Maximize Your Second Half of Life

You talk in the book about some outdated beliefs about aging that kind of got started a long time ago and we just never fixed them.

One of the clearest things that we see is peak performance aging starts young. The hardest parts of creativity get massively increased in our 50s, and then you get empathy and wisdom. If you want to stave off cognitive decline, fight off Alzheimer's and dementia, you need lifelong expertise and you need lifelong wisdom. By 30, you have to solve the psychological puzzle of identity. You got to figure out who the hell you are in the world. If there's not a match between who you are, your values, your beliefs, if you're not living with passion, purpose, and flow, you got massive problems. In the 50s, you have to forgive those who have done you wrong. The wisdom, the empathy, if you can't forgive yourself and forgive other people, that's going to end up blocked. Older adults who engage in challenging social and creative activities that produce feelings of mastery and control are the ones who thrive the most. 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. Great things. 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. 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 Steven Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio.

Today's show is all about— oh, it's all about Steven Kotler, who's a friend and a fellow author. And actually a chihuahua rancher in one of his lives. But he's well known for writing about flow states, brain states, extreme athletics, and all sorts of other just really interesting, well-crafted stories. And his new book is called Gnar: Growing Old, Staying Rad. This episode is about testing your limits and challenging yourself as you age. And as you guys know, part of biohacking is longevity, radical longevity. And part of it is cognitive performance and doing things you're not supposed to be able to do when you're 16 or 25. And it turns out if you do those right, you probably won't age as much anyway. One of the things that happens as normal humans age is they start putting in all these limitations and challenging beliefs and things like that. And some of that's hardwired— doesn't mean you can't hack it, but it's hardwired— and some of it's really more software-based. So Stephen's book is literally about that. It's what happens in your brain in the second half of your life.

The only point I make about all that side of this equation is most of us are going to be old, whatever the hell that means, right, for a lot longer than our ancestors, and probably a lot longer than we suspect. That, like, is that, you know, that we can all agree on.

So, okay, we totally agree on that. And, uh, bottom line is, if you want to call it second half, second whatever, uh, things do change over time. You can control how they change to a way greater extent than most people believe. But we do know things about synaptic pruning and all. And you go through in the book and you do the things you write about, and we talk or you talk in the book, and we are going to talk about some outdated beliefs about aging that kind of got started a long time ago and we just never fixed them.

You know, what I call the traditional theory about aging— let's start here— is what I call the long, slow rot theory, right? It's the idea that our mental and physical skills decline over time and there's nothing we can do to stop the slide. And it actually starts with Freud. 19— I want to say it's 1903, it could be 1908. Freud is about to be 50 years old. He's terrified of getting older, and he writes that don't even try psychotherapy with anybody over the age of 50. They can't learn anything anymore. You're wasting your time. So literally, and he's not even 50 yet. And then what's hysterical about it is Freud goes on to write 3 or 4 of his most famous works in his 60s, right? So it's not even true for Freud, but that statement has remained with us. If you want to have the craziest experience you can have, go back to Harry Truman's founding statement in 1950 for the Social Security Administration. They had to send out a document basically to everybody invited to the meeting. And the document basically says, by the way, old people turns out are people too. They have all the same feelings and desires that you do. It's a crazy document. And this persists into the '90s, which is the 1990s, which is when it starts to wobble. And what we have since learned has replaced it. And this is almost true across the board. There are obviously things that change as we age, but all the stuff we used to think declined over time, and you alluded to this, we now know it's all use-it-or-lose-it skills. And if you never stop training these skills, we can hold on to them and even actually expand them much later in life than anybody thought possible.

I think I just heard you say old people are lazy. Is that what you just said, Stephen?

I want to say that I think most people are dead before they're dead. That's, that's, that's how I'm putting it.

It's not laziness. Like you said, you stopped using it and why you did that. Well, hey, that's my next book topic. Said Mother Nature's wired you to do that. Doesn't mean you can't change it. But the idea of not doing things you don't have to do. That's kind of built in as conservation of energy. And so there's no moral problem with that. And if you allow that to run things, just like you allow your hunger to make you eat cheeseburgers all the time— and although actually cheeseburgers are probably better than Pop-Tarts, come to think of it. So if you allow your hunger to make you eat vegan burgers all the time, that's just true junk food. And if, you know, you, you stay up all night, you never sleep, and you just don't take care of yourself because you're just being lazy about self-care, then you probably are going to be lazy when you're older. But if you do a little bit of self-care ahead of time and you keep pushing yourself and build those habits that you talk about, you might be dangerous. And the way you open up the book is awesome. It's to do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art. Like, I do— I make danger coffee, okay? I'm all about being dangerous. I mean, who knows what I might do? I can do whatever I want, and you might not like it, but I have the power. And I love that quote. Why did you pick that quote by Charles Bukowski?

Well, the book is an experiment in peak performance aging, right? The idea underneath the book is, as you sort of pointed at, the old idea, right? Long slow rot theory is you can't teach an old dog new tricks. And I was doing a ton of work in flow science, right? My core field in network neuroscience, which neural dynamics directly, that's how we approach flow anyways, and embodied cognition. And I'm learning and learning. And this is 20 years of work and all of it says, hey, wait a minute, if you apply these ideas, you should be able to really learn difficult physical challenge activities very late in life. And so, I decided to try to teach myself how to park ski. Park skiing is the discipline in skiing that involves jumps, doing tricks off jumps and on rails and boxes and wall rides. It's very acrobatic. It's very dangerous. And the general thinking is you haven't learned it by 35, don't bother. It's very, very difficult. Over 40 or 50, it becomes downright impossible. And so, of course, I tried to get good in my 50s, but action sports are about creative self-expression on the mountain. Most action sport athletes, especially in the generation that I came up with, thought of themselves as artists as much as they thought of themselves as athletes. And for sure, my approach to skiing has always been— and skiers use the word steezy. It's a blend of stylish and easy. It's the ultimate. In action sports, you want to be steezy. You want to be really, really stylish but don't look like you're expending a whole lot of effort doing it. And to do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art, as Bukowski said. I think in his case, he was talking about drinking bourbon, but he did it with a lot of style.

