Greg Voisen
Hey, well, welcome back to Inside Personal Growth. This is Greg Voisen. And joining me on the other end of the line, he probably doesn't need much introduction. He's been on the show many times, but it's Steven Kotler joining us from you're in North Lake Tahoe, right?

Steven Kotler
Actually in the East.

Greg Voisen
east. Yes, sir. Northeast, Northeast. Okay. Well, and he said today as we were talking it's actually raining out not snowing. They were expecting snow snowing at the higher elevations. So for all of you, who are Southern California listeners, and go up to Tahoe that is where he is. We're going to be talking about his new book called NAR country. Growing old staying rad. I don't know I always wonder what is the new old anymore. I mean, I'm going to be 69 in July now feel 69 So you got to have some statistics on that you're 53 I'm sure you don't feel 53. So, but let me let the listeners know a little bit about you. For those who haven't seen you before on my podcast, or don't know who you are. He's a New York Times bestselling author, award winning journalist and one of the world's leading experts in high performance. He's the author of eight bestsellers including stealing fire the rise of Superman Tomorrowland, bold abundance, west of Jesus, a small fury prayer and the angles quickest for flight and his writing has been translated in 40 languages and peering over 100 publications including the New York Times and Atlantic Monthly Wall Street Journal, Forbes, wired and time. Steve's also the co-founder of creating equilibrium, a conference concert innovation accelerator focusing on solving critical environmental challenges long side his wife, joy, Nicholson, Steve's a co-founder and as your ranch still going at the Rancho chinchilla. Okay, so it's a hospice care for Special Needs dogs. And it's a sanctuary in the mountains of northern New Mexico. And I got to commend him on that, because I'm a big dog lover. I have two chihuahuas, myself. And I rescued both of them. He's got a BA from the University of Wisconsin Madison, of which, just Steven for your edification, I was just there, seeing Richie Davidson, who's done all the work with the Dalai Lama. And most people don't connect Madison, Wisconsin, with work in meditation, mindfulness, compassion, and healing. But it's kind of the biggest center for that. John Hopkins University, whatever possibly found hurling himself down mountains at high speeds, may be now riding in ski parks, which is not about hurling yourself down the mountains at high speeds. So, Stephen, you chronicle this book, it was great, was almost like a journal at the began. I remember in the webinar you did last Friday, you said, you know, this is one of the hardest books you wrote. While from the outside, it maybe doesn't look like it maybe, you know, the rise of Superman, to me seems like it had a lot more research in it. And whatever. This had a lot more of you in it, you became the experiment of our country book, at your age 53. And you wanted to master a park skiing, you state that if you want to rock until you drop, we must train the brain that actually came from last Friday's little workshop that you did. What does the research tell us about sustaining peak performance much later in life than we really think possible?

Steven Kotler
It's a good place to start. So you want to begin with the older idea, the traditional idea about aging, which most of us grew up with, believe or still partially believe, and it's what I like to call the long slow route theory. It's the idea that all of our mental skills, all our physical skills, they decline over time, and there's nothing we can really do to stop the slide. And it turns out that true and false and both at the same time, all of our mental and physical skills do decline over time, but it turns out, none of it's inevitable. Every skill you can think of, is a use it or lose it skill. So if you never stop training these skills, you get to hang on to them, even advanced them far later in life than anybody thought possible.

Greg Voisen
Yeah, and it is something that for anybody, we're gonna get into it. You know, kind of the neural pathways of the brain are a big element to this when they look at Alzheimer's. Research now they're finding so many different ways to help somebody kind of retard the process. And you mentioned that if we want to attain peak performance in any age, we must deal with personal forgiveness and traumas of the past. Now, that's kind of an interesting one, because that's really more of a whole psychological element. Why is this such an important element and reaching and reaching peak performance, because most of the listeners out there, Steven, we're not going to correlate me giving forgiveness to whether or not I'm going to be a peak performer.

Steven Kotler
It's, um, anywhere you go inside the field of peak performance aging, you find really astounding, like sort of shocking evidence of the mind body connection at work. And this is one of those places. So this is really neat. And maybe a little troubling, but really neat. So as we have to our 50s, there are profound changes in the brain. Some of this is genetics, that certain genes only activate with experience. Some of this is that the brain, you know, late 40s, early 50s, it starts to recruit underutilized regions. And in our 50s, the two halves of the brain start working together like never before most of our life, they're not quite in opposition, but they're a little bit in opposition. And they really started to come together in our 50s. And this process peaks in our 80s. And as a result, we gain access to whole new levels of intelligence, wisdom, empathy, and creativity, we can go much deeper into that topic in a minute if you want. But these are real, cognitive superpowers. But, but like a lot of things in psychology, this is adult development, this is a natural thing that happens in the field of adult development. But adult development is not automatic. So childhood development is kind of automatic kid is going to go through the terrible twos, when they're too you know, in that window span, it happens automatically. adult development, we have to pass through gateways there are moderators is, which is a psychological word for if then conditions. So there are certain things you need to accomplish, at certain at every decade, basically, to unlock the superpowers, which is why I always say, peak performance, aging starts young. And some of the reasons that start young are the psychological reasons we're talking about. So if you want to thrive in our later years, and you want access to the superpowers that I talked about, you have to fight age 30-ish solve the crisis of identity, got to know who you are in the world, right? What are your values? What are your strengths? What do you stand for? What are your goals? What are your passions? What's your purpose, some you don't have to have it locked down, because obviously, that's an evolving, changing growing thing. But you got to you got to have enough, because by 40, you have to solve what economists call match fit, you need a tight alignment between your vocation, and your identity, or your avocation. And how you spend your time has to be aligned with passion, purpose has to give you regular access to flow. It's got to draw on your strengths. It's got to align with your values. Otherwise, you have problems and then at 50, you have to forgive yourself, you have to forgive those who have done you harm. And this seems weird, right? Like, why would why would that matter for peak performance aging, like you can see from a psychological perspective, oh, I don't want to grow into a bitter old man or better all the woman right. Okay, that makes some sense. But like, why does it matter? Elsewhere? Some of it has to do with, we get access to new levels of creativity, intelligence, some of the intelligence that comes on, for example, is multi perspectival thinking, we learn to see things from other people's perspectives, but we can't forgive ourselves. We can't forgive other people that doesn't start to come online. Empathy is blocked if we can't forgive ourselves and forgive other people. So that whole superpower that really deepens in our 50s 60s and 70s. And really helps us do incredible things goes away and wisdom is blocked. So you have to it's this weird developmental challenge. But most interesting thing is, let's tie it all the way back. You started with my alma mater, go Badgers, Wisconsin, work of Richard Davidson. Richard's work has been on predominantly compassion, meditation, loving kindness.

