Flow and Aging: How to Thrive in Your Later Years

I've read and interviewed a lot of authors who have written a lot of books. And one of the things that I always find is that they didn't live it. They just read about it.

Old dogs should be able to learn new tricks. Over 50, it definitely appears that if you're not moving forward, you're going backwards. If you don't know who you are, how the fuck do you figure out what the match is between who you are and how you live in this world? Everybody has different labels. Often by 30, it's a role. I am a father. I am a mother. I am a schoolteacher. Those sorts of things.

I think about my age all the time and I fight it and I work out and I'm always busy, but hearing what's possible based on the research you did just was like, I was like, fuck.

It was amazing. 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, Rhian Dorris, and together with bestselling author Stephen Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio.

We've got a man my age, Steven Kotler, who studies flow. He's basically a flow scientist.

He's an old man.

Yeah, an old man. But Kotler is kind of defining— I mean, defying age. He became a park skier at that age. What that means is he does— he jumps, he does flips, he does all kinds of crazy shit. He was like, that, that sport, you're done at 35. And he was like, well, let me see what I can do. He's written a bunch of nonfiction books, Abundance, Stealing Fire, The Rise of Superman, The Art of Impossible. He's, he is fascinated with performance and he's fascinated with the notion of flow and how it gets, how you can do things you didn't think you could do. And part of it's incremental progress. He talks about in our country, growing old, staying rad. He literally put his own body to the test. He was like, let me see if I can apply all these lessons I've studied, all these, all the science I've studied. Let me see if I can apply it to myself in real time, doing something people say is impossible, which is trick skiing, park skiing, doing dangerous stunts on skis, you know, with a guy who's an expert. And let me see if I can actually surprise myself and get into flow. And I gotta be honest, the book's fascinating. The book is fascinating. He's fascinating. He's given several talks. And when you actually go down the rabbit hole of what flow is and how you can generate flow, there are techniques where you can get yourself into the zone, where you can get yourself into a situation where you actually shut your brain down. They used to think you use more of your brain. It may be that you actually stop thinking. And you know what the Buddhists say is it takes over. It takes over. Like when I do kung fu, I'm saying, dude, if I'm gonna fight you, and by you, I mean you and your group, like you come at me, if it's one-on-one, I'm gonna do— I'm gonna do my shit, you know what I'm saying? I know, but I'm gonna do my shit. I'm gonna surprise you, okay? And know that I'm gonna surprise you, okay? But if you come at me with 4 or 5 of your guys, I'm gonna let it take over. I'm gonna let it take over, okay? Can you stop? What? I'm just saying that I'm gonna stop thinking and I'm gonna start moving. Yeah, with extreme prejudice. But this is not about kung fu. I mean, it is. It's about kung fu mindset. Okay, that's flow. That's the zone. Steven Kotler is a master at this. He studied it. He's applied it to his own life. Nar Country is the book about that experience. And we had a great podcast So please enjoy Stephen Kotler on the Brian Callen Show. Stephen Kotler, welcome. I'm a fan. I read Narco Country, which we're going to talk about, Abundance, The Art of Impossible. But you've read— well, you've written all the books. You've written like 17 books. It's obnoxious, actually.

It's 14. I'm not done till I have a shelf though, dude. Like, I want a full shelf, and I'm talking about like in one of those old school—

it's an outrage—

big libraries.

Well, West of Jesus, there's all these There are a bunch, just a bunch of books I have to read now because, but I've listened to your lectures and what I got, what I was really pumped about was that I've interviewed a lot of people and they do a lot of research and they do a lot of primary research. They do a lot of secondary research and they write a book, could be a book about whatever it might be. And then they have a nifty title. You have been studying flow and peak performance aging and everything else forever. And now you finally put it to the test in such an extreme way. Like the shit you were talking about, as I'm reading this stuff, you learn how to park ski. And if you don't know what park skiing is, it's that trick shit that you do when you jump in the air and twirl, and it's the most dangerous thing. And you did it at 53, ladies and gentlemen. I did. And that's— you gotta— you're a— I kept reading, I go, this guy's a fucking nut. Like, I always think of myself as crazy, and then I read about somebody who makes me feel like I'm a Boy Scout. So congratulations on being alive. It was such an interesting book in that sense, and I just appreciate that you are willing to fucking put your words to the test. You basically have been talking about this and you go, I'm gonna do— I'm gonna be the most extreme example and prove that this actually works.

It's interesting because usually the experiments on myself come first.

Yeah.

And I just don't talk about them, right? Like, I usually always start there because otherwise I'm just not comfortable enough there that I'm going to be able to talk about in any learned way. Like, it can't be that removed from me, otherwise I'm not a talented enough writer to pull it off. I— whatever it is, I just usually keep the experiments out of it. And especially, like, I've been doing this a very long time, but like, guys like Tim Ferriss came along and the experiments were sort of their thing, and I was like, okay, that's their thing. I've just been doing the same thing, but whatever, let it be their thing. But it was fun to actually like—

well, Tim does stuff, but let's be honest. Hey, can you close that just in case? There's— Tim will experiment on his own body, but there's a big difference. Like, Hemingway did a lot of stuff, right? Hemingway drove an ambulance in the Spanish-American War, I think, and various stuff, and it's all good. And maybe did some boxing, jumped around a ring a little bit, and then maybe did some bullfighting, but not really. Like, I think there's a big difference. I actually was racking my brain to find who had done something that required this kind of physical exertion, this kind of wear and tear, and this kind of risk. And I actually don't— I came up short.

Oh, wow. That's interesting. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. I don't think of it that way. Part of it is, after spending so much time around professional action adventure sport athletes, I see what they do and I think, oh my God, I can't go near that. That's, that's insane to me. So I don't even rate on the scale compared to the folks I know. And what do— what they do sometimes.