There's a corollary to the early days of computer hacking. So, back in the '90s when you were figuring all this stuff out, I was a cyberpunk, mirrored shades, leather jacket. And breaking into systems that you're not supposed to break into. But the idea of making it look easy and, you know, taking over someone else's system in a way that's creative— and I'm just going to say stylish according to hacker ethos— it's the same thing. It's this idea that you did it with beauty, like an Olympic diver going into the water with no splash. Like, how did that happen? It's that effortlessness. I want aging to look like that, for me and for everyone, to be perfectly honest. And you're working on that too. Although I have to ask you this, I wasn't planning on doing it here in the interview, but we're friends. Okay, I talked about you screaming at 2 AM in a hotel room, remember that? Okay, so what happened is you screwed up your shoulder doing some sort of ridiculous skiing into a tree or something. I don't remember what caused the injury, but it was hurting for 9 months, right?

I think it was a rotator cuff.

Um, it was. So, so I took my crazy Russian prototype electrical stimulation device and I slapped it on there and I had you do the motion while I was putting you under an insane load, way more than your body would ever think was, was rational, and showed your body it could do the movement. And magically it stopped hurting. And the next morning, like, oh my God, I have full range of motion! Like, what happened? But you did scream because that was the body going, I'm not gonna do it, and you saying, actually, you are going to do it. And it was fixed. But you had pain for 9 months because you do crazy stuff, Stephen. I mean, I don't care if you're 20 or if you're 50 doing your triple flips on skis, getting traumatic brain injuries.

It's a fair point. Yeah. Are you going to hit a wall sometime? But let me back up and talk about one thing, and then I'm going to answer that question. We took this idea and I used this sort of methodology to try to teach myself how to park-ski. I literally said, if it takes 5 years, and we could talk about why I was doing that, a lot of that grew out of a conversation I had with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and the last conversation I ever had with him before he passed away. But I was like, I was going to learn. It doesn't care how long it took. And I created a list of 20 tricks and I figured if it took me 5 years, whatever, great, fantastic. I did it in a season. Which shocked me. Now, my ski partner who is 20 years younger and a former actual sponsored athlete who had a terrible injury and came back to the sport at the same time I started to learn it, he was using the same methodology. He got incredibly far. That was cool, but as you know, that's like the world's smallest pilot study, right? There's 2 people. But, this past winter, we took the same methodology, we took 17 older adults ages 30 to 68 and in 4 sessions on the mountain, again, taught them how to park ski. The goal wasn't actually to teach them how to do tricks. We broke— we break park skiing into the 8 foundational motions. And the goal was to get them to be able to creatively interpret terrain features as a faster path into flow. The flow takes care of the progression and the trips, trick and all that. Right. And so it's like a 1-inch-at-a-time, go slow to go fast. Just teaching people how to creatively interpret the mountain because creativity, that pattern recognition is a flow trigger. And, that's what I did. That was the goal. And, if you actually go to the webpage for the book, which is www.narcountry.com, you'll see there's a tab that says Peak Performance Aging Experiment. You can click it and watch the video. We made a huge video about the experiment. You can read the white paper. So, while you are right and I am crazy and I do am more than willing to hurt myself in the name of research. And you're totally right. But I always say, well, first rule for Stephen is if it works for me, it's probably not going to work for you. The reason I'm uninterested in psychology has always been it's squishy, it's subjective, and what works for you is not going to work for me because of a lot of reasons, how personality gets set up, connections to genetics and early childhood experience. But if you can get to the level of neurobiology, evolution shapes that is shared by all humans and that will work for everybody. So, that was the approach we took here. We then took it out of action sports and ran 500 subjects through the protocol and got really big performance improvements in their lives as well in the latter half of their lives.

I don't know that's the best anti-aging path because what often happens with just normal humans who aren't wired the way you and me are, is that, you know, you do something, you get an injury and it stops you from exercising and then you get frail hips and you get sarcopenia because it's hard to heal them. And there's times you can push through it and there's times when it's actually just an injury. And I, I kind of wish when I was younger and going really hard on stuff, even though I was obese and unhealthy, I don't— I don't think the 3 knee surgeries I had before I was 23 have served me well as I aged.

Okay. But, you know, a couple of things. One, of course, they have not served you well, right? I've broken 87 bones. I can tell you what the weather is going to be 3 days out. You know what I mean? For sure.

Exactly.

That said, and you know this too, and at the end of the book, I start experimenting with third-generation regenerative medicine, what we have around today. And while I think there are ridiculously silly claims being made around stem cells and things like that, if you're dealing with tissue injuries, soft tissue, if you're dealing with muscles, tendons, and even some bone stuff, no, regenerative medicine has actually finally grown up. Finally. I've been working with it and playing with it and researching it and studying and writing about it since really the late '90s. And it wasn't, it was a joke then, and it was a joke even into Around 2015, it started to get a little bit better. And, in the past decade, you're looking at real actual legitimate advancements. And, the stuff I play with in the book isn't even— and you know this too, it's not even the cutting edge. I was writing about the stuff in the book, a friend of mine blows out her ACL, they take stem cells out of her hip, spin them like they're going to PRP the stem cells, and shoot it back and regrow her ACL in 5 months and she's skiing again. And, this is a top-level skier. So, top athletes used to be a year, 2 years ago, 3 years ago, your OBJ playing football, it's a year and a half recovery from that same problem. And now, she's back skiing at a top level after 5 months. That's crazy. Crazy progress. And as you know, this stuff is starting to get democratized, so cost is coming down. In America, my mom just had PRP and her insurance covered it. Now, PRP is not cutting edge. It's like where the field was 5, 6 years ago or 8 years ago, but it works and her insurance is now covering it. So, that's getting interesting on that front. But the point I want to make on all this because you've touched on it a couple of times and I want to just go back and hit it because I've certainly stumbled on it how many times I can. You can rock till you drop pretty much, but one of the clearest things that we see is peak performance aging starts young. I mean, you can make interventions in your 60s and 70s and 80s and they're going to work and you're going to get results. In our research, we found stuff. There's dietary stuff that they think starts to matter in your 20s. And certainly from an adult development. So, one of the things, this is covered in the book and I'm just going to say it now because I know you were going to go there, but I'm going to spare you the pain.

