Steven Kotler | Aging and Peak Performance: How Flow Can Help You Thrive at Any Age

Srini: Steven, welcome back to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Steven Kotler: It is so good to be with you.

Srini: Yeah, it is my pleasure. You're like one of those rare guests and I think at this point you might be on par with Danielle Port for being the most frequently appeared guest on unmistakable creative.

Steven Kotler: Oh, that's awesome. Thank you for saying that.

Srini: Yeah. And there's a good reason for that. You have had a profound impact on my own thinking, my own way of working. I think, millions of people probably could say the same thing about your work on flow research. And you have a new book out in our country, which we will get into.

And I was thinking about how we could start this conversation given that I've talked to you so many times. I was thinking back to what questions have I not asked you, but given the subject matter of this book, I thought this would be an interesting place to start. What was your very first action sport and how did that end up influencing everything you ended up doing going forward?

Steven Kotler: Oh my God. It was escape. So the way we rode bikes, I grew up in, in Ohio and we rode, like we were trying to do what, like BMX jumps and things like that, but on. Seven 1970s hard trail. or banana seats. So I think that was probably my first attempted in action sport. I got my first skateboard, I want to say when I was 11 or 12.

It was literally some of the very first skateboards they made. They were like polyurethane death traps. I broke I, I got my first broken bone from from that skateboard. But I think skiing was also like right around, I learned to ski right around. And from the really, I guess the answer, here's the answer you're looking for. The first time I went skiing there mogul skiing was, expert skiing at the time. Especially in Ohio where we didn't really have much else. And I saw a guy show up at the ski area. They were having a ski contest and it was like a standard like mogul skiing race contest. And this guy showed up in top hat and tails and was like a new school free. Ballet. Crazy. He did, he just crazy. I remember he like top hat entails and threw a 360 into the moguls and I had never seen anything like it. And that the whole attitude that was, the action sports world that I got subsumed into much later. And costumes remained a big part of it in a funny way as well.

So I think that,

Srini: Yeah it's funny I had a feeling it was a skateboard. Cause I remember you referencing that in our previous conversations and I, I started with that in particular because of all the toys that my parents would not buy me. That were within their means. A skateboard was the number one thing on that list.

My mom would always say, kids who skateboard break bones. And of course now you know, I'm 40 something. And I remember when I was staying at my parents' house and I brought home a skateboard, they're like, what the hell is that? And I was like, it's a skateboard. I'm 40 something. We're not gonna have this conversation.

My dad went to Costco, bought a helmet, and I was like, this is a helmet. Please wear it. . One thing that I wondered, as somebody who learned how to both surf, fence and award later in life why is it that when you look particularly at Kids on the Mountain or for that matter, water in any other action sport They one like seem to be able to recover from damn near anything in seconds.

Like I see these kids riding park who are like six years old and they just eat shit and they get up and keep going. But also in terms of the sort of brain development and neuroplasticity, like why is it that you can pick up a skill like surfing or for that matter, even learning a language why are those skills so much more rapidly acquired when you start?

Steven Kotler: They are and they aren't. And this is, so in our country, the new book is about peak performance aging. And this is one of those myth surround aging. And like many of the. There's a big portion of it that's true. And then there's a caveat at the end that changes everything.

Srini: Yeah.

Steven Kotler: The thing you're talking about is essentially a, this motor learning window for performance that is open, in childhood and starts to shut down.

And it was almost completely closed by around eight 20. and that's the theory, right? And there is truth to that in terms of brain development and whatever. What is actually more true though? And that window does shut. So they tell you, don't become a ballerina after age 25. Don't try to learn gymnastics.

They, after age 25, math gets harder, foreign languages gets harder. And there's lots of different things going on in the brain that make this true, but. is the biggest impact is that when we are kids and when we are younger, we tend to take a, playful approach to learning and a lot of benefit to a playful approach to learning. And a lot of things it actually does in the brain and the body. And if you're really interested in peak performance aging, part of the formula that you need to know about is that you want to be engaged in sort of dynamic deliberate play activities on a regular basis. Dynamic is a fancy word for saying it hits all five aspects. Of physicality. Strength, stamina, balance, dex and flexibility. The old idea about peak performance or about aging is that all those skills declined over time and there's nothing we could do about it. The new thinking is they're all user to lose its skills. And if we never stop training them, we get to hang on to them and even advance them far later in life.

Maybe it felt possible, and this is true with all the cognitive and physical and mental skills, we used to think client over time. They're all user or lose skills. And this includes a lot of the difficult physical activities we're talking about what changes. One of the things that changes is how we learn.

If we approach learning in the same way that we do when we're younger, as older adults, you get much bigger results. There are a couple of other differences. There's a, that's not a blanket statement. There's more going on in the hood and we have, we'd have to really peel that back. But that's the sort of the short answer to your. I'll stop there and let you go at where you wanna go.

Srini: So the natural sort of follow up to that is why don't we take that same playful approach to learning when we become adults? And I'll give you, of an example with Daniel Coyle here who wrote the talent code. And this is something I've mentioned before. So I learned to play the tuba in ninth grade.

I know I started in seventh grade. By ninth grade I missed Allstate by one chair. By 10th grade I was, ranked number one in California. And I played probably for about nine years. I had no natural musical aptitude. And to this day, anytime I've tried to pick up a musical instrument, the process is so frustrating.

There's a part of me that gets annoyed because I'm I got that good that fast. And I know and I think that's my own ego in the way, but Daniel Coyle said something to me that, that had always stayed with me about that. He had said, he was like, you know when we're thinking about something like musical instruments, he said, can you get so good that you impress the hell outta your friends and family?

