How to Find Purpose in Aging

Flow plays a huge role in peak performance aging. The traditional idea of aging, I call it the long slow route theory. It's the idea that all of our mental and physical skills decline over time. We can't stop the slide. Wait a minute, that decline does happen, but all those skills actually are use it or lose it skills. If you want to stave off cognitive decline, dementia, Alzheimer's, most important thing is lifelong learning. So this is another reason why flow matters so much. Flow amplifies learning. We love long goal. Missions are helpful at any stage, but they really start to matter later in life. The challenge-skill sweet spot, flow's most important triggers. You're always pushing on your skills, and you're always coming out the other side of a flow state more complex, more adaptable, wiser, with more mastery. How do I get a purpose? Well, it turns out you have to grow a purpose out of a passion, and then you grow a passion out of curiosity. You have to earn meaning. 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 Doris, and together with bestselling author Stephen Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio.

Today's guest is a New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning journalist, and the executive director of the Flow Research Collective. He is one of the world's leading experts on human performance. He is the author of 11 bestsellers, including The Art of Impossible, The Future Is Faster Than You Think, Stealing Fire, The Rise of Superman, Bold, and Abundance. His work has been nominated for 2 Pulitzer Prizes, and he has appeared in hundreds of publications around the world. Welcome back to the show, Steven Kotler.

Thanks for having me, Matt.

Well, I'm excited to have you back on. We had a nice discussion to start. We got to get through this interview so you can get back on the mountain, but I've enjoyed reading your new book, In Our Country. It is, uh, a bold endeavor just to say, you know, what you decided to do. So I'd love for you to just share about, uh, that book, you know, your intention for trying to do something crazy and what you learned from it.

So Our Country is a book about peak performance aging. And my interest in this field sort of grew up— my core focus is flow, right? The optimal state of consciousness known as flow. And I run the Flow Research Collective, where we study the neurobiology of peak human performance focused on flow. So what's going on in the brain and the body when we're performing at our best? Since flow underpins all optimal performance, we spend a lot of time looking at the neurobiology and neural dynamics of flow. And flow, for reasons that we could talk about later, plays a huge role in peak performance aging. Really, really, really important for peak performance, really important for peak performance aging. Not surprising, but there's a bunch of extra benefits we get getting into flow over time, but our ability to access the state may decline over time, those sorts of things. Anyways, there's a whole bunch of new ideas that came out of flow science, a couple other sort of whiz-bang fields, embodied cognition, network neuroscience, et cetera, that said, at least on paper, right, in the lab, that most of what we believed about, about aging, about the second half of our life wasn't true. And there were a couple of like big, big, big takeaways. The first is that like the old idea about the traditional idea of aging, I call it the long, slow rot theory. It's the idea that all of our mental and physical skills decline over time. There's nothing we can do about that. We can't stop the slide. The new idea says, hey, wait a minute. That decline does happen, but all those skills actually are use-it-or-lose-it skills. And if you never stop training these skills, you can hang on to them, even advance them far later in life than anybody thought possible. This also includes our ability to get into flow, right? Declines over time, but if properly trained, can go through the roof. But this is true with like strength, stamina, VO2 max, all different aspects of cognition, et cetera. And most importantly, what all this research started to suggest is that the idea that an old dog can't learn new tricks is totally ridiculous. It turns out old dogs are better at different kinds of learning than a lot of younger dogs. And according to all this stuff, on theory, somebody in their 50s, myself, should be able to learn even really difficult physical skills. So I decided, let's put it to the test. And I designed what may be one of the more radical experiments ever run in peak performance aging, which is I decided to see if I could teach myself how to park ski. In my 50s. Park skiing, as you know, is, you know, the discipline in skiing, snowboarding that involves doing tricks off jumps, on rails, wall rides, boxes, etc. It's pretty dangerous, very acrobatic, and for about 11 different biological reasons, it's supposed to be very difficult to learn over the age of 35. You get to 45, it's really impossible. By 50, 55, you're just downright crazy and people just laugh at you. And I was 53 when I started, and took all these new ideas and I combined them into a learning protocol and I made a list of 20 tricks that they basically covered zero. I'd never been in a terrain park. I had no experience, knew no tricks. I knew how to ski, but I had no terrain park experience to intermediate. And I figured if I get to intermediate, I can take control of the learning process. The random falls are gonna go away, it's gonna get a little less dangerous, et cetera, et cetera. And by intermediate, I would get what I really wanted, which was the ability to creatively interpret the terrain all over the mountain. Creatively interpret everything and not just like do, do tricks in a train park, but be able to use the entire mountain as a slopestyle course. And this would be the front end of that. And there were a bunch of other reasons why I did this. We can talk about that stuff later if we want to go deeper into flow stuff. But that was the, that was the quest. And I figured it takes 5 years, it takes 5 years. You know what I mean? Like, okay, whatever. I learned how to park ski. I hit all those 20 tricks in a season. Which was amazing. It was almost the fastest I'd ever learned anything. And I learned something incredibly hard. We thought, this is really neat. My ski partner was younger than me by a couple of decades and was a former sponsored rider, sponsored park skier. It would walk, got injured, walked away, had a family, career, came back to it right after a long gap using the same protocol. She, you know, she went farther faster than he'd ever gone before. Thought, okay, this is cool, we're on to something. The next year we came back, we took 17 older adults ages 29 to 68, and in 4 days on the mountain using the same protocol, got them, you know, really damn comfortable riding through terrain parks and doing stuff, uh, tricks. So, uh, now, you know, that, that went from like interesting to, oh wow, we have real data. We've since grown those studies beyond that, but what everything I just told you is sort of the story told inside in our country. So it's both a book about peak performance aging, but because you're sort of tracking this experiment over time and sort of preseason training through the season and the end of it, it gives the reader a look at like applied peak performance. What is it? We can talk all we want about a high-flow lifestyle or making flow reliable and repeatable and its importance to peak performance aging. What does that look like in practice on a day-to-day? Basis. So that's what in our country is, that's what the book's about. It's part science experiment, part adventure story, and, you know, part primer how-to on peak performance aging.

