The Flow Approach to Longevity

define flow, because I don't want to assume the audience knows what that is. And then if you want to talk a little bit about what's actually going on in the brain.

Flow is a goal-directed state. When we talk about flow, it's like, why is flow so pleasurable? And just to put it in context, romantic love— when we fall in love, that is predominantly norepinephrine and dopamine. So that's 2 of, you know, 5 of the pleasure chemicals in this group. Flow is literally a sign of mastery. You mentioned unconscious competence. Flow is the sign that you've developed competence. The day you want to celebrate is the day you got that same performance with no flow and it was miserable. All the stuff comes together in flow and it's a taste of what's actually possible and takes you a couple more months to get to the point that you could do all that same stuff without flow. That's usually a sign that you're going to get another really big deep flow state and that unlocks the next level. The upper limit is now someplace higher. What does it take to do the impossible? What does it take to level up your game like than ever before. What does it take for individuals, organizations, for even institutions to achieve paradigm shifting? Nothing is ever the same again. Great things. Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance, access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Ryan Doris, and together with bestselling author Steven Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Muscle Intelligence Podcast. I am your host, Ben Pakulski. Thank you so much for joining us here today. This podcast is my passion project to truly understand what goes into getting the most out of our life. That could mean physical, that could be mental, that could be spiritually and emotionally, and all the facets of an exceptional life and ultimately being an exceptional human. One of the things that I'm most often quoted as saying is I am passionate about people who begin where everyone else ends, people who truly aspire for excellence in their life. They teach us where our boundaries are. They teach us where our limits are, maybe where our limits are not. Today's author is very much in alignment with my mission. Steven Kotler joins me today. Steven is a New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning journalist, and executive director of the Flow Research Collective. He is one of the world's leading experts on human performance and flow. And if you don't know what flow is, you're going to want to listen carefully to this podcast. Get out a paper and pen because we're going to literally walk you through processes on how to achieve the highest state of flow. And ultimately what that is. Steven is an author of 11 bestselling authors. He's written 14 books in total, including The Art of Impossible, which is one of my favorites, The Future is Faster Than You Think, Stealing Fire, which everyone should read, The Rise of Superman, and Bold and Abundance, which he partnered with Peter Diamandis, who's the creator of the X Prize. Incredible collaboration there. His work has been nominated for 2 Pulitzer Prizes. which is an award for fantastic books. He's been translated into over 50 countries and appeared in over 100 publications, including New York Times, Wired, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, Time, and the Harvard Business Review. Alongside with his wife, Joy Nicholson, he's one of the co-founders of the Buddy Sue Hospice Home for Old Dogs canine elder care facility. And he tells us a little bit about that as well. So thank you very much for joining us here on this podcast. I know you are gonna absolutely love today's conversation with Stephen Kotler. Mr. Stephen Kotler, welcome to the podcast. It's an absolute honor, my friend.

It is great to be with you.

As I said just prior to recording, I've read many of your books, some of which I would put in the top of my favorite books ever. I always leave your book feeling inspired, feeling educated, and feeling like I have a clear path. You know, the most recent one, or the most recent one I've read, The Art of Impossible, Loved it. I think I've recommended to everyone that I, that I coach, everyone that I, that I know who's a high performance coach, and an absolutely phenomenal book. But you've written so many others that are just changing the scope of, of how people look at performance, from The Rise of Superman, uh, and now into a brand new one that I hope to dig into today. So I really appreciate you making the time, and most of all, I appreciate who you are as a human.

Thank you so much. It's really nice of you to say.

Yeah. One of the things that I say that inspires me most is I'm inspired by people who begin where everyone else ends. That's really what drives me in life. These are the people that I seek on to get on the podcast, people who are, you know, they, when things start to get hard, they start to dig in. And that's the feeling I get every time I read your book. It's why it kind of gives me the warm and fuzzies. I'm like, Stephen knows exactly where I'm coming from. So I'd love to talk about how this became a mission for you. So like, where did, where did the pursuit of What I would paraphrase is the pursuit of excellence, but I'd love to hear how you would paraphrase kind of your mission right now.

Oh, my mission has always been the same. I mean, I only— the same 3 things has always been. I want to write books that have a deep impact, and really, I want to make great art more. That's really at the heart of that work. I want to advance flow science and research and training. And I've been trying to make the world a better place for animals. That's all I do, right? It falls into one of those three categories. And really, that's all I've sort of ever done, as far as I can tell.

So you're obviously very well known around the world for flow. Was your research into that inspired by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, or was that something that you found after you kind of had an interest in that?

