Gnar Country: Fascinating Insights Into Flow and Aging with Steven Kotler and Joe Polish - Genius Network Episode #189

Group flow always starts with what's known as collective ambition. So Genius Network's a great example. There's a collective ambition. There's a goal that the Genius Network has that none of us individually can accomplish, but together we can accomplish that goal. That's collective ambition. So when you're bringing a team together, they have to really want the thing that you're going after. And everybody has to know, first of all, their own lives are going to improve. They get the thing, but they can't get it alone. That's the place you have to start.

If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network event, or want to learn more about Genius network, go to www.gienstruitnetwork.com. there's a lot to this. This is a really important subject. You've written a lot of books. Yeah, I remember when we first met too.

We're like, I've come to believe Joe is one of the truly good people in the universe, but I started out thinking he was Satan.

Yeah, you say marketer, you say marketing, things like this. But yeah. So NAR country, this is his latest book. The whole book is utilizing skiing as a way to, as it says, growing old and staying rad. And it's called NAR Country. Explain this why this book and then we'll get into the topic, which is.

Really flow books about peak performance, aging, and for reasons that we're going to get into, the titles start to make sense as we go along. But gnar is action sort slang and it's short for gnarly. And despite whatever you may think about action sport athletes, their lingo is incredibly precise because they have to perform in situations where they fuck up, they'll die. So the term gnar or gnarly means literally any environment that is high in perceived risk and high in actual risk country, any landscape, terrain, fictitious or real. Narcountry is also a phenomenal scripture of our later years. High in perceived risk, high in actual risk. And it turns out, and we'll get into this, it's a phenomenal description of the whole thing in our country, of the gritty mindset it takes to really thrive and kick ass during our later years. So that's where the title comes from. Yeah.

So you are a pretty intense dude, Right? So you've broken over 80 bones in your body. How many bones have you broken?

I think it's 87.

87. Okay. And you? Lyme disease and all kinds of different things that caused you to. Did you seek this out or did you stumble upon it as a result of basically feeling hopeless and maybe going.

To die in terms of flow.

Yeah, yeah. And just.

So the Lyme disease is sort of the second half of the story. The first half of the story. I became a journalist in the early 1990s, and journalism is this astounding career, especially if you're wired like me, where they pay you to be curious. And that was. I was like a kid in a candy store. And the two things I was really fascinated with was peak performance or how humans work. And I was really interested in the neuroscience of it. In the 90s, especially around like 94, 95, neuroscience shifted. Before that era, we had been like, let's identify clusters of neurons and maybe what do they do? And in the 90s, we started to be able to say, oh, this is what emotions are, this is what consciousness might be. This is how we can study it. This is what flow. These bigger topics that had sort of been off limits to science suddenly became examinable through neuroscience was fascinated. And action sports was the other half of it. And I'm not a naturally born gifted athlete, but I've been a lifelong action sport athlete. And action sports was just catching the public eye. So the Gravity Games were just getting started, the X Games as well. And most journalists couldn't even get into these action sports communities. They were punk rock communities that really didn't like outsiders. But I had a big mohawk and everybody liked, so they would talk to me. So I spent the better portion, about a decade chasing professional athletes around mountains, across oceans. And if you know anything about action sports in the 1990s, it's often referred to as the era of impossible, more impossible feats, things that had never been done before, were believed never going to be done, got done. In fact, it got so radical during the era, it was very often like somebody would do something that was impossible on Monday and by Wednesday somebody else was iterating upon it and by Friday somebody else was building on that. And it was. None of it made any sense. But what was really weird and what really caught my attention, and I think this may resonate with this group, is most of the excellent sport athletes. Like, if you know anything about peak performance, especially back in the 90s, if you were going to perform at your best, you better have had a good childhood, you better have had good education, the right parents, all this stuff and all the athletes. I knew these people, their childhoods were train wrecks. They had almost no money, they had very, very little education. And these, the communities we were living in, high risk and lots of substance abuse. And normally you put those things together in a community, people die young or go to jail. What they don't do is reinvent what's possible for the human species. And that's what was going on. So I had the neuroscience on one hand saying oh, here's the tools. And I had this absolutely incredibly, really weird, impossible feat. And I, and I always like to point out that like it is sort of one thing to like turn on a television screen and see Laird Hamilton surf a hundred foot wave or watch somebody jump 100 foot cliff. But when you're, you go drinking with your friends on Friday night and then everybody wakes up hungover on Saturday morning and going to the mountains and your friend does something that for all of recorded history is totally impossible, that changes things. Suddenly it's not a person on a screen who's not a human being. Suddenly it's like, oh my God, my very flawed and very broken friend just did the impossible. What the hell's going on? So that's where all of this started. If you talk to those people, nobody was really using the word flow. They had tons of words, a lot of mystical language, A lot of it took a really time to sort of decode can get through the language barrier and figure out what everybody was talking about. But everybody kept talking about the experience of flow. They would use different language, they would describe it different ways, but every single. How did you do that? I don't know how I did it, but I know when I'm performing my best, I'm in an altered state of consciousness where every decision, every action flows seamlessly, effortlessly from the last. That's where the definition of flow comes from, by the way. That was the answer. Mihal Csikszentmihalyi went around the globe asking people at the times in their life they felt their best, they performed their best. Everybody said the same thing in an altered state. And every decision, every action just flows seamlessly, effortlessly, perfectly from the last. That's where the title comes from. It's actually a phenomenological description, meaning it describes how this experience makes us feel of what it's like to be in a flow state. So flow is one of those words where the experience sounds like what it is. And then I got Lyme disease. And as Joe pointed out, I spent three years in bed. Doctors had pulled me off drugs, my stomach lining was bleeding out, there was nothing anybody could do for me. I was functional 10 minutes a day and if I reset for had really extreme Lyme, you know, it can get into your brain. Got into mine. I had no short term memory. I had no long term memory. If I met you before the age of 30, I will not remember you. Like, including people I dated for months at a time. Like, it's just wiped.

