Steven Kotler: Getting Younger with Age: Mindsets for Boosting Learning and Flow

Mark Bidwell 0:38
Hello, everyone, this is Mark Bidwell, it’s been some time since I’ve released an episode of the podcast. I’ve been pretty busy the last couple of years, as I’m sure many of us have. And I’ve got three new podcasts lined up two of which are with previous guests, and one with someone who, whose book I read one of his books I read just before COVID, and unfortunately got delayed. And he’ll be coming on the show with a new book, which I’m particularly excited to share with you. So three new episodes are coming up, as I say to people who are friends of the show, and whose previous episodes have been very well received. So very excited about bringing them to you. This first episode is with Steven Kotler, who you might remember, he’s actually been on this podcast three times before talking about some of his books such as Bold, the Rise of Superman, and a number of other books. I think he’s written 12 In the last few years, and his work has been very, very helpful for me in the corporate world, but also, more broadly. This latest book is called Gnar Country, G-N-A-R, which is short for gnarly, which refers to not just a sort of a very hostile environment in which he learns new action adventure sports skills at the ripe old age of 55, he’s my age, but also about the environment in which you know, at 55 you’re operating in. And so, the reality of getting old, and some of the challenges associated with getting old. And he really turns on its head some of the conventional wisdom around the psychological and physiological decline that accompanies old age, and offers an extremely optimistic view of how we can turn this round to our benefit. So we’ve talked about action sports, peak performance, longevity, and a number of other topics. He’s great, Steven, I love working with him and talking to him, he’s had a huge impact on me. And as you’ll find out in this episode, he’s mapped out in this new book, an approach which I’m gonna adopt to continue to learn a number of skills which I failed to learn in my youth. And I’m pretty excited about rolling up my sleeves and approaching this set of skills acquisitions with a very different approach, and looking forward to sharing those results with you and probably with him in a few months or a couple of years, once I’ve nailed this project. So without any further conversation, I’ll introduce you to Steven Kotler.

Mark Bidwell 3:06
Hey, Steven!

Steven Kotler 3:07
How are you, Mark?

Mark Bidwell 3:08
Very well, how are you?

Steven Kotler 3:09
Great, thanks.

Mark Bidwell 3:10
So you’ve been on the show four times. And this book, I think I’ve mentioned a couple of times before, I mean, your books, they’ve always had left marks, but this book, in particular, has moved me somewhat. I’m very keen to talk to you a little bit about it, if that’s okay.

Steven Kotler 3:23
That’s fantastic.

Mark Bidwell 3:24
Since we last spoke, we talked about The Art of the Impossible, which is your last well, it’s not your book, you had a science fiction book in between, I think, but that was the last time we talked about it. Maybe just, what has been the highs and lows of your life since then, how have you been spending your time, and then let’s get into the book itself.

Steven Kotler 3:41
So, the answer is literally, with the exception of writing that novel, which I was writing, probably when we spoke, I’ve been involved in either writing Gnar Country or doing peak performance ageing research, the experiments that are underneath that book. some of them took, like an entire winter to round long experiments. So I’ve literally been living in the world of peak performance ageing, almost for three and a half years. And, you know, that’s not my introduction to the topic, but it was when I decided to get serious about it.

Mark Bidwell 4:14
It had a feeling over kind of a COVID project to some extent, you know, in the sense of, probably it would have been much harder to have done it outside, when it certainly, you know, being locked down can mean one can focus on things in a very different way. But it also had a little bit of a feeling of a midlife kind of transition project, am I right on either of those things or not necessarily?

Steven Kotler 4:35
It was definitely, I mean, I tell the story in the opening in the book, it was definitely a little bit of a COVID product, it got kicked off by COVID. But it was more the shutting down of the ski resorts and the realization of how much unfinished business just like personal, at a deep personal level, I sort of had with this relationship I had with skiing, which is lifelong. That really brought it to bare. The COVID, while I was incredibly busy during it, gave me the ability to dial in my training and really plot out the season. By the time the actual experiment came, we talked in the middle of that experiment when I was doing Art or Impossible, you know, that I was also running that first round of experiments, which made, with having to do all the press wherever possible a lot easier, because what life threw at me workwise I knew like my days off were going to be scary.

Mark Bidwell 5:33
And it’s a very, very different book as well. It’s a visceral book. Lots of things struck me. One is, I mean, just the style of it is very different from how you’ve written the other books. It was far more sort of in your face, far more punky, far more kind of real. I guess on the other hand, having all your books has got a far more intellectual kind of basis, this was far more somatic, and that lived experience if you’d like that came through the reading of the book.

Steven Kotler 5:55
Nice of you to notice. There were a couple of goals. One was, so the style in the book is actually what would happen if you took my first two nonfiction books West of Jesus and A Small Furry Hope, which have a kind of a particular style to them. And then I learned a very different style in the next four or five books. And I finally managed to put them together, which I had been wanting to do for a while, but it required the right vehicle. It was the first thing. The second thing is, you’re right, it’s way more personal, it’s way more sort of punk rock, it’s a little in your face. It was, on a certain level, I noticed somewhere around Art of Impossibe, maybe a little bit before, that people stopped asking questions about the work and started asking questions about me, which always made me uncomfortable, right, I never really liked that. I’m an introvert and those questions sort of bothered me. But they were coming from a real place, which is I think people wanted to see how peak performance looks like when it’s applied actually in a life like in a real life. So first in this book, you get the applied version, which I couldn’t do with all the science. So being able to back off of some of the science allowed me to show you what the application of peak performance and peak performance aging was in real time, which I’ve never been able to do before, and to the best of my knowledge nobody’s done previously. So nothing like that sort of exists. And there’s a bunch of writing challenge reasons why, more than anything else. And the final reason was giving people this ability to see what it looks like on a day to day basis, I think for at least the people who were lucky enough to coach the flow research collective. Also, we’ve heard a lot from people like, what does this look like over the long haul? Or the other one is, I always say that peak performance works like compound interest, but when you’re in the front end of the project, and somebody says that to you, you know what I mean, your typical response is well, screw you, buddy, what do you mean by compound interest. So now at least I have something to point to and say, this is what it looks like, and this is why you care.