Greg Voisen
Exactly. We're working on best

Steven Kotler
tool in the world. This is how you do this. How do you forgive yourself? How do you forgive others? You can that I did some funky things in the book. And there's the big NARS style quest to like solve some of the big stuff. But on a day to day basis, loving kindness, meditation, truly matters. And even better, like he's got all the benefits. We could go. We could spend the next hour on the benefits of loving kindness meditation, but it's got distinct amps. Aging properties. Yes, the craziest one. So this is work that Barbara Fredrickson did in the University of North Carolina, she was looking at telomere attrition, telomeres are the caps on chromosomes, yes, you duplicate, they get shorter than they stop working. This is one of the reasons we age, right. And it turns out, loving kindness meditation actually enhances our telomeres and the they decline it at a slower rate. They tested loving kindness meditation against focus, meditation and a positive a bunch of different systems. And it turns out, not only does loving kindness meditation help us get through some of the gateways of adult development. It also helps us fight aging at a really like core biological level. So that's kind of neat, too.

Greg Voisen
We know what's really neat about you, I remember first meeting you at La at a conference, and then we went and had dinner together. And I talked with you about meditation way back then this goes, I think it was whatever that conference was. And you now are a super advocate of meditation back then you had your concerns, you weren't quite there yet. Because I remember having a distinct conversation with you at dinner, when I brought it up. And I didn't get pushback, but I also didn't get that you were totally engaged with it. But so see, now you have Well,

Steven Kotler
Greg, you have to I've been meditating. I mean, on a on not daily dailies overstating it, but on a regular basis for how long did since the early 90s. Okay, I'll actually probably 1987 when I dropped out of college and moved to Santa Fe is when I really started meditating on a regular basis, and who got you into it. I got myself into it through just interest in philosophy and consciousness. And, you know, III, both Eastern and Western approaches and things like that I wasn't closed off, what I think is that meditation on its own, for most of us is weak sauce. I think meditation is a great complement to all bunch of stuff. I am a big believer, there's data going back to the early 1980s. And work done by Michael Posner up in Oregon, showing that focus meditation and has access to flow. So I've always been a proponent of using I think flow is equally powerful, if not more powerful tool. But meditation used in concert with flow and like I wrote and in stealing fire, different altered state altered states are tools and ways of altering our consciousness tools. And they their best can bind, you know what I mean? You can use them together. That's the it's combinatorial therapies that are the most interesting to me. And I've always been, and this work is starting to really get done. Right. This is, for example, what we were just talking about is an example of comparative, you know, altered states of consciousness research uncovered. So what has happened is, meditation has gotten firm enough that I'm really calm, I'm much more comfortable talking about it as a tool because I the science has caught up. And all of the I didn't like the What the I wanted to put flow research on a fat on a strong neurobiological footing, that's always their mission one. And when the New Age was controlling the dialogue on meditation, I wanted nothing to do with it. Because it's not like that's not a dialogue. There's a very closed minded approach to meditation as far as I'm concerned. And I want something that bridges the gap between science and spirituality, which is what Richie Davidson what my mentor Andy Newberg, what like a lot of the pioneers in my field, did they went into the spiritual community, they found great people, Dalai Lama, young, a Mingo Rinpoche, a couple others, and they say, yeah, what are you experiencing? What, you know what this is what our research can tell us. And they started building those bridges. So I love that love having conversations. I didn't like it back then. Because I felt the spiritual community was so closed minded towards the science community. It wasn't it didn't strike into the science community, they were closed minded to the spiritual community in like the 80s. But around like, around the time, you and I had that conversation, the bias had switched, and it was in the spiritual community. And I felt that very unhelpful for what I was trying to do. Right. You

Greg Voisen
know, Richie Davidson has taken it a long way. He's, I think he's written more papers for NIH than anybody about the neuroscience of this and what it actually does. And you know, I spent the full day with him and nine other people and I was just amazed with the with the amount of research I mean, if you want to look at science, he is the de facto in Mayas. Demacian as far as science regarding meditation and the benefits of meditation, but in particularly, because the Dalai Lama told him 30 years ago, why are you working on depression? And why don't you switch and go to compassion? And that was the biggest flip in his life, right was to study the effects of compassion.

