Action Sports for a Better Aging Experience

What model or what framework of adult development do you think is the most true or the most relevant specifically for peak performance?

We used to think mental decline was inevitable. Turns out that as we move into our late 40s and 50s, if we get it right, we gain access to whole new levels of intelligence, whole new levels of creativity, whole new levels of wisdom, whole new levels of empathy. People are flow-prone over their entire span of their life, but it drops once we lose our bodies. Once the bodies fall apart, a lot of the like peak performance aging formula is about preserving that physical function. Once you get to age 50, if you're not going forward, you're going backwards. As you age, flow is really important, but make sure you have lots of ways to get into flow. Have a lot of these leisure activities that drop you into flow right away because you're going to need it. What does it take to do the impossible? What does it take to level up your game like never before? What does it take for individuals, organizations, for even institutions to achieve paradigm shifting. Nothing is ever the same again. Breakthroughs.

Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance, access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Ryan Dorris, and together with bestselling Stephen Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio.

Hey listeners, this is Paul Austin, founder and CEO at Third Wave, and I am so excited to have Stephen Kotler on the podcast today. Stephen is a friend, and colleague, someone who we've had on the show previously. And in fact, this is our first repeat episode of the podcast. I've been hosting this 7 years, and this is the first time that we've had an individual guest come back on the show to talk about what we are up to. So in today's show, we go deep into peak performance aging. Steven recently published a book called "Nahar Country," Growing Old and Staying Rad about his experience learning park skiing at the ripe age of 55. And we talk about how as we grow older, we can still learn new things. And so in this episode, we go deep into the fundamentals around peak performance aging. So Steven Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning journalist, and the executive director of the Flow Research Collective. He is one of the world's leading experts on human performance. Steven is the author of 11 bestsellers, including The Art of Impossible, The Future Is Faster Than You Think, Stealing Fire: The Rise of Superman, Bold, and Abundance. His work has been nominated for 2 Pulitzer Prizes, translated into over 50 languages, and has appeared in over 100 publications, including The New York Times, Wired, Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, Time, and the Harvard Business Review. Alongside his wife, author Joy Nicholson, he is also the co-founder of the Buddy Sue Hospice Home for Old Dogs, a canine elder care facility, and Rancho de Chihuahua, a dog rescue and sanctuary. All right, that's it for now. I hope you enjoy my conversation today with Stephen Kotler. Hey listeners, welcome back to The Psychedelic Podcast. I'm your host, Paul Austin, today with our first ever repeat guests, Steven Kotler, the flow aficionado, the flow genius, the flow expert, the flow research guy. Steven, it's good to have you back on the show.

Thanks, Paul. I'm feeling very flowy. Super flowy. Yeah, super flowy. By the way, we should tell people that when we talk about that, my expertise is actually in plumbing technology. Right. Yeah, yeah.

Just to keep a little humility in there, right? So we had you on the show in early 2018, and this is right after Stealing Fire was published. And Stealing Fire was an incredible success. And yet you've also written, I believe, 10 other bestselling books. You've written 14 books in total, and you've really made a name for yourself when it comes to the overlap of flow, peak performance, and I think my sense is science with a journalistic bent, meaning science that is accessible and available to a broad range of people. And a recent book that you published, which we're going to talk about today in the podcast, is called Gnar Country: Growing Old, Staying Rad. And I'm just going to read the first paragraph from the COVID so we can use that as a launching off point. Cutting-edge discoveries in embodied cognition, flow science, and network neuroscience have revolutionized how we think about peak performance aging. On paper, these discoveries should allow older athletes to progress in supposedly impossible activities. After all, a world-class athlete such as Kelly Slater or Tom Brady can beat players half their age. But what about the rest of us? So to see if theory worked in practice, you, Steven Kotler, you've been studying human performance for over 30 years. Conducted your own, and I love this phrase, ass-on-the-line experiment in applied neuroscience and later-in-life skill acquisition to teach an old dog some new tricks. Interesting. And it overlaps a little bit with what we're learning about psychedelics in terms of how they bring the brain specifically back into a childlike state. And I'd love to open up our conversation today with just why write this book? What's the impetus for this book? What's the motivation behind Gnar Country?

So the book is about peak performance aging, and there were sort of— books come from, at least my books, they come from like a dozen places. So I could pick any story, but I think there's two here that are going to be most relevant. The first was something that— forget peak performance aging for a second. You know, the Flow Research Collective, we train folks in peak performance and wildly diverse group of people working like 130 countries and tens of thousands of people every month. But there is this commonality of like everybody we trained, which is the applied side of peak performance remained a mystery. Like you can stand on a stage, you can tell people this is how flow works, how peak performance works in the brain, in the body. But until you get to the day-to-day trenches of trying to put this stuff into practice, it's just words. And how to convey that information was really tricky. And nobody had really ever written a book about applied peak performance because you have to take on a really big challenge and then you have to essentially do a diary. And that would be mostly boring. It's a writing challenge, but, and that's why, but I knew that when going in, right? I was like, okay, I'm up for this writing challenge. Um, one, I thought the adventure I was going on lent itself to that. I could do it as the kind of, kind of storytelling I needed to not bore the shit out of my reader, but it was to solve a problem for our clients, which is like, what does applied peak performance really look like on a day-to-day basis? Part 1 and Part 2 was really sort of what the COVID says. So for reasons we could probably get to later on, flow science runs smack into adult development. So in a sense, a large portion of what do we mean by peak performance, or some portion of what we mean by peak performance, is also the same thing as what it means to become a very successful adult.

Right.

There's a tremendous amount of overlap there. And Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, while he's written a bunch of books on flow, a ton of books on flow and adult development arguing that flow is the driver or one of the main drivers of adult development. So why do we grow up? We grow up through flow states. And why does that make any sense on the other side of flow states? Because we're pushing on our skills to the utmost to get into flow. We learn stuff, and learning is way amplified in flow, right? So we come out the other side, we're more adaptable, we're more complex, wisdom increases, expertise increase, empathy increase. These are all things we associate with sort of maturity. So Csikszentmihalyi noticed this. A lot of other people noticed this. He worked on this, and he also worked on the question, does flow help us age better? And the answer is yes, for a ton of different reasons. It boosts the immune system. It specifically targets some of the real chronic issues of aging, on and on and on and on. And that was really prevalent. So the tradition I was in sort of moved in this direction, and I had been researching it for a while. And also there was this need to show stuff to our clients. And finally, okay, third thing, and this will summarize everything, and then I'll shut up because I don't mean to talk your face off, Paul. Third thing is, if you go into the field of what is now known as peak performance aging, and which is really like 14 different fields that have come together in the past 5 5 years to become Peak Performance Aging. What you learn is that the traditional theory of aging, which I'd like to call the long, slow rot theory, right? It's what we all grew up with. It's the idea that our mental skills decline over time, our physical skills decline over time, and there's nothing we can do to stop the slide. That was entirely true up to about 1995, and then holes started showing up in that research. And by today, or 5 years ago when the book got started, Essentially, that entire idea had been overturned almost completely. And the new thought was everything we used to think declined over time, mental and physical. We now thought, at least on paper, in labs, they're all use-it-or-lose-it skills. So if you never stop training these skills, you get to hang on to them. You could advance them far later in life than anybody thought possible. That was the theory. Nobody— well, I don't want to say nobody, because Ellen Langer at Harvard and a couple other people along the way had taken this question into the wild. but nobody had really taken it into the wild and said, okay, if this stuff is true, then the idea that an old dog can't learn tricks has to be, like, totally false. And in fact, maybe old dogs could really take on incredibly difficult, like, supposedly impossible tricks. So I decided if this stuff was true, I should be able to craft it into a learning theory and teach myself how to park ski in my 50s. Now, park skiing is the discipline in skiing that involves doing tricks off jumps, on rails, on wall rides, on boxes. It's very acrobatic, it's very dangerous. And for about 11 different biological reasons, essentially considered impossible or very difficult to learn over 30, 35. By the time you get to 40, 45, it's considered impossible. You get up to 50, like I was at 53 when I started the quest, and you're bleeping crazy is the only response anybody has, right?

