Peak Performance Aging: Growing Old, Staying Rad with Steven Kotler

You're not constantly rising towards challenges. You're going to limit the amount of flow you can have in the second half of your life, which is absolutely going to impact quality of life. You want to keep dropping into flow in the second half of your life because it turns out flow is neuroprotective against cognitive decline. What does it take to do the impossible? What does it take to level up your game like never before? What does it take for individuals, organizations, for even institutions to achieve paradigm shifting? Nothing is ever the same again. Breakthroughs.

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

All right. Hello. Hello. Big welcome. Thank you, everyone, for joining us ringing in 2023 in style. I'm here with Steven Kotler, 11-time bestselling author, executive director of the Flow Research Collective. I'm Dr. Tori Higgins. I'm the head coach at the Flow Research Collective, and we are super stoked. We thought now would be a great time for a call about peak performance aging for a couple of reasons. Number one, because It's the week of New Year's. We tend to be acutely aware of the passing of time, another year in the book, that kind of thing. This is also when many of us set intentions for the coming year. So we thought this would be a great opportunity to talk, uh, peak performance. You can, uh, gain some great recommendations on how to attack your next year of life to get as much of the good stuff out as possible. Uh, the second reason that we thought now would be a great time for a call on peak performance aging is also because Steven's new book, Gnar Country: Growing Old, Staying Rad, is coming out at the end of February. There it is, that's the one. Um, so this book is all about goals, grit, progression, especially in the second half of our lives. Um, and this is really a book of how not to, right? Not how to, how not to. How not to lose that fresh fire, how not to give into that cozy blanket of middle age, how not to go gently into the good night. So Today, Steven's going to be sharing some of his peak performance aging lessons that he learned while, uh, writing Gnar Country and living the experiment that you're going to hear all about. Um, and the goal here is for you to learn some of these lessons as well, learn how to apply them to make the second half of your life even more rad than the first. Steven, I thought it would be fitting to start our conversation off with a question about goal setting. I know, not very original, but As a coach, I can't tell you how many times I've worked on goal setting with clients who start to pull their goals back from the edge later in life. They start to water down what they really want because they don't think it's appropriate to be so audacious with their goals now that they've come to a certain age. So I want to know what you think about that. Is there an age limit for peak performance? Should we start setting safer, less audacious, less massive goals as we get older?

There does, there does not appear to be an age limit for peak performance, or if there is an age limit for peak performance, it keeps getting pushed back, pushed back, including Csikszentmihalyi, godfather of flow psychology. The very last paper he published posthumously came out after his death. He died a couple of years ago, was a paper on how flow proneness does not decline over time and that we stay just as flow chronically. If the only time it falls off is at the, like, very end of your life where there's physical decline. But as we're going to talk about that, even what we know about physical decline is in the second half of our lives is changing a lot. So there really doesn't seem to be a tremendous amount of an age limit at all. And Certainly, if our country is about anything, it's about the absolute, like, crucial importance from a healthy aging, successful aging, peak performance aging, etc., etc., etc. perspective of setting really challenging goals in the second half of our life. Almost the exact opposite of tapering your goals off. For a lot of different sort of biological reasons, if you really there's a lot of cool stuff that happens in us in the second half of our lives neurobiologically. We'll get into that. But if you really want access to it, challenge and rising to a challenge is crucially important. And also, as we all know, the challenge-skill balance, flow's most important trigger. And if you're not constantly rising towards challenges, you're going to limit the amount of flow you can have in, in the second half of your life, which is absolutely going to impact quality of your life. And for reasons that we can get into, you want to keep dropping into flow in the second half of your life because it turns out flow is neuroprotective against cognitive decline. But we'll talk more about that as we go along.

Such good news for all of the flow junkies that are probably in this room right now is stay addicted to that, right? It's going to help. It's going to be protective later in life. Okay. So, before we get into the nitty-gritty of the how and the why of peak performance aging, Let's take a step back for a second, and I want to hear a little bit. I know everyone's probably curious, what's the origin story here? So what pulled you down this road to exploring peak performance aging and flow?

So there's a couple of different origin stories here, but this one actually starts with the last conversation I had with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi before he died. And I told this story in, uh, in, in the email that I, I put out when he passed, but I'll tell it again for— hopefully most of you didn't read that email or forgot this story. But, uh, I had called him because all this, all this, a bunch of his early interviews that were done in Italian, um, he had a collaborator in Italy, was there for a while, a lot of interview, early interviews that were translated out of Italian. And I started to realize he was a much, much, much more serious action sport athlete than he had ever let out. I knew he was a mountaineer, I knew he was a rock climber, I knew he lived in nature, but he was like dropping names of like hardcore Yosemite climbers from the '60s that he would only know if he was in the mix. And I was like, well, wait a minute, he talked about the origin story of flow is I was in a concentration camp and I saw people playing chess and they could let go of the concentration gap. And then he told this story about artists and his early work, and those things are true and I've seen the work and everything else. But I called up and I was like, Mike, you got it. Tell me, like, you were an action sport athlete. You were getting into some really deep flow states out there and rock climbing. You couldn't figure out how to talk about that, so you started talking about it in terms of, right, the Holocaust and, uh, and, uh, art. And there's a huge pause, like a minute goes by, a minute and a half goes by, 2 minutes goes by, and I'm on the other end of this. Call thinking, oh my God, I crossed a line. Like, you know, and I literally, the worst part of it is like he had had a stroke. He was in his 80s. I was worried about him. I called to see if he was okay. And I was like, oh crap. And you just offended him. And finally, after like a minute and a half, there's a, there, he says, Steven, you gotta be careful. And at this point I'm like, careful? What do you like? What is he talking about? Has he lost the thread? Like what's going on? Careful? What? And I was sort of nervous. I was like, Mike, What should I be careful about? You know, like, oh no, what happens to that? And he's like, you know, you do something your whole life for flow, and then you get to be my age. Forget about climbing mountains. Some days I can't get out of bed. You need a backup plan. You got to be careful. And that was our last conversation. And I had been looking at different aspects of peak performance aging for 20 years from a whole bunch of angles, but suddenly, like, he wasn't talking to me like one researcher to another. He was like one flow junkie to another saying, "Look, man, like, get a backup plan." And so, I, of course, came up with a backup plan. And what I really did is the old— the idea that you can't teach an old dog new tricks is based on sort of the long slow rot theory of aging. The idea that we You know, all that happens to us is we get to a certain point and all our mental skills and our physical skills, they just fall off a cliff. They just decline. There's nothing we can do to stop the slide. But I, in a bunch of different areas, in flow science, in embodied cognition, in systems neuroscience and neurodynamics and a handful of other fields, adult development, a whole bunch of stuff that said, you know, it should be totally possible to teach an old dog new tricks. In fact, old dogs should be better at learning certain new tricks than others, including challenging physical activities. So of course I decided that I was going to teach myself how to park ski at age 53. That was where— why not? We could talk about why that was my backup plan in a second. But for those who are not familiar, um, park skiing is the discipline in skiing that involves doing tricks off jumps and on rails and wall rides and boxes. And it's, it's very dangerous. It's incredibly acrobatic. And for about 17 different biological reasons, it's pretty much considered impossible for anybody to get good at over the age of 35. And by the time you're 45, 50, it's just absurd. And that was the old idea. And I said, well, if these new ideas, which are true in research papers and they were true in labs, are true in the real world, I should be able to do this. And short version, I made a list of 20 tricks that represented going from zero to intermediate. And I figured if it takes 5 years, cool, it takes 5 years, whatever. I got, I got time. It's a hugely ambitious goal. And we took all this knowledge, I formalized it, I put together a system, and I ticked off that trick list in a season. I went farther, faster than anybody expected me to go, than I expected me to go. It was jaw-dropping. Ryan Wicks, who's on, on with us in the crowd, was my ski partner. Ryan is a former sponsor athlete and who had injured himself and hadn't been park skiing in a very long time and was using my product, same protocol, and he made crazy fast progress. And that's the story of that experiment and what actually happened is sort of how we did it and everything else. That's the story really at the heart of NAR. But the next step, I think, is equally important because I really think, um, at the end of NAR, we had won the coolest pilot study in history, but that was all we did, right? It was super neat, but we like— it worked for us. Would it work for anybody else? So this past year, we took the same principles and took 17 older adults ages 30 to 68, and in 4 days also taught them how to park-speak. And they too made astounding progress. And then to where you've been involved in this, we took the same ideas, turned it into a class. We've now run, I think, 300 or 400 people through that class. And everybody seems to be getting the same results. We're running, we've got a whole research arm that's flowing out of these early experiments. But that's what the book is. That's where it started. That's where we are. Well, I probably talk too much because, you know, that these, I do that. But why?

