Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Steven Kotler on Peak Performance Aging, Flow, and Being Rad EP 260

Episode Date: February 28, 2023

Today on Passion Struck, I welcome the Flow Research Collective's Executive Director, Steven Kotler. He is one of the top authorities on human performance and a multi-award-winning journalist. Eleven of Steven's books have achieved bestseller status: The Art of Impossible, The Rise of Superman, Bold, and Abundance. We discuss Gnar Country: Getting Old, Remaining Rad, his most recent publication. Steven Kotler and I Explore His New Book Gnar Country In this conversation, I discuss aging, skill mastery, neuroscience, psychology, and flow with Steven Kotler. In our culture, aging is seen as a physical and mental decline process as we age. Kotler encourages us to engage in "difficult" tasks that foster mastery and creativity to challenge our preconceived views about aging. We adjust our attitude toward aging when we can gradually push past our physical and mental boundaries, ultimately increasing our longevity.  Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/steven-kotler-on-peak-performance-aging/  Brought to you by Policygenius. With Policygenius, you can find life insurance policies that start at just $39 per month for $2 million of coverage. --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally! --► Prefer to watch this interview: https://youtu.be/TJbVVoa6GMg  --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles Want to find your purpose in life? I provide my six simple steps to achieving it - passionstruck.com/5-simple-steps-to-find-your-passion-in-life/ Want to hear my best interviews from 2022? Check out episode 233 on intentional greatness and episode 234 on intentional behavior change. ===== FOLLOW ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnrmiles.c0m  Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/   

Coming up next on the Passion Struck Podcast, the number one correlate for health and longevity and successful aging for good peak performance at just successful aging, strong legs. It's weird, but even in terms of cognitive benefits and preserved brain function, strong legs. There's a number of reasons they think that might be the case, but it doesn't change the fact that like,

wow, my quadriceps, my amp strings, my calves are gonna determine the quality of second half of my life in a really big way. Welcome to PassionStruct. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you

and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long form interviews, the rest of the week with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators,

scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Episode 260 of PassionStruck. Recently ranked by an interview at Valet is one of the top three podcasts for conversation. And thank you to each and every one of you to come back weekly to listen and learn, how to live better, be better, and impact the world. If you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here.

Or you wanna introduce this to a friend or family member. We now have episode starter packs, which are collections of our fans, favorite episodes that we organize in convenient topics to give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show. Just go to either Spotify or passionstruck.com slash starter packs to get started. In incase you missed my interviews from last week, they featured two amazing ones.

The first was with Oksana Masters. The United States most decorated Winter Olympian and we discuss her brand new memoir, The Hard Parts. I also interviewed Dr. Mark Heimann, one of the pioneers of functional medicine, a 14-time New York Times bestselling author, host of the Doctors Pharmacy Podcast, an author of the new book, Young Forever. Please go and check both of them out. I also wanted to say thank you so much for your continual support of the show and giving us ratings and reviews, which goes such a long way and not only promoting the popularity of the podcast, but more importantly, bringing more people into the passion-struck community. I also know our guests love to read your comments as well. Now, let's discuss today's episode.

In our later years, we may be of guys to slow down, but that doesn't have to be the case. In the last 10 years, advancements across a dozen fields have challenged traditional views on aging and our capabilities. Research suggests that we can maintain peak performance, much longer than previously believed. To validate these findings, our guest today, Steven Kotler, took matters into his own hands, and learned how to park ski at the age of 53. A feat that's considered nearly impossible for those who are over 35 due to various biological factors.

Join us as we explore his journey and surprising findings captured in his new book, Our Country, and how the latter half of our lives can become a prime opportunity to pursue our grandest aspirations. We will learn that aging is not just a physical process, but also a mental one too. And changing our mindset can add seven years to our lives. Our abilities, including strength and stamina, can now be seen as skills that we can maintain and also improve with proper training.

As we age, our brains undergo positive changes that if nurtured can lead to increased intelligence, wisdom, creativity, as well as empathy. Contrary to popular belief, older adults are often better at acquiring new skills than their younger counterparts. And lastly, far from being a time of solitude, depression, and cognitive decline, we will discuss why aging and be a fulfilling and meaningful experience. Stephen Kotler is a New York Times best-selling author, an award-winning journalist, and the executive director of the Flow Research Collective.

He is one of the world's leading experts on human performance. Steven is the author of 11 best-sellers, including the art of impossible. The future is faster than you think. Stealing fire, the rise of Superman, bold, and abundance. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me, be your hosting guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin. I am so ecstatic today to welcome Stephen Kotler to the PassionStark podcast. Good to do with you, John. Well, Stephen, I wanted to put your book up here and tell you congratulations on this fantastic

new book. Hopefully it's going to be your 12th best-selling book. I got such a good read out of it because you and I are pretty much the same age. And so I'm at this point where I'm doing everything I can to learn more about peak performance aging, which we're going to talk about a lot today. Perfect. Let's dive in. Well, I thought it would help to set the stage for our interview. If you could discuss with the audience how you came up with our country as the name of your book and why it's so important. So another country, the book is about peak performance aging.

So another country, the book is about peak performance aging. The title is actually Action Sports slang. Nar is short from Narley. And while people make fun of Action Sports slang all over the place and that's fine, it's actually a very precise slang. Action Sports athletes are performing in dangerous arenas and they use a very precise language and not is defined as any environment that is high in perceived risk and high in actual risk. Country is any landscape or terrain. Our country then is both a really great description of our later years, high in perceived risk, high in actual risk. And as it turns out,

when we dig under the hood of peak performance agent, it's a really fantastic description of sort of the gritty mindset it takes to thrive in our later years. So that's where the title comes from. I read in the book that you describe yourself as a child, as skinny, let's see, always scared and often slow. And the last person anyone would pick to be on a team,

we all have defining moments. How did your discovery of rock climbing and about with Lyme disease help you overcome the feeling of dirty old shame? And why in order to achieve this great peak performance, we all seek must we deal with personal forgiveness and traumas of the past? So this is really interesting research. One of the core ideas in the heart of our country is the idea of lifelong learning and the idea of taking non-hard challenges in the second half of our lives.