That's amazing. Well, I really enjoyed the read, and I think it's inspiring just to have that goal because I'm getting a little bit older. I just turned 39, and I have a background in park skiing, snowboarding, you know, hitting the big jumps in Whistler. I just know you're there. And I had a couple of years off and just coming back, knowing the consequence right? So now that I'm older and I have a daughter, I'm thinking about the consequences a lot more than I used to. So to read, like, you know, when you had these setbacks and when you'd slam on your face, and I'd be like, I had a slam and I kind of know what I'm doing, but I don't really want to come back and do that again. So, um, the, the goal was very ambitious and it was a very interesting read. And I like how you weaved through the peak performance. And one, one thing I'd love to ask, like, you know, what was surprising to you when you were moving through, like, learning about this anti-aging, you know, applying the peak performance to like overcome these challenges you had? Did anything surprise you in this pursuit?

A bunch of things surprised me. Bunch of things surprised me. Let's just start at the top. I talk about flow as being important to peak performance aging. So one of the things that was really interesting, and this emerged out of the research in the field, like I wasn't looking for flow, I was looking into peak performance aging. And over and over again, you see that older adults who experience feelings of mastery and control live longer, healthier lives. Now, flow has 6 core characteristics. They're phenomenal, a lot of characteristics in the technical. That big word just means this is how the state makes you feel. So, and there's 6 things that define flow. There's complete concentration on the task at hand. There's a merger of action awareness. Your sense of self, self-consciousness gets It's quiet, it diminishes. Time passes strangely, meaning usually you get so sucked into what you're doing that hours go by, right? And it feels like 5 minutes. And the last 2 are really important. This flow produces a sense of control. That's what the peak performance feels like on the inside, right? Oh, I can control things I can't normally control, right? My skis are doing magic things today that they don't normally do, right? And this feeling of euphoria, joy, joyousness comes in flow. So when we humans experience super powerful positive emotions, sense of mastery, sense of control, this euphoria that shows up in flow amplifies the production of T cells and natural killer cells. T cells are just— they fight disease, right? That's the immune system. Natural killer cells target tumors and other sick cells and senolytic cells. And those are one of the major causes of aging and disease and dying. So some of this stuff that was really, really neat is in this field of neuroimmunology, the link between sort of the mind and the body and the mind and the immune system. And some of the stuff around that in general was with all of that stuff. And I could talk for the next hour about all the different, the mind-body connections and how mind-blowing that is. But that was one category of it. Another category was learning. So one of the things that's really important to know if you wanna stave off cognitive decline, dementia, Alzheimer's, most important thing is lifelong learning. So this is another reason why flow matters so much. Flow amplifies learning, right? Studies run by the military in the United States, soldiers in flow learn 240 to 500% faster than normal. So that's a really big deal because expertise and wisdom are both fancy words here, neuroprotective against cognitive decline. What that basically means is expertise and wisdom form these really diverse, diffuse neural networks through the prefrontal cortex, which is the area that's most vulnerable to cognitive decline in Alzheimer's and dementia. And the, when you expertise is, think of it as like, you know, skills and facts and skill sets and strategies. And wisdom is like all the emotional intelligence stuff that we learn sort of under the surface. But they're both these really diffuse networks. They're neuroprotective against cognitive decline. And so if you want to stay above Alzheimer's, this is sort of how you do it. So again, flow, which underpins learning and mastery is super important here. But what I was shocked by was really what I said in the beginning was like, I grew up in a world where old dogs don't learn new tricks, right? Like that's, that was like something I heard all the time and holy. So what was shocking was how fast I learned to park ski in my 50s. That would, that was mind blowing. And what it did to whatever, like my mindset around aging. We know that a positive mindset towards aging produces an extra 7.5 years of like health and longevity. It's really important. That's another one of those mind-blowing facts about, right, that I learned along the way. But changing your mindset can be tricky, right? There's stuff you can do around your language and around mindfulness and things like that. But having a quest like my NAR-style adventure where I was like, I'm going to learn to parkour at 53. Fuck, man. By the time I learned my my first nose butter 360, whatever else I thought was possible in the second half of my life was out the window. Because it didn't— like, suddenly I was doing nose butter 360s. That was not something I ever thought I was gonna be able to do, and it was mind-blowing. And it really sort of restructured a lot of what was, uh, possible. And the last thing, um, this is in the book, but it really, like, it blew my mind, and I didn't— I didn't know to expect it. I made so much progress in a single season, which meant that every time I went to the hill, I had to do something that scared me, like really scared me. And I was successful most of the time, right? Like I pulled it off, I learned the thing, I did the thing, but I still would get like little residual PTSD from it. Even though I have been successful, the thing I had done scared me enough that I was like, you know, a little twitchy. And over a course of a season where I was making all this progress, by the time the season ended, I was really twitchy. There was a lot of like PTSD from success. I had no idea that was possible. I actually called Laird Hamilton, the big wave surfer, and the story is in the book. And I was like, dude, you've gotta talk to me about this. Like, I had no idea you could get PTSD from success. And he started laughing 'cause it's something that happens to big wave surfers all the time, right? They'll go out for a couple, like swell will move in, they'll have like 3 or 4 days of big waves. They won't even like, you know, even if they make it through unscathed, they can be really twitchy afterward just from the exposure. Um, and that was really interesting to me. I hadn't experienced that before. So those— I could go on, but those are the 3 things that really just stood out when you asked the question.