It's why we love you. No, I think, look, you hit on so many important things that I want to— I want to pull a few of those different threads. But I mean, in some really, the reason that I think our country is so unique is it's you actually applying the peak performance aging science, right? What does that look like in real life? And then now we've been able to take that to the masses, right, in the actual course and see what does this look like? When people actually do it in the real world? And it's— the answer is, I think some pretty, pretty amazing things could happen in the second half of your life. So I also love how you kind of one by one challenge some of those big myths around aging and just completely dispel them. So one of them you just talked about was you can't teach an old dog new tricks. So in our country, you call complete BS on that. So can you talk a little bit more about how critical do you think it is to fight that tendency that we tend to have as we get older that we should just stick with what we know and really, really embrace becoming a lifelong learner.

So there's two sides. I'm going to talk about mindset first, and I'm going to talk about lifelong learning because I— yeah, I want to get the mindset stuff out of the way because it's really, really crucial. So one, aging is a fact of life. Old is a mindset. And it is a mindset that in a lot of people, and there's biological reasons for this, it starts to show up around age 30. Um, and it happens. We spend our childhood being governed by the seeking system, the play system, and that's a dopamine, norepinephrine. Those are the drugs we're mostly addicted to. Child, in our teenage years, we start getting pro-social neurochemistry, but it's all underpinned by dopamine and norepinephrine. Around 30, you get the job that you like, or the partner you like, or you start getting— you start having stuff to lose. Once that happens, you move from seeking and play to protect what I have, and you get a bunch of pro-social neurochemicals for that: endorphins, oxytocin, um, serotonin. These are great, but though they replace your earlier addictions and They make you very conservative, right? They make you want to protect. They make you feel safe and secure, but they also make you want to protect what you have and be conservative. You want to thrive in the second half of your life. You have to reboot those, the seeking system and the play system. You have to really cultivate a positive mindset towards aging. And Ellen Langer, who's, I would say, the godmother of peak performance aging. We talk about lifelong learning. We talk about Jean Cohn, who I think is the godfather. Father, but Ellen Langer is definitely the godmother. And to me, you can make an argument that it starts a little bit earlier, but to me, she's the first person who shows up and says, hey, wait a minute, everything we think we know about aging is wrong. And she shows up in the '70s and does it, which is just so far ahead of her. She's an amazing researcher. But, um, I'll— we won't go into her work too, too deep because we'll probably cover it on other Crowdcasts. That we end up doing. And we'll talk in the next hour. But she did the original work on mindset, and her work has since been really well validated. What we know is that if you have a positive mindset towards aging, meaning the second half of my life is full of possibility and amazing potential, it translates into significant health and longevity. In fact, when they tested it— and this again has been proven again and again— The Ohio study of longitudinal study of aging and retirement was specifically designed to test over 20 years the mindset idea that Ellen came up with and some other people came up with. At the end of that study, and this has been confirmed again and again, a positive mindset towards aging results in an extra 7.5 years of life. So, it's a huge boost in longevity and huge boost in health. So, having a proper mindset towards aging is fundamental. Also, because without it, right, without proper mindset towards aging is also a growth mindset. Without that growth mindset, if you have a fixed mindset around I can't learn new things in the second half of my life, everything I'm about to say about lifelong learning is going to be worthless. On the lifelong learning tip, the godfather of peak performance aging, Gene Cohen. Gene is actually a guy in the '70s. He's, I think, the last psychiatrist drafted into Vietnam. Like last doctor who got drafted, and instead of serving in Vietnam, um, he ends up working in a retirement facility with veterans, and he starts running experiments and observing stuff. He's a really young psychologist, but he starts to realize that a bunch of stuff that he had been told about aging sure doesn't look right. And so he starts petitioning the National Institute of Medicine to set up a National Institute on Aging. And let— and he becomes the first director. He runs it for 15 years. Then he goes on to another position, runs two of the biggest studies ever done on aging. And what he learns is rather than sort of the long, slow rot, there are really cool and amazing neurobiological changes that start taking place in the brain in our 40s and 50s. So first of all, certain genes only get activated by experience. So until you have certain experiences, They're not coming on. Second of all, as we move into our 50s and into our 60s and 70s, the two sides of our brain start talking to one another like never before. And finally, around our 50s as well, the brain starts to figure out, well, okay, this real estate isn't being used at all, hasn't been used for 50 years, so I'm going to colonize it and use it for other stuff. So all these changes start to happen in our 50s. If you do certain things correctly and we can talk about what those things are, Peak performance aging, by the way, starts young. Interventions at any age seem to make a difference. But certainly, if you really want to rock till you drop, there's stuff you want to start doing in your 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s. Like, it really actually— it does. But if you get it right, when you get into your 50s, you get access to whole new levels of intelligence that open up abstract reasoning. Problem-solving, decision-making, new levels of creativity. And you start to get access to new levels of divergent thinking. That's outside-the-box thinking. So the most difficult to train because of brain changes, we get better at it. There's whole new levels of wisdom. And wisdom is, is a word you're probably going to hear a lot tonight. When I use the term wisdom, scientists define wisdom as a cluster of neurobiological traits exact thing in the brain. We know what, what it is. It's an exact psychological trait. And, um, one of the cool things about wisdom is because most cognitive decline— Alzheimer's, dementia— attacks individual parts of the brain but not the whole brain, wisdom is a huge broad network, especially all across the prefrontal cortex, which is the most vulnerable structure to aging. So the more wisdom you have, it actually protects the brain against cognitive decline. It allows you to hold on to stuff that would normally go away. So one of the things— flow, by the way, amplifies wisdom. So one of the reasons flow is neuroprotective against cognitive decline is because of the relationship through wisdom. But we get more wisdom, and we also get a lot more empathy, which allows us to see things from other people's perspectives and really sort of feeds into the intelligence and feeds into the wisdom. So, all of these things come on in our 50s. And according to Gene Kohn, and all of his research, this makes adults better learners and better able to learn a whole bunch of stuff than younger folks. So, there's really cool changes in the brain that unlock all kinds of new abilities. And they're not guaranteed. You have to get certain things right. And if you want to hold on to them, you have to do certain things to maintain them. But these abilities definitely come our way and we can take full advantage of them.

And I love that this is a theme of the book because I think that so much of the conversation around aging is always focused on what you— what we lose or what we typically lose as we age. But this is really what you're talking about is we have an opportunity for— to make some real gains in some very meaningful ways. Um, we talked about some different kind of cognitive superpowers. So can you speak a little bit to— okay, so what are some of the things that people can be doing to cultivate these superpowers?