Steven Kotler
I mean, I, you know, I'm inside, there are a ton of people, Richie was great. And Dan Goleman. And I think they paved the way, but there's a lot of unsung hero, I'm sure. Will it be Britain and brown? Was there really early or at Brown? Was there really early same time, there are a lot of other people who sort of were working on this because it was. And the reason I'm mentioning this, it's not that Richard didn't work incredibly hard. It's that this was a huge fight. Like this was the 90s for hundreds of people, myself included, right? How do we take these altered states of consciousness, these things that science has spent 100 years saying are not real? How do we how do we validate them? Or that they're real? Nobody remembers us anymore. But so a lot of on peak performance, aging, one of the things that's really important is a robust social life. And when you look under the hood of what is that mean? There's categories that are belonging. So we find people with strong religious affiliations, do better. And people with real, like robust social connections and active sources, all that, yeah. And you have to sort of look at that belonging, and there were the religious connections and say, Well, what is this, and nobody remembers this, but we had to spend the 90s, proving that like, if you went to church, or you had a regular meditation practice, or any, this was good for you, and then we started to decode it and figure out, okay, the altruistic activity that you get from religious belonging, plus the social connections, plus the gratitude, regular gratitude practices are the things that make that special. And we understand the neurobiology of all of that now, but it has to start with like, hey, this stuff is good for you. Right? Like,

Greg Voisen
yeah, I don't know if anyone's done any studies, you know, but it came about a meditation through Joel and Michelle Levy, I think first, and then I ended up getting involved with self-realization fellowship. And here's the point, I'm going to make real quick the next question, because it's a real important one is, I don't find a lot of camaraderie and SRF, what I do find is the energy that's being held, to get into some very deep meditations that I may not be able to get into on my own, because I actually like the energy that the temple holds, or the meditation grounds hold. But what I will say is, you're not find a lot of people glad handling afterwards saying, Hey, let's go do coffee, let's go do this, or let's go do that. It isn't that kind of place. But look, you are the foam foremost thought leader on flow, the flow Reese research initiative that you're working on and have been working on. Yeah, sorry, collective, you've been working on forever. And I'm going to direct our listeners to that as well. While I believe the listeners might know what flow is, I think coming from you, it'd be nice to have a definition as we speak about flow and aging, and how they go hand in hand. You know, it's one thing to talk about flow and say, hey, look, I'm trying to get into flow state, I want to have flow, I want to, you know, I'm gonna do an A micro dose, something to get into flow. And whatever it might be. My point is, is how do the two go hand in hand with aging?

Steven Kotler
Yeah, so this is really, this is really super interesting. But let's start with a definition, flow is scientifically, right. It's defined as an optimal state of consciousness, we feel our best and we perform our best and more specifically, it's any of those moments of rapt attention. total absorption is so focused, I want you to do it on the task at hand rug, everything else just starts to disappear, right? Since the self, not just as the voice in your head, get really quiet. Time passes. Strangely, usually, you just get so sucked into what you're doing that like five hours go by and what feels like five minutes and throughout all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go through the roof. So there's a huge amplification in about a dozen different mental and physical skills, maybe more that happened and flow is how humans do peak performance. It's a built in function. anybody listening can get into flow, right? It's kind of baked into all you most mammals can get into flow actually, but it turns out for heavily different reasons, flow is deeply tied to adult development and successful aging. In fact, the godfather of psychology magic sent me hi spent, I would almost be willing to say the bulk of his career literally working on this issue on flow as one of the major drivers of adult development. Quick version of this is flows It's F triggers preconditions that lead to more flow. And a short version of one of them is that when we're using our skills to the utmost, right when we're pushing on our skills, and we're stretching beyond our normal capabilities, that drives us into flow as a result, and flow that amplifies performance, so we're trying to onboard new skills are pushing really hard. And then flow amplifies our performance we do on board those skills spell on the other side of a flow state work more complex, one more adaptable, we're more capable. And for the exact same reason that loving kindness meditation works on forgiveness. So flow works on the same part of the brain, the temporal parietal junction. And as a result of being in flow, we become more empathetic and we become wiser. So flow is an engine of how we grow up. It is also incredibly, incredibly, incredibly neuro protective against cognitive decline, and physically protective against general decline. Let me go into greater detail here. So changes in the brain happened as we move into flow. First thing that happens is stress hormones get pushed out of our system, there are nine known causes of aging, all of them linked to stress and inflammation. That's the commonality among all of them. So anytime, you can push stress hormones out of your system, that's essentially an anti-aging technology. Additionally, when you experience incredibly powerful positive emotions, and at the top of the list, our favorite thing lists always at the top. But if you look inside that like why is flow always at the top, it's two elements in flow that really drive that one, we get a sense of control and flow, oh, I can control things, I can't normally control my sentences or doing great things, or that basketball is just falling through the hoop again, and again and again. And we get the sense of mastery, right? We're growing, we're stretching, when we encounter really positive emotions, besides the like broad and Bill Barbara Fredrickson, like we get more resilient, we get all that all those benefits. But on top of that, at a neuroimmunological level, those feelings produce amplify the production of T cells, which are key fight disease and natural killer cells, which targets sick cells and tumors and other diseases of aging. So flow at sort of every level is an anti-aging medicine. And finally, the neuro chemicals that show up and underpin the flow experience, are huge immune system boosters. So you're resetting the nervous system, you're boosting the immune system, and you're boosting very specific properties in the immune system that have anti-aging benefits, and you are becoming more complex, more adaptable. And finally, most importantly, perhaps, flow gives us both expertise, learning and wisdom. So the difference, think of expertise, as you know, this is the intellectual side of learning, or the skill side of learning and wisdom is emotional intelligence. But the point is this, you said at the beginning of the program, that there are ways to fight off Alzheimer's, one of the most important is lifelong learning. And the reason this matters so much is Alzheimer's, dementia, cognitive decline, they target the prefrontal cortex. So if you want to protect the prefrontal cortex, what you need is neurogenesis, the birth of new neurons, and synaptic plasticity, the creation of new neural networks. And to really backup the prefrontal cortex, you want redundancy in those neural networks. That's exactly what you get from expertise and wisdom. They create these used of use networks and prefrontal cortex, which is why you like you can lifelong learning is the most important way to stave off cognitive decline, dementia, Alzheimer's. In fact, you know, the, it's interesting, a lot of this work came out of studies where they would find they were autopsy and brains of people who had no signs of dementia or Alzheimer's. And they get they find that autopsy the brands that they find tangles and plaques in the brains were a mess, they've had dementia, they had Alzheimer's, if they showed none of the symptoms. So what the hell was going on. And the commonality was wisdom and expertise. And here's another place that peak performance starts young. The more of these neural networks you build up, the more things you learn, the more skills you learn more abilities you have over time, more times you cement these things into place with flow, the better off you're going to be. Now, the final thing I have to add in it's not flow related, but I need to say this is there's a bunch of cool ways to train the parts of your brain that you don't can't protect at this point. Adam Ghazali has done really cool work at neuro scape on all the different video games that sort of can target different aspects of cognitive decline that maybe didn't get cemented by expertise and wisdom. So we're getting very good at sort of like the whole picture, which is really cool flows a big part of it, but there's other things going on and I it's worth pointing that out, too.

