How Does Lifelong Learning Boost Performance?

Everything we've heard about performance in the second half of our lives is wrong. In adulthood, we start learning in a radically different way.

Progression.

I think progression is the best drug. There's a relationship between progression and expectation that kind of destroys more good days than anything I know.

How does the word standard fold into that expectation versus standard?

In my Nara Country season, right, my goals were never try to learn a trick or ski a big line. If I got into flow and I was performing my best, then is when I would go learn a trick or ski a big line. I had a standard for behavior. It was unlinked to performance, unlinked to the things I couldn't control. Nothing is more demotivating than saying, I'm going to go here and learn this, and you don't. What does it take to do the impossible? What does it take to level up your game like never before? What does it take for individuals, organizations, for even institutions to achieve paradigm-shifting Nothing is ever the same again. Breakthroughs.

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

Let's find out how to grow old and stay rad in this week's conversation with my friend Stephen Kotler. Stephen, this is number 4 that you've been on this podcast, and that's a record for us. So we're doing something right here where we're having a little bit too much fun or we're really like, our folks want to learn from you. So it's awesome that you're here again. Thank you.

We got to do it live. I know. Is this the first one live? I think the first— I want to say the first one was live. Yeah.

So yeah, yeah, there we go.

But I mean, this is close enough for you to spit spitballs at me like you did last time. You know what kind of kid you were in high school?

That might have been a theme for you as I was reading Our Country, and I didn't realize. Yeah, right. It's coming up again. You can't slip stuff by psychology. It just, you know, it just kind of happens automatically. Okay, so we'll get into some of the origin story for you, but When you told me a couple of years ago what you're sorting out to do, and then when I read Nar Country, I was like, oh, he did it. He did. He did it. And when you first told me, I was like, really?

Is that what you're going to do? Yeah. You were part of the that's impossible crowd.

Yeah.

Like, really?

And then I was incredibly inspired by it. Like, I can't wait to see how this goes for you because it's a real thing that you're facing down. But just to be clear, let's just start with this question, which is like, what are you doing with your life? What was this really about? And explain the whole thing to your best ability. And let me just soak it in from your perspective now.

All my work is— most of my work is in flow. And flow has deep ties into the world of adult development, has deep ties into the world of successful aging, peak performance aging. All of those things flow plays a major role in. So, and it's not just— Csikszentmihalyi ended up moving in this direction, uh, the godfather of flow psychology. So in following his work, you know, I, I started stumbling deeper and deeper onto the, onto these things around peak performance aging. And long story very short, you know, I grew up like, like most of us grew up with like the traditional theories of aging, which is what I like to call the long, slow rot theory. It's the idea that our mental skills, our physical skills, they decline over time. There's nothing we can do to stop the slide. And yet there was stuff I was following in flow science and in related fields like network neuroscience, neural dynamics, and embodied cognition, and some whiz-bang stuff. All of it basically said, hey, wait a minute, everything we've heard about performance in the second half of our lives is wrong. Is wrong. For example, the long slow rot theory, all our skills decline, there's nothing we can do to stop the slide. Partially true. Our skills do decline over time, but it turns out they're all use-it-or-lose-it skills. So if you never stop training these skills, you can hold on to them, even advance them far later in life than you thought possible. And that also includes flow. Flow is really important to successful aging, peak performance aging, all those terms. But our access to flow declines over time. But it's, again, trainable.

That's a new idea that your access to flow, the ability to experience flow as an older adult declines.

So the ability to experience the way you phrased it is not— I don't think that shifts. Or does our flow proneness, our desire for the state that— In fact, Csikszentmihalyi's very last study was on flow proneness late into life.

That's right.

What changes is our ability to utilize some of flow's triggers, and we can talk about why that happens. It just shrinks a little bit because of things second half of our life that we have to train against.

Oh, that's cool. Which is doing things in the backcountry where you break your body if you make mistakes.

All that is besides the point right now.

Yeah.

Okay. Anyways, so I bet that the traditional theory of aging, the, like, the, the, the classic phrase is you can't teach an old dog new tricks, right? That's— and I was reading all this stuff and I was like, Wait a minute, this stuff is right, at least in the lab. Old dogs should be able to learn new tricks, including really, really hard tricks.

When did you start to identify with being an old dog?

I didn't. I never really identified with being an old dog, but I would even in skiing, right? We call it getting geezered. It's where somebody gets their, oh, I'm too old for this shit juice all over you. And I would find invariably this wild mismatch. I'd go skiing. You know, you're wearing goggles on a mat. Nobody can tell how old you are. And I'd be in the chairlift talking to people who were clearly like 20 years younger than me. And I'd be like, hey, how are the moguls over there? What's this cliff like? Or you're trying to talk about the stuff I wanted to ski. And I would consistently be like, get like these looks like I'm to my knees, haven't done that for 10, you know, all this stuff. And I was looking at people who were consistently a lot younger than me, and I was like, wow, they seem like they're old. None of that makes any sense to me. And that doesn't— it's not how I feel or think or anything, though. I'm now 55 years old, and I don't necessarily know if that's old, but it's certainly not young, I don't think.

Yeah, right. So when you— that phrase, can't teach an old dog new tricks, you were not identifying with the old dog?

No, not at all. Not at all. I was not identifying. I was just— all I was saying— so all I knew is that what the research is starting to show is that people over 40, over 50, there are cognitive superpowers that start coming online in those decades. Right. And everything I'm reading says, oh my God, you should be able to really learn. Difficult skills late into life. And there was stuff, you know, the big saw was the motor learning window, which supposedly slams closed. And that's not also not true. It's that when we're kids, we predominantly learn through playing. And what changes so much in adulthood is we start learning in a radically different way. Yes, the motor learning window does thin and there are shifts, but it's actually the way we approach learning that changes the most. And so all this stuff was saying, hey, wait a minute, we should be able to do this. I wanted a way to test it is part A, right? So, and I decided to test it by teaching myself how to park ski, which if anybody's listening and doesn't know what park skiing is, it's the discipline of skiing that involves doing tricks off jumps, on boxes, on rails, on wall rides, super acrobatic, somewhat dangerous. And as you pointed out at the start of the conversation, if you're over 35, people say, wow, it's really difficult to learn. You shouldn't even really try. Over 45, it gets to, that's impossible. And over 50, you're downright crazy, which is what most people really thought. You know what I mean? It was very clear to a lot of people that I wasn't running a science experiment. Clearly, I was having some kind of midlife crisis. And that wasn't it at all. All right. I was literally running a science experiment, but that was the only frame people had to relate to what I was doing is, oh, this must be a midlife crisis. He's not going out and buying a Ferrari. He's going to teach himself how to park ski.