It turns out we actually have certain advantages in going after these challenges. Turns out in our 50s, we gain access to a suite of legitimate cognitive superpowers. It happens because there are certain genes that only activate over time, and there are changes in the brain that start coming online at that point. But if we do it right and we're going to come back to doing it right, because that's the sort of answer to your question. But if we do it right, we gain access to whole new levels of intelligence and really sort of abstract reasoning and thinking really like complicated rich areas of intelligence. There's whole new levels of creativity open up to Virgin thinking, which is the hardest

aspect to creativity to teach. We see whole new levels of empathy and wisdom, which basically says, how do we grow up? How do we open adults? I studied all this and what they found is that, while these changes do come online in their 50s, it's not guaranteed. And in order for them to be guaranteed, you have to pass your certain gateways of adult development along the way. By age 30, we need to solve the crisis of identity.

We need to know who we are in the world. By 40, it's matched bit. We need to type it between what we do in need to know who we are in the world. By 40, it's match fit. We need to type fit between what we do in the world and who we are. And then by 50, the answer to your question, self forgiveness and forgiveness of others becomes really key. And if we can't make these changes, we can't gain access to those new levels of intelligence and creativity and wisdom and apathy. So for me, as you pointed out, I spent a lot of my childhood not getting along very well with the jocks, with the traditional athletes, and it left some scars. And I didn't have most challenges when it comes to self-urgiveness, and forgiveness of others. I find that loving kindness meditation is sort of the tool you need for the job.

It works incredibly well. It's been incredibly well researched. The neuroscience loving kindness meditation, the passion is fantastic. But this was like something that was bigger than that. And I couldn't put it down that way. It wasn't going to go away. And so in a sense, I did a fairly crazy athletic quest

of my own as a way to try to forgive my past. I had no idea honestly, John, I started out, it was going to work. I just didn't have any other ideas. It turned out it did work and that's talked about throughout the book, but I was a shock, I think, as anybody else, that actually my crazy, glad worked. Well, you are one of the leading experts on the science of peak performance and flow. And you wrote a fantastic playbook on it in a book called The Art of Impossible, which I would highly encourage the audience to read if you want a good backdrop into peak performance. And as you and I talked about before, this podcast is focused on,

how do you create an intentional life? And like you, I believe that any one of us can achieve peak performance and that has to do a lot with the culmination of our daily choices in determining our long-term synonyms of greatness. So I wanted to ask so you could frame it for the audience, what is the difference between peak performance and peak performance agent? So when I use the term peak performance, what I mean is nothing more or nothing less than getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. This is not a new idea. William James, the godfather of psychology pointed out,

and it's been like 1901, that the great thing in any education is to make your nervous system Meaning a brain in your body. You're a high, not your enemy. This is an old idea. It's not new. What is new is We know sort of what are the cognitive and what are the physical skills that would fall under the heading of biology That's sort of been shipped out and the second-after-a-d question is, what's the distance between peak performance agent? Nothing more than getting our biology to work for us right that day against us, when applied to the challenges of the second half of our lives. That's really the difference. If you guys could take it one step further, so we're really listening to some clarity.

You mentioned the Ardenbop. The Ardenbop is really focused on the cognitive side of the peak performance agent or peak performance equation. When you talk about cognitive skills and peak performance is actually four categories of skills. There's a bunch of skills that fall into the heading of motivation, other skills into the heading of learning, another skills into the head of the head of creativity, and finally bunch of skills that fall into the heading of flow, which is the state of optimal performance, peak performance that we're all hardwired for. So that combination, that sort of cognitive peak

performance, if you're looking on the physical side, there's really five side of the skills that matter and it's strength, stamina, agility, balance, and flexibility. So if you're talking about the biology of peak performance in the sense, you're talking about the biology underneath those nine sets of skills. There's more going on, obviously, but that's the quick and the dirty here. So, if I look at this, hopefully in the correct light, what you were teaching in the art of impossible was kind of the science, and what we were going to talk more about in our country is the art of how you deploy it in your life. It's exactly correct. It was the one thing that couldn't do in the art impossible. The book is, it's a fun book to read,

but it's a very thorough breakdown of the science of being a performance. And if I wanted to add in the application, it would have been a 2,000 page book and nobody would have read it. So in a sense, ended up splitting it into two books. And you've got the art of impossible, which is a little bit

more of a playbook of the textbook if you will and in our country which is the applied side and it's an adventure story and hopefully if I did my job right it's fun and it's a blast, a blast reading so it's an adventure story that teaches you a lot about applied peak performance aging and it's a fun ride along the way if I did my job. Okay. Well, you did because NAR country tells an in depth story based on your journal entries. Over, I think it was an 18 month period. The story of you conducting a daring experiment and peak aging by teaching yourself how to park ski.