Do it.

So, Gene Cohen, who is one of the pioneers of big performance aging, has sort of invented the field of geriatric psychiatry, which wasn't a field until he came along literally because we didn't think old people were psychologically treatable, right? Like Freud said no. And it took till 1973 when Gene Kohn comes along. He's the first guy to say, hey, wait a minute, maybe this isn't true. Let's run some experiments and see. Anyways, he discovers that rather than, like, an inevitable cognitive decline because of a bunch of different neurobiological changes, if we get it right, and we're going to come back to what that is because that was the point I was going to make, in our 50s, we gain access to like whole new thinking styles, right? New levels, really radical new levels of intelligence, new levels of creativity, and really deep divergent thinking. The hardest parts of creativity get massively increased in our 50s. And then, you get empathy and wisdom. And wisdom is the coolest trait in the world because if you want to stave off cognitive decline, fight off Alzheimer's and dementia, you need lifelong expertise and you need lifelong wisdom. Because they're big networks in the brain and they're impervious to cognitive decline. Basically, diseases like Alzheimer's dementia, they tend to target individual areas. And, if you've got these very dispersed neural nets holding your information, a lot more protected. But, what does it mean to get it right? So, adult development tells us that if you actually want those superpowers in your 50s, by 30, you have to solve the psychological puzzle of identity. You got to figure out who the hell you are in the world by 30. And by 40, it's match fit, right? If there's not a match between who you are, your values, your beliefs, and how you make a living or spend the bulk of your time, if you're not living with passion, purpose, and flow, you got massive problems. And 50s, this is the weird one. This came out of the Harvard Adult Development Study, the 100-year study of adult development. They were the first to notice it. In the 50s, you have to forgive those who have done you wrong. Self-forgiveness. You got to like sit down and shame the other because otherwise the wisdom, the empathy, which is about seeing things from other people's perspectives and all that other stuff, if you can't forgive yourself and forgive other people, that's going to end up blocked. And then in your 50s—

The thing is, you can do that in your 20s. Like, that's my whole 40 Years of Zen thing is about forgiveness. And it's just, it's a teachable skill. I'm working to get it in high school.

You can do 40 Years of Zen. I mean, You don't need to go with that. Loving-kindness meditation, right? Richie Davidson, Madison has been looking at this for 30 years. We have so much data on compassion meditation. And I don't know if you know this, this is really cool. They tested focus meditation against loving-kindness meditation for telomere attrition. And it turns out focus meditation won't protect your telomeres at all. But loving-kindness meditation actually prevents telemere attrition, telomere decline for some reason that nobody can figure out the neuroimmunology of this quite yet. But it's really interesting.

It is really interesting. I see all kinds of markers improve when people learn it. I just found it was a lot easier to go all the way in with loving kindness when I have a lie detector telling me when I'm not doing it right. Now, I agree you can do loving kindness all by yourself. I'm just saying don't wait till you're 50 to master this.

That's for damn sure.

I work with 20-year-olds all the time, or say 20 to 30s, um, not just in neurofeedback, just in, in chatting and talking and sharing stuff. When they get it, it's easier because skill acquisition is kind of easy in your 20s. You can still learn languages. And if you teach people a, a provable skill, and it's like a handstand but you're just doing it with your nervous system, man, the upgrading of the future comes from getting high school students and college students to get that loving kindness in. Because in all this shit that we go through in our 20s and 30s, you could—

if you can put down a lot of the— there's a lot there. I talk about this a lot in the book. There's a lot of shame along the way that is a tricky one, really insidious in terms of what it does to human development and growth and emotional regulation and a whole bunch of stuff like that.

And telomeres and dendrites and cortisol and all the other stuff, right?

Yeah. And you can set up patterns of inflammation in your 20s that are really problematic in your 50s and 60s because most of aging comes down to inflammation. I want to jump back to something you said earlier because you were right on, on something and I wanted to layer in a detail. So, you started talking about mindset and aging, which is one of the topics that's in the book. And the work on mindset and aging is stunning, right? Ellen Langer at Harvard was the first person sort of through that door. But we now— there's so many studies that show this. But for example, the correlation between longevity and mindset is wild. The Ohio Longitudinal Study of Retirement and Aging, which is the most thorough look at mindset, it's 20 years, a couple thousand people. Proper mindset towards aging, which is literally, I believe the second half of my life is filled with interesting possibilities and I'm excited about it. That's the proper mindset, adds an extra 7.5 years to your life. So, that's stunning. The other thing I want to say on this one because it sort of dovetails in with some of the peak performance aging starts young and some of this stuff. So, that you were talking about when we're younger, right? We all know that neurochemicals, especially the pleasure chemicals, the reward chemicals, are addictive, super addictive, right? And when we're younger, it's predominantly we're run by the seeking system and the play system. Those are the biggest drivers. And that's predominantly dopamine and norepinephrine with a little bit of endorphins. Once we get to, and this is where I think the mindset of old, quote unquote, actually starts. Once you start to get like you have the job you want, that you go into your 30s, or you find the partner you want, or you start to have a family and kids, the neurochemicals you have, we switch our addictions, right? We go from dopamine and norepinephrine, the seeking system, to serotonin, oxytocin, and really endorphins. These are all safety and security. These are about protecting what you have, not going out and getting more, right? Serotonin is the calming chemical. Happy with what I have. I'm satisfied. And, if you want to really thrive in the remainder of your days, however many days there are, and according to Dave, there are a lot of days, you have to reboot the seeking system and the play system.