Yeah, well, that's really fascinating. You know, with the PTSD part of it, it's funny because I told you at the beginning of this, like, I recently— first time ever, I fell backwards off a cliff onto rocks, and I saw it coming. I was like, oh no, it wasn't a great snowpack this year. And If I didn't have my camera, I wouldn't have known what happened. But I basically got bit by a snow shark going the wrong way because the snow wasn't deep enough. And coming home, I was like jittery. It's the fight or flight, you know, you're activating the central nervous system, the fight or flight response, and you have to learn how to kind of navigate that. And I'm curious for you, like, how important is it to do something that you're really passionate about physically that is putting you into the realm of scaring you, of pushing you, but also inspiring you so much that you're willing to architect and orchestrate separate your life in a way that you're like, I want to get so good at skiing at 50, but I'm a, I'm a bestselling New York Times author. I work with some of the best athletes in the world. I have this business side of me, but there's this other side that's being fueled up. How important do you think that is in someone's life to have both of those things functioning?

If you want interest in peak performance and you're interested in peak performance aging, whatever, top performers stack motivations, much in the same way that athletes stack fuel sources, right? Like, you would never go into an athletic competition without a good night's sleep, without good hydration, without plenty of fats and carbs and protein, right? And so you have all the fuels you'll, you'll need. Peak performers similarly stack intrinsic motivators, right? And there are, there are 5 major intrinsic motivators. Curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, and mastery. And they're actually— they all move together. They all kind of come online together in a particular sequence. So you want to stack all of those, right? And then on top of that, you've got goal setting. And there's 3 tiers of goals that humans respond best to. We like mission-level goals, what I call a massively transformative purpose at the top of the pyramid. These are overarching goals for your life. Then you want high-hard goals, the 3 to 5-year steps that will take to aim towards your mission-level goals. And then you want clear goals like the daily action. This is my to-do list. This is what I'm going to do today, and it's going to feed into my high-hard goals. They're going to feed into my massively transformative purpose. And so that's the sort of full stack of intrinsic motivators as I presented it in my book, The Art of Impossible, which we we talked about previously a little bit. In our country, I take it one step further and say, look, if you really, really want to get all this stuff together, design a mission that feeds all these things. That's what our country was. I had— and it was a mission in that I had unfinished business in skiing. I had unfinished business in athletics lingering over from my childhood. I had unfinished business in skiing as an athlete, as a guy who spent, you know, early years of his career as a journalist. One of my beats was action sports. So I would chase professional athletes around mountains. And, you know, I would get my butt handed to me daily. Like, it was the most humbling and awful experience. I was doing this thing I love, but like, I couldn't keep up with the pros. I was a writer, they were professional athletes. And I was breaking bones right and left trying to— try to— so I had a lot of unfinished business in skiing. So I created this NAR Style Quest, this mission. It aligns, right, All of my intrinsic motivators are fed into it, plus the 3 tiers of goal setting were fed into it. And then I created a mission out of all of it that even closed a bigger loop. And the reason really is the second half of what you said, which is so flow states have triggers, preconditions that lead to more flow. Flow underpins learning and mastery, right? So the more time and flow on the ski slopes that I get, the farther, faster I'm going to go as a park skier. Really matters. So flow states have triggers. Preconditions lead to more flow. Simple idea here. There's 26 triggers in total, but what they all do is they drive attention to the present moment. Flow doesn't show up if all our attention isn't on the task at hand. That's what the triggers do. They drive attention to the task at hand. And we pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge of the task slightly exceeds our skill set. So you want to stretch but not snap. So, uh, in, uh, younger people, it's usually about a 5% difference. The older we get, it shrinks down to about a 1% difference. One of the things I did, uh, as part of like my learning protocol, but that was, I went, you, I went one inch at a time. Like, I knew that this Shrunken Challenge skill sweet spot, the reasons that you're talking about, what you're describing, you fell on your face, you hurt your back, all of this, increases what's known as allostatic load, which is the impact of stress over time on our psychology and our physiology. Right. And what it, one of the things that does is, um, first kills us, but it also shrinks the talent-skill sweet spot. Right. Um, so in, in an older adult, it's a lot thinner and you want to go like 1 inch at a time, meaning start with an established motor pattern that you can do 100% of the time with zero fear and almost no consciousness interference, and then build on it one little movement at a time. And don't try to make it like homework. This isn't like deliberate practice, it's deliberate play. You wanna make it like improvisational and fun. That's really the best way to amplify all of this. But that's the challenge-skill sweet spot. Flow's most important triggers, you're always pushing on your skills and you're always coming out the other side of a flow state, more complex, more adaptable, wiser with more mastery. Like it, flow. So when I say flow is neuroprotective against cognitive decline, those are the reasons. Those are some of the reasons why. And you see how all of this, like, it ties together nicely. The other thing you need to know is all those intrinsic motivators that I talked about— curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, mastery— those are also flow triggers. When we have those things, autonomy, right? When we're the one driving the bus, we really care where the bus goes, right? That's simple. Mastery is like, I love these skills, they're helping me go where I want to go. So all this stuff, these are big curiosity. Drives focus. Passion drives focus. Purpose drives focus. These are all flow triggers. So if you get them all stacked together and you get that challenge-skill sweet spot tuned right, result is a tremendous amount of flow. What happened to me— why is it progress led to PTSD— is like, this was the weirdest part about the whole damn thing, is I set out saying I'm gonna go so slow, I'm gonna go so slow. Like, what I could call victory on any given day was really frickin' small. And yet, as you could tell from the books, like, even doing this, you'd have like any of these breakthrough days where I would learn 3 or 4 new tricks in a day. And like, I started with a list of 22 tricks I wanted to learn, or 20 tricks I wanted to learn. So if you knock 4 of them off in a day, that's a big day. That's a ridiculous amount of progress. And I would get there, like, with these tiny, tiny, tiny steps. Which was so— which was wild. Also very surprising.

