Defying the Stereotypes of Aging

All humans are hardwired for getting into flow. One of the keys to like really successful aging, really healthy aging, is maximizing flow in the second half of our lives. Two of the most powerful positive emotions that we get to experience is a sense of mastery and a sense of control. Older adults with regular access to a sense of mastery and control live much better and longer than other people. We tend to lock away the aged and we undervalue wisdom and overvalue youth in really like wild proportions. If you actually understood what older adults bring to the table, well-trained older adults bring to the table, hiring younger workers versus older workers is a disaster in the modern world. Aging is a fact of life. Old is a mindset. 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.

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, Rhian Dorris, and together with bestselling author Steven Kotler, I To you, Flow Research Collective Radio.

I've loved your, your books, particularly those, you know, on Flow, The Rise of Superman, all of them. And I think there's about 14 of them in total. Today I want to talk to you about Gnar Country. What drove you to write this book?

So Gnar Country is a book about peak performance aging. And the first thing is, is sort of the obvious thing. I've spent my career working on flow. I'm the executive director of the Flow Research Collective. And for those of you who don't know what flow is, it's technically an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best, we perform our best. That's not particularly useful. So more specifically, it's any of those moments of rapt attention and total absorption where you get so focused on the task at hand, everything else just starts to melt away and disappear, and all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go through the roof. So, Flow science goes right through the science of adult development. Very simply put, one of the keys to really successful aging, really healthy aging is maximizing flow in the second half of our lives. And, for a bunch of different reasons, while our desire to get into flow doesn't drop off, there's something known as the flow continuity hypothesis, which basically says, yes, we love flow from the beginning of our life to the end of our life. That doesn't really change. But our ability to get into flow for a bunch of different reasons can decline over time. So, the work on flow runs sort of straight through peak performance aging. And one of the things that really matters over time is ability to access flow. So, one, there was this huge part of this that was just sort of in my field. And the second part was you take the flow science and the new discoveries in flow science and you add it to some new discoveries we've got in embodied cognition and network neuroscience and a couple other whiz-bang fields. It was starting to look like, you know, one, the old idea about aging, which is that all our mental and physical skills decline over time and there's nothing we can do to stop that slide. That was very clearly not true. What we now know is that all those skills do decline over time, but they're all use-it-or-lose-it skills. It's all like the flow was a classic example. We never stop training these skills. We hang on to them, even advance them far later in life than ever, than we thought possible. One level beyond that, and I'll shut up, you can ask your next question. But one level beyond that, we've all heard the old saw, you can't teach an old dog new tricks, right? And it turns out, but All the evidence was saying in the lab, in a sense, was, hey, wait a minute, that's not true at all. In fact, old dogs are better at certain kinds of learning than young dogs. And if you really apply what we know about flow science and embodied cognition, these other things, it should be possible later in life to onboard even very, very difficult physical skills that are supposed to be biologically impossible. And that is sort of what I set out to test in our country. Was I ran a kind of a radical experiment in peak performance aging around all these ideas. And, that was at the heart of that book. But, it really sort of emerged out of flow science. It emerged out of conversations I was having with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi before he passed away, the godfather of flow psychology and things like that about these topics.

Yeah. I was actually wondering, I was going to ask you about the interplay between flow and peak performance aging. So, I think you answered that really well. I am going to throw out a statement, which is my observation. I'm just wondering what your comment would be to this statement. It's my observation that kind of for all the miracles of Western science and medicine and, you know, all the advances in our society, in many ways, we are maybe aging more gracefully than maybe our ancestors would have. But it also appears that in some indigenous countries, or countries or societies where we are looking at people that are living a much simpler form of lifestyle, or more associated to the way that we maybe were living thousands of years ago, that they seem to have it right. Although I do acknowledge that they didn't live as long. What's your view on how modern ways and modern science and medicine has helped us, but also how modern ways of living have actually resulted in our decline. And would you even agree that that's a thing?