Oh, how do you do that?

Literally, I mean, curiosity, passion, purpose, all the things that reproduce dopamine, you still want all the other stuff, right? Preconformance aging sort of demands all of your reward neurochemistry sort of working together. You also have to get a grip on the reward neurochemistry. You can't let it be quite as addictive as it was in your youth a little bit. So, there's a little more— What does that mean? I think it means more emotional regulation is what it means. I'll give you a classic example, my own mistake in my Nara country adventure, which is I started making so much progress. I came to power skiing in my 50s. I thought it was a long shot at best. And the thing that we designed worked so well, the progress itself was really addictive. I rebooted that sort of seeking desire in a difficult physical activity where I had a little bit of a fixed mindset around and shifted it so I had a growth mindset. The progress is really addictive. I wasn't mentally prepared for it and the addictive progress kept me. I injured myself a little bit on this adventure, but it was because I wasn't taking enough recovery days. I knew what I should be doing, but I rebooted the seeking system. It was so pleasurable, I wasn't even paying attention. So, that's what I mean. There's a little bit of emotional regulation that matters because when you're young and you skip recovery days, it's one thing. But if you're trying to do this kind of stuff over 50 when it's a little harder to recover, takes a little bit longer, then you have to be cautious around that. That's what I mean.

How does one really go about doing that? So, I don't understand the problem. I've always had, I don't know, 5th-grade curiosity about everything, which gets me into all sorts of trouble but also makes me creative. It's a personality attribute or something. But clearly, based on your research and based on what I see, people do lose their curiosity and they lose their zest for life. And I feel like a lot of times we'll just give them some thyroid and some testosterone and magically it comes back or address dopamine with L-dopamine and it comes back. But is there something else going on in there?

You are not right. You are not wrong. There is neurochemical decline over time, and it turns out there's actually a good use for SSRIs. Right? Like, they're terrible for depression, right? Because they're blunt instruments and they globally raise serotonin levels. And that's not how depression really works in the brain. But serotonin levels do drop over time. So it turns out that low-dose SSRIs in people over 75 actually has a huge impact for exactly the same reasons you're talking about. Daniel Levitin writes a lot about this. The neuroscientist in his book, Successful Aging, he talks a lot about that.

Yep. In fact, my favorite one L-depranil. It's not even SSRI, it's an MAO inhibitor, but it increases dopamine sensitivity. And you use low doses of that. It's a classical anti-aging hack.

What? L-depravil? I've never even heard of it.

L-depranil, or selegiline is another name for it. But you use— even when you're younger, you can use 1 or 2 drops of it and your dopamine systems just wake up. And as you age, you add 1 more drop for every 10 years that you take every day. And as long as you're not doing DMT or something, because it'll inhibit that, it is, it is a massively potent brain anti-aging and performance-enhancing substance that just gets forgotten about because things get trendy. So we're all about the NAD right now, but honestly, L-dopamine is cheaper. It works on an entirely different system, but for the kind of stuff we're talking about, it's an antidepressant that you take more of as you age that keeps dopamine sparkly, sparkly, right? And, and that alone would address what you're talking about.

I mean, by the way, you don't even have— so Gene Kohn is the one who started figuring this out. He figured out that in our 50s, there's another gateway to adult development, which is creativity. So, while we get creativity and intelligence and all these things over 50 because of neurobiological changes to really gain all the access to it, that's the hack in your 50s. And the point you made, I'm wired like you. You know that. I'm insanely curious. It doesn't go away.

And childish, immature sense of humor. I mean, we're soul brothers.

All those things. Very true, Dave. Very, very true. And you want creativity. I mean, that's what you said. Like, how do you reboot it? Like, really start training up creativity in your 50s. And usually that's about— I always tell people the easiest way to train creativity is to stop buying your culture. You can't buy culture anyways. You go to a restaurant and I love this with foodies. They go to a restaurant, they think they're having a cultural experience. And I'm like, the only person having a cultural experience are the people in the kitchen who are cooking the food. They're having a cultural experience. You, on the other hand, on the outside, are buying your culture. Stop buying your culture. Start creating your own culture. That's what nurtures this in a really in a really deep way.

Pardon the interruption, and 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%. 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 human nervous system when it's functioning at its absolute best. After training thousands of high performers from Navy SEALs to Fortune 100 executives, here's what we've found. You're evolutionary hardwired to perform at your best. All it takes is pressing the right mental buttons and pulling the right biological levers, so to speak. It's about getting your neurobiology to work for you instead of against you. Now, if you want to make operating at a 10 out of 10 level as natural as breathing, just go to getmoreflow.com. I'll show you how to reliably trigger a flow state where you feel limitless and you do your very best work. This won't require any biohacking or nootropics or gadgets or caffeine guzzling. This higher gear is endogenous, which means it's a state that your brain produces on its own. No external stimulus is required. Just go to getmoreflow.com to learn how to get your biology working for you instead of against you so you can make peak performance second nature.

All the best.

What else can we do to age well besides smoke weed, jump off mountains, and forgive people?