I love all that. And you're kind of addressing that success isn't kind of linear sometimes where you might have like stagnation and then all of a sudden it pops. And I've had that in skateboarding before where I go day in and day out, I'm skating and skating and can't land anything or it's just not coming together. Then one day I go and I'm just landing everything in a row and I was like, I have never done that. 2 days ago I wanted to give up because I suck so bad. And that's a very challenging one to get back into when you're older too. It takes a lot of balance and I kind of beat up a little bit with my weight, so I was heavier and a little bit more muscular. Usually skateboarders tend to be a little bit thinner, a little bit more, uh, light, you know. So I'm a little bit, a little bit heavier, um, trying to balance around. So you shared a lot of great points there, and one of the big ones is this idea of a mission and, um, linking that all together. And I think that is one thing people really struggle with when we want to go towards peak performance. You need to have something that's a worthy goal. Just when I was learning about law of attraction and manifestation and that whole spiritual world, it really you know, that whole world, they'll talk about manifesting and all that kind of idea. And in peak performance, we have a goal. But the big challenge I found when speaking with people or coaching people is that they don't know what the heck that they want to go towards. They don't have this inspiring thing to work towards to then use all of the peak performance, all the spirituality, all the tools, all the tactics we have to achieve that goal. It's got to be lined up. And one of the things you teach about is massive transformative purpose. And I love that. So I'm wondering if you could give people like a tiny framework if they're just starting with this process, like how to get a little bit more clear and then maybe adding a couple tips with the protocol to begin their own journey. Because I feel like this is covered in The Art of Impossible.

And if you go to thepassionrecipe.com, there is a free— the Flow Research Collective has a free masterclass on this protocol because so many, so many people wanted to know how to do this. So the way to think about it, and I'll do this really fast because I've just given you a lot of assets for where to find it. I said earlier, you have 5 big intrinsic motivators: curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, and mastery. So, and I said they all have, they're designed to be built into one another. So that what you're asking is, how do I get a purpose? Well, it turns out you have to grow a purpose out of a passion, and then you grow passion out of curiosity. Curiosity is a motivator. It gives you focus for free, drives attention, right? But it's not super sustaining over the long haul. It's enough to get you awake and keep you interested, but it's— is it gonna, you know, when it's 3 o'clock in the morning, the 5th night in a row when you're trying, you know what I mean? Or it's the 120th time you tried the skateboard trick, you know, is curiosity alone gonna get it done? It's not. So what you want to start doing is you want to, and I tell people to do this, start by making a list of 25 things you're curious about. And then, and by curious, all I mean is if you had a free, if I get pause time and have a free weekend, you can take a bunch of lectures and, you know, maybe watch a movie and read a book and learn some skills. This is something you would, you would pick, right? And then what you want to do is you want to identify places where those curiosities intersect. Single curiosity doesn't have enough fuel, but if you can find a place where a bunch of those curiosities start coming together and nestled together, then you've got real fire. That's actually passion. People screw this up a lot because they think they have an image in their mind of what passion looks like. I said, give me an example of passion in athletics. And you'll give me like LeBron James scowling in for a windmill dunk. And yeah, but that is mature, late stage, all grown up adult passion. What that passion looked like at the front end when he— when you were trying to cultivate it was like a little kid in a driveway trying to get a basketball to sink through a hoop. That's what it looks like on the front end. So you can't expect it to feel like that windmill dunk until you fed that passion for 20 years. That's the end result. And so people go in the front end looking for something that literally cannot show up biologically for a lot longer. So all you're looking for is the intersection of multiple curiosities. Once you take that and you couple it to a cause greater than yourself, you figure out how your passion can make the world, the planet, the environment, the lives of animals, the lives of turtles— I don't care— better. That's purpose. And there's neurobiological reasons why each of these things works as a motivator. Basically, the more of these in a row you get, the more reward-based neurochemistry you get. So the more motivation you get. And the full sentence, the way to think about it, is curiosity is built into passion, passion is built into purpose. Once you have a purpose, what do you want next? Autonomy, the freedom to pursue your purpose. What do you want after you got autonomy? Mastery, the skills to pursue it well. And that's the full stack of intrinsic motivators. And they do— one gets developed into the next, into the next, into the next.