I don't know how you're measuring our decline. So the meta hypothesis there, I don't know how to comment on, but let me talk about the stuff you said and maybe we'll find our way to some kind of an answer that's satisfactory. Certainly, we become more sedate over time. We get less exercise. And we may, especially with modern technology, we have sort of deprioritized interpersonal social connection. And I could actually go on. There's a lot of bad stuff that spins off of phones and screens, right? There's a lot of negative stuff that spins off of phones and screens. There's a lot of negative stuff that spins off of, I don't know, not getting enough exercise. And, you know, is our diet better? Our diet's— what's available to us is far better than ever before. Do we take advantage of it, or are we filling ourselves with crap? Open, open questions. And that seems to be the case across the board. I think what you could say at a blanket statement level is, I mean, we are certainly living a lot longer than our ancestors. And A lot of us are going to end up living a lot longer than we expected to. That's really clear. Part of the reason I wrote this book is I've spent 20 years looking at regenerative medicine and longevity science. And 20, 25 years ago, it was an absolute joke. It was nonsense. It was, it was, it was— you were just being lied to about the miracle properties of testosterone, basically, is really— I mean, it has some, some benefits, don't get me wrong. But they're not what people think they are and it works a lot more differently than most people know. But it's gotten much more mature. This is not what our country is about, right? And our country is about the 50 years of research about what we absolutely know about peak performance aging, things you can bet the house on. The longevity science, regenerative medicine, you hear a lot about that. There's tons of podcasts, everybody wants to talk about it, biohacking. This and that. And it's super cool and I really like it, but we are at the front edge of that revolution. And historically, going back 25 years into longevity and medicine, regenerative medicine, we get it wrong much more than we get it right. And so, NARCOTERY is about the stuff we know that works. And where we're going in longevity medicine, longevity science, and regenerative medicine, we're going to get older. I mean, biotechnology alone is advancing so quickly that we gain 5 hours of life expectancy every day we manage to stay alive. So, it's really moving. And, you know, a high-quality second half of our life, whatever the hell that means, right? Wherever you are at on that scale, we've got some really good understandings of what it takes. Is it more related to primitive lifestyles versus modern lifestyles? It sort of depends where you were, you know, way back in the day, where you are today and how you're living. But, I think the one thing that is really worth hitting on is, if you go into the Blue Zones, the longest-lived communities on Earth, right? And there's some controversy around the Blue Zone research, but it's important to point out where that controversy is. The controversy in the Blue Zone research is not about the big lifestyle decisions, exercise, social connection, those sorts of things. It's around little dietary things. You know, that's where the arguments are. And those are basically the same arguments that are going on in longevity science and regenerative medicine, which is why I say You know, we know what the big levers are. The things that most people are focusing on are the smaller levers, and, you know, lots of arguments still. I'm not saying don't do those things, but I'm saying if those are the primary things you're, you're doing, that's probably not the best strategy. I'm gonna stop there. I went all over the place with that answer.

No, no, no, that was, it was a good answer. No, it was. And you know what, we were gonna touch on the Blue Zones. I think what, what's clear is, you know, with abundance comes an abundance of choices, and a lot of those choices are potentially bad ones, right? And it all comes down to our level of discipline and I guess how we're interfacing with the world, right? We have more choice today, and with more choice comes the more opportunity to make ones that are suboptimal. Let's, let's dive into peak performance aging. How do you define that? And what—

yeah, let's— I mean, so like, let's start at the beginning. Well, how do you define peak performance? And then let's move into peak performance aging and To me, the definitions are very related. I've always defined peak performance, and this is, by the way, this is not my definition. I have upgraded the language a little bit, but it's a definition that goes back. William James is really who I'm quoting, the godfather of psychology. But peak performance is nothing more or less than getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. And peak performance aging is getting our biology to work for us rather than against us when faced with the challenges and opportunities emphasis on opportunities here that come in the second half of our lives. So that's how I think about it. And as it turns out, most people hear somebody say something like, oh, we're going to optimize our biology, and they think I'm biohacking. And it turns, turns out that's really not what I'm talking about, because most of the biggest interventions are possible that are possible are essentially psychological or physiological interventions that have huge impacts on our neurobiology. Those are the big levers that I'm reaching for that we work with at the Flow Research Collective.

So, are you talking about mindset?

I'm talking about the relationship between— mindset is a big part of it, but I'm talking about really the relationship between the mind and the body. And it goes so much farther than mindset. So, let me give you a couple examples. I said flow matters to be performance aging. So, let me use this as my example. Why does flow matter so much to be performance aging? Couple of reasons. One, there are 9 known causes of aging. All of them, what they all have in common is inflammation, stress and inflammation. So, anything that fights stress is an anti-aging technology tool. Flow, as we move into flow, there's a global release of nitric oxide. It's a gas, a signaling molecule. It's in every cell in the body. If you've gone to the gym and you've worked out for 20, 25 minutes, your lungs open up, it gets quiet upstairs. That's nitric oxide. What it does is it dilates our lungs, and it lowers stress hormones, mostly flushes them out of our system. So, in flow, you're essentially resetting the nervous system back to zero. This is hugely important, right? This because of the connection between stress and aging. That's just one example. Another example is, and this is maybe a little sexier, this is neuroimmunology, powerful positive emotions. And, it's interesting that two of the most powerful positive emotions that we get to experience is a sense of mastery, and a sense of control. And well-known fact in, in, in aging, uh, older adults with regular access to a sense of mastery and control live much better and longer than, than other people. Flow has 6 core psychological characteristics, phenomenological characteristics, ways the state makes us feel. 2 of them are it increases our sense of mastery because flow, we're always pushes on our skills, we're using our skills to the utmost, and so we're learning, right? We're more adaptive and more complex on the outside of a flow state. And we talk about flow as optimal performance or peak performance because all humans are hardwired for getting into flow, and flow is how we do peak performance. But that's not the experience on the inside, right? I watch LeBron James in a flow state, and from the outside I'm saying, oh, that looks like peak performance. On the inside, LeBron just feels like he can control things he can't normally control. So you get this sense of control, right? This could be me as a writer. It's Tuesday morning, 6:00 AM, and my words are doing a magical things that words don't normally do at, you know, 6:00 AM on a Tuesday morning. When we get access to these two really powerful positive emotions, it increases the production of T cells and natural killer cells. T cells fight disease, natural killer cells fight tumors and other sick cells, another one of the major causes of aging. So this is the kind of very tight mind-body connection that we're seeing. You mentioned mindset, and I'd be derelict if I didn't close this all off without telling you what we know about mindset and peak performance aging because it's wild. And this is extremely well established. There's like 50 years of data that shows this, that a positive mindset towards aging, which is I'm really excited. I think my best days are ahead of me. I think the second half of my life is filled with, you know, exciting possibility results in an extra 7.5 to 8 years of health and longevity. It's really well established. So is the inverse. So, neg, being exposed to negative stereotypes around aging, having a bad mindset around aging, being exposed to negative stereotypes around aging, and by a bad mindset about aging, by the way, I always point out that old is much more— it's a mental event. It's not a physical thing. And old, the minute your voice in your head starts saying you're too old for this shit, right? Those kinds of thought patterns, you've caught old. Literally, there's changes in your physiology, there's changes in your neurobiology. And the bad news is those of us who catch old, those of us who are exposed to negative stereotypes around aging and we believe them, by the time we get to 60, when they measure memory, somebody who has never been exposed to negative stereotypes around aging and has a healthy mindset versus the other side of that coin, 30% greater decrease in memory. In people who've been exposed to negative mindsets around aging or have a negative mindset around it, been exposed to negative stereotypes around aging. That's wild. That's, by the way, for anybody who's curious, not my research. Becca Levy, she's at Yale, probably the world's leading expert on stereotypes and ageism, which is also interesting because ageism, as a final thought, is the most socially acceptable stereotype in the world, right? Like in today's, in the modern world, if I like, I walk outside my front door with any kind of prejudice on display, I'm going to get canceled by the time I get to my mailbox. Right. But I can look at you and be like, dude, you're just too old for this shit. And people laugh. It's funny. We don't even think about it. And yet the research shows that, like, me landing on you with that can impact your memory by the time you're 60 years old. Not actually old by the time you're 60. That's remarkably young in today's culture.