One, on the physical side, you, and you have to train You can preserve significant amounts of strength, stamina, flexibility, agility, and balance long into life, but those are 5 different categories and they all sort of need to be trained simultaneously. You can put them together into certain activities, but you can't skimp on any of those. And, with things like balance and agility, you have to be smart about it because As we age, we have prime mover muscles, our big, big thick muscles, and we have stabilizer muscles. And what happens is the prime movers, whenever we have bodily injuries or whatever, when we're healing around that stuff, right, you break your left foot ankle, and as you're healing, your right leg gets a little stronger. Your left leg learns to compensate for the injury. That doesn't tend to get fixed over time. It tends to magnify. And as a result, a lot of our prime movers take over and our stabilizers stop doing work. This is one of the reasons that falls increase 40%, 50%, 60% over 50. It's this issue. And it's just about knowing how to train and being able to train all of those things at once. So, that's what has to happen on the physical side. Cognitive performance. As we said at the beginning, lifelong learning is foundational to stave off cognitive decline. If for no other reason, then expertise and wisdom are both the two things that are actually neuroprotective against cognitive decline. And those are the skill sets you're aiming for. So then, we talked about all the gateways of adult development that you sort of need to pass through. And then, everybody's— we know this, right? And there are really basic lifestyle factors, right? Older adults who engage in challenging social and creative activities that produce feelings of mastery and control are the ones who thrive the most. And mastery and control are really actually key. Both of those feelings, those emotions, there's a lot of neuroimmunology work that show they both they increase T cells and killer T cells or natural killer cells. And, this is one of the reasons flow matters over time. Flow is, from a scientific perspective, one of the things that flow does, we now believe it's the evolutionary signal of mastery. It's the brain's way of saying, "Hey, you've mastered this thing, you've learned it," because knowing when you're good at skills is important from an evolutionary perspective. So, one, you get that feeling of mastery directly from flow. And, one of the core characteristics of flow is it produces a sense of control. And, these are usually important. I mean, even Ellen Langer who I mentioned earlier, the queen of mindset, her very first famous study on perceived control back in the '70s, this is one of the most famous. This is the study that changed everything we thought about aging. She was hired to make life better for people in a retirement home. She took a group of 16 folks, divided them into 2 groups, that both got the same interventions. They both got plants in their room, more movie time, and more social time. Right. And the difference was one group, they had to take care of their plants. They got to choose what movies they were going to watch, and they got to choose when they were going to have more social time. The other group, the nurses took care of their plants and they got more movies, but they picked the group movie and they got more social time. But everybody, it was a Tuesday at 4. And a year and a half later, the group that had perceived control, because they didn't have a whole lot more control over their life, they just had this increase in perceived control every single health metric you could possibly imagine was through the roof. But the craziest one was they were twice as likely to be alive. That was the biggest difference.

I truly think that's why we still have voting.

Receive control.

Because it gives people the perception of having control, which makes them happier and longer lived, even though, let's face it, you have absolutely no control over whatever crackhead is running the White House right now. Or at any time in the past or the history. You actually have no control, but the perception that you have control probably does something neurobiologically that's valuable for humans.

You are certainly not wrong about that. And certainly for health and longevity, perceived control really matters and control really matters. And flow, because the feeling control is built into it. This is one of the reasons flow matters so much as we age. And a lot of people, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the godfather of flow psychology, he really spent the bulk of his career focusing on questions of adult development and flow. In fact, the last paper he published before he died was on did flow proneness change over time? What changes? And you know, this is a moving target variable. If you look at the data, it's only when bodies really start to break down and you can no longer kind of do the same thing to get into flow, that it starts to taper off a little bit. So, that changes obviously. You go back 20 years ago, that was in people's 70s because that was when we tailed off. And now, if you look at it, it's late 80s. So, it keeps getting pushed out as we live longer and as we maintain health and vitality longer. So, it doesn't seem to drop off at all. And Csikszentmihalyi argued in 2 or 3 of his books that flow is the actual engine of adult development, which I tend to agree with. That's a big statement. Well, this is how you need to think about it. So, flow states have triggers. The most famous is challenge, skills, balance, right? We get into the flow through focus and we pay the most attention to the focus, to the task at hand when the challenge slightly exceeds our skill set. right? So you want to stretch but not snap. When you're doing that, you're using your skills to the utmost. So when you get into flow, this is why flow amplifies. You're getting learning, you're getting growth, you're coming out the other end, you're a more complex and adaptable person. And flow also automatically expands perspective and empathy. So wisdom. So a lot of the traits we associate with adult development are automatically expanded. I mean, this is— it happens because of, you know, how empathy and wisdom, a lot of that is in the temporal parietal junction, and which gets really active in flow. And this is why we see things from other people's perspectives and why we become one with everything in extreme macro flow states. It's the same mechanism, right? But all that happens in flow. I don't— with Chick Settling High's statement, I tend to agree with him. I want to study it. We've been trying to figure out Can we run better experiments and things like that? He came at it from a psychological standpoint, and the psychology definitely holds up. Does it hold up neurobiologically is an open question, and I'd like to do more work on that. We're thinking about it at the collective right now.

I'd like to see the results of that as well. All right, let's say that you're 90, smoke weed, jump off mountains. What does a 90-year-old do for flow? There are slowing of brain cells in most people. What's the safe way to do this?