Mark Bidwell 7:48
Yep. But it was also nice to me, it was a part of me, as you say, skiing has been in your life, yyou’ve been skiing for many, many years. But actually, you were doing the kind of skiing that you might have started off doing back in the day, you know, not kite skiing, but I mean, the park skiing. And it’s funny, I mean, my inspiration, the inspiration I took from this, I mean, I’ve been biking all my life mountain biking, but I’d never picked up any of the trails and and now the bikes are amazing and you could do all sorts of things, like, my bike is far better than I am riding it. And so my challenge and that’s why this book was quite inspirational is how do I go back and learn some of the things that I never learned when I was 15 now that I’m 55.

Mark Bidwell 7:48
You start with the bunny hop, and you go one inch at a time.

Mark Bidwell 7:54
Exactly. I’ve got a list of the things that I need to do, just like you had in your book of the trails I need to do and the technologies and the actual skills I need to acquire. So that’s why the book, when it arrived, the timing was great. Let’s start with the title. I mean, for the Americans they’ll know what gnarly is…

Steven Kotler 8:49
Maybe, maybe Steven made an error here. I always say that some of my titles are from PR marketing, where they’re horrible until the book comes out and people understand what the title means, and then the title really resonates but before the book comes out, they actually debits the chances of the book. So Gnar Country is, as you pointed out, it’s action sports slang, Gnar is short for gnarly. And the book is about peak performance aging. Gnarly is defined as any environment that is high in perceived risk, and highly natural. Country is any landscape or terrain, of course. So what’s cool about Gnar country, what I liked about it is both, it describes our later age, right, high in perceived risk, high in actual risk. And as it turns out, as you now know from the book, it sort of also captures the gritty mindset that you need to thrive during it. And so that’s why I love the title, though there was a ton of pushback along the way on that title. I had to fight for it.

Mark Bidwell 9:48
And the sport itself is I mean, the skiing that you do is obviously pretty, pretty high consequence, put it that way.

Steven Kotler 9:55
Well, so this was the idea. I guess you got to start at the beginning, which is the traditional theory of aging, which I like to call the long slow rot theory, it’s what we’re all familiar with. It’s the idea that all of our mental and physical skills decline over time, there’s nothing we can do to stop. The new version is no, no, no, that’s not actually true. In fact, not all at this point. But I think it’s going to end up being all in the end. But the vast majority of what we used to believe declined over time, we now know they’re all use it or lose it skills. And this is cognitive function, physical function. And if you’ve never stopped training these skills, you can hang on to them, you can invest them far later in life, we never knew that was possible. And there’s a bunch of actually beneficial changes in the brain that start happening in our 50s, which make it easier to onboard certain kind of new skills. And there was a ton of this data and I said, okay, and it was all true in the lab. Some stuff was true in life, but most of it was just true in the lab. And I was like, okay, if this stuff is really true, we should be able to take it, build a learning protocol around it and try to onboard really challenging difficult physical skills later in life. So as a way to test it, I decided to teach myself how to park ski, which, as you pointed out, is very dangerous. It’s very acrobatic, there’s about 12 different biological reasons, and for those who don’t know, park skiing is the discipline in skiing that involves doing tricks or jumps, and on rails and wall rides and boxes and that sort of thing. And well, there are 11 or 12 different biological reasons why it’s supposed to be theoretically impossible. It’s challenging over 25, it’s very difficult over 35, you get to 40, 50, downright impossible according to most people. And in fact, even like the top ski professionals who I went to, who were over 40 themselves, they thought I was nuts. And so it turns out I wasn’t.

Mark Bidwell 11:44
What are some of the main biological reasons, is it flexibility?

Steven Kotler 11:47
The biggest one is, well, strength declines over time, stamina declines over time, VO2 max declines over time, balance, agility, these things all decline over time. They’re all use it or lose it skills, we now know, but they do decline, right. Some of them start declining as early as their 30s, VO2 max starts in our 20s, but it really starts to fall off a cliff in our 50s, though I just to point out what I’m talking about, when they look and they measure the VO2 Max, which is upper respiratory capacity, like sprinting, right that’s what VO2 Maex measures your ability to like sustain that respiration feed. And I found that healthy 80 year olds have a healthy 80-year-old track athletes have the VO2 max of 35-year-old, healthy 35-year-olds. The world record holders like a guy who’s 88 and I want to say he is the healthy, he’s got the VO2 Max of a healthy 25 year old and maybe this is one of these things he used to hammer you, like it didn’t matter what you said about age, like VO2 Max. And so that’s one example of that.

Mark Bidwell 12:48
So you were saying there are these biological reasons why it’s so hard to do this.

Steven Kotler 12:52
So anyways, that’s one of them, strength, some of the big ones, and the one that everybody’s familiar with the motor learning one. So right, we have this motor skills learning window that is open during childhood. And so it is totally shot by 25. That’s what most people thought. And this is why they tell you don’t become a gymnast or a ballerina at 25 and once again, not the entire picture. So that is some of the pictures. But a bigger portion of it is how we learn. When we’re children. We learn, as kids we learn by playing, there’s less self-consciousness, there’s less self-esteem issues. There’s low self-expectation, there’s way more neurochemistry or reward neural chemicals. That means all learning takes place at a much faster rate. So it’s not so much that the window shots as we stop learning the way that we did when we were little kids, and that feeds into changes in our biology. But if you understand what biology is and how to work with it, are you going to perform physically like you did when you’re 18? No, but I will also tell you and I just you know, it’s funny, I just had this conversation with a friend of mine, I skied two days ago, I’m now 55, the book was written when I was 52. Two days ago I skied the biggest rowdiest, craziest lines of my life two days ago, at 55. And we were talking about it and my friend brought up like, you know, people will say things like, what, are you trying to pretend you’re 18, and my friend, like looked at them, and he was like, are you kidding, I would crush the kid I was when I was 18. He wouldn’t have a chance against me now. And I absolutely feel the same way.