A lot of this starts for me. I become a journalist in the early 1990s, and two things are really interesting to me. Journalism is this amazing career. You get to exploit your curiosities, and I covered everything. I mean, I had a music column for a decade. I did a lot of different stuff, but what I was obsessed with, really interested in how human beings work and human performance, but I had zero interest in psychology. I thought psychology was squishy. It was subjective. It was individual. I didn't like it, didn't trust it. And especially if you go into the peak performance literature, '80s and '90s when I was starting to poke at this. Okay, so enough said there. I was fascinated with neuroscience, and in the '90s, neuroscience was really cool because prior to that, it was just, what's this cluster of neurons doing and what's it called? And suddenly in the '90s, we're talking about emotions. They're a real topic. And behavior, right, is suddenly becoming a realer topic. And consciousness and all these things that I was really interested in. And simultaneously, I was obsessed with action and adventure sports, surfing, skiing, rock climbing, snowboarding, and the like. And if you know anything about action adventure sports in the 1990s, the '90s are often referred to as the era of impossible because more impossible, never been done before, never gonna be done feats occurred. And they were like so frequently in all these sports that people would do the impossible and 3 days later somebody was iterating on it and right there innovating around the impossible. And it was over and over and over again. And I was living in these communities and I knew these athletes and I knew sort of enough about peak performance in the '90s to know that these athletes were defying all expectation, not just in their performance, but everybody I knew, they had no natural advantages. They had shitty childhoods, like horrible upbringings. Many of them had very little education. They had no money. There's a ton of risk taken. There's a ton of substance abuse. And normally, if you put those things together in a community, people die young or go to jail. They do not reinvent what's possible with the human species. So what the hell was going on was my core question. In starting to talk to the athletes across the board, it didn't matter what sport we were in, I was hearing stories of flow. And the descriptions at that point were almost like mystical experiences, right? Nobody even had a language for this stuff that was really coherent. But it was weird. You know, if you spend any time around action adventure sport athletes, they're very literal people. As a general rule, they're literal people. And some of it comes from spending your life, you know, in fall-you-die situations. Like, there's a certain kind of truth-telling and literalness in everything. And yet I'm hearing the same crazy language around flow out of all of their mouths. And that was where it started to catch my attention. And I came in through the neurobiology, so it wasn't I was writing A Small Furry Prayer, which was already my second book on flow. I was— it was a book about the relationship with humans and animals, and I needed to know if dogs got into flow. I started to realize I was getting into flow states while running with my dogs in the backcountry, and that sounded crazy. And so at that point, I emailed Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi for the very first time, and that was how we met. But I had already been working on the neurobiology of flow. For 5 or 6 years by then. In fact, I will tell you something funny about that because all of the core idea that I laid out for where I thought flow came from neurobiologically in West of Jesus, my second book, really my first book on flow, my first nonfiction book, we just published a paper in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews on the first few seconds of flow, what happens in the brain as we transition into a flow state. And it is literally the same idea I have been working on since I wrote West of Jesus in like 2000 when I was doing that research. It's, you know, finally in 2023 or 2022, right when it came out, you know, I think I finished that puzzle.

I think so. I'd love to have you walk us through it because that's really interesting because I know you've written about it in a couple of your books and Some of the places where you speak online, you talk about the neurobiology, what's actually happening in the brain at that point. So first, if you could define flow, because I don't want to assume the audience knows what that is, and then if you want to talk a little bit about what's actually going on in the brain. For sure.

So flow is technically defined as an optimal state of consciousness, state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best. More specifically, refers to any of those moments of rapt attention, total absorption. You get so focused on the task at hand and everything else just seems to disappear. Sense of self-consciousness is going to diminish. Time's going to pass strangely. Sometimes it'll slow down and get that freeze frame effect. Maybe you've been in a car crash. Much more frequently, it speeds up and 5 hours go by in like 5 minutes. And throughout, all aspects of performance, mental and physical, go through the roof. So, that's flow. Now, When psychologists define flow, they take it one step further. They say, hey, the state has 6 core phenomenological characteristics, ways the state makes you feel. I just listed a bunch of them. It's complete concentration on the task at hand, merger of action awareness, the diminishment of self, time passes strangely. We don't feel peak performance. We feel a sense of control. I'm controlling things I can't normally control. And finally, psychologists talk about the experience as autotelic. It's a fancy way of saying an end in itself. It means that flow is so ecstatic, so joyous, so underpinned by addictive motivational neurochemistry that it is one of, if not the most pleasurable experience on Earth. And not just pleasure, but meaning and well-being and overall life satisfaction. People who score off the charts for all those things are the people with the most flow in their lives. Neurobiologically, there's an entire sort of suite of things that we are looking at. It stretches from— if you're trying to— brainwaves, there's a baseline signature for flow which appears to be sort of between alpha and theta.

Is that consistent across everyone?

No. In a second, I'll talk about, like, at a network level, we think we've seen a couple of things that are consistent across everyone. But this is work that was originally— well, so the chess work, going back to Adrian Groot's chess work, started it. There was some work done by Leslie Shearland when he was at Red Bull on this. And this is where this comes from. Other people seem to have confirmed it, but I think we need to look a little bit deeper at it. But the general idea is, yeah, you definitely spend time at the alpha theta borderline. Inflow. But every time you make a decision, right, there's a decision-making cycle, and the brain will pop up to high beta and whatever. And it seems like one of the big differences between peak performers and everybody else is when peak performers come out of that alpha theta borderline, they can smoothly move back to it, and most other people get hung up somewhere along the way. That seems to be one of the differences from a network level. Take it the next level out, One of the folks I got to co-write with in our paper for the first few seconds of flow was Dr. Richard Husky at UC Davis. He has done great work on what's going on at a network level in the brain. And there is still debate on, are these areas synchronous or are they metastable? But if you ignore that sort of neural dynamics question for a second, what you see is two networks working very much in alignment. The goal-directed network rooted in the basal ganglia. The flow is a goal-directed state. That network is very active. And then the executive control network is also very active. Executive control is what allows you to filter out task-irrelevant stimuli. Like when you talk about complete concentration on the present moment, the task at hand, that's that network doing that. So that's— things are pretty consistent. We see a lot of activity in the dopamine system, the norepinephrine system, the endocannabinoid system is very active. There's endorphins involved. And these are— these are— I mean, obviously there's a whole bunch of other neurochemistry involved. These are just the big reward neurochemicals. So when we talk about flow, why is flow so pleasurable? It seems we get 5 or 6 of the most potent reward chemicals the brain can produce in really high concentrations all at once, right? Dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, anandamide, endorphins. And just to put it in context, romantic love, when we fall in love, that is predominantly— this is Helen Fisher's work, it's not my work— that is predominantly norepinephrine and dopamine. So that's 2 of 5 of the pleasure chemicals. And if it's group flow, the social shared collective version, a team performing at their best, for example, you'll also start to get oxytocin. So an additional 6 pleasure chemicals. So this is the reason flow is so pleasurable. That's a quick and dirty version of the neuroscience. We can go wherever you want.

So now that you've identified flow so clearly for kind of a long time and an athlete or an extreme performer can identify that, hey, I'm approaching this state, or I know that I've been in this state before. Have you had any accounts of people like being able to acknowledge they're in it and be present and conscious of the fact they're in it? Or is this the type of thing that you realize after it's over? You're like, whoa, I was just in some zone there.

