Redefine Aging with Peak Performance

What do I mean by peak performance? What do I mean by peak performance state? So, what's going on in the brain and the body when people are performing at their best? We literally define peak performance as nothing more, nothing less than getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. Flow states are not singular experiences. They're a spectrum of experiences. Flow states have triggers. Preconditions lead to more flow. They drive attention into the now. Flow follows focus. It only can show up if all our attention is the right here, right now, and the thing we're doing on the task at hand. That's what the triggers do. They drive attention to the present present moment. They do it a bunch of different ways neurobiologically, but that's what they share in common. Creativity is a really big flow trigger. So when we link ideas together in a novel way, that's pattern recognition. You just have to map your experience onto the 26 flow triggers that have been discovered, and you can duplicate in other aspects. Yeah. 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.

Stephen Kotler, thank you for joining me on the podcast.

It's good to be with you. Yeah.

Yeah. So I'm going through your book, Nar Country, and I love it. And you're an absolute psycho. Like, I respect— I respect the hell out of it. There's one line in the book where you say something along the lines of I've filtered out my life to the point where I want to maximize the amount of times I'm on the slopes for a powder day. And you calculate that down to like 268 days or something. And then of course you have the family, friends, relationships. But the fact that you say that or you write it down and you just put that out there, I feel like no one has the balls to be like, this is my number one priority. And just screw the things that don't filter down to one of these things that I give a shit about.

I love having really good, like, filters for life anywhere. And one of the ones, like, easy one, like top 10 experiences, right? Make a list of your top 10 favorite experiences and prioritize those, because, like, what good is number 17 or 27 compared to 1 through 10? And we have a limited number of days on this planet. I want to use mine wisely in a sense.

Do you remember when you made those top priorities, and especially the, the priority for getting on the slopes and, and powder skiing and pushing it to the limit? Like, was it a, an instant thing? Was it a gradual realization where you go like, this is, you know, this is it? Like, how did you come to that?

So it— yeah, it's— I mean, it's— I remember, so I remember being on the mountain in New Mexico when I lived there. I think I was at Taos or the— I think it was the Santa Fe Ski Area. And I was deep in flow. I've been— I spent the day like just skiing really fun tree lines with a little bit of powder. And I remember thinking, feeling guilty that I should get off the hill and get home to to help my wife do whatever, right? She hadn't asked me to do anything. I'm just like making up guilt in my head and feeling bad. And as I was thinking, as I was like going up the chairlift, I realized I was like, wait a minute, this is the absolute— this is your favorite thing on the planet. And this is— you're in flow doing your favorite thing and you are going to leave. Like, what are you doing? That's not the way to arrange priorities. And if you were to talk to your wife about this, she would tell you to stay, right? Like, I was like, this is really screwed up. And I, so it was sort of the beginning of starting to like rearrange my priorities based on like their actual real importance in my life. Never mind everything else. And it were, and it also skiing to me is, is about mental health, right? It allows me to hurling myself down mountains at high speeds, whether I'm on a bike or on skis, that resets my nervous system, gets me into flow, resets my nervous system and allows me to come back into everything else at maximum. But it's gotta be my first priority. Because my nervous system gets outta whack and I can't perform my best. Nothing, you know, why, why, why sort of, why bother? My, my attitude is I don't want to go in into anything if I can't, you know, give it my all and be at my best. And there's certain things I have to do to be able to do that. One of them is get into flow regularly and, you know, skiing is the best way to do that. So in a sense, I'm prioritizing my mental health above everything else so I can do everything else. Yeah.

So I'm curious, how, how did you work that out? With your wife? Because I know a lot of people— like, it's such a cliché that a guy wants to do something, whether it's skiing or fantasy football, basketball, pickup gaming, and the— in all the rom-coms, it's like, well, you know, I gotta ask my wife, like, is she gonna let me do this? How do I work around it?

So interestingly, um, my wife and I are We're married in a Jewish wedding ceremony. And when you're married in a Jewish ceremony, you have to sign a ketubah before you get married. And a ketubah literally is the rules for marriage, the rules for divorce. These are the things. So my wife and I run a dog sanctuary together. That's one of the things we've done for about 20 years. And on the ketubah, I had one condition and she had one condition. She can divorce me if I'm mean to the dogs, and I can divorce her if she stops me, tries to stop me from doing action sports.

Wow.

So it was like, it was established, you know, I went in, you know, the one I got, Joy and I got married fairly late. Um, I was in my, like, we met when I was in my late 30s. We got, I think we got married right around the time I turned 40 and she turned 40. So, um, we had done a lot, we'd been in a lot of other relationships along the way and we had sort of figured out things you want to do right and things you do want to do wrong. And, um, that was, you know, one way or another, having those ground rules going in, uh, was really useful. And so in my work at the Flow Research Collective, when we train people, one of the things that's really great about flow, we talk about peak performance, we talk about how flow amplifies all these various skills. One of the things that goes up is motivation, productivity. And there have been different studies. McKinsey, the business consultancy, did a 10-year study where they looked at top executives in flow. They want to know how much more productive they are in flow than out of flow. On average— and I always tell people, you guys sort of take this with a grain of salt because it's self-reported, but I will say it's a, it's a good study. They spent 10 years data gathering, they went global. On average, it was 500% more productive.

Wow.

The moral here is productivity goes to the roof in flow, so it actually gives you time back later. So priority— making flow this and putting yourself into flow the center of your priorities makes the most sense from a performance standpoint. And when you do that, there's a bunch of different things that have to shift. And one of the things I always tell people is whether you're at home or you're at work, you got to have your conversations first. You got to talk to your kids, you got to talk to your spouse, you got to talk to your partner, you got to talk to your boss, you got to talk to your friends. You got to say, this is what I'm doing. This is how it works. This is the biology of it. We know it works. It's, you know, but this is what I need to make that possible. You're going to get more of me back and you're going to like the version of me that you get back better. But this is what it's going to take.

Yeah.

And that's, that's sort of how I approach it.