Thank you for tuning in Flow Research Collective Radio, and please pardon the brief interruption. I've 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, 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. That's getmoreflow.com. All the best.

Thing I always want to tell people is your brain is a pattern recognition system. It binds links between ideas, does this automatically free of charge all the time. That's what neurons do at a really basic level. Your job is to figure out what your curiosities are and play there 5, 10 minutes a day and let those intersections start to come to you. You're not— maybe some of them are obvious. A lot of them are going to be less obvious things that you learn by just feeding your curiosities a little bit at a time. You want to do this slowly. This is meant to happen slowly. And the reason is this: you literally do not want to be like 2 or 3 years into your passion to figure out that, oh shit, this was only a phase. You know what I mean? And so it's meant to happen slowly. We're very impatient these days. What's my big passion? What's my big purpose? And especially these days, because like having a passion and purpose is sexy now. You could go talk about it at a bar on Friday night, it'll get you laid, right? And, um, it is, it's true. I like, I'm in business meetings now where people lead with, hi, my name is Sarah and my passion is blah blah blah, or my name is Henry and my pa— and like, if we would have done this 30 years ago, somebody would have punched us in the face and kicked us out of the meeting. Like, that would— like, are you freaking kidding? And so this, like, its passion is very— it's, which is great. Like, this is fantastic. This One of the reasons that I've been involved in this work for so long is I wanted to see that kind of shift in the boardroom and in society. But it's also, it's sexy. And because it's sexy, people are impatient to be there now. And that's just not how the biology works, right? You have to be patient along the way. Flow will help amplify the speed of the process. So there are ways to use flow to sort of speed this up a lot. And flow is ultimately how you end up turning passion into purpose and how you move along that arc as well. But that's sort of the quick and dirty answer to your question. If you want more, thepassionrecipe.com or The Art of Empath will help you out. Or if you want to see what this looks like applied right or staffed in the real world, that's in our country in a sense.

Yeah, I appreciate that. And that was very well summarized and incredibly helpful. With looking at peak performance and aging specifically, it's interesting what we believe I think is so important. As you mentioned before, I had Chris Duffin on the podcast a while back and he squatted and deadlifted 1,000 pounds for reps. So he is one of the strongest men to ever live. It's completely absurd. And I can't remember one of the age, but I think he was 70. His name's Rudy, I believe. If you look at Chris Duffin's Instagram, you'll find it. And I believe at 70 he was deadlifting 500+ pounds and squatting around 400. And basically what Chris is saying is that, you know, this strength is possible and it's also healthy. So when you think about a 70-year-old, you don't—

okay, let me, let me, let me just blow your mind with something right now. We'll answer your question in a second, but I just want to give you like mind-blowing wild fact.

Yes, let me ask it as a question.

What do you think is the single most important correlate for peak performance aging. The single thing that is most important for health, longevity, over— out of anything.

Mindset?

Leg strength.

Oh, I love it.

Leg strength. Leg strength for preserving cognitive— for fighting off cognitive decline and physical health. Legs. In fact, thigh muscle mass inversely correlates with mortality. So this is really well established and it blows everybody's minds. In fact, you know, they keep talking about like, oh, we're running older candidates in America and we should test their cognitive fitness, everything else. You should do a squat contest, people. Squats, deadlifts, like really, if you want to talk. And so I can, I can break down the reasoning. There's a bunch of different reasons. One, um, One of the most important things you can do to preserve mental function is have a robust social life. Robust social connection preserves our brain. It also preserves our— it lowers stress levels. It does a lot of really beneficial things. When our legs go, when we lose our leg strength, we lose balance goes, and we don't, we're not as mobile. So, we're less social. That's one. Two, there's a bunch of stuff in the brain that declines over time. And the question has for long been why, what's going on? And part of the answer is we lose bone density over time and our bones are the mineral factories of the body and the brain. So the brain runs on calcium. Where do you think we store that calcium? And what are the biggest bones in the body? Quad bones, your leg bones, your femur, right? So leg strength, you're preserving the brain both through social mobility and through this and leg strength. Prevents falling down. And so the number one causes of mortality are still cancer and heart disease. But if they don't kill you, the thing that has the highest chance of killing you is you're going to fall down, you're going to break a hip, and as you're recovering from the hip, uh, your immune system is going to be depleted and you're going to get a secondary infection in your lungs, pneumonia, and die. And that's literally like the third most common killer. So strong legs protects against that. It just takes it sort of off the table. And then it goes, goes from there. Physical exercise is enormously beneficial, and it's dynamic exercise that matters the most. So when we use strength, stamina, flexibility, agility, and balance at the same time, coordination, all that stuff, it not only has a lot of big physical benefit. It produces angiogenesis and neurogenesis. Angiogenesis is the birth of new vasculature, blood vessels that support new neurons. New neurons, neurogenesis, the birth of new neurons. And what you really want to stave off cognitive decline, you need to birth new neurons, make them into robust networks, synaptic plasticity. And that's what's neuroprotective against cognitive decline. So dynamic motion is also really neuroprotective. You can't be dynamic if your legs are shit, right? Like, it doesn't— it's like, this is the powerhouse of dynamic movement, right? So I could go on and on. There's, there's more here, but I just had to stop you because it's so— it's shocking. It's like, there's a ton of myths about aging, and some of them are really like, like weird. Like, um, and by the way, tell this to the distance runners. Thigh muscle mass is not what you get from like long aerobic activity. You need strength training. Wow.