Greg Voisen
We know as you're speaking I'm reflecting, and I'm reflecting on resistance and resilience, you know, the more you let go, because of this optimal state, whether you get it through attaining flow or meditation, which is an optimal way to get to these states, you resume, you reduce resistance to what comes at you, and you build resist resilience. And I'm just curious, because it was kind of like, it was just like, those two words are floating in my brain as you were talking, and I'm gonna like, hey, to me, that's it. And you know, you're, you speak with the listeners, if you would, about what, you know, I've kind of been working with lately is this peripheral vision activities, the parasympathetic nervous system, and the importance it is in overcoming fear. Because fear, as you know, that's going to release cortisol. Cortisol is bad. Fear is what you kind of want to stay away from, I'm going to say I want to hear what you say. I know in certain cases, fear protects us. But especially when it came to park skiing, snowboarding, etc. Speak with us about the peripheral vision, that connection, overcoming fear, and how this worked for you and all the other participants in park schemes.

Steven Kotler
So at the heart of it, so the background is not only do we have all these user loses skills, right, that we keep trying to get to hang on to them. There's this old this traditional idea. Old Dogs can't learn new tricks, right? And we know yet we know the importance of lifelong learning to performance aging, we just talked about it right. Yeah. And I was looking at a bunch of stuff and flow science in network neuroscience, neural dynamics, embodied cognition, a couple other places. And if these things are true on paper, I should be able to onboard really difficult new motor skills, even in my 50s, right, that was the three that was what I decided to test. But part of what I was doing was I was going one inch at a time it was start with an established something you could do 100% time was zero fear, no conscious interference and build on it one inch at a time in a creative, playful manner. Right. And that was the whole there's, we can talk about all the reasons why, but that was at the heart of it. But fear creates tremendous amounts of problems with performance. Right? It. First of all, it doesn't let you know where that one inch at a time is. Right? It secures it. It's harder to figure out what's where you're going. It hampers performance, too much fear can block the blocks power, our ability to access 100% of our strength. It blocks fast twitch muscle response. It makes us less creative, more conservative, more blocks learning, there's a big detriment. So you always have to be monitored in any kind of sort of difficult challenge for your levels matter, right? You want daily practices dramatic to monitor your nervous system gratitude, practice mindfulness practice, exercise being the three best. But then what do you do in situations where you're redlined? Right? How do you so you need some tools for that most of us know enough to do deep breathing, and they know, if you want to activate your parasympathetic nervous system, it's very useful to make your exhales double what your inhale czar. And if your exhales are longer than seven seconds bonus, because at about seven seconds, your brain goes, oh, shit look long exhales you must be calm. We don't have to produce so many stress hormones and fear hormones and fear chemicals, etc.

Greg Voisen
Can I ask you a question in the middle of this? Sorry to interrupt, but I mean, I know a lot of people out there are. And this is a big field now heart rate variability, right? It's like, okay, I want peak performance. I want to look at my heart rate variability, is this a push day? Is this a maintained day is this so I get that, you know, this science may not be perfect, but it's been around for a long time.

Steven Kotler
And now there's good stuff with there's good stuff with HRV. And I think HRV is very useful. For example, for overtraining and for recovery, I believe that an over reliance on measurements and metrics ends up hindering as much as it helps. And I think it's better to be able to sort of get internal signals of overtraining those things, but if you're trying to learn how to steer your sleep, your training, I think HRV is a really good tool. There's all kinds of really interesting work on HRV and longevity So there's direct correlations to high heart rate variability, and longevity, and health. So there's a lot of benefit there, not what we're talking about here at all, no heart rate variability is not in the moment thing. In fact, every single heart rate variability app out there anyway, you can track it with the exception of first beat, and they have proprietary software. So you have to actually be working with them. And it's a big machine that you're wearing. Nobody can track heart rate variability in acute situations. So I was used, the technique we're talking about with peripheral vision is how do you know, ski something that's scary, right? Do something that scares you heart rate variability, it'll tell you whether or not you want to put yourself in that situation in the first place. But it's not going to help you in the moment. Breathing can help you in the moment, the other way to get that same parasympathetic response even quicker. And this is work that comes out of Andrew humans Lab at Stanford, he was going to first figure this out. If you look at the world through your corners, your eyes, your brain goes, Oh, shit, all his chill. I can relax, I don't have to produce those stress hormones. When we're super focused laser focus on what's directly in front of us. It's like fight or flight. That's very acute focused vision. So the opposite I got is parasympathetic reaction, focus, vigor triggers a sympathetic reaction. So I this was the experiment. In the middle of my ski season, I had a ski partner Ryan wicks. And we were running a lot of different experiments, but throughout his rise a slightly faster skier than I am. And we're similar size, similar levels of aggression. We skis like a couldn't figure it out what's going on? Why is he always a little faster than me? And I asked him about it. He said, you know, I don't know why. But I tried to keep my vision really far down the hill. And I know there's a very tight link in the body between we go where we look. So I already knew that in performance literature. So but when I was listening to him talk about where he was keeping his focus, it sounded like what I had had heard Andrew humor and talk about this peripheral vision ideas. And I put it together and I said, okay, let's see if this is the same thing. And if it's true, and I started applying scale, but keeping my vision farther down the hill and trying to widen it out, keep it as wide as possible. I found that a calm way down, it slowed everything down. And it actually was a really good in the moment is part of my adventure, you know, trying to learn to park ski. It means doing stuff that scares you on a daily basis. And you don't, in my experience, courage, always like having to take that step to fear always feels bad. Doesn't matter how many times you do it, it always feels bad that maybe there are people out there and get over that bad feeling. I've learned to like train it like I can, I can now look at it in certain Writing Situations and be like, Okay, I know what that is. I don't even have to feel it. But in athletic situations, I still feel it. And what