Is that a good thing?

Depends. I don't know.

I don't know.

I probably was not a picnic to date in those years. So maybe. But yeah. So it took everything I could work maybe five, ten minutes a day. And I was in so much physical pain, I couldn't walk across the room. And I surfed myself back to health. It wasn't by choice. Friend of mine showed up by my apartment right at the point I was about to end my life and demanded we go surfing. And I. And I was like, you're crazy. I can't walk to the table. Like, I'm not going surfing. You're out of your mind. And she wouldn't leave my house. And like, after four hours of badgering, I was like, it, let's just go surfing. What's the worst that can happen? And I dropped into an immediate flow state as soon as, like, they got me to the break. They gave me a giant board. They care. They literally carried me out to the break and put me on the board. But I got myself into the first wave and as soon as I stood up, I stood up into the deepest, craziest flow state I'd ever had. Like, nothing had prepared me for. It was a full blown mystical experience. But all the pain was gone and my head was clear and I felt good. And I felt so good, I caught like four more waves. And after those five waves, totally disassembled, can't even move, they brought me home, put me in bed, had people that bring me food for like two weeks because I couldn't get out of my bed to get to my kitchen to make a meal. But on the 15th day, I could walk again. And I had a neighbor who was a former pro surfer, and I banged on his door and I was like, you've got to take me to the beach. He's like, dude, you can't walk. What? And. But over the course of about 10 months, I went from 10% functional to 80% functional. And the only thing I was doing differently was surfing and having these very powerful alternative experiences. And what I started to realize is that the exact same state of consciousness that had gotten those athletes from normal up to Superman and Superwoman had gotten me from super subpar back to normal. And the question was, what the hell? What? Right at that point as a neuro guy was, wait a minute. Surfing is not a known cure for chronic autoimmune conditions. And I'm a hardcore rational material. So if you talk to me, you know, I'm very hostile to a lot of woo woo ideas. And I like, you won't get anywhere with me with that stuff. But I was having mystical experiences in the wave. This was beyond what I thought the athletes were talking about. So I thought, oh shit, the disease must be in my brain. So even if I'm feeling better, I must be dying. So I laid out on a giant quest and led me sort of into the field of neuroimmunology. We're going to talk about peak performance aging in a second. So one of the things I want to just mention from that research is while flow is incredibly it's peak performance. Cognitive performance gets optimized, physical performance gets optimized. It's also amazing for your immune system. So we're going back to Herb Benson's work at Harvard in the 90s shows that as we move into flow, all the stress hormones get flushed out of our system. So why can flow cure Lyme and actually most autoimmune conditions. Autoimmune conditions are a nervous system gone haywire. You don't know where normal is, so you can't find normal again. Your homeostatic system can't return to where it was. So by flushing all the stress hormones out of your system, you get back to a normal baseline. You can reestablish that pattern simultaneously. All of these neurochemicals that underpin flow boost the immune system in a really serious way. Probably most importantly, especially from a peak performance aging standpoint, when we drop into flow, two things that happen is we get a sense of control. We if you're watching something flip, from the outside, it looks like peak performance, but on the inside doesn't feel like peak performance. It feels like, oh, shit, I've got control over things I can't normally control. This could be me As a writer, 6am on a Monday, doing things with words that normally doesn't happen at 6am could be one of you leading a business meeting where suddenly everybody's just getting along and the ideas are really bouncing off and you're doing a great leadership job. Could be any of those things. But you get this sense of control and you get a sense of mastery and we can talk about the learn it. Flow amplifies learning and it really increases mastery. Mastery and control, the two most pos positive feelings that humans can get these are literally our two favorite feelings. When we get the most positive emotions we can get, it amplifies the production of T cells which fight disease, and it amplifies the production of natural killer cells, which are the cells that target sick cells, tumors and other six cells. So a lot of the causes of aging are they're all inflammation related, first of all. So by pushing out the stress hormones from our system, you're in general fighting aging. But T cells and natural killer cells are really going after some of the. One of the reasons flow is so important over time is what it does to the immune system.