Well, but you got to add in the fact that these people you're talking about, that you're talking about the X Games a lot in the book, and here's what— here's my theory on it, and you touch on it. Here's another thing you did in the book I haven't heard about. You talked about— you brought it up many times in the book— getting punched in the arm by jocks, basically proving that you're not a pussy.

A lot of— so The book is about peak performance aging, and one of the things that came out of adult development, right, which is the field of how do we grow up— and this was mostly George Valliant's work, who was the last caretaker of the Harvard— there are two studies in Boston, 100-year studies of, of adult development. One was done on Harvard graduates and one was done— they went, oh wow, those are all rich Harvard graduates, so let's redo it on just working-class Boston folks. George ended up as the last caretaker of that information. And one of the things he discovered is there are gateways in adult development, right? Like, there's all kinds of really neat stuff that we've learned, that like new kinds of intelligence and wisdom and empathy and creativity that come online in your 50s, but only if you've passed through these thresholds. And the first one is the thresholds of identity by age 30, and by 40 It's match fit, which is an economics term for there's a tight fit between who you are and your strengths and your values and how you like to live and what you do for a living or what you do with the bulk of your time. But by 50, it's forgiveness. You have to forgive those folks who had done you wrong and forgive yourself. And most of that stuff I had worked through, but as I didn't get along with the jocks as a kid and I lost a lot of fights over a long period of time, And that never really— like, it just wasn't— it was hard to put down. It never quite went away. And I— one of the reasons I came up with this crazy park scan quest was maybe if I tried to turn myself into one of the jocks, if I really, like, walked a mile in their moccasins kind of thing, maybe that— I didn't have any other ideas, right? I was like, I don't know if this is going to work, but nothing else has worked. Let's try this. And it was one of the, one of the things I, that I embarked on the quest for. It was a little extra added motivation for sure.

Gutsy, bro. It was so gutsy though, because that's a fuck— that's dicey territory to start talking about how you were picked on as a kid and then seeing if it works. But it made to me all the sense in the world.

I also wanted to write a book about like shit that men deal with all the time and don't ever talk about. Don't— and especially our generation, we're the same age. Where like you don't complain, you don't cry. Yeah. I grew up in a world where like men didn't have emotions at all. The most rebellious thing in the world you could be. My joke is that hug, give somebody a hug in the '70s and '80s as a man. Give somebody, give another man a hug. Yeah.

Yeah. Like my father always considered that he talked to his buddy who was seeing a therapist. He goes, he's seeing a fucking therapist. He needs therapy. Like if I ever cried, are you kidding? He'd be like, what are you, a leftist? What the fuck's going on? Exactly.

So we did, we grew up.

Yeah. No, we, so you grew up in this world where you couldn't have a mo—

you couldn't have any of those things. And it was sort of, yeah, it was just a way to see if I could settle that score. But I really wanted to talk about a lot of the heavy, like, in a fun way. I wanted to talk about some of the shame issues and like just some of the masculinity shit that men carry around. And nobody, especially today, you really can't talk, cuz the last thing anyone wants to hear is a man talking about like male—

you guys have had your time. Shut up.

Like, shut the fuck up.

You don't matter.

And that's fair. Totally.

Not really, but okay.

You can— it's fair. I mean, you get to have your opinion.

Maybe fair, but what I think the book shows is that there's a real vulnerability in the book. But that was what I thought was so interesting. I want you to dial in on sort of identity, on match— is it matchmaking?

Match fit or match quality?

Match fit, and then forgiveness.

And then self-forgiveness.

So these three concepts came to you from a—

No, it was— it showed up in the work of George Vallian watching the Harvard Adult Development Studies. Like, In psychology, they talk about moderators. Moderators are a fancy word for an if-then condition.

Yeah.

And some of the early work came out of like goal theory and the science of goal-directed behavior and things like that. They started to find moderators and they go like this because you have a—

you have— yeah, you have dust. I mean, you have not lint. It would have bugged the shit out of me.

It would have looked really good on camera.

Yeah, exactly.

He's got a sexy thing coming off his neck. Taking off his shirt. Um, go on. The hell was I saying?

You were saying that— I said the 3 stages.

So from— yeah, so the crisis of identity, Erik Erikson identified that way, way back. He thought it was a crisis that sort of was 12 to 18 and you'd have to solve it by 18. And what the, the study showed is that no, it actually stretches on to longer. But if you don't solve it by the time you're 30, you start to have problems because by 40 you need match fit, right? And if you don't know who you are, how the fuck do figure out what the match is between who you are and how you live in this world, which is the next thing you have to—

but is identity identifying what you want?

No, identity is who are you, what— who are you as a person. The crisis of identity—

what does that mean, where to place your energy?

No, however you identify as an individual, and everybody has different labels. Often by 30 it's a role. I am a father, I am a mother, I am a school teacher, I am like— it's what— it's those sorts of things. But it can be You want to be clear on your sexuality. You want to be clear on all that, you know, all that, all those big things, if you can be, right? And it's mostly so you can get match fit and figure out, like, how do I live in the world? And it seems like the forgiveness thing is interesting, and— but it seems like it's what unlocks, first of all, empathy and wisdom. And one of the reasons— let's— so Wisdom, which is a specific neurobiological trait, like certain areas of the brain are involved in it, codes for certain things, and expertise are the two things that are neuro— big words— neuroprotective against cognitive decline. Cognitive decline means slowing down of cognitive function. It becomes cognitive decline once it's, I think it's below 50% of what you normal function, and leads to dementia and Alzheimer's. And when they autopsy brains afterwards, they can find people with brains that are filled with plaques and tangles, all the signs of Alzheimer's, but they showed none of the symptoms, and always because they've got lifelong hobbies or learnings, basically, right? And it's the wisdom and the expertise that comes off of it because they form big neural nets in the brain. And usually if you get Alzheimer's dementia, it's like individual spots that tend to erode. So you have these big neural nets, they're protective and they're redundant against cognitive decline.

Yeah, you use the expression 'use it or lose it' a lot.