And I was hoping for the audience if they're not a skier, or maybe they're a novice skier, what is park skiing? And why was this such a huge magnitude of significance to try to attempt it at our age? So, great questions. Thanks for asking them. Park skiing, if you saw the Olympics,

Eileen Goe, cleaned up as a park skier. It's the discipline and skiing that involves doing tricks off jumps on rails, walled rides across boxes. It's very aromatic. It's fairly dangerous. And for 12 to 15 different biological reasons, it is considered extremely difficult for anybody over the age of 30, 35 to start learning and get good. And once you reach 40, 50, it's considered just absolutely impossible and or insane. And I decided while I was a good skier, I had zero parking experience and for a lot of different reasons I decided I was going to try to teach myself on a park ski in my 50s. And essentially, there's a bunch of new science in my core field and flow science in embodied cognition, which is sort of related to the work I do. And in systems neuroscience, a handful of other fields that said, hey, at least on paper, right, in the lab, if these things are true, all dogs should be able to learn new tricks,

even if the new tricks are these like really complicated, difficult, physical skills that nobody thought you could on board at this age. And so to run this experiment, what we did is we took Parkskying and I made a list of 20 tricks. So we would essentially cover zero to intermediate. There was a reason I wanted to sort of get to the main idea. Once you get to intermediate, you can go randomness in this stupid stuff you do, because you don't know it even.

It starts to fade away and you can sort of control your progression, right? You throw the damage you do. So while parking itself is very dangerous, I figured if I could get to the intermediate, it would start to get a lot safer. And there were a lot of reasons why I cut down this question. That people performance agent reasons, we could talk about all that. started to get a lot safer. And there were a lot of reasons why I kept on this question, that keep performance agent reasons,

we could talk about all that. But the point is I made this list of 20 tricks, and I thought, if it takes five years, I'm 60 years old by the time, I figured this out great, fantastic, wonderful. And it didn't take five years, it took less than a single season. And it was so shockingly fast.

And as you pointed out, not a naturally gifted athlete, to that bad athlete, I have a very broken body, I broken nearly 80 bones. And I run a big company and I write books, not have a very busy schedule. So I was up against the handfully challenges that made this fairly difficult quest on top of the fact that it was considered too socially possible. And I did it in under a season and that was amazing. My ski partner, that name Ryan Wicks, who's 20 years younger than me, was a former actually sponsored pro-parks skier athlete who got injured, retired, had a family job, decided to come back to the sport at the same time I entered for the first time, and he made more progress than he's ever made in his life in a work of press time.

And we thought, oh my God, this is amazing, but this is also like the world's sexiest pilot study, right? We've run a very radical, but very small, but very cool pilot study in peak performance agent. So the following season we came back and we took a group of 17 older adults ages 29 to 68. We took the same protocol. We could talk more about what the protocol was that we write and I had used. And in four days on the hill, taught them how to park ski or how to park snowboard.

And these were like intermediate to advanced skiers. It's snowboarders. And they started nobody really had any park experience. And you, by the way, don't take my word for any of this. You can read it in the book, or you can go to narkcountry.com, click on the peak performance aging experiment video. We made a video of these experiments.

So you can see that. There's another introduction to park skiing video which documents my progress. You can see exactly what I did, and you can read the white papers and everything else. There as well That's sort of the wall and the what we can go from there, but I'll stop there. Chuck If a regular listeners tuning in today, it's not every day

That I have someone talking about skiing on the podcast. So they may be thinking why should I spend my time today listening to these two guys talk about skiing? Can you have Fantastic question. Yeah. And let me, I didn't finish the story in all honesty because once we were done with the 17 older adults, what we did is we, and we, but when I say we I'm talking about, I'm the executive director of the Flow Research Collective, where research and training organization on the research side, we stood in the neurobiology of PQM performance and injected with research, did stamp burden USC and UCLA Davis on an publisher work in major neuroscience journals and

then we use what the science train people we train people in 130 countries tens of thousands of people every month or data gays so we measure everything and anything so we have a really good global wildly diverse look at exactly what works and what doesn't so that's the we I'm talking about. So we took these ideas, stripped out the action sports because you're right. Like there are reasons action sports are really important or think there are reasons that things that action sports bring to us are really important for big performance aging. We can talk about those in a second, but let's openly admit not for everyone, right? Not for everybody. And so we stripped out the action sports

and we put everybody through a training. The training had two main goals. Goal one was, right, I think people's mindset towards aging, mindset, if you want to understand people's aging, you've got to start with mindset. There's 50 years of research that shows that aging is as much a mental event or a mental process as a physical process.

In fact, a positive mindset towards age and a grand place to an extra seven and a half years of health and longevity and study after study, after studying like long 20 years studies with thousands of subjects, very rigorous science, very well established. So in the class, the goal was, can we radically show people's minds that, because that's the place you have to start? And can we help them design what I would call a narer style quest for themselves, which was, if you want to sum up peak performance aging in the sentence,

it's, if you want to rock to drop, you want to engage in challenging creative social activities that demand dynamic deliberate play and take place in novel outdoor environments. And we can talk about why all those things exist. That's the reason action sports matter, right? Because dynamic is a fancy way of saying, I'm using all five categories of functional fitness at once.

Why? Because if you're not using them all at once, right, you just want to rock to drop, but you're not interested in action sports, well, the World Health Organization is very clear on what you need to train to pick performance aging. It's a hundred to three hundred minutes of aerobic activity, a week, moderate to figure us two strength training days a week, three balance agility and flexibility training days a week. That is roughly two hours a day of training five days a week.