Yeah, no, I mean, so let me tell you where this all started. I've been studying this stuff and as you know, I do my work with Chihuahuas. We do a hospice care dog sanctuary and we've been massively successful at extending the lives of dogs. So, one of the first things I started to realize when the "lifestyle factors" caught my attention, it wasn't like I thought the blue zone research was particularly spectacular. It was that When I looked at the Blue Zone research and I looked at all the other lifestyle stuff, I realized we had done very similar things for the dogs. And we were taking dogs with late-stage heart disease and cancer and getting 3 to 5 more healthy, active years based on sort of lifestyle interventions and no real extreme medical interventions. Because when you have the volume of animals that we work with, you can't— there was no way to afford those kinds of medical interventions. Especially when we were starting out, we were getting crazy results. But, it started with, "Holy shit, what's going on with our dogs and is this even possible in humans?" And, I started looking in humans and I went, "Oh, wow, they've discovered very, very similar things." That said, right before COVID it was the last— So, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi passed away in October of 2021. And, But I talked to him in, I want to say, July of 2020, and I called him up to ask him a funny question. I called him up because they had translated— one, he had had a stroke and I wanted to make sure he was okay. And two, they had translated a bunch of his work, early interviews out of Italian and into English. And I was reading them and there was all this stuff about early Yosemite. I knew he was a rock climber and a mountaineer and sort of an outdoor athlete, but he was quoting, naming hardcore Yosemite Valley rock climber names that I was like, "Oh, he would only know these people if he was really, really serious." So, I called them up and I was sort of kidding him and I said, "Mike, I know in your TED Talk you talk about stumbling upon flow in a concentration camp during World War II and then your original work was on artists, but in between, you were a very serious rock climber." And, Tell me the truth. Were you getting into deep flow states out in the mountains and just didn't know how to talk about it with academics, so you started writing about it with artists? And there's this huge pause, enormous, like 30 seconds go by, a minute goes by, a minute and a half, and I'm thinking to myself, holy shit, I've offended this man who's a legend to me. Holy crap, I've totally offended him. Wow. And suddenly, he says, Stephen, You got to be careful. And at this point, I think to myself, holy shit, has he lost the plot? What's he talking about? I got to be careful. Wow. And I'm like, well, Mike, what should I be careful about? He said, well, Stephen, you do something your entire life for flow and then you get to be my age and forget about climbing mountains. Some days I can barely get out of bed. You need a backup plan. You got to be careful.

There you go.

So, right, my primary flow activity is skiing. It's always been my primary flow activity. Up till before Nara Country, I was a big mountain skier, which meant the only way I got into flow was charging down really big, gnarly, scary lines. And I knew if that was my main source of flow as I aged, to something I was absolutely right, I'm screwed. Why did I start park skiing? That seems totally crazy, but I figured if I could get to intermediate, it was going to be dangerous going zero to intermediate. But at intermediate, you can sort of check your progression. There's much less randomness. And I would have all these millions of ways to creatively interpret the mountain. I wouldn't have to use risk as a flow trigger. I could use creativity and creative and embodied movements and all these other things. So I would have a million more entrances. Into flow over time. That was the entire Nar Country adventure. That was exactly where it came from.

The only human being who's like, you know, this bombing down these dangerous runs, it might be a problem. I'll just learn park skiing to be less risky. But like, that's a uniquely Steven Kotler thing to do. For the rest of us—

But you see the logic.

I do see your logic.

I'm also teaching myself how to play piano.

Okay, that's a good flow. Or chess probably too, right?

Park ski. I haven't gone back to chess, but I will tell you what I am doing, what I have been doing. I got so frustrated. There's gaps in my math. And as you know, in neuroscience, you can't really have gaps in your math. I got so frustrated, I've gone all the way back. I started with Algebra 1 and I'm literally working my way all the way through because I was sick of it. I was like, you know what? First of all, this is good for my brain as I age. And second of all, I'm annoyed that there's something here I don't understand and I don't know. And I was just tired of it. Best guess, maybe it'll be the next decade, but these days it's been calculus.

I'll be straightforward. I like going for hikes in the mountains. I like beauty. I like certain physical activities, but I don't want to go to the gym and practice dribbling soccer right now. It's just not very high on my list of how I could spend my time. So if I can acquire those skills or the physical results of those skills in 1% of the time, I'm going to do that and I'll spend the rest of time going into flow state in other ways that serve me and make the world better.

Here's the thing I want to— all that is true. All of that is right. Here's the point I make at the very end of the book, which is that action sports are actually anti-aging medicines in very specific ways. One is action sports, and I'm not telling people to learn to park ski. There's a billion action sports to choose from. But they all demand strength, stamina, flexibility, agility, and balance. You get all the use-it-or-lose-it skills in one activity. You also, if you want to protect cognitive function, what do you want? You want neurogenesis. You want to birth new neurons and create new neural networks. That's how you're going to protect against cognitive decline. Most of the neurons in the adult brain that are born show up in the hippocampus, right? Even the very late in life, you're birthing 700 new neurons neurons in the hippocampus a day, basically up to the point we die. But, what are those neurons? What does the hippocampus do? It does predominantly mapmaking. That's grid cells and place cells. So, if you really want to preserve cognitive function, you want to basically use the hippocampus in the way that evolution designed it. You want novel challenging experiences in outdoor environments because the brain was designed in an evolutionary sense where hunter-gatherers for a very long time. Remember where you are when important shit happens. That's what our brain is designed to do very much. So, action sports by— I'm not saying you have to go out and learn how to park ski, but you want to go do your hikes outside in novel outdoor environments. I don't know if you've seen this. They did a study. They didn't include action sports, which bummed me out, but they did a study, I want to say 10 years ago, about which sports have the best impact on longevity. Number 1, tennis. Number 2, badminton. Number 3, soccer. Now, one thing that's worth pointing out, all of those are social activities because when they get to number 4, it was cross-country skiing and then running. And so there's a, there's a list, but once you get to 4, they're all solo activities. And we know that it's really important to have social connection. Later in life. And they didn't test action sports, but I think you're definitely right about hand-eye coordination. I tell the story in the beginning of the book of, or the end of the book, of the mystery of Stradivarius, which is another one of those mysteries that I stumbled upon. Stradivarius made 50% of the rarest musical instruments in history, which is the fact that I stumbled upon, which I was like, "Oh my God, that's bizarre. One dude builds half of the most valuable instruments in history. That's crazy. What other field has that ever happened in?" And as I'm sort of researching that and sort of geeking out because I'm curious, I discovered that two of his most famous instruments were made when he was 92 years old. And at that point when I stumbled on that fact, I was still under the influence of the long slow rot theory. This was the point I was like, "Well, wait a minute, there is no possible way if fine motor coordination declines over time, if dexterity declines over time, manual dexterity declines over time, there's no way a 92-year-old dude makes a priceless viola. But, that was when I started saying, "Hey, wait a minute, there's something really rotten with this information." Of course, Stradivarius made 1,000 musical instruments over the course of his lifetime. He never stopped making them. So, use-it-or-lose-it skills, perfect example.