Yeah, it's really interesting. I was reading about a study a week ago where a control group had words kind of subconsciously suggested to them that were associated with being old, and they started to walk like they were old.

Yeah, there's a ton of those studies. Yeah, they grew out of— in the beginning, they were doing studies on empathy. They were empathy studies, right, where they were priming people and seeing how they you know, treated somebody who needed help. Right. And I should point out, so there's all this stuff going back to the '70s that, that argue that a large portion of what we call aging is actually a result of language priming. And so Ellen Langer is sort of the queen of this, and she wanted to know how much does language priming contribute to aging. She was at Harvard. And she ran a study we called the Counterclockwise Study. The study I ran in our country, maybe the most radical study anybody's ever run in peak performance aging. This is the second most radical. And it was— she wanted to know really if you prime people for health and vitality and youth, right, if it would have any impact on health and vitality and youth. So they took— she took 16 basically 80-year-old men. And she started at Harvard and she found a monastery in New Hampshire a couple hours away. So she drove these guys out to this monastery and they had tricked out the monastery. This was in 1981 and it looked like 1961. So they had all the magazines and books from '61 and they were showing, they would have movie night and they would show films from '61. And the people were divided into two groups. Group one, just reminisce about 1961. Talk about what life was like 20 years ago. The second group, pretend it's 1961, pretend you're 20 years younger and talk about current events, etc., etc. They measured every biomarker, psychological marker, indication of age, including they taking photographs of participants, um, right before and after. And on, on the back end, every single thing you, you could possibly imagine— their health improved, their gaits improved, arthritis decreased so much they got taller in Fingers got longer, eyesight improved, hearing improved, IQ improved. It's like the list is on and on. And this was after like 5 days play acting. And people, so many people said bullshit that this study has been redone now 3 or 4 times. They made 3 TV shows out of it in Europe where they ran the study and just filmed it as a TV show because they just couldn't believe it. But this is one of the most stunning impact because this is very acute. This is literally like you're going to play act for 5 days and your vision is going to get better. Your hearing is going to get better. Your fingers are going to get longer. Come on. Right. That sounds like crazy talk, except again and again and again and again and again, it shows up in research. And her research, what I like about it is it's not— she's learned things in the lab, but she took them into the wild. She ran A lot of people have problems with their studies because they're like, okay, there's too many confounds and this and that and this and that. And maybe there's something to be said about that. But it's also— she's running this stuff in the wild with real people and it's, you know, it gets closer to the kind of results you're actually interested in also. So, yes, there are confounds, but I think it's really worth paying attention to nonetheless, maybe more important than some of the other stuff.

I mean, in Western society, we have, you know, we have retirement. You know, there's a lot to be said on what happens to people once they retire. And I've seen people deteriorate, particularly people that have been very active after retirement.

Daniel Levitin, who wrote a really great book, is a neuroscientist, wrote a really great book called Successful Aging that recently came out. It's— we've basically— I ran some weirder studies than he did, but I think we both read the same 5,000 papers, right, to sort of come to our conclusions because our conclusions are very, very similar. But one of the things he said in his book is peak performance aging in a single sentence: don't retire. I have a different sentence, but, but like, what's yours?