Yeah, so, uh, there's two sides of this coin. Uh, the first side is there are so-called gateways of adult development, and this— a lot of this research comes— I want George Valliant, who is the current keeper of the longest-running studies on adult development, the two studies out of Harvard and one out of Stanford. And he has done a lot of work on this. And so this is other people's ideas, but he's sort of the— he's put it all together. And what he found is there are major things you have to do in each decade if you really want these superpowers in your 50s. In your 30s, by the time you're 30, you have to solve the crisis of identity. You got to know who you are in the world, right? Erik Erikson was right. The crisis shows up around 12 for some people, and Erikson thought it ended around 18. That doesn't seem to be what the, the research actually shows. It seems to end around 30 if you get it right. But you need to get it right by 30, because in your 40s— and this has to sort of be done by 40 if you really want to thrive— after that, you have to solve what economists talk about as match quality or match fit, uh, if you— right, read David Epstein's Range. He talks about this. This is a match between who you are, your values, your strengths, and what you do with the bulk of your time. This could be your job, but this could also be your main passion projects, your hobbies, whatever. But you have to be aligned. You have to be authentic, and you have to have this match fit, match quality. And that's why identity has to be solved by 30, because if you don't know who the hell you are, you can't figure out how to match, what the match is between you and the world by 40. By 50, you have to forgive those who have done you harm and you've got to forgive yourself. That if you can't do that, this brain shifts that unlock empathy and wisdom won't— will not come your way. Now, here's, here's the other side of it. Once you are in your 50s, if you really want to take advantage of this, you have to combat two things that happen with age. One, We become more risk averse over time. It's not all categories of risk aversion. People, social fears go away. We get to our 50s, we no longer give a fuck what Andy thinks. And you're right, you're just fine. You walk into the street, you do the dog into them. And financial fears don't actually decline with age if you work with money. Like if you trade stocks, do that sort of thing and are familiar with money, Well, financial stuff doesn't tend to decline with age, but if you're saving for retirement, you become more risk-averse. That, that happens. The other categories all decline with age and you have to fight against it because creativity, if you are risk-averse, you are fearful. If you are fearful, fear, norepinephrine blocks the anterior cingulate cortex ability to think creatively. That's the part of the brain that says, Am I going to be logical or linear? Safe, tried and true? Or am I going to be wild, experimental, and novel? And you need— Gene Kohn was really clear on this. You need to think creatively to unlock these superpowers. The thinking creatively, that's really— in your 50s, if you really want to unlock this, done everything right, start putting yourself in challenging, creative, preferably social situations in your 50s. One of the reasons in our country works so well It was a challenging creative social situation. So it's exactly designed to, to do this. Um, and this is really crucial. So, um, openness to experience, which is one of the things that you get if you, if you train, you train up openness to experience, it makes you less risk-averse, among other things. There's a direct correlation between when I'll bring it— when there's a point at which openness experience could fall off a cliff. And in study after study, all the personality traits are important in aging. But when openness to experience falls off a cliff, you're going to be dead within a year. And that, and that is really, really clear. So like risk aversion and fighting risk aversion is really important for unlocking the superpowers. But it also seems to be really important for the, for mind-body reasons that I don't think we fully understand for health and longevity. Finally, the second thing is physical fragility. So you can't take— obviously you can't kind of keep learning new tricks if your body is falling apart. So the long slow rot theory of aging says, hey, physical skills decline over time, mental skills decline over time. There's nothing we can do to stop the slide. What a growing giant pile of research from the '90s to now shows is that's just not true. All the skills We use that. This is not to say, by the way, there are things that go wrong as we age. Muscle fibers do decline over time. Strength drops over— like, all these things happen. It just turns out that all these skills are use-it-or-lose-it skills. And if you never stop using them, you can hold on to them, even extend them far later in life than you thought possible. And the, the fun example that I always like to give, because it's the one that was so shocking to me, because this was the thing that I've heard almost my entire life, which is it didn't matter if we— if you talk to aging experts, didn't matter what you said, hey, this doesn't fall off over time, that everybody would always say, yeah, what about VO2 max and stamina? Because it just starts to decline at 25 and like falls off a cliff after 50. And, and it turns out if you start training VO2 max and say your 50s, when you're 80, There's a whole bunch of research that just got done on octogenarian triathletes. One of the things that's happening is over-50 triathletes and marathon runners and distance runners are putting in better times than the people in their 40s and their 50s and their 30s. And they can't figure out why. Nobody can figure this out. But there's— this is happening. And one of— then one of the things they're starting to do is they— okay, let's go measure the VO2 max of 80-year-old triathletes. And they were expecting, you know, just to find a disaster because it's always been a disaster. And it turns out they had the VO2 max of healthy 35-year-olds. And they did this again and again and again. So you can— in fact, the world record holder for it, I think his VO2 max is a healthy 25-year-old. He's, I want to say, but I could be wrong on his age. So yeah, all it seems like most of those skills or Some of the other things, like we know brain matter volume shrinks over time and it matters. One of the reasons we become risk averse is actually brain matter volume declines and they think signal transduction slows down. So reaction times slow down, so you get a little more cautious. And but other than that, it used to be they were like all these things happen, but it turns out nobody can correlate them with anything bad. They happen, but nobody— like, what do they mean is an open, interesting question. Um, which is like, I'll give you another example. The idea that old people are more absent-minded and forgetful than young people. It turns out when you actually test old people versus young people, old people and young people forget shit roughly the same. Um, it's just that old people make a really big deal about it because they've been told Alzheimer's and dementia are an issue, right?

There, it's a major red flag. Yeah.

He's like, where'd I put my keys? Right?

Yeah.

You know, think, think about it. Old people get nervous because there's a bunch of stereotypes that make you really scared. So, um, it's interesting that way.

So, so what I'm hearing kind of just overall though is that the fact that, okay, some of these physical skills that we all have kind of thought for a long time you know, inevitably decline with age, really they're use-it-or-lose-it skills. So the challenge here is how can we be super intentional and strategic about maintaining or even building these skills, uh, later in life. And so, you know, at FRC, we're all about, you know, being as efficient as possible, getting as much out of our input as we possibly can. So I love that you talk about some, some multi-tools that can help people do this. So Can you speak a little bit about what are kind of some of your recommendations for optimizing physical fitness, things like stamina, strength, things like that later in life? What did you come across?