Well, I'm so glad you shared that. I love that because only the last few years I've been getting into strength training as a part of the protocol. I was a martial artist and a snowboarder, mostly calisthenics type of stuff, then realizing, oh man, if I would have just done squats the entire time. And I remember having one of my ski racer friends We were chatting one day in Whistler and this guy was an absolutely phenomenal skier, ski racing background. He was truly unbelievable, but he's built like a brick. And he said, yeah, well, when we did our training, we did squats. I was squatting 500 pounds in high school. I thought, oh my God, 500 pounds. That's insane. And it's interesting to see these correlations because if you look at a 70-year-old like Rudy was, you wouldn't expect him to be that strong. You're like, oh, you start to get older then. And it's again changing.

The mindset. This is— no, it's not just mindset though. So strength declines over time, but here's the use it or lose it part. The— we will lose— like, we, we lose about 30% of our muscle fibers between like age 25 and, and 90 or something like that. That happens. But what they don't tell you is if you train— first of all, first of all, that just that This is— we, if we're training it, we get to keep 70% of the strength that we had when we were like 18 in peak form. We wanted to— that which is a big deal in and of itself. But the remaining muscle fibers, it turns out, can out— they'll do— they learn how to do more work, so they become more efficient and more effective. So you end up being able to perform as if you've kept 85, 90% of your strength, and, um, which is amazing. So that's, you know, a really cool— so that's— mindset matters, of course, but this is actually like literally use it or lose it. VO2 max is the same thing. So VO2 max starts falling off a cliff at 25, right? And yet when they go out and they measure octogenarian triathletes, guys who've been running triathlons, men and women have been running triathlons, you know, for 30 years, starting in their 50s, into their 80s, they have the VO2 max of like healthy 35-year-olds. So we can really perform at our best till much later in life. This is, this is what some of the new stuff is showing. And it's across the boards. Where it gets interesting and unusual is that some of the interventions are not what you would expect. We can train all this stuff, but some of the ways that we have to train some of it is just It's new, it's different. It's not what you would think exactly. And so that's the training methods are developing rapidly. But anyways, it's cool.

Well, I love that interjection. And it's interesting with Rudy, he started at 50, right? And so I think I wanted just to point out like what we think is possible as we get older is different than what most people believe. I always thought as I got older I was going to get better. I never had the mindset that I'm going to get old and I'm going to wither away. I'm going to train. My whole life. It's a part of who I am. It's a part of what's most important. If you look at whether it's spirituality or even, you know, people who've done great things, they always treat their body as their temple, right? You look at these old statues of Socrates, supposed to be one of the smartest guys, and you look at all these old statues, they're absolutely jacked. What were they all eating? What were they all doing? You know, they were just these physical masters. And they also talk about the importance of having, like, you know, body mastery and strength and combat with the philosophical mind, which I think is so important to combine those two, because when you bring them together, whether you're doing this as in athletics, whether you're doing it art, if you're pursuing mastery in something that fires you up, it transfers into your business, into your social life, into your relationships, into your family, because I feel like you're more fulfilled, right? When you go on the mountain and you do something and you have that joy, and that, that's energy that you can use for something else. And I'd love to ask you, like, It's been my experience when I do something out in the sport world, you know, maybe I landed like a 900 or something. I wanted to do a double backflip this year. That was my goal. I came close before I kind of quit. We didn't get the snow year for it, and I'm not trying it on ice. But, you know, I remember landing other tricks like a really nice 900. I was so lit up. And what it does is you're like, holy— you think, what else is possible, right? What else is possible? And so in your pursuit, when you did this, did you have one of those aha moments for maybe your business or your life, whether it's physical or like with the flow research? You're like, oh no, you're like, boom, you got this inspiration. You're like, you know, now I have a new idea of what my limits are as far as business or what you're pursuing with skiing.