You know, can you just speak to. Because I don't want to forget about this and there's some guided questions I have just because I want to hear some things just simply productivity be more effective in a flow state. You talk about in cite how like 5 times the level of things that a person can do or get done. Like for instance, if we could engineer flow, most people could work and get as much productive work done in a single day as they currently take a week to do.

This is in our research. It's McKinsey, the business consultancy. They spent a decade going around the world. This is self reported, so you got to take it with a grain of salt, but spent a decade. We're talking to top CEOs about how much more productive they were in flow than out of flow. And on average it was 500% more productive inflow. So that means if you spend Monday in a flow state, take Tuesday through Friday off, as Joe pointed out, you're getting as much done as your steady state peers. The thing I want to say is two days a week in flow, you're 1,000% more productive than the competition. The thing I want to say is at the flow Research Collective, I know who we train. We work in 130 countries where we work with everybody from the army or excuse me, the Air Force and the San Francisco Police Department to Facebook, Accenture, Bain Capital, and on and on and on. In other words, chances are we're training your competition already and they're going to end up 1000% more productive. So my point is flow is it's no longer a secret. It's leaking into the mainstream, which I think is a great, great thing. But it's sort of like AI if you're not hip to what's going on and if you're not familiar with these tools from a business point of view, you could really be left behind. Because optimizing ourselves is just as important as optimizing Our technology.

Yeah, yeah. So there's. There's two things here that I think are really important and why I wanted you to touch on them right now. And, you know, if you go through Steven's book, you'll kind of get it, and I believe you'll understand it at a far deeper level. So it's one of individual flow, what that does for the person. Then there is group flow. And everyone here has teams, they have companies, they have this genius network. You know, if we could have genius network when it is in group flow, if it can get there and when it can get there, makes it a hell of a lot more of aligned experience. And can you speak to what are the things that are needed in order to get into group flow? I know that might be really.

Yeah, it's a really long list. The original work was done by a guy named Keith Sawyer. Really cool work. He was a psychologist, studied under Chicks at My highway at the University of Chicago, and he was a jazz musician. So he teamed up with Second City Television, the comedy troupe, and he became their pianist. And he videotaped Second city television for 15 years. And he used audience laughter as a gauge for group flow. Team coming together. Team performing at the best means the improv group is really in flow. And then he did frame by frame analysis of like, what happened, what changed in the room, what changed on the stage. That was sort of the foundation of the research and just going from there. The thing I want to say, the three things I'm going to say about team flow is first, start with yourself, start with individual flow. Flow is a little like other emotions in that it's contagious. Leaders in flow drive their teams into flow. It has to do with brainwave entrainment, a whole bunch of other neurochemical stuff. The other thing I want to point out, there's a counterpoint to this. And when I lecture company talk to companies, talk to everybody. I say this out loud and it's worth knowing. Passive aggressive leaders, the only thing you're going to do is drive your team into burnout, period. If you are moving the goalpost on you, I tell people this. If you have a boss who moves the goalposts on you and it's happened more than twice, quit, be done with the job. You cannot win. It will block flow and you're only going to end up towards burnout. That's the number one cause of burnout, and there's nothing you can do about it. So if you are one of those leaders who's leading in that style, Change it. And if you're in that situation, get out of it. The third thing I want to say about Group Flow is, so there's a really cool new textbook on it called Team Flow. It's very short, pretty straightforward, sort of written for a business audience. Even though it's a textbook that said, they did a lot of work. And in my book, the Art of Impossible, while the book talks a lot about flow, the story starts talking about motivation, because that's if you're interested in peak human performance, there's an order to the process, and it always starts with motivation. Group flow always starts with what's known as collective ambition. So Genius Network is a great example. There's a collective ambition. There's a goal that the Genius Network has that none of us individually can accomplish, but together we can accomplish that goal. That's collective ambition. So when you're bringing a team together, they have to really want the thing that you're going after. And everybody has to know, first of all, their own lives are going to improve if they get the thang, but they can't get it alone. That's the place you have to start.

