Grow OLD, Stay RAD: Unlock your Full Potential | Jim Kwik & Steven Kotler

Flow is the mechanism by which we grow up. Literally, it's how we mature. And the reason is because of the challenge-skill sweet spot. Like, every time we drop into flow, we're pushing on our skills, we're growing, we're becoming more adaptable, more complex, and we're a different person on the other end. Certain genes get turned on only by experience. We see the 2 halves of the brain start to talk together like never before, and we see, uh, the brain start to utilize underutilized real estate new ways. As a result of that, as we enter our 50s, we turn on legitimate suite of cognitive superpowers. If we get it right, we get access to new levels of intelligence, abstract reasoning, problem-solving, creativity. And this includes divergent thinking, right? Outside-the-box thinking, the hardest-to-train aspect of creativity, starts to really turn on in our 50s.

Welcome back, Kwik Brains. I am your host for the Kwik Brain Podcast and your brain coach, Jim Kwik. We are going to talk about unlocking new levels of flow, performance, and learning as we age. This is a topic that comes up a lot in our community. Can we actually grow older, but in some ways actually grow better? Actually, this guest has been on probably more than any other guest, so we're really excited to have him back, Steven Kotler. Many of you know he's a New York Times bestselling author, award-winning journalist, executive director at the Flow Research Collective. He's authored somewhere in the neighborhood of 14 books. We've talked about it a lot on our show. A lot of his books are on our book list. The Art of Impossible, The Future Is Faster Than You Think, Stealing Fire: The Rise of Superman. It just goes on and on and on. He's been even nominated for 2 Pulitzer Prizes, which is amazing. He's been on our show and also speaks at our events. He first came and spoke at our annual Brainpower Conference for superhumans back in 2011. We did an event in Vegas together in 2013. Absolutely, our community loves him.

Thank you.

Thanks for being back, Steven.

It was great to be with you again, Jim.

Let's jump right into this. Research shows that we can actually sustain high levels of performance later in life, later than most people thought. You have a brand new book and it's called Gnar Country. Why don't we talk about a little bit some of the findings you've had in the book? People, they know your story and I'll link in the show notes links to your book, links to our past podcast episodes. But you're, you're in, you're learning, right? I mean, you, you are a big researcher and you practice this. I understand that you've taken up a new challenge. Why don't we go into that?

The old theory of aging, right? Traditional theory of aging, which I know you don't subscribe to, but the long, slow rot theory, like all of our mental skills, all of our physical skills decline over time. And there's nothing we can do to stop that slide, right? That's the old idea. As you know, for the past 20 years, people have been chipping away at different bits of it, right? And, and it's starting to fall. We— and, and basically the general thinking now is all the skills we used to think, uh, declined over time, both cognitive and, and physical, we now know are use-it-or-lose-it skills, right? And if you never stop using them, you never stop training them, as you pointed out, you get to hold on to them and even advance them much later in life than anybody thought possible. So, that's— ideas have been developing for a while, but there's one sort of old saw, you can't teach an old dog new tricks, that sort of hung on stubbornly for a while. And I've been studying peak performance aging for 20 years on and off in different guises. And there was a whole bunch of stuff in my own field, in flow science, in embodied cognition, in neural dynamics, and a handful of other fields. That I was looking at all the research and I said, you know, if this research is true, I should be able to learn a really impossible, difficult, physical, challenging activity in my 50s. At 53 is when I started this quest. So, I took a bunch of these ideas and I combined them together into a learning protocol, and I used it to try to teach myself how to park ski at age 53.

Wow.