Or you can pick an action sport that hits all those categories at once. And if action sports are not your thing, you can actually take with a weight vest. Hiking through nature with a weight vest actually covers a lot of the same things you're getting from a lot of these other things that are much more toned down basis. But why would you want to do any of these things that's just roll that back? The old story about aging, John, I'm sure you're familiar with this. It's what I like to call the long slow rock theory. This is the idea that you and I grew up with, which is that all of our mental

skills and our physical skills decline over time and there's nothing we can do this time. Turns out, not true. Yes, our mental skills and our physical skills do actually start to decline. Some as early as our 30s, some in our 50s, but they're all turns out user losing skills. We never stop using them. We get to hang on to that and even advance them far later in life than Amy thought possible. And that includes our physical abilities. In fact, the number one correlate for health and longevity

and successful aging for good peak performance at just successful aging, strong legs. It's weird, but even in terms of cognitive benefits and preserving brain function, strong legs. There's a number of reasons they think that might be the case, but it doesn't change the fact that like, wow, my quadriceps, my amp strings, my calves are gonna determine the quality of second half of my life in a really big way. the fact that like, wow, my quadriceps, my amp strings, my cabs are going to determine

the quality of second half of my life in a really big way. So you really do want to stay on top of the physical stuff. Yeah, it's one of the reasons after interviewing as many people as I have on the show that I follow a similar exercise routine to you. I do a ton of cycling as a way to build up my endurance days, but I probably walk 50 to 60 miles a week. I haven't tried the weighted vest. I did a bunch of that when I was in the military, so maybe it's something I got to bring back into my routine. But I, like, you're recommending building strength days, but the most important thing I try to work on

is keeping my legs strong. I just didn't realize there was a link to that to my longevity and cognition. So interesting point you bring up. Yeah, so let's also add in all the thing that you're doing because you're outside. So if you want to stave off dementia Alzheimer's cognitive line, you want to birth new neurons and you want to build new neural networks. And we learn back in the 90s that new neurons are born in the adult brain, that we know, and we've learned more recently that most of that on our genesis takes place and they have a campus. This is a, a book is a Latin word for the seaworse-looking structure deep in the center of your brain,

and it is in charge of long-term memory and location. It's a place that's packed with grid cells and play cells. Why we're hunter-gatherers? Are we involved that way? So remembering where you are when you found that right fruit tree or where you are and you're going to attack by the bear or where you're right, that's sort of the thing, critical to survival. So this part of the brain was evolved to remember when we have emotionally charged incidents in novel outdoor environments. So, actually sports, as I mentioned earlier, one of the reasons they're so great for peak performance aging is they're packed with emotionally charged incidents in novel outdoor environments.

You can get those in other ways, but the novel outdoor environment is what the brain evolved to remember, is still getting our biology to work for us, or that against us, you wanna have those experiences, you wanna help your biology as much as possible. So Steven, one of the things a listener may be saying to themselves right now is these guys are talking about a lot of time investment here to do this.

And I know as you were doing this novel experiment, if I have the data correct, not only were you continuing to do hikes with your dog along the way, you were releasing a book, editing a second book, writing a third book, all at the same time that this was going on. So my question would be, if you're a listener and you're thinking to yourself, I can't do this,

I don't have time. I'm aging. There's no way I can do the things that these guys are talking about. What is the cost of procrastination in achieving our aspiration? Inverted it out of me. So, what is the cost of procrastination? Our soul, like our life force, our purpose, our path, everything. Everything is the cost of procrastination.

I said this in art of impossible. As far as I can tell, we are all gonna agree on as we get one shot at this life. Maybe we get more, but we're all gonna agree that we get one shot. And we know we're gonna spend a third a bit of sleep. So what you do with the remaining two thirds is the only question that matters. And procrastinating on your dreams makes absolutely zero sense in light of those facts as far as I can tell.

Yeah, I think we go through this period where oftentimes we arson the very dreams that we're trying to make happen. Meaning we're on this path, we're nearing our highest talents. And then the scared side of us, we're as it's ugly head. And we start saying, like I was saying before, I can't do this. I can't create the time. I'm too old. If you're asking me about the time issue, there's a ton of time management and stuff that you have to do with people before I'm saying, I do spend a lot of time on this in the book and I think it's worth touching on for a second, which is I look for and we do this at the Florey Research Collective. We train people on 130 countries, there's one, there's wildly diverse people

and we train a whole bunch of different companies, wildly diverse companies as well. The one thing everybody we train has in common, everybody's busy. Everybody's really busy. So we are always looking for what I call multi-tool solutions, which are a single tool that solve multiple challenges at once. Action sports are a multi-tool for the physical side of peak performance agents. You have to train five different categories of fitness. You have to be able to train your stabilizer muscles and your prime move or some of that. A bunch of other things. Action sports is one stop shopping, right? You pick up an axis for any, by the way, so is tennis and bad. They will

also also do this job for you too. As long as you're playing in outdoor courts, you're just not getting as much of the non-alcoholic environments. So like play tennis and copple it with hikes in the woods, and you're in the neighborhood kind of thing. But that's that side of it, right? If you're, we're all too busy to solve problems one at a time. And you're solving problems one at a time. That's dumb, that's a bad idea. That's not a problem.

You want multi-tool solutions, or you want, when I said something I talk about again, and I will stack protocols. I talk about a narcontory to a stack protocol is, for example, if you're going to go after this hard physical challenge, you're going to need an active recovery program. As a recovery, it's keeping a beer and it doesn't do you any good when you're trying to recover from either cognitive or physical challenges. Alcohol tends to mess up sleep patterns, so there's problems there.