Yeah. He said, are you gonna open for guns and roses at their next concert? No.

Steven Kotler: So what he's, the things that, that, that sort of, he's talking about declined. There are things we used to believe declined in time and he's really an expert on myel. and white matter and white matter in the brain declines over time. This is true, and as a result, processing speed slows. Where this really shows up most, where everybody sees it in their life is in risk aversion. Risk aversion is actually directly tied to processing speediness, processing speed slows. The brain is a little bit behind what it used to. We tend to get more risk averse over time. Now, there are ways to fight against that. One fights against that. as if we keep exercising, especially in a dynamic way, that utilizes all the skills that declined over time that actually can protect that. And the hippocampus, which does a lot of long term memory you can shrinks over time similarly, and you can rebuild the hippocampus with the. So anything you lose to age can be rebuilt through exercise. There's also a bunch of new research that shows that brain decline seems to be tied to bone density. Our bones are the mineral factories of the brain. Where do you think a lot of the calcium the brain uses to make decisions is stored? And there's bone brain communication. This is the cutting edge of neuro immunology in a lot of those fields right now. But they're starting to realize that if you in keep your bones, keep up, bone density over time, brain slowing you can slow down brain slowing as well.

Daniel's looking at some real stuff and he's talking about some real stuff. his science is pretty current, but polls in those ideas have started showing up over the past five, six years. In fact, Adam Gali, who's a U C S F, he's a neuroscientist, a colleague of mine at the Flow Research Collective. We do a bunch of research with him.

He's got a side company called Neuroscape that makes video games. So they're specifically designed to treat all these different aspects of cognitive. And they can rebuild pretty mu a lot of this stuff. So there's stuff that has to get rebuilt. There's stuff you have to do differently. And here's the biggest one, and this is a slightly longer, let me pause here. And there's a slightly longer answer to your question that involves flow and a whole bunch of other stuff. And I go there if you want, but I'm gonna pause here and,

Srini: Okay.

Steven Kotler: kick it back to you.

Srini: Yeah. It's funny because I was somebody who learned how to surf after age 30. I started snowboarding consistently at 35, and I, to this day, I remember when I was in my twenties and in college, I was the only one in my group of friends who couldn't even get down the damn mountain. Now, I don't think any of those friends would even bother snowboarding with me.

So I've seen that in my own life, but having moved away from the water and trying to learn how to surf again, I've actually resisted it because I'm like, damn it, this is gonna be going through this whole learning curve beginning. And I got back in the water when I was in Brazil after two years, and I was stunned at how difficult it was.

I was just like, oh my God. I'm like,

Steven Kotler: so I, let me tell you a couple things,

Srini: yeah.

Steven Kotler: of all, you're stunned how difficult it is. If you would've stuck with it for two, three weeks, you're gonna be stunned at how fast you actually progress.

Srini: Okay,

Steven Kotler: yeah, you'll c you'll, it'll, it comes back Really, it comes back really fast. I've come back to surfing on three different occasion. after a very long break sometimes, cuz I moved away from the ocean and whatnot. So yeah, you can come back to it. You'll actually be shocked at it. But one of the things you have, this is actually the answer to the question, part of the answer to the question, one of the things that happens. So one of the secrets to learning across the boards is flow right when we are in. There's a huge increase in the amount of neurochemistry in our body. The more neurochemicals that show up during an experience, better chance, it'll move from short-term holding into long-term storage. So time and flow really impacts learning rates. One of the reasons kids learn so much faster, developmentally fr flow prone, so it's easier for kids to get into flow. This is another thing that happens. This is one of the reasons play matters so much in older adults. Play has a bunch of built-in flow triggers and it blocks some of the stuff that blocks flow and play Amp, massively amplifies learning. Where this gets tricky in adults is the following flow states, as you probably remember from a previous conversation, and that I know you know, have triggers, right? Pre-conditions that lead to more. and all of the triggers work by driving attention into the present moment, right? Flow only when all our retention is the right here, right now.

So all the triggers drive attention into the present moment. And one of the most important of those triggers is this idea of the challenge skills sweet spot, right? And this is the idea, that we pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge that task slightly exceeds our skillset. Now, and especially when we're younger, that gradient difference between challenge and skills is roughly about 5%, four to 5%. Now, this is more metaphorical than actual. It changes based on your energy level, based on your expertise, based on a million factors, but it's roughly four to 5% except over time stress. an exposure to stress over time impacts the body. We call this allostatic load. It's the impact of stress over time can be the impact of trauma over time, but it's really the impact of stress over time and it impacts our physiology and our psychology and it shrinks the challenge skills sweet spot. So what happens to a lot of adults is they remember the pace that they learned at when they were younger. And they go at the activity with that same kind of pacing and rate of progression in mind. And in fact, what you want to do is you want to like, try to just go out and push like 1% harder than your skills, not 5%. And by going slower. And a asking less of yourself. You're respecting the fact that the allotted load has increased over time and it's in fact impacting the challenge kill sweet spot, which is shrunk from about 5% down to about 1%.

So you want to take much smaller bites at what you're

,

trying to learn, but you'll actually go by going slower. You're gonna end up getting more flow and going much. But you, it's about holding yourself back a in comparison to how you learned at younger dates. You said all this with musical instruments in tuba, like you're taught you spoke right into this stuff.