Mark Bidwell 14:25
Amazing, amazing. Maybe we’ll come on to what the feedback has been from your clients, but it does raise all sorts of issues about you know, what is possible, what projects one can embark on? And what’s possible if you just take away these sorts of these self-imposed barriers, which as you say are there for different reasons than the conventional wisdom suggests they are. So when you I mean you’ve got, the book is based on your performance diary, right, your diary of your activities, and it’s full of long days. And by the way, these are days is it, after a day of work, you’re out there. So this is not just, so you’re already emotionally exhausted having done it, presumably, you’ve had a good day of work at your computer or with the business, and you’ve gone out and done 20-25 circuits, you know, in some pretty exciting and high consequence sort of territory. Just give us a sense, the book hasn’t come out yet, it’s coming out quite soon. But give us a sense about some of the sort of practices that you set up because it’s a pretty structured procedure, you had a very clear structure.

Steven Kotler 15:29
Yeah, with everything I had a very clear structure. So I’m an early riser. I’ve always been an early riser. So I took advantage of that. I normally get up at about four o’clock in the morning, and I work from 4am to 8am. That didn’t change. What I did is, because I would come back and feel so exhausted, forget having a social life, it was gone. As soon as I decided on this project, that wasn’t happening. But I didn’t ski with who I was married to during this period, I didn’t really know you. So I’d get up, I started to tip my schedule back about an hour and a half. And so I would work before I went to the mountain, do work poles on the way to the mountain on the way back from the mountain. And if you put all that together, very rarely did I have to work once I got home, sometimes I’d have to put an hour in or something like that. But it was never that much. But it took a lot of planning. Like you had to really stay ahead of it and things like that. But on the hill, there was always one of the things that with older athletes, you want more time for recovery, and you want more time for warmups. The body tends to lie about fitness ready. You still wake up with you know, aches and pains, there’s a lot more you can do about that stuff, fix it, but it’s gonna, that’s going to be part of it, but I found that I’d walk my dog first, so I get like a half an hour walk in, then I get like a 10-15 minute stretch in and then I was like okay, now you can access your skill level. So there was a long warmup period. When I got to the mountain it was very precise, it was a four lap warm up that we did every single time. A lot of this was to stay safe and things like that, there were goals for the day and they were unattached park skiing. I had listed 20 tricks I wanted to learn. That was my real progress, but you want sort of process goals that are unattached to outcome. So my goals for when I went to the hill, if I was tired, exhausted, 12 laps and 12 laps is sort of not much of a ski day, but it means you’re getting enough physical exercise that you’re not going backwards. And you know this is yourself as an athlete, you need two or three or four training days a week to not be going backwards. So 16 laps was a good day, that’s what I aim for every day, and 20 laps are great days. Usually around 16 laps or 20 laps, that would always end up putting me into a flow state, and the flow is what really took care of the learning. Flow is the state of amplified performance, so oftentimes though, the goal was to learn to park ski, I would ski myself into flow and then go down to the terrain park, once I was already performing at my best.

Mark Bidwell 18:04
What told you that you were in flow? What was the trigger if you like?

Steven Kotler 18:08
So flow has six core psychological characteristics, right, for phenomenal athletes, that mean they describe how the state makes you feel. This is how do you know if you’re in flow? Complete concentration at the task at hand, there tends to be this merger of action and awareness, which is a really complicated idea but it basically means like you’re so focused on what you’re doing, that you can no longer separate skiing from Steven, you know what I mean? They become sort of the same thing, your sense of self tends to quiet down, the voice in your head gets really quiet, time passes so strangely, so usually it speeds up just get so sucked into what you’re doing that hours go by in minutes, feels like minutes. Lowest peak performance, we don’t feel peak performance, we feel a sense of control, oh wow I can control things I can’t normally control. Finally, the most obvious experience is joy, it’s ecstatic. As humans we prefer flow, it’s our favorite experience on Earth. Study after study has shown that it underpins happiness and wellbeing and overall life satisfaction, and meaning and purpose for a reason. Like we love this experience, which is great for motivation also. That’s one of the other things is, by doing it this way, using this to work my way into flow, flow sort of takes care of the motivation. You know what I mean? Like when you wake up sore in the morning, okay, you’re sore in the morning but in comparison to what was possible in a flow state, you don’t even think about it.

Mark Bidwell 19:31
I guess you’d say you’d get into this state, and then hit the tricks the jumps?