Greg Voisen
actually happens to you when you say you feel bad, like I know certain people biologically their systems produce chemicals and they end up getting a headache, they get a stomachache, they get you know, there's a lot of things that can happen. I'm just curious what happens to you well,

Steven Kotler
there's your I get stomach aches, I can get headaches, I get all of that, right. But in the actual if it's physical danger, or you know, big I get butterflies. When the danger signals for me, what I look for is spiraling thoughts. Because once my thoughts start to spiral, there you go. Fear is going to impact muscle performance. That's the thing that really like if my thoughts are spiraling if I'm spinning, if I can't get new thoughts in then I you know, there's a bunch of tools I want to reach for peripheral vision is one breathing is another curiosity is fantastic. Curiosity may be the very single best way to fight fear in the moment because your brain has a very hard time being anxious and curious at the same time. They're opposites, you're distracted. It's not even that you're distracted that they have the same that the same neural chemicals they're saying nor they're underpinned by the same neural chemicals. So this is this is not my work originally, this is work that came out of work with animals, but you have heard animals and they're scared. You can get them curious. You can put things into like their environment that they're curious about as your yard it will totally block anxiety. So this is like something Yeah, it's something that comes out of animal welfare. I think the very first time I heard about it was Temple Grandin is were you Yeah How's she worked with the cat version of it used it with we use it with dogs all the time and in hospice care work and the dog sanctuary also, I just started applying it more and more talk a lot about it in our were in our country as well about you know these tactics but you want to fears gonna block performance

Greg Voisen
I do like the idea that you put your vision or he did all the way down the ski slope, right. I even remember personally getting to the top of Spooner over in Tahoe. It's called Spooner, and I had to come down the other side of the mountain on the bicycle. And you know how steep the downgrade is. And then there's those greats. And when I took my vision and put it out in front of me, because you get moving very fast, and you realize that if you wiped out on your bicycle, you're pretty, it's going to be pretty bad, right? So that did calm me. Because those skills would always scare me and I throw the brakes on, right? It's like, okay, I'm gonna pull the brakes back and pull the brakes back and pull the brakes back. And I actually let go with the brakes. The time when you said, Put the vision down. It's absolutely right, because I wasn't looking at the asphalt I was

Steven Kotler
in versus the other side of this. So this is a truism. In action sports, you go where you look. So in mountain biking, right, you're trained to look 30 to 60 yards down the Tres, right in surfing, you cannot physically surf a tube. If you try to pull into a tube and do everything you need to do to serve a tube, your body can't move that fast. We steer our muscles with our eyes, we go where we look. And that's how we steer them. So with it to writing, the secret to writing a tube is you have to put your eyes on the end of it. In Park skiing, when you're sliding a rail, you have to keep your eyes at the very end of the rail, otherwise you come off.

Greg Voisen
Yeah, no. And, and I love that. Because even if my listeners just take this away and say, Look, I had some fears associated with this. And now I can overcome the fear by changing where my line of sight is, right? I mean it right? We

Steven Kotler
do the same thing in human development, we just call them goals. Right? Week, right? Like, you know, and we know humans have worked performed best with three tiers of goals and like, but like literally, the brain doesn't really differentiate between, I'm looking at a point and I have a goal. Because that's how the brain works. It's the same parts of the brain that every everything's working together. So this is sort of why these systems work so well, in performance. Goals work as well. There's a goal. And that's why they tell you to be able to visualize your goal and see all aspects of it. And we go where we look.

Greg Voisen
Yeah, it is really, really powerful. What you're saying. Now, you know, let me ask you a question. You know, you wrote in the book, you know, you're a skinny little kid, you're a klutz. Kids made fun of you, they picked on you, you lost a lot of fight, when you knew you needed to overcome the stigma from childhood. So what did you do to transmute the psychological barriers that were holding you from being the peak performance person that you wanted to become? Because there's 1000s of listeners who were in your shoes, go listening to this show today. And this is a really important point, because many of them are retarded, become pardon me, I mean, use the word retarded, but they are from becoming peak performers, because they're allowing that bullying that psychic psychological element that got in their way. And I know we talked a little bit about it before, but this is you personally.