Now, park skiing, it's the discipline in skiing that involves doing tricks off jumps, On rails, on boxes, on wall rides. It's very, very acrobatic, very, very dangerous. And, for about 13 different biological factors, it's considered pretty difficult to learn if you're over 30, 35. By the time you get to 45, it's nearly impossible. And, once you get to 50 or where I started at 53, most people just think you're insane for trying. And, the research said otherwise. So, we combine it in a cool way. I, uh, I sort of made a list of 20 tricks that would cover like zero to intermediate. And I figured if it, if it takes 5 years to pull this off, cool. It takes 5 years. Like, it took me 5 years to learn something. I'm gonna, you know, and I got there in under a season and it was so fast and I learned so quickly. It was shocking. I had a ski partner. He was running the same protocol as I was. Now, by the way, uh, I had never park skied before. Zero experience, right? I was a good skier, but zero experience at the terrain park. My partner was a former sponsored athlete, a park skier, but he had gotten really injured, walked away from it, had 3 kids, raised a family, jobs, all that, came back to it, and he was making crazy progress, like faster than we've ever seen. And he couldn't believe it. And this was sort of like the world's most intriguing pilot study ever. We then took the same protocol, We ran 17 older adults, ages 30 to 68, through the same protocol. And in 4 days with this protocol, we also trained all of them up to park ski. And you have to understand, some of these people were intermediate skiers in their late 60s. And when we had our preliminary meeting, team meeting, they were like, there's— I have never left the ground in 50 years of skiing and I'm not going to start now. Like that kind of like really. And I was like, we went into that experiment. I was like, I don't think this is going to work. Like these people really don't seem into it. Like okay, it's it's definitely a good study group, but I think we're gonna fail. And they all went so much farther faster than than anybody thought possible. And we since actually took the skiing and snowboarding out of it, stripped it of the action sports requirements, and ran about 500 people through the protocol as just like a peak performance aging training to see you know and a huge impact on everybody's everybody's life. So. We are definitely capable of far much more than we know later in life. And that includes learning really difficult, challenging physical skills that are really supposed to be impossible for folks over the age of 30. You just have to approach it in sort of specific ways.

Okay. So for people who are listening, I mean, and I'm in this age group as well, so I'm thinking I'm a decent skier, took up snowboarding recently, but being off the ground would actually I definitely have some hesitation for doing that. But you mentioned that old dogs can indeed learn new tricks, and I assume older humans can also be better at certain skills than maybe their— even their younger counterparts.

Yes. And let me just start by talking a little bit about the work of Dr. Gene Cohn, the late Gene Cohn, who I think of him as one of the godparents of peak performance aging. He was the first director of the Center for Aging, the National Institute of Mental Health. They had a Center for Aging. He helped establish it. He was the first director, and he discovered something wild. Rather than like cognitive decline later in life, what he figured out is that as we enter our 50s, there are fundamental shifts in, in the brain. Certain genes get turned on only by experience. We see the 2 halves of the brain start to talk together like never before, and we see the brain start to utilize underutilized real estate in new ways. As a result of that, as we enter our 50s, We turn on legitimate suite of cognitive superpowers if we get it right. We get access to new levels of intelligence, abstract reasoning, problem-solving, creativity. And this includes divergent thinking, right? Outside-the-box thinking, the hardest-to-train aspect of creativity, starts to really turn on in our 50s. Um, there's whole new levels of empathy and whole new levels of wisdom. And wisdom, if you're not familiar with it, it's a definable, definable biological trait. It's neurobiological It's— we know exactly where it takes place in the brain and what it is and how it works. And wisdom is actually really important because it's one of the things that helps make the brain impervious to cognitive decline.

In the book, you show that aging well and achieving flow, that they go kind of hand in hand, right? And you and I, we've talked about flow in the past, norepinephrine, dopamine, how it amplifies pattern recognition. For new people, why don't you define flow for those listening?

