 Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of Dr. Jill Live. I'm here today with a colleague and brilliant best-selling author Steven Kotler. We're going to talk about his many best-selling books and his latest work, NAR County Today, and I'll introduce him formally in just a moment. If you haven't caught my previous episodes, you can catch them all on YouTube, Stitcher, iTunes, or anywhere you listen to podcasts. And I hope you'll stop by and rate and review. Today is especially exciting for me, because as I've written my book this last several years, one of my heroes and inspirational authors that I've read is Steven Kotler, and he's here with me today. Let me formally introduce him, and then we'll dive right in. Steven Kotler is a New York Times best-selling author and award-winning journalist and the executive director of the Flow Research Collective. He's one of the world's leading experts on human performance. Steven is the author of 10 bestsellers, including The Art of Impossible, The Future is Faster Than You Think, Stealing Fire, The Rise of Superman, Bold and Abundance. His work has been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes translated into over 50 languages, and he's appeared in over 100 publications, including New York Times Magazine, Wired Atlantic Monthly, Wall Street Journal, Time and the Harvard Business Review. Alongside his wife, author Joy Nicholson, he's also the co-founder of the Buddy Sue Hospice Home for Old Dogs, a canine elder care facility, and Rancho de Chihuahua, a dog rescue sanctuary. Steven Kotler, thank you so much for your time and for joining me today. We're sure it's good to be with you. Thank you. So I know you don't know me that well. I know a lot about you. What I'd love to start with is story always drives what we do with the curiosity that we bring to life and the work that we do. You've done a lot of transformational work, not only in my life in framing health flow can help health and aging and we're going to go into that today, but also just how flow states in general can really optimize human performance. What I'd love to know though is what's your story? Where did you grow up? How did your childhood, your life, the things that you saw and did as a younger person frame what you came to be with passion and purpose in your life with the flow states? Was there any particular memories or experiences that you had that you realized you were this curious person that had such a potential? I had an amazing mom. I had an amazing mom as the place you got to start because when I was born my folks didn't have a whole lot of money and my mom was young. She was early 20s and I don't necessarily know if she really knew. I was her first kid but I don't necessarily know if she knew what she was doing, but she knew books were good and libraries were good and so she used to just go to the library and we'd pick out 100 books and she'd read them to me until I figured out of reading and I'd read them to her. So you know there was just a love of language and learning that sort of went together for me that goes all the way back. Other than that I mean I was an action sport athlete going all the way back. I was an animal geek sort of going all the way back so sort of the things I'd become in my adult life I think I started out being an early childhood a little bit. That's so fascinating because curiosity as you well know and have written is one of the foundations of flow and I would go further to say I think it's a foundation of genius and you clearly had this curiosity as a young child but isn't it neat when we have those experiences of our parents actually fostering that and kind of encouraging that because clearly reading is such a powerful thing. I feel like you have been again in my world I'm an avid reader. I mean probably two 300 books a year and you are one of my favorite authors and I think not only have you taken the study of flow to this level but you have also really made yourself this incredible author and writer. How did the writer part of you get developed? How did that come into place? The writer part was there so my grandmother my mom's mom was a poet and I used that in the Hallmark greeting cards that were right but so there was but there was no barriers to entry like my grandmother was doing it so like I was four years old and I remember being at her table I still have this somewhere and I wrote up my first poem so I started writing really early on my senior project in high school was a collection of poems my senior thesis in colleges and undergraduate was again in poetry so I'm actually trained as a poet which is totally bizarre but and only only transitioned into fiction when I moved into grad school but and then transitioned into journalism when I was trying to figure out how to like make a living while I was writing my first novel basically so the writing has always been with me it took a lot I was what so it took a while how to learn how to like do what I can do in poetry in fiction and then in journalism and then in non-fiction books I had sort of a backwards learning process I could do amazing things with words long before I understand the rules of grammar because you don't need grammar if you're a poet you're not right away at least right um I got away with it for a while I love that because what I've always I've never been hugely into poetry but what I realized recently in writing and working on film and producing and things is the eloquence is in the length the editing is in the conciseness of words right like the brilliance really comes in the editing and if you can say something brilliant in less words poetry is the ultimate example right because you say something you move someone with very very