You, this is your experience and this nAR Country is a book about me teaching myself how to park ski using a bunch of these same ideas. Park skiing is supposed to be impossible for anybody over the age of 35 40, 45, and I taught myself how to park ski at age 50. You had 53 and then when and it wasn't just me, right?

We ran this experiment with me and my ski partner, and then we came back the following year and ran it through the flow Research collective with an actual study group where we had 17 older adults, ages 29 to 68. We used the same protocol. most of them were intermediate park ski skiers or snowboarders with zero terrain park experience. And in four days on the mountain using this protocol, we got them incredibly far. And if you go to nar country.com, which is the website I built for the book, you can click on the Peak Performance Aging experiment and see the video. We had a National Geographic photographer following us, or a video photographer following us around.

It was one way we measured performance was to do video and. Analysis after the fact. But anybody can see what, what I'm talking about. But we, this was the thing. It was about holding them back more than letting them go at the pace they wanted to go at. And that's one of the things that resulted in so much progression.

Srini: Yeah it's interesting like when I hear you say that, cause I think about how I practiced when I was learning the tuba, it was borderline obsessive to the point where I drove everybody and my family crazy cuz tubas are not pleasant to listen to. But I was talk, we're talking three to four hours a day and now I'm realizing, oh, Yeah, that would make sense that I can't just sit around and play a guitar for four hours a day.

And it wouldn't

wouldn't probably,

Steven Kotler: flow, right? Like you can't do it without flow. And the problem with guitar, with all this stuff is, and the, and here's the thing, over time, right? Like we, there are correlations between learning right there, there are patterns that exist in learning to play guitar and learning to surf and learning. algebra. There's there's patterns that overlap for sure, but there's also a lot of individual variation, and we start to think, oh, wow. I, I learned this really fast. I'm not learning this nearly as fast. Something's probably wrong with me. I maybe I'm not built for this. And suddenly you're fucking with your mindset and the minute you have a fixed mindset, It's getting harder. So there's a lot of stuff that sort of works against us, which is why this idea of trying to go one step at a, we call it one inch at a time, right? And that was my model. Go one inch at a time. When you're going for less it actually tempers a lot of that in weird ways.

Srini: Nah let's get specifically into the book. I think the moment I read that first chapter when you mentioned, you decided to learn how to park ski at age 53, my first sort of thought was, holy shit. Because I literally. Probably said to my friends a dozen times, I'm like, riding park on a snowboard looks amazing.

I'm 40. If I break a bone, I'll be out for the season. It's never gonna happen. But after reading your book, it made me rethink the whole concept. And I was like, okay. One like what in the world made you want to, ski? I figured you're already a pretty much an expert level skier right now.

Does that make a huge difference?

Steven Kotler: No, I mean it, I literally I mean it helped with some of the stuff, but I actually, it also meant that I brought a bunch of bad habits into the terrain park with me. So it helped and it hurt and I. it was interesting. I like, there's 11 different things that went into why I chose park skiing and one of the most importantly is, so this kind of not difficult, challenging quest later in life is really important, but it's really important to align whatever your quest is.

You want a mission is my it's very important to have for successful aging. Regular access to passion, purpose, and flow really matters, right? That's that, that's part of what gets you into this door in a sense. and then sustaining it over time really matters. And was, as an expert skier, my only entrance into flow is big mountain riding, more challenge, more risk, more. park skiing, even though it seems ridiculous. What I was trying to do was I was trying to learn how to creatively interpret terrain features. Some of those terrain features were in the terrain park, but really I wanted to be able to use the entire mountain, like a slope style course, if that makes sense to you.

Srini: Mm.

Steven Kotler: reason is this risk is a flow trigger, so is novelty, and that's what I was getting as an expert skier. What I wanted was creativity. So creativity when you. Ideas together in a new way. You get pattern recognition that works as a flow trigger and it's a much safer flow trigger than risk. And if by learning how to park ski, I would learn a million different ways to creatively interpret the mountain and get into flow.

So I was learning to move my body in new ways and use the terrain in new ways, at all levels of terrain. And what I was doing was actually giving myself a million more entrances into flow. time than I actually had before as a skier. So this was actually about Maximum flow is so crucial for peak performance Aging, in fact.

So at the at the Flow research collective, right? We train people on all this stuff. We bundled our standard zero to dangers, our regular flow training with anar, the peak performance aging training because you almost want to come in with the flow stuff already down. Into the peak performance aging stuff.

Useful cuz flow is so fundamental for peak performance aging. And I can talk, there's a million different reasons and we can talk about what those are, but I'll, I'm, again, I'm gonna pause here so I

Srini: Yeah. ear off.

You talked about the park having an element of creativity, not Yeah. More than having an element of risk. And one of the things that you actually say in the book is that basically we, you say, Stanford neuroscientist and Huberman said that you can fight fear with peripheral vision.

Because I think that, like when I look at the. I see opportunities to be creative, but like the whole thought of, eating shit scares me to death because

I like I'm gonna break a bone. Explain that to me. Like I said I wrote off the idea of ever being somebody who could ride park on a snowboard until I read this book, which made me start to think maybe I can actually do jumps in all the crazy shit that I see.

Steven Kotler: Okay, so let me tell you what we did and then I'll talk about Andrew Huberman in a sec

Srini: Hey, Stephen, I l.

Steven Kotler: They're slightly different though. They're related in a cool, important way. First

Srini: okay.