Television actually blocks recovery. Now it feels relaxing, but it's not actually relaxing for our brain and it actually blocks recovery. So you want an active recovery protocol. I like sonas. I like breath work. Reading is also really good and I like to stack them up. So I will at the end of my day, I'll leave it going, when Epson's all bad, I'll have a sauna, and I will meditate, and then I will read. And it's a single thing that I'm doing, recovery, but I'm stacking three different perverticals. And I wanted to spend different peak performance aging standpoint, recovery, all those things that I was just

talking about, they're meant to reduce stress levels and lower information levels. There are nine known causes of aging. Every single one of them is directly tried to stress an inflammation. So anytime we have an active recovery protocol, more fighting inflammation or fighting stress, not only are we achieving peak performance,

because you need those things with peak performance, we're also achieving peak performance aging. So multi tools and stack protocols is how I take on the time management stuff, both myself and for all the people we have a good fortune trying. Well, you mentioned that as we enter our 50s, we gain access to a suite of legitimate superpowers. What are those superpowers and how are we impacted by one of the things that often gets in our way, which is our ego. So those superiors are what we mentioned earlier. It's the new levels of intelligence and new levels of creativity, new levels of wisdom, new levels of empathy and the shorthand for how to think

about this is our ego start to quiet and our perspective starts to widen. So like you look at the levels of intelligence that come online, there's things like the ability to multi-perspectival thinking, right? The ability to see multiple sides of a problem. On the end of sort of black and white thinking, we start to realize that black and white thinking is sort of a folly use for everything as a little gray underneath those kinds of things. These are kind of empathetic-wise.

Seeing things from multiple points of view, we've got a big ego for absolutely certain that our point of view is the only point of view. We're blocking these abilities. More than that, it's also, we talked about the gateways with adult development, right, and self-purgivitis being one of them, but to really unlock these abilities, there's three other things that matter. The first is that it's creative activities, challenging creative activities that seem to really use new levels of intelligence, empathy wisdom, and creativity. So creativity, unlocks creativity is one way of thinking about it, but it means that as we enter our fifties for sure,

we really want to make sure we're engaging in challenging creative activities So I'm opinion if they if we want to hold on to these superpowers into our router 50 60 70 80s So for two things matter one you have to train down risk aversion the risk aversion Ends to increase over time Certain categories don't actually increase, but as a rule, it increases over time. The problem with risk aversion is there's fear underneath it, right? That's what we're talking about here. It's an increase in fear and increase in caution. And that means an increase in the cortisol and noraphanepferin, right? Like stress hormones and anxiety hormones and There are real thoughts for that. First of all when you have those hormones in our system

We age faster, right? Second of all, it really impacts our decision making so the more norapinephrine in our system The less creative and the more logical and linear and don't give me a new solution Give me something that works on a percent of the time, right? We also more now are ep up and up for an accordion of solar system, we block learning. So we're not, we stop learning, we stop growing. And there's all kinds of performance penalties.

We don't, we actually can't perform at a best test, which, muscle response doesn't work so well, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a big penalty for risk aversion and it blocks our superpowers, right? And simultaneously you have to train down physical fragility because even though we get all these cognitive superpowers, if your body starts to fall apart on you, you can't take advantage of any of them.

So this is sort of a look at like what we gain access to and what was one of the reasons I could learn how tothesty. In my 50s, it's a very creative activity. I took a very creative approach to it and all that stuff actually started to come into play in our approach and it really helped me out, but you have to train for it. The development is not guaranteed in the sense. So I want to get into the training that you went through, but I'm going to introduce it in this way. You were not new to the slopes. In fact, you regarded yourself even when you're in your 20s as an excellent skier, but you got a really rude awakening in the mountains in France in 1994 when you tried to follow a group of what you could say are professional skiers down the hill.

What did you learn about yourself at that moment? And then over the next 20 years, how did you create what you call stylish self expression? Well, so when I started my career, I was a journalist. One of my beats was Neuroscience and peak performance and other beat was Actions Works. The similar themes that we're seeing in American Treat and I was lucky enough to spend about 10 years chasing professional athletes, Cross-Motions and Dam Mountains and I was in Chamonix France to the birthplace of modern extreme skiing with literally the American pioneers of extreme skiing.

John and Danny Egan and Doug and Eric DeLaurier all four on the skiing, all the fame, come in the most legendary skiers ever. And we were in Shamanay for extreme ski workshop. And up at that point, before I got to Shamanay, I would have told you I was an expert skier. I had started skiing when I was about seven. I skied my ski bummed after college and half been. I spent a ton of time skiing along the way. I could generally make my way down to any double black diamond expert professionals.

And anybody who's ever gotten into the room with professional athletes is, if you're not a professional, you've had this experience where you suddenly realize that you may be an expert, but the gap between you and the pros versus like you and someone you does is never even played the sport before, it's bigger. Like you don't look at the pros and you're like, I don't understand. It doesn't make sense. How did they get? They're not that much older than me.

Like how did this happen? It doesn't, it's unfathomable. It was like, especially in the early days of the games game, when people were doing super powerful pizza over and over, and it was like, watch the magic trick. It didn't make any sense. It took me, that was 1994. It was in, I give the date, in the Bose 2013, I want to say. I was in Jackson Hall, casing a rustine around with an all star policy professional athletes and

I noticed that we were all getting the chairlift the exact same time and after 20 years of chasing these guys around I'm outing for the very first time I could keep up not in the big mountain like we go to all this but it's okay my ass but like Jackson Hall which is a serious mountain I was finally able to keep up, but I wasn't as super interested in just keeping up. I wanted what they, I was just the ability to use creative self-expression to kind of interpret the mountain.

And that's what the athletes could do. And it didn't matter what train feature was in front of them, they could find a way to do something interesting with it, that was what was really intriguing to me about action sports also. And this is something that a lot of here on the outside looking in action sports looked like sports. But for most of the practitioners on the inside, they feel like they're involved in a creative art form as much as athletic activity. And so stylists' self-expression is really sort of key to the sport and especially the freestyle skiing. and so stylus self-expression is really sort of key to this board and especially the freestyle skiing.