Ben: There's a little more wisdom in Stradivarius as well because he told everyone how he soaked his wood and did all this stuff. It was all bullshit that he was telling his competitors to throw them off how he did it or that he didn't soak it, dry the wood. Some sort of a thing. I don't remember.

I didn't know that. That's brilliant.

And then they found out by looking at a shaving of one with an electron microscope, like, wait a minute, this thing's been soaked forever. I think it was— he told him it was dry. So he basically misdirected everyone, which is part of wisdom. And then his mastery that happens from doing it over and over, those fine motor skills— it's like a surgeon who's done it for 20 years can do things that a new surgeon just can't do. Until they get that layering. And the overall reason I, I like your book, I like your approach on this, is that I wouldn't be here with the brain and the biology I have now if I didn't, out of desperation, when I was about 25, 26, start hanging out with people 3 times my age who were working on the anti-aging problem before it was, it was cool to do that because I was so profoundly sick and just, you know, fat and my brain wasn't working. But I realized I'm downloading all this information from, from the masters. And even now, a lot of my guests on the show are 60s, 70s, 80s, because I want their 40 or 50 years of work. I want to be able to ask them any question and download it into my audience's brains and mind so we can maybe get the wisdom faster. And if we can make these people healthier with better working brains and maybe give another 20 years, the wisdom is going to compound and compound and compound. And it does share down through the generations. And the, the people in their, their 20s, which is, by the way, the, the second largest cohort of people listening to the show, um, is they're like, oh my God, I'm getting such an unfair advantage because I, I just got all this stuff, so I didn't have to go do it all. Like, just what you shared about the stages of development right there, if someone just picks that one nugget of wisdom from you and says, I'm just going to work on that for a year. You just saved them like 10 years of crap in their life. And we just have to get older people who kick ass. And that's kind of what you could have named your book if you didn't name it In Our Country, right?

Old People Kick Ass. Well, I mean, the other thing is this. We do tons of work with CEOs, and if you talk, I've had hundreds of conversations with thousands of CEOs at this point. Everybody says the same thing. The two skill sets that are hardest, that I need the most in the 21st century, that are the hardest to train for or hire for are creativity and empathy. And creativity matters because the rate of change in the world is ridiculous. And if you're going to innovate and keep pace, you need it in your employees. And empathy— one, teamwork is at the heart of any good company. And without empathetic team members, you've got no collaboration, got no cooperation. But also, if Bezos is right, And, you know, even you're right from back in the day, customer-centric thinking is the mantra of 21st century business. Without empathetic employees, nobody's thinking like your customers, right? And a well-trained over-50-year-old is the ideal worker for the 21st century. Like, you're talking about the dream workforce. So it's really interesting because there's a business revolution sort of tucked inside all of this. Waiting to happen that's really exciting as well.

Okay, I'm 100% with you there. And so much can happen if we just get that dialed in for CEOs. It's a big part of my mission when I work with them as well, is let's just get those tuned in. But I'd also add working memory. There's a really high correlation between working memory size and ability to run larger companies. And you kind of look as the as you climb up through the executive ranks, quite often the CEO and senior operating people in a company have a working memory that can store about 10 digits. And if you go down to the average of 7, that's your management level, and then people can only remember 6. It goes down. So that ability to rapidly swap things in and out of your—

fascinated by this. I want to see, I want to see the research on this. That's crazy. I didn't know. That makes a lot of sense to me. I also think one of the things I've always thought about working memory is if you write books, for one example, if you do anything that requires you to hold tremendous amounts of information in your head all at once and books or long-form articles, research paper, any of those kinds of projects tend to require that. You can't write a book, you can't write 250 pages if you can't hold 250 pages. There's going to come a point when you have to start moving shit around and It's in nobody's head but yours, right? So, those kind of skills. So, I think working memory in that way, exactly what you're talking about, is actually, it's trainable, but most people don't challenge themselves. Most people have never even tried to write a 10,000-word article, which like a long-form New Yorker-style article. But even that, holding all that information and being able to move it around, And I do remember, like, that's one of the reasons I know it's a trainable skill is because I remember the first handful of times I wrote like a 5,000-word article, my editor got in my face.

It was very different.

Move it around, you know, asking me for changes. And I was like, I couldn't even see the whole article that I had written.

Yeah, you have to draw a picture, at least that's what I do, of the entire book to be able to see what the book looks like. And then that means you can change how the image looks in your head. Otherwise it, it's impossible. For the first book, it took me 5 years to write it, in part because of that problem. And then, you know, I got the skill. But I, I want to ask you this: the articles, 3,000+ words, you know, several pages, no one reads them anymore online. I write them and it's so down. It is social media with your 5 bullet points while someone's dancing. Is that making people older faster?

That's an interesting question. I'm sure there's all kinds of advantages in newer media cognitively that I'm not looking at here. But yeah, David, I think I agree with that statement. Certainly what I've noticed over time is What has certainly been lost is there's like now language has to be unbelievably boring and communicative. People have lost, there was a level of, you know, you said you were a cyberpunk. Go back to like William Gibson stuff from the '80s or the '90s. People can't read it today. It's too confusing. They can't follow that plot today. Like literally today. So like there's something, there's like a richness in the storytelling that has gone away. And like our ability to understand complicated metaphors and similes has gone away. I was rereading a lot of Annie Dillard's work recently, and especially her book For the Time Being, which is absolutely beautiful. And I was thinking to myself how most of the book is a metaphor, right? I mean, it's an argument with God. The entire book is a lengthy argument that she's having with God from a scientific perspective. And if you were to write it today, I don't think— I mean, people consider it one of the great books of the 20th century. I don't know if you could write it today. Oh, there's a lot of stuff like that where I'm not— I think it's not to say that there's cool stuff that has emerged out of You can do stuff with language and technology that's interesting, but I think there's some levels of cognition that have been lost. I think they'll come back with new things. But yeah, I think for now, I think you're probably right.