So this is one of the big differences. So flow is very trainable. Trainable, right? This is the work we've done at the Flow Research Collective. We're very good at it. And the state itself is very trainable. And it's not a binary, right? It's a 4-stage process. So flow is— you're not in the zone or out of the zone. There's a 4-stage cycle you move through to get into flow and out of flow and can't really skip steps, or it doesn't appear that you can skip steps. And there's precise kind of changes in the brain at any each level. The point is that flow states have triggers as well. Preconditions lead to more flow. So, if you're interested in more flow, that's sort of your toolkit. And knowing where in the flow cycle to deploy which trigger starts to make things reliable and repeatable. And yes, people who are better at this stuff can go, "Oh, wow, I'm in flow." So, let me give you an example. I'm a skier. I'll be in flow all the time when I'm skiing. On the chairlift, I might drift out a bit depending on what kinds of conversations I'm having. But it seems like people who are really good at it can recognize when they're in the zone and really know how to stretch it out and deepen it. So there's certain triggers you can utilize when you're actually in flow. They're better used in flow than trying to get into the state. They're better used to extend the state a little bit. And there's ways to do that as well. So, yeah, that was one of the things that was tricky. So, yeah, I'll say this and then I'll come back to this comment. So, one of the things that's tricky with people is usually in the beginning when people are in a flow state for the first couple of times, they're like stoned teenagers, right? Oh, look at the sky, look at the moon. They don't realize this is a peak performance state. You can make it reliable and repeatable. It's generally rarer than a lot of other states and you want to use it. right? You don't wanna, you don't wanna like just sort of like flit it away and like drift away. So learning to recognize when you're in flow without knocking yourself out of the state can take some practice. It's definitely, you know, it's definitely something you have to learn how to do through experience a little bit.

Yeah, I've certainly experienced that. I do a lot of downhill mountain biking and when, you know, when you're whizzing between trees and you're like millimeters away from death, you're like, there's definitely moments where you're like, oh yeah, I know where I am now. And I feel like I can speed up. Like, I'm like, it's like the Jedi, the Force is with you kind of scenario. You just, you just, body just knows what to do. You just know where to go.

So couple of things. One, I don't know if you know this or not, but you are sped up. But dopamine and norepinephrine, among their many attributes, they enhance both fast twitch muscle response and pattern recognition. So the ability to see and detect patterns and signal and noise. So one of the reasons everything is sped up is for those reasons, though, when there's dopamine in our system, time speeds up anyways. One of the fastest ways to influence time perception in the brain.

Would you be willing to share the 4 steps, or do you want people to go and pick up the books?

Oh, sure. I'm happy to talk about that. This research originally was done by Herbert Benson at Harvard, Harvard cardiologist. He wanted to rename flow the breakout principle to go along with his relaxation response because that wasn't a bad enough name. Now we're going to try to rename. But anyways, luckily that one didn't happen. But the biochemistry was really good. We've been working to try to publish on this as well and advance a little bit. But the front end of a flow state, there is a struggle phase. So flow is essentially what happens after we've learned a bunch of new information, sort of chunk that information, putting together all those new chunks together as one bigger action plan schema, larger chunk kind of thing. But you still have to learn all those skills sort of individually before they can sort of come together and flow some struggle. That's what we're doing. And this could be— we could be talking about athletics, right? Learning how to swing a baseball bat. There's a million You step through the pitch, keep your eye on the ball, use your hips, follow through on the swing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. A lot of those things are learned individually. They're all put together, right? They'll come together and flow. This could be me as a writer, right? Writing is a very flowy experience, but the front end of a book, not a very flowy experience. I'm doing tons of research. I'm making phone calls. I'm reading books. I'm reading papers. I got diagrams all over my office. It's not flowy once it starts to come together. So that's stage 1, is a struggle phase. And what's really important to know for people about the struggle phase is frustration is a built-in part of the process. You are absolutely going to be frustrated and struggle. In fact, the research shows, in a sense, the more frustrated you get, the better it is. There's a bunch of different reasons that have to do with how the subconscious mind processes information. But the more you overload it— and we know working memory will hold 7 items of facts, and most of us tap out after 4 concepts. So if you're trying to learn anything complicated, you're going to get frustrated. You're going to overload working memory, and that's actually a sign you're moving in the right direction. So most people get frustrated and think, I'm doing something wrong, bad person. You start judging yourself. All those programs start running, and this work is actually a sign that you're moving exactly the right direction. You want to get to the point right where your head feels like it's about to explode. And then take your mind off the problem. It's a release phase. It's literally— you just want your conscious brain to pass the problem over to your subconscious. What works best is low-grade physical exercise. So this is not going to the gym and going hard. This is going for a long walk, a 20-minute walk in nature. This is gardening or building model airplanes or anything that sort of just gets your body a little bit involved so you can get a little bit out of your head. The third stage itself is the flow state. And on the back end of the flow state, there's a recovery phase. Flow is biologically expensive state to produce. So there's recovery on the back end that's required. And because flow significantly accelerates learning, studies by the US Department of Defense, 240% to 500% above baseline for skills acquisition in flow among soldiers. So you really, you're going to need Delta wave sleep, right? For to pass anything you've learned in flow, not only do you have to just like, you need an active recovery protocol in place, but you also are gonna need a good night's sleep on the backend to actually gain the benefits of flow.

So you mentioned, you know, kind of special forces type people, are they using this protocol repeatedly to try to acquire skills more reliably?

So, this study actually wasn't done on special forces. It was done on marksmen. I want to say target— it was target acquisition shooters. We have, we have done work with special forces, but no, I don't know what you know about the special forces community, but sleep is a major problem. Huge, huge, huge problem. And recovery is a huge problem. In fact, most of the— a lot of the work that we do with peak performers tends to be on the recovery side. It's the piece that so many peak performers tend to get wrong. We often have to start there.

I'd love to actually talk about that because you're right. I mean, some of the guys I work with are burning the candle at both ends. I'm going to bed at midnight, I'm waking up at 5, taking as many cups of coffee as I need to get through. I can only imagine that's interfering with your ability to get in the flow. Have you seen being overstimulated?