Really?

He's like, don't retire. It's like, it's, it's really that one. That one's really simple. I think my, my sentence explains a little bit more about why you shouldn't retire, but like, really, you can get a lot there.

Yeah. And, you know, I mean, I don't know what your view is. I grew up, you know, in, in, in the Bay Area in San Francisco, but we were immigrant family, and at the head of our family we had an older kind of matriarch who, you know, the elderly were very visible and very active in our lives. And when I look at traditional Caucasian society, particularly in the West, like, as people age, they kind of get locked away.

Yes.

So you kind of get removed.

So I want to—

we—

so this is the thing, you just actually landed on the one— remember our second question where I was like, I'm gonna be all over the place with this fricking answer. And do I think they did it better back then than they do now? This is where— this is the one caveat where I'm like, no, no, no. I think we did it better back then or in certain other cultures. And certainly respect. So we know this. Societies, all the blue zones, first of all, there's tremendous respect for the elders, right? And all the blue zones, and this is really important for both young and old, Cross-generational friendships, hugely, hugely, hugely important. In fact, if you want to talk about peak performance aging, one of the more radical and important suggestions that you have to make to people, and we've said this numbers of different ways over the past 50 years because it's offensive to some people, but the flat out, the way I like best is make replacement friends. Most people make friends in their age group. And so, powerful, Robust social connection matters so much for successful aging, matters so much for peak performance across the board. You actually cannot perform at your best at any age without maintaining robust social connections. It becomes much more important later in life for quality of life reasons, but it's really important at all times. The best way, by the way, to maintain those social connections is is probably to drop into group flow with people. So group flow, again, here we are back at flow for a bunch of different reasons, but the social connection matters so much. And these cross-generational friendships really matter because if you don't make replacement friends— I've got two examples in my life. I've got— so this is— I have a friend, he's in his 90s. He is one of— he was one of the brightest people alive in the 20th century, considered one of the great minds of the 20th century. Every single friend he had from the 20th century is dead. He's the last one left. And what's weird is he comes out of a particular— like, there were a group of thinkers that came up in the '60s and '70s that thought unlike anybody else, and he was part of that group. So literally, like, anybody thought like him, they're gone. One of the reasons I'm friends with him is because I sort of, I know about these group of thinkers from the '60s and '70s. I'm fascinated by their ideas because they're sort of so neat and unusual. But it's really strange. I'll call him up and he'll be like, oh my God, it's so good to hear your voice, Stephen. I haven't talked to anybody in a month. And he's not actually kidding, right? We do some hospice work with dogs. We run a hospice care sanctuary with dogs. We also So we just take our old dogs to meet older humans. We did this yesterday. My wife and I did this yesterday. We were doing like a hospice call with dogs. And, you know, my wife and I go into these situations and, you know, with awareness that there's a good chance the person we're sitting across from, we're the only people they talk to all week, which is wild, right? Really, really wild. More about social connection matters so much for healthy aging. And you start seeing this. The guy we were with was 72, not considerably old by contemporary standards. So, um, replacement friends really matters. And I do think traditional cultures get it wrong, and I do think contemporary Western cultures, um, I don't know if it's Caucasian or not Caucasian, um, as much as Western, we tend to lock away the aged and we undervalue wisdom and overvalue youth in really, like, wild-ass proportions. And we make, you know, the point I make, one of the points I make in our country is, like, if you actually understood what older adults bring to the table, well-trained older adults bring to the table, hiring younger workers versus older workers is a disaster in the modern world. Like, the skills we want in the 21st century are skills that come built into well-trained over-50-year-olds. And yet we're not hiring. We have this youth culture movement at work. And it's the exact opposite of what we're looking for in terms of employees, which is wild.

It seems to be trending. I mean, I've done a couple of talks here in Australia recently behind the whole piece on intergenerational learning. It seems to be taking some form in corporate land, but probably not quick enough. I want to ask you something. I want to ask you if this is a revolutionary statement or question. Do you, do you think that aging, in the sense that we have come to learn or view it, is a social construct? Like, how much of it is reality versus kind of what we're— what we learn? Like, you know what I mean?

So, yeah, so Truth, I don't know. That's an awesome question. That's an awesome question. That's a truly awesome question. I don't know how you exactly study it because, for example, we know Ellen Langer's work, what we were just talking about, aging is partially a result of language priming, right? We know that for sure. We know that aging is also partially as a result of mindset. And we know that there are certain things that decline over time. The way I always think about it is, and maybe this is the better answer to your question, aging is a fact of life, old is a mindset.