But here's a question for you, Steven. Flow state in reading. Do you get into a flow state when you read?

It's interesting. I always said one of the marks of knowing a subject actually is when you can get into a flow state while reading the textbooks. And that was right. That was when I started to, like, when I started to get into flow while reading neuroscience textbooks, that was when I was like, okay, this is really like, I was like, oh, wow, this is a really interesting marker for like expertise. Oh, you know, and which, um, but yeah, I always say that like when you know you're an expert when you're reading the textbooks and they read like adventure stories. By the way, first actual adult development researcher in the world was Bernice Neugarten, right? In '50-something, she was awarded— the University of Chicago gives her the first PhD in human development. Her argument, so she was studying the question. She's exploded the idea of the empty nest syndrome and menopause as trauma and all these old ideas. She exploded a bunch of them. But my favorite thing was she proposed the first theory of adult development based on the social clock. So what she basically said is society says this is the time to get a job, this is the time to get serious, this is the time to get married, this is the time to have kids, and you're either on schedule or off schedule. And either way, there's a whole bunch of societal pressure that comes with being on schedule or being off schedule. And that's the actual engine of development. So, I was listening to you talk about social pressure and I was thinking that Bernice made the argument that this is actually one of the things that drives us that ages us.

Interesting. I believe it. The idea, if we could boil our country down into just one thing, it'd be really hard to do. But, one of the the things that you said first on the interview that I think comes through well in your book is just the idea of keeping your curiosity. Anytime someone says it's impossible, anytime someone says to me, like, why? Like, is that real? Is that true? What, what if? And just always having that going. And I, I've seen your work with the Flow Genome over the years, and you remember I was like the very first investor in it, like in what, 2013 or something?

Way back.

Um, and like, I, I, I just see good stuff happening, but it requires continuous curiosity, sometimes for 10 years or 20 years. And if we can help our current 8-second attention span TikTok-addicted friends of all ages turn curiosity back on, I think it's gonna make the world a better place. Oh, and we'll have less— we'll have less decrepit people. Certainly.

A, you're going to have less decrepit people, and B, curiosity is a weapon for success. It's a weapon for success. And I will say, I don't know if I can make this as a blanket statement, but I know very, very, very, very, very few super successful people who do not have a burning curiosity still, like endless, right? And I think it's such an important driver all throughout our lifetime.

Well, let me ask you this before we wind up the interview because we're over time. What's different about you that let you keep it? Was it your parenting? Was it your schools? Are you just stubborn? What let you do it?

So, you have to— everything about me as an adult from age at least 15 to say 35, that 20-year span, a lot of it is spent trying to solve a fundamental puzzle, which is how do you get paid to write? I knew I wanted to be a writer from the time I was 4, right? And by the time I was 15, 16, I realized that, like, I wasn't— I didn't fit very easily into nice molds for society. I didn't slot well, and that this was going to be a challenge. And I didn't want to be poor, and most writers ended up poor. So, like, not only did I want to make a living as a writer, I wanted to make a good living as a writer. And so one of the first things I figured out when I started working as a journalist is journalism is about exploiting your curiosity. Anything that you know sort of a little bit more about than other people, you know, than my contemporaries, right, was an advantage. So, like, cultivating curiosity was how I made a living, right, especially as a journalist, right? Like, so, and it just, it, by the time I had solved that puzzle, I Then, I was writing books, which obviously, you still need to do that or I'm running a research institute. So, all those things still require curiosity. It just continued to feed itself. But, in the beginning, it was a solution to— My mother, we didn't have a ton of money when I was born. My mom, my parents were young and without a lot of money. My mom knew that books were good. So, we would go to the library and she'd get me 50 books and read them to me until I could read them to her. And then, even when I was growing up, if I was curious about stuff, she found ways to let me indulge in it one way or another even if we couldn't afford it. She would find ways to make it possible for me to indulge those kinds of things. So, I was raised a lot. My mom's secret to parenting was cultivate curiosity in the kid, it'll keep it busy kind of thing. You know, so I think it's been with me all along. Right. But it was definitely, you know, it was a weapon in terms of writing success for me.

So it was the desire to get paid doing what you love that helped to drive it. I'm always intrigued to get a chance to pick your brain. I love it that we're going to be on the New York Times list together, assuming listeners help out, guys. Nar Country and Smarter, Not Harder. Buy them together. You're going to read them both. And you're not going to read the same thing in either one, but they're both going to help you get there faster, which is cool. And I got to say, your storytelling is fucking legit. Like, just author to author, I— every time we're like, how did he do that? So I'm helping myself improve when I read your books to figure out how you're getting there. So that's just a genuine compliment. No asking there.

Good skill set. Thank you. I appreciate that.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. It feels good to pummel your to-do list and free up more space in your life. On the subject of punching things, meet Krista Stryker. She's an amateur boxer, journalist, entrepreneur, and world-renowned fitness expert. Here's what she had to say about training with us at the Flow Research Collective. Quote: Before learning about flow, I felt like life was just kind of happening to me. I felt there was no real control over it. Why sometimes I have good days and sometimes I have bad days. After completing Zero to Dangerous, my life is a lot more intentional now. Being in flow has helped me to complete my second book as a writer and prepare for my next fight as an amateur boxer. And I can't thank the Flow Research Collective enough for it. That's epic to hear, Krista. We're super stoked that you shared that with us. And if you're listening in and you want to take back control of your time, your work, and your mind, go to getmoreflow.com. We'd love to work with you to achieve your boldest goals in less time and with more ease. Again, just go to getmoreflow.com to get started.

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