It's like having a child in your mid-50s, basically. It sounds like it's right.

Yeah, it's not like, it's just not something people can really look at and say, oh, that's That's brilliant. You should absolutely do that. Let me help. That's not what happened. But on paper, that's exactly what was possible. And so I decided I would put it to the test. And that experiment run by myself and one other person initially, and let's just say massively successful, and then rerun by a group of 20 older adults in a double-blind study using the same protocol, getting the same fantastic results. So it wasn't just us. And so the book itself tells the story of mostly my experiment, my ski partner's experiment, but it goes into that at the very end, the other, the other study. And we've since, you know, run even larger studies than that with the same protocols and the same ideas. But that's— wow— long and short what the book is. And we could talk in crazy detail about any, any direction you want to go, but I'll stop there.

Well, and I want to— there's, there's a couple of things that I want to go deeper into. One is just adult development. It's something that we talk about on the podcast here and there, but I think one, one follow-up follow-up question that I had is what model or what framework of adult development do you resonate most with? Do you think is the most true or the most relevant specifically for peak performance? Because we have, we have Wilbur's model, we have Keegan's model, we have Maslow's model, right? There's, there's probably dozens of models of adult development. Which one or two maybe do you feel like they've really—

you got into That's interesting because, uh, we actually— at first I'm gonna go, I'm gonna give you a meta, the highfalutin answer, and then a real practical answer. Cool. At a high level, what I have discovered is if you look at Chick Setme High's, he doesn't really have a model as much as he has a flow-based argument for how development occurs. Um, You find, for example, Keegan's model sits totally inside of Csikszentmihalyi's model. Keegan's not saying anything different. He's using all kinds of fancy made-up Bob Keegan language, right? Which is like the, you know, angels dancing on a head of a pin as far as I'm concerned, and totally needlessly complicated. And Wilbur, uh, not as needlessly complicated, but really sort of the same thing. In like 2,000 more words per sentence, right? With a lot of history in there. And I'm not saying— and some physics. And I'm not saying bad. I'm really not. I think everybody has to understand this stuff through their own language. That's what language is about, what we do with it. So I'm not judging anybody for their choice. I'm just sort of like, well, I'm poking fun at Keegan because this stuff is so damn hard to read. But I think Csikszentmihalyi's model of flow really holds them all because most of them are. And the only problem with it, of course, is that Csikszentmihalyi was very flow-centric. And the true model seems to be that one of the major drivers of adult development are these profound altered states of consciousness. Sometimes it's flow, often it's flow, but awe seems to play a role. Trance states, meditate, like a lot of this stuff, psychedelics, as you know, it seems like altering our consciousness is built into how we develop. And that's what Keegan sort of stumbled onto, though he didn't want to say— nobody wanted to say that out loud until fairly recently because you would have been laughed out of academia for the statement, right? But a lot of people said it very discreetly along the way. But like, you know, Keegan, when he finally mentioned psychedelics and other things, he does it in a tidy little footnote. Right? Like, it's a real— it's a flow. It's a footnote. It's not in the body of the text at all. But anyways, that's the highfalutin crazy answer. Here's the practical answer. So we know if you're going to age successfully, there are gateways you have to pass through. There are certain things you have to do at age 30, by age 20, by 40, by 50, right? And What's interesting is some of these things correspond with models, some of them don't. But for example, by age 30, if you're going to really thrive in the second half of your life, you need to have solved the crisis of identity. Right. And this is Erickson's model, basically. Right. And he said we develop through these crises with identity. The only thing Erickson seems to have gotten wrong, or we live so long now that the timetable has completely changed. He put 12 to 18 as like, you're going to figure out, I don't know, any 18-year-olds, myself included, who had a clue who they were. But we know biologically that if you don't solve it by 30, you start to have real issues. And one of the big ones happens by 40. By 40, we have to solve the crisis of sort of what economists talk about as match fit or match quality. Just basically your vocation, your avocation has to match with your identity, with who you are in the world, your values, your strengths, all that stuff. or to put it into the terms that Csikszentmihalyi would use and a lot of the humanists, you have to live with passion, purpose, and flow, right? So there's a bunch of different adult development models in there, as you can see. But like, so the end by 50, this is an interesting one. And this comes out of the Harvard Adult Development Project, probably more than anything else in the Terman cohort group at Stanford, these long studies, 80-year, 100-year studies. Of adult development where people have said, hey, the cohorts aren't exactly sort of like— mostly they studied white men in all these cohorts except for Stafford, where there's some women in one of the groups. And so people are saying, suspect, does everybody age this way? Who knows? But what we learned in these groups, by 50, you have to have forgiveness for self and other, right? If you don't put down those old grudges, everything after that sucks. And then it gets really sort of interesting. And this is a lot of the work that I have been involved in. Like, what do you do post-50? There are other moderators, but I want to stop there just because this is sort of the answer to your question, which is from a practical side, you can actually look at the data and say, oh, this person got this right. And then, by the way, a lot of the theories of child development, Piaget and those stuff, are still— even Erikson. They're maps, you know what I mean? It's like the Big Five, right? The Big Five personality profile. They use semantic analysis to get there. In other words, they started with the English language and they said, how many adjectives describe personality? And then they put them into categories and they come up with 5 basic categories that all of our descriptions of personality fit into. And then they went looking for these in people and tying them to genetics and other things. And is it Is it 100% accurate? Not at all. You know what I mean? It's a made-up framework that helps us think through a puzzle. Daniel Kahneman gave us dual processing theory, system 1, system 2. Is that neurobiologically accurate? No, it's really not. But is it an incredibly useful metaphor to think with? Yes. And even Kahneman pointed that out. He's like, look, the neurobiology is going to be different, but from the point of view of observer and categories that are useful to talk about, You know, it's sort of like in psychedelic research, right? Somebody had to coin the phrase cosmic unity. Does it capture the experience? But at least we could talk about it.

Well, and this reminds me of what you've done for flow, right? Prior to you really stepping in and professionally committing to this and building out the companies that you've built and writing the books that you've built, I feel like a lot of the, the conversation on flow was more academic. It was more about the map. And you acted as a phenomenal bridge to take the map step into the territory and actually apply it in a significant way?