Pardon the interruption, and thanks for tuning into Flow Research Collective Radio. If you're listening to this, here's a bold bet I'm willing to make about you. My guess is even though you're a high performer, you're still only performing performing at about half of your capacity. Maybe even 10%. Now even if I'm wrong, assuming that you're performing at less than your full potential opens up the possibility for you to improve. And that's good news. I mean, you've already outperformed most of your peers by a long shot. You've got a skill stack that people envy. It's why you earn what you earn. And yet, you're just warming up. You know those days when you knock out more in your morning than most do in an entire day? Well, what if you could perform at that level every day? Reliably, consistently, What would that unlock for you? Now, here at the Flow Research Collective, we study the human nervous system when it's functioning at its absolute best. After training thousands of high performers, from Navy SEALs to Fortune 100 executives, here's what we've found: you're evolutionary hardwired to perform at your best. All it takes is pressing the right mental buttons and pulling the right biological levers, so to speak. It's about getting your neurobiology to work for you instead of against you. Now, if you want to make operating at a out of 10 level as natural as breathing, just go to getmoreflow.com. I'll show you how to reliably trigger a flow state where you feel limitless and you do your very best work. This won't require any biohacking or nootropics or gadgets or caffeine guzzling. This higher gear is endogenous, which means it's a state that your brain produces on its own. No external stimulus is required. Just go to getmoreflow.com to learn how to get your biology working for you instead of against you so you make peak performance second nature.

All the best. So, old is certainly a product of learning. And this was, you know, one of the weird things that happened sort of in the beginning in our country when I was writing this is I would notice these things because if you spend a lot of time in action sports communities, it's not unusual to see like 80-year-old skiers or surfers or snowboarders and like ass-kicking, ass-kicking men and women. That's not all that unusual in those communities. Whereas, you know, sort of you don't— you go to the gym, you don't usually see 75-year-olds playing pickup hoops. You may occasionally, but not all the time. Whereas you go to the ski mountain and like 30% of the people on the mountain are over 60 and they're— a lot of them are killing it. Like, you know what I mean? And so these are cultural differences where like one culture says, okay, this is an acceptable culture for older athletes. You know what I mean? And the only difference is some of these action sports are considered lifestyle sports, not sports, right? And there's no— but there's no difference. In fact, from an athletic standpoint, there's studies coming out of Japan that show that— well, first of all, we know action sports are phenomenal for longevity for a bunch of different reasons. But there's research out of Japan that says skiing is the single best activity over a lifespan because of how it loads the bones and preserves bone density around and trains strength, stamina, flexibility, balance, and agility, which are the 5 physical skills we have to continue to train over time. Or we start to have problems, right? Like, those are the use-it-or-lose-it skills. And the World Health Organization, they— we, I mean, we have exact numbers. You want peak performance aging, it's 150 to 300 minutes of moderate to vigorous aerobic activity every week, plus 2 strength training days and 3 balance, agility, and flexibility training days. And, um, or you pick activities like action sports that do all of those at once, or Non-action sports— tennis. Give you a funny story, a funny study run out of the Mayo Clinic on this one. They want to compare like running, swimming, joining a health club to like other sports. And some of this is that some of these sports are more social, but most of it is that they're dynamic. They need all strength, stamina, fight, all these, all these skills at once. But you join a health club, you're going to live about an extra year and a half. You start running, it's about and stay, stick to it for the rest of your life, it's about 3, 3.5 years. Swimming is 3.4 years. I think running is 3.1 and swimming is 3.4. Soccer is about 5.5 years. Badminton is 6 years. Tennis is 9. And then skiing, snowboard, action sports seem to be— though we need more data on this one— seems to be about 10. But if you go from in America, the longest-lived communities in America are Summit, Pitkin, and Eagle County. They're all in Colorado. They're like meccas of action sports. And on average, uh, it's Summit, which is the longest-lived community in America. They live on average 10 years longer than, than the rest of the country. And it's an action sports base. So it's not exactly— it's sort of anecdotal. It's more data than anecdote, but like, we're not 100% on that. It's not like the Mayo Clinic study where they literally spent 25 years comparing activity against activity, but the social activities matter, the dynamic activities matter. I don't know how I started down this, down this road. That's another reason I think, you know, flow matters over time because a lot of the athletic activities that produce so much flow also fit into these categories. And when you're in flow, right, there's a lot of painkillers that show up naturally. So you're going to perform longer. Hour, right? I know, like, when I go skiing, I tend to— flow shows up, tends to show up in the afternoon for me. Um, and I know if I drop into flow, I'm gonna ski an extra hour. And usually that extra hour is the difference between, like, like, a good workout day and a great workout day, where, like, you know, I'm peeling myself off the carpet afterwards because I've sort of worn myself all the way out kind of thing. Um, So there's downstream stuff there as well.

In terms of that, let's unpack that. So one of the things that you talked about that I really loved, and I had this conversation with Rich Divini, who I know you know, a few weeks back, and we talked about, you know, I call it crucibles. He was talking about the development of attributes and something you talked about in your book or wrote about was creating a quest. Like, I think that's like important irrespective of anything, but how does that interplay with aging and why is that so important?

