did a study, they didn't include action sports to bum me out, but they did a study, I want to say, 10 years ago about which sports have the best impact on longevity. Number one, tennis. Number two, badminton. Number three, soccer. Now, one thing that's worth pointing out, all of those are social activities, because when they get to number four, it was. I was cross country skiing and then running. And there's. So there's a. There's a list, but that you get. Once you get to four, they're all solo activities. And we know that, you know, it's really important to have, you know, social connection later, later in life. So. But in the interest, action sports. But I think there's. You're definitely right about hand eye coordination, right? I tell the story in the beginning of the book of like, or the end of the book of the mystery of Stradivarius, which is another one of those mysteries that I stumbled upon, right? Like Stradivarius. Stradivarius made 50 of the rarest musical instruments in history, which is the fact that I stumbled upon, which I was like, oh, my God, that's bizarre. One dude built half of the most valuable instruments in history. That's crazy. What other field has that ever happened in? And as I'm sort of researching that and sort of geeking out because I'm curious, I discovered that two of his most famous instruments were made when he was 92 years old. Like at that point, when I stumbled on that fact, I was still under the influence of the long slow rot theory, right? This was the point. I was like, well, wait a minute, like there is no possible way. If fine motor coordination declines over time, if dexterity declines over time, annual dexterity declines over time. There's no way a 92 year old dude makes, you know, a priceless viola. But that was when I started saying, hey, wait a minute, there's something really rotten with this information. Of course Stradivarius made a thousand musical instruments over the course of his lifetime. He never stopped making them. So use or lose it skills. Perfect example.

There's a little more wisdom in Stradivarius as well. Because he told everyone how he soaked his wood and did all this stuff. It was all bullshit that he was telling his competitors to throw them off how he did it or that he didn't soak it, dry the wood, some sort of a thing. I don't remember the.

I didn't know that that's Australia.

And then they found out by looking at a shaving of one with an electron microscope. Like, wait a minute, this thing's been soaked forever. I think it was. He told him it was dry. So he basically misdirected everyone, which is part of wisdom. And then his mastery, that happens from doing it over and over. Those fine motor skills. It's like a surgeon who's done it for 20 years can do things that a new surgeon just can't do until they get that layering. And that the overall reason I like your book, I like your approach on this, is that I wouldn't be here with the brain and the biology I have now if I didn't, out of desperation, when I was about 25, 26, start hanging out with people three times my age who were working on the anti aging problem before. It was cool to do that because I was so profoundly sick and just fat and my brain wasn't working. But I realized I'm downloading all this information from the masters. And even now a lot of my guests on the show are 60s, 70s, 80s, because I want their 40 or 50 years of work. I want to be able to ask them any question and download it into my audience's brains and mine so we can maybe get the wisdom faster. And if we can make these people healthier with better working brains and maybe give another 20 years, the wisdom is going to compound and compound and compound. And it does Share down through the generations and the people in their 20s, which is by the way, the second largest cohort of people listening to the show, they're like, oh my God, I'm getting such an unfair advantage because I just got all this stuff so I didn't have to go do it all. Just what you shared about the stages of development right there. If someone just picks that one nugget of wisdom from you and says, I'm just going to work on that for a year, you just saved them like 10 years of crap in their life. And we just have to get older people who kick ass. And that's kind of what you could have named your book if you didn't name it in our country, right?

Old people kick ass. Well, I mean the other thing is this. We do tons of work with CEOs and if you talk, I've hundreds of conversations with thousands of CEOs at this point, everybody says the same thing. The two skill sets that are hardest that I need the most in the 21st century, that are the hardest to train for or hire for, are creativity and empathy. And creativity matters because the rate of change in the world is ridiculous. And if you're going to innovate and keep pace, you need it in your employees. And empathy. One, teamwork is at the heart of any good company. And without empathetic, you know, team members, you've got no collaboration, got no cooperation. But also, if Bezos is right, and you know, even you're right from back in the day, customer centric thinking is the mantra of 21st century business. Without empathetic employees, nobody's thinking like your customers. Right? And a well trained, over 50 year old is the ideal worker for the 21st century. Like you're talking about the dream workforce. So it's really interesting because there's a business revolution sort of tucked inside all of this waiting to happen. That's really exciting as well.