I had two interests when I came to flow, and they never changed, right? I wanted to put flow science on a hard science footing and decode the neurobiology of flow. And when I look at our most recent paper in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews on what happens in the brain as we transition into a flow state, I feel like it's 30 years later. But from the point I had, and the funny thing is, if you go back to West of Jesus, which is 30 years ago or 20 years ago, and I basically lay out what I think flow is in the brain, it's hypothetical, it's speculative, but I give you two paragraphs of this is what I think it's going to be. The funny thing is, 30 years later, yeah, there's way more complexity in what's actually going on, but I wasn't really wrong, which was kind of amazing. So that was interesting to me. The other thing was It always bugs me in academia because, look, in a sense, I'm in academia, right? And I do that work. But if you peel back the fancy language, academia— and I'm going to use the term dude as a gender-neutral term— it's just dudes with questions. You know what I mean? Philosophy is the example I always give. There's this guy, lived a long time ago, at a time people were wearing bedsheets, basically. And he was trying to figure out how it is that kids intuitively understood math? Why is it that every kid understands if you have 2 oranges and I give you a third, you get 3? Why is it that we intuitively understand geometry? That guy's name was Plato. That was the world of forms. He was trying to figure out why the hell the kids intuitively understand math. And the answer was the world of forms. The entire tradition of philosophical intuition and sort of Western philosophy comes out of that. But it starts with a guy who's like, Why is it that math seems to be a perfect description of reality and come inborn into people? That's weird. What's up with that? And that's exciting. When you tell the story, when you're like, this is what happened, this was the puzzle he was trying to solve. Everybody gets that puzzle because we're human and we think about these things and we ask ourselves these questions. So if you take it out of all the fancy— and the fancy language is great because it's precise and it's accurate and it's really serving a function. But you can strip it all back and anybody can get involved in the discussion. And I sort of thought in the beginning, because I wanted to decode flow science, and it was very clear to me that the psychologists were not up to the job. Like, if you look at when I come into the puzzle in the late '80s and the '90s, if you go into the deep psychological papers, they are like arguing over the most arcane, absurd questions and not talking about anything super practical, super real, super like what all we care about, or at least what I cared about. So I was really annoyed. I was like, it's one thing to have precision language. It's another thing to get lost dicking around for 20 years precision language because I personally want to decode ultimate human performance, right? Like, isn't that the thing we want? So I think it came from both of those urges and just a bullheaded willingness to stick to it for 30 years. And the fact that people such as yourself and, you know, a million other people came into the conversation along the way and went, hey, wait a minute, like, we want to have this conversation too. And maybe some of them were, you know, got— saw that they could enter the conversation through my language. A lot of people came a lot of different ways, but like, that was the point, right? I learned that sort of— my early mentor was Andy Newberg. And you got Andy Newberg, Richie Davidson, these scientists, they did something radical. They went and talked to the spiritual people, right? Andy Newberg wanted to know why Buddhist monks felt one with everything and why Franciscan nuns felt one with God's love, why it shows up in all these meditative traditions. And so he did something that almost got him kicked out of the University of Pennsylvania. He went and had conversations with Buddhists. right? And Catholics and put them into scanners. Nobody had done that before. So a lot of progress in my field had come from people having conversations across the wall and saying, hey, you're having these experiences. Let's talk about what the science might tell us about these experiences so maybe more people can have the discussion. And that was the whole goal. And here we are a bunch of years later. And a lot of people are having this discussion and that's fantastic. That was mission accomplished in a sense, but there were so many thousands of people who were on this same mission, you know what I mean? But got it there and that's cool.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. Thanks for listening to Flow Research Collective Radio. Before we dive back into our conversation, there's something to consider. It may be that today We are under-challenged. We're drowning in comfort. Now, in his book Antifragile, statistician Nassim Taleb pointed out something that's of key importance: quote, "Undercompensation from the absence of challenge degrades the best of the best. The best horses lose when they compete with slower ones and win against better rivals." Now, put another way, who we could be, or our highest potential, is squandered by safety, coddled by comfort. Comfort. If you want to train with us at the Flow Research Collective, it will require boldness, but what's life without a little adventure, right? To learn more about how you can get more flow in your life and achieve your professional and personal goals in less time and with more ease, go to getmoreflow.com. If you're a good fit, we'd love to train with you. All the best.

A collective effort, and there are often individuals that, like, you know, you've, you've put so much of your time and energy and effort behind this, and, and you are— you're not a small person by any stretch of the imagination. So to have all of that effort has been, you know, you, you really have been a giant in the field and that's been, that's been incredible to witness. So one thing I want to get into— absolutely. And it's, it's true, you know, it's absolutely true. Um, one thing I want to get into is a little bit of the historical context around flow. It's something we haven't talked about before and it just—

I love that. Yeah.

It was starting to come up as like you talked about, really you're talking about between the age of 12 and 18, ideally before the age of 30, there needs to be some sort of rite of passage with an altered state of consciousness. Right.

And so indigenous groups have had this interesting, I don't know if I said that, but it is not interpretation. And I will tell you just as a, for historical sake. So I got inspired a lot of my work. There was a guy in the 80s who was an Outside Magazine journalist named Rob Shultz, wrote a really famous book that I've talked about called Bone Games: Zen Shamanism and the Search for a Trend. Extreme Sport, Zen Shamanism, the Search. I gotta read this.

I've not read this.

He's the first—

Bone Games.

Okay, Bone Games. He's the first person I know of through the door. Like, he connects the psychedelic, like, all that stuff. He's the guy who walks the action sports path into flow first. I had been looking at the phenomenon. I didn't actually know the word flow until I read his book. And he, by the way, this was the other thing about Schultes that I was already geeked by neuro and distrustful of the psychologist. And Schultes argues in terms of neuroscience because he's working right at the time that the endorphin hypothesis, that is, endorphins at the heart of flow, flow is being postulated. So he just leaves the psychology behind and talks about neurobiology. So I read this book, and not only was he talking about the very thing I was most interested in, the crossover, right? These rituals of flow, which is what you were talking about, which is what triggered this. But he was talking about it in a neurobiological context, and I was an outside magazine writer, and that was a magazine I always wanted to write for also. So, I was reading all of their great writers and the best of outside and all this stuff and stumbled upon Rob Shultz's work.

Bone Games. We'll have to check that out. So, with psychedelics, we know that they were used. There was a book written, The Immortality Key, a few years back. We had Brian Murarescu, the author. He talked about the use of psychedelics in ancient Greece in particular. Flow really came onto the scene from what I understand in the '70s or '80s as a term. From an ancient perspective, how did ancient societies talk about flow? Ancient philosophers talk about flow. What has been the context and the relevance before, let's say, modern times around flow state? Yeah.