Steven Kotler: how, what we did with park riding, we didn't try to teach people to do tricks. We started, we broke parks, skiing and snowboarding into eight foundational movements. A hockey stop, excuse me, a snow grind, a jump, a crouch, a slash 180 could be done on the surfaces slow. So you could do a sliding spin or a surface swap. 180, right? A 360. and there's one motion I've forgotten that'll come back to me in a half a second.

And our goal was to. To teach people two new ways to move their body and practice their body and to the goal was start with an established motor pattern. Something you do a hundred percent of the time with no conscious interference and zero fear. And here's the thing, skier and snowboarder knows how to hockey stop.

If you're at the intermediate level, you can hockey stop. If I raise the angle of the terrain and you try to hockey stop on a tilted surface that's a grind. I knew everybody in our study group, everybody who could at least be an intermediate, had something they could do a hundred percent of the time.

Hockey stop. Cuz that's a basically a beginner thing that you all learn. This is how you stop on the mountain and we could just lift you up a little bit and teach you how to grind. And then if we teach you, how to shift your weight when you do it, we can teach you how to slash those were, I knew every, in every new skillset and everybody basically knows how to. And even jump a little bit. And so we built on that and the idea was go into the terrain park and use, you don't have to use the jump as a jump. You can use the mound of snow and come in and snow grind along the edge of it, which is a legitimate park trick that people do all the time. But it's allowing you to use this big ass jump feature in a really unique way that's gonna drive dopamine into your system so that dopamine acts as a flow trigger flow.

Once you're in flow, performance goes to the roof, and then you might want to start working on tricks. That's the first thing we did. Here's the second thing we did. We played games that follow the leader. The idea was got in big long lines and we tried to, based on basically how fast you felt like going down the hill, the fastest people were at the front of the. right? All the way back to the, and it wasn't like, who's faster? Just how fast did you wanna go on this run, right? So it switched all the time and it was, do what the person in front of you is doing, or if you don't have the trick, do something meller that's within your skillset. And the idea here is when you watch somebody else perform a motion, your mirror neurons run the same motor program and you actually get a signal.

You'll get a little squirt of dopamine pleasure. you have the trick and you'll get a little squirted nor epinephrine if you don't. So if you have the trick, you do the trick. If you don't, you do a mellower version that is within your skillset only pushing like 1%. And this is what we did and this is how we did it.

And you get incredibly far these techniques. So that's what we did. What you mentioned about Andrew, you bring in peripheral vision is what we would do ahead of time. And here's. that challenge skills sweet spot is very much tuned to how much fear is in your system. So regulating your nervous system is really important for these kind of harder challenges. On a daily basis, you can use things like a gratitude practice or a mindfulness regular exercise. Those are great ways to regulate your nervous system. But in scarier situations, you need stuff that's gonna work immediately. Sometimes breath work will do it. Sometimes reframing will. Sometimes you need a more physiological based intervention. So it turns out when we are looking at the world through very intensely focused vision, right? Staring at the thing in front of us with full concentration, that's what the eyes do during fight or flight. That's what we do when we're really scared, when you're looking and that's a, that produces a reaction in the sympathetic nervous system, the fight or flight. When we look at the world through peripheral vision, the corners of our eyes, this actually, and this is Andrew Newman's work at Stanford. This actually calms us down. It activates the parasympathetic system. It's literally your brain going, oh, you're looking at things outta the corner of your eyes. You're checking out the scenery.

All must be chill. Let's calm down cuz it's expensive to produce fear like the neurochemicals underneath. Fear energy to produce and burn calories, and the brain is an efficiency. if it can protect, those calories, it will. and so you want to on a, if you're going into a challenging situation, and we used to do this like on our way to ski over to the terrain park, I would always try to look outta the corners of my eyes as much as possible. So I'm calming my body down so when I pull into the terrain park, I as calm as possible because I'm about to do something scary and I want to be as calm as possible to stay in that challenge skill sweet spot.

Srini: Yeah. So when you say like a milder version of the trick, so just for clarity's sake, let's say that I wanted to go and attempt a jump or something like that, or one of those things that looks like a jump. So rather than doing the jump, I would just go up the ramp and go down it like I normally would

Steven Kotler: I so at FIR one. I would start you. You have to understand how your body learns. So this is about pattern recognition and embodied cognition and affordances and a bunch of wizbang science. But the point is you have to learn the shape of the features in the terrain park before your body starts to even get vaguely comfortable.

So I would tell you to start by skiing up and then down the jump very slowly so your body actually gets a feel of this is what it looks. This is what it looks like to come down. This is what it looks like to ride over that knuckle. I would give yourself five or six just tours through the terrain park where like the first couple things you're doing, nothing.

Then you've got the on a jump, right? You've got the rounded mound of snow. That's the knuckle that the jump sits upon. And then you've got the big jump. Start by jumping the knuckle, just like coming up the rise of the knuckle and popping and getting like an inch over the knuckle. We had one of the people, our study, she was a woman.

She was 66 years old. She had never jumped off anything, and we started her this way and by the end of camp on the last day, she floated a

,

40 foot knuckle. I've never

Srini: Oh shit.

Steven Kotler: I, we, I literally, I was like down in the park, I was just watching people that I had told my partners. I was like, they're getting really excited. There's a lot of progress today. Keep people dialed back, make sure they're staying at 1% and they're not pushing. And the next thing I know, this woman Ros into a knuckle of a pre, like a medium to large size park. And jumps the entire knuckle, just like she's only a foot off the ground, right? Air wise, she's only a foot above it.