So the tool— when I started this, it was at the front end of COVID and I was in the same situation as everybody else, right? Like, I was terrified. The company— we thought the company was in trouble. Right. We were really like, you know, are we going to survive? All those same questions. And so I was busy as hell. I also had COVID. So I was sick with COVID busy as hell trying to like do all this stuff, but committed to this. And I was like, I was busy, I was tired, I was broke. And I was like, I need— I don't have time for more training. I was already going to the gym like 3 or 4 times a week and I was like, what am I going to do? But I hike my dogs every day. And so I started looking at weight vests. And the more I looked at weight vests, the— and Peak Performance Aging, the more I started to realize this is an amazing tool. And that was— I worked out really hard in the gym, and I changed my workout a little bit in the gym to focus more on legs and, and sort of dynamic moves I was going to need for skiing. But my time didn't go up. I literally just introduced a weight vest. And actually, the Flow Research Collective now is a partnership with HyperWear, which— because we like their science better than anybody else. And they have this— first of all, they make weight vests for men and women, all shapes, all sizes, which you don't get all the time. So the fit is awesome. But they're— because the fit is so good, perceived exertion is actually lower than actual exertion. So you, you actually are working 10% harder than you think you're working, which is a bonus. But what is so cool about Weight Vest is other than flexibility. So functional fitness as you age means you have to train strength, stamina, agility, flexibility, and balance regularly. And there are like, there are very clear recommendations. You need 150 to 300 minutes of moderate to vigorous cardio a week. You need 2 strength training sessions a week. As you age, you need 2 balance and flexibility sessions a week. And that's sort of like the minimum for peak performance aging and sort of go— I think it goes up from there if you really want to push this. But with a weight vest, you get stamina. And I— what I would do is I went in very mellow, but you know, I worked my way up to like going hard up hills and I would go out and I would do like, you know, 3 big hill climbs in a session, hard uphills for— and so like just the walking is stamina, the going hard uphill is VO2 max. I come down fast, I both got VO2 max and deceleration, decelerated force, which is both really important for park skiing and really important as you age. You get agility and balance. Every time you take a step with the weight vest, your core is working because you have to stay. Yeah. Yeah. You're getting 360-degree core work, right? It's not just your front, it's also your back muscles. And there's a tremendous amount of great research. Hiking with a weight vest increases bone density and bone density decreases over time. It's one of the reasons people break bones as they age. Balance starts to decline because people aren't using it enough and One of the things that I like, if you're hiking in nature, one of the things that one of the big problems in aging with on a physical side is we have big prime mover muscles and stabilizer muscles, right? Your quads, your glutes, those are your prime movers. And then you've got your hip flexors or your, you know, rotator cuffs, which just like on the backside of your rotator cuff on your back, there's like 5 connective points for your rotator cuff. And this isn't even— hadn't gotten to your shoulder yet. These are your stabilizer muscles. What happens as we age is if you get injured, or lazy, your prime movers take over, your stabilizers stop working and they tear and they break. And this is how we start to really fall apart. You can't hide your stabilizer muscles from a weight vest hike on uneven ground there because they're going to get— they're going to get work automatically. So the weight vest and I go through a fairly thorough protocol in the book, which we should tell them about.

I agree. So, I think this is such an incredible multi-tool, and we're all about the stack protocols at FRC. And so, I love that you can pair just a weight vest with walking, but then you can start to increase the novelty, the challenge, the challenge level increasingly by adding uphill, right? Adding some inclines, adding some novel terrain, right? It's really easy to start integrating different ways to challenge yourself and look for novelty.

Let me add one more thing because this is— yeah, so we talked about challenging social creative activities in our 50s. If you really want to finish that sentence, it's challenging social creative activities that involve deliberate dynamic play in novel outdoor environments. That's the full sentence. Um, There's probably something at the front end that I left out, but I want to talk a little bit about the novel outdoor environments. And because you hit on it and it's super so important. So if you want to protect against cognitive decline, you need neurogenesis, the birth of new neurons. The adult brain keeps birthing new neurons. You'll birth 700 neurons a day until very— until you're dead, basically. So it doesn't stop. How do you really amplify that and how do you hold on to those new neurons, you have to ask the next question, which is where are those neurons being born? And the bulk of them are in the hippocampus, which is that seahorse-shaped structure, right? Hippocampus is Latin for seahorse, basically. That's deep in the temporal lobe. And it has a number of responsibilities. It does a lot along her memory, but it— what does place location? It's got grid cells and place cells. Why? Because the brain, especially when you were a hunter-gatherer, right? Where were you when you found that ripe fruit or when you got attacked by that tiger or any of those things? Like, you've got to remember. So what is the best way to stave off cognitive decline? Or one of them have novel experiences in outdoor environments because that's what the brain was designed to remember. You'll hear me talk about action sports being neuroprotective against cognitive decline. Park skiing was a great choice. Any action sport because you have novel experiences or you have novel experiences and novel outdoor environments or emotionally charged experiences. And that's really important. If you can have a flow state in a novel outdoor environment, now you're really talking.

I love it. So, you know, because I'm a coach, I'm all about, okay, how can we apply the science, make it real for people? So, so far we've covered using weight vest putting yourself in novel outdoor environments, right? We've talked about use it or lose it skill. So, really being intentional about building those types of activities into your schedule. Hopefully, you know your primary flow activity so you can build that in. If it's outside, even better. I want to dial it back for just a moment because you talked about just the importance of mindset, right? And there's just a wealth of research to show that actions follow beliefs. If we think that, you know, peak performance aging isn't a reality, we're not going to do all of the great things that we've been talking about, right? So, you talked a little bit about positive mindset around aging. I think that for, if people were hanging a question mark around what does that mean, ask yourself the question, what does aging look like to you, right? If you start to journal about that and you start to see some language that's really limiting, that's negative, right? That's a real opportunity. Build some awareness around your language and start to challenge, start to reframe, and really cultivate that growth mindset. Around aging. And I want to tap into, really double-click this one piece, Stephen, because we're getting questions about this in the chat, is, well, you talked about, you know, becoming risk-averse as we get older. And it does seem like fear becomes this increasingly— it tends to have an increasingly larger role in our lives as we get older. So what happens, uh, this is the question that we keep getting, what happens if the thing you want to do is actually dangerous? Right.

This is a great question because, I mean, you folks, you have to like— I'm a good skier. I'm not a park skier. When I started this, I literally— I had— I could do zero tricks and I was terrified. Terrified. And at the core of the methodology we used— and this is— this is where I want to start this conversation. So one of the big insights that we had from a flow perspective is we talked earlier, everybody knows the challenge-skill balance is flow's most important trick for reasons covered in Art of Impossible. Like metaphorically, we always say for that in older people that it's usually, that means that the ideal sweet spot is when the challenge is about 4%. That's a metaphor. That's not a real number, but it's a metaphorical useful number greater than your skills. Right. This allows you to stretch but not snap. And it turns out that as we age, that challenge skill spot tends to shrink. The reason is allostatic load, which is essentially the impact of trauma over time on your nervous system and your physiology. And what happens is by the time we get into our 50s, especially for like challenging, physical, dangerous kind of stuff, it's really small. It's about 1 inch. So when I, when I said, when I went into my Narcondry adventure, here was my thinking. Why did it— what was my backup? Let me give you my backup plan and let me tell you. So as a big mountain skier, which is what I was, that was what I did. That was my primary activity, right? So I was like walking right into the very trap that Mike warned me. I don't like get to be 80 as a big mountain skier because at 80 as a big mountain skier, the only way you get into flow is by taking greater and greater risks and pushing that edge and pushing that edge. I thought, okay, if I can learn to park ski, I'm going to learn to creatively interpret the terrain in a million different ways. And if I can get to intermediate, intermediate is sort of where you take control of your fate. You don't have the random accidents and you can sort of stay safe from that point forward. Not 100%, but a lot better. And so I figured if I get to intermediate, suddenly I had a million new creative ways to get into flow on the mountain, right? I didn't just have this one risk-based way. So it was a brilliant plan, provided I could get to intermediate safely. And how I decided to do that is we had a bunch of different embodied cog ideas that influenced how we, how we approached the mountain. But the starting point was go one inch at a time. Literally 1 inch at a time. Go so much slower than you possibly thought you would go, and so much slower than I would normally. So I had— I would have to go home frustrated. I would make progress, but not nearly enough for my ego, and I would go home like that. I was— I like— I kept, right? It took me a while to sort of get used to it because I'm a hard charger. I don't— I don't go slow. I don't go 1% at a time. but I was not going to the hospital and I wasn't getting hurt and I was going to see if I could get it done. And it turned out it worked brilliantly. And it actually— you end up being able to widen back out the challenge skills balance a little bit. But it was, it was a really cool insight. We're now entering into a study where we're actually directly measuring allostatic load, challenge skills balance, and this stuff in older adults. So we're going to get more information on this. Um, but that was— so one, go really slowly. You have to, like— and it's really, for me, it was really about— one was checking out, like, my fear at the door, and two was checking my ego. And I had to check both of them at the door. Um, and I really, like, I had to really get used to, like, being a 2-year-old on a ski mountain. I mean, like, you know, trying to learn to ski backwards at 53. That was pretty.