I grew up skiing as well. I love it. I think that skiing is an excellent laboratory to figure out edges, not literally, you know, underneath your foot, but just the edges of what you're willing to push on. And so I've, I've loved skiing for those reasons. You know, it's a high-speed environment. You get to choose. You can stay in the groomers, or you can go explore. Depends a little bit about your nature and the crowd that you're with.

Mm-hmm.

Right. Which is a cool thing that we can talk about as well. And so, but getting— there was a phase in my life where I was like, I'm not leaving. I'm not leaving the snow. I don't need to leave the snow anymore. To your point, the old thinking, you know, of the young person, which is like, why do I need to be up in the air anymore? That's for the young kids. And so I know exactly what you're describing as this phase or experience in my life where I pulled back. And knowing what you were doing just last week, I spent about a half— I've spent a good solid week on the mountain with my son and he's like, Dad, let's go in the park.

Did you go?

I did go. And yeah, but I'm not doing— I, you know, I mean, the most I pulled was a 540 kind of safe grab. I'm joking. I'm joking. Yeah, no, no, no, nothing. I mean, I'm like, I am the old guy going, am I going too fast for this lip? And so, you know, like, let me just kind of tuck my knees and see if I go straight and kind of land in one piece. But so, so I do, I really appreciate that you pushed up against that constriction and you said, no, I'm going to use me as an N-of-1 experiment.

So You asked for the full story, right? And you know this. So it was good that way. I'd like— yes, but I had so— first of all, I had unfinished business from sort of just my childhood relationship with the jocks and athletes in general. Then I had unfinished business in skiing because, you know, I started my career as a journalist. I chased professional skiers around mountains for a decade. And were you like the little brother?

Like, hey, I guess we'll take him on? Or were you like— was it different than—

it was a little worse than being the little brother because you can ditch your little brother. When your little brother is there, you know, covering, you know, skiing for the New York Times or Rolling Stone, or you can't ditch your little brother. So, so you are a reporter. So you were— no, no, I was just a reporter covering, right? And this was the beginning of the peak performance research as well from those areas. You know what this is like. I thought I was an expert skier until I got onto a mountain with actual pros. And then you see what that looks like and you're like, I'm not even a beginner. I've got no skill. Like, your self-worth goes— I mean, it's a crushing blow to your self-worth. To me it was. Most of us go experience that. Part in our country was— so I knew I was going to need a lot of motivation to learn how to park ski in general. You're going to hit the ground so many times. Difficult, it's hard, it's going to hurt. I knew I needed all the possible motivation. I knew I wanted to test these peak performance aging ideas and I knew I had to pick something to test them where I was really, really motivated because it was a challenge. The experiment I was running was very challenging and it needed to be.

Physically or emotionally?

Physically. I will tell you that I make this point at the end of the book, but the two things that were hardest about this project, One, it was once I started having success, the addictiveness of success was like the addictiveness of progression is so delicious. And the other thing was when— and I didn't know this. I mean, I could have probably talked to anybody I knew who would have told me this, but I just didn't know. I didn't realize that when you Even if you do go up against really hardcore scary things over and over and over and over again and you win at them, you're successful, which I was most of the time, you're still going to get PTSD. It's still going to affect your nervous system in that way. So I would step up to the plate every day.

What's the PTSD from?

Literally from success. Over the course of the book, I stepped to so many hard challenges, and even though I survived them, Every one of them scared me a bunch. It wasn't any one thing, but the residual, I was scaring myself a lot for an entire— for 7 months in a row. By the end of it, I had serious— I called Laird Hamilton about it. He was the guy I called and I was like, "Dude, I didn't know you could get PTSD." And he said, "Oh yeah, it happens to big wave surfers all the time." Yeah.

We more talk about adrenal fatigue.

Right.

Yeah, right. But you're calling— you're framing it as like a traumatic stress.

Well, the reason I was framing it as a recurring traumatic stress is, in my case, the two of the distinguishing features were my startle response was jacked up to 11, and that's a PTSD symptom that, you know, it's too much norepinephrine in your system. And I was doing that fixating thing when you fall asleep and you replay it and jerk awake.

Oh, that's interesting. Right? So this is actually, this is relative. This is not adrenal fatigue. Adrenal fatigue is what we see with people that are on the frontier, in the backcountry of whatever it is that they're doing, where it's a high-speed, high-heat, rugged, consequential environment they're operating in where speed and accuracy are required.

Oh, okay.

So what ends up happening is that it's so intense that there's a fatigue system that takes over where not only do you struggle just to have the normal enjoyment from a good conversation or whatever, but you need to go above and beyond the stimulus that you once had to feel anything that new. And so there's, you know this, it's like chasing a bigger, bigger, bigger, and it gets exponentially more dangerous. And one foot bigger in the backcountry on surfing is when you're at that scale is like a big deal. Whereas one foot in small surf is not necessarily a big deal. So it's exponentially harder and more dangerous. So there's an adrenal fatigue that takes place that looks very similar to people that come back from combat. But you're not talking about that.

No, I'm literally— yes, that was the problem with the addictiveness of progress, right?

Yes.

Is because that's part of the addictiveness of progress. I was talking about that in that side of it, but this was literally I was developing literally symptoms of actual legitimate PTSD. The start was super amplified. My wife rolls over in bed, I jump kind of thing. You know what I mean? So that stuff was real. So those things I didn't see coming. The thing that was so unusual about this is I'm a bad athlete. I've become a good athlete, but it's after literally decades of work at it. And what was so shocking about this in our country experiment is that the protocol we developed from all this kind of whiz-bang science that I applied to park skiing, then Ryan applied, then we applied in our study groups with others, I mean, it worked. I mean, when I started this all out, I figured if it takes 5 years, cool, it takes 5 years. I learned my goals, I reached all my goals in a single season.

To go after something, there's no hacks and shortcuts. There's no real secrets, but there are fundamental commitments. And so that's me talking, not you talking. There are fundamental commitments that the best in the world do. And you made a fundamental commitment. You moved to the base of a mountain. I don't know exactly where, but you went, you organized your life and lifestyle to go after this thing. Is that a fair statement to say?

Yes. Yeah.

So, and then And then you had this ticking time bomb at some point, like, I'm going to run out of time.

Yeah.

And then the pandemic hit.