So, that's a great question. So, there was a core question, is enlightenment flow? right? Like, that's one of the core questions you've got to start by answering. Is enlightenment flow— are we talking about the same thing? It turns out no, not at all. Not neurobiologically, not from a historical context. And one of my favorite experiences ever is— so, Yongey Mingyar Rinpoche, who is a Tibetan Buddhist, and he is one of the people who worked with Richard Davidson. And so he knows some neuroscience. but he's a Tibetan Buddhist. He gave a lecture right before COVID where he actually gave the Tibetan word for flow. And he said he was like, there's this experience. And he said the closest thing what we have in another, in the Asian tradition is also satori, a brief near period of enlightenment, right? Different from permanent. And flow is a state, right? It's not a stage. Enlightenment is a stage. And so all People have looked at enlightenment. Andy Newberg, my mentor, has done a lot of this work on the neurobiology of enlightenment, and it looks like more kind of permanent changes in the brain than a brief temporary state. So you have these. And then in the Western tradition, I mentioned earlier philosophical intuition. If you actually go through— so one of my favorite things to do is you can go through the Bible, or you can go through the philosophical tradition or the scientific tradition. But the philosophical tradition is actually great because they write about their experiences and they're trying to explain it and point at the flow states. So Spinoza has this classic experience that we call philosophical intuition, this classic intuitive story. And when you listen to what he's describing, he's describing a deep flow state with cosmic unity and like a macro flow state. He's got all the elements. And that's so you can look, you can reread a lot of the philosophy around philosophical intuition until you basically get to the Enlightenment in a sense, even through the Romantics though. And once you get to the phenomenologists like Husserl and Heidegger, it changes. It becomes much more scientific and language of mind and the language changes. But literally, like, you can read flow through the history of science. It ends enters our vocabulary. The first person to put a term on it that I know of was Goethe, who coined the term Rausch, which is overflow for overflowing joy. Nietzsche wrote about Rausch. So when I talk about Nietzsche working on flow, he worked on Rausch. Now, what they were trying to quantify— this is really funny. This always cracks me up. Germany, as you know, has a long history of, like, drunken beer festivals, Oktoberfest, right, among others. And So, there was this sort of communitas, like a drunken revelry at scale when everybody sort of comes together, this shared giant collective altered state, group flow at scale is communitas. Rausch was a term that was trying to describe communitas and they were trying to figure out where it came from. And, it could go terribly wrong and it could go terribly right. If it went terribly right, it produced crazy amazing works of art and creativity and philosophy and it went go terribly wrong, you've got basically drunken brawls at scale, right? So they were looking at these questions. I think James works on— William James writes about flow and varieties of religious experience. Of course, it's called different things because he's looking at all these different religious traditions. And then Maslow lumped flow with other peak experiences, but it's really clear from sort of reading what was going on, what he was studying, he was really looking at flow and awe much more than he was looking at psychedelic experiences. You know what I mean? He was looking at what did Albert Einstein do to get creative or what did Eleanor Roosevelt or Franklin, right? He was looking at what he defined as success and he found most. And his sick definition of successful, it's important to point out, wasn't just I made a lot of money, it did good in the world. It was I was a good person. Kindness was really built. All the humanists felt this way was really important. So he's looking at what makes a good person and successful in the world. And the answer was these peak experiences, which are mostly flow states. And we now know the mechanism. It's the wisdom and empathy, et cetera. That you get on the other side of a flow state that he was also looking at. And then Chick Set Me High comes along and all he does is Maslow is looking at sort of an elite group of people, right? And Chick Set Me High just asked the common man-woman question, which is, what does it feel like for all of us? How do the rest of us do peak performance? We know now what these geniuses do. So what about the rest of us? And he takes that question. And goes around the world and conducts what is the original, the founding flow study, still one of the largest studies that was done in positive psychology. So that's sort of the history. You can go bit by bit. You could talk about Croce and an aesthetic flow, but it's not flow. He's talking about an aesthetic intuition. And it's sort of this cross between awe and flow and art-inspired empathy where you feel what the artist was creating, which is the origin of empathy came out of art. They were trying to figure out how it is that a piece of art makes you feel the same as the creator felt when the creator created the piece of art. So they were looking at that stuff. Anyways, that's a really long-winded technical answer that you probably didn't want, but there you go.

This is precisely, no, the satori to the rausch to flow.

Now, I have, by the way, Paul, I have to say, let me just put this out here because I have to say it. I have for decades now been gathering flow terms around the world.

Okay?

So please find me on— if you're listening to this and you know flow terms that I don't know in other languages, @StephenKotler on social media, please just shout at me because I've been gathering them. And for this very reason, it's like Andy Newberg said, have the conversation. Listen to the really precise details because there's neurobiology perhaps underneath those details, and those are clues. So, like, our language is a container for really complicated things that are hard to put words around, right? So, like, and we do it differently in different cultures. And so that I find it very useful.

Okay, I have a— this is going to be a slight of a tangent, but it will come back. Into the, the core of what we're doing. Uh, so, so with flow, we've talked about altered states, right, and how flow is a form of altered states. And I believe it was Wilbur who said altered states lead to altered traits, um, or they can lead to altered traits, right? That's, that's, that's sort of the nut of them. It's not just about the state itself, but how are they actually shifting and changing an individual. And, and one thing that you mentioned as it relates to, to Maslow Uh, was the sense of kindness that can come about from being in a state of flow. Now, one of the things that you've been focused on professionally is bringing flow into, let's say, the corporate workplace. And we know that generally corporate workplaces are pretty cutthroat. Uh, they're highly competitive, they're highly political, and I'm curious just what you've noticed as As you—

so you gotta let me, let me back this up because I think we—

do you know where I'm going with this question? You get a sense of where I'm going.

I know where you're going with this question, but I also want to, uh, I want to sort of like— you have to understand that when I started this work, I wasn't really interested. I always say that like the work I do is not altruistic in the beginning at all. Like my interest is helping animals. I like, you know, I wanted more flow for me and my friends in the beginning. Like that's where all this sort of started for sure. And it's only been more recently that I've wanted to actually take it to the masses. And I really feel like I'm smuggling into the heart of the mainstream. I mean, I'm smuggling it out loud and in public, but I'm smuggling. And I will flat out tell you, if what you do is make widgets for a living, you're going to use all this flow work to make better widgets faster and you're going to be more productive and all that stuff. And that's totally true. And that's what people want. And that's fine. I could give a shit because I don't necessarily think we need more widgets. But on the other side of widgets, you're more empathetic, you're wiser, your sphere of caring has expanded, often beyond the border of species. Right? So we know this about flow. We know this about psychedelics. We know this about altered states in general, that it expands the sphere of caring beyond the border of species. So I think humans are we're horrible species and that all life is equal, right? Empathy for all was the motto at the heart of Last Time in Cyberspace and Devil's Dictionary, the two books I wrote sort of about these ideas. So that's what flow gives you over time. Altered states in general do that, but flow is very reliable and there's less noise in the signal, I believe. So to me, that's a fair trade, which I think is brilliant.

And I'm just curious about what are the tangible outcomes of that? How do people shift and change? How do organizations shift and change? What have you just noticed and observed as you've started to do that?