So if you want to be able to get into flow in a marriage, have your number one priorities with your spouse and then convert to Judaism or have a Jewish wedding, that's the, that's the best way to do it.

Whatever your version of the ketubah is. I don't think you need to do all that.

Yeah. Have some sort of agreement or like acknowledgment like that.

Yeah. Yeah.

You've—

which— yeah.

Anyways, so you've, you've spoken about many of your books coming from fits of madness. And for your latest book, Gnar Country, where you take on the quote unquote impossible task of learning to park ski in your 50s, Can you tell the story of the, the brand of madness that led up to this book in particular?

So the madness, I, it's just that I, I've always been, as back when I was a journalist, even like as a kid, I'm just wired to follow an idea right off the edge of the world. I've got no problem at all doing that. I get really, really curious. I get really obsessed and I just keep going until sort of like the puzzle is solved or the mission is completed. Um, I'm wired that way. In our country— so let me give you— in our country's a book about peak performance aging, and let me just give you a couple of big picture things about peak performance aging, um, that'll be useful. So one, what do I mean by peak performance? What do we mean by peak performance aging? Definition of terms. Let's just start there. The Flourish Collective, where we study the neurobiology of peak human performance— so what's going on in the brain and the body when people are performing at their best— we literally define peak performance as nothing more, nothing less than getting our biology biology to work for us rather than against us. That's all we're really talking about here. Nor is that a particularly new idea in, in science, right? That there's a long history of that particular idea. Um, we think neurobiology is sort of the, the right entrance point into it, and it's the, it's the good lens. Um, if you're looking to make things reliable and repeatable and sort of mechanistic, that's the— that seems to work the best. So that's how we approach it. But that's peak performance. Peak performance aging is literally just applying, getting our biology to work for us rather than against us when applied to the challenges and opportunities of aging. Okay, so simple definition of terms. Now, big picture also, the traditional idea of aging which most of us grew up with, right, it's what I like to call the long slow rot theory. And this was really the dominant theory of aging for most of the 20th century. It's all of our mental skills and all of our physical skills decline over time and there's nothing we can do to stop the slide. Like, that's the— that's what happens. And it turns out what we've discovered in the past 20 years, all the discoveries that fold into the field that is now known as peak performance aging, say, hey, wait a minute, that's not true at all. Almost everything, if not everything, that we used to think declined over time, both mental and physical, we now know these are all use-it-or-lose-it skills. So if you never stop training them, you get to hang on to them and even advance them far later in life than anybody thought possible. So one of the corollaries of that is the idea that an old dog can't learn new tricks has been totally disproven. And it's now known that because of these really beneficial changes in the brain that take place over 40 and over 50, old dogs are better at learning new tricks than younger dogs. So that was all true in the laboratory. It had well-discovered thousands of studies, right? Extremely well-validated. But other than a handful of like really cutting-edge researchers who have taken bits and pieces of those ideas into the real world and tested them, nobody said, okay, let's do something real with this. Let's really— let's see if this really— this shit really works. And so I decided, as you pointed out, to see if I could use these ideas to teach myself how to park ski. In my 50s. Now park skiing is the discipline in skiing that involves jumps off, doing, you know, tricks off jumps and rails and wall rise boxes. Very acrobatic. It's pretty dangerous. And for about 11 to 14 different biological reasons, depending on how you're counting, it's once you're over 35, they said, look, it's really difficult to learn. Once you get to 45, it's, that's impossible. Once you get to the age that I started at, which was 53, they're just like, you're downright crazy. Yeah. And but on paper, scientifically, I was like, no, no, I don't think I'm so crazy, so let's test it. And so that's what the book is. It covers the story of the experiment I ran on myself, then the experiment, uh, my ski partner ran. Um, he ran the same protocol, and then, uh, which was both our protocols was massively successful. We obviously learned how to park ski late in life. Uh, we then re-ran 'Cause 2 people don't a study make, right? It's cool pilot data. But then we took 17 older adults ages 30 to 70 basically. And in using the exact same protocol, same ideas in 4 days on the mountain. Most of them started out, by the way, at the intermediate skier, snowboarder level. So they weren't even experts. We got them up and running in park skiing and park snowboarding. So thought it was successful. That's the story told in the book. You know, it was, it's, I mean, I'm, I don't think that I'm willing to go farther to test an idea than, than most people. Like, I don't think of that as, but it, other people look at that and go, yeah, I would never have gone that far to, you know what I mean? I don't feel like it's, it like, uh, like I'm, it's that crazy of an experiment, but, um, judging from the reaction I get in, in public, it might be.

But yeah, when, when you look at the, just the overarching goal and accomplishments of the book and the self-experiments that you're performing, if you look at it from a 30,000-foot level, it seems crazy. But then when you detail the incremental steps and you're going through every day, the conditioning, doing the ruck walks, walking your dog up the mountain, weighted packs, and then you build the, the dirt ski complex where, you know, there's no snow, it's the middle of the summer, it's in like Utah or Nevada, um, somewhere out there, and you're just trying to figure out ways how to enter into the realm of park skiing on a, on a dirt mountain essentially, and building that from the ground up. When you see that all laid out step by step, it still seems wild as shit. Like the, the the progress is insane, but at least I could see how you're getting from A to B to C. And it is— it's very inspiring and also very useful because it made me think about the flow states and like the moments where I've experienced that in my own life. And I, I thought about baseball a lot while I was reading it because the way that you talk about feeling that nothingness or the void and the flow state when you're barreling down a mountain, the closest I've ever felt to what you describe is when I was playing college baseball and, you know, you're throwing a ball 93 miles an hour off a mound or you're long tossing it 100 yards. And I don't know what it is, but like people always describe a high level of efforts when everything kind of works together in the kinetic chain as nothing. Like it almost feels like you're doing nothing. but the ball is coming out of your hand like 94 miles an hour when everything's working together. And so I, I, it made me question like, why am I not trying to go back to this? Or at least, you know, it's been like 6 years since I've been washed up. Like, what is stopping me from going back and, you know, playing around with baseball and playing around with throwing? And so, yeah, it's, it's a, it's an awesome book, not just because of what you've laid out, but because it it challenged me to question, you know, like, why am I not making more time for these type of things in my own life that put me into that flow state?