But she took off at the front of the knuckle and landed on the down slope and the entire flat part across the top, she floated across. She had never done anything like that in her life. She was so ecstatic.

Srini: I can only imagine. You're speaking of which you say that it appeared that our NAR country approach was addictive. Once people realized there was an accessible entrance point to park skiing, the sliding SP spin 360, their fear was replaced by curiosity and dopamine did the rest. The neuro cam chemical amped up, pattern recognition, fast twitch muscle response and willingness to take risks.

The result, someone who'd never done a sliding spin 360 nail one in their first try. And then you go on to say that most of us arrive in our fifties feeling the cage has gotten smaller. What's actually shrunk is our mindset. We're in apri of our own making. Once we discover we can keep on learning later in life, that mindset shifts and the cage vanishes.

And I think the other thing that struck me most was what you say about It in terms of

That people tend to think that slowing down is the a good thing and you actually say it's safer to go fast. So explain that to me.

Steven Kotler: People don't realize this, the gear in action, sports across the boards, pretty much everything, you're buying beginner gear, is made for. experts, mountain bikes, snowboard, water ski wake for take your pick at much faster speeds. And so the equipment is designed to work at speed.

If you are riding a mountain bike at two miles an hour along a very bumpy trail, you're gonna get sucked into every rock, and you're gonna get bounced around. It's gonna be like you're on a fricking bronco. If you're going 15 miles an hour, you skip over the surfaces of the. never dive into those holes, and so it's a much smoother, safer ride. And because the bike is designed to work at speed, you have full use of the suspension, which allows you to be very agile, so it's a lot safer. it just takes a little while to get to those speeds. The same thing is true with skis. Most skis are made to work above 25 miles an hour, 20 miles an hour. You. that cuz most people don't get, don't ever learn how to ski that fast. But when you get to that speed, input goes way down. Performance goes way up. You could be at 25 miles an hour on skis. all you have to do is turn your ankles a little bit to initiate a very hard carve. But if you're going like three or four miles an hour, people leaning all the way over left trying to get their edges into the terrain, right?

They're to or snowboard. They're totally off balance. It's because they're not used. The board doesn't have, it can't do what it's designed to do at two miles an hour.

Srini: Okay. That makes sense. So one thing that you pointed out in the book was what you say, the neuro neurobiological changes unlock three types of thinking that are mostly inaccessible before our fifties. More, more importantly, all three types of thinking continue to improve with age as long as we continue to cultivate creativity.

And you talk about relativistic thinking, non-dualistic thinking and systematic thinking. So explain how those all work together in terms of peak perform.

Steven Kotler: Yeah. This is so cool. is so cool. So the old idea, traditional idea of aging one, a part of it is the old dog can't learn new tricks. And it turns out is totally wrong. It turns out old dogs are actually better at learning a whole slew of tricks than new dog than young dogs, new dogs, whatever.

I'm crushing this metaphor, but, and here's why. So as we enter our late forties and our. There's certain genes that turn on only through experience. The two halves of the brain start working together like never before. And normally they're in opposition, but they come together in our fifties. And they, this increases into our eighties.

And finally, we gain access. The brain starts to utilize underutilized resources and real estate, right? Colonizes new territory. And the result is these three kinds of intelligences that you talked about. So let's talk about what comes online and then there's a whole bunch of stuff downstream from it that's. So relativistic thinking is we learn that there's no such thing as black and white. Everything is gray and everything is shades of gray. And if you really wanna be paying attention, everything is really subtle. Changes in shades of gray, right? That's really important. Non-dualistic thinking. We learn that our perspective is only one perspective.

We learn multiperspectival thinking. I can now see this thing from full circle, a bunch of different perspectives. Mine's only one. I don't, it's not black or white, all that stuff. Finally big picture thinking, right? We learn to think, sit at a systems level like never before. These three levels of inte. Unlock whole new levels of abstract reasoning and problem solving and decision making. Then we get whole new levels of creativity, including thinking, which you know, is the hardest aspect of creativity to train. We also gain a whole bunch of empathy, which is really key. And finally we gain a lot of wisdom.

And wisdom is a very specific neurobiological. It's, it's essentially, what we think of as emotional te intelligence or emotional intelligence over time. That's often wisdom, but it it's really important. And these are key skills that make learning later in life so much easier. And it's one of the reasons we saw as much progress as we saw in our older adult subjects was cause of this. And fully, if you wanna unlock these superpowers, There's a bunch of things you have to do along the way, but in your fifties you need to think creatively. You nailed it. And creative activities, whether it's writing or cooking or coding or just like how you get dressed in the morning or drive to work or any time you're forging the brain to think creatively, it's that activity and what it was in the brain is actually what starts to unlock these developmental intelligence. So in psychology we talk a lot about moderators, if then conditions. And in adult development you see a lot of these moderators. And in our fifties, creativity is a moderator to quality of life afterwards for these reasons.

Srini: There's one other thing that struck me here, and you say, for the past 18 months, while ski 88 days, I also launched a book, edited a second, wrote a third, and almost finished writing a fourth. Additionally, I helped steer the flow research collective through a pandemic. Gave over 200 speeches and interviews, led half a dozen research initiatives and managed to stay happily married throughout.

Also, my dogs still like me all. Matters for one big reason. Being busy is not an excuse. And then you go on to say that too often the siren song of adult responsibility is where our dreams go to die. We have an al alphabet's worth of excuses. I can't do X because I'm already doing Y and Z. Talk to me about that because it got me thinking about, how much time I'm not spending on the mountain when I read that, even though I have my season passed and I'm just.