So I've seen everything from the— this was probably not what the organization intended to— and let me just speak to that. So I've seen We do a lot of work inside the Fortune 500, the Fortune 100. We're brought into one of those companies by their head of innovation. Company's going to remain nameless. And we took our training and flow follows focus. And so if you want more flow in your life, anything that drives focus into the present moment will amplify flow. One of the big drivers is autonomy. Money, right? So we, we like to steer the ship, and when we're steering the ship, we pay way more attention to where it's going, right? So the head of innovation at Fortune 100 company X brought us in, and after taking our 8-week training, which he thought was fantastic and completely changed his life— changed his life so much that he had to quit his job. So we've seen that, right? Which is like, wherever— I mean, Yes, everybody probably in the end is better off for that, but like, talk about unintended consequences. And we've, um, have we massively shifted corporate culture anywhere? I don't think so. Um, but I mainly don't think so because corporate culture is something that tends to shift slowly over time. Are we changing corporate culture? Yes, we are. That I can say for sure. But I think the questions you're asking are like finish line questions, and I don't necessarily know if they're answerable. So let me put it this way. I'm somebody who gets into flow fairly frequently, and I'm competitive as hell, but I will flat out tell you, in the writing world, I want to be the best writer in the history of the universe. And I know that's not a thing, but it doesn't change the fact that I want to be that. I mean, one of the reasons I get to work with a lot of professional athletes is because I'm wired like that right now. I'm also very wired cooperatively. And one of the hardest parts about leading my companies, for example, has been to realize that as a leader, you can't always be cooperative. Sometimes as a leader, the best way to be cooperative is say, oh, no, that's a bad idea. Let's not do that. Right. Which I normally would. So I had to really shift how I did that. Into something that maybe seems more competitive. Right. That's a bad idea. Seems more competitive. But actually, I know if I let my employee work on an idea for 3 months and then say, oh, no, that's the wrong idea, which is what I would naturally do because I'm cooperative and go test it out and let's check it out. But I've learned that if somebody's spent 3 months of their life investing in an idea and then you take it away from them, they're mad. That's not kind. Right. But that can seem like a lot of other things. It's actually, you know, I'm being kind, but it doesn't look like it. Right. So I've seen— I don't know, that answer was all over the place. Did it satisfy at all? Like 1%, 2%? 2%.

But like the— and sort of the larger relationship that I'm drawing here is what you wrote about in our country with peak performance as people age or with aging.

Yeah, let me talk about this because this is cool. So what we have learned, and it's a big we, but you got to shout out Gene Cohen, who sort of built the National Institute of Aging as the guy who really drove this forward. We used to think, right, mental decline was inevitable. And now we know, as I said, it's all use it or lose it skills. And bonus, turns out that as we move into our late 40s and 50s, if we get it right, there's a moderator that matters here. We gain access to whole new levels of intelligence, whole new levels of creativity, whole new levels of wisdom, whole new levels of empathy. And, I can go into kind of a lot of detail about what you're gaining, but intelligence, you'll understand this immediately because it's seen in psychedelics as well. You get multi-perspectival thinking. You gain the ability to— black and white thinking goes out the window and you're like, "Oh, it's all gray and I can see from multiple perspectives." And, big picture thinking comes online and like never before. So in ways that we really can't access before. So people get much smarter, that creativity expands as well. And it's not just any creativity, it's divergent, outside the box, far-flung pattern recognition that increases the most. And this, as somebody who trains people in creativity, is the hardest aspect of creativity to train. And you get it naturally in your 50s. And then you get wisdom and empathy. And wisdom, just so it's a clear neurobiological trait, we know what it's composed of. Think of it as social intelligence and emotional intelligence writ large. That's short version, and that's not entirely right, but that's sort of a shorthand for what we talk about when we talk about wisdom. And why did this catch my attention? So I wrote a bunch of years ago, a book called Bold, which was about exponential entrepreneurship, right? How companies could tackle grand global challenges and make a lot of money by helping a lot of people. And after that book came out, I did a lot of speeches and I talked to a lot of CEOs. And when CEOs talk to a guy like me, conversation is often about training and hiring, right? How do I hire for peak performance? How do I train for peak performance? And My first question was always like, well, what are you training for? Right? Like, that's a big broad thing. What do you want in your employees? And hundreds, thousands of these conversations over a lot, over a decade. Right. And I always, I didn't always, 90% of the time I heard one or two answers, often both at the same time. I would hear some version of, I need more creativity. I need more innovation. The rate of change in the world is so fast. I don't know how we're going to keep up. We're good at the marketing. We're good at the sales, but the innovation, we don't know how to do it. The second thing I would hear is stuff that has come to the vogue now as psychological safety. And it's important in the workplace, but it basically was, I want wise, empathetic employees because psychological safety is so important that if you don't have empathetic employees, you can't get psychological safety. And without psychological safety, there's zero team performance and no flow, right? Like, it's a flow blocker as well. So that was a real issue. Nobody was using the term empathy, per se, but that's what they were talking about. And where I heard it most clearly was from people who had been swayed by— I think Jeff Bezos has had a bigger influence on 21st century business than almost anybody save Elon. Maybe you can argue otherwise, but I think Jeff, more people have really copied him. And one of the things he has said over and over again is the mantra of 21st century business is customer-centric thinking. And that's why you need empathetic employees, right? Without empathetic, nobody's thinking like a customer. So the reason this was so lodged in my head along the way is I knew about Gene Kohn's work, and I knew that people over 50 were the very people who were getting kicked out of the workforce and laid off. And yet, if you listen to the employers, these are your dream employees. And there were some caveats. There were some reasons they had for not hiring older employees around sick days and fitness and risk aversion. And that hurting, uh, the innovation, creativity. And so those are the skills I worked on. And I, like, a lot of, a lot of the work that I've been doing is how do you train down risk aversion as we age, and how do you preserve physical function as we age, because it allows us to take full advantage of these superpowers. And there's a, there's a lot there, and I could unpack that if you want. But, um, the, what would have— the answer to your question, what was really sort foremost in mind when I was writing this book is, holy crap, like, this is the dream workforce of the 21st century. People should be hiring the over-50 crowd in droves. And that's not what's happening. I mean, it's easier now that people are working from all over the place because you no longer— you've got employees, you don't quite know what they look like, or it takes you a while, and they sort of worked your way into your good graces before you find out, oh wow, this person's in their 70s. So a lot of the ageism biases, that sort of stuff goes away because you don't, you don't see people as much, perhaps. But, um, it's a real— it's, it's an interesting issue, um, for sure.

And, and so just to land this, of those lessons that you learned from writing Bold, from talking with CEOs, from starting to get into the aging sort of, you know, peak performance aging in workplace, what practical things did you then apply as you learned how to park ski in our country?