There's a bunch of stuff, like a bunch of different things, but I want to— let's start where you started because it's cool. Um, I'm really excited to hear what you just said, and the reason is this: one of the reasons I wrote In Our Country I always like to go in with like up to a book with like 6 or 7 different reasons for writing a book because they're long projects and one reason isn't enough motivation. I need like 6 or 7. But one of them was the Flow Research Collective. We, I mean, we train people in 130 countries, tens of thousands every month. But one of the things that it's just been like we've seen it as this gap in what we can teach our customers, clients over and over and over again, which is applied peak performance. What does it really look like on a day-to-day basis where you're really just taking these ideas and applying them to a hard challenge on a day-to-day basis? Nobody has really written that book because you get it wrong and it's really fricking boring. Right? It's, you get it wrong and it's just terrible. So there's a lot of ways it can go wrong. Mm-hmm. So it, it takes a certain level of writer to want to even wade into the challenge. And it, it just hadn't, it hadn't happened. And I saw the opportunity sort of to track my progress and use it as a way to show people this is what applied peak performance looks like. Now we can, when people ask what's the day-to-day application of this really looks like, in the real world. Here, here's just— here's one example, but it's a literal day-to-day example. So hearing you talk about that and hearing you see it, that's— that was the point. I, you know, then I did my job, and that's awesome. The other thing I want to mention to you, flow states are not singular experiences. They're a spectrum of experiences. So what you were talking about with baseball is macro flow. It's a full-scale flow state where all the flow's core characteristics are turned up to 11. You experience microflow, right? You just— great conversation, you're doing a podcast, gets so sucked in that, you know, you and your guests sort of just disappear and time goes by and nobody even notices, right? That happens to you fairly frequently. That's microflow, right? You can learn to turn microflow up and turn it into macroflow, which is one way to do it. Um, or you could also learn sort of look at flow's triggers and look at, look at baseball and say, okay, the— this assortment of triggers really dropped me into a macro flow state. You know, sort of what works for you. You just have to map your experience onto the 26 flow triggers that have been discovered, and you'll be able to sort of figure out, oh, this is the formula that, that is baseball to me. And you can duplicate in other aspects of your life.

Yeah, so I, I did a a deep dive on YouTube of going to a bunch of different park skiing videos and just watching tricks, like going down the rabbit hole. And after, after watching that, I have a much better idea of why park skiing is seen as impossible for older athletes to learn. Can you dive into some of the, the tricks and mechanisms that you were attempting to do specifically that make it like so seemingly hard to do past a certain age? Like if you could break some of the mechanisms down or some of the moves that you were aiming to do on the list just so people could have an idea of like the physicality and the effort involved and how you even begin to do that.

A lot of effort went into, like, let's start with the nose butter 360, which is sort of where I hung my hat. Um, so it's a 360 means the skier hits the jump and spins 360 degrees in the air and, and you land face forward. The thing I want to just mention going in is even on a kiddie jump, a kiddie jump, which is like 3 feet high, you're going to jump double to triple the size of the jump if you hit it with the proper pop. So you're going to be 6 to 10 feet up there. And with a 360, it's a fairly simple trick, right? For in skiing, but you, you miss it by more than 5 to 7 degrees and you're going to mess your knees up bad. You have to land it very much facing forward, and that requires getting a lot of air sense. Being— and most people, when they start spinning in the air, they'll do things like close their eyes or they won't be able to see anything move around them. Nosebutters make it more difficult because as you're going into the jump, you're putting all your weight on the noses of your skis, the front of your skis. So you're popping up on the noses and then you're about— they will collapse a little bit and bounce you back straight, and that extra force spins you into the air. It's, um, it's considered a lot more difficult, um, both because it's sort of terrifying to be going at like 30 miles an hour and then suddenly have to lean over the nose of your skis as you're going up a jump. It's also terrifying because the question of when do you start spinning, and like, you have to— you literally like when you start spinning on a nose butter is the moment you sort of can, you see the horizon line. So essentially you're just spinning into the void and it's this like, just, it doesn't matter how many times you do it. There's this moment of, I'm just spinning off the edge of the world. So there's a lot of psychological factors, uh, that are difficult. I spent a lot of time, I'm still working on, on that trick. I, you know, but I spent most of the book working on it. Um, That's just one example, but, um, there's tons of them. Uh, 540s was, uh, was the next step, a nose butter 540. So I add an extra 180-degree or 80 or 90 degrees, 180 degrees of rotation and land backwards. Um, landing backwards is a wild experience, um, when you're, you know, clearing 10 feet of space, 20 feet of space. There was a lot of that stuff. The reason it's considered difficult, uh, for older adults to learn— there's a bunch of them— but, um, fast twitch muscle response declines over time. That's one. Uh, motor dexterity declines over time. Strength declines over time. Stamina, VO2 max, all those things decline over time, supposedly. Um, the big one is there's a motor learning window We've all heard about this, right? And it's open in childhood and slammed shut by the time we're 25, 26, right? Don't become a ballerina if you haven't done it by 25, 26. Don't become a gymnast. And all those things are true, sort of. Yes, all those things do decline over time, but as I said, um, they're all use-it-or-lose-it skills. If you keep on training, you get to hang on to them, even advance them. Far later in life than anybody thought possible. And, um, let me just give you a simple example. VO2 max, which is upper respiratory capacity. It used to be, uh, in the aging discussion, this was like one of those like big freaking mallets that the cynics would beat you with. It didn't matter what you came up with around peak performance aging, some smartass was going to be like, yeah, well, what about VO2 max? And they were right, because VO2 max, which is our upper respiratory capacity which is what we're using in park skiing, for example, it peaks in our 20s and then it starts collapsing, and by 50 it really starts to fall off a cliff. And then 10 years or so ago, they started to notice this really weird thing in ultra running. They started to notice that like 60 and 70-year-olds were beating 40 and 50-year-olds, and they couldn't figure it out in like 200-mile road races and like shit where you were What? They're doing what? What's going on? Why is this going on? So a bunch of scientists said, okay, this doesn't make sense based on what we know. Let's go look at VO2 max. And so they looked at the VO2 max of just basically octogenarian triathletes. So folks in their 80s capable of, of running a triathlon, very fit, but not super elite, best in the world, just very fit. And they found that on average they had the VO2 max of healthy 35-year-olds.