So you created your dog sanctuary, and you would take hospice dogs that were basically going to die, you put them in packs and get them out running, go running with them, and they would heal. What the hell is happening?

So it started. Have you ever brought your team to a ropes course, right, for team bonding, anything like that? What are you doing? You're trying to drive people into group flow. That's what that's all about. Why? Because the neurochemicals. Three of the neurochemicals that show up in flow are very potent social bonding neurochemicals. Right? And they bond teams together. Oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. These are the most potent social bonding chemicals that the brain can produce. And we get them all in flow. What, with the dogs? It started because we do extreme hospice care. So if you are a geriatric Chihuahua with a horrible abusive past, late stage cancer, heart disease, one eye, three legs, and flatulence, you're our guy. That's what we like. So when you're dealing with extreme hospice care scenarios where they don't have long to live, showing up in a new pack is like showing up in high school on the first day, right? As a, as a, as a transfer in like, you're not welcomed with open arms by the pack. They're suspicious of strangers. And we needed to get dogs adopted into the pack as quickly as possible. So I decided to try to see if running them up and down the mountains. I live in the mountains and sort of running down a mountain is a great easy flow hack. You know, it puts most people into flow. Dogs get into flow is actually the first conversation I had with me high csiks at me high is I started getting into flow with the dogs doing this. And I was like, this can't be real. There's no way this is real. I sort of knew the neurobiology and it was like, okay, cross species flow should be possible. But I just didn't believe it. So I called Mike. This was their first conversation. And I said, I think I'm getting to flow with my dogs. He knew who I was because my first book, I was like, am I out of my mind? Is this actually really happening? And his answer was, oh, I get into flow with my dogs all the time. Call me and we'll talk about it. And he gave me his phone number and that was how we became friends. So we started using FLO in the hospice, in the hospice work, among other things. We were using some evolutionary psychology, a couple other things. This was actually one of the foundations of NAR country is we would, our dogs would all go to a phenomenal vet, one of the best in America, right before they'd come to us. And she would always hardcore old school, like zoo vet, who really not very emotional, be like, don't get emotionally attached. This animal is going to be dead in a month, two months. Just know that, just a good death, that's your job here, is, you know, that's what you're doing. And the dogs would live three, four, five more years. And we've helped over 700 dogs have passed through our immediate facility and 5,000 through the outreach facilities. So this is a huge sample size. And this was a result we're seeing again and again and again. And I started saying three to four dog years is 21 to 28 human years, right? That's all big. And I found out two things. One, I started to realize there was a movement in the veterinary world to double canine lifespan. I wasn't the only person playing with this. There were a lot of people doing a lot of high tech stuff, but there was an overall movement to double canine lifespan. So I was part of that was the first thing. And then I started to realize at the same time I was seeing this in dogs, a bunch of other people like Dan Buettner were seeing it in humans, right? They were, they discovered the blue zones, these long lived communities. And if you Break down what's going down in the blue zones, and you break down what we were doing with the dogs. It's the exact same thing. There's a couple dietary things they were doing in the blue zones that we were doing differently with the dogs for a bunch of reasons, but other than that, it was the same. And that was when I started to really pay attention to this stuff. I was like, okay, this is very real. It's working for humans, it's working for dogs. It's working for thousands and thousands of subjects. Let's start paying attention.

Yeah. Which is also why. So, like, what Stephen's work here is focused on is flow and basically high performance aging. Right. So what does that even mean?

So talk about peak performance aging. The first thing you have to know is the old story of aging, which is most of you have definitely heard and probably actually still believe parts of. It's what I like to call the long slow rot theory. This is the idea that all of our mental skills and all of our physical skills decline over time. There's nothing we can do to stop the slide. And this actually it dates back to Freud. It was something Freud said in 1907. He was scared of turning 50. And so he said, you know, most people, once they turn 50, they are too fixed in their ways. I'm paraphrasing. Don't even try psychotherapy with them. They're no longer educable. So the idea of an old dog can't learn new tricks. Thank Freud. All that happened over the 20th century is we proved Freud right by 1990s. By the 1990s, we had just figured out the biology of decline. And then a couple cracks started showing up in that thinking. And over the past 30 years, what we we've learned is that all the skills we used to think decline over time. We now know they're use it or lose it skills. And if you never stop training them, you can hang on to them and even advance them far, far later in life than anybody thought possible.

Okay, so what are two or three of the most important discoveries that you've learned about your own body and your ability to perform with doing this because you do some crazy shit in our country.