Let's not answer that question because it's going to be very Parks being specific. And let me instead pull back and give you peak performance aging in a single sentence. And let's decode the sentence and then we can come back to park skiing and seeing how the sentence applies. But let's stay with the practical. Now, I mean, there's a bunch of terms in the sentence. The only one that's going to be unfamiliar to people is dynamic. And when I use the term dynamic, so as we age on the physical side, we have to train up strength, stamina, agility, balance, and flexibility. And there's very specific— the World Health Organization has said, look, peak performance aging, 150 to 300 minutes of aerobic activity, stamina a week. It's 2 strength training days, 3 balance, flexibility, agility. So it's very specific. Or pick one activity that blends all those motions. That's a dynamic activity. Skiing. You're using strength, stamina, balance, flexibility, and agility all at once. And there are actually bonuses to dynamic motion from a peak performance aging perspective, in that when we are dynamic, it actually amplifies the birth of new neurons in our brain for a whole bunch of different reasons. But anyways, the sentence is this: if we want to sort of rock till we drop, as I've become fond of saying, you want to regularly engage in challenging creative and social activities that demand dynamic, deliberate play. Deliberate play is a technical term we come back to, but you get the idea, and take place in novel outdoor environments. It is literally peak performance aging in a single sentence. And before we dive into it, let me just high-level mention one other thing. If you've been listening to the discussion around anti-aging, around longevity, around biohacking, you've been hearing lots of hot and heavy talk about boosting our mitochondria or taking this supplement or that supplement or ice baths or this or that. And the thing I want to point out is that there is no supplements, pharmacology, or any of that built into what I just said. The thing about all the psychopharmacology and the supplements and the stuff that people are taking is brand new. And historically, regenerative medicine, anti-aging medicine, that's about 10% correct, 90% wrong. And maybe we're getting better over time. But stuff I just said, all of it, there's 60 to 70 years worth of hard, hard, hard dozens and dozens and dozens of studies, not tens of thousands of studies that show what I just said is the formula. And it's interesting because you can't own that formula, right? Like, nobody can patent it. You can't sell it. There's nothing you could do with it other than just sort of say it out loud and live it. But that's the formula. And Incredibly well documented.

Can you say it once more? Just to have it once more.

And then I can break down what bits and pieces mean. If you want to regularly engage in challenging creative and social activities that demand dynamic, deliberate play and take place in novel outdoor environments. So let's break it down one at a time. The first thing you need to know is a bunch of terms in there are actually flow triggers. So flow is so important. Peak performance aging, And I could really spend the next 10 minutes talking about why, but like slows down the aging process, helps you live longer, blah, a bunch of stuff really fundamental and massively improves quality of life. So makes you want to live longer also, which really matters. Challenging activities which push on our skills drive flow. So a bunch of these are flow triggers. So challenging activities, flow trigger creativity. Also a flow trigger. When we make creative decisions and link ideas together, you get dopamine. Dopamine drives focus. Focus drives flow. So creativity is a flow trigger. But also, I said Gene Kohn did all this work. There's these superpowers of aging, more intelligence, creativity, empathy, and wisdom. There's a moderator. If then we talked about it earlier, you can't enjoy your 40s unless you solve the crisis of identity. These are moderators. If then conditions at 50, you have to engage in creative activities. Creative activities is what train the brain to start thinking multiperspectivally. And all the stuff that comes on, if you're not regularly engaging in creative activities, you're not going to get the superpowers of aging. These superpowers of aging are what allow, help us stave off some of the bad stuff that comes with age, right? It's not that the stuff doesn't come, it's that you can fight back against it. But the point is really clear. Once you get to age 50, if you're not going forward, you're going backwards. So this stuff is coming for you. You can fight against it, but you have to really do it actively. So challenging and creative social activities. We know that social activities maintain cognitive function, and we know that people with robust social networks and social lives live 8 additional healthy years than people without. So very clearly shown in the data again and again. So that's what that's about. We can go more into the benefits of a robust social life, but you get it. Dynamic is the next term. We talked about that. That hits all 5 categories of physical things that need to be trained over time. Deliberate play is the next term. So you've heard about deliberate practice, Anders Ericsson's repetition with incremental advancement. 10,000 hours gets you to mastery. Okay. High-level, big-picture, peak-performance aging thing. If you want to stave off cognitive decline, you want to preserve mental function, not get Alzheimer's or dementia, you have to build up what's known as a cognitive reserve. This is essentially how you fight back. And there are most decline in the brain takes place in the prefrontal cortex. And the prefrontal cortex is where two traits live more than most expertise and wisdom. They live in the prefrontal cortex. We learn a new skill. It forms this incredibly redundant neural network across the prefrontal cortex. And because it's so redundant, it makes it more impervious to cognitive decline. So the more expertise we get, the more wisdom we get, the more protected we are against Alzheimer's and dementia and cognitive decline. Again, really well established. This is why you hear lifelong learning matters so much. So So next question, what's the fastest way to learn? If lifelong learning matters so much, you've got to be able to onboard new learnings. We know being in flow helps a lot. You would think deliberate practice helps a lot, but it turns out that's not actually true. There have been a bunch of kind of people who have argued with Anders Ericsson. And Anders Ericsson, by the way, he passed away not too long ago, was a lovely, lovely man, was a friend of mine, and I was one, somebody who argued with him. Because flow amplifies the path to learning. But we were friends and we would go to the same peak performance conferences together sometimes, not together, but we would meet at these conferences. My point being, one of the big breakthroughs was that deliberate play, which is repetition with improvisation. Instead of doing the same thing again and again, do the same thing but improv on top of it, it's actually so much better for learning. There's neurochemical reasons. When we play, we don't just get dopamine, the reward for doing the thing again, we get hitting our goal, we get endorphins with it. So this amplifies memory, and I could go on and on. Also, when we play, there's no shame or self-consciousness, or like a lot of stuff that blocks learning goes away. So deliberate play radically outperforms deliberate practice as a path towards learning. And then novel outdoor environments— novelty is a flow trigger. Novel outdoor environments serve two purposes. One, outdoor environments in general reset the nervous system, right? They calm us down. We know this— 20-minute walk in the woods, you're getting as much serotonin as you get from SSRIs, etc., etc. Um, there's a lot going on there, but there are 9 known causes of aging, biological causes of aging. What do they have in common? Stress and inflammation. So anything that works as an anti-inflammatory, anti-stress device is anti-aging. Why is flow so important for fighting aging? Right? One of the reasons is as we move into a flow state, there's this release of nitric oxide which pushes stress hormones out of our system. It resets the nervous system to zero. Huge benefits for aging, right? If stress and inflammation is the cause of all the causes of aging have in common, anything that lowers this. And nothing is more potent at kind of de-stressing us in the moment than flow. So novelty is there because it's a flow trigger. Novel outdoor environments are there because they calm us down a ton. And finally, last bit of information, and then I'll be done with this, is we mentioned neurogenesis earlier, the birth of new neurons, right? You obviously want to preserve brain function and you want new neurons and you want to protect the ones you have. Most of adult brains continue to produce about 700 new neurons every day, even late in life. But it's where they come from that's important here. And they predominantly come from the hippocampus. The hippocampus is a part of the brain that has long-term memory, but it also does location. It has place cells. It has grid cells. Why is this important? Because when we are hunter-gatherers, remembering where you were when you discovered the ripe fruit tree, or the watering hole, or where you got attacked by the saber-tooth tiger. That was survival, right? So the brain is built hardwired, has a really easy time remembering novel experiences that take place in outdoor environments. And that gives us new neurons and preserves brain function. So what you want to do is if the new learning, the expertise and wisdom, right, what you want it to do is to, like, build a really rich network that goes into the associative cortexes, which is where memory lives. And this is the best way to do that. So you're preserving mental function and physical function, and that's peak performance aging in one sort of complicated but practical simple sentence.