Wow.

The difference was they had started training VO2 max regularly in their 50s and never stopped. And so that was huge. There's a bunch of stuff like that. The big one is mo— this motor skills window that slams shut, maybe sort of partially, not quite. What really changes more than the motor skills learning windows— there are changes in the brain and it does become slightly harder, but what really changes in our approach to learning Kids learn through play and adults learn through work. And learning complicated motor skills is almost impossible if you're not playing because of how learning works, because of how the brain works, because of a million different reasons. So they— we now know, for example, if you're talking about accelerated learning, the old idea— you're probably familiar— Anders Ericsson's 10,000 hours deliberate practice, do the same thing over and over, incremental advancements. And there have been 3 arguments against that. One I made in The Rise of Superman, and it involves flow, which amplifies learning. Another one David Epstein made in Range, which was an argument against early specialization, which is the cult of, of that stuff. And it, it shows that that's actually not the best way to learn. And the final one was Anders Ericsson himself, who said, hey, wait a minute, this stuff is true for a very small category of skills. If you're trying to learn how to play the violin or become a math genius, deliberate practice works really, really well. But in a lot of— so in most other places, deliberate play outperforms deliberate practice almost all the time. Deliberate play is— deliberate practice is I'm going to do the same thing over and over with incremental improvement. Deliberate play is I'm going to do the same thing I did last time and then I'm going to improvise on top of it. And it doesn't matter really which direction I go in. There's no right, there's no wrong, there's no shame. There's no self-consciousness because I'm literally playing and exploring movement and not— right. And as a result, there's a whole bunch of things that happen. But shorthand, you get a ton more neurochemistry when you're playing. And the more neurochemicals that show up during experience, the better chance that experience will go from short-term holding to long-term storage. So play produces way more neurochemistry than deliberate practice. Simple reason: with deliberate play, there's one wrong answer. I did the thing I did last time, right? Everything else is a right answer. All right answers give you a little bit of dopamine, and for playing, you get a little bit of endorphins. With deliberate practice, there's only one right answer. There's only one thing that will give you that dopamine and cement that into long-term memory. Everything else is a fail. So you don't even get the information, as much information from failures as you do playing. You learn more, both positive and negative, from play. So If you reboot play and a handful of other things, you can actually learn significantly better later in life. And all those other skills that I mentioned are also trainable. So everything's trainable in ways that we didn't believe.

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

All the best. And, um, you can sort of reopen that motor learning window provided you, you kind of approach it the right way.

Yeah, so play still involves a plan, but then you have the improvisation aspect on top of that where it's not totally a rigid structure.

Yeah, let me tell you how— let me tell you what we did. Um, this may be a little too geeky on the skiing, snowboarding side, but like, go for it. So here's what we did, um, and we did this for ourselves and we did it for everybody else. A couple things you need to know, big picture. One, flow states have triggers. Preconditions lead to more flow. How the triggers work. There's 26 triggers. They all do the same thing. They drive attention into the now. Flow follows focus. It only can show up if all our attention is the right here, right now, and the thing we're doing on the task at hand. That's what the triggers do. They drive attention to the present moment. They do it a bunch of different ways neurobiologically, but that's what they share in common. Creativity is a really big flow trigger. So when we link ideas together in a novel way, That's pattern recognition, and pattern recognition is really fundamental to survival. So we get to reward dopamine. So we know this— you've done a crossword puzzle, Sudoku, you get an answer right, that little rush of pleasure, that's dopamine. So if you're a skier or a snowboarder and you look at a, at a terrain feature, you look at it like a snow berm and go, oh wow, I can grind that. I just lost my voice.

No, take your time. But yeah, having like having that play aspect and not sitting within the, the rigid structure, like, like you don't know exactly what workout you're going to be doing 6 weeks from today. It could depend.

That's— I mean, you know, that's totally demotivating anyways, right?

Yeah. That's one of the things that I loved about— that's one of the things that I loved about the book was how flexible you were on the mountain and your willingness to improvise or perform different challenges or slopes during the day, depending on certain factors, to, to hunt the dopamine, to hunt the flow state, like you say in the book. And something that is changing now in sports and particularly baseball, but this is like a very recent thing, is incorporating more play into practice. Like, I, I would know exactly what I was doing in college baseball 4 to 6 to 12 weeks out. I'd have it written out on a program. You perform it.

You—

if it's, you know, you're feeling pain or off or something, you just like, you, you do the exercise and then you perform prehab or rehab in between. But like, you don't deviate from doing the 35 throws at 30 yards, 50 throws at 80 yards, squatting 5x5, deadlifting. But like, it's all just predetermined. And one of the things that I started to incorporate in my workouts after baseball, which I want to bring back to when I start to throw again, is like improvising what I want to do that day on top of the plan. Like, like you broke down so well in the book and not not demotivating myself with such a, just such a, like a rigid, uh, kind of stale typical workout program.