Yeah, no, the research is unbelievably clear. We humans need 7 to 8 hours of sleep a night, period. It's not like there's really almost no debate on this. I always tell hard chargers, if you have to use your brain at all, you're out of your mind. And here's the great example. The Wonderlic, which is what they give pro football players, is available for free online. It's one of the shorter intelligence tests. Take it one day after you've slept 7 to 8 hours and then take it 2 weeks later after you slept 4 hours and are powering off long on coffee and see how many IQ points dumber you are. And that'll end that. There's a bunch of stuff going on, but the biggest problem that people don't understand is when you are running on lack of sleep, your brain is much more likely to treat almost every situation you're in as a threat. You're going to overproduce cortisol. You're going to overproduce norepinephrine. There are massive penalties for this. There's all kinds of physiological penalties, too. It's really bad for your system. But the more norepinephrine in your system, you'll lock yourself out of flow. You'll block learning. You shut down creativity. So the more fear, nervousness in your system, the more logical and linear, tried and true. Safe, secure, what worked a million times before solutions the brain wants. It shuts down the entire upper portion of your creative brain by just not getting enough sleep for those reasons. It's really, really a kooky thing you don't want to mess with.

How much is unconscious competence a part of achieving flow? Like you spoke about bringing all these pieces together. Is that ultimately what we're trying to achieve? Is this concept of like—

It turns out flow. So there's been a bunch of different arguments about where does flow come from, where did it evolve from, what's its purpose? And there's like 6 or 7 different answers and they're all probably right. But one of the answers that appears to be right is flow is literally a sign of mastery. So you mentioned unconscious competence. Flow is the sign that you've developed competence. Why is it when we were certain skill, it's good to know when you've mastered a skill. So the thing, especially from an evolutionary purpose, is you don't want to go try to hunt down a tiger until you've mastered the spear kind of thing. So it's good to know when those skills are combined. So there's some thinking that's Flow is actually the sign of mastery and that unconscious competence. Now, I will also say that though I cannot prove this to you in the science at all, I can just tell you anecdotally and from 30 years of looking at this, this is what I consistently see. One of the things that happens is flow, you tend to get flow the first time all the skills come together. The day you want to celebrate is the day you got that same performance with no flow and it was miserable. And usually that's a couple months later, right? So usually all this stuff comes together in flow and it's a taste of what's actually possible and takes you a couple more months to get to the point that you could do all that same stuff without flow. And that's usually a sign that you're going to get another really big deep flow state that comes next and that unlocks sort of the next level. And it seems to work that way. Yes, it's the sign of unconscious competence, but it also like to do it when you're not in flow, when you're not feeling your best. That usually takes a little while longer. But I always say those are my favorite days on the mountain. I mean, they're horrible days, right? They feel terrible on the inside. Or a day when I'm in the gym and I'm able to hit a max lift. Feeling terrible. That's always an awesome day because I'm like, okay, if I feel this bad that I could do this, good, the upper limit is now someplace higher.

Very cool. You have this uncanny ability to take things that are seemingly incredibly complex or hard to define and then create a process around them. So, The Art of Impossible, The Habit of Ferocity, Flow, you literally take these things that people are these kind of obscure places that people get to or want to get to, and you create processes behind them. How much of that would you say is like inherent in your personality versus attributable to flow? Like, you actually—

I want to know how things work. I need to understand them. And I'm— and I don't think I'm that smart, so I have to like break it down into really simple steps to figure out how it works. And that— so that's just me trying to understand. And there's a very In particular, one of the advantages I think I had in doing a lot of this work is by the time I graduated college, I was already sort of a novelist working on— and if when you have to hold 500 pages in your head and move them and be able to move them around, those sorts of things, what came first, what came second, those sorts of questions become really, really important. And when you're telling other people's stories, when you're writing long magazine articles, the same sort of set of skills of just like, you got to put this stuff in an order in your head that you can move it around. Otherwise, you don't get to have this career. So those two things, somehow my need to understand things and then my need to be able to move large amounts of information around in my head to do my job, those two things came together and I think really worked well for me. But that was the same frustration I had with psychology. It was one of the reasons why it took me a really long time to truly understand how brilliant, um, he really was because the psychology was not practical enough. It wasn't like— that's why the neurobiology caught my attention. I was like, this stuff is practical, it's useful.

Pardon the interruption, and thanks for tuning in to Flow Research Collective Radio. If you're listening to this, here's a bold bet I'm willing to make about you. My guess is even though you're a high performer, you're still only performing performing at about half of your capacity. Maybe even 10%. Now even if I'm wrong, assuming that you're performing at less than your full potential opens up the possibility for you to improve. And that's good news when you've already outperformed most of your peers by a long shot, you've got a skill stack that people envy, that's why you earn what you earn, and yet you're just warming up. You know those days when you knock out more in your morning than most do in an entire day? Well, what if you could perform at that level every day? Reliably?

Consistently?

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

All the best.

Yeah, that's fascinating. So you shifted from, you know, obviously being a journalist to discovering and deeply pursuing flow and then deeply pursuing high levels of performance. You've studied performance of CEOs in Silicon Valley and now the highest level kind of extreme athletes. Talk to me about like your, your, your cognitive direction. So is it just like you find things that you're really interested in and you pursue those? Or is it, you know, what, what is it that, that's your, your guiding light? So your, your north star, where, like, what's the, what's guiding your, these decisions?