And just to hit on that last point with the hippocampus, I think this is particularly or comparatively helpful because we spend so much of our time on Google Maps or in, you know, houses or knowing where everything is, right? We have very sort of tidy linear world that we live in. And so, that capacity for the hippocampus to really be activated because of these novel experiences that are happening in nature almost brings us back into a biological state that we, on a deep level, I think crave for really being alive.

So, right downstream from your very important and wise and smart statement, is one of the, like, more surprising findings of the heart in our country. Um, and I'll give you experimental data to back it up, but it turns out action sports, the very thing, right, that we're like, stop, put down childish behavior, right? You're too old for this shit. Like surfing, skiing, rock climbing, snowboarding, skydiving, roller skating, all this stuff, right, that we literally are told to stop doing as we get older. It turns out action sports are phenomenal for peak performance aging for a lot of different reasons. One, they're dynamic activities. And let me put it in context. So the Mayo Clinic wanted to know. They looked at 20 years of data and said, what are the, what are the physical activities that help you live the longest? And they looked at everything. You join a health club, it's an extra year and a half. You learn to swim, It's 3.1 years, or 3— learn to run is 3.1 years, uh, swimming is 3.6. Then you get, I think, 6 years for soccer. Badminton is 7. Tennis is 9, and I'll— we could talk about why in a second. And finally, action sports are 10, skiing in particular. But, um, that's different data from a different study on the action sports. But anyways, my point— so what, what is happening is the activities are becoming more dynamic and more social. Tennis and badminton are very dynamic with a lot of hand-eye coordination, a lot of fast twitch muscle, a lot of very dynamic tennis. More than badminton because badminton is a little light. You need more strength for tennis, right? And the court's a little bigger. So that's why tennis works so well. And it's social, right? It's almost impossible to play tennis by yourself. You might be able to practice against a wall, but you're going to play with others. So it demands So you're seeing how it's one activity that hits a lot of it. Longest-lived communities in America, Summit County, Pitkin County, Eagle County, Colorado. That's Vail, Aspen, Beaver Creek, Copper Mountain, A-Basin, right? All of it. And huge action sports, outdoor sports meccas. So you see this at work in the world a lot. And there was research out of Japan that found that if you're downhill skiing, bone density decreases over time. A lot of people are fighting against a lot of different ways. It's really important. One of the reasons our brain declines so much is a decline in bone density because the bones store the minerals used by the brain. So like you've got this really tight weave there. Been a lot of different approaches. But if people are like, what is the best sport for improving bone mass? If you're looking for a sport, weightlifting is really good. You can hike with a weight vest. That's really good skiing. Because you're perfectly loading the bone with each turn. Every time you make a turn, it's a tremendous amount of force on the bone and it perfectly loads the bone. Whereas, like, running, too much force, right? You tend to degenerate the bone over time, right? It's too much impact. Swimming, by the way, people are told to swim as they get older. It's terrible advice. Doesn't load any of the bones. So you lose bone density. You're sure it's good for your heart, but you're losing bone density. And, um, uh, so we can go on and on from that on the physical stuff. There's all kinds of wild details under that hood.

Well, I'm glad you went there because that was going to be my next question is what are practical examples of this that actually play out? So going through surfing, skiing, rock climbing, soccer, badminton, tennis, skiing. Another thing that I thought of You know, like Albert Einstein is well known about, you know, he played violin till a very late age and that helped with cognition. Now, was he doing that in outdoor environments? Probably not. But there's probably also something to be said for even if someone being able to do both, like it is, is critical.

Let me, let me, let me, let me tell you a story.

Okay.

One of the questions, where did the book come from? Let me tell you another, where did the book come from story? Yeah. This is not about Stephen. This is about Stradivarius. So I was researching a— I was going to write a novel about a jewel— about a cat burglar, and she was going to steal— and I wanted something cool for her to steal. Um, there's actually a flow juvenile delinquency tie-in, so it was actually— there was some flow stuff in here, but we're going to ignore all that for the purposes of this story. And I was looking for something cool to steal, and I was like, how about rare musical instruments? I've never read a book about a cat burglar, right? And I was like, well, what are the rarest musical instruments in history? Right? That's it. Next question. Turns out that Stradivarius, one guy has built 50% of the rarest musical instruments in history. Do you know how weird that is? That's like one painter paints half of the rarest paintings in painting history. I mean, like, what? And so I sort of forgot my cat burglar book for a little while. It's just like sort of Stradivarius obsessed because I was like, what is this? So weird. So cool. Talk about peak performance, right? And then I learned the weirdest thing ever, which is that two of the most famous instruments Stradivarius built, he built when he was 92 years old. This was the moment that the long, slow rot theory collapsed for me, because I went, if fast twitch muscle response declines over time, if fine motor performance declines over time, if eyesight declines over time, if on and on and on. And he built the goddamn thing in 1687 or something like that, long before we have modern medicine, right? right? So, um, none of it makes any sense. I'm like, either this guy is one in a gazillion, which I never tend to believe as a journalist, right? That's a story that doesn't make sense. Um, or something's wrong with our theory of aging. And that was, um, and this was right when my wife and I were doing, doing our hospice care work with dogs, which is we run a dog sanctuary, do hospice care. And we were getting these incredible longevity results in our dogs. They were living a lot longer than possible. And we were starting to ask the question, why is this happening? And then I stumbled upon Stradivarius. And here's the— want to solve the mystery of Stradivarius? The dude made 1,000 musical instruments in his lifetime by hand. He never stopped making them.

Right.

So use it or lose it skills, right? If you never stop using the skills, you get to retain them, even advance them. Far later in life than we thought possible, like making two of the world's most expensive musical instruments in your 90s in the 1600s.

Insane.

So, right, that was— uh, anyways, that answers your question.

Well, I'm glad you mentioned that. I, I played violin for 12 years. I've actually just recently picked it up again. And so my musical teacher, you know, orchestra leader, would talk about Stradivarius when I was 12, 13, 14. So I always knew that these were like, I think, a minimum You're going to pay $1 million for a Stradivarius. And it is sort of a goal of mine one day, not to own one necessarily, but to play one because the violin is an incredible instrument and the beauty that comes from it kind of ties into the sense of awe that can come. Like right when I'm playing violin, I start to do scales and I start to do other things. It's immediate flow state and the beauty that comes out of it is really something else to witness. So, um, just a little anecdote.

So, uh, do you mind if I spin off your anecdote with two quick stories?

Please.