It's— well, the old idea on aging, right? And it's the one I grew up with, is probably the one you grew up with, which is like the long, slow rot theory, right? Our mental and physical skills decline over time. There's nothing we can do to stop the slide.

To be honest with you, until I read this book, the value of this book, I swear to God, I'm not blowing smoke up your ass, but like, I, I think about my age all the time and I fight it and I work out and I'm always busy. But just Hearing what's possible based on the research you did just was like—

I was like, it's kind of— it was amazing because every— I mean, everything that they used to think declined over time, we now know it's a use-it-or-lose-it skill. It doesn't change the fact, like, your strength fibers, strength muscles start declining at 50, and they're going to keep going. They are going to decline. It's just that if trained properly, the remaining fibers more than compensate mostly for what is lost, and you can even start to gain skill. So, and it's like across the boards, VO2 max, which was something that we were— every stamina goes over 40, you're fucked, forget about it. And now they're measuring the VO2 max of like 85-year-old octogenarian triathletes, and they've got the VO2 max of like 35-year-old and 40.

That was fascinating in the book. I freaked out when I heard that because I had— I bought into The fact I ride that Aerodyne bike, it's such a nightmare. But I was like, well, I gotta just hold on to my VO2 max. But you can actually—

you can extend it.

It's crazy.

Yeah, there's a lot of this stuff that you actually can extend. And some of it's weird, like there's weird facts. Like, so if you want real neural net new networks, right, you want memory protection and things like that, exercise obviously matters hugely, which is one of the reasons this is so important. But it's not just exercise. It's balance and coordination, agility and coordination, changing movement. Certain things produce way more neurogenesis, the birth of new neurons, than other stuff. So it's getting very specific, which is really— it's not just use it or lose it was big enough news, right? But the fact that we're now— there's a recipe in a sense, um, which is really kind of amazing.

So then you've got identity, you've got matchmaking, A match fit, and then you've got self-forgiveness, and then self-forgiveness, self-forgiveness of others, forgiveness of others and self.

And it's because we get access to new levels of wisdom and empathy. But if you can't forgive people, it— the parts of our brain— so wisdom, empathy, all this comes out of a part in our brain called the temporal parietal junction. It's basically right here, and it's the part of your brain that does perspective-taking. So when you see things from another's perspective, or when you have an out-of-body experience which is a— right, you're physically floating above your body. It's also a radically different shift in perspective. It's the same part of the brain going haywire in an out-of-body experience— maybe haywire is a strong term, but having a weird surge. But it's this portion of your brain that seems to be where wisdom and empathy develop. And something about— they don't quite know why yet, but something about forgiveness. If you don't get through that gateway, if you can't put this shit down, it seems to block some of the empathy.

I love that you're talking about forgiveness and there's— you're breaking it down scientifically. The Christians have been saying this, but right, it's like religion has been— I can just see all the religious people going, we've been fucking saying it for 2,500 years, bro. So do you find as you get older that the— do you find yourself getting more curious about the ancient mythologies, the religions that, that are ever-present in our lives, or are you still an avowed atheist?

I've never been an avowed atheist.

I like— I see.

I'm very— yeah, I'm a very strong agnostic. And I actually think I don't get atheists because to me it's a belief like any other belief. And I'm a strong agnostic because I don't know, right? Like, the universe is just bigger than I can comprehend. And the amount of arrogance it takes to say, oh, I know this for sure— yeah, I'm amazed by— like, wherever you— like, religious, atheist, like, wherever you fall, I'm just amazed by your certainty.

Like, how's that? That's how I feel.

Okay.

I'm not about to be like, bullshit. And I get there and God's like, now you want to be my friend? You know what I mean? I don't know, man. I'm the same way. I just, I would never presume to be that sure.

Yeah. I like about anything rationality.

What I really love though, is just, I think you, it feels like you're on the forefront of this sort of idea of cognitive aging and peak performance aging and. So I love, I love these things, but let's talk a little bit about, because I'm a huge believer in this too, like just incremental improvements. So tiny little, like instead of looking at just fucking one step at a time, instead of looking at the top of the mountain, right?

It's so we have to talk a little bit about flow.

Yes.

For this to make sense. Flow, which is what at the heart of all of my work, if you are listening and don't know what flow is, it's an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best. Right? Those in-the-zone moments, you get so focused on everything you're doing that everything else vanishes.

Not thinking.

Right. So flow states have triggers, preconditions that lead to more flow. So if you want more flow and all the benefits that come with it, the triggers are your toolkit. One of the most famous is what's known as the challenge-skills balance. I don't care, baby. And the challenge-skills balance— so flow follows focus. It only shows up when all our attention is on the here and now. And we pay the most attention to the task at hand, to the here and now, when the challenge that we're facing slightly exceeds our skill set. So you want to stretch but not snap. So next step, and then we'll get to the one inch at a time idea, is that a bunch of years ago, the godfather of flow psychology, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, was sitting down with a Google mathematician. They tried to put a number— can we put a rate, an actual number on the difference between challenge and skills? And they did a back-of-the-envelope calculation and they came up with 4%. Wasn't a real number, it was a metaphor.

4%.

4%, meaning we pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge of the task is 4% greater than the skills we bring to it. So you're stretching but not snapping, right? So allostatic overload, or allostatic load, is essentially all the bad shit that's ever happened to you in your life, all the tragic emotional and physical otherwise. It's the residual of it, right? And it builds up in our nervous system, and it's called allostatic load or allostatic overload. It's often talked about in the— around burnout. You hear it a lot when they talk about burnout. But we started to realize is that 4% challenge skill sweet spot, because of allostatic overload, is shrunken in older adults. They don't even know. So you still feel like the athlete you were in your 20s, and you may have the physical skills to be that person, but the amount of fear has gone up so much and you haven't noticed. And so I stopped and I was like, okay, I think that's probably true with me because I've broken so many bones and I really didn't want to get injured, which is a strange thing to say. I'm going to teach myself how to park ski and I don't want to get injured. Yeah, but that was like the craziest shit you could choose, you could possibly do. But the idea was, let's start with an existing motor pattern, something I can do 100% of the time with zero fear and 100% success rate, or 95% success rate. And build one inch at a time. And you're building—

are you building neural— like, is it like the myelin sheath?