Well, I, I mean, my curiosity is what's gotten these decisions more than anything else. But yeah, I mean, the north star was always what does it take to do the impossible? And usually whenever you see the impossible become possible, you see people extending human capability and harnessing disruptive technology. So I've written 7 books on disruptive technology. I've written 8 books or 7 books on extending human capability. And the projects are very like in our country, the new book, which is on peak performance aging, that was a topic I started poking at in the 2000s, right? Really, really early, looking at everything from, like, longevity science to regenerative medicine. Really early days there. You know, I was already running peak performance aging experiments because my wife and I run a hospice care sanctuary for dogs, and we have for a very— 20 years now. And so we were doing— this was like really hardcore applied work because our our specialty in our dog work is like the worst case scenarios you can find. Like if you're a 3-legged, 1-eye geriatric Chihuahua with an abusive past, cancer, heart disease, flatulence, and 4 other problems, you're our guy. So we had been doing healing work there. And then it just— other things start to fold into those things. That's what becomes the stuff that you see in public are those things where everything I've been curious about starts to fold into it. And that's what happened with Peak Performance Aging. So, Mike, for example, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, he's really famous for his books on flow, but he wrote more books on adult development and flow as an engine for adult development and flow and aging and well-being and all those questions than he did the flow stuff that most people are familiar with. So some of it was just like the natural evolution following my own field right in. And I just, you know, I ended up following Mike's footsteps in that one very much. And it was a lot of our country came out of a last, the last conversation I had with Mike, which is the last conversation we had before he died. And it was, that was, I'd been working on, but it was the impetus to write it, like conversation with him finally. Sort of snapped it all together and I was like, okay, yeah, now I see a way forward. So it's usually that things are just— threads are coming together and they're coming together and they're coming together. And finally I'm like, oh yeah, I got to write a book about this.

Yeah. So that's why I asked the question. I'm trying to find the common thread, right? Like when people are doing something so repeatedly, like you are always putting out these perennial bestsellers, I'm just trying to identify what in your mind is the common driving thread. So if it's doing the impossible as a human, how then do we— the question then I think that you're asking is then How then do we rapidly or repeatedly do the impossible? So you're trying to ultimately kind of systematize and objectify recreating the impossible. Is that paraphrasing kind of like where this has come from?

Yes, it's just peak human performance and how does that work, right? Like, what's the neurobiology of peak human performance? And it turns out, so the impossible quote unquote, the impossible is just a really good shorthand for— there's no such thing as the impossible, right? What I mean, whatever we've called the impossible is just like what we haven't gotten to yet. Now, it may turn out to be impossible, but like, right? So, like, I just use it— to me, it's a shorthand for like, if you're looking for examples of human peak performance, whether it's, you know, people taking sci-fi ideas and turning them to sci-fi technologies, or somebody setting a new 100-meter sprint record, you're looking at peak performance, right? So one of the reasons I started in action sport athletes for studying flow, for example, is it was very hard in early research. Were your subjects in flow or not in flow? But at the upper level of action sports, if you're living through the experience, you were in flow. There's just, you know what I mean? There's just no other way to do a lot of the stuff that's gone on. So it was just a really good, okay, feedback. Now I know. I mean, now we've got a bunch of different ways to measure and I can take it, we can take different approaches. But when I was starting, how do you know your research subject is in flow was a really complicated question.

Yeah. So what I'm getting to is how can we predictably and reliably reproduce these peak performance states, right? So it sounds like you've kind of started to create these subcategories. So it sounds like physical fitness is a big part of it. It sounds like mental fitness and ultimately focus is a big part of it. It sounds like mastery is a big part of it. Are there other, there are other facets that I'm missing that you're like, hey, this is a big piece?

Well, so depends where we are. Are we talking about peak performance aging? Are we talking about peak performance? Because there are slight differences, but if it's peak performance, it's the work that was an art of the impossible. As you know, if we're talking about, essentially if we're talking about peak performance, there are 5 physical categories, right? Strength, stamina, agility, balance, and flexibility. Those are the basic 5 core. You know, there's a bunch of other stuff in and around. We've got fast twitch muscle response and stabilizers versus prime movers and all that stuff. But like, those 5 categories that you want to be training. And turns out on the cognitive side, when we talk about cognitive peak performance, we're talking about 4 categories. There's a bunch of subheadings under these categories, but process always starts with motivation. Then there's a bunch of things under the heading of learning, then a bunch of things under the heading of creativity, and then finally a bunch of things under the heading of flow. That's the full suite for cognitive peak performance. And the way I like to think about the cognitive suite, and I talk about this in The Art of Impossible, is motivation gets you into that game. Any peak performance game, motivation is what gets you there. Learning allows you to continue to play. Creativity is how you steer, especially when you're steering towards impossible, hard-to-get-to challenges. And then flow, optimum performance, how you amplify the results kind of beyond all reasonable expectations. Flow will also boost everything on the physical side as well, or a lot of the things on the physical side as well, but also amplifies all the mental stuff.

All right, that was a great kind of— all this was for me leading up to this most recent book. I just wanted to understand the, the path and, you know, ultimately reproducing the highest level, highest level of physical capability that we can cognitively, certainly, and physically. And now we land on your most recent book, Gnar Country, which is coming out, I believe, in February.

It is.

All right, so tell me about that. So what, well, first, what does that mean? What does Gnar Country mean?

Gnar is action sports slang, short for gnarly.

Gnarly.

Yep. And I said earlier, action sport athletes are really, really literal. When you use the term gnarly, It has a very specific meaning. It is describing an environment that is high in perceived risk and high in actual risk. Country, any terrain, landscape, fictitious or real, right?

Makes sense.

But as it turns out, nar-country is a great description of our later years. This is a book about peak performance aging, right? Nar-country is a great description of our later years, high in perceived risk, high in actual risk. And it turns out once you sort of understand peak performance aging, it's a really good description of sort of the gritty mindset that you need to thrive in the second half of our lives. So that's where the title comes from.

All right, you're talking my language. What does that look like? I wanna thrive in the second half of my life. Let, let's start to decode it. Let's start to uncouple what this looks like.