There's a lot you said. There's a lot that's in there. There's just— so, you know, one of the things is just basic embodied cognition, right? There's a whole bunch of learning theory and coaching theory and sports theory now that says, hey, wait a minute, you want, you want to be prepared. These are dynamic. You want to be prepared for dynamic situations. You need the novelty. You need the variation. If you train the same thing over and over and over again, you're not going to be able to respond to the variability in game, the game as it shows up. So there's a bunch of learning theory that, that points to it. But it's also, you know this from baseball because it's a long-ass season. Skiing is a long season. So, it can go, I mean, my ski season can start in November and go to July sometimes. That's a very long time to stay motivated. There's a lot of injuries along the way. There's a lot of stuff. And for me, I don't know, nothing is worse than self-expectation. And like so much gets dashed on the shores of self-expectation. So, one of the reasons I'm always sort of, moving things around is as soon as I develop like a level of unrealistic expectation in one part of my, my ski game, I gotta move to another area because all I'm gonna do is disappoint myself and lose motivation at that point. And then confidence is getting eroded, it's harder to get into flow, and performance is gonna— and then I spiral.

So one of the, one of the things that I wasn't expecting as a through line to the book is edibles. So I wanted to, to ask you, what role do edibles play for you on the mountain, off the mountain recovery? Like, how do you use them? How does that work into your regimen?

So, I don't always ski stone, but I, I And there are certain— so oldest, one of the oldest flow hacks in the world is 20 minutes of aerobic exercise followed by a cup of coffee followed by, uh, THC. And people, you know, it's the hippie speedball in action sports, and people have been doing it since the '60s. We have done a lot of work at the Flow Research Collective on, um, caffeine and flow and why caffeine works as a flow trigger. Uh, we've done some work on THC and flow, CBD and flow. We've looked at all these things. We're trying to sort of drill in that. We don't train people in, uh, in that ever because it doesn't seem to be reliable for everyone. People have very different relationships with, with, uh, THC, um, and, uh, and different kinds of THC. So it's not— I don't find it something that's useful for everyone. So we don't, you know what I mean? And I, and I truly, at The Collective, we'd like to specialize in psychological interventions that produce neurobiological reactions because I don't want to have to ever depend on a substance for peak performance. But, um, one, when I'm dealing with pain, um, I would much rather take an edible than take an aspirin. Yeah, it's much better, right? It's better on my liver, it's better on my body, and it works better. So, you know, I'll use it for recovery if I ding myself up. And then— but I've found with marijuana, like, there are a lot of times it won't work. If it's cold, it will not work and can take me in the other direction. If I'm hungry, it will not— right? I can't— I can't use it to push through hunger. It makes it worse. If there's too much fear, it can mess with performance in unhealthy ways. Right. So there's very, there's very, there's very specific things. And it's, you know, um, the more complicated the movements, the better marijuana works as a performance-enhancing chemical. Also, this is, uh, this is some weird— so ever— we all grew up being told that marijuana, uh, is a— is bad for performance. And, um, that's not entirely true. So when they test reaction times— what, that's what they were talking about— they do it with a light box, like a tic-tac-toe board. So they light up a square and you tap a square, and they light up 2 squares and you go boom boom, and then 3 squares, boom boom boom. So when they tested it, they test it, it's usually like stoned versus sober, right? And if— what they discovered is, and it took them forever to do this, 'cause nobody bothered to do it this much. But like in the beginning, if you test, light up one square and it's stone guy versus sober guy, sober guy wins. Two squares, boom, boom, sober guy wins. Three squares, they start to tie. Four squares, they start to tie. And at five squares, stone guy usually pulls ahead. And it's because you can learn those really complicated patterns, but you have to turn off the subconscious to reproduce them. Marijuana will turn off part of the prefrontal cortex that'll block that. Um, so if you're performing very complicated patterns and things like that, marijuana can work as a performance-enhancing chemical. Um, but you have to know what you're doing. You actually have to train with it. Marijuana also produces state-dependent learning, which is— you heard about it, but it's studied with the SATs and purple sweats. Take on purple sweats, that's state-dependent learning. But it's the same thing marijuana produces, state-dependent learning. And so Most people smoke pot in high school eating Cheetos and watching Monty Python movies and laughing, and that's what they train themselves to do. And they didn't realize, oh wow, it's a performance-enhancing substance and you can use it to focus and it, it's good for certain skills. Um, I covered, uh, marijuana as a performance-enhancing substance a bunch when I was writing articles for like Men's Journal and Men's Health. I wrote a bunch of articles about it. Um, but it's not for everyone.

Yeah, it makes sense with the, the most benefit coming from the more complex movements because there's so many athletes that will smoke and go train or a lot of athletes play high, especially with MLB, NBA, like a lot of people putting the, you know, pressing the brakes on just banning marijuana altogether. Like I've I've never been a huge edible guy myself while I'm training or playing, but I have friends in various sports, some of who are still playing that, you know, maybe once a week or a few times a month they'll smoke and take batting practice or smoke and throw or take an edible, like lift weights. And it does— the times that I've done it, I do feel I don't know if it's more connection with my body, but just like a different connection with the way that my muscles are moving and things are coming together. And especially when you're doing a movement like throwing, or I imagine it's even more intense when you're skiing down a mountain and you're performing tricks. But like, I feel like I can feel the out-of-syncness earlier and, and more deeply when I've smoked before I throw, rather, or compared to sober where like I might— it might take me like 20 extra throws to feel that something's wrong. I just feel like more in tune in a way with weed in my system, performing a complex movement like, like throwing a baseball.

It's funny. Also, I like I found I'm a mediocre surfer. I'm an expert skier. If I try to use marijuana while surfing, um, it, it's terrible. I'm so much more— like, it doesn't help at all. Like, so I've, I've discovered that, like, it's the more expertise I have, the more useful it tends to be for me. Um, again, that may just be me, that may not be other people, but I Like, um, and it— and, you know, marijuana, it's— I mean, I— this was— I remember the very first pro ski shoot I was ever on. It was a photo shoot at Squaw Valley, and the— we were Palisades. We had early ops. It's like 7 o'clock, 6 o'clock in the morning. We're on top of this massive cliff. It's the early '90s, and there's like 10 of the best skiers in the world up there, and the wind is howling. It's like 80 miles an hour, and they're all huddled together behind this like one thing trying to get stoned. And it's like 6 o'clock in the morning. But so many of the pro action sport athletes were using marijuana as a performance enhancing chemical. It was everywhere that you had to— I wasn't— I came to marijuana late as when I got Lyme disease, it was— I came to it as medical marijuana. It really helped with my recovery. I wasn't a huge smoker before that, but I remember like this was in my early 20s when I saw that for the first time. I was like, what the hell is going on? Like, I didn't— like, it didn't make any sense to me until— that was where all those articles I wrote came from. It was trying to figure out what I was seeing all over action sports, why it was happening, because it didn't— you know, everything we heard about marijuana growing up said, no, no, this is dumb, don't do this. And yet it was everywhere.