Steven Kotler 19:38
Okay, so let me tell you what we did. So how do you proceed in a really dangerous activity like park skiing in your 50s? There’s a handful of things I have to tell you that sort of walk you into this idea. The first is that flow has this really core classic flow trigger. You want more flow states, flow triggers are your friends that preconditions and lead to more flow. Flow follows focus, all the triggers tend to drive our attention to the present moment, most famous is the challenge to skills difference, that says we pay the most attention to the task at hand, and the challenge slightly exceeds our skill sets, so you stretch but not snap. Now we put a number on it, and this as a metaphor, this is not science, it’s just a metaphor. If you’re about 4% or 5%, right, you want 4% or 5% difference between challenge and stills when the challenge is about 5%, greater than our skills, we pay maximum attention to what we’re doing, etc. Now, mind you, this shifts a little bit if you’re tired it may go to 4%, etc, etc. But what we realize is that there’s something called allostatic load. It’s literally the impact of stress over time, and it has an impact on our physiology and our psychology. We realized that because of allostatic load it is challenging, because sweetspot in older adults probably shrunk down about 1%. So we came up with this idea of one inch at a time. Start with an established motor skill so that you do 100% of the time with zero conscious interference and no fear, and then build on it, one new motion at a time. And the trick with building on it is you want to do it playfully, it’s like a playful, improvisational on top of your skills, not like deliberate practice where I’ve tried to do the exact same thing, but a little right. It’s not that it’s a playful improvisation. We can talk about why. But like, that’s the sort of what you’re thinking about there. And what we did with park skiing, and this is why I stopped you because you said you’re out there doing tricks. No, we’re not actually out there doing tricks. This is now I’ve told you about another flow trigger. Creativity is a flow trigger. When we link ideas together in a novel way. That’s pattern recognition, it produces dopamine, which drives focus, which drives flow. So when you look at a mound of snow, you go oh, wow, that mountain is sort of tilted at 45 degrees, I could use it to do a grind. Or I could throw 180 and that’s pattern recognition. Creative interpretation of terrain features is how it will drive you into flow. So what we did is we said hey, park skiing has actually eight foundational motions, jump and crouch and slashing, grinding a shifty, a 360, or 180, and skiing or snowboarding backwards. The goal wasn’t to learn new tricks. The goal was to teach you new ways to move the body and meet new ways to move my body on terrain features, and that creativity, creatively interpreted and trained features drops you into flow. And then once you’re into flow, for reasons I’ll get to, then you start learning tricks. Now the first thing I want to mention about what we did before is, when I ran this experiment on myself, my ski partner and then we took 20 older adults at ages 29 to 68 and rerun it with them and well, myself and my ski partner we’re pretty good skiers. The folks we did the experiment with were, most of them were intermediate skiers. So what do you do with them? How do you do that? Everybody who’s ever skied and snowboarded knows a kind of hockey stop, you turn your skis or snowboard sideways and grind it to a stop. That’s how you stop. In fact, you can’t go from beginner to advanced beginner without learning how to hockey stop. Everybody gets this, it’s usually within like the first month they’re on a mountain. So a grind and a slash, depending on which way you shift your hips. If I rise, it’s on flat ground it’s a hockey stop, but if I’m on a 10-inch inch mound of snow, something that’s just like this, anybody can. That’s a grind or a slash. We knew that everybody could do that. So everybody had this entranceway in, this movement that you knew was safe, you could build upon. Another thing we did is, we took advantage of all this restriction of body cognition around the mirror neuron system. So we played the following leader games around the mountain. I had a ski partner or we have bigger groups of people. And the goal was to do what the person in front of you does. Or if it’s too difficult, dial it back and do something you can do, or if it was too mellow to build on top of that and go. What most people don’t realize is that when you watch somebody else perform a motion, your brain automatically runs that same motor instantly. On top of that, you get a signal, a go, no-go signal, literally you get a little squirt of dopamine, oh, pleasure, happiness, you know, usually in your gut kind of thing, that says you got this, or you get a little squirt of fear, and especially if the fear is like spiraling your thoughts, OCD kind of thoughts or impairing muscle, that’s a sign to back off, not don’t do anything, just back off and take it to the level you’re at one inch at a time. And so people would see the tricks, even if you couldn’t do it, you could do some facsimile. And what ended up happening is, because you were already in flow from this creative interpretation, once you started the Follow the Leader games, the tricks just sort of taught themselves, just to follow people through the terrain park kind of thing. And then we spent, we did a lot of stuff, it wasn’t what we did, it was what we didn’t do. Flow, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain right back here is quiet. So you want to keep it quiet. So what does that mean? Well, what fires up the prefrontal cortex more than anything else? Emotional stuff. So don’t talk about yourself. Don’t talk about your job. Don’t talk about your homework, don’t talk about anything that could rash your emotions and don’t talk about yourself. Because ego also gets the prefrontal cortex going. On the chair lifts, even during our experiments with other people, you could talk about skiing or snowboarding or you could make each other laugh. Everything else, please just be quiet. And so there were a handful of other things like that. But that’s sort of in a nutshell what we did. And it works so spectacularly. In our experiments, we only spent four days on the mountain, before studies continued, and you don’t have to take my word for it, go to www.gnarcountry.com , click on the tab that says Watch the peak performance aging experiment. We had a National Geographic cameraman follow us around. But it was cool in the experiment, because we didn’t just, we saw skill wise, we saw a 26.5% increase in park skiing skills in these photos, we also saw like a 6% increase in flow, which is amazing. Because like skiing, or snowboarding for everybody in our experiment was their primary flow activity. And we got a 5% boost in flow. So there was already producing a lot of flow, that was significant. And then the biggest one was like a 35% boost in their confidence in advanced motor skills, which was the craziest one, like the thing that older people aren’t supposed to be able to do at all and onboard these new skills and their confidence soar. And probably the most important impact of the whole experiment and doing all this was on mindset. And we can talk more about mindset and aging is really important. But like this kind of bought Gnar Country class and Gnar style class tends to explode the so-called mindset of bold, and replace it with a peak performance aging mindset, which is really important.

Mark Bidwell 26:45
Let’s go there, because I think, a number of people will be listening to this, and some of them might take up the challenge of really getting into a physical activity and pushing themselves. But the broader point, I guess, is around how you think of aging and how you think about, how individuals think about learning and continuing to remain active physically and cognitively as they get older. I know you’ve done it with Peter Diamandis, I don’t know if he’s still got some longevity business interests. But there are lots of different narratives around longevity, yours is quite a unique one, I guess, isn’t it?