Well, all the time. I don't have one. I mean, like, I have millions, right? Because that's sort of how it works. Right? You— and what I found, and people say that I have the ability to kind of see farther, like it's something I'm good at naturally. And early on, I became very close friends with guys like Peter Diamandis. Peter Diamandis wanted to open the space frontier. So whatever, like, go— and he did, right? Like, and he did. And so— and he was— Peter's been a very good friend of mine for a very long time. So I came in already with this idea that like I could set ambitious goals. And the other— there's so— every time you achieve them, right? It doesn't matter if it's snowboarding, your 900 example, it's always, well, what else can I do? What else can I do? Right? What else can I do? That progress is the most addictive drug. And on top of that, So we know very much that the amount of flow in your life directly correlates to meaning, purpose, overall life satisfaction, well-being, that sort of thing. Another big element in all those things that I just mentioned that we all want is essentially the satisfaction of a job well done. We love long goals, those mission-style goals, really good for us, especially later in life, by the way. Really, really missions are, are helpful at any stage, but they really start to matter later in life. Uh, we're better suited for them. But, um, that was one of the things that, uh, I loved about, uh, weightlifting, actually, because I— when I started working out, I was so skinny and I was so small, um, and it took me almost 10 years to get anywhere. I tell this story where, like, I remember being in a gym in San Francisco. Mind you, I had been working out 3 to 4 times a week for 5 years at this point. And this big dude comes up to me, sort of like puts his arm around. He's like, don't worry, man, if you stick with it, you'll get somewhere. And I literally wanted to shoot him in the face. I was like, motherfucker, I've been doing this for 5 years. I was so mad. I was so mad. Like, I'm an actor more. Fuck you. It was terrible. But I've had a lot of like— my first book took 11 years to publish, finish and publish.

Right?

There's been in my, in my life, we recently published a paper on what happens in the brain in the first 2 seconds of flow. It's literally 30 years worth of, worth of research in, in that paper. So I love those kinds of projects, those kinds of really long missions. Personally, um, they're really good for us over time. And outside of the amount of time we're going to spend in flow, they're a really good marker for overall well-being, life satisfaction, meaning, right? You have to earn meaning. And this is one way you do it. And those long projects are really important from a— we talked earlier about the massively transformative purpose. And one of sort of its benefits is that like once you set one up, anytime you make sort of progress towards those mission-level goals, you're getting more dopamine, you're getting more motivation. It. So it feeds itself and it's a really beneficial cycle.

Amazing. Well, I love all that. There's a lot of different ways I'd like to go, but we only have about 10 minutes left because I know you want to get back on the mountain. So I'll kind of give it to you to choose. Would you like to talk about anything in particular of the book? I love ideas about protocols, just for me, you know. Um, I think that in your books, I like how you do the story, but then I can find the protocol because I want to go do it. So things like Wim Hof, I'm like, okay, he's sitting in cold. Well, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go in the cold and not do his breathing and test that. And then I'm going to test his breathing to see if, you know, there's a difference. So there's like, there's the protocols, but then there's also being the guinea pig. And I think that's important. So protocols are great.

I like being the guinea pig. So, yeah, so if you're, if you're just impatient, right, you're interested in all this stuff, you— what I tell people is read the first chapter. And then read the, the last chapter in the appendix. Because what I did in this book is I took all the science and all the protocols and pushed it to the very end. Um, and it's funny, people have come up to me, they're like, why couldn't you put it up? And it's because I had to tell you so many things first. You couldn't understand if I tried to move this stuff up front. One, You'd be so bored with the book by like, it wouldn't, it wouldn't have worked, but it wouldn't have made sense. And so all the protocols are at the back end, but the one that I sort of like the most, it's sort of, it's rule 1, right? There were, there are 10 rules that I, that I sort of set up around peak performance aging. And one of them is, is a sort of, it's a goal setting motivation thing that I think of. So I, um, when I'm setting up higher goals, I tend to think of it— I don't like— I work for the boss. The boss is the version of myself who creates those goals. Because in the moment, like day to day, I'm like everybody else, right? I get in the situation, I'm like, what's the easy high? What's the quick fix? I'm busy, I'm stressed, right? But because I work for the boss, and the boss is the one who creates the rules, the protocols, right? I don't have to make decisions. Like, I just do what I, what I'm told. I literally treat it that way. So the boss is the person who sets up the rules and creates it and has— why? Because the boss is the person who has my long-term best interest at heart. And I know long term because we just talked about it, right? The satisfaction of a job well done, being on mission, all those things, that's actually what's going to make the biggest difference in my life. That's what this idea prioritizes. And in the moment it allows me to like, I don't even have a choice. So like when it came to skiing, I'll give you, now let me put this in the context of skiing. I had a ski partner, Ryan. He's better than me, not a lot better, a little better than me. Meaning like if I try to do what he's doing, I'm usually sitting right in that challenge skill sweet spot, right? I'm pushing on my skills to the utmost. And so what I realized is going into the season, one of my rules was if Ryan can do it, meaning if he did something on the hill, I have to do it. I had 3 caveats. Don't do it if you're feeling too much fear, back off, come again later, because that will crush performance. Don't do it if exhausted. Um, low mass exhaustion, feel-good pleasure chemicals. Do you have to have— if I'm swishing my turns or underjumping my hits, I'm exhausted, come back later. Or, you know, Ryan, there's shit— he was a former sponsored athlete, so if Ryan wants to, he can throw a 700 to the moon, and I'm just not going to be doing that first You know what I mean? So like, without those 3 caveats, that was it. This was like, I work for the boss. So this is the rule. The rule is if Ryan does it, I have to do it unless A, B, or C. And it sort of was awful and yet wonderful at the same time. Because what I realized, big picture, over the years, I've been skiing with Ryan a long time. If he does something and I don't do it, I get really pissed at myself, right? And I will beat myself up and I will turn this thing into a much bigger thing than it is. And it'll take me like 2 or 3 years to finally get it done. And I'll really like, every time I see that thing, it'll haunt me, it'll bug me, right? Like, so I realized, I was like, wait a minute, by following this rule, it's short-term displeasure. I have to do this thing that scares me versus like years of actually beating myself up over not doing it. I was like, well, wait a minute, This, this equation is wrong. Let's, let's change the equation, right? And so, um, that to me, out of everything that I talk about in the book, I mean, there's a lot of other things you can do on a date, right? But it was this sort of master rule that really had the most freedom in it in a weird way. Like, it's— it was a way of like taking choice off the table, but by taking choice off the table, there was the most freedom which I know is counterintuitive, but it was— it really helped.