Do you have video of that by any chance? Do you—

right, it's in the book. Ryan will tell you, he was there.

I literally—

I, I, I didn't even look behind me. I just— I put my skis into like a backwards snowplow and I went backwards down the hill like a 4-year-old in a straight line. That was— that was great.

I hope everyone's enjoying picturing this as much as I am.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. Thanks for listening to Flow Research Collective Radio. Before we dive back into our conversation, there's something to consider. It may be that today we are under-challenged. We're drowning in comfort. Now, in his book Antifragile, statistician Nassim Taleb pointed out something that's of key importance. Quote, undercompensation from the absence of challenge degrades the best of the best. The best horses lose when they compete with slower ones and win against better rivals. Now, put another way, who we could be, or our highest potential, is squandered by safety, coddled by comfort. If you want to train with us at the Flow Research Collective, it will require boldness. But what's life without a little adventure, right? To learn more about how you can get more flow in your life and achieve your professional and personal goals in less time and with more ease, go to getmoreflow.com. If you're a good fit, we'd love to train with you. All the best.

And I want to— so I have to— Michael in the chat just said, curious if the 100+ bones you've broken early in your life, Stephen, had any— has become an issue at 50+.

So, no. So that's— it's a great— it's a great question. It's not 100+, but it is 80-something. And I will tell you, part of the book talks about regenerative medicine and part of the book talks about, you know, and things like that. So like, I don't think longevity medicine, regenerative medicine, that's like once you get past tendons, ligaments, and bones, I think it's nonsense at this point. I think it's fairy tales and you're being sold lies. I'm not really— I'm not yet convinced that side of that is ready for primetime yet. But from a bones, tissues, and ligaments perspective, there's a ton that we have gained access to in the past 10 years, and it's really starting to work. So one, I've had a really good toolkit to work with, but what the broken bones manifest as and what all the injuries manifest as and is quite simply, I don't judge my— how ready am I to meet the day until I've gone for a walk and stretched. It takes— I've discovered that the biggest difference is in this, specifically going to go after really hard, challenging physical activities. You need more of a warm-up. And that's just— but that's the— that's really where my broken body shows up is I just have it. It takes me a little bit longer to get back into my body. But I just— so people understand this, I am at 55 now. I just broke my max squat record over the summer. And this ski season, I've skied a number of the biggest lines I've ever skied in my life. So it's— none of those things seem to be stopping for me, and they're certainly not holding me back.

And I think, look, something that I want to underscore here, because I think that this is just— it's huge what you just said, and I want to make sure everyone is grasping it, is you're having a longer conversation than I think a lot of people have, right? So, a lot of times, especially as we get older, we consider doing something that's new or challenging, and fear or anxiety pops in, and that's where the conversation ends, right? Oh, better not do that. I could get hurt, right? What you're talking about is you have a longer conversation. Number one, you ask, what would just 1 inch more be, right? What would, what would be a calculated risk, right?

The other thing, the other thing is this, and I, like, you may get hurt, like you absolutely may get hurt, but like one of the things— so people have this thing about getting hurt. One of the funny things is when you, like, I do too, but I have broken 80-some bones. So like at one point or another, most of my life I've, I've had, I've been recovering from something. And one of the things that you learn when you do a lot of that stuff to yourself is most of your fear is in your mind. You, like, you're gonna solve it, you're gonna figure it out, you'll figure out how to— I mean, if you have a job where if you, if you break something, you know, I had a job that if I broke something serious, I wasn't going to be able to do it. Um, I can sort of like, there's a bunch I can do and still write, but, um, you're not as frail as you think you are. Um, is the, is, is the, is the other thing. I hit the ground so many times learning to bark ski. Um, I, I really did. It's all, it's all in the book. Um, I definitely hit the ground a bunch and I, you know, I skied straight through the season. I skied 88, you know, and I like, we're not as frail as we think we are.

Yeah. Well, and I think that that's, you have to ask the question like, what would happen if I fall? Well, put yourself in a situation where maybe it's not going to be the most epic of wipeouts, but you fall And what you'll learn, you'll collect data that it'll be, it's probably going to be fine. Right? I also like, I like what you're talking about in terms of collecting data on how do I feel today, checking in with the body. We get so practiced at tuning out that I think it becomes even more important when we're talking about taking on new things to really practice tuning in. Right? And you talk a lot about embodied cognition in the book.

So, yeah, so Tori, it's a great point. I want to just actually emphasize this because So, interoception, which is our ability to tune into the body's internal subtle signals, is really, really crucial for peak performance in general. In fact, there's tons of studies that show correlations between interoception and, first of all, like, people with poor interoception, depression, suicide goes— risk of suicide goes way up with bad interoception, OCD, mania. There's all these links to the stuff we want to avoid. But on the bonus side, my favorite one is, is a London stock trader study. And they, they tested interoception abilities of London stock traders. Those with better interoception had better pattern recognition skills. They performed better in the market and they actually where the only— the people with the best interoception skills were the ones who outperformed the market and everybody else failed. So interoception directly correlates with pattern recognition, which correlates with— it's a flowchart, right? So, and if you are— if you have a diminished challenge skill sweet spot, like if I'm saying it's 1%, if you can't tell how much fear you're feeling— how is this anxiety or is this actual fear? you're not going to be able to figure out where that line is. So interoception, body cognitive skills, really, really, really crucial for peak performance aging.

Yeah, I love that. And, you know, and we talk about different ways to train that as well. So super important. Okay. So, Stephen, I have another burning question for you. So in our country, you delve into just like the decades of research that's been conducted on blue zones, which for folks who are unaware, those are communities in the world where people tend to live significantly longer. And you came away with some key insights around how to turn your life into a high-flow blue zone. So can you share some of those, some of those takeaways with us?