Flow is, uh, it's scientifically defined as an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best, we perform our best. And it refers to any of those moments of rapt attention and total absorption when you're so focused on what you're doing, on the task at hand, that everything else just starts to disappear. Sense of self, self-consciousness is going to quiet down. Time's going to pass strangely. Usually just get so sucked into what you're doing that hours go by without you noticing. And throughout this experience, all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, tend to go through the roof. Um, huge amplification in, in skills and abilities. One of the things that, to answer the next part of your question, you need to know is that flow states have triggers, right? We've talked about that before on this show, preconditions that lead to more flow. So, if you want more flow in your life, these triggers are sort of your toolkit. Now, here's where it gets interesting when you start talking about peak performance aging and adult development, a whole bunch of stuff. The most important of flow's triggers, as, as you know, I think we've talked about this on the show before, is the challenge-skills balance. So shorthand for the triggers: flow follows focus. It only shows up when all of our attention is in the right here, right now. That's what all the triggers do. They drive our attention in the present moment. The idea with the challenge skills balance is we pay the most attention to the task and to the present moment when that challenge of the task of what we're doing slightly exceeds our skill set. So you're stretching, you're pushing on your skills, but you're not snapping. You're not overwhelmed and and scared, right? Chick sent me high. Mihej sent me high. The godfather of flow. psychology. It's funny, everybody knows him as like the flow guy, and yet the bulk of his books were on adult development, and flow's role in adult development one way or another. Um, he really spent a lot of his career there, and he ultimately argued that flow is the mechanism by which we grow up. Literally, it's how we mature. And the reason is because of the challenge-skill sweet spot. Like every time we drop into flow, we're pushing on our skills, we're growing, we're becoming more adaptable, more complex, and we're a different person on the other end. And simultaneously, because flow automatically expands empathy, it allows us to see things from others' perspectives, um, and wisdom. Some of the same things you get in your 50s, flow automatically expands for us along the way. These are the mechanisms of maturation as well, right? Like we're learning, we're developing new skills, we're gaining wisdom, we're gaining expertise. So, his argument was flow is literally how we grow up. And interestingly, in the very last study he did, it was just published, he died a couple of years ago, but this was just published like 3 months ago posthumously with a number of other great authors, was he studied flow proneness in later life. And he wanted to know, do we ever stop craving flow? Does this engine of development ever go away? And it turns out, no. Our desire to drop into flow stays consistent across our lives. The only time people see it tail off is at the very end of their lives, as their physical skills start to decline, that there's a correlation there. But as our, you know, as regenerative medicine and longevity science and peak performance aging sort of extends our life, you know, past our, the 80s into our 90s and beyond, that limit looks like it's gonna keep moving out with it. And it's only like as the body totally starts to fall apart that our desire for flow seems to wane a little. And it may not even be our desire that wanes, but it's our ability to get into the state.

And I mentioned our audience is full of quick readers. Many people are going to go and order your book, which I highly recommend. They also have— they're a stickler for names, remembering names. And so, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and word substitution, just break it down, everybody. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It's pretty easy to remember. Let's talk about trauma. How does trauma affect our performance? I've listened to a number of interviews with you and you talk about trauma and we're hearing more about being more trauma-informed and the role that maybe personal forgiveness could have. How does that affect our performance?

We have a very recent paper that was published Collective with alongside, uh, neuroscientists Scott Kelso and Richard Huskey in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews that looks at the first few seconds of flow state onset. What happens as we transition into a flow state? This, uh, paper, a lot of the work that's in our country, a lot of the research, the actual technical detail and what was going on is in this paper. Um, it's open access, so anybody can type in, uh, it's called First Few Seconds for Flow. Um, and, and my name, and, and you'll get it. Uh, that's an open access, uh, journal, so anybody can read it. Very deep, thick neuroscience, 100 pages of neuroscience. So hopefully you enjoy that sort of thing. But what we did is, among other things, we compared flow to traumatic stress. And what are the differences we wanted to look at? We actually also compared flow to psychedelic states because there's overlaps between the 3 altered states— traumatic stress, flow, and psychedelic states. There's some overlap, um, and there's a lot of differences, but we wanted to know why do certain experiences become flow instead of trauma and vice versa. We did ask— we started to ask those questions. You're asking questions about past trauma, correct? This was one of the actual cool insights we had with older adults, and it's the heart of the learning protocol. One of the things we did is— so metaphorically, normally healthy normal people The metaphorical difference between challenge and skills in most of us is about 4% to get into that sweet spot, right? So, you want a situation where the challenge is roughly 4% greater than your skill level, 5% greater. That's a metaphor. We've been testing it for years. Nobody can say for sure this is the number, but it's metaphorically very accurate and it's practically very accurate. It works for people. But what we realized is, so there's something called allostatic load. It's basically trauma over time in the body. Right? And what it does to our physiology and, and, and various other things. You can measure it in, in heart rate variability, among other things. But we started to realize that because of allostatic load and a couple other variables, this challenge to have sweet spot in older adults might be really shrunk down. And I, when I say older adults, I mean like over 35, over 40, over 50. I'm not, you know, maybe over 60, 70, and 80 too, but we just were like, oh wow. So if you go at hard physical activities, Like it was a 5% difference, you're going to be way overloaded all the time. That much fear crushes performance, as you know, destroys learning, destroys memory, hinders fast twitch muscles, by everything you could possibly imagine. So we— the whole idea here was go as slow as you possibly can. So we taught older adults when approaching these skills, start with a physical activity, start with something you could do 100% of the time. With zero fear and no failure, basically. I can explain how we did this in skiing in a second if you want, if you're curious, but that was one of our big insights. So, everybody went a lot slower than they've ever gone before in their lives, like really, like even like— and we really, we slowed everybody down and we made them much more playful. Those were in our approach. And those were two of the— 2 of the key secrets to doing it. And it really allowed people to progress a lot faster by going so much slower than they're used to going because of this shrunk skill squeeze spot. And going so much slower actually dropped them into flow much more easily. And flow took care of the accelerated performance and the accelerated learning and did a lot of the dirty work for us once we realized that, hey, there's this trauma load in the body. That just sort of, you know, if you've ever injured yourself physically or if you're scared of it, you know what I mean? Like, all that stuff builds up over time and has such a big impact on performance that if you're trying to learn something difficult and physical, you want to really slow down. So, that was one of the insights from the trauma stuff.