So what totally triggered it was I had worked 9 years without a break, literally without even a vacation. Now, I would go skiing, I would have day trips for skiing, but I didn't even go anyplace overnight. My wife and I, I think we went away for maybe 2 weekends in that period of time. And if you— I don't go out to dinner, I don't have a social— like, I work with you, I ski with you, or I'm married to you, or I don't know you, right? Like, and that's always been my life. So when I say I worked 9 years without a break, I worked 9 years without a break. And I rearranged my life, moved from northern New Mexico to Tahoe, and, uh, I was launching a book that winter.

Which book?

Future is Faster Than You Think with Peter. And my plan, we were going to launch the book. I knew there was going to be 2 months of book tour, and then I was going to come back, and for the first time in 9 years, I was going to take a 3-month break, and I was going to ski from basically March through May, which you can do in Tahoe. And yes, then COVID happened. And COVID, and first I got COVID, I've got COVID, and then COVID happened, and then they shut down the ski resorts. And out of all the things going on, it was the ski resort. And mind you, I'm like everybody else in COVID. We're trying to save my company and it's like everything else, it's crazy. But I'm so angry that the ski resorts had closed. Not just a little angry. Homicidally murderous and it's building every day. And I like— the whole world is suffering. Billions of people are suffering and dying. And I care that the ski resorts are closed. And I like— and I couldn't stop caring. Like, I was super angry. And the level of anger where, like, you're dangerous to your marriage, you're dangerous to your job.

Like, you're like, you understand rock and roll better.

You do understand rock and roll better.

Yeah.

Slipknot. Slipknot sounds really good. Yeah.

And so what I was picking up on in your experience is that you hit the panic button, like, I'm going to run out of time and I'm not going to go after—

I'm not going to run out of goals. All those things happened. Like, the season went away and I was like, this has been— so why am I so mad? That was it. I was like, why? This anger is totally irrational. So I started investigating the anger, right? I'm like, okay, why are you so mad? And I was like, oh my God, I've been robbed of progression and I'm running out of time. So that was exactly it. Like, I'd run out of time. Yeah. And so I decided then, coupled with all the peak performance aging stuff, it seemed like a great way to kind of turn that into a fundamental challenge.

And then the other motivators, like the deeper motivators, were it sounds like that you struggled at some level as a kid with your relationship with sport.

Oh, yeah.

And so is part of this that you wanted to prove them? In quotes?

So no. So we started this conversation. One of the things I said at the beginning is as we enter our 40s and 50s, we get access to legitimate cognitive superpowers. So let's go a little bit deeper into that. There are genetic changes that happen. Certain genes are activated only by experience, so it's actually epigenetics. And there are changes in how the brain processes information in our late 40s and 50s. And it's really the two sides of the brain start to work together really well like never before. And the brain starts to recruit underutilized areas and regions and build backups and redundancies and things like that. And as a result, we gain access to whole new levels of intelligence, creativity, empathy, and wisdom. Hugely important traits. So one of the reasons I knew that I had a suspicion that I could learn to park ski later in life was the heightened creativity that you actually get and even the heightened wisdom. The heightened wisdom means more emotional control, ways to keep myself safe that maybe I didn't have access to when I was younger. So I thought there were certain things from this pool working to my advantage. And I want— I'm a writer. I want access to new levels of intelligence and creativity and empathy and wisdom as a writer. Oh, my God. Yes. But as you know, because you're a psychologist, these are not— this is adult development. But like everything in adult development, it's not guaranteed. There are moderators, if-then conditions, and there With adult development, especially coming out of the long studies, the Harvard studies on adult development and some of those, we've learned what some of these gateways are. And there are 3 that take place before 50 that unlock these superpowers. By age 30, you have to have solved the crisis of identity. You got to know who you are in the world, right? It's 40, it's match fit, which is there's a tight match between My identity, who I am, and sort of what I do with all my time, my values, my strengths. Put it differently, you need to live in a way with lots of passion, lots of purpose, and lots of flow. And you need a tight fit between your identity and what you do in the world to get that. So that's 40. But here's the weird one, and this is the answer to your question. By 50, it's forgiveness of self and other that matters. And so you got to set down shame and self-consciousness, and you got to forgive all the people who have done you wrong. And I've said this before, I grew up in Ohio. I was a punk rocker in Ohio. In Ohio, if you had a mohawk, carloads of football players would pull over on the side of the road just so they could beat you up as a group. That was Ohio. So, yeah, a lot of us carry grudges. Besides everything else that went along with that. But I had unfinished business with these people, and forgiveness was this moderator. And most of the intelligence levels that come online in our 50s, this is about multiperspectival thinking, being able to see things from other people's perspectives. You can't forgive others, you're not going to have access to their perspectives. There's going to be no increase in empathy, no increase in wisdom. It's going to block the creativity. Everything I wanted. And so part of my mission was— and the standard tool, by the way, for forgiveness and wisdom is really love and kindness meditation, compassion meditation. And I've done that on and off for years. Amazing tools. Fantastic. But it wasn't big enough and strong enough to sort of solve some of the grudges I had from back in the day. So I decided I wanted this kind of challenging athletic quest because I thought if I could go walk a mile, in their shoes, like really create a quest where I would have to become a jock to succeed. There would be no— like, you can't teach yourself how to park. That's a massively athletic activity that requires all of, like, the— right? So I was like, okay, I, like, I know I want these superpowers and I need them to— for this quest and everything else. But like, I, I knew there were— that's when I say I had unfinished business. I had unfinished business. And it was bigger than the best tool I had, which was loving-kindness meditation. And so this is what I did. I think it was going to work? No, I thought the whole thing was kind of ridiculous, but I had no other ideas and I knew I needed to do something. So I just ran the experiment and it turns out it did work surprisingly well.

When you were running it by people, and I think about our call when you were telling me what you were doing, did it help you or get in your way? When I or others were like, really? Is that what you're going to do? Did that— like, sometimes that does wonders for me.

So, oh, I always say I'm really fond of spite, small s spite, as a motivator. Yeah, right. I really am.

It feels like it was too hot of a fire for me. Like, I couldn't manage it.

It doesn't like— well, so I'm not like I hear about like, you know, some of the football players, even maybe they're just saying it for the microphones where—

No, no, they're not saying—

I know. Like, where like that kind of like competitive— he's like, like, I'm not that way, but like, tell me I can't do something. Tell me it's impossible. That works.

That's why I'm asking.

That works. That's really motivating for me.