Is it— I want it— well, first I wanted the new— I wanted the new motor pattern. Yeah. And it was—

everything is that way. Boxing, jiu-jitsu, wrestling— you drill the same move over and over.

Yeah, you want the same, and then you want— so I took a— I took what is known as— I took a deliberate play approach, which is different than deliberate practice. Is Anders Ericsson, do the same thing over and over again, get your 10,000 hours, right? Which Slight improvement. Repetition without repetition. Deliberate play is do exactly what you did before but just improv a tiny little bit on top of it, right? So it'd be the difference in, in MMA of literally like, I'm putting my weight in my right hip versus my left hip, right, for this move. Something really micro like that. That's how I was playing with it, and it— we just got good results right out of the gate.

Like, good results in getting in flow right away?

Well, it wasn't even so much flow with— yes, there was a lot of flow, but no, I was actually making progress. I mean, that, like, I knew there were going to be a couple tricks where, like, the first time I threw a 180, you're gonna have to land backwards, right? I was gonna have to, like, get over it and just— I'm gonna have to figure out how to land backwards.

Just think about my knees breaking. It's—

what was surprised— so surprising to me is how I actually understood. Like, as soon as I landed backwards, my body knew what to do. Yeah, like, it was a very— it was a very weird thing because I was so terrified of it. And like, it was— my body actually knew what to do. And that was— it was a lot of stuff like that along the way where like I'd have to push, but I was doing it in such a way that like what I was finding on the other side of the pushing, which was new for me, was something I could build upon rather than something like, oh wow, that's too hard, it's unattainable. I can work with this. And that was the fun of it. And you may know this is to suddenly find yourself at 53 years old getting better at a sport like park skiing was nuts. Like it was, it was so— that was—

that's not supposed to belong to 50.

Well, that was so that— but that was the, the real thing that was interesting is that was really where the book, one of the places the book started is there was all these theories out of network neuroscience, neural dynamics, but how the network level of the brain works, embodied cognition, which is basically the science of like, hey, we're not just heads on sticks, our brains are actually embedded in the body, in our bodies, right? And flow science that said, hey, wait a minute, we— old dogs should be able to learn new tricks. Like, all this idea that old dogs can't learn new tricks, it's like I'm reading theory after theory and It's all saying this: if you put these things together, this should work. And park skiing was a great test because it's— there are 12 or 13, 14 different reasons that it's biologically supposed to be impossible for anybody over the age of 35 or 40 to learn how to park skate. And all Stephen Kotler came along, it was a bunch of scientists in labs all over the world who did the actual—

like, they weren't doing 180s and 360s.

They did not put it to the test. Yes, it Be modest.

It annoys me. Just fucking brag. Go on. No, I hear you. But still, you still have to put it to the test. I know. I hear you. I had to cut you off because I know all the science, but you were following that maniac. No, but like when you're skiing, when you're park skiing, it's kind of hard not to do it full. It's kind of hard.

You got to get a certain speed to jump. Yeah, that was, well, that was, yeah, that was the—

when he told you to jump and you saw all the rocks below, you were like, just fucking do it, Bro, just some of those things, like if you chicken out last minute, it's—

no, you don't.

Problematic.

You actually can't. Yeah, you have to. You do have to. And a lot of those things you do have to commit. And the one thing that I've definitely learned, and I've learned it again coming back into this season— it's day 6 of the season— you have to relearn your tricks. And you fool yourself. I've been fooling myself trying to relearn them slowly. You know what happens when you try to relearn a park trick slowly? You fall down.

Yeah.

You fall down and it freaking hurts.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Park skiing doesn't care. I also felt like when I read the book, I was like, look, man, it's all good. You did this. And I love the book. And, but at the same time, like that was then it's not something you got to just keep doing it. It's not like you can take a year off and come back.

You definitely have to keep— well, no, it's, this is something I learned years ago. I, when I was learning how to rock climb, when I was learning how to surf, it's the same thing. In all action sports, for me, this may not be for other people. I've been around phenomenal athletes who can like show up once a week or twice a week and make progress. He's telling me, yeah, I got to show up 4 times a week and work like 2 to 4 hours. Otherwise I'm going backwards. Yeah, right. That's just who I am. So I like—

yeah, yeah. But that's the other thing I appreciated about the book. Very vulnerable. I wonder if there's any escape. It's constant work no matter what you're doing.

Right. I think, well, over 50, it definitely appears that if you're not moving forward, you're going backwards.

Thank you for tuning in to Flow Research Collective Radio. Please pardon the brief interruption. Got a question for you. Do you have great ideas and big goals? My assumption is you have more skills than most knowledge workers. You're paid well to use your brain, and you've reached this level in your career by being uncommonly effective at what you do. But maybe something's changed. You're typically relentless, but fatigue has started to slow you down. You used to be crystal clear on your priorities, but mounting responsibilities have started to blur your vision. Now, on your best days, you can focus for hours on end on the most critical tasks and blaze through a massive workload with ease. But perhaps you're inconsistent. Some days you can barely focus for more than a few minutes before your attention gets yanked elsewhere. People rely on you, so you're constantly reeled into conversations, task switching, and multitasking. Or perhaps you've got no trouble keeping focus. You can consistently execute on your highest priorities, and you're fully able to manage your time wisely, but you know that something is missing. You're looking for a way to perform at your absolute best, and not just some of the time, but all the time. On your best days, you can get 10 times more work done in half the time, and it feels nearly effortless, and it's enjoyable, and it's energizing. At the end of a 10 out of 10 day, you hit the pillow that night feeling unstoppable. Now, this level of extreme accomplishment is its own reward, but you get the external rewards too by excelling in your profession and your craft. Now, with 10 out of 10 days, you exceed your own expectations and surprise yourself with what you're capable of. And if you've ever suspected there's a way to operate at a 10 out of 10 level every day, you're right, there is. And we're going to show you exactly how to access apex performance like this at will without fail. To train with us at the Flow Research Collective, go to getmoreflow.com. .com. That's getmoreflow.com. All the best.