Steven Kotler 27:21
Well, a lot of people do a lot of work around regenerative medicine and longevity technology. And it’s just not here yet. I mean, the regenerative medicine is what I say is tendons, ligaments, and bones, you’re in luck, we’re there, most everything in that way we can fix. And I speak from experience, I fixed a lot of stuff on myself using these tools, but organ regeneration, that sort of stuff. We’re not there yet, right? Five years out, 10 years out, who knows, but we’re not there yet. A lot of that stuff is on that side of the equation. The funny thing, So let me, peak performance aging in a single sentence. Here’s everything you need to know. And what you’re going to notice about this sentence is none of the stuff that most people talk about is going to be anywhere near this sentence. If you want to rock till you drop, you want to engage in challenging social and creative activities that demand dynamic, deliberate play and take place in novel outdoor environments. Let me unpack that for you a little bit. Challenging, creative and social activities, so challenging activities drive the challenge to skills balance, that’s a flow trigger. Flow is crucial for peak performance aging for a bunch of different reasons. And it’s actually the driver of adult development first of all, so one of the main drivers. The other side of flow states, because so much accelerated learning, we’re more complex, we’re more adaptable, we’ve grown a little bit and flow expands empathy and wisdom. So we get sort of wisdom and expertise at the same time in flow, which is really cool. Challenging social activities are enormously important. Maintaining robust social ties as we age is foundational for everything. People who have strong social networks have much less chance of getting cancer and heart disease, and depression and loneliness. And when they do get any of those conditions, their recovery chances are so much better. And you could go on and on and on, on and on in terms of challenging social activities. We haven’t talked about our mindset yet. So I’m gonna come back to mindset. But creative activities are really cool, because there’s another thing most people don’t know. As we enter our 50s we get access to whole new levels of intelligence, creativity, empathy, and wisdom. They come on board due to these really beneficial changes in the brain, but we need creativity to unlock them. So it’s the act of thinking creatively of this pattern recognition I talked about that actually, we gain three new thinking styles basically in our 50s, and all these other skills build on top of them, but creativity unlocks them. So the secret to peak performance aging also, from study after study, creatives are like 34% happier and more fulfilled than everything else. So that’s really good. Dynamic deliberate play. What the hell is that? We’ve talked about play a little bit. Dynamic is simply, if you want to preserve physical function, you have to train five different physical skills: strength, stamina, agility, flexibility, balance. Dynamic is shorthand for those five skills in one single activity. Skiing is dynamic, so is tennis or badminton. This is why if you look at what are the best sports for longevity, you could join a health club which will add about one and a half years to your life or you could play tennis which will add nine years to it. So exercise super matters for peak performance aging, but how you exercise and dynamic motion especially when there’s balance, coordination and strength are all involved, is actually phenomenal for neurogenesis, the birth of new neurons. If you want to protect cognitive function, you want to birth new neurons and one of the better ways to do this is through dynamic activity. Deliberate play is the opposite of deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is repetition with incremental advancement, deliberate play is literally repetition without repetition, repetition with improvisation, and we learn better. Plus play is neuroprotective against cognitive decline, dementia, Alzheimer’s, good for the immune system, it’s got 11 or 12 benefits we could go on. And the novel outdoor environment. Novelty itself is a flow trigger bonus, and as I said a second ago, if you want to preserve brain function, stave off cognitive decline, you want neurogenesis, the birth of new neurons. And you want those neurons to form new networks, which is known as synaptic plasticity, right? So where do all those neurons come from the adult brain? Neurogenesis, in our brain takes place in the hippocampus, the hippocampus does map making, it’s long term memory, but place and locations that grid cells, and place cells. We’re hunter gatherers, remembering where you were when that emotionally charged thing happened, right? Where’s the right fruit tree? It’s been a long cold winter, and I’m hungry. Where was that fruit tree? Or I’m thirsty, and where was that watering hole or don’t go near that cave, we got attacked by a tiger last time, right? That’s really crucial for survival, so the brain is great at doing just that. So if you go to challenging activities out in novel outdoor environments, it’s exactly what the brain was designed to do. So using the brain exactly as it was designed, and you get a bigger performance benefit. So that’s the formula. And the last thing I want to say is, all of this, when correctly applied, will explode your mindset towards aging. And the reason a positive mindset towards aging literally translates, and there’s so many studies that show this now, into seven and a half years of longevity and health. So aging is not just a physical process. It’s a mental process, and everything and a lot of what I just talked about, these are psychological interventions that have just as big an effect on the mind, as on the body. And that’s why.

Mark Bidwell 32:47
And the other thing is, the big insight for me is it’s not about necessarily living longer, it’s actually enjoying your life much more. So being able to enjoy some of these activities for far, far longer.

Steven Kotler 32:58
So what I like to tell people, when I think about it this way, I love that they love this point, because I think that’s it’s the better point. What do we know about longevity science? What do we know about regenerative medicine? There’s big questions, the only thing we can be certain of is that most of us are going to be old, whatever the hell that means for a lot longer than our ancestors and possibly a lot longer than we suspected. Right? That is very, very true. Go back a hundred years, we lived to be 30 or 40. Now it’s mid 80s, and dip with COVID, but I think it’s coming back up now. And it’s only going to increase, because as you probably know, there are nine known causes of aging, and all of them, by the way, are tied to stress and inflammation. So that’s the commonality among them. But there are now billions and billions and billions of dollars and dozens and dozens of companies aimed at each and every one. And stuff is rolling out on a yearly basis. In healthcare, that changes on an annual basis, which is wild to me, because like, in our childhood stuff changed, but it was like 10 years, that was the time span, five years maybe in the 21st century. Now it’s down to yearly changes in what’s happening. So what really is gonna matter is quality. You know what I mean? We’re gonna get more of it. How do we maximize it and enjoy it the most?

Mark Bidwell 34:22
Yeah, it’s extending, as someone who explained it to me, as extending health span versus lifespan.

Steven Kotler 34:27
But let me say one thing from a business perspective, because this is key and this is in our country, but it’s really important to me. So you think about the four cognitive skills that get boosted by peak performance aging, which is intelligence, creativity, wisdom and empathy. So when I wrote Bold and other books with Peter Diamandis, especially Bold, though my work with the Flow Research Collective also necessitates this, but it was, I spent a really long time after Bold talking to CEOs. For years I was hanging out with CEOs in Valley, helping their companies and things like that, and I heard the same things over and over again, about dream, like, this is what I needed my employees, I need them to be intelligent and creative and innovative, because the rate of change in the world is ridiculous, and we want to keep up. And we don’t want to lose our advantage and our market share and all that stuff. The other thing I heard is, and more and more and more recently, empathy and wisdom, and for three big reasons. One, nobody can perform at work, as we now know, without psychological safety, you don’t get psychological safety without it. Two, everything we do at work, most of the time, is about teams. I’m a writer, I have like one of those solo professions around and I still spend as much time solo as I do working with teams, and you can’t have team performance without cooperation, collaboration, you can’t have cooperation, collaboration without empathy and wisdom. And finally, the mantra for 21st century business, I think it’s Bezos’s fault, but his customer centric thinking. And if you don’t put in there wisdom, nobody knows how your customers are thinking. So a properly trained over 50 is the ideal workforce of the 21st century. So there’s, I mean, yes, quality life is important. Yes, all these things that we’re talking about, but there’s a Business Revolution waiting to happen with older workers. And that, to me, is one of the really exciting things. And also, you know, I’m not the first person to say this, but like, if you want to sum up a lot of peak performance aging in two words, don’t retire.

Mark Bidwell 36:25
Yeah, yes. Earlier, one of the previous guests was Chip Conley, who I think was an Airbnb. And he was talking about wisdom.

Steven Kotler 36:33
I just talked to Chip two days, or three days ago.