I'm just wondering like what the insight is when you have an idea and it's relatively clear and you are pinging your community, if you already kind of know what they're going to say and you're using it in your echo chamber to be able to do something with it, or are you really hoping that they're going to see you and they're going to say, Stephen, I think you can do this.

You know this, like, you don't need many. In fact, many is possibly too much pressure. Because if everybody expects you to do it, well, you better not screw it up. But if you had just have a couple of secret allies who believe— The other thing that I had going for me is that Ryan, who was my ski partner, Ryan had seen me throw. So the whole thing started before the thing is because it's that weird sliding spin story that's in the first chapter of the book.

The almost 360.

Yeah, the almost 360. I had thrown sliding spins.

Explain what a 360 is.

So a sliding spin 360, which is the trick we're talking about, is, is a trick 10-year-old skiers learn how to do. It's you're sliding forward on the snow and you spin in a circle. You don't leave the snow, nothing. It's just— it's— and most skiers stop doing this trick by like age 12 because it's really not cool. Like, it's super uncool. But it turns out that novel sensations are a phenomenal flow trigger. And whenever we encounter G-forces or polyaxial rotation spinning around your middle, those novel sensations plus some of flow's deep embodiment triggers, meaning engages multi-senses at once and that pulls our attention to the present, this drives flow. So at the front end of every ski day, I would throw a handful of these sliding spins because it would dump some dopamine into the system, prime the system for flow. And I didn't even think of it as a trick. It wasn't a trick. It was just this thing I like to do. Nobody would ever consider it a trick. But if you tilt it and do it in a halfpipe or on a rail or on a wall ride, that's a real trick. And so Ryan and I were skiing and it was like the last day before they closed the resort COVID, and we're in the middle of a pretty serious shoot, nowhere near a terrain park. And I saw this snow pillow on top of a rock, and my brain went, "Try a sliding send 360 on it." And I did a 270. I'd never tried anything like that in my life. I don't know why. And Ryan saw it, cheered. And so he also, he knew what I was building on. That was what I was going to— that was my I was going to build on that foundation. And so he had seen that. Nobody else had seen it. And he'd also seen that I threw it basically on one of the steeper pitches of a run called Oops and Poops. That's a heavy run. So it wasn't like I just threw it on a beginner slope. It's I threw in the middle of a really heavy run with consequences everywhere. I don't know why. It just sort of came out of me one day. So he had seen that. And he had a little bit of faith. He was also very nice about it. I think he had a lot less faith in the beginning than he talked about. And my wife liked the idea, which was the other thing.

Oh, she did like it.

She never pushed back against it because she saw that I was starting to have fun.

People ask me all the time, what do you think? If there's one thing, and there's not, right? But if there's one thing that sits as part of the high performers' support mechanisms, what is the number one thing that goes with most of the high performers that you have?

Support mechanism?

Yeah. They're out there doing the thing on the frontier. What allows them to do that?

That's an interesting question. A part of me, One, if without regular access to flow, you're not doing it without— but almost every one of them, they've either got a best friend or a girlfriend or a spouse or a boyfriend or, you know what I mean? There's somebody who is solving the cognitive load problem, right? There's no way to— that's part of the hard— like, when you're trying to do that at that level, you can't hold all the rest of your life in your head, right? Literally, you're up against a cognitive load wall. So there's got to be somebody who's filling that gap, and there's got to be a lot of flow in a tight loop because otherwise you can't keep going. The other thing is I always think there's always a little extra. It's a mission. It's not just there's a little bit of a— there's a little, especially with the ones who are really really good and, you know, stay for a while.

When you say mission, so I'm nodding because that's now how I'm answering the question is like when people ask me and I'm like, it's my wife, you know, and they ask like, what is that true for other people? I'm like, yeah, the support mechanism is really important.

And so I couldn't have done it.

It's an intimate—

I didn't— I couldn't have done our country without Joy for sure. Yeah.

Well, you would have had to choose between, let's say, if she was like, no, bad idea. Like, I'm not part of this. I don't think this is smart. And you know what? You want to go move to Tahoe? Go ahead. Or Nevada? Go ahead. That would have been a choice between marriage.

So I've written two of my books Joy didn't like and didn't like when I started writing them, not when I was done. Didn't like the idea. And those are difficult projects. It's hard to work on a multi-year project where your partner is not down.

On with it.

I like— I think that's one of the great things about my marriage and a strength that, like, my wife is willing to look at me and be like, yeah, I think the book you're writing, I think that's a bad idea. And I, like, I don't— I disagree with the premise. Like, I— that's just— that's— I look at that and I'm like, right, that's like— that's a healthy marriage. That's great in a relationship.

So good.

Um, and it's also— it forces my books to be better, right? She's constantly like, you can't sleep on anything, because she's you're already against the idea a little bit. So it makes me better and I don't mind any of it. And but it does. It is a harder project. It's a harder—

it's harder.

Yeah, there's, there's no way around that.

Okay, so let's do two words. Let's do one word right now. Progression. It's a word that matters to both of us, but let's just open that word up a little bit and then let's get into what the unlocks are that you figured out for other people that want to increase or grow in a multifaceted way in their life, and they're feeling a little bit older, they're over the age of 50, and they're looking for some unlocks. So let's go progression, then the insights you learn and the unlocks that are applied for folks.

So it's funny because the unlock that I'm going to come to in a moment is literally a formula for progression and lifelong learning. So if you want to stave off cognitive decline, Alzheimer's, and dementia, you need expertise and wisdom. All right, those are the big— they create big networks in the prefrontal cortex.

You need to— okay, so keep working, keep working.

No, no, so when, when they say, hey, lifelong learning is how you preserve the brain, they're not joking. Expertise and wisdom, which are— expertise, think of it as facts, strategies, skills. Wisdom, emotional intelligence writ large. When we suffer cognitive decline, Alzheimer's, dementia, it's predominantly in the prefrontal cortex because the prefrontal cortex is the newest structure in the brain from an evolutionary perspective, most vulnerable disruption. And when expertise and wisdom are really diffuse networks across the prefrontal cortex, and when the brain builds brain networks, as you know, it doesn't find one way to do something. It likes to find 11 different ways, redundancy. Is what the brain likes when it builds networks. So the greatest defense against Alzheimer's and dementia and cognitive decline is literally expertise and wisdom. In fact, Yaakov Stern out of Columbia, who did some of the early work on this, he did a really famous study where he was looking at leisure activities that increase expertise and wisdom. So things like doing puzzles or having rich intellectual discussions with your friends or reading or those sorts of things, you get an additional 8% protection against Alzheimer's cognitive decline and dementia for every additional sort of expertise skillset. Oh, that's a cool finding. Yeah, really, really neat finding on there. So expertise and wisdom, lifelong learning progression, is literally how you have to preserve brain function. So the hack I'm going to give you in a moment does all that, but I want to, I want to come back to progression.