Yeah, but I loved— what I loved is your examples, right? So I went to an exhibit, a Picasso exhibit. He was 90 years old. The dude was painting on a level as high as he was when he was 40. Then you use Stradivarius as an example.

That was— yeah, that was one of the myths, right? That was where one of the places the book came from.

Like, the The way it was? Is that where you started?

No, I, so I started a whole bunch of different places. I'll give you an order. So let me tell you the Stradivarius thing. The Stradivarius thing, this was very early on before, long before it was a book, but I was, I wanted to write a novel. It'd been a long time since I wrote, my first book was a novel and I wrote a couple recently, but it, this was in, in a long gap and I was like, oh, I'll write a book. And I wanted to, I always wanted to write a book about a cat burglar. And there it was for flow reasons. There's this. There's a bunch of chicks that may have early work on juvenile delinquency. And the argument is that a lot of the things juvenile delinquents, quote unquote, do— graffiti, fighting, petty theft— they're doing to regulate their nervous system and try to drive themselves into flow. And it's about flow seeking, not moral transgression. Choose. Exactly. And so I was like, oh, cool, I'm gonna make a cat burglar who's like the grown-up version of one of these Flow Kids, Juvenile Delinquents. And that was— and I was like, okay, well, my cat burglar, what's she gonna steal? I want something cool. And I was like, after thinking about it for a while, I settled on rare musical instruments. Next question: who— what are the most expensive musical instruments in history, right? And I start looking into this, and I realized that Stradivarius, one guy in the 1600s, has built half of the most valuable musical instruments in history, which is bizarre. That'd be like One painter has painted half of those. It doesn't even make any sense.

After I read your book, I kind of did a little research.

Yeah, you get in line.

Obsessed about fucking the glue and the kind of glue he used.

Oh, and the strings too. It was amazing. Yeah. But so I'm reading about Stradivarius and I realized that he had made— so this is, I still believe, the long slow rot theory of aging at this point. And it's— I'm reading whatever I was reading and said he made two of his most famous violins or musical instruments When he was 92 years old. And I went, wait a minute, if this is true, everything I know about aging has to be wrong because there's no way a 92-year-old man with cognitive decline, with lack of motor skills and motor coordination, all the things that are supposed to go away, you can't build priceless violins, right? It doesn't make any sense. So that was one of the—

by hand.

Yeah, that was— there were a bunch of— a lot of the puzzle pieces So my wife and I run and did for a very long time an animal sanctuary. We do hospice care. So we've had 700 hospice cases have passed through our lives. And we have a— there's a movement in canine welfare to double canine lifespan. And there's really high-tech approaches and there's low-tech, and we're in the middle. We do some flow science stuff, some evolutionary psychology stuff, and some nutrition stuff. But we get amazing results. Like, we'll get dogs, they'll come from vets, and the vet will be like, don't get very attached, this dog's got a month to live, and we'll sort of institute our healing protocol and we'll get 5 or 6 more years of life out of these animals. And these aren't— we take our dogs into the backcountry off leash every day, so they'll do 5, 7 miles up and down mountains when they're supposed to be dead in a month. And so we were seeing this, hundreds of dogs, not just a couple, hundreds and hundreds of dogs over, over 20 years at this point. So I knew one, something was, I knew something was wrong. I was like, this doesn't, like, whatever they're saying about aging, like we're getting results that don't even make any sense. And we're not doing, like, we've increased the quality of their food and we've matched their diet to what the dogs evolved to eat, but we've just created an, all we did was create an environment very similar to what dogs evolved in. And that's most of what we did. And suddenly they just blossom. So I knew something was wonky. Because that didn't make any sense. The Stradivarius thing was another whole— and then what really changed for me where— so the book was percolating, but it was the last conversation I had with Mihajčić before he died.

You actually had a conversation?

Yeah, we've known each other for, for a while, but I had— so you get a kick out of this, a funny story. Um, one, I, I knew he'd had a stroke and I hadn't talked to him, but I knew he was starting to improve, but I wanted to check in on him. It had been a bunch of years since I talked to him. And they had just translated— but they published a couple new flow textbooks, and in doing so, they translated a bunch of old interviews with Csikszentmihalyi that were in Italian into English. And I'm reading these interviews, and he's always been an avid outdoors guy, right? Um, and his students tell stories about how he would come to class with like black eyes and like things— we'd go into the backcountry and things would happen, and he worked on rock climbers early on, talked— some of the early flow research was done on rock climbers. But I'm reading these interviews and he's like name-dropping 1960s-era Yosemite Valley climbers, like hardcore people. And I'm like, there's no way he would have known these people if he wasn't really serious about this stuff. And I just had this— it was a really weird— I had this weird idea. So I called him. I was like— he answers the phone And, uh, I was like, Mike, you gotta tell me. I've been reading all your old stuff and I know you and your TED Talk. You say that you first stumbled onto flow in concentration camps and then you did all this research on artists. But tell me the truth. You were an action sport athlete. You were getting into flow in the mountains as a rock climber, as a mountaineer, and you didn't know how to talk about that because that was even me writing about action sports in the early thousands. Was hard enough trying to do it in the '60s when he was writing Beyond, right? You could never do it.

It sounded like almost like magic, right? He can— he used conductors, painters, rock climbers, and surgeons. Yeah. And, and talked about how they get— it was—

yeah, it was how they get into it. Started— I mean, his famous one is artists, right? Like, he started with artists.