Don't let me not talk about mindset in a second. It's just, of course. Okay. But I'm gonna start someplace else. I wanna start with the traditional theory of aging, which I'm, guessing most of your listeners know enough and no longer subscribe to. But let's just start there. And I like to call it the long, slow rot theory. And it's the idea that dominated the 20th century and still dominates today, that all of our physical skills, all of our mental skills decline over time, and there is nothing we can do to stop this slide. And it turns out that's not true at all. The vast majority, not all yet, but the vast majority of the skills that we used to think declined over time, there's nothing we can do to stop the slide. They certainly do decline over time, but it turns out they're all use-it-or-lose-it skills. And if you never really stop training these skills and you really get serious about them, you can hang on to them, even advance them so much longer in life than anybody thought possible. So that's overall first picture. Second thing I need to tell you is a little bit more on the cognitive side. Turns out that rather than like all of our mental skills falling off a cliff as we enter our 50s, because certain genes only get activated with experience and a bunch of other neurobiological reasons, you gain access to a legitimate suite of cognitive superpowers in our 50s. So the first thing that happens is we're getting access to whole new levels of intelligence that open up for us, right? We get to start seeing things from multiple perspectives. So everything from abstract reasoning to problem solving to analytical thinking improves.

Is this a result of simply something biologically that happens at a certain age, or is this a result of the accumulation of—

I'll go through the rest of the biology. Some of the genes get active. What happens more than anything else is the two hemispheres of the brain they sort of work in opposition for most of our life. They start to work together like never before in our 50s. It gets really good in our 60s and 70s, but it starts in our 50s. The other thing that happens is the brain starts to utilize underutilized regions. So regions that haven't been colonized, the brain will go, oh, there's some empty space. Let's be redundant. Let's colonize that. Let's use that, make some new neural nets. Et cetera. All those things start happening in our 50s. And as a result, new levels of intelligence, whole new levels of creativity. And this includes mostly divergent thinking. So, outside the box thinking, the hardest area to train. We also gain access to whole new levels of empathy and wisdom. And wisdom is a very distinct neurobiological trait. So, all those things start coming online in our 50s. What is at the heart in our country, and you get a kick out of this, is— so I had been doing this work and looking at all these ideas for a while, but one of those— so one of the classical saws is that you can't teach an old dog new tricks. And outside of all this research that I'm talking about, there was stuff coming out of flow science, out of embodied cognition, a couple other places. And I said, If this stuff is right in theory, you should be able to learn really difficult, even impossible skills later in life than anybody thought possible. And so I took a bunch of those ideas, I blended them together into a protocol, and I decided to see if I could teach myself how to park ski in my 50s. And park skiing is the discipline in skiing that involves doing tricks off rails and on boxes and wall rides and over jumps. It is very, very acrobatic. It is, it is very dangerous. And there's a general rule for about 11 different biological reasons that I'm happy to go into. There's general thinking that if you haven't learned how to bobski over the age of 35, it's going to be really difficult. And over 40, 45, 50, crazy impossible is what you hear. And I, I said, no, I don't think that's going to be the case. Let's, let's see. And we found a bunch of different ways to measure. I mean, I basically made a trick list, 20 tricks that was essentially zero. I had zero skills when I went in, by the way. Knew no tricks. Was a good skier, but couldn't barge ski at all. And these 20 tricks would've got me from zero to intermediate. And I thought, "If it takes 5 years, cool, whatever." It took under a season for me to— And my ski partner, who's younger than me and a former sponsored athlete, but had walked away from the sport 'cause he got injured, had a family, job, whatever. He was using the same protocol and he went ridiculously far, ridiculously fast. And we thought, okay, this is cool. This is the world's smallest pilot study, but it's intriguing. And so we then took those same ideas and I can talk a little bit more about what we did, but, and then took 17 older adults ages 30 to 68. And in 4 days on a mountain together, taught all of them how to park ski or snowboard. And then we actually removed the action sports from the protocol and just used it as a peak performance aging protocol and ran about 500 people through it just to see if they found it incredibly useful in their lives. And it's now a new class with the Flow Research Collective. But that the experiment, the ski experiments themselves are what are at the heart of the book.

Well, sign me up, man. What does that look like? So, so what first comes to mind is you're, you're a very healthy, fit guy, at least I assume so. You look very fit and healthy. You're obviously training. You're obviously, you know, with high level competency in skiing. Is that a prerequisite to be able to do these things? Like, who are these people that you pulled into this? Yeah.

So, and you, by the way, don't take my word for it. Go to the website, which is www.narcountry.com. Watch the Peak Performance Aging Experiment video and read the white paper. So, just take a look at what it looks like. No, in fact, the vast majority of the people in the learning class were intermediate athletes. Now, let me tell you what we did. Let me tell you why we did it. And because it's one, I have to back up and tell you something about flow states. We talked about how flow amplifies learning and we talked about how flow has triggers. One of the things that triggers flow is creativity. So, flow follows focus. It only shows up when all of our attention is in the right here, right now. So, all of flow's triggers drive attention into the present moment. They do a bunch of different ways. One of the ways they do it is by producing dopamine. Dopamine, when it's in our system, we feel a lot of excitement, curiosity, we pay a lot of attention. When we link ideas together in a novel way, that's creativity. That produces dopamine. That's pattern recognition. Pattern recognition is so fundamental to survival. It's what all neurons do at a really basic level. We get little squirts of dopamine when you creatively interpret a terrain feature. When you look at a jump and go, oh, I don't have to hit the jump, I can roll over the knuckle and do this on it, or whatever it is. That's pattern recognition. So by creatively interpreting terrain features, we're producing little bits of dopamine. The goal was to teach— we took park skiing and park riding and broke it down into 8 foundational movements, a crouch, a jump, a slash, a grind, a 180, just the movement of a 180 and a 360. The goal was not to teach anybody how to park ski. We weren't going to teach tricks. We're going to teach you how to do these new movements and how you could use them to interpret terrain in a new way. Along the way, we figured these creative decision-making things will start producing dopamine, will drop people into flow, and flow will take care of the learning and the trick progression for us. And that's exactly what happened. So we focused on 2 movement patterns a day on the hill. And, and work that way. The goal was to go 1 inch at a time, start with an established movement path, something you can do 100% of the time with zero fear and right, no, no problems. And intermediate skiers, everybody there could stop for a hockey stop, right? Where you throw your skis or your snowboard sideways and you stop because everybody was at least an intermediate. That's a grind. To slash also, depending on which way your body position is and where you're aiming on the hill. So everybody already had one basic move that I knew they could do. They also— we would— we often started there. Like, instead of hockey stopping on flat ground, here, here's— let's— here's a slightly raised snow berm. Let's grind across it. And like little snow grinds and things like that was where we started with it and, um, and moved and built up from there. So this one inch at a time protocol, and we used a basically a follow-the-leader style protocol. So the goal was follow the person in front of you, do what they did if you can do it. If you can't do it, just do— if they threw a 360 in the air and you can't do that, throw a sliding 360 on the surface of the snow. If that's too much for you, throw a 180 sliding spin, progress it down to wherever you are, 1 inch at a time. And a lot of the— like, we used a lot of really best embodied cognitive movement protocols with very little talking. And we, in fact, wouldn't allow— so flow, one of the things that happens in flow is you get a large shutdown of the prefrontal cortex. It's called localized transient hypofrontality. Is the technical term for it. And if you start talking about yourself, thinking about yourself, getting self-conscious, all that stuff, the prefrontal cortex gets active and it blocks flow, right? So it was really important. One of our rules is when you're on the chairlift, don't ask people personal questions. Don't talk about current events. Anything that's going to get you emotionally involved in the prefrontal cortex, it's off limits. You can talk about the you're skiing and you can make people laugh, or you keep your mouth shut. And that was one of the rules we had. So, uh, in fact, a lot of what we did on the mountain was, uh, it was more about what we didn't do and a lot less about what we did. We had a very minimal protocol, um, and didn't do a million other things that most other instructors would normally do. We stripped things away rather than added them in.