Pardon the interruption. Thanks for tuning in to 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 at about half of your capacity, maybe even 10 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 when 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 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 10 out of 10 level as natural as breathing, just go to getmoreflow.com.

.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 can make peak performance second nature.

All the best. I don't think there's a better drug in the world. I think progression is the best drug.

Yeah, I wish that term wasn't political.

Is it political?

Progressive. Progressive.

You know, I guess that way.

And like, you're like, it's one of my favorite words, progression. It's definitely an off-access feel to the word. Like, you can look at it and not get the vibe that I think you and I both feel when we say the word.

So when I say the word, my buddy But Michael Worden, one of my closest friends, has been teaching himself how to play the guitar, I mean, for 4 or 5 years now. And he says, "The best thing about teaching myself how to play the guitar is I'm never going to run out of guitar. I'll never run out of guitar. There's an endless amount of shit that I can keep. I don't run out of anything. I'm going to keep learning, keep learning, keep learning." I think of skiing that way, or writing that way. I actually think marriage that way, the actual, like, how to be in a good relationship. These are the infinite games right there, but their progression is built in and you don't win. There's just the progression. And the other thing that is weird also is to me, there's a relationship between progression and expectation that kind of destroys more good days than anything I know. Which is like going into, and it could be a writing activity, going into a mountain and expecting a certain level of you're going to make this much progress today.

I love this thought. How does the word standard fold into that? Expectation versus standard as a killer too.

So this was why in my Nordic country season, my goals were, if I didn't have a lot of energy, I wanted to ski 12 laps a day. If I had a lot of energy, I'd ski 16. And if I felt really great, it was 20 or more. And my goals were never try to learn a trick or ski a big line. If I got into flow and I was performing my best, then is when I would go learn a trick or ski a big line. So I tried to separate the standard. I had a standard for behavior. It was unlinked to performance, unlinked to the things I couldn't control. My standards are things that I can control.

That's what I could say.

Always meet.

Standards are about process, not an expectation for outcome, but a standard for how the inputs feel.

Yeah, exactly. I'm going to do this. And I totally had to separate those. I knew, well, then that was for motivation reasons because nothing is more demotivating than saying, I'm going to go here and do and learn this and you don't. In fact, I found oddly one of the easiest ways to not learn how to do something while skiing is to turn to my ski partner before the day begins and say, "You know what I'm going to definitely do today? I'm going to get my switch 180s down. 10 of them, at least 20 of them today." And the end of the day will come and I'll realize I hadn't even done one. It's almost a guarantee if I say it out loud, it's almost a guarantee that it can't happen. And I don't know why, what that is. Even about.

It is such a fine line because the progressive progression nature, I have a hard time relating to people that don't love it. And I don't get— I get external goals, I should say that, but they don't drive me. And I know that's a popular thing to say, but the unlock is so rich. When something happens inside of me that I go, "Oh, got it. Oh my, wow." That thing is elusive and wonderful and it's big when it takes place, that fuels me big time.

Chick Set Me High talks about flow as an engine of adult development because on the other side of a flow state, because to get into this state, you have to use your skills to the utmost. You have to push on your skills. Right at the edge. Right at the edge. And so on the other side of a flow state, complexity goes up, adaptability goes up, mastery increases, wisdom goes up. And so Csikszentmihalyi considered it the major driver of adult development. Other people have talked about it as always as an evolutionary sign of mastery. When you get into a flow state, it's a sign that you've actually mastered skills. I think it's definitely a sign of progression. That's sort of what you're— that, that's, that's for sure. And but the thing that I think is so neat about progression is this is— it's so empowering, right? It's really a weird thing. I learned how to throw a 180, which like, does that have a real-world application? I mean, at all? Like, besides on the ski hill or in a— what, like, and just describe, describe the nuances of skiing forward, jump up into the air and land. So I'm skiing backward, I throw a 180. Right? It's a 180-degree turn. But it's amazing, this shift in real-world confidence and competencies and efficacy. There is something very strange about progression, something that shouldn't actually matter in a real-world frame and how it actually does impact the rest of your life. And it's hard to explain.

And I love that you're talking about earning self-efficacy, meaning a sense of power that I can do some stuff and I feel powerful in myself, in my— in the world around me. And you have to earn it. You can't— nobody can give it to you. Same with empowerment. No one can give you like this idea that happens in business is like, we want to get after empowerment. We want to know— we want to help people to be empowered. You can't come off of the perch and say, "You are now empowered," because if I'm the one giving you power, then I can also take it away.

Yeah, it doesn't— You have to work from the inside out. Yeah, you have to take it.

Yeah, you have to earn it.

Earn it. Right?

Because there's so many mechanisms inside of us that are saying, "Hey, play it safe. Be small. Don't get your head lopped off. That's a risk not worth taking." There's so many mechanisms that are keeping us away from the edge. But when you get on the edge and you figure out how to dance a little bit on the edge, that's like, oh, I can dance on the edge and I'm okay. That sense of power is really important.

No, I mean, you know, like my favorite part about all this is I can, I can now ski some really big, big lines. And it's not that I can ski them. I mean, that's cool, but it's that on the other side of them, my pulse rate hasn't even spiked.

That's right. That's where I was going. It's like, what do you now say to your— get to say to yourself that you didn't get to say to yourself in 2020?

There's a million of them.

What's a couple of those?

Questions around skiing and bravery where I used to wrestle with them 'cause I would see what the athletes would do and I wasn't putting myself into those situations. But like my skiing ability, even in the big mountains, right? 'Cause the thing about park skiing is we were playing this game with, we were lateralizing back and forth with the challenge, skills, balance. So you'd scare yourself in the terrain park and like get to the point that And then you'd just go back into the big mountains and stuff in the big mountains suddenly seemed a lot less scary. Or when the big mountains got scary, we'd go into the terrain park and suddenly the terrain park wasn't so scary. So it was this back and forth between—

And you were more confident in the backcountry.

I was more confident in the bigger lines. So I've now managed to ski a handful of lines that I would actually consider significant. And so those issues are done. They're off the table. My ability to learn, really to set myself— I had never in my entire life set an athletic challenge and meeting it. I was not one of those jocks. I was an artist. I was a creative. That was not what I did. And I came skiing, skating, the things I was doing, those were not sports. Ohio in the '70s and '80s, right? That's— they weren't—

we were arrested for it, right?