Yeah, this is, I guess, the other— I said in the beginning there's a couple of origin stories. This was the other origin, one of the other origin stories. So as many of you may know, um, my wife and I have done hospice care for dogs for 20 years now. We ran Rancho de Chihuahua hospice and dog sanctuary in New Mexico for a long time. We're now running the Buddy Zoo Hospice Home for Old Dogs. And when we set up Rancho de Chihuahua in New Mexico 18 years ago, or however long it was, we wanted to specialize— when we— my wife wanted to specialize in the worst-case scenarios, and I just didn't know any better. So I agreed to go along with this. Insanity. And so, you know, our dogs, if you're like a three-legged, one-eyed Chihuahua with an abusive past, cancer, heart disease, and flatulence, you're our dog, right? Like, we love you. That's, that's who we work with. Obviously, all these dogs go to the vet before they come to us, and the vets would say, hey, don't get really attached to this one, really sick animal, maybe a month to live, two months at best. You know, be— take care of your emotions kind of thing. And we created a healing protocol that was, that was interesting, but not super fancy. It was just based on some flow science, some evolutionary biology, some really sort of simple, straightforward ideas. And the dog didn't die. Like, they wouldn't die in a month or 2 months. And on average, these dogs that were supposed to be done in a couple of months were living 4 to 5 years longer. And I don't just mean like living, they were thriving. We do off-leash backcountry hikes. We're doing like 3 to 5 miles a day in the backcountry, up and down mountains, um, when they were supposed to be dead. And it was a lot of dogs, and I couldn't figure out what the hell— like, it was weird. It was, it was, it was too much. And one of the things I started to discover is that I wasn't alone in this. There's a movement in, in, in Pet Health to Double Canine Lifespan. It's sort of a global movement. We were applying some of the low-end stuff and getting really interesting results of the low-tech stuff. But my point is, in trying to figure out what we were doing, I started to realize that I wasn't the only one asking these questions. I just happened to be asking them about dogs. A bunch of other people were asking them about humans, and they were finding these Blue Zone communities where people lived an extra 10 to 12 years longer than most other people, and they were very healthy. And what was going on? And they spent a long time figuring it out. And I realized that everything that they were doing in the Blue Zone communities, we were essentially doing with our dogs. And that was what we did. We essentially turned our lives into sort of like high-flow Blue Zones. And I want to stop and say, because we've got a lot of smart people in the audience, Blue Zone research itself, uh, Dan Bueller's research is a little controversial. And I want to talk about why that, why that is. One, and this is a guy who's been a journalist and a scientist, and I will tell you that scientists don't like it when journalists play scientists. And Dan Bueller is a journalist with National Geographic, and he's teamed up with tons of scientists all over the world. But some of this is just literally like people are very territorial. Some of it is that there are certain claims being made about very specific health diet practices and things like that, that there are open loopholes. Where there are no holes in the polls, where there's agreement, 30 to 40 years worth of studies is that lifestyle matters. And there are very specific lifestyles that matter for peak performance aging. And there's no zero controversy over it. So while there's a Blue Zone diet and a Blue Zone, all that stuff, and yes, there are, there's arguments there. There's none about the lifestyle stuff. So what is the lifestyle stuff? Regular exercise. Right. People move around a ton in blue zones. They don't— it's not often super, super rigorous, but regular exercise. So like what I recommended earlier, 150 to 300 minutes of moderate to vigorous a week covers you, but regular exercise. There are also folks in blue zones tend to be very social. There tends to be an emphasis on family and spiritual or religious belonging. And when they look under the hood of that, like, what is that? One is it's all the pro-social neurochemistry you get from being part of any community. But what you get in religious communities that you don't tend to get in other communities is altruism and empathy. And those are the variables that really seem to matter lifestyle-wise. And so we can, we can go on from there if you want, but The studies of the blue zone research is lifestyle matters. Another thing that is common in the blue zones is people live with passion, purpose, and regular access to flow. That was what really started to change with our dogs also. We would take them into these off-leash backcountry hikes up and down mountains. We would run through the backcountry. It was very flowy for the dogs. Dogs get into flow just like humans, and just like humans, it's really, really good for them. And so this is also really, really common in blue zones. They also— the thing we do with our dogs is literally we just said, okay, we're going to match the diet that dogs evolved to eat. So like, and one of the things that is nobody really seems to argue with in Blue Zones is like, do we evolve to eat certain kinds of foods? And those tend not to be processed. And though you're right, there's no one diet that works for everybody, but it's pretty clear that processed foods and lots of sugar— there's, there's things we know don't work. Um, yeah, right. There's nothing that works across the board for everybody, but there, there are things that definitely don't across the board for everybody for sure.

And I don't know if you want to expand on this because we've gotten a few questions in the chat about, um, you know, diet and gut health and their relation to longevity.

Do you want to say, let me just start by saying a couple of things because this, let me make a big comment and people are going to not like this one. I think. But here's— you asked, we were talking about myth busting. So what I've noticed is when people are interested in peak performance aging, right, at all, or successful aging, healthy aging, as a general rule, what do they do? Well, they start exercising. What does that really mean? They join a gym and usually they get on a treadmill and they, they do aerobic activity on a treadmill and they start paying a lot of attention to their diet and they start getting heavy on supplements. Though that tends to be what, like, that's what most people start doing. And as a general rule, if you look at the research, diet is— it's a lever. It's important, but it's not one of the big levers at all. Like, social— having a robust social life is far more. In fact, even late in life, Having a robust social life is more important than fighting obesity. If you're massively overweight versus you're trying— I'm going to— I'm either going to lose all this weight or I'm going to get socially active. Well, I'm going to do one thing later in life. What should I do? You should get socially active. More important than losing weight. And this is like massive. Same thing with like anti-inflammatory supplements. Yes, there are 9 known causes of aging. Yes, they all link to inflammation. Yes, there are really pretty good anti-inflammatory supplements out on the market, but none of them are as effective as petting a dog for 8 minutes. So like, that's like, that's like the best news for people.

I hear people crinkling up their New Year's resolutions about diets.

We, we want the pill. We want the like easier things. Um, and you know, the psychological, physiological things, they're not, you know, as, as sexy. And it's also, it's a lot harder being told you need to train 5 categories of functional fitness in a week. Don't just get on a treadmill.

We're talking about meaningful social connection. What we haven't talked about is the critical importance of having a training partner, and you're it. So do you want to talk a little bit about that piece?

Yes. No, I'd love to. Anything specifically that you want to jump into first? Because the book is just loaded with so many different stories.

Well, let's start with why is having a training partner so important?

Right.

What I experienced most, Tori, was absolutely the trust factor. You know, because action sports, park skiing involves a lot of risk-taking. It was really critical to have someone to kind of bounce ideas off of and be able to give immediate feedback. And so in addition to that, one of the things that we leveraged, you know, both Steven and I just playing around the mountains and then in our study as well, was just the ability to follow someone around the mountain and not have to think a whole lot, right? Really kind of leverage those mirror neurons and Chase the Rabbit toy was a game that we played. Steven and I played it, we played it with our study subjects. Um, and the basic premise behind it is when you're learning something new, you don't want to overload yourself with a bunch of instructions on what to do, right? That can really just gum up your system and slow down learning. You want to be able to have someone ahead of you, right, that you can just follow and more or less mirror what they're doing. And it was an incredible success. You know, I learned so much from Steven in that NAR Country year. He learned a lot from me, I know. And then, you know, when we applied it in the study, it was incredible. You know, this group of 17 adults who had, you know, some of whom had park skiing and snowboarding experience, most of whom didn't, when they came into it very skeptically but began to, you know, follow their, their friends through the terrain park, their learning, just the skill acquisition was remarkable. It really blew us away.

You need one.

Let me, let me just build on that a little bit so I can flesh out a little bit of the idea for people. We didn't teach people tricks. We broke park skiing into 8 core activities, basic activities: crouching, slashing, grinding, a 180, a 360, but could be done on the snow. Nothing too scary. And what we would do is we'd teach people 2 new moves a day.

We'd—

best skiers were sort of in the front of the pack and it sort of trailed to the back and snowboarders. But based on how fast you want— best is wrong— how fast people wanted to go and how they were feeling that day and all that stuff. And the goal was do what the person in front of you did if it's 1%, right? But if they did something too fancy for you, scale it back, but use the same move. So if they throw a slash, right, maybe they threw something in midair, you throw it on the surface of the snow, you can dial it back or you can progress it forward. It's just— and a lot of it has to do— we were trying to get a lot of mirror neuron activity going and a lot of those sort of like embodied cognitive principles of learning really start coming into play. In that learning situation, as Ryan pointed out, like we went into the— you got to understand that when we started this study, and Ryan will tell you, on day one I sat him down and I was like, dude, this is not going to work. Like, it was great. We had a fun year. It was, it was cool, but there is no way this is going to work. So let's just check our expectations right now. And at the end of day one, I sat Ryan down. I went, holy shit, we got to calm people down. They're going to kill themselves. They progressed so fast after one day, we were, we were actually freaked. Like it was, it didn't make any sense. We were like, okay, this was really like, this was not what we expect. I really like, no one was more surprised by the results than me. I really like, I thought it was a cool idea. And, and, but like, I was not, I did not believe it was going to work. Forever. It really didn't. I mean, I couldn't believe how successful it's been.