Steven Kotler
So you gotta so first of all, there it's a three part Effort, Right? Four part effort, maybe. But yeah, I did not. A lot like a lot of people. I don't think there was anything unique about that experience is way too common. And the other thing I should say, up front, is the very best thing that ever happened to me was, it was scary at school, it was scary at home and having to deal with that and learn from that was the best thing ever. Like that. Like, cuz that's how you everything I am, in a sense was a reaction against that. So I don't write and it was a reaction against I wants to hurt calm. Do you say? Like when I discovered like who I was, and I realized I wasn't a very courageous person. I couldn't live with that. So I had to change it. Right. And that was sort of my experience. I wasn't a very courageous person. I was You know, bullied for a long time and scared for a long time. But it forced me to, you know, change and help me become who I am. So there's first, like, I wouldn't change anything because I like I like where I am now. And I don't get to be here without starting there. So like, Thank you, you know, first and foremost, that's a reframing technique. But I think,

Greg Voisen
Oh, I always think when we thank our parents, a lot of people think oh, I grew up in this horrible environment, whatever and look at what you learned from being you got

Steven Kotler
to be you. And first of all, you have to take back that locus of control if you're a victim. This happened to me I've outright you've given up performances play the possible because of the burn, you've just, like, totally destroyed your ability to happen. And yes, that's a be loving kindness meditation, right? Like, there's your here's your tool, right? So, but see, what do you do with the shit the loving kindness meditation can't touch? That was the question I brought into our country. And I had some lingering anger, over sort of, I had unfinished business inside of athletics. So I created an AR style quest for me, it was parks game, because I had unfinished business and skiing, and I love skiing. But we all have that unfinished business somewhere. And I could designed a quest that literally would it was a jock quest, like, I got vites with the jocks, like I turned myself into a jock, I create an incredibly difficult physical quest. And, you know, miles, I literally went out and created a quiz that would force me to walk a mile in their moccasins kind of thing. So I didn't know that it was gonna work, Greg, I just knew that adult development told me that forgiveness matters, you got to sit down and the shame, the embarrassment, and also that shame, that embarrassment that self-consciousness was going to block learning was going to block the creativity and tell it all this stuff that I needed. So designed a quest for a lot of different reasons. Peak Performance aging experiment, but also because it closed a loop, it helped me try to transmute a some unfinished business. And, um, you know, I had milestones for progress. And I had ways to get feedback and see if I was actually reaching these goals and was working, and whatnot. But like, don't think there was like, in the beginning, there was no method to my madness, right? There was just like, these are the facts. Yeah, I'm screwed. So let's create a crazy ass experiment that tries to fix this and see if it works. And then if it works a little bit, let's study the neurobiology of it and like, make it more rigorous. And, like, that was a lot of that stuff. And but, you know, a lot of it wasn't hard to piece it together. Also, back to Richard Davidson's work, a lot of that compassion, meditation science, went in these directions, right, and the emotional intelligence stuff to like, we had to learn why this is hard, holds us back, and all that stuff. And

Greg Voisen
so yeah, but it did work for you. It worked.

Steven Kotler
The funny, you know, it's you sort of see that by the end of the book, and the proof that it will really work so I, my entire life had been blocked from group flow, when I was skiing with other people, I get into it alone, or maybe with one other person. But I was so self-conscious, when there were a group of people around. And the proof is that now I can, like regularly drop into group low with a big group like that was, that was the signal that oh, you've really actually gotten over this. And you can, now you know you're our participant, not on the outside feeling bad, or any of those other insecure self-conscious, all that other stuff.

Greg Voisen
So that resentment and anger that you may have had pinned up inside of you about these other athletes, you basically came to peace with that during this experiment.

Steven Kotler
Well, the other thing, so the book is, you know, the book opens literally with the definition of punk rock. Right? And in what people have asked about that, why is that? What is that because one of the things that punk was, was a cultural reaction, trauma at powerlessness, right? And one of the things that the punk movement really taught us was turn anger, resentment, hostility, whatever you got, take that and turn it into creativity. That is the that's the path forward. So do something with that anger is great as an energy is just bad if you hang on to it, right? It's good. It's better than depression because there's energy there, right? But you got to do something with it. And I, um, over the years, has been anger is a very powerful emotion as a performance emotion, but you have to know how to work with it. So even in raw Is or in our country I used to you can, when you shout, right when you yell that produces testosterone. This is why in martial art tradition, certain ones, especially the Japanese ones, they keep up, right, they shout before attacking. And it's, it releases testosterone. So I run into vertigo, I'm afraid of heights, and I have inner ear problems because of Lyme disease, and you lose muscle control, and things start spinning. And that's a bad quality in a skier because I'm in wildly exposed terrain all the time. And I would fight vertigo, by shouting, I can roar, and it would bring testosterone into my system, and bring muscle control online and stop the spinning and I could get myself out of the dangerous situation. So there's lots of different ways to work with anger. One was these big NARS Dahlquist, but even in like, in moments, when you need courage, there's some neuro chemistry underneath courage, and there's a way that you can you can use a little bit of that to your benefit.

Greg Voisen
Yeah, it's that is fascinating, the fact that you could yell and release testosterone, and it would affect this problem you're having in your inner ear, because that's just like, that's, I had no idea there was a connection between that. But that's cool. And I remember a stain a statement, I'm gonna hopefully I'm gonna get this right. It's not going to be exact. But as you were speaking, again, this little thing pops in about something Mother Teresa said, they said, Well, will you march against something? They wanted her to march in a some March. And she says, No, the only kind of Marches I ever want to do are for something. And you know, that's the whole concept of compassion being for something, and you talking about this meditation, about how we can bring something positive into our life from this, versus when these bullies bullied you way back when and you carrying all this psychological garbage with you and using this experiment to overcome and I think it's awesome. Now. Look, you're 53? My listeners, oh, I'm going to be 69. How can we do the impossible, at 50 or above? I've actually thought this. I know, just myself, Steven, that my fears and apprehensions about going down big declines on my bicycle at 40 miles an hour, kind of like, whoa, maybe I don't want to do that that much anymore. You know, I want to, like I just said, Maybe I want to put the brakes on. And sometimes I don't a lot of times, I don't let it fly anymore. But there are times where I do want to. But the fear keeps me from doing it. How can I