So how does an average person do this, assuming not everyone's going to want to get out there and ski?

Well, let's— I mean, so let's talk about the moral of all this story. There's two things I want to talk about because I want to stay with mindset. So you asked me earlier, where does all this start? And I want to say this may not be true with general peak performance, though I think general peak performance, you need an internal locus locus of control, not an external locus of control. I think with peak performance aging, it has to start with mindset. The research is really outstanding on mindset and aging. A positive mindset towards aging— I am thrilled, I'm excited about what the second half of my life holds— will add an additional 7.5 years of health and longevity to your lifespan. It's a shocking number, and it's so well established. Like, the data goes all the way back to 1975. Ellen Langer was working on this at Harvard. There's the Ohio study of longitudinal study of aging and retirement, a 20-year study from '75 to '95 that looked at the impact of mindset on aging. And that's— 7.5 years came out of that, among other studies. So you got to start there.

Just so the audience knows, locus of control internal, I'm in control of my destiny and my outcomes. Versus something else being in control.

Yeah. And basically, I don't think there's a whole lot of, like, a positive mindset towards aging is like an internal locus of control as well, right? You're believing that you can have an impact on the second half of life. So you definitely got to start there. Now, if I were to summarize peak performance aging, everything in a sentence, and then we can spend the rest of our time together breaking down what these words actually mean. You are interested in engaging in challenging social and creative activities that demand dynamic, deliberate play in novel outdoor environments.

It sounds like exactly the same thing you should be doing with your children before the age of 7, right?

Well, wait a minute. Here's the craziest thing. It turns out there are intervention windows that are exceptionally critical And peak performance aging starts really young also. And there's this young pre-7 window for a lot of this stuff. But yeah, the exact same things apply, but absolutely crucial. And this is the dynamic, deliberate, play-based approach. Dynamic literally is just a fancy way of saying there's 5 categories of functional fitness. Train them all at the same fucking time, right? Like, do it, do it all at once.

Get outside, play with your buddies, make it at a high level, be creative with it, create. So I think, I think where people go wrong is they have fear of like, am I doing it wrong? So it sounds like creativity is like, there's no such thing, just go.

Yeah, that, well, that, I mean, the thing about the play, remember, is the first thing that goes, nobody fails when they play. There's a right? Like, you can't— that's play. Is that— that's where— I mean, deliberate play is a very specific thing. I don't know if you're familiar with the term. It's repetition without repetition. Yeah. Okay. But I'm using it that way, but I'm also saying, hey, classic play stuff. You cannot judge yourself. That was the, the biggest deal with our athletes or our research subjects and the people Performance Aging was one was getting them over a ton of— and there was a ton of fear. Like, we had a free meeting and there were a couple of— there were like 4 people in there in their later 60s. And one of the guys was like really crushing me. He was like, I have been skiing for over 40 years. I've never left the ground and I'm not going to start now. We were all like, okay, absolutely. Don't have to. Don't hurt us. We got you. He was, of course, in the air, like, literally, I think, 4 hours later we had him in the air. But that was besides the point. It was really— once there was a little bit of fear, but mostly it was— so this is a really funny— it was really funny and really stuck with me. First time we approached it, we were at Northstar and we sort of— everybody sort of skied through the kiddie park and then we got to the big park. And there's this big giant, like, it's a heavy medium to large size jump, and we're at the top of it, and there's, you know, 30 people, and everybody's terrified. And I just skied over the knuckle and just spun in a circle on the knuckle and skied off the other side just to show them that, like, that counts too. Like, it's literally like, this is a mound of snow, do something creative with the mound of snow. You don't have to hit that giant kicker to do something creative with it. And after that run, like 7 or 8 different people came up to me and they were like, oh my God, I had no idea you could just do that. And I was like, yeah, of course. Like, that's the whole point here is once you get past the like, oh my God, I'm not brave enough to— who the fuck's brave enough to hit a 30-foot kicker if they've never been in the air before? Like, that'd be insane. But everybody can do something on the knuckle and have a really amazing time. And it's a crazy sensation that they haven't experienced before because it's a weird round mountain of snow. And that's what we're getting after. Once flow— once you're in flow, flow is peak performance. All kinds of abilities go up. Then we can start trying to learn some of these harder moves and things like that because you're already primed for it. But like, let's have some fun. Let's play and not judge ourselves to give ourselves a chance to learn. I always say this is always the problem with passion too. People often want— they really want mature passion and they forget that passion on the front end is just a mild curiosity.