Because both are probably really practical here. One is, one is an origin story about where the book came from, and I'll come back to that. The first is, so amazing that you're picking up music again, right? And the reason is, so I talked about cognitive reserve, which is our protection against Alzheimer's dementia. I talked about expertise and wisdom. So Yakov Stern at Columbia, who did a lot of the core work on this, has said we get an additional— and it's cumulative, so stacks on top of each other— 8% protection against Alzheimer's and dementia for every leisure activity we sort of take up in adulthood. Leisure activity, music, language. This year I've been teaching myself to draw again. I have a degree. I have a minor in fine art from way back when. And I always sort of liked life drawing, but I was never— or like drawing, but I was never great. So I've been doing a drawing a day for 6 months now. That's my latest one. Our country was— I taught myself how to park ski. So additional 8% protection for each one of these. And he says, by the way, I always say peak performance aging starts young. This is one of the reasons, is, as Yakov Stern said, he said in his papers on this stuff, he's like, look, each of these gives you an additional 8%, but you got to really become an expert. So start young. Flat out says it, right? So that's one story. The second story, and I know we're running out of time, but this might be a good final story for you. So you asked where this book came from, and the shortest long version of that answer is So, the last conversation I had with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi before he passed away, he died during COVID I had called him up to ask him a weird question about the influence of action sports in his life and in his development of the theory because I had stumbled upon a bunch of interviews of his from the '60s that had been translated out of Italian. He had given them in Italian to Italian newspapers and they got translated into English and put into a collection of some of his work. And I'm reading them. And he's sort of name-dropping Yosemite climbers from the '60s. And I knew he had done some rock climbing and some research on rock climbers. I knew he was an outdoor athlete. But suddenly I'm like, well, wait a minute. Like, these are people you only know if you were in that world, like really in that world. And then we started working with a couple of his ex-students from way back. And they used to tell— they would tell stories about how like he would come back from a weekend in the mountains with like bruises on his face, like he was getting after it. And I was like, wait a minute, I think this stuff made a bigger dent than he ever let on. And so I called him and I, you know, I was like, didn't phrase it exactly politely. I was very excited. And I was like, so Mike, I got to know, like, I know you tell this story about being in a concentration camp in World War II is where flow comes from. And I know you did a lot of work on artists and But really, tell me the truth. This was really action sports, right? You were out there on the mountains yourself. You were getting into these wild altered states of consciousness, and you knew you couldn't use rock climbing to explain it because it was too weird. So you had to go in these other directions. And that was the question I asked him because that was exactly what happened to me. Right? I know the difficulty of using action sports to explain this stuff. And I did it 50 years later, right? Or 30 years later. And it was it was still really hard. So like trying to do that back in the '60s and '70s would have been impossible. But this is the question I ask him, and there's this huge pause. I mean, like nobody talks for 2 minutes, and I'm thinking, oh my God, I offended him. Holy crap. Well, like, you know how I feel about Chip Zemeckis. He's the godfather of flow psychology. I can't offend him. You know what I mean? Like, he's the uber mentor. And finally he says, Stephen, you got to be careful. At this point, I think, oh, crap, he's lost the plot. I knew he'd had a stroke. I knew he was in his 80s. I was like, oh, God, this is bad. And so at that point, now I've gone from, oh, shit, I offended him, to, oh, crap, something's wrong with his brain. And I was like, Mike, he asked me to call him Mike. He always went by Mike. What do you mean? Like, what do you mean I got to be careful, right? And I'm just like sort of dreading the answer. And he says, you know, you do something your whole life for flow, and then you get to be my age and forget about climbing rocks, forget about climbing mountains. Some days I can't get out of bed. You need a backup plan for flow. You got to be careful. And it was the most amazing moment because here was literally like the godfather of flow psychology, like, what was one flow junkie to another. And he was saying, as you age, flow is really important, but make sure you have lots of ways to get into flow. And it particularly resonated with me because up to that moment in time, I had been a big mountain skier and most of my deep flow states came from hurling myself down big mountains. And that was sort of my retirement strategy. But his point was, I was like, oh, wait a minute, that's not long-term tenable. And even though park skiing seems really ridiculous as a way to— it gave— actually gives me a lot more creativity on the mountain and a million more entrances into flow rather than just skiing these huge risky lines. So where does the book come from? It comes from all these places, but it literally came from Mike Mihajcic telling me to be careful as I age, have a lot of these leisure activities that drop you into flow right away because you're going to need them. Right. And that was— I mean, I'm glad I got to tell the story at the end of our hour together because it doesn't make a whole lot of sense at the front end. You need a bunch of details. But that was really like— that was the actual catalyst of what changed where I was like, oh, I'm going to go, I'm going to do this now.

And that's a beautiful way to end because that's even where my mind was going. It's like in your 50s and 60s. Yes. And 70s, 80s, 90s, what other ways can we diversify the ways that we can access flow with things that may not be as physically taxing? Because the truth is, at some point, you know, this may change in the next 10 years or 15 years, but at some point our body does start to feel the sort of weight of existence. And, you know, there are other ways that we can, we can access flow that don't necessarily involve hurling ourselves down huge mountains.

So, um, yeah, it was actually the last study Mike did— me, I did— before he passed away. That was the exact study he did, is he found that people are flow-prone over their entire span of their life. It never decreases. Our drive to get into flow and flow's importance for our development never goes away. But our— it drops once we lose our bodies, once the bodies fall apart, right? So a lot of the like peak performance aging formula, you know, and a lot of the cool stuff is, is about preserving that physical function. Um, and you know, and also developing, as Mike pointed out, backup plans.

Gotta have them. Stephen Kotler, NAR Country, Growing Old, Staying Rad. Stephen, thanks for joining us on the podcast. Any resources or places to point people if they want to go check out more about your work and what you're up to?

Yeah. So if this was interesting to you, Gnar Country— and Gnar is short for gnarly, which, by the way, is an environment that's high in perceived risk and high in actual risk, which is a phenomenal description of old age, which is why Gnar Country is the title of the book. But gnarcountry.com is the book's website. In fact, the Peak Performance Aging Experiment, where I told you I took 20 older adults and taught them how to park ski, we had a National Geographic cameraman follow us around and we videotaped all of it. So you can go watch videos about that experiment that there. A bunch of other things are there. I'm stephenkotler.com, uh, or, you know, @stephenkotler on social media. And Flow Research Collective, it's the Flow Research Collective. And the off chance you're interested in, in training flow with us, or you want to learn more about that, cheesiest URL in the world, but it's memorable: getmoreflow.com. So getmoreflow.com is where you go if you want to, uh, if you, if you want to train with us. Thank you, Paul. Thank you for hanging out. I appreciate the fact that I get to be your only repeat guest.

This is fun.

I think that's how it should be for all eternity. I think like I'm the only guy, everybody else they did it once, I got twice.

Exactly.

That's it.

This is fun, Steven. Thanks for having me.

I'm not competitive. I'm not competitive. Not at all. Not at all.

Thank you.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. Now, if you're listening to You probably have a long track record of success. However, you also have a craving you can't ignore. It's the deep desire to do more and to take things to an even higher level than before. And when it comes to your performance, you're by no means inconsistent. However, you may have hit a plateau. The traditional ways of breaking through and gaining new ground just aren't working. If you're starting to wonder if you actually have it in you to get to where you want to go, maybe you can feel it. You're in the middle of an important stretch for your career. And the good news is there's a way to get at least 50% more out of what you're currently doing. You can gain the altitude needed to escape reactivity, to stay in the strategic zone and transcend stagnation, all without compromising what's truly important to you. That's precisely what we're here to help you do at the Flow Research Collective. We've done it for thousands of top-tier performers. Reviews and praise for our tools, our protocols, and our ideas have come in from the likes of Elon Musk, Arianna Huffington, and Bill Clinton. So if you'd like to train with us, go to getmoreflow.com. What you'll learn is backed by research from Harvard, DARPA, and Deloitte. These are the same peak performance protocols we teach to Navy SEALs and executives in Google and Facebook's boardrooms. Just go to getmoreflow.com.

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