Steven Kotler
conquer that. So peak performance aging in a sentence. And we can unpack it afterwards. But in a single sentence. If you want to rock to draw, right to go back to the metaphor you started with, right? Yeah. You want to engage in challenging social and creative activities that demand dynamic, deliberate play, and take place a novel outdoor environments, challenging social and creative activities. Creativity is another one of these moderators, if you want the superpowers of aging, creative thinking is based is what actually starts to unlock all the new things that we get in our 50s. So you, it's really important, challenging, for the other reasons about pushing on our skills, that's a flow trigger, right. So that's why that's their social activities. We could spend the next hour talking about the benefits of social connection, especially as we age, but we all know what that is. Dynamic is the word that literally means the five categories of functional fitness. So we need to try and strength, stamina, balance, agility, and dexterity over time. So that's what dynamic stands for deliberate play. We've heard about deliberate practice repetition with incremental advancement. It's good for learning. But it's not the best deliberate play, which is repetition without repetition, or repetition with like little improvisation, much better for learning much better for lifelong learning. So dynamic, deliberate play is just a system of incorporating a bunch of physical stuff with a robust learning platform in the novel outdoor environments, outdoor environments, lower stress levels, and they also novel outdoor environments, amplify access to flow. They also improve neurogenesis, the birth of new neurons and new neural networks. So that's it in a sentence.

Greg Voisen
That's, that's what people need to hear. Hey, I was listening to Huberman last night on a podcast on the way home from Anaheim and I want to get your opinion on this. And you know, here's I'm, like I said a little older. But he said like, upper body stuff, here. Rate, lower body stuff, legs, thighs, calves, muscles, doing leg doing lifts with

Steven Kotler
Andrew, Andrew Ross to read my book.

Greg Voisen
So I’m asking you this question, this is a question. You know, I've cycled all my life, my calves, my thighs, all that stuff is like, it's kind of rock hard in comparison to my upper body, which is not, but he's saying, that part isn't as important as you age. Because to keep your agility to keep your balance to keep it, you know, you want to be working as much as you can on your lower body. And I sitting here going, well, I've just been told I need to work on my upper body. So I'm just curious. Yeah, so

Steven Kotler
he's right. leg strength is the single most important correlate, okay, we're healthy longevity. But he's, there's a bunch of reasons. One, because social connection is so important for peak performance aging, that if we lose our mobility, that goes away, falls are a big killer of older adults, right? They, they lose their balance. And right. So also really important is bone density. So there's a lot of bone brain connection, most people don't realize that your bones store minerals, which the brain runs on. So if without a lot of bone density, some of the decline we see in the brain is actually a bone related decline. So you have to work on bone density, one of the reasons leg strength is emphasize the bones. But that's also upper body strength still matters, right? It's use it or lose it across the boards. And now, do you want to prioritize legs and lower body? Absolutely, you did? Yeah. You really, you really want you really do. But you don't want to you want to prioritize the entire kinetic chain. Right. And it's well, you

Greg Voisen
use you use weighted vests. And I know he was talking last night on the podcast with Tim Ferriss about how he goes out on a Sunday with weights in a pack, and literally will just do five hours, you know, like five hours on a Sunday of hiking with like, water in the backpack or whatever the hell he puts in there. Or weighted vests? What problems does that overcome? How did that help you? Yeah. So which muscles are is fine motor performance, the stamina? All of

Steven Kotler
it? Yeah. So yeah, it's, again, how you with a weight vest. You know, you have to who is clear The World Health Organization, if you want peak performance aging, you need 150 to 300 minutes of stamina training a week, to strength training days, three, balance, agility, and flexibility days, like, that's what you need for peak performance aging. So you, unless you want to train a couple hours a day, five days a week, you got to find multiple solutions, a single tool that solves multiple problems at once, skiing hits all of those, right. But I had to train for the skiing that I was doing. So I started with a heightening of the weight vest because it hits all the categories. And as you pointed it out, you get my motor performance, you get fast twitch muscle response, best twitch muscle response I got because I would go up with the weighted vests. And then I would come down fast, wasn't running, but I was moving faster than normal. So does that. And what about rowing? Rowing is great to a better outdoors than on a machine. Yeah, the outdoor, you know, Novolin outdoor environments better to exercising in nature is really important. The other thing is you want to dynamic motion. Rowing is not as powerful as a lot of stuff is a little bit dynamic, but it doesn't have you not there's not a ton of coordination. Once you get the patterns in. See there's cycling, road cycling versus mountain biking. So dynamic movements. When there's balanced coordination, strength all at once it actually improves. Not only does it all the physical stuff, it amplifies neurogenesis, angiogenesis, birth of new neurons, and the birth of new vasculature so there's new neurons get blood and oxygen, food so all that there's these compounding effects. That's what you're aiming for. We're in the final thing about weight vests is a there's data that it's slow but you can improve bone density with weight vests there are better ways to do it. We do some work with the company osteo strong that is phenomenal and you want like bone density problems or you're getting on in yours you haven't addressed boned as the osteo strong frickin amazing what they figured out. They've just got a way to load the bones very evenly and massively amplify a But bone basically, um astrocytes, ASTRA blasts astrocytes build up bone. And it's a pretty good place to start on that, you know what I mean? If you're looking if you're like I got, I don't necessarily know if I'm in the shape, like with a weight vest yet, start with a movement professional can start like working out what's like sort of like, can watch you walk and say, oh, you broke your ankle when you were 12. And you, you overcompensate here and under compensate here. And you know, one of the things that we have to be really careful of as we age is even with guys like you really strong legs, but do you favor your prime mover muscles over your stabilizer muscles, over time, the body will learn how to do that, right. And you want to train all of that stuff. So we don't get injured as we age