Mark Bidwell 36:36
It was a book about the wisdom of the elders or something like that. And does that conversation, the conversation you’ve been having with CEOs, I mean, are they on that now? Or is it still gonna be a few years out before, that starts translating into the numbers?

Steven Kotler 36:52
It’s going to take a little while. Also, we talked about creativity as one of the moderators and unlocking these superpowers, there’s a couple others we should talk about. So the thing is, it’s not automatic, you get to access these two superpowrs, they’re actually like the standard product of adult development. But there are gateways in adult development. If you don’t solve the crisis of identity by 30, by 40, iff there’s not a tight fit between who you are, your identity, and what you do in the world, your vocation, right, if it doesn’t line up with your strengths and your passions, and your values, that you don’t match fit, that’s another blocker. And then by your 50s, you have to forgive yourself and those people who’ve done you harm, otherwise, sort of the empathy and the wisdom does not become yours. And then if you want to hang on to these things, you want to train against physical fragility, which means the five categories of functional fitness that we talked about, and then you actually have to train, risk aversion increases over time, and they’re not 100% certain why, but it seems to be most linked to a shrinkage in white matter in the brain and the temporal lobe. White matter is what insulates those from the axons, the nerves, and as myelination. And when it starts to erode over time, brain processing speed slows down. Now, cool new research shows that most of that white matter may decay, because our bones are actually the mineral storehouse, and nutrients storehouse for our bodies, bone density decreases over time. And so a lot of things that we think change in the brain over time ties to physical problems in the bone. And we’ve actually solved a lot of the bone density stuff. There’s, there’s treatments, there’s things you can do for bone density that are really, really good at this point. This is figthable over time through medical ways, but you want to protect against this risk aversion. Because risk aversion means more fear. Fear literally blocks, there’s three kinds of intelligences that come online, fear can block two out of the three, it blocks creativity, the brain’s much more logical, linear and we’re scared. Fear makes us much more selfish, and much less empathetic. And too much fear just blocks learning. So you forget about adding wisdom all together. So you really got to fight against that fear. And so what you want is over 50s, who have done all these things, and are continuing to do these things, and for sure, like, it’s funny, but like you have to, you either got to make sure that the work you’re putting people in who are over 50 is challenging, creative, social, you know, novel outdoor environment, or they need to be engaged in those activities regularly. Because that’s how we preserve and really light up the stuff that we get. Otherwise, you’re going to end up with the same problems that we had before with all other reasons older employees didn’t work, were put behind, you’re going to have those same problems. So it’s changed what we think. I don’t think the revolution is upon us at all. But I do think more and more people are starting to notice.

Steven Kotler 36:59
There’s lots of items on the British news at the moment around trying to get people to come back into the workforce, people who retired at the age of late 50s, early 60s. And they’re interviewing people on the radio show saying what would it take for you to come back to the workforce? And a lot of it they say, is to do with health, but maybe they’re not as fit as they were or they could be long COVID. But I mean, it’s interesting how so many features, so many times they’re featuring this very topic, because I didn’t know how much you’ve been following it, but I mean, certainly in the UK, partly because of Brexit, but partly because of the aging population, there’s just people are not in the service industry. There’s not enough people to do the work now. So there is a huge economic crisis looming as a result of the demography and the early retirement of lots of people.

Steven Kotler 40:28
And it’s really, it’s just a shame. I mean, certainly, you can do really active stuff with your retirement and have none of these problems, right. But the idea like, stop using your brain and your body, right, which is the retirement idea, dial it back, literally will kill you really fast.

Mark Bidwell 40:52
So what’s been the feedback? I mean, the book hasn’t gone out yet, but I guess you sent it around to some of your clients, some of your people?

Steven Kotler 41:01
So I will tell you, it’s weird, Mark. Weird good. The most excited I’ve ever seen people when I wrote a book was when I wrote the Rise of Superman, which was my first big book on flow. And I would talk to action sport athletes, or athletes in general, they would figure out that they weren’t crazy, that flow really was like, you know what I mean? So it was very validating in a real way to people. And that was the most excited I’d seen people. This just started happening, because I’ve only, like I’ve done a lot of interviews, but in public live is recent, I just started two weeks ago for the first time wanting to go public and actually gave a speech and talked about the stuff and with a roomful of a couple hundred people. And I’ve noticed it on the podcast, but being in the room, there’s a literal temperature change, when you tell people the truth about the second half of their lives, and how much potential really holds, so much fear and stress leaves people’s bodies. I mean, people’s faces light up, their posture changes, everything else. But literally, like I don’t know how to describe it, the temperature in the room seemed to change. And it’s because I think so many of us have so many of these fears. And it’s a relief to find out that they’re actually in our head. I mean, there’s reasons, biological reasons for this mindset of old that start setting up in our 20s. So it’s not like, old is a way of thinking about stuff. And there’s a biology underneath that, and that biology sort of made sense when we died at 30. But it doesn’t make any sense when we’re dying at eighty.

Mark Bidwell 42:35
So going to the next level. I mean, not many people, I guess, are going to do what you did. I mean, what you did is a pretty extreme experiment.

Steven Kotler 42:44
So Mark, let me just pause you for a second because, well, so here’s what we did. When we finished the experiment with the skiers, we stripped out the actions and replaced it with weight vest hiking, so weight vest hiking, first of all, it’s great for bone density, but it trains, it’s how I train for ski season and will train all five categories. If you stretch first and stretch after you’ve got all five categories of functional fitness. So we stripped out the action sports and then ran that as a program for about 300 people. The goal was, can we explode your traditional mindset toward aging and teach you how to embark in a overhauling a gnar style quest, right just like go after something that first has a lot of meaning to you, something where there’s you have a feeling of I got unfinished business, you’ve got unfinished business biking. I got unfinished business with skiing, right something where you want to finish it and sort of like your life would be much more complete if you get through it. We’ve got people, everybody has gone from like, I’ve seen people in their 60s and 70s go from like, I’m just starting, I’m returning to painting, and my goal is to get to a solo art show. I’ve seen people start becoming triathletes. I’ve seen people take a kitesurfing in their 60s. So a lot of people will go back to action sports, because there’s really good reasons for using action sports as a peak performance aging tool. So no, is 350 people a huge sample size? It’s not enormous. And were these people self-selected because they knew about The Flow Research Collective a little bit? Yes, there was a little bit of that. But we’ve seen it work for huge swathes of people.