We were arrested for it. Exactly. That's exactly right. They were against the law.

And it's crazy to see my local community now have like not one skate park but two. And we were, we were run out of town. It's, it's awesome. Like what, what's happened over the last 30 years. Well, so this is where we're talking about self-efficacy. This is actually how self-efficacy gets paid. Is that there's 5 mechanisms to increase self-efficacy, but it really has to push through a filter, which is something about I can do hard things.

Well, to me, it's the other— I mean, some of it. Okay, I'll give you a random example. We skied a line the other day at Kirkwood called Jim's that it's not only on the edge of a cliff, it's right. Normally dropping into a chute or something like that, you can come in anywhere. Here you have to come in right off next to the cliff edge. And I have vertigo and blah, blah, blah. And Jesus, 3 years ago when we started the Nar Country project, I literally 25 feet from that edge, I could sort of stand 25 feet away and look and sort of see the edge of Jim's, and the world would start to spin and I would start to shake and I would collapse. There were times I would have to crawl back, like crawl just to the main run to just get out of sight of it, literally, because my whole body had collapsed. And we skied it the other day and afterwards I looked at Veronica and I was like, "You know what's funny is I don't just think I just skied that. I think that's the first time I stood on the edge of that cliff without even collapsing," which was really Like, so, like, those are— it's not just a little bit of courage, you know what I mean? That's a, it's a, that's a totally different kinesthetic bodily response. That's really completely different.

Would you say that? So you're the artist focusing on doing athletic feat or having an athletic process with clear goals. Is that similar to the athlete that's trying, or the executive even, but let's do athlete trying to now really push in and write a book, or they've always been fascinated with canvas art and they're going to go for it. Would you say that the corollary is similar, or does it fall apart because it's not physical?

Oh, I think it's really similar.

Okay.

Because I mean, certainly let's just talk about the business for a for a second. We process financial fears and money, as you know this, in the same structures that we process physical fears. So there's no difference in the brain between physical pain and financial pain. And it doesn't appear there's much of a difference between physical pain, financial pain, and social embarrassment, shame, all that stuff, which certainly all creatives are going to face when they bring their stuff into into the public eye. So, no, I think— and that's what I like about it is because— and you know as well as I do, this doesn't always translate. You and I both know members of the Special Forces or professional athletes who try to transition to the real world and they go into a boardroom and fall apart, or they can't do it. But those that stick with it, end up really kicking ass. And the reason is the skills are transferable. It takes a while to figure out how to transfer. Not everybody sticks around long enough to really be able to figure it out, but the skills are transferable and the patterns are the same and the learning patterns are the same. And the order is always crawl, walk, run. It's always going to suck to be a beginner. It doesn't matter what learning a hard physical challenge or, you know, certain challenges. Skateboarding. It's so painful to learn. It's so painful. Falling has such—

what do your shins look like?

I broke my back. Look at my shins.

I've got my back scar tissue up my back that, you know, like you leave, you leave blood and skin on the asphalt.

Yeah. I mean, I took all the skin off my body. I broke my arm in 4 places. I broke my back in 2 spots. Skateboarding hurts, man.

I understand when you said you were not an athlete.

Yeah, that's, that's the other thing. No, no, no, that's exactly right. Yeah, you're totally right. I did, I was devoted to all this right on the edge. No, but I'm not like, I'm not naturally— I know what sort of naturally gifted athletes look like. I've been around a lot of them. I'm not that. I really am not.

So when you— okay, so let's get to the unlocks and like when people read and/or they're listening at this moment, what do you hope they take away? What is the process that you've clarified?

Oh, I see.

Yeah.

I mean, the two takeaways. I mean, like, what's the— So one, you asked for the hacks. So like—

No, I did not ask for the hacks.

Not the hacks. Well, you and I know there's no such thing as a hack. There are no shortcuts, but like the formula.

Okay.

Peak performance aging in a single sentence. If you want our octet to drop, you have to regularly engage in challenging social and creative activities that demand dynamic, deliberate play. And I'll define dynamic in a second and take place in novel outdoor environments. And let me— dynamic is, right, as you know, dynamic basically means there are 5 categories of functional fitness: strength, stamina, flexibility, agility, and balance. All 5 need to be trained over time. All 5 decline over time. All 5 are very trainable. So dynamic is one word for all 5 at once. And bonus, when activities are dynamic, when the brain has to coordinate strength, stamina, and balance at the same time, for example, that not only does a bunch of good stuff for the body from an exercise perspective, but dynamic motion boosts the angiogenesis and neurogenesis. Two big fancy words, but angiogenesis, birth of new blood vessels in the brain that support, right, new neurons. And neurogenesis is new neurons, right? And you want to fight off Alzheimer's and dementia, preserve cognitive function, you need new neurons, right? So dynamic motion is an extra— it's a— it hits all the physical categories, but it also helps you preserve the brain. Um, it's also one of the reasons that action sports such great anti-aging tools. They're phenomenal for it. But that's the formula. And before we drill down into those parts, I want to say a couple high-level things. First of all, a lot of those words are flow triggers, right? So a lot of this formula, flow really matters for peak performance aging for a bunch of reasons. We can talk about why in a second. But so a lot of these things do double duty as a flow trigger. A lot of them help unlock the— so creativity, we talked about the superpowers of aging. Creativity is a moderator. If you want multi-perspectival thinking, this boost in intelligence and creativity, and what you actually— creative activities in your 50s are what unlock it and totally train the brain. So you have to have them. Challenging activities.

What type of creative activity?