I have to tell them what I did in our country. Okay, so.

And then we can show the video later.

Okay, so it's actually a chicks at me high story. So I'll tell you. It was the last phone call I had with me. I checked me. I passed away during COVID and we talked probably six months before he died. How Old were you? Was he when he was. I want to say it was 82, 83. Somewhere. Somewhere in his mid to mid-80s, he had it. And when I. I'd already had a stroke, so I really just called to sort of check in on him, see how he was doing. Little known fact about flow and Csikszentmihalyi is everybody talks about flow and performance. Csikszentmihalyi spent most of his life working on flow and adult development. Turns out, for reasons that we can talk about later, he argued that flow. So on the other side of a flow state, learning increases, our skills increase, we're more adaptive, more complex. Wisdom and empathy also get increase in flow. He argued that this is the engine of adult development, that it was through flow states that we actually mature as adults. Now he argued it was the primary driver of adult development. I think that was overstating the case a little bit. But he spent most of his career working on adult development and flow. So I was talking to him, and I'm a lifelong skier, and my plan for my later years was to ski as much as possible. And I'm a big mountain skier, which means I like to take big, big risks. And I like, you know, really gnarly, really scary, hard lines. And I was talking to Mike, and he. A bunch of his early essays had been translated out of Italian, and I read them. And he was always a outdoorsman. He was a rock climber and lived in Montana. Hiked a lot. Bless you. But I started to realize that this guy was a much more serious mountaineer and rock climber than he ever told anybody. Like, he was in these articles that got translated. I would tell you. And he was like, talking about early 60s Yosemite Valley rock climbers by name. I was like, there's no way you would know those names if you weren't in that community. And so I called him up to talk to him about this, and I was like, you know, we were talking about it. It. And he just. Out of nowhere, he's like, stephen, you got to be careful. And I was like, what do you. What do you mean? Have you lost the plot? What the fuck are you talking about, Mike? And he's like, you know, you do something climbing mountains, rock climbing your whole life for flow, and then you get to be my age, and some days you can't even get out of bed, forget about climbing mountains. You need a backup plan. You got to be careful. And he was just telling me, one flow junkie to another, and have a backup plan for how you get into flow as you age. Otherwise you could find yourself locked out of this state. And that's a real issue. And it really landed with me. And so other side of the story is I've been continuing to study peak performance aging and there's a whole bunch of new theories that said, you know, that I basically looked at in flow science and body cognition and network neuroscience, a couple other places, places that said you not only can you teach an old dog new tricks, old dogs should be better than younger dogs at learning certain new tricks. And if this stuff that was worked in the lab theoretically was accurate, anybody over 40, over 50, over 60, over 70, should be able to onboard really difficult, challenging physical skills, supposedly impossible skills. So I decided in my at 53, I was going to teach myself how to park. Ski park skiing is, is the discipline in skiing that involves doing tricks off jumps and on rails and boxes and wall rides. It's incredibly acrobatic, it's very dangerous, and for about 11 different biological reasons, it's considered almost just really hard to learn. If you're over 30, 35, and by the time you get to 40, 50, it's downright impossible. It's crazy. Most people, I have nothing funny to say. No.

Someone just, just spill. That's just.

I got the flow. Yeah. By the way, every time I hear somebody talk about it, I think I'm at a plumbing convention.

Yeah, exactly.

Thank you.

See, that's group flow right there. Just tackling.

Well done. Problem solved. What the hell was I saying?

Part scheme, park scheme.

We to test it, I made a list of 20 tricks that would cover zero to intermediate. And once you get to intermediate in any sport, you can sort of take the random falls out of the equation and you can be a little more intentional. It's a little safer. There are a bunch of reasons why I wanted to do this, but I had zero experience. I could skubic mountains. But that's like the difference between, you know, speed skating, where you're in contact with the surface of the earth and moving in a single direction, and figure skating, where it's above the surface of the earth and you're twirling and flipping and all that stuff. So radically different sport. And I figured if it took me five years, cool. It took me five years. It. I accomplished all 20 tricks on that trick list in under a season, which was wild. Ryan Wicks, my ski partner, Wave, who works with me, the Flair Research Collective Ryan has, was a former sponsored athlete, a park skier who had gotten injured, had a family, walked Away came back when I came back, and he made more progress in a single season than he's ever seen. And at that point, we were like, okay, this is cool and it's working, but we've got, like, the sexiest pilot study in the history. Pilot studies, but that's all we've done. So the following year, we came back, and this is the video Joe was going to talk about. And we took 17 older adults, ages 29 to 68, use the exact same protocol we were using, and in four days on the mountain, taught them how to park ski or how to park snowboard. We then stripped out the action sports because bare. Maybe not for everyone. I don't understand that, but apparently not for everyone. And we turned into a training called enter the gnar. That the whole goal of. We'll talk of this about this in a little bit. But mindset is crucial for peak performance aging. Having a positive mindset towards aging, meaning I think the second half of my life is filled with thrilling possibilities. I'm sure my best years are ahead. Ahead of me for a lot of neuroimmunological reasons, translates to an additional seven and a half years of health and longevity. So where to start with peak performance aging? You start with mindset. You start by working on your mindset. And with. When we stripped out the action sports, we just wanted to see if we could explode people's mindsets towards aging and, you know, maybe give them a. It worked beautifully in five. I think it was 340 people. 500 exaggeration. I think that 340 was the number. Worked really, really beautifully there. So now we're kind of confident that it works and onto something. But that's the story of those experiments are what, at the heart of our country. And you asked what I did.