And I love the— because we integrate that in our training, this dynamic deliberate And play approach, right? Is that one of the things that helps to— Yeah.

So if you were to summarize peak performance aging in a single sentence, literally, it would be you want to have— you want to engage in challenging, creative, and social activities that require a dynamic, deliberate, play-braced approach to learning and take place in novel outdoor environments. That's literally The formula, and what you didn't hear me mention: nutraceuticals, supplements, diet—all the things like running on a treadmill, all going joining a gym, all that people do to age well. I'm not saying that stuff isn't important, but it's nowhere close. I'll give you a funny example: the challenging social and creative activities—the social part—it is more important as we age to maintain social connections. Than it is to lose weight if you're obese, or to quit smoking. I often think with peak performance aging, people want to do the right stuff. They just don't know exactly what the right stuff is. And when you say dynamic, deliberate, play-based activities, you have to really define dynamic, right? That means hit all 5 aspects of functional fitness, because you can keep your skills as we age, but you have to train strength, stamina, agility, balance, and flexibility on a regular basis. You have to make sure to engage your primary moving muscles and your stabilizing muscles. All those things are really, really, really crucial as we age. That's what dynamic is about, right? Which is why if you look at like skiing may actually turn out to be the very best sport for peak performance aging, which is not something that I knew in my research. It's actually something I learned last week. But it turns out that the single most important correlate for peak performance aging is strong legs. Leg strength correlates to preservation of physical health and cognitive function. Number one thing, and the most important thing about legs is loading them so you get increases in bone density. You can do that through weightlifting. That's really great. Um, some of the stuff that people do for exercise as they age, they, they're told, oh, go swimming. It doesn't load the joints. Well, it also doesn't do anything for bone density. So it's a worthless exercise. For peak performance aging, running terrible because it breaks down bone density. The two best things you can do is skiing because it's side-to-side motion that loads the bones slowly, and or hiking with a weight vest. Hiking with a weight vest will also load bone density. So dynamic is a very specific term when you're talking about peak performance aging, meaning it's got you know a very specific definition. But I think that's in a sentence, and it's exciting that you can say that out loud. Everything in that sentence is completely definitive. It's you know there's there's there's a lot of overwhelming data on it. There's also a lot of overwhelming data. I want to go back to one thing you said earlier about flow and aging. So when we're in flow, two of the things that the state provides us with is a sense of mastery, right? Because learning is And a feeling of control. That's one of the defining characteristics of flow is this sense of being in control of things you can't normally control. Turns out that feelings of control and mastery are among the 2 very best feelings humans get on this planet, and both have really strong neuroimmunological consequences. So when we get feelings of mastery and control, it boosts T-cell production, right? So we fight off diseases with T-cells. Also boosts the production of natural killer cells, which is what targets tumors and other sick cells. Simultaneously, as we move into flow, there's a global release of nitrous oxide. It's a gas signaling molecule, and it basically pushes stress hormones out of our system. There are nine known causes of aging. All nine of them are linked to stress and inflammation. They're all linked to inflammation, and inflammation is always linked to stress. When we move into flow, it resets the nervous system, pushes all this stress out of our body. Flow underpins meaning and well-being and purpose and overall life satisfaction and happiness, and it boosts health and longevity. Flow isn't just how we get a life worth living, it's how we get a whole lot more life worth living.