So one, let's go back to, let's start with mindset, right? Yeah. If I always say, if you're gonna peak performance aging, the place to start is with mindset. How do you fix a mindset, right? There are like 4 things I think that are worth doing. Two Ellen Langer suggestions, credit where credit is due. These are not unusual. We've heard these before. One, watch your language. Watch how you talk to yourself, right? Listen to the voice in your head. You want language and thoughts that open you up and you want to avoid stuff that makes you constrict and feel tighter, right? That's a quick shorthand for that. Two, mindfulness in general. Keep your attention focused on the present moment and paying attention to what's going on. But for peak performance aging, this is interesting. Alan Langer suggests noticing, because we tend to, we live under the illusion of stasis, right? That the one truism in life is everything has changed, but the brain sort of hides that. You feel like you're the same person you were when you were 30 or 20, and you're not. You're wildly different, but you don't know that because the brain The brain hides that from us for a lot of days. Self— we maintain what's known as this continuity of self. It's not true, but we, we have this illusion. So you can fight back by actually noticing that moment by moment by moment, actually change is the most constant thing in our lives. That makes us less fearful about the change that we see as we age. The third thing you can do is divorce your phone. Phones— the average Westerner spends 4 to 6 hours a day on their phone. Phones create what we call is a mobile mindset. They turn us into narcissists with this huge cushion of safety and security around us. We have this fake sense of safety and security that the phone provides, and we get very, very narcissistic. On top of which, there's a bunch of stuff in the brain that declines over time. We can train it up, but phones make it worse, like task switching, right? Our ability to, when we switch tasks, to stay focused on whatever. Phones destroy focus. They destroy our ability to task switch. All these things that are kind of declining over time anyways, and we want to fight back against phones make worse. So divorcing your phone is hugely important here. And the final thing, the last thing is do those first 3 things. But if you really want to explode your mindset towards aging, get a quest, get a mission, get in. My mission was could I teach myself how to park ski? In my 50s. Right now, park skiing, if you don't ski, it's the discipline in skiing that involves doing tricks off jumps and on wall rides and boxes and rails. For about 12 different biological reasons, it's considered very difficult to learn if you're over 35. And by the time you get to 45, 50, it's downright impossible. That was the theory. Theory turns out not to hold up very well. I used a whole bunch of new ideas. These new ideas we were talking about at the start of the podcast, taught myself how to park ski. We then ran the experiment with a bunch of other older adults. You can go to narcountry.com and watch the video. We were followed around by a National Geographic cameraman during this. So, you can see, but the same protocol worked for a lot of other people. It's not just me. It worked across the boards for a big research group. My point on this is when you create this kind of like NAR-style quest, this challenging quest, When I was learning how to park ski, like, it didn't matter what my mindset was towards aging. It was— it got— when I started learning how to do 360s and 180s and nosebutters and blah, blah, blah, all these tricks with crazy names and slide boxes and rails, whatever I thought might be possible in the second half of my life, it went out the door, replaced by, holy shit, I have no idea what's possible because nobody thought this was going to be possible, right? Every, everybody I talked to, said, oh my God, you're going to put yourself in the hospital. You can put other people in that. This will never, ever work. And it worked astoundingly well. Incredibly, incredibly, incredibly well. So that is the, I think, the first version of a quest. The second thing about a quest is we hear a lot about living with passion and purpose and flow and how important those things are to adult development and overall quality of life and well-being. But creating a high flow, like, this is a way to put it into action. And one of the other, one of the final things, and I'll shut up about this, is that we know this, older adults who have long quests, right? Long, basically like high hard goals, goals that take multiple years to accomplish, do so much better. This is one of the problems with retirement, right? You lose those like sort of long-term goals, these missions. So, especially if you're planning on like working less. And I think this is at any point in your life, right? If you're, if you're planning on like, like you need a mission so that everything that needs to stay active stays active in the brain.

Yeah. And Stephen, to your earlier point, I think that's why sports with these kind of communities, action sports, endurance sports with real strong communities and with a lifestyle help individuals kind of continue on that trajectory. Case in point, I, I got a friend out in Colorado, his name's Travis Macy, and his dad was part of like the original ultra running crew. I'm an ultra runner. And so like the Western States crew in Leadville, and he's got like Alzheimer's and dementia, but he's still out there running, man. Like it's insane. Like he's, yeah, he's out there running on the trails up there in Colorado. Like as, you know, they're always worried, will he get lost, will he not? But he's just having a go.

I met a guy— so I, I've been a guy who's part of a posse in the East Coast. They're East— they're marathoners, all in their 70s. But he's got a friend who's 76, I want to say maybe 78, who he runs with, who juggles while he runs marathons, right? He runs marathons and juggles the whole goddamn time. Talk about like hitting everything you need to hit for being a performance agent. It's kind of, that's one of, that's been sort of the most fun of sort of doing this work is getting to meet, because like older ass kickers have just like crawling out of the woodwork. Like there's, there's a million of them in every community, but until you go looking for them, you don't, you know, they're doing their thing, right? They're not often advertising. And, but when you go looking, you're just like, they're everywhere. And, um, that's another thing around mindset. I, you know, going looking for the evidence that you're— that like what you think is possible for you in the second half of your life is wrong. You know what I mean? Like paying attention to that evidence because it is everywhere, as you sort of pointed out.

I think with older athletes as well, they're not like social media focused, right? Like they didn't come up in the social media age. I remember I asked—

well, yeah, it's funny, Larry Hamilton and I agree with, agree with this. You know, Laird, people always be like, how come I don't— there's not more photos of me skiing or video of me skiing? And Laird, you know, people are always like, how come there's no video of you surfing? And Laird's point and my point is the same, which is like, if I'm shooting video, I'm not surfing. If I'm shooting video, I'm not skiing, right? Like, my point is to go do the thing, right? Like, my point is not to show you that I did the thing, That's, that's a different, that's a different game.