Mark Bidwell 44:20
You’ve taken away the fear, I guess, that transfers across into a lot more less, you know, more benign environment sports. It’s hard to think where you draw the line essentially, because any steps that one takes down this road, as you say, is going to have some positive benefits. It’s up to the individuals how far they want to go. Oh,

Steven Kotler 44:40
Right on that tip, so this is really funny, but one of the largest groups to benefit from going, if you take totally sedentary, 80-year old 70 and 80-year olds, like I mean, you haven’t moved from the couch since your 50s kind of folks, and instead of taking the escalator or the elevator you have them start taking the stairs right, and maybe like if walking to work if it’s under a mile, like that sort of stuff, just really low interventions. Huge, huge benefits. Exercise across the board is so important for peak performance aging. But you get these really big benefits with intervention even late in life, which is kind of cool.

Mark Bidwell 45:18
Yep. Yep. So a pretty selfish question, what should I do with my mountain biking? Obviously, I’ve got to get, so well, I can follow a few stretches, maybe I’ve got to get a training partner, right?

Steven Kotler 45:30
I think the right training partner is enormously beneficial. There’s tons of reasons why. One of the things that I thought was really important, peak performance aging, as we’ve talked about, requires a robust kind of social bonding. And with the right training partner, you’ll find yourself in group flow, right, the shared collective version of flow state, and what that allows you to do, so if you go into like the blue zones, the really long lived communities, social connection, belonging is a really a big deal. But if you go to some of those communities, some of them are like they’re spending like six hours a day on social connection. Wow. That may not be mandatory, but that’s the emphasis in these places. I don’t have six hours. I mean, one, I don’t have that kind of time, dude, I’m an extreme introvert, like, six hours with people? That’s a lot of time with people. So if you could find the right training partner, there’s a bunch of learning benefits, bunch performance benefits, but there’s also much, it makes it much easier to drop into group flow. And group flow gives you all of the social bonding neuro-chemistry that is so good for the immune system, it’s so good for the nervous system in less time, and you actually get more of it. So it’s more beneficial, from a peak performance aging standpoint in less time. And those are the kinds of solutions I’m most interested in. As you asked earlier, when we started the conversation, peak performance aging is totally possible. But there’s a lot to do, there’s just no way around it. There’s a lot you have to do. You want to train smart.

Mark Bidwell 47:01
Yeah, stacking things, for instance.

Steven Kotler 47:03
You want to stack protocols and find what I call multi-deal solutions, a single solution that solves six or seven different problems at once. So a right training partner does that. You don’t have to do that. The place I always tell people, you want to start with a mindset before you do anything. There’s two things that I think are really important, one is when we start with mindset. And that starts with two simple things. One, just pay attention to the present a little bit more, mindful noticing. And the thing to pay attention to that’s really important for peak performance aging is that our brains like to hold things still, where it likes to pretend that nothing changes, right? It’s really beneficial to notice that change is a constant in life everywhere. Nothing never stops changing, and that it’s fine. Like this is the way life works. That’s the first thing, the second thing is you really want to monitor your language. Limiting language is really, really dangerous for mindset and you want to do anything ageist. Anytime you have the voice in your head saying you’re too old for this shit, the voices lie and you gotta watch it. You got to watch it with other people too. So people don’t realize this, but stereotypes, ageism is the most prevalent and socially acceptable stereotype in the world. And I mean, I don’t know what it’s like in Europe right now, but like in America, if you walk outside and try to show off your stereotype, they’re gonna cancel you. Any stereotype in the world, it’s cancelling, except for ageism, I can walk all over the place be like, aren’t you too old for this shit? Nobody blinks. Right? But we know, because of the really tight mind-body connection, ageism is really, really dangerous. In fact, if you’re susceptible to negative stereotypes of age, and you grow olde, in an environment filled with them, by the time you’re 60, you’re going to suffer 30% more memory decline. It’s huge. It’s a huge impact. So when we get our, what I call it getting geezer when somebody gets their, like I’m too old for this shit juice all over you. Right? When we do that to other people, or people do that to us, we’re actually killing each other. We’re quite literally killing each other. It’s astounding, but it’s true. And this is not my research. Becca Levy at Yale has done most of the work on stereotypes, or most of really good work on stereotypes on aging.

Mark Bidwell 49:17
Yep, yep. And then obviously making it fun, playful versus deliberate practice. And I think the other piece that I took away from your book is, you know, recover like a professional and as well as train like a professional.

Steven Kotler 49:30
Yeah, it’s really, it’s really key. So one, most people still go in for what’s passive recovery, right TV and beer. And it’s a disaster. So you have to recover more, if you’re really going to be engaging in this kind of physical activity when you’re older, it takes longer for older athletes to recover. There’s stuff you can do to trim that down and whatever, but it’s a fact, that’s true. TV actually blocks recovery in really insidious ways. Nobody knows this, but so to recover you need the brain in alpha, daydream and or theta below it. So when we are awake and alert and anxious that’s beta. Focused attention is also beta, but high beta is anxious. So when there’s a quick cut on television, we could feel like a couch potato, we’re just chilling out. There’s a quick cut, your brain, which is trying to what, motion means something could kill me, right? There’s something in this environment that just moves across my framework very quickly, the brain goes, oh, shit, that thing could kill me and it flips into high beta for a microsecond. You don’t notice it, but your brain never recovers when you try to watch TV. And alcohol, there’s different arguments. There’s some folks in the blue zone who love booze, you think a couple glasses of wine for there’s resveratrol is really good a day, other people myself who think alcohol, probably, if you could avoid something, alcohol is the thing you want to avoid. But the main problem with alcohol is it blocks sleep, it screws up REM sleep. And so lifelong learning is one of the secrets to peak performance aging. And for the simple reason that, if you want to protect the brain over time, as we said, we want the birth of new neurons, and you want those neurons to form really diffuse stuff. If you can be more precise, you want that in the prefrontal cortex, prefrontal cortex, part of the brain is right back here. It’s the newest part of the brain, the most powerful part of the brain, and so most subject to erosion and decline. Deep brain structures, things that are way back there that have evolved from billions and billions of years, not billions of years. That’s an exaggeration, millions and millions of years, hundreds of millions of years, are pretty impervious to cognitive decline, but it’s the newer stuff that erodes wisdom and expertise. First of all, the brain loves them, so you get new neurogenesis. Second of all, they form really diverse networks, you get a lot of synaptic plasticity in the brain. Everything’s redundant in the brain, the brain will never figure out one way of doing something, it will figure out eight ways of doing the same thing. So these new neural networks are really protective against cognitive decline, so lifelong learning is the best way to preserve brain health, expertise and wisdom. So I would stop there and you can ask the next question.