Okay, I'm 100% with you there. And so much can happen if we just get that dialed in. For CEOs, it's a big part of my mission when I work them as well is let's just get those tuned in and. But I'd also add working memory. There's a really high correlation between working memory size and ability to run larger companies. And you, you kind of look as the, as you climb up through the executive ranks, quite often the CEO and senior operating people in a company have a working memory that can store about 10 digits. And if you go down to the average of seven, that's your management level and then people can only remember six it goes down. So that ability to rapidly swap things.

In and out of your Fascinated by this. I want to see, I want to see the research on this. That's crazy. I didn't know that makes a lot of sense to me. I also think one of the things I've always thought about working memory is if you, if you write books for one example, if you do anything that requires you to hold tremendous amounts of information in your head all at once and books or long form articles, research, any of those kinds of projects tend to require that. Right? You can't write a book, can't write 250 pages. If you can't hold 258, there's going to come a point when you have to start moving shit around and it's in nobody's head but yours. Right. So like those kind of skills so very. I think working memory in that way exactly what you're talking about is actually it's trainable but most people don't challenge themselves ever even like tried to write like a 10,000 word article which like a long form New Yorker style article. But even that holding all that information and being able to like move it around and I do remember like that's one of the reasons I know it's a trainable skill is because I remember the first handful of times I wrote like a 5,000 word article. My editor got in my face, it was very different. Move it around, you know, ask me for changes and I was like I couldn't even see the whole article that I had written.

You have to draw a picture, at least that's what I do of the entire book to be able to see what the book looks like. And then that means you can change how the image looks in your head. Otherwise it's impossible. For the first book it took me five years to write it in part because of that problem and then you know, I got the skill. But I, I want to ask you this. The articles, 3,000 plus words, you know, several pages, no one reads them anymore online I write them and it's so down. It is social media with your five bullet points while someone's dancing. Is that making people older, faster?

I that's an interesting, that's an interesting question. I don't. So there, I'm sure there's all kinds of advantages in newer media colliery that I'm not looking at here but yeah David, I think it, I absolutely, I think I agree with that statement for certainly, certainly what I've noticed Over time is. What has certainly been lost is there's, like, now language has to be unbelievably boring and communicative. People have lost. There was a level of, you know, you said you were a cyberpunk. Go back to, like, William Gibson stuff from the 80s or the 90s. People can't read it today. It's too confusing. They can't follow that plot, like, literally today. So, like, there's something. There's like, a richness in the storytelling that has gone away and, like, our ability to understand complicated metaphors and similes has gone away. I was rereading a lot of Annie Dillard's work recently, um, and especially her book for the Time Being, which is absolutely beautiful. And I was thinking to myself how most of the book is a metaphor, right? I mean, it's an argument with God. Is. The entire book is. Is. Is a lengthy argument that she's having with God as a. Like, from a scientific perspective. And it's. It's you. If you were to write it today. I don't think. I mean, you know, people consider it one of the great books of the 20th century. I don't know if you could write it today. Oh, there's a lot of stuff like that where I'm not. I think. I think the. It's not to say that there's cool stuff that has emerged out of, like, some of the social. You can do stuff with language and technology. That. That's interesting, but I think there's some levels of cognition that have been lost. I think they'll come back with, you know, with. With new things. But, yeah, I think. For now, I think you're probably right.

But here's a question for you, Steven. Low state and reading. Do you get into a flow state when you read?

It's interesting. I. I always said one of the marks of knowing a subject actually is when you can get into a flow state while reading the textbooks. And that was. Right. That was when I started to, like, when I started to get into flow while reading neuroscience textbooks. That was when I was like, okay, this is really like. I. I was like, oh, wow. This is a really interesting marker for, like, expertise. Oh, you know, and which.