Well, I love that, and your protocols are really helpful. And then also, you know, you speak about it in the beginning of the book, just you— how you set up your day. It's crazy how much you get done in a day, and I realized that I'm a slacker. I was like, holy smokes, like, this guy is getting up this time. Like, oh my God, I have got to get my shit together. That is amazing. Um, you've been able to accomplish a lot. Do you want to comment on that, or would I just keep ranting?

You can keep ranting. I've been—

I like—

I mean, so I'm not— you know, I'm an early riser. So like, you should always work in accordance with your circadian rhythms if you can, because you're not going to win that fight very well. So I'm an early riser. All I started to realize is I could push that a little earlier and a little earlier and a little earlier. And, um, you're right, there's an amazing amount I essentially, because I get up at 4 o'clock in the morning and I work most days till like 5 o'clock, I could work a full day and go ski a full day, right? And it just, what I don't have that, I'm married, so that's beneficial, but I like, I don't have much of a social life. I always tell people, if I'm not married to you, if I don't ski with you, or if I don't work with you, I don't know you. Those are the people, right? Those that, that, that, those are the only. So there, there is some, you know, there's a, there's a, there's a trade-off involved that may not be for everybody. Um, but, uh, it has worked for me. And I like, it's, it's sort of amazing. You get up a couple hours earlier before the rest of the world and just work those plus the rest of your day. You put, you do that for a couple of years. People always say, how the hell can you write 14 books? And, you know, those sort of things that I've done, this is the answer.

Yeah, it's—

and flow. This plus flow, right?

Yeah. You have an incredible work ethic. Uh, you definitely accomplished a lot. I know we have a couple minutes, so the last thing I'll ask you was, what was the most fun thing about this experience and this challenge you've given yourself? And do you have something high on your bucket list that's come out of this?

So the most fun thing was that I skied the biggest line of my life last Wednesday. I'm 55, right? So your dream was to always be getting better. I'm still getting better. And yes, like, park skiing is, is new, but I've always been a big mountain skier. Like, that's what I did. And the fact that I skied the biggest line of my life, like, that's, that's the whole, that's the whole point. And Um, what was the second half of the question? What came out of that?

Oh, do you have a new bucket list that came out of this? Like, an item? One of them I only ask because one of mine is I want to go to Alaska and ski the big lines on a heli.

Uh, I do want to do that. I've got a lot of friends who go every year, and they've been trying to get me to go for years. Um, I've been to Alaska and I've done that. Um, I wanted to get myself to the point that I could go back and like not be terrified for my life every moment of every day. I don't think that's possible, but like, I'm getting close to the point where I'm like, okay, I think I'm ready to go back. Um, so that's always, always on my bucket list. Um, uh, no, I mean, like, what's expanded is the— like, those 20 tricks are no longer satisfying. Like, I got, I got things on my trick list where I'm like, really? Like, really? Yeah, that had— you had to put that on the checklist. Really? We're going to learn to do that. So like, there's some of those that— which is, which is the cool part. I like that.

Awesome. Well, you know, this has been a pleasure talking to you. I appreciate you. Where can people go find the new book, your old books, all the stuff you're working on? Where should they go?

Yeah, you get— in our country is available anywhere books are sold. Amazon has your back. Barnes Noble has your back. Support your local independent bookstores if those still exist around you. Um, if you can, uh, stephencollar.com gets you me. Flow Research Collective gets you the Flow Research Collective. Uh, if you're interested in training with the Flow Research Collective and learning more about flow and our peak performance aging training, uh, getmoreflow.com is sort of one-stop shopping. You can sign up for a free hour-long coaching call with, with one of, with one of the coaches of Flow Research Collective. And learn about our courses and such. How'd I do?

Amazing. Well, and I'll also add with the book, if you download the book, which I did, so Audible, if you have those Audible credits, if you're not on Audible, you should be because you should also be training. And that's how I get a lot of books when I'm in the drive. And, and that's how I was able to listen to most of this on the way to Lake Louise snowboarding. You give away a lot of great high-value bonuses. So the education that you get from signing up for the book and buying it is—

oh yeah, if you go to ourcountry.com, uh, where I think we're— the bonuses I think are still up and running. Um, they were really pre-launch, but I think my team is still— I think the team is still using them. Um, I think they're still there. Yeah, there's like $1,700, $1,800 in free peak performance training stuff that you get, uh, for, for every purchase. Um, I think it's the purchase of a hardback. Maybe an Audible counts too.

I don't know. Maybe because I interviewed— I hope I didn't screw up your team. Yeah, I don't You find them. Yeah. All your stuff.

Where's my focus these days?

Awesome. Well, enjoy the mountain. This was a pleasure.

Thank you, brother. This was fun.

Thanks everyone for watching. All right. See you guys.

Peace.

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 wanna 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.

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