And I think, you know, that's just anecdotally what I'm hearing from other folks that are now planning their own NAR quest is that they can't believe that this is actually possible, which is, I mean, incredible. So can you, can you both talk about what are kind of the— because I'm all about, again, the how-tos. So if folks are interested in taking some of these things on and they're realizing that they need a training partner, what are maybe some key criteria they should be looking for as they hunt for the ideal flowing partner?

Ron and I spent a long time on this and a long time thinking about like, how are we going to teach this afterwards and things like that. Um, I, I think there's a couple of things that really matter the most, which is path into flow and learning preferences. So, and they're very interrelated. So Ryan and I have the exact— not only do we have the exact same flow triggers that we like, but we have a very similar warm-up needs, and we like to deploy the flow triggers in the same order. So like, we will— first lap is just like, go. A lot of skiers, especially once you get to better skiers and expert skiers or whatever, they show up and they want to like just start charging really hard, crazy. We know that's not We start very slow. First lap is like, just get in the body, get in your body and remember that moving. Second lap is get used to speed. Third lap, hardcore aerobic activity. So we ski bumps, we ski trees where we have to turn a lot to get the body really used to being in the— for lap, we really start to layer in jumping, but it's mellow. It's all we want to— dopamine you get from the feeling of flight, right? So once— and then we start to really start to push. But without that, so we have the exact same warm-up and exact same flow triggers. And we also like to learn in the same way. And I like— we hear a lot about learning styles and how that didn't turn out to be good information. What people are really talking about is like, are you an auditory, kinesthetic, or visual learner? And yes, that didn't turn out to be good information. But like, I'm an introvert. I like to learn in private. I don't want to learn in public. I don't want to learn inside of chairlift. I don't want to let inside of anybody else. I do not like being bad in public. I have no problem being bad, will fall down on my face all day long. I just don't want other people to see it if I can avoid it. Ryan's the same way. We, we— and, and, you know, there were, there were other things. Once we start to ski at speed, we never slow down, right? So like, that's— and we both learn it. And Barry, there's a lot of overlap in our learning preferences, our fitness styles, what we like to do together on the mountain. Our body types are sort of similar, which helped a little bit because it meant like on skiing, I like to jump from like between narrow— I'll dart between trees. Ryan does as well. And usually like if I do something with my body, he knows because we have similar body types and terrain preferences. He can do the same thing. If he does something, I'm like, okay, you know, I'm roughly the same size. You know, he's a little bigger than I am, but like it just like— so that's useful in these kinds of, of dangerous situations and context works. So, um, that was— and our skill levels are, you know, Ryan's a, a better skier than me in almost every zone except one, the trees, but we're pretty evenly matched. So he's never waiting for me. We're getting the chairlift at the same time, that sort of stuff. Um, so, uh, that also is really— and that's really important for group flow trigger, right? You want—

yeah.

That familiarity and you sort of want equal skills and things like that. So like, I, those are the things that really sort of matter to me. And finally, one of the things that's super important, this was a rule we had on the mountain. If you're in flow, you want the prefrontal cortex to stay deactivated. So that means no talking about yourself, no talking about emotionally charged stuff, no talking about scary stuff that's happening in the world. Right? There were a whole bunch of like, we didn't distract each other from the task at hand, and we spent a lot. And that's— that takes a lot, a lot of work, right? Um, and then, which isn't to say like we didn't talk about hard— like if there's stuff going on in our lives, we talk about it before we skied or after we skied, but it was never on the hill. We like— that stuff stayed off there. We were there to do a job, and that job requires flow, and flow requires the prefrontal cortex. To stay shut down and my ego to stay quiet. And that requires not having certain kinds of conversations. So this is something else we did in our country in the training on the chairlift. We— yeah, you were only allowed— you can make people laugh or you could talk about skiing and what we're doing on the hill. Those are the only conversations that were allowed. And, um, that was really— that was really, really important. People don't talk about that a lot, like in terms of like flow and partners and whatever. But it's one of the— is for the same reason that social media is so crappy for flow, because your emotions get involved so fast, and once your emotions get involved, you're getting knocked out of flow. The same thing is, is sort of true in, you know, in any high-flow environment. You have to really watch your conversations and respect, you know, I like— for me getting into flow because it like it maximizes learning, right? So I can learn faster, more in flow. I want to honor that and respect that. That's why I came to the mountain for that. Like, that's the center of what I'm doing. That's, that's the point. That's the focus. So everything else is bullshit.

Yeah. No, this is, this is why I wanted to ask you about this, because it just, it goes along with everything else we've been talking about is this stuff doesn't happen by accident, right? There's so much intentionality, there's so much strategy. In what is the mindset that you're cultivating, what is the physical fitness and how you're training. That's super intentional, all the way down to who is my training partner, how am I setting myself up for flow, and then how am I protecting that flow when I'm actually in the activity, right? You're checking all these boxes. You're not leaving any of it to chance, which I think is really important for people to process, that you don't stumble on this, right? This is planned.

And I want to say, I mean, you notice this and you pointed it out earlier, but I want to just mention it for people. So this is the The coolest thing about in our country, um, and the thing I'm probably really, really proud of, and it hasn't really happened before because it's just a hard— it's a hard writing puzzle to solve without like how to— I— so the book is about applied peak performance as much as it's about peak performance aging, right? And nobody's ever written that book because you basically have to go— I go day by day through my ski season at It's hard to do that and not bore your readers or like, you know, or lose people or be too technical or all that stuff. It was a pretty— and I could only— I think I could do it because I wrote The Art of Impossible already. So like, you know, that was sort of done, right? Like, and this is a perfect follow-up. So it allowed me to take all the ideas in Art of Impossible and apply them and apply them to peak performance aging. But it's the— that's what's sort of, I think, really cool about this book is it's the only time I've ever seen a book where you're like, here's peak performance being applied in a real-world, high-challenge situation on a daily basis. This is what it looks like. And yeah, you know this from working with, with our, with our clients. This is the hardest thing to teach people is like what it just looks like on a day-to-day basis. What is sort of smart hard work look like on a day-to-day basis? How do you apply this stuff on a day-to-day basis? It's very That's different. And how does— and how— and we always say that flow and peak performance works like compound interest, but unless you've done this for 6 months, a year, you have no idea what that means. So I think finally we've got something we can point to and say, hey, this is, this is what it means, this is what it looks like. Um, which hopefully— which I think is cool too.

Hey Steve, if I jump in really quick, sorry to cut you off, Tori, but, but also I think, you know, to kind of round out the need for a training partner is the sense of a common mission, you know, that we were on and the consistency of scheduling a primary flow activity and how critical that is to peak performance aging. Could you jump into that a little bit?