Yeah.

And these, they're pro athletes, they, like, they know what they're doing, right? They obviously— like, you can't say it's bad for performance if they're all using it at this level.

Yeah. Yeah, it's funny. All the athletes, like you mentioned, that they're smoking marijuana and at the same time there's all this information saying that it's horrible for performance, but then like no one's saying anything about alcohol or amphetamines, which like a lot of athletes were doing also. I feel like marijuana was just singled out for demonization.

Yeah. And you know what's interesting also? First of all, I agree with you. And the funny thing is both alcohol and amphetamines really hurt performance, and they're just as ubiquitous in sport. Um, and I mean, it's certainly, you know, go read the old— baseball was a game of amphetamines.

I mean, oh yeah, you know, still is. Now it's just like legal prescription Adderall, but right now it's Ritalin and Adderall, but in the '70s, yeah, right.

Greenies.

Yeah, it's— I know that alcohol is terrible for performance, but one of my favorite things to do is in the afternoon to rip a shot of whiskey on the lift before I go down, like maybe my last like 5 or 6 runs of the day. And I know I'm probably performing worse, but it's just like the lack of inhibitions or what, you know, like the alcohol gives you. It's like I don't— know that I'm performing worse, but I— it hits me, and like the combination of the warmth going down my throat and the cold, I'm just like, oh, this is like making me feel alive, and it's fun. But I, I know it's not the best for that, for performance.

It's— and people, I mean, I, I'm amazed because alcohol to me, um, is set— it like, it's the opposite. It takes me in the opposite direction. It like, it really— I really feel hindered I've tried to ski with booze in my system only a couple of times and it really won't work for me. But it's amazing to me how much alcohol consumption I see in the mountains. It's wild how many people actually use it that way. It is one thing, confidence plays a huge role in our ability to get into flow. And that's one of the things that you are getting from— it's boosting confidence in, in a big way. Not in a real way. Yeah. It's a fake boost, but, um, it, it may be enough to drop you into flow and flow will amplify performance. So if you— that's the path you're going in the end, I think you're probably gonna end up performing better. Um, even though the booze is gonna hinder your performance, I just don't think— I've also discovered that people who use Um, people use booze to get into flow because you can do it. It'll turn off part of the prefrontal cortex. It'll do it. I've known some writers who have done it, and the problem is it's not— booze doesn't work like others. Like, your tolerance goes up too much. So like, I know writers— I have— I had a friend who was an author who would drink half a glass of wine to start her first book, but by the time she was finishing her second novel, it was 2 bottles a night.

Yeah.

And That was a real problem, right? Like, suddenly she, like, now she had writer's block and she had a problem with alcohol. And that tends to be another problem with people, like, regularly using substances to get into flow. Um, so cautionary tale.

Oh yeah, no, it definitely— you definitely acclimate to, and it starts to add up after a while. And, you know, I, I've heard actually powerlifters talk about taking shots of whiskey before a big lift just to calm the nerves or, you know, sort of have that confidence. It's not real confidence, but like you feel, you know, maybe a little bit of a boost that makes you feel like the weight is going to be lighter, that you have more pull or something like that. I've experimented with taking a shot before practicing Muay Thai occasionally, like to calm my nerves before a sparring session. I'll take one shot of whiskey and I haven't done it enough times to tell you whether I think it works or not, but there definitely is like a little bit of a relaxation effect. But then again, my performance, if I was measuring it, is probably a little less.

I, I've never tried it. I've never tried alcohol with fighting. I've tried marijuana, and I'd like— nothing is worse than getting punched in the face while stoned.

Really?

Like, you just don't— yeah, to me it doesn't like the ability to like, like take a hit, absorb blow, stay focused. Like the, the, the marijuana seemed to really sort of screw with that for me. But again, not an expert fighter, right? So somebody with way more skill might have a very different resp— resp— experience. Lost my ability to speak this morning.

Yeah, no, I'm, I'm, uh, I'm there with you a little bit. I'm, I'm actually still adjusting to jet lag from Japan. It's been like 2 weeks, but it's, it's kicking my ass. So I'm stringing sentences together better than I thought I could this morning. So, so I'm there with you. Nice. So I wanted to ask you, what was the closest thing to a derailing moment that you had during the process? Something that's much more than a speed bump and it felt like you were hitting a brick wall? If you had a moment like that.

There were a couple. So when that guy T-boned me, that was mid— like midair, I You know, I did not— I thought that was the end of the season. That was such a freak accident and a collapse. I mean, it was a really big accident. We— he skied into me. We were both probably doing 40 miles an hour and we were flying down a cliff. The fact that either of us lived, let alone like walked away and had a season, was a miracle. So that was one. Another one was, so this is odd and I underplay it a little bit in the book, but I skied a line called Pencil Chute. It's like a 75-foot straight line. And I skied it the first time and it was terrifying. And there was a gap between when I skied it the first time and when I skied it the second time. And I knew I had to ski it a second night 'cause it was so scary. And I knew like if it didn't, like that fear was just gonna eat at me and it was gonna end up winning. And I knew I hadn't sort of like, I conquered this thing. And so I didn't talk about it much in the book, but there was like a 10-day, 12-day period in between attempts at skiing that I really sort of like, I knew I was watching it, the fear sort of eat at me eat at me subconsciously. That was a derailment. At the end, when I injured my knees and I didn't know if I was going to come back from that one. Also, those are the 3 ones. I'll give you another one, which I don't— again, I don't spend much time on it early in the book. We talked earlier about learning to throw a nose butter. So when you screw up a nose, I spin, uh, left, right? That's my natural direction to spin. When you spin left on a nose butter, when you get your timing wrong, meaning if you start too early to spin up the jump, or you tend to catch your tails and you go right in on your right hip hard, and by like Mid-season, my hip was bruised from like the middle of my thigh to my ribs. And I mean, like literally just like black and blue, 'cause I just couldn't get it right. And I just kept going in. And that was, I didn't, like, I didn't know if I was gonna fix my time. Like, it was getting to the point where I was like, holy crap. Like, I'm gonna lose my ability to move. And this is getting like serious. I'm gonna have to actually stop. So there was, there was some of that. Um, those, those were the ones that sort of were the biggest, but none of them felt like real derailments. And the worst of it was the, the pencil chute fear. 'Cause I've watched, I've seen fear just derail a season before where there's something I really wanna do and I show up at the mountain every day. It's like, okay, I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna do it. And I don't. Mm-hmm. And it, it just chews through your, like, self-confidence and self-worth. And, or at least for me, I can't— I don't put it down. Um, and, uh, so that was— that one was serious.