What's the concept of stacking motivators? Because I think that that was a real brilliant concept. I want to share that with our audience.

So this is a peak performance idea in general, works really well in terms of peak performance aging. The idea here is peak performers, elite performers. If you think about athletes, they never rely on a single fuel, right? Like you would never go into a race saying, well, I slept well the night before, but I didn't get any fats or proteins or carbohydrates and I didn't hydrate, right? No, you hydrate, you balance your diet, you get— you want as many axes and you sleep well. You want all the physical fuel, the fuels of physical performance. Well, elite performers do the same thing with psychological fuels, motivation. So there are 5 major intrinsic internal drivers in humans. There are way more, but there are 5 huge ones and they're curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, and mastery. Turns out all of them actually do double duty as flow triggers. So if you actually get these things going in your life, you're going to spend a ton more time in flow. Bonus, really important. But there's a lot to do with peak performance aging, right? There's a lot to do. And you sort of gotta— I think that my— the mindset fight in the second half of our life, until culture itself really starts to change, it's a constant fight, right? I think it's a constant fight, uh, and you— there's a lot of stuff that starts happening, you know, can get really demotivating. So you want— as you want all of your intrinsic motivators lined up and pointed in the same direction. This is the other thing that peak performers know. So biologically, curiosity is designed by evolution to be built into passion. Passion is designed to be coupled to something outside of ourselves that gives you purpose. Once a system, an organism has purpose, what does it need next? It wants autonomy, the freedom to pursue that purpose. And once it has autonomy, it wants mastery, the skills to to pursue it well. These are the big 5 intrinsic motivators, and as you can see, they're pointed. They come online in a particular order, and they all stack up. So what I say is, if you're going to end up with, with a Gnar-style quest, like my quest to learn to ski or anything else, make sure that that quest is designed in such a way that, like, you're stacking intrinsic motivators, because it's hard. It's hard to stick with anything over time, and especially these kinds of really challenging quests. The upside from it is, is amazing, right? It's phenomenal what it's going to bring to your life. But you really want to make sure you're staying on that path and stacking intrinsic motivators is one of the best ways to do this.

Excellent. So, Steve, we're going to start to land this plane, but always a couple of questions before we go, particularly around habit orientation. So say you've got a younger person that is starting to age. I'm doing the quote-unquotes because of the conversation we're having, but they're starting to get older, uh, biologically. What are— or, or they're already older biologically— like, what are some of the kind of basic habits that you've seen that people that have been a very good example of what we're talking about in terms of peak performance?

Yeah, I mean, so the first, the first one, the place you gotta start, um, is you gotta just get good at flow. Right? And you want to lay these habits in, in younger. Um, you know, at the Flow Research Collective, just to— we run a— we have a basic flow training, it's called Zero to Dangerous. In fact, we actually put people through Zero to Dangerous before we put people through Enter the Gnar, which is our peak performance aging training, because it's so foundational. Um, just so people understand this, we have an 8-week training. We're data geeks, we measure everything we can pre and post, which is why I can tell you And we train people in 130 countries and tens of thousands of people every month. So we have like globally accurate, wildly diverse people, what works and what doesn't. My point here is that on the back end of an 8-week training, and it's a hard training, you have a coach, you have a, you know, and you go through it with a PhD psychologist as your coach and there's a lot of work. It's not easy, but we see a 70-80% boost in flow. So my big point here is this is totally trainable, right? If anybody's curious and wants more information, go to getmoreflow.com and you can just sign up for an interview and learn more about what we're doing. Or, but besides the point, lay in those flow habits, right? Figure out flow states have triggers, preconditions that lead to more flow. It's not binary. There's cycles, a 4-stage process. Understand the map of the process and understand where you are, which triggers you need to kind of get you where you want to go from each point in the cycle. Those sorts of things, that information is available free. It's in my books. You can go to StephenKotler.com or FlowResearchCollective.com. There's videos out the wazoo. They're all free that kind of break that down. Or you can take the class if you want more information. But that's like where you want to start because this stuff is going to get harder over time if you don't, right? High flow lifestyles are, are, are tricky. The other, the other couple of things that really matter early on. So I know we're going to land this plane. Let me do this quickly. I'm going to do this really fast, but it's important. So we know in our 50s there's changes in the brain that unlock whole new levels of intelligence, creativity, empathy, and wisdom. These are so-called superpowers, cognitive superpowers of aging. We didn't— this is new information, right? We didn't— this was like contrary to the long slow rot theory. No, it actually turns out shit happens in the brain in our 50s that's amazing, and we get a hell of a lot smarter and more creative and more empathetic and wiser. And all this is astounding, but— so there's these caveats in adult development. Psychologists call them modifiers. They're if-then conditions. You can have all this in your 50s, but you got to check the following boxes. By age 30, you actually have to solve the crisis of identity. You got to know who you are in the world. By 40, you need to live in such a way that you're getting lots of passion, purpose, and flow, living passion, purpose, and flow. Or you have another way of thinking about it is you've got match fit, which is a tight link between how I spend the bulk of my time and my values and my beliefs and my strengths and my passions, my purpose, right? That really matters by 40, by 50. Self-forgiveness and forgiveness of others really, really, really matters. You want to unlock those new levels of empathy and wisdom and all that stuff. You actually have to. Forgiveness matters. And for Anybody who doesn't, the best tool for self-forgiveness is forgiveness of others is loving-kindness meditation. So there's your kick-ass tool. And then in our 50s and 60s, to really gain access to this creative thinking, creative activities actually unlock all of the thinking styles that unlock all these skills that we're talking about in our 50s. So creativity in our 50s matters. And then beyond that, you always have to be constantly training down risk aversion. Because risk aversion increases over time. And if we get more risk, risk averse, we get more fearful. Fear blocks learning, it blocks flow, it blocks empathy, right? Make it— makes us very selfish, blocks wisdom, blocks creativity. So you have to train down risk aversion. And the last thing that's important is you have to train against physical fragility, because what good is the superpowers of aging if our bodies fall apart, right? We talked about that earlier. So where do you start? Start with flow. But like, these are these big milestones of adult development. You cannot thrive in your 50s and beyond if you don't. And the final thing I want to say, and I think you would agree with me on this one, is if you're not exercising regularly, start early. It's, it's a harder skill to onboard later on. And if you never stop exercising, so much the better, right? It's just got such a huge impact on health and longevity and stress and everything else you want. And, you know, we could spend the next 3 hours talking about that one. But those are the things that I think are sort of most important.