Okay. Yeah, like I'm making excuses here. I know I could easily go and spend a co a day on the mountain. I could probably do two or three days a week if I wanted to.

Steven Kotler: So the a bunch here and. It starts with this peak performance. Aging is possible for all of us, but there's a lot to do. There's stuff you gotta do, and what the research shows is once you reach your fifties, if you're not moving forward, you're going backwards. So if you're not training the skills you need to be training, they're actually declining, right?

So it becomes much more imperative. Later in life. My big point is that what there, there were a number of big points. One is that this is a standard flow thing. So flow massively amplifies performance as we know, right? McKinsey did that 10 year study of top executives in flow and they found that top executives in flow are 500% more productive than out. That's a huge boost in productivity. One of the reasons I was capable of doing so much while spending so much time to park ski. As park skiing kept dropping me into flow, the heightened productivity and the heightened creativity that shows up in the state will outlast the state by a day, maybe two. So it bled into all the other stuff I was doing first and foremost. So getting more flow on the mountain allowed me to get a ton more flow at. Second of all, if you don't, that's the thing about peak performance aging and these na style missions that I'm emphasizing. If you don't do it now, are you gonna do it?

It only gets harder if you wanna rock till you drop. What the science shows is we want regularly engage in social and creative activities that demand dynamic, deliberate play, and take place in novel outdoor environments. That's peak performance aging in a single And the question, it's just a question of like, when do you start? And how far do you want to go? To me, I, and the last thing I wanna say about your comment is, the, oh, I've got a season in pass, but I want to go. I keep making excuses. All this stuff is part of the, what I call the mindset of old starts showing up in our late twenties for a bunch of biological reasons, but it's deadly.

It's deadly. And what I mean by that is we know from copious amounts of studies, like 50 years worth of study, is that the link between mindset, And peak performance aging is unbelievably tight. If you have a positive mindset towards aging, I think my best years are ahead of me, and I think, my life is filled with wonderful possibility.

The result is an extra seven and a half years of healthy longevity. you have a negative mindset towards aging there's a health penalty as well. So time you make excuses for yourself and you don't do these things, you're feeding into that unhealthy mindset towards aging. You're feeding a very dangerous beast.

Srini: Yeah. I mean it may, sorry, go ahead.

Steven Kotler: let me take it one step further cuz this is crazy, but worth saying so. when we are subjected to negative mindsets around aging, meaning when we are subject to stereotypes around aging, meaning when somebody says, ah, you're too old for that shit, or in the voice in your head says, you're too old for that shit. know from work done by Becca Levy, Yale. Very, really rigorous. Great work that being exposed to negative mindsets around aging, meeting exposed as bad stereotypes around aging. By the time you're 60 years old, if you've grown up around. And gone into adulthood with these ideas, you'll have exhibit 30% greater memory decline than people who are not subject to negative mindsets around aging.

Srini: Wow. Yeah, it it makes sense as to why when I was surfing so regularly, writing just to happen so easily cuz the float just carried over consistently.

Steven Kotler: over.

Srini: Yeah.

Steven Kotler: carries over. It's the other, the other thing I think that nobody really talks about, but I think this is really important. When you are in bar when you're doing these kind of challenging physical activities. And it doesn't have to be, we, I mean we're all up in action sports, but you

Srini: Yeah. learning salsa dancing, or you could be learning tennis for that man and you still get a lot of these same carryovers cuz they're dynamic activities and they do a lot of the work that you need doing. But physical challenge because we're physically embodied creature. Always has priority in the brain in terms of survival. And when we have, when we like, reach and exceed physical goals, it does a number of things for us. But one thing it does is it really calms our nervous system down. So what happens is if you're out surfing and you, let's say you're comfortable in four foot surf and a five foot wave comes in and you take it, right?

Steven Kotler: You push yourself a little bit and take it and you surf it and you're fine. That extra bit of confide. That shows up in, in surfing translates when you run into like writing and you run into a writing challenge, you actually have more confidence because a writing problem doesn't seem as scary as that five foot wave.

Srini: Yep. Totally

Steven Kotler: Even though we both know a five foot wave isn't gonna really do much damage and a writing problem could threaten your career, and that's totally not right, that's not true, right? It's an illusion. It's not true. And yet the brain prioritizes the physical stuff. So what ends up happening is like work stuff, which is actually often a lot more survival. Gets, we get less reactive and as a result, you know this, when we're calmer, you get amplified learning, amplified creativity, amplified performance, better access to flow, all the stuff you need comes from that calm. So there's a lot of different benefits that overlay here. And yeah.

Srini: So basically you're making me think, like I'm working on this new book called The Artificially Intelligent Creative, which is all about ai and creativity. And like I've gotten a significant amount done way faster than I ever thought I could, but I've been stuck lately. So I'm thinking after hearing you, it's oh, know what goes,

Steven Kotler: By the way, I go flee, go to the mountains,

go snowboarding, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. where are you? You're in

Srini: I'm in, so I'm in SoCal at the moment. So Big Bear is my closest mountain. Yep,

Steven Kotler: Yeah. I think you'll find you'll start finding some crossover, especially if you go in open with I'm gonna learn.

I'm just gonna, that sort

Srini: totally.

Steven Kotler: The kind of thing where you're not judging yourself, you're not self-conscious, you

Srini: Yeah.

Steven Kotler:

,

set yourself up well for flow. And I think you'll start to see bleed over.

Srini: Yeah. You're making me think I should just go.