Yeah, that's right. Painters.

Painters. He was at the University of Chicago and he was trying to figure out, like, why they were so invested in these paintings, and the minute they were done, they didn't care about the work anymore. It was just about— it was just about the painting. It wasn't about the fame, the success, all the things that people thought it was going to be about. It was just about—

continue what you were saying because I interrupted. So anyways, because you said—

so I called him up to ask and asked him this ridiculous question, right? Like, and there's this huge pause, 30 seconds, a minute and a half, 2 minutes. And I'm like, holy shit, I've like— I've just mortally offended the Godfather of low cycle. Like, whoa, oh shit. And finally, his voice was really deep, like, well, Stephen, you got to be careful. I was like, what? And I'm thinking to myself, oh shit, this drug got into his brain. Like, he lost the threat. And I— so I sit there and I didn't know what to do. And after about a minute, I'm like, okay, I just gotta— there's nothing to do. I was like, Mike, what do I have to be careful about? He's like, you got to be careful. You do something your entire life for flow. You get to be my age, forget about climbing mountains. Sometimes you can't even get out of bed. You got to have a backup plan. You got to be careful. And I went, oh crap, this is the godfather of flow science. It wasn't even like— it wasn't—

so he was a rock climber?

He was one. Yeah, he was a mountaineer and a rock climber. He did it his whole life for flow, and then he got to a point where he could no longer do it, do it. And he So he tells me to have a backup plan, and I'll get to why park skiing— backup plan to get back into flow, meaning as you're going to age, have a backup plan for how you get into flow. Because if you're locked out, and at that point, so I know why would I learn to park ski? What skiing was always my— what I did for flow. Yeah, but I was a big mountain skier, which means the only way I'm getting into flow is doing 60 miles an hour down something very steep and really dangerous. And that's not super user-friendly in your 80s. And so I figured if I could learn to park ski, I could creatively interpret the mountain. Yeah, getting to intermediate was going to be dangerous, and I knew that. But I knew what— once I got to intermediate, I didn't want— I didn't— if I get to expert, great, whatever. But if I get to intermediate, there was going to be a million more ways I could get into flow much more safely Yeah, on a mountain, then just like diving down chutes at 70 miles an hour, right? And that— so I was like, okay, that's maybe my total backup plan, but this is where I'm starting. And so that was the final— like, there was a bunch of other stuff going on, but that was the catalyst when I was like, okay, yeah.

That's why I feel so incredibly lucky to be a stand-up comic, because flow for me has been probably— I didn't really think about it deeply, but I remember doing a show in Sacramento and I was just, I was firing on all cylinders. It was just like one of those shows because I was about to drop my special, so I had everything dialed in. And I remember I didn't have to think about anything I was saying. I didn't even have to think about the jokes. I swear to God, I was playing the audience the way you play an instrument. So you play it like the way you play— what is that? What's this thing?

Accordion?

Yeah, the fucking accordion. The, that instrument.

Not a crime.

No, I was gonna say But when you play that or you play an instrument, a reed instrument, you're blowing, you're regulating your breath, right? You're pulling back your way. I swear to God, man. I was like, I was like this side of the audience. They're laughing too hard. They're going to get exhausted. So I pull air back there and I'd hit and I go, that guy, this part of the audience looks a little bit, I've been directing too much attention. Let me hit these guys. That guy's macho. I could do that. I was like, that guy's macho. He's not giving me much. So let me give him attention because he's going to say something. He's going to, I was able to see every fucking person in that audience. I swear to God. And I started playing them. I was like, this side now looks like they're a little tired, so let me give them energy. Let me give you guys energy now, and let me pull energy back from you. So it was almost like I was playing— the best way to describe it, I felt like I was playing the entire audience. I got to like, woo, more air, pull air back here. And I didn't have to think of anything. But I've had so many of those experiences where you literally are not thinking about anything other than you just let it take over. You go because it's exactly where I'm supposed to be. It's what I was born for. And that's probably why nothing else is interesting to me. Like, like, you want to go rock climbing? Cool. Yeah. You want to go hunting? Yeah, we'll go hunting. You want to go? The only thing that came close was maybe boxing, because I would always get nervous because I got to fight some fucking young dude's going to hit me in the face and I'm going to be dizzy for the next. But even that, everything was pretty much everything pales in comparison. And I didn't really think about why. I always thought it's just what I'm made to do and stuff. No. And I have these lofty ideas of what an artist is, an original self-expression. But I think if I'm really honest with myself, it's probably because my brain shuts off and— or maybe it turns on, but I feel as honest as I ever have. I feel like I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be and I don't have to think about anything. It's where I'm truly Maybe Schiller once said, man's never more himself than when at play, which is that thing you would do for its own sake. You would do it whether you got paid for it or not. And I just—

two things. One, I was listening to you talking, it reminds me, Tom Waits once said, songs are really fun things to do with air, right? But that's besides the point. What I was actually thinking is, because right and wrong, meaning You were making fun of yourself for having a definition of an artist that you were up on stage fulfilling. And what I want to say is that I think the point of flow is it, it matches our values and our strengths and things like that. So if you like, one of the reasons you find so much flow on stage is also because you have these values that you're living into when you're on stage.

Yeah. Yes. I, I actually think Like the best way to get to know yourself is to get really good at something. I believe that.

I agree with that.