Curiosity.

Right. It grows into passion. But you think about They always think, you know, yes, for a basketball example, people talk like LeBron James in the finals, howling in for a windmill dunk or, you know, take your pick. You're like, well, yeah, that's, you know, passion after 40 years of working at it. It started— he was like a 5-year-old trying to sink baskets in his driveway. That's what it looks like on the front end. And so you have to like sort of forgive yourself for like not looking like mature LeBron and looking like a little kid. But that's where it starts for everyone.

Yeah. So it sounds like certain base level of physical competency, physical capability has to be there. So physical fitness is a part of it. Like you wouldn't jump off a ski hill if you couldn't land it and confident you weren't gonna tear your hamstring or something like that. So there has to be a certain base level and then the willingness to play and be creative and explore. And ultimately the more repetitions you get into that, it becomes, oh, I'm gonna try this. So it becomes confidence and then it becomes confidence becomes competency and competency then becomes flow. Does that sound like a general— you said it much more eloquently than me. I'm just trying to break it down in layman's terms.

I've got no disagreement with everything you just said. I think that's pretty right.

Yeah. So I think that to me is repeatable, right? Just like the willingness to explore, the physical capability to be able to explore safely, the willingness to explore and play and be creative, moving into confidence and competency.

Yeah, pretty much nailed it.

Anything else you wanted to reference as far as the book? I haven't had a chance to read the book yet. It's not out, so as soon as it comes out, I will be getting it. But is there anything else there that's really important for our audience to understand?

The only thing I want to mention really quickly before we jump is, so flow's most important trigger is what's known as the challenge-skill balance. The idea that we pay the most attention to the task at hand. Flow follows focus. When the challenge of the task slightly exceeds our skill set. So you want to stretch but not snap. One of the things is 5% is sort of metaphorically— we want to push 5% harder than our skills as a general rule to get into that sweet spot. That's how you sort of want to attack every challenge. But in older adults, this is one of our big insights, because of allostatic load, the basically the weight of trauma over time, that sweet spot shrinks. And often, especially if you've been like an athlete before or something like that, if you've done physical stuff before, you'll come back to sports, you'll come into the sport expecting too much of yourself. And so in this situation, we found go slow to go fast, go slow to go fast. That was one of the biggest unlocking moves. Play. And then once you start playing, even once you start making progress, hold yourself back more than you normally would, and you'll actually get farther over time.

Stephen, one thing I want to mention before we wrap is you do have a coaching program for people who want to learn how to engage in flow. You also have a coaching program for coaches that want to teach people how to engage in flow. Do you want to mention that?

Yeah. Anybody who's interested in And Zero to Danger is our flagship flow training. It's an 8-week training you go through with a PhD coach, psychologist, or neuroscientist as your coach. It is not— it's work, right? It's a hard class. We get phenomenal results. We see on average a 70-80% increase in flow. And for anybody who's curious, you can go to getmoreflow.com. Sorry for the cheesy URL, but it sticks in people's minds. Getmoreflow.com. And you can sign up and get a— it's a free hour-long peak performance coaching interview. People love those interviews. Nobody on my staff is allowed to hard sell anything, so nobody's going to try to sell you anything. They're really just going to listen to you and say, hey, this is what we're doing, here's how we think it might help, and that sort of thing. And that's free for anybody.

So do they take it and apply it to the things that you're trying to achieve flow in? So if I'm trying to write a book, will Do they teach me how to achieve flow in that state, or is there specific modalities that they encourage?

No. So flow is ubiquitous, right? It shows up anywhere and anyone provided certain initial conditions are met. So it's wherever you need to apply it. Usually people want more flow at work. That's the vast majority of folks we're training are C-suite executives.

Perfect. Stephen Collar, I'm incredibly grateful for your time, sir. I want to be respectful of it. Thank you for being here. Do you want to direct people? We sent a few URLs, but you want to send people to the book narcountry.com?

narcountry.com. And if this is going to run before the, before pub date, which is February 28th, we have an amazing presale campaign. We're giving away like $1,800 worth of free peak performance training tools with every presale, with every book you order, just because it helps me out so much in our campaigns. So narcountry.com, getmoreflow.com, and you guys are styled out. I'm stephencollar.com if you want to learn more about me.

We will link to all that and more in the show notes. Stephen Collar, thank you very much for being here, sir. Massive respect and gratitude.

Thank you, Ben. Fun hanging out.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. Question for you: when was the last time you were in the zone? When you were in so deep that afterward you were stunned by how much you got done even though very little time had passed? You've got bold goals, yet you're slammed with work and you're short on time. You know the heights of productivity you can achieve when you get into the zone because you've been there before, but it's a mild form of torture knowing how productive you're capable of being without access to that level of output all the time. So how do you get into the zone whenever you need it? There's still a lot that we don't know about flow states, but over the last 25 years of researching it, we've learned a lot, and we've shared our findings with thousands of high performers. You're in flow during those moments of total absorption when you're so focused on the task at hand that everything else disappears. Time passes strangely and performance just soars. I mean, motivation and productivity, creativity and innovation, learning and memory, cooperation and collaboration all skyrocket. In some studies, as high as 500% above baseline. Now imagine what you can accomplish if you could reliably increase your productivity by 5x. And the best part? Flow is accessible to everyone, anywhere, at any time. You don't need to pop a pill. You don't need to be surfing a monster wave. You don't need to meditate on a mountaintop for 10 years to get there. Flow is accessible to you right here, right now. If you'd like to amp up your productivity and get leverage on every second, go to getmoreflow.com. Just think of your 10 out of 10 days when you get more done in the morning than you typically do in a full day. Now imagine if you tapped into that level of performance with push-button consistency every day. All this is possible when you trigger flow frequently and reliably. Just go to getmoreflow.com, unblock your flow, and unlock peak performance.

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