Yeah, I was gonna say, when I've been to the resorts and I am a decent skier, but I'm nowhere close to the magnitude of greatness you are or the people that you're describing. But I remember when I would go by the terrain areas, it really is watching people do stylish self-expression by the different moves that they put on. And these are tricky things from a timing perspective from the risk consequence that if

you don't nail it right, the repercussions that could happen to your body. I just wanted to put the backdrop that when you started this, it's not as if you put this plan into motion and everything fell right into places you wanted it. It happened in March of 2020, right as the COVID stuff was hitting us. And if I remember correctly, you were about maybe days into this when they basically shut everything down. Yeah, they said it down before. So the front of that quest, bunch of things that happened. One, for reasons we don't have to go into,

but I was burned out, I believe. I'd worked literally nine years with almost no vacations. And I had moved my family from Mexico to Tahoe and the whole thing had been this plan. And I was gonna get to Mar, I was launching a new book in January or something and I was going to get to March and then I was going to take a break. I was going to take two months off first time in nine years and he and instead I got COVID and then

10 days later all the resorts in America got shut down because of COVID. And we're in the middle of pandemic. Everybody's suffering. Moons of people are dying. And yet I'm getting angry and angry because I can't see. And I feel like progress had been stolen from me and by time to advance. Shrinking. And it started with, well, how could I sway to thank,

because it was really gotten to the boy. It was an unhealthy anger. Like I was yelling at the dog. It's yelling at my wife. It was totally like, it was nobody's fault, right? It was on me. But like, I was like, OK, I got to solve this yet. Oftentimes, I believe that like, sometimes when facing burnout

for me, I'll invent like crazy quest. Like, sometimes that's what really works. When you're back, it's up against the wall, creating even bigger, harder challenge and go at that. And I think that's what I did. But it was really about like, what could I do that was gonna make this deal better? And I was like, oh, I wanna enter next season

a better season. Here, how do I do that? Maybe I should learn to Park ski. And as you pointed out, like I started, we built a rail jam setup in an abandoned gold muffin in the mountains behind me in Nevada. And I tried to learn how to rail slide like a dirt with dirt skis. And it was crazy.

I like the amount of violence I did to myself even before I got the skisies and was pretty ridiculous. But that was another thing I discovered is you're so much tougher and less fragile than you think you are. And that's always a lesson you have to sort of remind yourself of. Well, the other key thing I wanted to pull away here is if you've got a dream, you're going to run into obstacles like you did. You're going to run into obstacles like you did, but instead of letting the dream just linger, you've found alternate ways to pursue it.

Having worked at Loes for many years, I never thought I would have ever heard the use case that you came up with for using cardboard and artificial grass and PVC to create this freesky park that you did, but you didn't allow yourself to willow in your pity. And instead, you tried to change the circumstances that you could do whatever you could to get prepared, including then also learning how to do some of these tricks using trampoline parks as another way to enhance it.

So I think it's a key learning for someone who's trying to pursue their goals. The thing I want to emphasize with all those things is that one of our core philosophies was go one inch into time. So like the whole, everything I did was built around a handful of sort of foundational peak performance ideas about flow. One of them is flows of so float states have triggers. You want more flow in your life. The triggers are sort of your toolkit and there are 26 known flow triggers, but they'll have one thing in common with this flow. That state where we get so focused on what we're doing, so focused on the task down, everything else just starts to disappear so that complete concentration is at the heart of flow. That's what all the triggers do. They drive

our attention in the present moment. The most famous of these is the challenge skills balance. The idea that we pay the most attention to the task at hand from the challenge of the task slightly exceeds our skillset. So you want to stretch, but not snap. Metaphorically, this is not actual science, this is just metaphor. We talk about that in most people, that's about a 5% difference. Right? We pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge of the task

is about 5% greater than our skills set. But in older adults, and by the way, older here could mean anything over 25, 30, right? Like the point in which you start to get more cautious, more conservative, more protected, this is from that point forward because of something called allostatic load, which is basically the residual physiological and psychological impact of trauma over time. We talked about burnout, alostetic overload is one of the main causes of burnout, but alostetic load because of it, we realized that this challenge skill sweet spot is going to shrink in older adults. And instead of being like five percent, we think it was down about one percent. So at the core of what I did in about 1% to the core of what I did in Parksking at the

core of what I did to train for Parksking at the core of what I did with the trampolines. All of it was about how do you start with an established skill, and the established voter skill that you can execute with zero fear because fear of blocks learning and performance and everything else and almost 100% chance success, and then build on it with like one micro movement at a time going as slowly and as safely as possible, and it's a much slower progression than most people are actually used to. And the funny thing about going so slowly

is we ended up going so much faster. Even when we were running our experiment, we spent more time trying to hold people back rather than trying to push them forward. And that's a very different approach. We were trying to creatively interpret the mountain in novel ways, not learn new tricks. So there were differences in how we approached it.

And this is sort of like the philosophy that was underneath it. But the thing that you wanna know is that these kinds of hard physical challenges are totally doable, but you've got to go at them differently than you would have when you were younger. Yeah, and I remember in the book, you went into this season hoping that you would get a good 50 days on the slope and you end up surpassing well past 80. But to what you were just talking about, why was it so important for you to do something during almost every single time that you went out that actually terrified you? Because I think this is something that's so important chasing any goal that we have.

You've got to put yourself into this point of being uncomfortable. You don't have to take it a mountain degree further the next time. You just have to do micro increments of it. But what does doing that do to your realization of goals over time? There's a stubborn answer packed into what you just said, but I think the, let's start with the end of it because I think it was that, baby, that, baby, the point that is most important which is where does momentum come from?