Greg Voisen
Well, you know, that the issue here is, Is this Steven is I know the listeners now have a pretty good idea of your experiment, how it worked out for you, I want him to go get a copy of this book. And there's a website called NAR country where you can buy multiple copies I have, I was on his webinar last Friday, he's got another one coming up. And we're gonna put a link to that as well. But yours two places that you can go and you can actually buy multiple copies of this book, I actually am going to be handing it out to my son and friends, my son who's a big snowboarder, anybody you know, please, you know, go do it. Just go to Nar country G and AR see you and see you and try.com. And there, you're going to see videos order now. And you can actually buy a multiple copies of this book. And then what you're going to get, which I've already been into and listened to and seen is what's called bonuses, he's got all these great bonuses that you guys can benefit from. And it's actually over $1,750 in bonuses and performance tools training available for a limited time. So, you know, the commercial here would be this. I've known Stephen for a long time, anything that he puts out is high quality, you're not going to have to worry about this, you're only going to pay $28 for this book. But if you get the book, and then you buy a few more copies of the book, you get more bonuses. So just go check it out seriously. Um, with that being said, you know, because I ended the show a little bit with praise for you. And I really, really honor you and all the work that you've done. This book chronicles that, and getting to this critical point in your life where you wanted to overcome these issues. What advice last bit of advice would you leave our listeners about with the path of peak performance? If there were three or four things I know we've talked about so much, you know, the psychology of it, the community element of it, the fear associated with the release chemicals in the last hour, we've talked about a ton. But if there were three things that I could go apply to my life today, what would that be?

Steven Kotler
So I'm gonna give you one thing and three ways to apply it, okay? You invert it, because peak performance ageing, starts with mindset. And so the mindset of old, which is that voice in your head, the one that says don't go down the hill at full speed, right, like, the mindset of the brakes on right, that now that shows up early, there's a bunch of like, sucking start to show up in our 20s It is the point you need to change it. And so that when the boy says you're too old for that shit, you got to fight it back. Why? Because a positive mindset towards aging. I am thrilled with the days that are in front of me the second half of my life, and think that with today's information filled with exciting possibility, you know, those kinds of thoughts. It translates literally to an extra seven and a half years of healthy longevity. We talked in the beginning about the mind body connection, use another example. And there's so much data on this and so people hear that and they go, Okay, I gotta shift my mindset around aging. How the hell do I do that? Here's my three things to do. So the first two, I'm actually gonna give you four. The first two are come out of Ellen Langers work she was she helped pioneer she's a Harvard psychologist. She often talked about the God Mother of positive psychology, the godmother of mindfulness movement. She was definitely there first. And she worked a lot on kind of the mindset of Aging and how do you fix it place to start is, with mindfulness of the present get curious about the present moment. And her advice is noticed because the brain likes to sort of pretend everything's the same. I'm the same person I was 10 years ago. It's it likes stability, but the truth of the world is changed. Everything is constantly changing. Every time you breathe, you're changing the internal chemistry, like everything's always changing her advice. You want to change your mindset around aging, start by noticing that change is foundational to life. And that's the constant, one to watch your language, limiting language, how you talk to yourself, how you talk to others don't sleep on how you talk to others. ageism is the most socially acceptable stereotype in the world. And it's deadly. People who grow up around a negative around negative stereotypes around aging, by the time they reach 60, they show a 30% greater decline in memory than people who grew up with positive ideas about aging. It's huge. And we are making we are inflicting penalties on people for you know, these negative mindsets around aging. So three,

Greg Voisen
creating our stock, would that be distilled down in what you think about you become,

Steven Kotler
in a sense, and I don't think I think it's important to create an AR style quest, because there's going to be stuff that you hang on to there's going to be residuals, right, and an AR style questions like find something that's impossible for you. So you sort of want to get done. And there's unfinished business as you want a lot of motivation to go in. And but it's something that if you were to prove it to yourself, if it were to if you were impossible, whatever you believed about the second half of your life has to go away. My narc 100 class was exactly what I did. That was what the biggest lesson and this is the biggest lesson of running this experiment with hundreds of other people at this point is when you create an experiment, and you go up against your own personal impossible, it just destroys these traditional mindsets and for put down your goddamn smartphone, put it away. Smartphones create it make it dumb. Well, they create a mobile mindset, which is like they emphasize solipsistic, narcissistic behavior, and it actually will block the very mindset you need. Right? And the other thing is peak performance aging. There's a lot to do this, you will there's you gotta get busy. Most Americans spend four to six hours a day on the frickin phone, on their phones. So, you know, where do you get the time put down the phone, it's bad for your brain. It's bad for your mindset, bad for and I mean, we could go on I could, I could literally talk for the next hour basically about all the detriments of smartphones to have on the brain and especially the aging brain, smartphones train down exactly the skills that we need to be training up over time.

Greg Voisen
Totally. I agree with you. I mean, I mentioned my wife the other day as we walk the dogs, you know, we walk the dogs probably 20 hours a week or more. The people with Down Hand Syndrome, you know, that walk right into you. They're so busy looking at the damn phone, they're not out enjoying the fresh air and, and whatever. They're like literally, we never take our phones with us anytime we walk the dogs right and but the reality is, is this, this is what you get. You get a lot of it. I mean, it's a lot. It's not just a little.

Steven Kotler
It's also Yeah, it's, I could go on. I know where I gotta go. I'm running out of time.

Greg Voisen
Hey, well, I appreciate you. Thank you. For all my listeners. We're gonna put a link to it and our country.com Gnarcountry.com. You can also go to the flow research collective, we're gonna put it there. Thank you so much. Namaste to you. Thanks for spending time with me today. It's always a pleasure having you on, Steven.

Steven Kotler
Greg, lovely to see you. As always. Thanks so much again for your interest.

Greg Voisen
I hope you get, I hope you get snow.

Steven Kotler
You too.

Greg Voisen
All right, bye.

Steven Kotler
Bye.