Doesn't actually matter. It's literally— so you got to remember, creativity could be everything from I drove a new route to work. For the very first time, to I'm doing fun things with words as a writer in sentences, to I'm creatively interpreting terrain features with my body in a new way as a skier or as a snowboarder or whatever. So creativity, and it's the act of connecting ideas together in novel ways that starts to unlock these really beneficial changes. Challenging social and creative activities. Social, huge boost, right? If we robust social connections, people with robust social connections will live about 8 years longer than other people, right? Really matters. Dynamic, I explained. Deliberate play is just the, it's sort of the inverse of deliberate practice, right? And deliberate practice, repetition with incremental advancement is great for learning certain kind of skills. But as a general rule, with most skills, deliberate play, repetition without repetition, repetition with improvisation, outperforms deliberate practice for a million different reasons. If the first is that the more neurochemicals produced during an experience, the better chance we're going to remember it, right? That's what neurochemicals do. They tag experiences. When we do deliberate practice, the best we're going to get is, oh, incremental advancement, and you're going to get a little bit of dopamine from goals. With deliberate play, you're going to get that dopamine, a bigger hit of dopamine. You're also going to get endorphins, which is what underpins play. So you're getting two really potent reward chemicals instead of one. So you've got a much better chance of increasing learning. And with deliberate play, deliberate practice, there's one right answer. I did before and a little bit better. With deliberate play, there's only one wrong answer. I did the thing I did before. Everything else is a right answer. So there's a lot of feel-good neurochemistry and less shame and embarrassment. So challenging social and creative activities that demand dynamic, deliberate play take place in novel outdoor environments. And novelty is another flow trigger, right? Pushes dopamine into our system, drives focus into the now, drives us into to flow. So there are 9 known causes of aging. What they share in common is inflammation, stress inflammation. So anything that fights stress is an anti-aging technology, right? So this includes mindfulness and breathwork, all that stuff. But as we know, a 20-minute walk in nature outperforms most of the SSRIs on the market, um, pushes that much serotonin into your system, removes stress hormones. So, uh, novel outdoor environments, you want the stress component there, the de-stressing component. But most importantly is if you want to preserve cognitive function, you want neurogenesis, right? The birth of new neurons, synaptic plasticity. Those neurons form networks. We evolved as hunter-gatherers. The brain evolved to remember where we were when we have emotionally charged experience in outdoor environments, which is why they have a campus which does long-term memory. That's cool. Also does mapping and location, right? So the easiest way to get the brain to do what it's supposed to do and birth new neurons is to have powerfully emotionally charged experiences in novel outdoor environments, which is why the longest-lived communities in America—Summit County, Pitkin County, and Eagle County, all in Colorado. This is Vail, Beaver Creek, Aspen, Copper Mountain. And folks in Summit County, which is the longest-lived community in America, they will outlive the rest of America by an average of 10 years. So you want to talk about the power of action sports and outdoor activities for longevity, the most— think about my formula. A lot of that is packed into outdoor sports and action sports. Summit County is your example of it working. Oh, that's cool.

Yeah, that's a good find. Wow. So you consider a park, a terrain park, to be a novel outdoor experience?

Have you been into a terrain park recently?

Yeah, but they don't change. So I want to just point out—

Oh, they do change, by the way.

Well, they change, let's say, every X number of days. But when you're doing 12 laps, they're the same. The features haven't changed. Your line on it can change.

Which is a good thing, right? Because you can get those repetitions. But every couple of weeks, they do change the park.

Yeah. So I naturally went to surfing, which is like every wave. Every wave is different. Yeah. So you're fitting that in. So is that basically any outdoor environment?

Any outdoor— so any— it's the emotionally charged experiences. Right.

There you go.

Right. So that's like, as long as you're having emotionally charged experiences in outdoor environments, the brain— our brain evolved to remember where was that ripe fruit tree after the long winter, or where was the cave that housed the bear that tried to kill us. And so we could avoid that, right? All that stuff. Yeah. So that's what the brain evolved to do. So it doesn't really know the difference between like, I scared myself jumping off a jump and I saw a bear. It's still a bunch of norepinephrine and cortisol, and the brain is treating it the same way. So you get the same kind of reaction, but you get neurogenesis, um, which is what you're looking for. So that's the— like, that's really peak performance aging in a formula.

Is that your term, peak performance aging?

So it's been, I think, the first adaptive aging, successful aging. There were a bunch of those, right? And they were all about, and they still are, they're about maintaining quality of life and sort of lifestyle interventions. They weren't about peak performance, keeping, like, performing at your best. Where peak performance started showing up It was some, it started emerging as a term when people started looking at the skills like VO2 max. I think this was one of the first times I saw it. VO2 max is one of these use it or lose it skills, right? And it used to be, we know VO2 max, which is our upper aerobic capacity, it starts declining at 25. By 50, it really starts to fall off a cliff. And in the, successful aging community, in the whatever community, this is one of those things people used to sort of beat you with. Like, you're never going to be able to do— because what about VO2 max? We all know it falls off a cliff. And what happened was there's this weird thing, you might have heard about it in sort of triathlons, ultra running, these really difficult endurance events. Older athletes, folks, men and women in their 70s, in their 70s and 80s are outperforming those in their 50s and 60s. And they started to wonder like, how is this happening? Why is this happening? It's been going on for a while. Why is a question. So they decided they were going to, well, let's measure the VO2 max of some like octogenarian triathletes and see what we find. Turns out they have the health, the VO2 max of like healthy 35-year-olds. So that was, and, but they've been training it for about 3 decades, right? So that was some of like, that was the, some of these use it or lose it ideas, right? Yep.

If leaders in business knew what you knew, how would they lead differently?