How do we get momentum? In the face of like, even possible physical challenges, where we're going really slow. Momentum is all about dopamine, the neurochemical dopamine. And it is really small goals accomplished daily time after time. So progress is really important. And you said earlier that I would have to go to the mountain. And most of my I had to show up and do something that scared me. That's because I was learning new trips. I was having to like take physical chances, even if they weren't to risky, but they felt like up here was a

risky night. This is really important flow. So I do the same thing, forget what I do on the mountain every day. I'm a writer, every day I'm a scientist and I want to push my skills to the utmost to like so I'm in that challenge skills sweet spot. It closer to flow. I'm always aiming for that and in everything I do. And you know, it's just the little wins produced Dubman, the Dubman over that Dubman over time. That's momentum. You get like little those little blasted dopamine over time plus regular access to flow. That is literally what we describe as momentum. And one of the cool things about momentum and the reason I chose it out of the big thing you had asked

is the place I want to start is another peak performance aging tip. So when we get, when we are accomplishing our small goals, right, when we're pushing on the challenge skills, sweet spot, what we really are getting is feelings of mastery, right? I'm learning and growing and control. And I got a control a little more in my world than I did the day before, right? And both of these are among the best emotions that are available to humans. We love this feeling of like I'm in control

and I'm a master of my world, we love these feelings. And it turns out, super positive emotions, like mastering control produce, they amplify the production of T cells and natural killer cells, so T cells are what fight disease, right? Immunological cells and natural killer cells are the cells that type target tumors and other sick cells that like, literally the issues we have with aging. So as we're pursuing lifelong learning and going after these harder goals and gathering this moment, we're gaining feelings of mastering control. And by the way, those feelings come baked into flow. If you drop into flow, one of the state's core psychological characteristics is this feeling of control.

It's really tied to flow. So flow tends to build on that stuff. And as a result, we this ends up turning into health and longevity. So it's not just momentum for the sake of I'm going after my goals, it's momentable to say I'm going after my goals, and guess what, you're gonna get more life to go after your goals as a result, which is kind of a cool thing.

Well, you gave me the answer. I was looking for, and that you were using that technique to help continue the momentum going, which is so important in any of our journeys. Well, I'm going to jump to your last chapter 10, because you bring up someone that I'm familiar with, but most people would not be. And that is Gene Cohen. And in the book, you give him credit as being the grandfather of peak performance agent. What did Cohen discover while he was working at the National Institute of Mental Health about three profound changes that take place in our brains that lead to three thinking styles that you lay out in the book?

Gene Cohen is the pioneer of these superpowers of agent that we've been talking about. The three thinking styles are sort of this multiple-respect titles thinking that we describe. But the team's cool. Like it's worth a love that you know it. That's so cool. And his story is so neat. So he is the last doctor drafted into Vietnam's 1973.

And he's literally like the last guy the draft board calls up to serve. And instead of going to fight, he goes to work in like a veteran's home or something. And he's a young psychiatrist. And at the time, this is when the Longslow Roth theory is the theory of aging. And there's also a couple of concurrent beliefs, one that old people can't learn new tricks, right, that learning is impossible. And other people that they're really inflexible of thought, they're uneducable, they're depressed, they're lonely, it's built in part. All these things are believed about the agent.

In fact, if you really want to see something mind blowing in the 1950s, Harry Truman, when he's founding the Social Security Administration, sends out a letter to all the people who are coming to the first conference. And he says, look, we're all coming together because we're going to talk about Social Security. But like, let's get a couple of things straight about the agent. These are the facts, as we now know them. Fact one, old people have feelings, just like you would me. I mean, it's like you really said you're like, what are you insane? Old people have feelings just like you are like. I mean, it's like you really said you're like, what are you insane? Old people have feelings just like you are like, what?

Really? This is new. So Gene Cohn is coming up in this environment. 73, he goes into these various situations and he realizes that somebody's been lying to him about all people. Like the folks he's hanging out with don't fit any of the stereotypes,

they're not shutting down. He's seeing all kinds of like creative flowering and all kinds of stuff. So he finishes the service and he petitions the National Institute of Mental Health to create the National Institute of Agent. He comes the first director and he runs to foundational studies.

He takes a real look at retirements. The first guy to sit down and be like, okay, we've heard about retirement. He's, by the way, the origin of it. You've probably heard this. If there's one bit of advice to peak performance aging, it's never retired, right? That's really not a good idea.

If you want to fold onto your skills and advance them later in life. So he does a study on retirement and learns a whole bunch of stuff about like, oh wow, what we do in the letter, a letter of yours is very different from what people think is going on. And then he does a study on the impact on creativity. And remember, it's that creativity unlocks these sewer hours of agents.

So what he had noticed is that science, right? The science in neurogenesis was just like, we didn't know it yet. It wasn't actually discovered through the 90s. Some of the genetics was starting to come into place and wait a minute. There's some genes that are only activated with experience. So they're only going to get turned on in our 40s and 50s. And what actually happens in our brain that leads to these new thinking styles that you referenced is who sides of the brain start talking to each other like never before, right? The hemisphere is essentially operate. Then my independently stuff is like,

it comes in on the right, which is where we do novelty and it gets past the left side, which is where we do familiarity. And over time after the right side starts to fade out, a little bit the left side becomes stronger, but like why do we gain access to new levels of creativity? Why can we see things from multiple respect? Because these two sides of the brain are talking to each other

and cool, even better, the brain starts to colonize underutilized areas. So if there's parts of the brain that aren't really, let's say you're not a musician, you're not really using a lot of like temporal lobe where a lot of the music stuff would normally live. So your brain might say, okay, let's sense the language stuff over there or something, some memory stuff over there. And so you start to colonize this underutilized real estate.

And as a result of these things, things do change in the brain over time. And there's stuff that goes down. This is the stuff that goes up. It's how we compensate for all of it. It's the trade off. And that was all to the gene commoners. You pointed out, I think if you're going to point to folks as like the god parents, just thinking that Godfather would be Gene Cone.