In a previous episode, we talked about some health conditions you were struggling with years ago and how you took up surfing. You know, and it helped, you know, on your healing journey.

Very similar mechanisms.

Yeah, exactly. Not only bounce back, but you bounce, bounce forward, which is astonishing. And with play, there's that phrase that I stopped playing because I grew older. Maybe you grow older because you stop, stop playing. And we love this, this idea.

I got to talk about this because this is one of the other things that we found. It's not 100%, but you know, every one of the, one of the reasons you can't learn to park ski over 30 is because the motor learning window Slams shut, right? So you can't—you don't become a gymnast or a ballerina. And partially, a little bit, like some of the—a little bit of that is true. It turns out it's not that the window slams completely shut; it's that we stop learning like we used to learn, right? As as kids, it's all about exploratory, play-based learning. Whether it's self-consciousness or shame, or we got to learn for work, whatever it is, we stop. playing, and that seems to be what shuts the motor learning window. And if we start playing again, um, it seems to reboot some of it.

Yeah, especially if it's social. We, we had Dr. Waldinger from Harvard talk about that 80-year-plus-year-old study on, on happiness and longevity, and it was more like not biological networks, it was social networks.

So the other, the other thing that was in that study, the Harvard studies, out in the 3 adult big long adult development studies, that is cool, 'cause you were talking about self-forgiveness earlier, and this is something I wanted to mention. So, uh, George Vaillant, who was the keeper, the last keeper of all those studies before, uh, it got passed to the, the person you were talking to, um, he wrote a couple of great books on it. And so, I mentioned those superpowers of aging that I was talking about earlier. Mm-hmm. He discovered there's some moderators involved. So, moderators is a psychological word for like if-then conditions. And if you really wanna thrive in your 50s and beyond, By age 30, you got to solve the crisis of identity. So you got to know who you are in this world by age 30. By 40, you have to solve match fit or match quality, which is there's a tight correlation between my strengths, my virtues, who I am, and what I do in the world, which is why you have to solve identity by 30. You can't figure out who you are and how to live in the world if you don't first know who you are. And then by 50, if you really want access to all these superpowers, You have to forgive those who have done you wrong and forgive yourself. And it seems like if you don't, without that self-forgiveness that you mentioned earlier, you can't really get at the empathy or the wisdom that that becomes you know yours in your fifties without that. So that's another thing that came out of that that Harvard study that I found fascinating. And the only thing I want to add to that there's just a couple more things worth knowing if you're really interested in unlocking unlocking those superpowers of aging creative thinking is what really does it. So that's another moderator in your You have to be engaged in some kind of creative activity. That's sort of a mandatory for thriving later in life. And then there's 2 additional ones that we added to the list. One is you have to train against physical fragility. If your body's falling apart, you're not going to be able to use the superpowers. So, it's really clear that by the time you hit your 50s, you want to be training all of them every week. And the WHO has guidelines, right? 150 to 300 minutes of vigorous— moderate to vigorous physical aerobic activity, 2 strength training days a week, and 2 balance and agility and flexibility days a week. That's the recommended for peak performance aging. Like, that— it's very clear, um, on that. One of the reasons that action sports are a great tool for peak performance aging is they train all those things at once. So you have a single activity that allows you to Rather than having to do all that stuff stretched out, like it's 2 hours a day. Or you could pick an activity like skiing or things like that. Um, also for this reason that when you look it up, what are the, uh, not, not including action sports, action sports actually are better, but the best sports for health and longevity. Tennis is number 1, badminton is number 2, and soccer is number 3.

Interesting.

It's 'cause they're social sports that demand all kinds of dynamic movement.