How do you manage the fear versus the self-expectation? Because you mentioned that, you know, one of the worst states you can be in is having too high of a self-expectation. But, but fear also connects to that 'cause you're afraid of something and you're like, well, I have to do this. How do you sort of manage that balance of pushing through the fear?

So I try with self-expectation to not set daily goals. I'll set seasonal goals. 'Cause daily goals, I never know how I'm gonna be on a given day. This could be as a writer or this could be as a skier, right? Like it doesn't, I find that I'll set a process goal. I want to ski this many laps because I know I'll be getting my workout in, or I want to write this many words, but I won't say I have to ski this line. I have to do this trick because I want a lot of the bigger tricks that I learned along the way. I was just chasing my buddy down the mountain. He did, and I was like, oh, I think I can do that. And just, you know, I saw it. I felt it. I had it. I tried it, but though you can't plan for those.

So as we, as we start to end off, I wanted to get into the immense ordeal that you went through with Lyme disease. And I won't ask you to recount the story because it's— you can find it on a bunch of other podcasts and you have a, you have a book about it.

Thank you so much.

The— what's the name of the book? West of Jesus.

West of Jesus tells the full story.

Yeah. So the question I had for you is that just to summarize, you experienced a huge battle with Lyme disease earlier in your life to the point where I think you described it as 10% functionality, couldn't leave the couch, contemplating suicide. And then through surfing, you were able to heal your body, going from 10% functionality to 80% functionality. Do you, do you see any crossover between learning to surf to essentially save your life and learning to park ski to defy life's limits? Did you find yourself like drawing upon different things from the Lyme disease?

No, that's a, that's a, that's an interesting question. So the reason surfing worked is cuz it was dropping me into flow and really short version, flow massively boosts the immune system, resets the nervous system, boosts the immune system, does a lot of really good things. There's a lot of neuroimmunology here. But the same, the very same thing that helps people go, help me go from seriously subpar back to normal. It's not just me, by the way. Herb Benson, who mapped what's known as the flow cycle, the 4 stages of the flow process, and really looked at the neurobiology underneath this. He has said most cases of so-called spontaneous healing, you're really looking at this flow mechanism. You're looking at this neurobiology. This is well known, been known for a while, but it wasn't at the time that I did this. So I was one of the first people through that doorway. But the same thing that will get you from seriously subpar back to normal flow will help normal people go all the way up to Superman. So what it— in my career, in my 20s, I actually was looking at flow as a performance accelerant. I got sick at 30 and then suddenly realized that it helped on the other half of the spectrum. And then, you know, on the other side of that is when I sort of wrote West of Jesus, my first, like, real deep dive into the neurobiology of flow. Like, what the hell? Okay, I've seen it everywhere. Let's, let's figure this out. Um, it was the beginning of my obsession.

Yeah, yeah. I thought, I thought, uh, one of the parts of the story that stuck out to me with your, your battle with Lyme disease is that your friend, but, you know, basically forced you to get off the couch. It wasn't out of your own internal will. So it sounded like you basically— you said you got carried to the beach. Your friend was like, you're coming surfing.

Yeah, my friend Andrea showed— my friend Andrea showed up at my house. And, um, one, you have to understand that, like, besides the fact that, like, she's a very— she was like the 12th— at the time she was the 12th best female rock climber in the world. And like, she's a tough lady in general, but she also is like a physical therapist who works with like the dying and AIDS patients and like the worst. So she could like, she's used to motivating people, right? She literally showed up at my house and said, we're going surfing. And I couldn't, I literally couldn't walk across a room at the time. And I was, you know, we're not going surfing. Go fuck yourself. Right. But she would not leave. It was like 4 hours later when I was like, anything, anything to get this woman to shut up. Just fine. Let's just go surfing today. What's the worst that could happen? Right. I'm suicidal. Right. I kill my, okay, fine. Let's go. And it really was that. It was anything I could do just to get her to shut up, 'cause she just wouldn't leave my house, just kept badgering me. And she was right.

Yeah. Yeah. Then thank God you have friends like that because anyone else, you could easily look at someone battling a disease and they're sitting on the couch and you tell them to get up. You're basically like, you're, you're coming surfing with me right now. You're, you're coming biking, you know, insert X activity that that seems impossible for that person's functionality, and you always have the out of, are you kidding me, like, I can't move right now. And then 99% of people would be like, yeah, that makes sense, like, you know, let's just chill inside. But, but to have someone like that that forced you to do a task that should have been impossible— amazing.

Yeah, she also knew me, right? She— we'd known each other a very long time. We had done a lot of stuff together. Gone through a bunch of stuff together and she knew me. And she's— so that was, um, she would— but you're right, it's like most people would have walked away. Walk away. It was kind of crazy, right? Because it could have gone really wrong, um, if I would have gone surfing and not gotten into flow that day, right? Um, it could have really taken almost all the strength I had left in the world and started a slide that I don't know if I would have come back from. So it could have gone really wrong. but it didn't. And, um, I, you know, there's a lot of other people. It's funny how many stories I hear about people using action sports as flow triggers to come back from autoimmune conditions. The My Lyme story, you know, because of West of Jesus, I get, you know, emails and letters from people all over the world like, oh my God, you know, yeah, yeah, I read it, I tried it.