And I also think that my God is honesty, truth. Like you spend a lot of your life lying to yourself. You spend a lot of your life pretending to be somebody you're not, right? I don't know if that's such a bad thing. I think men, I can speak for most of us, are planning our escape. Most men. There's some men that just dull that and they fucking smoke weed and they just stare in stupor and play video games all day. But for the most part, all of us are trying to get out of where we are right get some, right? It really is like being in jail in one way or another. But I think that for me, the battle is always about original self-expression, meaning I have to surprise myself, and meaning I have to be original and do something that I didn't know I had in me. And that means never getting too comfortable. I can't just keep telling the same fucking jokes, man. And that also means I've got to really key in on to what I honestly revere, what I am honestly afraid of, what I'm honestly angry about, and let me forgive. I really thought a lot about this with this book. I don't think there's any growth without forgiveness. And I just can't believe that a guy like yourself who's a scientist essentially, or somebody who's studying flow from such a mathematical perspective, brought that shit into the book. Because I think it's the most important aspect of the book. And I never thought about it until I read it. I was like, You can't move unless you forgive those that did you wrong and forgive yourself for all your— I don't know, maybe who you were pretending to be for the longest time. I don't know.

I definitely— I mean, I'm— I always say that with books, the secret to a great book is you have to tell the truth, tell the truth, and it's the third— like, it's— you got to go all the way in.

Um, Yeah, it was gutsy. You did it because it could have been—

it's funny because it— when I was doing it, it just felt organic. Like, if you would have pointed it out and been like, you're doing—

it wouldn't have, because it would have fucked you.

I don't—

you would have gotten in your head.

Yeah, I would have gotten in my head.

I don't know.

I— too much.

Now, you shouldn't even hear this. I shouldn't even tell you this because I don't want to fuck you up for your next book. Seriously, like, I'm very guarded of people's talent because I don't want to be kissing— I don't want to be blowing smoke up your ass because you're going to hate me for that.

But I've learned the same lesson you've learned. Also, which is that like every one of my books, there's a communication challenge is the thing I want to tell you. And there's a style challenge is how I want to tell it artfully. But there's always something hard that I have to learn. In our country was nobody's— the one thing that I'm really proud of is there aren't books that go day by— it's the first book about applied peak performance that I think has ever been written, because you can't— very few writers are willing to like try to go day by day through something without like— they're terrified it's gonna be boring. And I was too, right? Like, and it took a really long time. How do you write a book about skiing that people who've never skied in their life are gonna want to really read? Like, all that stuff. There were a bunch of writing challenges that scared the pants off me, right, going into it, going, wow, I don't know if like this is gonna work at all. And this was of the books that I've written, this was the one I was almost a year in before I was like, oh yeah, this might work. Like, I had really— yeah, it took you a year. I had been working on it.

No, what an act of faith.

That is almost a year.

That's an act.

When I finally was like, oh yeah, okay, now I'm seeing it start to work.

Wow.

It was a tricky one.

By the way, I can't believe I didn't mention enough of that. The book, the new book of your 14 is gnar country. And if you read The Art of Impossible or Abundance, or all of them have a lot to say and are just full of like what's possible in your life. But I just— this in particular, coming maybe from me at 55, selfishly, was just a door opener. I was just like, this is just so interesting to me because I'm glad that my work here is done. Yeah, dude, you literally put yourself— you put yourself— you were guinea pig. And it could have gone south.

That— no, that was one of them.

When I was— I was—

so I'll tell— let me—

yeah, tell the story.

The story, really. So we were skiing at Kirkwood and we were on a skiing a feature called Lower Norm's Nose. And it's a giant nose that protrudes out of the mountain, right? And there's chutes all over it. And we had been working our way in, and Ryan had tried to ski this really aggressive chute and it had slid. So he skied it, but he stayed right above, right ahead of the snow, and barely made it out alive. And I was— and it— but it slid. All the snow was gone from the rock now, and there was no way to go back. So I still had to go deeper onto the face, and I got to like the top of this chute. I was sideways into it, and the chute was like 15 feet below me. I'm on a side of a right rock wall. And as soon as I skied up onto it, the same thing happened again. The snow started to slide and there was no— like, I had to get into that chute. So like, there was no choice. I would— it was just— it was go.

You had to jump.

You have to jump and land and turn. And I had to do— and it was one of the crazier things I've had to do because it was jump, land, turn, and you're— it's like 5 feet wide. Like, it's landing in a 5-foot slot and The moment I landed down below, Ryan, my ski partner, I see him start to like raise his arms in victory, and then his eyes went really wide, and I saw it. And then there's something— there's a voice behind my left ear, in a voice like there shouldn't be a voice there, right?

Like at all.

No voice should be there, right? It was a— I, as you pointed out earlier, I weigh a buck 50, sopping wet. This was like a 210, 220-pound, 6-foot-2 guy entered the chute at the same time I leaped off the wall. He hit terminal velocity right as he impacted me. So we start— we're mashed together, like literally, like, almost face to face, right? And we're flipping down a 5-foot-wide corridor between lava rock walls, and I can see the lava rock flipping past my eyes, and I'm— my brain is literally like, the chances that two entangled skiers could tomahawk down a lava without dying here are almost minuscule. And I'm like, yeah, thanks buddy, thank you very much.

Like, I love how it ended too. He goes, you okay? Yeah, you all right?

Well, first of all, I think the dude had lost— like, he knew he was super at fault. I think he'd like— yeah, like, get out of here, see you later, you dropped something, sorry, you're all right.

Sorry about your life.

Sorry about your spine. Sorry about the fact that—

yeah, chest contusion.

No, he managed to almost completely sever my left rotator cuff. We didn't even know it until the end of the season when I actually, like, I went to go get my knees looked at and I was like, my left shoulder has been a little weird since that accident. Would you take a look at it? I was like, it's hanging on by a, like, a single thread.

Did you do operation or stem?

No, I did, uh, I did exosomes and stem cells and exosomes.

And my wife has a torn rotator cuff. I want to—

I've done— so I've done with torn rotator cuffs, I've had 5 of them. I've done 2 surgeries, which are the most miserable, awful things ever, and they take a year and a half to heal, and they're shitty.

They say 6 weeks, that's all bullshit. I love it.

PRP, which if it'll work— doesn't work for everybody— did— was amazing for me. I've fixed both rotator cuffs on either side. Very quick PRP. And then with exosomes.