Yeah, yeah. What did you learn about your body, your ability to perform? Like what?

So for this anything to make sense, I have to tell you one thing about flow. Flow states have triggers. You want more flow in your life? There are preconditions, conditions that lead to more flow. First thing to know, flow follows focus. It only shows up when all our retentions in the here and now. That's what all the triggers do. They drive our attention into the present moment. The most famous of these triggers, which I think somebody mentioned yesterday, is the challenge skills balance. We pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge of the task slightly exceeds our skill set. So you want to stretch but not snap. Put it emotionally. There's a sweet spot between anxiety, too much Stimulation and boredom. Not enough stimulation. What's known as the flow channel. If you speak physiology, it's the er, stopson curve. Years ago she accepted me high, sat down with a Google mathematician and tried to figure out what's the difference between challenge and skills in average folks. And they came up with 4% as the difference. And but it was a back of the envelope calculation. Wasn't real science, it was just a thing they did. Chip Conley actually told me about it. Mike didn't Chip Conley to told me about it. But we took it into the flow research collective and ran a couple years of studies on it. We found out it was pretty close to accurate. It's really hard to test, really hard to figure it out. But we thought it was really close to accurate. But and this is the first thing that we did in older adults and older here means anybody over 30 actually for reasons that we can get to. But once you sort of cross that threshold, all your trauma stays with you. Right. And we call it allostatic load. It's trauma. The impact of trauma over time on our physiology and our psychology. It's known as allostatic load. Allostatic overload is one of the number one causes of burnout. But what we started to figure out is that because of allostatic load in especially when you're going after difficult physical challenges, sweet spot is no longer 4 to 5%, it's down to 1%. So we it's way shrunk down and you don't even even notice it because a lot of it's subconscious. But there are subconscious breaks and governors on performance that tend to be there. So the idea was we're going to start with an established motor pattern, something that you can do 100% of the time with perfect success, no fear and build on it one micro emotion at a time because of this. So we were trying to go like one inch at a time was the motto. And for myself, for Ryan, for most of the people we trained, we actually had to hold people back, slowed them way, way, way down in how they'd normally want to progress. Even when they were everything was going well, even when everything was working, we slowed everybody down immensely. And it worked. You got to go slow to go fast and a lot of peak performance. And this was definitely, definitely the case here. So that was one of the main things we did.

What are the biggest obstacles and as people age that get in their way of I mean because the slow rot.

Right. I think they do the wrong thing. I mean really the biggest Obstacles is people do the wrong things, they reach for the wrong levers. So if you want to peak performance aging, in a sentence, everything you need to know about peak performance aging, if you want to rock till you drop, you have to engage on a regular, regular basis in challenging social and creative activities that demand. And all these words mean something. So we can talk about what they mean. Dynamic, deliberate play and take place in novel outdoor environments. That's the biggest lever we have at our disposal. I'll say it again. We want to engage in novel, creative and social activities. Novel, challenging, creative and social activities that demand dynamic, deliberate play and take place in novel, novel outdoor environments. Look at Genius Network. This is a challenging social and creative activity, right? Yeah, that. I mean, dynamic just means all five categories of functional fitness. So I said we have to train all our skills. What are those skills? Strength, stamina, agility, balance, and flexibility. Those are the five skills we have to train. And there are very precise numbers for this. The WHO, World Health Organization, we need 150 to 300 minutes of moderate to big. This is for peak performance aging, not for healthy aging or successful aging. For peak performance aging, meaning you really want to perform at your best. It's 150 to 300 minutes of stamina training a week. So aerobic training a week. Two strength days a week, three balance, flexibility and agility days a week.