And it stacks. The deliberate dynamic play approach to learning, we do that in our trainings with language learning. We get them moving and it's very social and just challenging social activities. What keeps, I notice, people from playing more or they hesitate is that fear. And you talk about ways, that parasympathetic, sympathetic kind of pendulum. You introduced an interesting idea About, uh, peripheral vision. I, I don't know if Dr. Andrew Huberman talks a little bit.

Yeah, it's not, it's not my— I, I tested it in a really radical, radical, radical situation is what I did. But it's, it's Andrew Huberman's research, but I'm happy to talk about it. Um, and he's the one who first told me about it, right? And it's quite simply that one of the fastest ways to calm your nervous system down is to look at the world through the corners of your eyes, to utilize peripheral vision. So I changed it slightly. I used it while skiing a very steep, narrow, icy chute, and I did it by trying to like widen my eyes out as far as possible when I was skiing to calm down. So I, I did run that, that experiment. But yeah, if you, if you look at the corner of the world out of the corner of your eyes, your eyes go, oh, you're just chilling out. You're, you know, you're checking out the scenery. All must be chill. And you get parasympathetic activation.

For a couple of decades, we've done exercises before people do our quick reading exercises, peripheral vision, to be able to relax. Some people have fear associated with reading, you know, that's, you know, more deep-seated, but it helps them to take in more, more words and be in a more relaxed state, certainly. What's one of the first things you would ask our listeners or our viewers right now to maybe start tomorrow?

Where to start? How do you even start thinking about all this stuff? Gotta start with changing your mindset towards the second half of your life if you haven't done that. The research is, is amazing on mindset and aging. Like, date back to Ellen Langer's work at Harvard back in the '70s. There's copious 20-year studies that have found this, but when they look at the impact of mind, a positive mindset towards aging, meaning second half of my life is filled with wonderful possibilities, that's all you gotta believe, right? Produces an extra seven and a half years of health and longevity. That's huge, astounding. And if there wouldn't have been so many studies, it's a fifty-year stack of research that shows this. It would be hard to believe. Um, so you gotta start by switching your mindset. At least have to start up opening your mind to to what's possible in second half of your life. I think switching mindset is difficult, and I my peak performance aging experiment my like teaching myself to park ski. I think that by the other side of that experiment, my mindset had thoroughly shifted because suddenly, like, I had learned how to park ski at age 53, you know, faster than I'd ever learned anything before in my life physically, right? Because of the superpowers of aging, this whole protocol. I like that. I was like, oh my God, okay, wow. I thought I had a pretty good mindset going in, but, you know, it really shifted by the end of it. So I, I really think that You wanna shift your mindset, reframing that sort of stuff as a way of opening the door. But I also think you want like an Our Country style experiment for yourself where, where you really go after a hard, harder challenge than you believed was possible for yourself, just so you can prove it to yourself. Also, you know, I think you wanna start with the mentality, but you wanna back it up with action.

As you, you heard it here, that aging is a, a mental event as much as is a, a physical event. And a shift in mindset could actually add 7 years to your life. Steven Kotler, I want to thank you so much for being on Kwik Brain for your— it's like 4th time. This is amazing. Where do people get Gnar Country? Where would you recommend people connect with you?

You go to www.gnarcountry.com, and we are running an amazing presale campaign. Coolest bonuses I've ever created, like $1,800 worth of free peak performance trainings for everybody who helps me out by, by pre-ordering a book. So you can get the book anywhere, but the website's great. And you, if you go there, the peak performance aging experiment I talked about with the 17 older adults, we made an amazing video. You can read the white paper there. We also made a really fun video about the experiment that anybody can watch. So you don't have to take my word for it. You can go to the website and check out the progress for yourself.

Amazing. Steven, thanks for being on the show. Everyone who's listening, you'll learn that part of his core methodology is just one inch at a time. These small, simple steps. Recommend everyone take one little step when you're done listening to this, and it's going to the site, following Steven on social media, making one small shift with your focus because we know that flow follows focus, right? And so, thank you everyone for listening. Make sure you you leave a review, subscribe on our YouTube. We're coming close to 1 million subscribers there where you could actually watch this more extended version. And, uh, we'll see you in the next episode. Until then, be limitless, everyone.