Steven Kotler: Southern California with all the snow they've been getting, you

Srini: Yeah. could go. Yeah man.

No, you're making me think I should just go rent a cabin for three days and stay up there rather than drive back and forth

Steven Kotler: think that's a good idea.

Srini: Yeah.

Steven Kotler: that.

Srini: Okay one thing you did write about in the book was getting hurt. Talk to me about that and recovery and how you deal with that.

Steven Kotler: think there's three or three or four things worth going, worth talking about here. The first is the fact of the matter. Older adults take longer to heal than younger. that fact, that's fact, period. So you really, you don't want to get hurt if you can avoid it. That's just primary.

But so how, one, that's why I always tell people, don't just jump into these things, right? There's a, I took the book, I took a year to train for park skiing before I went in full-time, right? Like I literally took a. March to March before I was full-time in the train park to do this. I also did all the smart things that people don't do cuz they get impatient on the front end. Good movement professionals will watch you walk and say, oh, you broke your ankle when you were. 12 and you're overcompensating by doing this, and this, and let's fix these smaller muscles that you're probably not paying attention to. You wanna do stuff like that so you don't get hurt, right? You also wanna go slower inside of it.

You want to have a very rigorous recovery protocol. Right TV and a beer isn't gonna get it done. You saunas stretching, restorative yoga, long walks in nature. salt bass the, thera guns are your friend body work is your friend cold plunges are your friend. All these things you want to put into place, you want deep delta wave sleep.

In between sessions one, you won't learn anything. So if you're trying to onboard new motor skills and you're not getting seven, eight hours of sleep at night, why are you bothering? Because you literally can't transfer the skills from short-term holding into long-term storage. So all that stuff becomes really important.

That's just maintenance over time. And then the other two things that are worth pointing out. I'm gonna, the one is the hard ass and one is the happy answer. The hard ass answer is, while getting hurt is serious. I've been hurt a great deal. We're not as fragile as we think we are.

One, two. Getting hurt is often not always, often not the big deal. We think it is. I, and this is coming from a guy who's broken 85 bones, right? Like I, I've been hurt a lot. I know what being hurt is. And I know what it takes to recover from different things. You, that it's not as crazy as most people make it out to.

The other flip side is that regenerative medicine has gotten pretty good. I've been writing about studying, researching, running experiments in regenerative medicine for 20 years, and I will tell you that 20, 25 years ago, and it started, it was a joke. It wasn't real. They couldn't do much and it wasn't real until probably around 2015 or so.

But in the. years, it's starting to get real. And when it comes to like ligaments, tendons, and it's now at the low end bones, we're getting really good stem cells, exosomes, placental, matrix peptides, plasma platelet, plasma. All these are very good tools that we didn't have five or six years ago. Some of them are cheaper than. Then that and cost is definitely a factor here, right? Like this stuff, a lot of this stuff is still designer medicine and not yet widely covered by insurance. Some is starting to be covered by insurance, but the tools are getting better and better.

And cheaper. And cheaper, which is, another factor. And the idea that younger young old people, older adults, take longer to heal than younger. is true only until we take control of stem cells and mo if you're fi, if you're tracking that research, five to seven years looks to appears to be the timeline for that.

So even that, seem to be circling in on, in, in cool ways. Now, I may be a little exuberant in that timeline. I'm trying to, I try to be as cautious as possible when it comes to regenerative medicine. I always tell. When it comes to the experimental stuff, the flow stuff, I got firsthand experience.

I'm, I do research. I, we do all that work at the flow research collective when it comes to, what I'm now doing, which is giving healthcare advice. Remember, you're getting healthcare advice from a guy whose degrees are in poetry and fiction writing. Like you're not taking advice from a doctor.

You're taking advice from a poet. Big grain of salt when I give healthcare advice, cuz I'm just giving it to you from my own experience and what I've learned re covering it. As, as a writer, I don't think I'm an expert there. I'm an expert when it comes to flow and flow science, but like when you cross that line into healthcare in, in general, this is not my expertise.

This is what I, I, I've been running experiments, I've learned a lot, but I always caution people on.

Srini: Yeah. I, this is just a question out of morbid curiosity that I meant to ask you earlier in our conversation, you're talking about children and how they easily get into flow. I have a five month old nephew and it's just been fascinating to watch his motor skill development. Like these very small things.

We were he has this like little jungle gym. and I was at my sister's house last week and I put his Curious George Monkey on top of the Jungle Gym just to see what he would do. And I was like, Hey buddy, can you help Curious George, get down. And, the Jungle Gym has like other toys attached to it.

So this kid literally looked at it for a few minutes, yanked the little toy, pulled it down and just pull Drew as George off. So what is happening in terms of flow at that age?

Steven Kotler: So there's two things going on at that age one, states have precursors, right? Things that, there were things that happened in the brain that produced more flow. There's changes in brain waves when we move into flow. Our brain waves are much closer to the alpha theta Borderline. normally, naturally, developmentally, prone to alpha, so they have an easier time getting into alpha state than adults. flow is right on that borderline, so that's part of it. Their prefrontal cortex is not fully developed and the ability. Turn off partially of prefrontal cortex and is critical for flow. So these kinds of things make kids developmentally flow prone, as a result. The other thing you're looking at, this is about embodied cognition.