The two things I'm going to speak to, one is obviously flow is becoming sort of really fundamental for business. And the stat I always like to point to is McKinsey. They spent 10 years trying to figure out how much more productive top executives are in flow versus out of flow. And they went around the world and they asked executives, CEOs, C-suite executives, and it's self-reported, so grain of salt with the numbers, but on average, they reported being 500% more productive. That's enormous. And what's so weird about that number is it's not out of line. When the Department of Defense measured how much faster soldiers learn in flow, it was 240% to 500% faster than normal. When they measured how much we boost creativity and flow at the University of Sydney, it was 600%. So that's sort of in line with the other things that we see in flow. But the collective now, I mean, we're training, we're working with companies and people in 130 countries, training them in flow. And we're training Facebook, the San Francisco Police Department, the Air Force, Bain Capital, Accenture, Audi. I mean, What I'm trying to give you is examples of companies in tech, in industry, in manufacturing, every industry you can imagine, peak performance. You know this because we do the same job, basically. Companies are starting to figure out that, oh my God, mental high performance is the ballgame. And if you're not training it, you're going to get your ass kicked. This is one of those advantages. I mean, with flow, it's easy. I can say, look, The competition is going to be 1,000% more productive than you are if they get their employees to spend 2 days a week in flow. What are you doing? Right? So that's A. The second one, and this is the cool one, and this is the message in our country that I think business leaders really want to listen to, is we gain access to new levels of intelligence, wisdom, creativity, and empathy in our 50s. So I have trained a ton of CEOs, met a ton of CEOs, worked with a ton of CEOs, had dinners with a ton of CEOs. And often the conversation is, I'm sure this is your experience as well, is about hiring for peak performance skills or training them. Right. And whenever that conversation comes up, my first question, probably your first question as well, is, well, what skills are you really interested in? Right. What are you, what are you, what are you trying to get? What are you trying to do? Right. And over the years, I've heard two answers, and usually they come together, but I want creativity and innovation because the rate of change in the world is blitzkrieg. And how do I keep pace if we can't out-innovate the competition? I hear that all the time. So I need intelligence, I need creativity, I need innovation. Or I hear I need empathy, wisdom, and those kind of emotional intelligence skills because I can't do my job without team performance. I can't do team performance without psychological safety and cooperation and collaboration. Or I hear the Jeff Bezos mantra of 21st century business, which is customer-centric thinking. And if you don't have empathetic, wise employees, nobody can even think like your customers. Just screwed. So I— these are the 4 skills that come online in adults in their 50s. Now, it's not a guarantee, right? There are moderators. We talked about it. And there are things that you have to do post-50. You need creativity to unlock it, and then you have to constantly be training down risk aversion because that increases over time and it'll block all this stuff. And you got to train up your physical skills because physical fragility Because I would hear this and I say, well, why aren't you hiring older? Like, these are older workers. And they'd be like, well, yeah, but they get so risk-averse that they're unwilling to innovate even though they're super creative. And I was like, okay, you know, that's a fair answer. And physical fragility, I don't want them to take sick days or time off or all that stuff. So you have to train against those things and we can talk about that if you want. But this is the dream workforce of the 21st century. The very people who are getting pushed out of companies right now are the very people companies should be hiring for exactly what we want to do in the 21st century. And there's these crazy biases towards younger workers, which is not— I think the best blends, it's like the best companies are companies that figure out how to use humans and AI. I think the best companies are also going to be the companies that have older and younger workers and really blend them together and get the best out of both. But that's— I mean, if I'm talking to business leaders, those are the messages. Like, if you're not training flow, what the hell are you doing? Because the competition sure is. And two, if you're looking for your dream workers, if you can screen for adults who regularly engage in challenging, creative, and social activities that demand that formula. Some variety of that, that's a pretty good barometer for, oh, are they going to be successful in their 50s and 60s? They have what we want. These are dream workers. So those are my two messages. Let me give you a couple quick hits.

It all comes down to—

this is going to sound like a freaking cliché. So it all comes down to showing up. Cool choice. Cool choice. Show up every day, there's— yeah, okay, so that's a cool choice.

But the way you said it's a little punk. Okay, because you didn't say, you know, being present, right? You said showing up. So it's a little off access there. Okay. I am— yes. Okay. My vision is— what the hell?

I'm giving you one-word answers.

Money is— My friend. My friend. Uh-huh.

Who tells you no? Not very many people successfully.

Where do you want to belong?

That's an interesting question, right? I don't really want to belong most of the places that'll have me. I want to belong a lot of places where they won't have me. I think that's an interesting—

that's super interesting. Yeah, I was wondering how you're gonna do that with the early childhood, like, or early adolescence.

It just reminds me of the Woody Allen quote, which is like, I I don't want to be a member of any country club that would have me as a member. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly.

Success is?

It's going to take some explaining, but I always think of success as having something exciting to go to next. I always think about how you define a creative to me is like the difference between— and there's lots of reasons people write books, and you don't have to be a creative. You can write books because you're a businessman, you have an idea, You think it'll help your career, whatever. But the mark of a true creative is they're always about what's next. So a book comes out, a movie comes out, an art happening, they don't— the real creatives don't give a fuck what people think about that stuff. They're onto the next thing already. So to me, not having that next thing, not having— success to me is being able to wake up every day and be creative for a living. That's what success is. You ready for this?

I'm going back to it.

Relationships are probably the hardest thing I do with my day.

Congrats on so much. Congrats on the clarity. I think back to our days over at Red Bull where, you know, like, the clarity that you have now—

now, now being the operative word, Michael.

Yeah, nice job. And, um, and just the, the knowing and what you've earned over the last 3 years, the way you've tested yourself and put your science and your art to work and to be able to have the systems thinking mind and the artistic, you know, abilities to write, to be able to share that, those insights and those practices with people like it reads like butter. And so when I was reading, I was like, were you laughing? Yeah, I'm so glad. And it was like there's ample vulnerability in there too. Like I knew— I know you now in a different way, which is—

yeah, I had to For the book to work, I mean, I always said the secret to good writing is tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth. This was one of those situations where when I realized what I was going to have to talk about in the book for it to work, I was like, couldn't we have another maxim? Couldn't there be another? Right. Really?

Every once in a while, tell the truth. Tell the truth.

Exactly. Yeah, you did it. But yeah, that was a little bit of a leap of faith. You know what I mean? I didn't know people were going to react poorly or well to that as well. That was a little scary.

Yeah, that's cool, man. Yeah. Are you enjoying the feedback that's coming or are you not taking a look at the feedback? How do you work with that once you launch it?

The thing that's been the most fun is, yes, we built this, we turned this into a training. So now we have our standard flow training and then we have Forever Dangerous, which is the second half. And it's really focused on our ability, as I said, flow, our ability to get into flow matters over time, but it decreases. So we've got a training for it. But people in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s are— because it's about— we can teach you a bunch about peak performance aging, but I'm also trying to create a NAR-style mission for people. Mine was learning how to parkour. Right. But it's whatever kind of impossible challenge you can set for yourself that would essentially explode your mindset towards what's possible in the second half of your life. And some of the stuff people are doing and have done, that's been really cool. That's been really, really cool. Yeah. Like, I'll see things on like, you know, the other day there's something on Instagram where it was like, Grandpa joined the climbing gym. You know what I mean? Like, red in our country and like that kind of stuff. And I'm like, that is so, so cool. And there's— and, you know, it's not just physical. Action sports aren't for everybody. So there's people have done everything from like there was a woman who first solo art show, right? Because that was like the impossible, her impossible barriers. There's been a whole diversity of things people have done. And it's new, it's early. So like there's more of this coming, right? That's what's really neat. But like, you know, 70-year-old folks who are like trying to run Ironmans or do or learn how to kite surf or, you know, it's just cool. It's just cool.

Congratulations, brother. Thank you, sir. Yeah. Thank you for coming in. Thank you for sharing eloquently wisdoms and insights and using your body as a bit of a tool for the last 3 years to, to heighten our understanding of peak performance aging. Appreciate it, sir.

Yeah, thanks for having me. Hey, it's Joshua with the production team.

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