Yeah. I mean, you could, you could have taken it, but what Ryan's talking about is there's a bunch of new work on team flow and which is essentially Group flow was, uh, there's a difference between group flow and team flow. We're not even going to worry, but there's a whole bunch of new work on team flow. Um, and at the start of it, like, the one thing they say is what they've done is they've sort of taken a lot of the goal setting ideas where we started this conversation, actually the goal setting ideas that are talked about in Art of Impossible, and they've realized that it really matters for group flow. And so if you're interested in group flow, team flow, interpersonal flow, two people together just like Flow with the training partner. Collective ambition is the place it starts, and that's— collective ambition is a shared goal that you cannot accomplish individually. There's no way I could have learned to park ski without Ryan. Would never happen. Would— I couldn't have done it. But there's probably— he probably couldn't have come back in the way that he came back without me. But together we had a collective ambition, and that was where It started with like, let's try to do this crazy impossible thing together. And, you know, I always say the other— and right, like the one thing I want to say that I didn't say is, especially if you're going after these kinds of challenging physical goals where there's fear involved, it's lonely in the north. Like it's lonely and it's scary. And if you're solo, it's lonely and it's scary. And if you've got a partner with you, you're like, oh, look at today's adventure. That's cool, right? Somebody's got me at my back and like, maybe it's pretend that Brian could save my life. You know, if I get myself into, you know, a bad enough situation. So far he's been able to, but, you know.

Well, so, and I want to jump in because I think that what you're, what you're talking about can be increasingly hard to find if you keep the same friend group throughout your whole life, right? As you get older, you tend to— with more and more people start to pop up that are like, I'm not doing— you're like, you're crazy. I'm not doing that anymore. And you talk to this a little bit in the book, right, with this notion of replacement friends.

So not just not— so this is one. So replacement friends are literally, as we get older, if your friends are just in your age group, they're going to die. If you are a survivor, right, you're doing peak performance, you're doing all the right stuff. You were going to outlive people. And I don't know if you've had this experience. I haven't. There are two people in my life right now who are both very close to 100 years old. They're both very, very healthy. They're both very, very smart. And literally neither of them have a friend left on the planet. Everybody they know is dead. One of these people was one of the brightest minds in the 20th century, like if I were to name his name, you would know who I was talking about. He started movements, he changed history, and all of his friends— and he was brilliant. And the weird thing about, like, he comes out of a group of thinkers in the '70s and '80s. Nobody thinks like that anymore. So literally everybody he knows who thought like him is also gone. And it's like, I'll talk to him and be like, oh my God, you're the first person I've talked to in a month. And he's not joking. And, you know, so one, you need the replacement friends. It's very, very clear. The societies where the healthiest aging takes place, and this is true in all the Blue Zones, it's actually true in how we did it with our dogs too. Age-friendly societies have cross-generational friendships. There's respect for the wisdom and the empathy of the elders, but there's also respect among older people for youth. And it's really important, um, to have those friendships. And it's, um, it's funny, one of the questions I've been asked the most, because we've had this conversation a lot, and I have worked really hard in my life to have friends in all ages because I, I need the perspective, um, right? Like, to me, it's really, really important because I You know, and I'm like, first of all, I haven't had anything to do with pop culture for a very long time. So if I didn't have sort of people around me to feed me new music, I'd have nothing to listen to, first of all. Right. But no, I like, I, you know, people have to be my lifeline to the world sometimes because I, you know, I do flow and I do skiing and I do dogs. That's about it. So I've always felt it was really important, but it's become sort of more important, and it's, it's really important, uh, mentally.

Yeah.

So don't just like, you know, make friends, make friends across the generations. Um, and it's also enough, it's, it's, it, you know, it's great because, um, I think every, every generation is a radically different perspective also, right? I'm a, you know, I'm a Gen X, and we don't think like Millennials, and we don't think like Gen Z, and it's really cool to get, you know, these other perspectives as well. Really good for flow too.

Yeah, absolutely. And, and you're going to open up your pool of potential training partners. So it's the gift that keeps on giving. So one of the key ingredients to peak performance aging is play. I think this is huge. This book is just such a call to action for people to go play, which I think is just truly, truly incredible. So Can you, you know, for, for our last question here, can you talk a little bit about why is play so important and maybe give some recommendations for people who have potentially forgotten how to play? Because I think that's a lot of people.

So as a general rule, peak performance aging just demands play. It just really, it really, really matters. First of all, it's just really— it's amazingly good for you, right? Play is really tied into the body's opiate system. So those are— it feels really, really good. The health benefits sort of go on and on. The learning benefits go on and on. The heart in our country is something known as dynamic, deliberate play. And this is a very specific thing. So dynamic play is just play that involves all multiple aspects of fitness, stamina, strength, right? You're moving your body around, you're back, you're using everything. So why does dynamic play matter? Because it hits all the use-it-or-lose-it skill categories that we have to train up. So that's the dynamic part. Deliberate play is an upgrade on— most of us have heard of deliberate practice, Anders Ericsson's fabulous ideas on peak performance. Um, you need 10,000 hours, that's the Malcolm Gladwell number, right? 10,000 hours of of deliberate practice to be an expert. And that is true, sort of. There have been a number of challenges mounted to it. One, Anders Ericsson mounted himself. I talk about this in Art of Impossible. But what the research has shown is that the place practice is good, that's repetition with incremental advancement, right? You do the same thing, you push a little harder. It's good for walking up the challenge-skill balance. It's very one inch at a time. But it turns out that deliberate play, which is repetition without repetition, so repetition with improvisation, right? I'm watching what Ryan did. I'm trying to do that move, but I'm going to improvise a little bit. I'm going to play a little bit on top of it, right? That's repetition without repetition. So that's deliberate play is the term for that. And it turns out because for simple deliberate play just produces way more flow than deliberate practice, and flow amplifies learning. You get farther faster with deliberate play. So for lifelong learning, and let's emphasize, I, this is the one thing I— if you want to know, protective protection against cognitive decline requires expertise and wisdom. Those are the two things you need. Your expertise is all the stuff you learn consciously. Wisdom is essentially all the stuff you learn unconsciously. Along the way. It gets much a little more particular than that, but like, that's just a quick shorthand for sort of what one of the distinctions, uh, between the two. But, um, you've, you've got that, that's really important if you want to hang on to cognitive function. And the best way to preserve our brains is, you know, deliberate dynamic play. So what did the whole sentence from the beginning, right? You want to have challenging, creative, and social experiences that involve dynamic, deliberate play in novel outdoor environments. That's a complete— like, Pete, I said earlier that with peak performance aging, everybody's arranging for the wrong levers. This is the right lever. That's the level. That's what— that's like, if you really want to make a dent, that's what you— that's what you're doing.

And to me, this is like the best news ever, that the secret to peak performance aging is you need to go outside and play with your friends. Like, that's what I'm saying.

Let me take it one step further, because this is the craziest finding, and there's— we need more research on this, I think. But one of the physical challenges in learning how to park ski is everybody knows the motor learning window closes at 25, right? That's why you don't become a gymnast after 25 or a ballet dancer after 25. And it— that is sort of still true, but not entirely. And the reason it's not entirely is children learn through deliberate dynamic play. That's what we stop doing. That's what goes away. If you reboot delivered dynamic play, we start learning the way kids learn again. It turns out you don't get the same learning window, but it turns out we can crank that window open again. Um, later in life, you just actually have to— you have to go through this. You have to do the same thing kids do, right? Um, which is like— which is really funny to me. It's the motor learning window doesn't close. It's that we forget that motor learning is fun. Yeah, right. Like, that's the problem. That's really weird.

Well, so, and I think that honestly, Nar Country is this incredible reminder of just that. So hopefully we have truly, you know, intrigued folks.

Tori, thank you. This was delightful. You're an awesome host.

Hey, thank you. I'll come hang out anytime. This was, this was rad. I truly, truly enjoyed it. Um, Thanks for having me. Thank you, everyone, for joining us to ring in 2023. Hopefully I will be seeing many of you, you know, in one of our trainings coming up soon. Come, come hang out with us at FRC.

Thank you, everybody. Welcome to 2023. You're going to have a great year.

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