You touch on some of these. If you took all of the things you know and gave someone one technique to immediately better their health, what would that one technique be?

Depends on the person. But the. So for a peak performance aging perspective, you start with mindset, and the next two things to focus on. Social activities are really crucial. So like it is, from peak performance aging perspective, you could be morbidly obese and. And you're going to go farther by having regular social contact than by losing weight. Social contact is rough equivalent of quitting smoking. Right. In terms. In terms of longevity and health. So social contact really, really matters. Change your mindset. And then this is a weird one. The single greatest correlate for preserving physical health and mental health is leg strength. You know, it, it's leg strength, which is odd. But they've done all these studies on cognitive, on cognitive reserve and preserving brain function and leg strength. They think it's because if you lose your legs, you lose your ability to move around and talk to people, basically. And social stuff stimulates our brain so much that we fall off a cliff without it. So that's one of the reasons. But they think there's other stuff that they just haven't found yet.

Yeah, what's a step by step method or way to get more easily into flow that everyone here can utilize going forward? And when we come back, we'll do Q and A and stuff with everyone.

So I don't know if there's a step by step. There's no one size fits all. There are 26 known flow triggers. And there stuff we all know. Novelty is a flow trigger, risk is a flow trigger. And that doesn't just mean physical risk, emotional risk, social risk, intellectual risk, pattern recognition. So let me tell you why my backup plan was interesting. When we link ideas together in a novel way, that's pattern recognition. It's fundamental to survival. It's what most neurons do at a basic level. And it produces dopamine. We get a little bit of dopamine and we all know this. We've ever done a sudoku crossword puzzle getting an answer right, that little rush of pleasure you feel, that's dopamine. And it's. And it's coming to you from pattern recognition. So creativity is a flow trigger. So when I say challenging creative activities, by the way, both of those are flow triggers. But the interesting thing about park skiing and why the plan was interesting to me is you can stack. You want to stack sort of creative experience on top of creative experience on top of creative. When you look at a terrain feature like oh, that's a mound of snow, I can throw a 180 off of it or I could grind across it or whatever it is that I was going to do, that's pattern recognition. So you can stack creative decision on top of creative decision. We were talking about this last night at dinner, right? You can stack creative decisions. Pop a creative decision on top of creative decision as you're skiing or snowboarding down a mountain. By the way, we. I got hired a bunch of years ago. I can't talk about the program or the coach, but for major college football program. And the idea was, if we can get our players into flow before practice, would injuries go down? And the answer is yes, that actually worked. What did we do? It was a football team and they all started practice. They always ran two laps around the football field. That was what everybody did to warm up. And we just put them in nature. We said, take it off the football field, go run the trails and interpret the terrain. So if you got a hill, go up an angle and come down with your body just like you were surfing or skiing or whatever, you're just running. And for the linemen who can't run that far. It was roll and do sort of the things you're going to be doing on the field, through the forest, in novel outdoor environments. And it worked. Tremendous amount of flow during practice, a lot less injury on the field. So it's not just skiing, snowboarding, that sort of thing that works here. But. But the other thing I want to say, one of the reasons novel outdoor environments are really crucial to this. So most of us work out, most of us probably don't work out outside. And really, if we do work out outside, we're not seeking out novel outdoor environments. Here's why it matters so much. One Especially from peak performance aging standpoint, we said earlier there are nine known causes of aging. If you've read Futures Fest and you think any of my work with Peter Diamandis, we talk a lot about it. All of them link back to inflammation. When we are in nature, most people know that 20 minutes in nature flushes stress hormones out of your system and will actually outperform most SSRIs for mild to moderate depression. It sort of equals out once you get to extreme depression. And there are reasons for this. If anybody's curious, come see me offline and I'll tell you why it works. But one outdoor environments are calming us down. Novelty is a flow trigger. When we encounter novelty, it produces dopamine and dopamine drives focus into the present moment. But the big deal from a peak performance aging standpoint, if you want to hang on to your mental function, three things are important. One is novel experiences, outdoor environments. Why? If you want to hang on to your cognitive function, you want neurogenesis, you want the birth of new new neurons, and you want new neural networks. Most of the neurogenesis in the adult brain takes place in a spot known as the hippocampus, which is a fancy Latin word for seahorse, because it looks like a seahorse. It's a deep brain structure. It does long term memory. It also does location. So from a hunter gatherer perspective, right, Remembering where you were when, like an emotionally charged thing, like I got attacked by a bear or there was ripe fruit on this fruit tree, happens is really crucial to survival. So the brain is specifically designed to remember where you are when you have emotionally charged experiences. That's what we birth, 700 new neurons every day in the hippocampus until basically we die. But that's what they're for. And so I always say peak performance is nothing more than getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. Peak performance aging is Getting our biology to work for us rather than getting against us when faced with the challenges and opportunities of aging. This is what I'm talking about when I say something like that. Novel outdoor environments use the brain the way the brain is designed to be used. And as a result we get to hang on to brain function for a lot longer. So that's the sort of the novel challenge portion of that.