And I think Ellen Lander, who is at Harvard, she's probably the godmother. And Gene Cone, Ellen was the one who figured out mindset and the mind body connection and aging and things like mastering control, producing T-Celves and Kept that's all. I'm inside in Gene Cone's The Creative Super Hours of Aging Side and you put them together and then you sort of add in the like the research that I've conducted that's going on and around was physically possible also and you start to get the picture of, oh wow, the second half of our lives are really interesting.

It's true. That's the truth of the matter is like, none of this stuff is actually accurate and our older ideas were wrong and don't fit the data. So like we're living into what's true and it's a better fit for all of us. Yeah, well, I love how you put in there that a key thing that our country showed

was that Jean Cohen was right about peak performance. And so I'm gonna just flip back before I ask you the last question. I just wanted to highlight for the audience three core themes that we talked about today. One of those was stack protocols, and that is where we do multiple things at once. And that's where Stephen was talking about wearing this vest on your hiking and how you can stack things together. You also use that same analogy when he talked about multi-tool solutions for healthy aging, peak performance aging.

And then the other thing we talked about was that in our country is really about chasing down your dreams before it's too late to achieve them. And that's why a flow first, wrist, second approach is so important. My last question would be, I've got a 24-year-old son, and he's not at the point where he's thinking he's like his old man, but what would be your biggest piece of advice for a younger listener who's been tuning in to us today on how they should consider approaching the next decade of their lives if they want to achieve peak performance in it? decade of their lives if they want to achieve peak performance in it. So,

two answers here. One, I just want to point out, we were talking about it, but like, let's just stay at it. Peak performance agent starts young. The psychological identity has to be solved by 30, or your 30s are going to suck, and your 40 40s are gonna be much where everything gets harder. There's these psychological developmental gateways that are really important.

Lifelong learning underpins peak performance aging. Expertise and wisdom are how we today evolve cognitive decline. Looking on goal, burger is the nervousness. Who really, he's the one who figured out that wisdom helps to stay evolve cognitive decline. Yakao Stern is the guy who sort of figured out that expertise helps.

But as Elkenoth says, dark young, right? There's a like lag in the foundation for life, long learning expertise in wisdom. And there's physical stuff that if you can lay it down in your 20s and your 30s, it's going to just, it's everything's going to get substantially easier later on. But in terms of general peak performance, I always say, and this is what I say in It's going to just, everything's going to get substantially easier later on. But in terms of general peak performance, I always say, and this is what I say in hardware impossible, one of the interesting things that we've learned over the past a couple of decades is there's an order to the process from an evolutionary perspective.

Certain skills are designed to come online before certain skills. And I said the top of the show that on the cognitive side of peak performance, and this is really across the board, it starts with motivation. And when you talk about motivation, we actually know where does motivation start? And well, one, motivation starts,

actually with money on the safety and security side. What the research shows, if you cannot pay your bills, if you are living under fiscal stress, you have to solve that challenge before you can solve a lot of other challenges. But the research shows, you don't have to make a lot of money to solve that challenge. The research shows that you literally, like,

a little bit above the poverty line. You gotta pay all your bills and have a little leftover for fun. And for an American family, when the research was done in the 90s, that was $70,000 in years. Now, I think, $10,000 a year for a family. I don't know what the numbers are for individuals, but you got to start there. But let's say that's taken care of. Let's say you can pay your bills.

Where do you go next? The research is unbelievably clear. You start with the foundational intrinsic internal motivator, which is curiosity. Curiosity is where all of this starts. Including, if you're interested in shifting your mindset around aging, you've got to start with curiosity, you're just going to start with, oh wow, what might be possible in the second half of the mile?

All right, like that's where all this starts. And you really want to go deeper into that. You can, I covered in both in our country and are impossible. Okay, and then last thing real quick for the audience, where's the best place that they can go to learn more about you? Narkountry.com will get you everything cool about the book. You want to learn more about me, StephenCottler.com, the flow research collective.com. And if you're interested in an any peak performance training, if that's flow training, might

sound interesting to you, that might be a thing you're, you can just go to getmoreflow.com and sign up for a free like hour long coaching call with one of the members of my staff. And those are great calls. People have a lot of fun. There's a lot of value there and you'll learn a little bit about what we do and probably a lot about yourself. And so get more flow.com for any of you who's curious. Narcountry.com is the book. Stephencoly.com is me. Blow Research Collective is all things. Blow Research Collective and Anamon Social. You can find me there as well. Well, Stephen, thank you for coming on. I'm going to show the book one more time. Congratulations on this. And I highly encourage the audience to give it a read, regardless

of what age you are. Thanks, John. Fun hanging out with you. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Steven Kotler. And I wanted to thank Steven, work Craven and Harper Wave for the honor and privilege of having him up here on the show. Links to all things Steven will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show. Links to all things Steven will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show. All proceeds go to supporting the show. Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place. At passionstruck.com slash deals, please consider supporting those who support the show.

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with training from Cornell, Columbia, and Harvard universities. And we discuss her new book, I'm so effing hungry. Why we crave what we crave and what to do about it. So that got back to her kind of acts as an army. And they are communicating with our brain, they're communicating with our hormones, with our immune system.

And they are helping us digest, they're helping us make decisions. They are helping us create cravings for the right things. And the sad thing is, John, that we didn't really understand this and 97% of Americans are starving that gut-backed. The fee for this show is that you share it with family or friends when you find something useful or inspirational. If you know someone who's really into longevity science and personal performance, then definitely share today's episode with them. The greatest compliment that you can give us is when you share the show with those that you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the

show so that you can live what you listen. And until next time, live life Ashensdruck. you