Stephen, just one thing. Did you find that everything was as true for men as they are for women, or there was some variation?

So there are, there are some sex differences between, for flow, first of all, um, we've been sort of trying to look at them at the Flow Research Collective for a while. It's hard to tell, um, what is exact and, and, and what isn't. Um, so, but, um, and certain things are, are cultural, right? They're, they're, they're, they, we want to say they're biological, but they're actually just cultural. and, and, and around sexuals. So there are differences, obviously. Um, there's also, there's menopause. So there's a, there's a severe hormonal shift in women. There's male menopause and our hormones change, but like when in women, that's, that's a stronger, that's a stronger shift. And so there's stuff around that. I also want to say, so where does the mindset of old come from? right? What is that? When we're young, we are predominantly driven by the seeking system and the play system. These are, these are, there are 7 basic primary emotions in all mammals. Seeking and play are 2 of them. And that's what, right? When we're who we are in the world, how do we want to live? How do you want to make a living? Who's going to be your partner? All that shit, right? That's seeking system stuff. That's all underpinned by dopamine and norepinephrine. Um, when we have stuff we want to We'll get the job, we've got the partner, we have kids, which is the one that really does it. But anytime we have stuff we want to hold on to, right, we switch our addictions. We're not seeking anymore. Now we're holding. We want to protect what we have. And that's about serotonin and oxytocin and endorphins. These are different chemicals than we're addicted to in the first half of our life. Literally, we're switching addictions on which neurochemicals, pleasure-seeking neurochemicals we produce that we like the most. The minute you start, the minute you have children, right? And stronger in women than in men, but you really start to shift these things, right? And it happens during pregnancy. And that's where the mindset of old starts to set up, right? It's not, it has nothing to do with like my age. It has to do with, I have stuff that I want to protect. I want to conserve, right? This is another reason to become risk averse over time, right? You're trying to hold on to what you have and pass along to your children, all that stuff. These are not negative things, but peak performance aging demands all these systems, right? You want them all working together in balance. One thing also is so testosterone— excuse me, dopamine declines over time. It's not dopamine synthesis that declines over time. It's that dopamine levels in the brain decline over time. This is Like at the extreme levels, this is Parkinson's and some of those diseases, but it starts much earlier. And this is important. Dopamine synthesis in the brain doesn't change. You can make as much dopamine at any point in your life. It's that you're shutting down the seeking system and the play system and some of the big dopamine supplies. We shut, we start turning, turning off in favor of this other thing. This is where that mindset of old comes from. And I think This is going to be a bigger issue in women than in men because it's, it's very, it's a lot more tied into hormones that show up during pregnancy. So there are other sex differences, but like, that's the one that I think about the most. And most people don't talk about at all, right? They don't know where the mindset of old comes from. They don't realize that we're addicted to neurochemicals, pleasure chemicals, you know, all this stuff. So that's the one that I like to talk about the most because I just find it the most surprising.

Yeah, that came up for me when you're talking about risk aversion. Anyways, unfortunately we must close the show. It's been a really fascinating conversation, Stephen. Really a big fan of your books. Really great to have you on the show to share the message with the community here in Australia. Where can the audience go to learn more about you and this particular book?

Flowresearchcollective.com gets you more about my work with flow. getmoreflow.com if you want to train with us. stephencottler.com if you want to know about me and my books. narcountry.com if you want to know about this particular book. And then apparently, I think I'm all over social media. I've heard this rumor. I don't know if it's true.

Well, thank you so much for your time, Stephen.

Hey, it's Josh here with the production team. Now, if you're listening to this, 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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