You know, last, last question. Do you have a favorite skiing scene in a movie or TV series? Some— something that you think about when you think of, you know, skiing in a cinematic sense, something that your mind goes back to?

That's interesting. Doug Coombs, I think it was, skiing the waterfall in Aspen Extreme. Aspen Extreme was this really cheesy, right, ski movie. And I think it was Doug Coombs who skied a waterfall. That one tends to stick in a lot of people's minds. When Shane McConkey reenacted the James Bond ski scene, that was pretty— like, the James Bond ski scene is classic, but Shane redoing it at Squaw Valley was I think better. Um, I'll tell you the— it's funny, I don't have his favorite ski scene in a movie, but in a ski movie, and it's so— in one of the early Steve Winter films, Shane McConkey, uh, who is the center of my book The Rise of Superman and one of the greatest action sport athletes of all time, But it's as an entrepreneur and an innovator that like, he's so astounding and he's so different from so many other athletes. And one of the most astounding things in my mind, still in history. So Shane had this idea that was radical at the time that, oh, wait a minute, skis can get fat. They're like water skis. Snow is frozen water and the dynamics will work the same. And. We should make fat skis. And to prove it, he mounted— took a pair of water skis, mounted ski bindings on them, brought them to Alaska, got in a helicopter, got flown to the top of an Alaskan peak. And this is, mind you, this is like '93, '94, just when we're pioneering Alaska. So the idea— even just like being in Alaska on those peaks, this was brand fucking new. And this guy takes totally inappropriate equipment because he's got an idea.

Yeah.

And he's gonna test it, right? Like, this is the ultimate product test, right? Like, this is like, oh, Coca-Cola, you've got a new soft drink, great. Now bet your life that it's gonna work or taste good. Like, it's the craziest thing ever. And on top of it, he films it. You can watch it. And it's so— like, of all the things in all the Ski Movies, that to me is my scene because you watch him at one point, he skis a spine line before anybody was even skiing spine lines, and he kicks the skis sideways and slarves the spine line. And this is, mind you, 10 years before people start skiing spine lines, 15 years before skiers start figuring out how to slarve anything on a pair of water skis. So that's the one where I'm like, yeah, this is the moment that still blows my mind.

What is a spine line exactly?

So, when you have really, really steep mountains and there's rocks, the snow will fall on the rock and it'll fall on either side of the rock and it'll make a very— like a knife edge. And when you're skiing really steep lines, one of the problems is you kick off snow and in Alaska, that slough can take you out. You can— if you run into your own slough, it could take out your feet and you can die because the runs are enormous. So how do you manage snow when you're moving through really steep Alaskan— these spines is an interesting question. One of the ways people do it is they just ride the edge of the ridge so the snow falls on both sides, but they'll throw their skis or snowboards sideways. And that's what slaloming is. They'll just ride it that way. Sort of jump back and forth. Um, but it's— it takes a lot of technique, takes a lot of courage, takes a massive amount of strength. Um, and McConkie was the first one to figure it out, and he did it on the wrong equipment to prove the point. That's in a movie. And so that's always my favorite because, yeah, wrong equipment to prove a point. I like— I'm wired that way. I would do something like that.

Yeah, that's like, you know, having a medication in a lab that could save your life but also could kill you. And before testing it on any animals, you're just like, let me just fucking put this in my veins and see what happens. You know, just going to Alaska, you know, bombing down those slopes out there is insane. But it worked out. Yeah.

Yeah.

And thank you. Thank you again so much, Stephen, for your time. I really do appreciate it. And I will link everything that we talked about in the episode, and people should go check out Gnar Country 100%. You know, I'm a snowboarder and I snowboard 15 to 20 days per year, and I found it absolutely captivating because like I said, I'm applying a lot of it to my own life and or I'm in the, you know, taking bits and pieces and in the process of doing that. And even though it's a book about skiing, there's so many things that you can take and put into the activity of your choice, whether it's, you know, skateboarding, throwing, you know, badminton, like whatever the hell it is, there's a lot of things that cross over. So thank you again for taking the time to hop on the podcast. And where, where can people follow you? Where are the best places for people to keep up with your writings, your, your publications, things like that?

Stephencollar.com is me. Flowresearchcollective.com is, is the Flow Research Collective. Uh, if you're interested in flow training, getmoreflow.com is, is the place to go. It's the cheesy URL that everybody can remember. And, um, uh, I'm, uh, @StephenKotler on Insta, Google, and all things Bookface.

Amazing. Thank you so much, Stephen.

Hey man, my pleasure. Thank you.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. Now, if you're listening to this, you probably have a long track record of success. However, you also have a craving you can't ignore. It's the deep desire to do more and to take things to an even higher level than before. And when it comes to your performance, you're by no means inconsistent. However, you may have hit a plateau. The traditional ways of breaking through and gaining new ground just aren't working. If you're starting to wonder if you actually have it in you to get to where you want to go, maybe you can feel it. You're in the middle of an important stretch for your career, and the good news is there's a way to get at least 50% more out of what you're currently doing. You can gain the altitude needed to escape reactivity, to stay in the strategic zone and transcend stagnation, all without compromising what's truly important to you. That's precisely what we're here to help you do at the Flow Research Collective. We've done it for thousands of top-tier performers. Reviews and praise for our tools, our protocols, and our ideas have come in from the likes of Elon Musk, Arianna Huffington, and Bill Clinton. So if you'd like to train with us, go to getmoreflow.com. What you'll learn is backed by research from Harvard, DARPA, and Deloitte. These are the same people performance protocols we teach to Navy SEALs and executives in Google and Facebook's boardrooms. Just go to getmoreflow.com.

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