You gave a really great example, the old I, so talk about if in traditional psychology or neuroscience, you'll hear people talk about the action percept or the perception action cycle. I perceive the world and then I act upon my perceptions. And it turns out that's exactly backwards. We don't perceive the world and act on our perceptions. We use our actions to test our perceptions. It's the action perception cycle. And cuz brains are built for movement. That's what brands are designed for. And so all movement, and this could be eye movement as well, are about testing hypothesis. If I do this, what happens if I. What happens if we were talking about your nephew got into the jungle gym and surveyed and looked around and then solved the problem for you by reaching up and that's what they're doing.

They're testing reality with movement.

and you, there's really crazy experiments on, and kids, babies where they take babies and they put 'em in a cradle, they put a mobile above. and the kids will maybe interact with the mobile a little bit. It's randomly whatever they're kicking there, whatever, and then they tie one of the kids' legs with a string to the mobile. the infants, once they realize they can affect change in the mobile by kicking their

Srini: Yeah.

Steven Kotler: go crazy. And they only go crazy with the leg that's attached to the mobile. So they learn, they wanna get this action cuz they're trying to learn. This is how kids learn. They test the world through movement, eye movement, physical movement certain kinds of conscious thoughts qualify as movement. If you're talking, this is embodied cognition and a bunch of stuff downstream from that. So the way they think about the brain sometimes movement is internal as well. Unconscious thoughts don't really, aren't really movement. But conscious thoughts can count as movement sometimes doesn't matter.

But my point is, this is how we, this is actually how we learn. So one of the other things that happens, one of the reasons we can pry open this motor learning window and reopen it in older. Is by making, by having, teaching them new movements and letting 'em investigate the world with movement. First, this feeds directly into how we learn.

In fact, just say you wanna learn a foreign language. If you couple the words with gestures. right? I'm trying to learn, it is. And when you're saying the word to yourself, if you coupled the meaning with a gesture, you'll learn it much faster. In fact, it in the inverse, when they see little kids around the age of your nephew and abo and above if he points to a, to an object and his mother names the object, right?

Like he points what is that is a painting or what, take your

It's a tact. Within two months of pairing the sound of the word with the gesture, the kid will learn the word. It just becomes part of their vocabulary if they don't. So there's now studies in, so it turns out this is wild.

It turns out kids have parents who gesture more, learn faster because we think first in gesture, gestures are proto words. So we think first in gesture and then in language. That's how it evolves. And so there's something in, in poor communities parents tend to gesture more. This is across the board.

It doesn't matter what nationality you're in. In lower income communities, they have what's known as gesture poverty, and it produces lower levels of intelligence as a result of this whole fee. So there's now all these inter. low income communities where they're going in and they're teaching the parents to gesture more.

Srini: Wow.

Steven Kotler: and this massively has an impact on how children learn. Talk about wild mind body connections that you don't think

Srini: Yeah. right? Yeah. All this stuff comes, this is stuff that I used to help train older adults, right? But it come all, a lot of the research and body cognition and this sort of stuff, it came out of like how do infants learn

Steven Kotler: Actually going on when infants learn?

Srini: Yeah.

Steven Kotler: That was where a lot of this early research started coming.

Srini: When you mentioned tieing, the mobile, like one of the things that we would do with my nephew and one of my sister's colleagues told her it's oh, buy a helium balloon and tie it to his feet. It'll be like hours of entertainment and is exactly what you talked about. It was just fascinating.

Like we called it playing soccer. You tie it loosely and every time the balloon would go off, we'd be like, go.

Steven Kotler: That's really cool.

Srini: Yeah. Look, as always, you and I could talk for hours and hours about all of this stuff. You're a wealth of knowledge. Like I said, this book was different than some of the other books. But also, filled with really interesting insights and like I said, made me start to rethink the idea of writing park.

But in the interest of time, I want to finish with my final question which, I've asked you before, what do you think it is that makes some deer something unmistakable?

Steven Kotler: Unmistakable. That's interesting. I always, to me the answer is style and, but I gotta, let me define what I mean by style. Style. And this is, to me, the root of all. Style is con a conscious choice. Somebody's made a choice. So I've got a good friend who works at a big company and a very, he's a vice president every day he goes to work in a button down in khakis, right?

Doesn't look like a very stylish choice, but he's got great style. Why? Because he knows that he's a much more effective manager if he blends. than if he stands out in his environment. He dresses how he dresses out of work a very different way at work. He wants to blend in. He's making a style choice, he's making creative choice. That's what I think what makes somebody unmistakable is when you see that kind of intentionality and that kind of choice over time in a lot of things. That's what I think makes somebody unmistakable is their creativity has bled out of their primary art form into everything they do, and it's visible in, in the choices they make.

Srini: Amazing. I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story, your wisdom and insights with our listeners. Where can people find out more about the new book and all the work that you've been up to since you were last year?

Steven Kotler: Yeah the new book, nar country.com also available Amazon or anywhere you buy books, support your local independent bookstores. If you are interested in training flow, which is foundational to peak performance, aging or training, peak performance for that the best url and pardon the cheesy URL here, but it's easy to remember.

So we're going with it is get more flow.com. So at the Flow Collective, if you wanna train with us at any level or you wanna learn more about our trainings, just go to get more flow.com. You can sign up for a free hour long coaching call. And all we'll do is get on the phone with you and talk to you about flow and flow training and peak performance aging and all the stuff we're. and it's one stop shopping and I, and people love that call. They learn ton. And it's super fun for folks.

Srini: I may have to sign up for one myself.

Steven Kotler: Yeah, get more flow.com. We'll get you there. And NA Country is the book if you want to flow. Gina of Flow Research Collective is the company in general and steven collar.com is me.

Srini: Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.