What are exosomes?

They're what stem— so stem cells, which were the big thing in regenerative medicine. The one of the problems with— there's all kinds of health-related, this could cause cancer type of maybe issues. But the biggest problem with stem cells were they would inject them into people into like the wound site and they would leave. They'd stick around for like 2 or 3 days and then they'd be gone. And what they started to realize is the things you want are what the stem cells actually secrete, which are exosomes. And they're, they're wound healing or healing properties, or they'll recruit other cells that will heal properties. And I think I treated the rotator cuff with one round of exosomes, in, out, and done, and I've not had any problems with it. PRP, I had to do two rounds, but I think with the shoulder, I literally did one round. That was one of the things that that this is not a book about regenerative medicine. That's not really my field. I don't do longevity science. I don't do regenerative medicine. You and I share similar skepticism. Nobody gets out of this thing alive around it. That said, I have been playing with regenerative medicine now experimentally on myself as a guinea pig since 2000, and it was a joke until like PRP showed up in around 2012, '13, started to get good. And that was like second round of— and now it's at the third level of regenerative medicine. And I still, for a lot of the diseases, a lot of the functional medical stuff, I still think it's crap. I don't— I'm not— but for orthopedic stuff, I have torn this, I have broken this, I have damaged this, it's starting to get very good.

That's, um, that's great. Yeah, so let's conclude this. You Do you have a philosophy on nutrition? Yes, you do. You're such a walking dichotomy.

I'm not. No, no, my philosophy on nutrition was I don't have a philosophy on it. Like, literally, my feeling on nutrition is this. One, I love that we're very clear on this. There is no one diet that will work for everyone. Two, let me tell you a funny story because the nutrition crowd loves low stuff. Right? They look— and there's never ever— we— flow is a high-energy state, so you would presume you need high-quality food to produce that energy and lots of hydration. And that's what we tell people, and that's what I try to live by, and etc., etc. True story, I wanted to know at a personal level if there was any relationship between what I ate before I went skiing and getting into flow. So I did a 10-year study on myself. What did I eat before before I went skiing, did I get into flow? How deep of a flow state after a decade? The only correlation I found is on the days that I couldn't— didn't have time, was running late, didn't make breakfast, didn't like eat at home, and I stopped at a gas station most of the time, bought like truck store donuts, right? That's when I got into the most flow. So after 10 years of trying to find this nutrition correlate that— blah blah— no, actually, like cheap Hostess donuts from the fucking gas station because I'm skinny and I burn a lot of energy.

Nothing says I don't give a fuck like Hostess donuts. And part of getting in flow is saying I don't give a fuck, let's go. There are rocks down there, but I'm taking the—

I'm taking it anyways.

I'm gonna end this with this. I compliment you with this because a lot of guys— I've read and interviewed a lot of authors who have written a lot of books, and on subjects like this and others, and one of the things that I always find is that they didn't live it. They just read about it. And I don't think you can really learn life by just reading about it and hearing about it. And you went out and did it.

Yeah, you got to do both.

Yeah, it's like Goethe read Newton's treatise on light. He read his 1,400-page volume on the properties of light. This is Goethe, who wrote Faust, etc. And Goethe said—

by the way, Goethe actually coined the word for flow. The first time flow is used in Western languages, it's Goethe, and the word is Rausch, which is overflowing joy. And Goethe was trying to figure out the, like, Bacchanese Dionysian passion at Oktoberfest, at German beer festivals, when everybody got like swept up in the moment. They called that Rausch, and it was the first showing up of flow. And when Nietzsche, who was the first person to actually work on flow, he was working on Rausch, he was working on it.

Talk about full circle. So then this story is very apropos and appropriate. And he said, I read that miserable treatise on light and all, you know, as a father of science, I read 1,400 pages about the properties of light. And yet he told me nothing and taught me nothing about beauty, which is the whole point of learning about light because the world is made of beauty. And I think that was a classic example of somebody who's theoretical versus somebody who lives. What's the point of life? You can't—

I always thought this was my advantage. Doing flow research is that, like, I'm— I know almost all the scientists in the flow world, and I will tell you that the ones who got farther than most were all athletes. Arne Dietrich was a marathon runner. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was a rock climber and a mountaineer, right? Like, the people who actually advance flow science come into contact with objective reality.

You got to feel the ground under It's helpful.

I find it helpful.

Fucking A. Thanks, Stephen Kotler, for coming out here. This is awesome.

Thank you, Brian.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. Now, your time is priceless, and in terms of dollars and cents, it's valuable. Whether you're an entrepreneur, executive, or a manager, you're paid well, but when you're short on time, you end up in a tailspin. Now, if you want to get more out of less time, just go to getmoreflow.com. We'll show you how, because you know that when you manage your time well, you can move mountains. But your time is like sand slipping between your fingers. Your to-do list grows, but time doesn't slow. You'd think that with less time you'd work harder or smarter, but a scarcity of seconds makes you prone to procrastinate, which makes things worse. But you can end this time trouble right now. Here's how: make more out of less through flow. You don't actually need more time. You already have enough. What it takes is switching to a higher gear of performance to get more out of that time. Now, here at Flow Research Collective, we study the human nervous system when it's functioning at its absolute best. There's a peak state you can tap into with reliability. It's called flow, or being in the zone. It's an optimal state of consciousness where you feel your best and perform your best, and in it, time seems to slow down. Now, if you want to access flow consistently and reliably, just go to getmoreflow.com. Our protocols come from research out of Harvard, DARPA, and Stanford, and others. Our founder Stephen Kotler's work has been praised by the likes of Elon Musk, Bill Clinton, and Vishen Lakhiani. We draw from over 25 years of flow science to train a wide range of peak performers, from Navy SEALs to Fortune 100 executives. Because our training is grounded in neurobiology, it works for everyone. So if you're interested, just go to getmoreflow.com for all the details. That's getmoreflow.com.

All the best.

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