Okay. So in our country, so you write a lot about. It's pretty much the journal of your skin and all the crazy ass stuff that you're doing. And then at the end of the book, you tie it all together. So this is a galley. The way that I physically read a book is I'll take like certain notes and stuff and I have like highlights and notes and everything in the, in the very end.

By the way, if you ever want to make an author feel good, let me just, let me just show you that having this much notes in a book makes the author feel really good.

Yeah. And what's cool about this and what's kind of cool about my job here is this. You know, I really have to go deep with this. What will people get out of this book and how do you suggest they utilize it to enhance and very much positively impact their existence?

One of the reasons it's sort of a diary is if you ever read the Art of Impossible, which is over there, it's sort of a. It's not a textbook, but it. It's essentially a textbook. It's friendlier and more fun to read, but it's essentially a textbook. But the thing, it's all about the science of peak Performance, but the application, even though it's called the Art of Impossible, it's about the science of peak performance. And I actually couldn't explain what the hell I meant by the title. The application of that science on a day to day basis in the face of real world world scary shit is an art. It's wildly different for all of us. And it's really hard to teach that to people. It's really hard to teach Applied Peak Performance because it's a daily thing. And writing this book in sort of a diary that this form allowed me to go day by day and really do Applied Peak Performance. Applied Peak Performance, Aging and group flow, which are the three things that haven't. That those don't exist. One of the reasons is it's a really complicated writing challenge to do that kind of thing and not bore the ever living out of the reader. Right. And so it was a complicated writing challenge to Solve. Which is why I don't think anybody else has really tried to do this. What's this? Jim Fix's book on running is the only other book that came a little bit close towards the end. He tried to do the same thing, but I, I just thought it would be a huge service to any who's trained with us or is interested in the application of this stuff. And as Joe pointed out, like, it's sort of an adventure story with some science woven through. And then at the end I tie it all together in a big way. And yes, it has to come at the end and not the beginning. Even though I know that would have made your life easier.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because at first I'm like, I'm reading all this stuff on skiing. What the hell's going on? And then.

Yeah.

And as you go through. And plus actually I always appreciate when other people suffer or figure things out. So I can make discoveries without having to go through all that. Not that you're going to bypass any of that. As a matter of fact, I think it really makes you want to be more. I can always speak from my own perspective and my own interpretation of it. This makes me really want to do a hell of a lot more in nature and go outside and also realize, you know, I have a tonal, I have a peloton, I go to gyms. But man, there are people. We have turned meditation and everything staring at a freaking screen. And there's so much that nature provides and you know, literally I have friends that based on their stress level, same diet, same everything, but when they're really stressed out, they have cortisol weight. All this. And one of the things you described, you know, we've had conversations numerous times in Genius Network. How do you solve one problem that solves five problems or solves ten problems? And the way you talk about hiking with your dogs while wearing a weight vest, you know, like you're doing all. You're doing several different things.

Yeah. By the way, if you're looking for one non action sport activity, if you're looking for one activity for a peak performance agent perspective, hiking with a weight vest is probably the single best thing you can do. And the bonus with the weight vest and I will. We have so the collective. We have a partnership with hyperware because we tested the ever living out of everybody else's weight vest. Theirs is the best. It's the best fit on your body. It's just hyperware.

Okay. If you just take an economic result as getting into flow state of what this can do for you, not just physically and mentally and adding years to your life as you get towards the end. And you write about this, the biggest thing from a money standpoint that I got out of this and we can maybe talk to it or.

That's so important.

Well, here's what I would say. I don't even know if we should even talk about it because I'd rather there's enough entrepreneurs in there because non entrepreneurs may not even get this, but get paid to grow old, right? So this literally the way you tie it all together at the end is it actually shows you how to get paid to get older.

Right?

And most people, they don't get paid to get older. As a matter of fact, their economic value goes down, or at least they perceive it that way. And the way you explain it and what you describe and what could happen if you, if you tap into this and if you utilize it. So he describes how to get paid to get grow old, but not in this, in the way, like here's the how to strategies. It's like just the way he describes who you become and what happens when you incorporate this. So I think you're going to get a tremendous amount out of it. Is there anything else you want to say before we break? And then we'll just come back.

Thank you for your time. Thanks for listening.

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