Mark Bidwell 52:13
We’re up on the hour, but I guess my next question is around just to begin to wrap it up. I mean, well, how have you changed as a result of this project? Physically, you’re looking pretty good. You said in the book that you are fitter now than you’ve been since your mid 20s or something, right?

Steven Kotler 52:29
Yeah, I’m definitely, in fact over the summer I set a new squat record like a lifetime squat record, when I was training for this ski season. So physically, I’m stronger. I think, Mark, what has changed the most is the mindset of old is tricky. It’s worth doing this really quickly, it sets up because when we’re younger, we’re essentially being run by the seeking system and the place system. Go into the world, figure out who you are, figure out how to live, all that very exploratory. As soon as we find the stuff that we want, oh, I’ve got the right job, I’ve got the right partner, I’ve got the right house, I’ve got kids, I’ve got a dog, we stop favoring those systems and we move over to like the protecting, the conserve systems, and both are underpinned by feel good neurochemicals. Play and seek is dopamine norepinephrine underneath to conserve and hold on to, you got oxytocin and endorphins, you get a little endorphins from play too, and more endorphins from social bonding, and serotonin. And it’s literally like old people are just addicted to the wrong drugs, right? Like you need to reboot the seeking system and get all of these neurochemicals, but that mindset of old, which really does age wil just set up early in our 20s. And yeah, I can pay attention to my language, and I can do all the stuff I told him to do. And that’s worth the damn, but it was the Gnar mindset class that, like, I was learning those 360s and 360s. And, you know, Park tricks that I wasn’t supposed to learn and when you’re learning impossible things, or what were impossible things well past you’re supposed sell by date, whatever your old mindset is, it just gets blown up, like it cannot hold up in the face of reality of what you’re actually doing. So that has been what has changed the most in the beginning. What has changed now and most recently, and it’s the wildest thing ever is my vision, my proprioception balance has changed so much that my vision changed. When I look at the mountain, I see a very different mountain. I used to look at lines, and I’d be like, you can’t ski that, I can’t ski that. I don’t think anybody can ski it. That’s not even possible. And now I look at those lines and I’m like, I know exactly how my body, and it’s literally it’s not a change in.. Physically, I’m not all that much better. It’s in my brain, what I believe is possible for myself. The limitations are gone, and some of the stuff around that physical stuff, balance and agility, those things have gotten trained up so much, that I’m literally living in a different world. I see it differently, which is bizarre. That I did not expect.

Mark Bidwell 55:06
Can you translate that enhanced vision into different environments beyond the natural world? Are you seeing it in the world of business, for instance, or in terms of relationships?

Steven Kotler 55:15
What’s come over, what has really come over more than anything else is nervous regulation skills, like of emotional regulation skills, because I am staying calm in such intense challenging environments that, when it comes to, you know, a lot of stuff in the business world, in my working life, there’s, why would I possibly…? You know what I mean, I just faced death yesterday, and survived and was totally fine. And actually, like, my heart rate didn’t even increase. So you think my blood pressure is gonna get up over this shit? That’s a really big deal. And for me, that was a really big deal. So we’re laughing about it. But like, I will tell you that emotional regulation in business situations, uncomfortable conversations, those sorts of things, that was a weak spot for me. A weak spot in my business game. And it’s getting closed, because of challenging stuff I’m doing on the mountain and is actually solving business problems. So I think that’s been really cool, too.

Mark Bidwell 56:19
Yeah, super, super good to hear. What’s the next project?

Steven Kotler 56:23
Well, there’s gotta be a break. I’ve literally almost written a book a year, for 12 years or something like that, something that was a bit of a long time. And so I actually know exactly what I’m writing. And we’re starting it now. The book is on intuition, and on the neurobiology of intuition. We’re starting with neuroscience, probably over the next year, year and a half publish half a dozen papers with my team on the neuroscience of intuition. But I’m going to try to take all of next winter off into a ski sabbatical. I don’t actually know if that’s possible. I say that now, but I haven’t. I haven’t taken a break in, in a very, very long time, mostly because my work is my play, and I love it. I actually love doing this, getting to go out into the world and talk to people about the books, but I’ve been doing a lot of this for the past couple of years. And I just want to pull back a little bit. Yeah, so it’s intuition, but it’s gonna be a little farther out. And you know, between now and then, The Flow Research Collective is, we’ve got a ton of peak performance, we’ve got trainings, we’ve also got a bunch of really cool science that we’re doing.

Steven Kotler 56:23
Brilliant. I follow it and it’s great work and this book, as with your previous ones, it’s shifted me, but this one this one, yeah. Next time we’ll be in touch, hopefully I have some stories of some achievements.

Steven Kotler 57:48
Cool. I hope you like, it seems like the adventure vibe in the book and that’s what I was hoping it was gonna do. That like, you know, we could get past the science and we could have sort of like a human to human conversation.

Mark Bidwell 58:01
Yeah it did. I was a little bit surprised when I started reading. I thought, what has Steven got into?

Steven Kotler 58:07
Oh, my God, you must have, having read my previous books, I mean the book opens with a definition of punk rock. That must have been a little peculiar/

Mark Bidwell 58:19
You’re referring to some music you’re listening to, I listened to a couple of tracks on Spotify. And I thought, yeah, well, maybe just keep going. It wasn’t my taste, that music, but the book was brilliant. I loved it, I must say it. And so yeah, thank you. We’ll push this out when the book’s released and lovely to see you. Congratulations, and we’ll keep in touch.

Steven Kotler 58:39
Thank you sir.