few words so it doesn't surprise me that your brilliant writing was founded on this idea that the lack of words or the smallness of words can actually be way more powerful if they're the right words right and so that's surprising it's the smallness of this the brevity for sure also the what you get really good at as a poet and you can't I don't think learn maybe if you're an actor near running lines you start to figure this out maybe a songwriter perhaps but um words change when you put two words next to each other and you start changing one of those words um you get to watch what happens to meaning to emphasis to rhythm all those things and they're all none of those are visible right those that's all pattern recognition pattern matching it's unconscious learning and it's really hard to teach it's like teaching style I've done it and you can do it and it's challenging and interesting there are sort of ways around it but it's not easy and the main reason it's not easy is because a lot of the like core stuff that you need it's non-conscious information acquisition it's you know rhythm and beats and things that you it's really hard to get consciously you just need laps through it and poetry definitely gave me those laps that makes so much sense it's almost let me also let me also say for the record I was a terrible poet I was a bad poet I might be able to become a good poet and you know you know they're an older but I don't think I had much command over what I was doing but I was doing really fancy sort of dazzling things with language so I don't think most people understood that I never clue I got over but I don't necessarily know if I was a great poet you kind of wowed them and then but I bet you were pretty good I wonder it makes me think was that maybe your first experience with flow not really understanding what it was or what where where would you say before you even were conscious of what now the the first clear memory of flow I was well over third eighth grade eighth grade I think I was at seven spring ski area which is in Pennsylvania about three hours from my home in Cleveland and the girl I had a crush on Vicki was rumored to be on the chairlift and I decided I was going to show off and I threw my very first back scratcher off a job and it turns out she wasn't on the chairlift at all she wasn't even in town it was just a rumor but I swear I you know I heard the river and I saw her on the chairlift she wasn't actually there but it did throw me into my first probably not my first flow state but my first deep macro flow state it was the first time I remember time dilating slowing down getting that freeze from effect so that really stuck with me it took a really I mean you know early days especially for a while nobody really we didn't even have a word called flow right there it was quasi mystical experiences nobody really knew what we were looking at uh chicks set me high and coined the term but like synonyms were confusing was Maslow's peak experience the same thing as chicks set me high as flow the same thing as Bill Jackson's in the zone the same thing as Jim's fix run or hide right like we had all these synonyms nobody knew what was under the hood what was really going on and it was hard to figure out and and then you'd have these experiences and you were like well I'm one with everything I'm having an out of body experience or you know quasi really powerful mist of experiences that we now 30 years later understand where they're coming from in the brain and why they're coming but you know back when all this was starting that was just it was just magic yes yes magic right yeah which is so fun because my realm is taking your research in um mixie hi she uh can I ever say his name me hi thank you I've said it a million times and I still can't say it so don't feel bad I learned to say it because I was on NPR in Cleveland Ohio and I slaughtered his name and somebody called in the show and they said hey tell the moron chick sent me hi that's good and I went chick sent me hi okay I'm never gonna forget it again thank you for calling me moron right I appreciate that because I've yeah yeah I've been practicing it still but that's perfect um so from now on I mean he didn't even I mean he you know asked me to call him Mike the first of my oh yeah I'm telling no one can get my name so um so oh I got so many directions I want to go I want to talk about the neurotransmitters because medically obviously those are fascinating to me but before we do I wanted to share observation and then I wanted to know your take because what I feel like is all of your ideas all of all of this flow research can be applied to human health and performance and which is what you've talked about and we'll talk about your book and how your experience with skiing I can't wait to get there but before we do one observation is I grew up bioengineering to very analytical using the left brain problem solving pattern recognition but in my 20 years as a functional medicine kind of a detective what I've seen is the power comes from taking that data driven analytical processing which is where you start collecting experience and now this right brain intuitive which is the subconscious processing of that data I come to solutions much quicker and now it's the combination of those and I know I'm saying it same way you have before but any thoughts on even the practice of medicine because I don't know if you realize but our training and our medical system is so masculine analytical driven science-based which is wonderful but sometimes we're told that that intuitive sense that we have that knowing where we've seen patterns of this case in this case in this case and we see the patterns we're like I think this is the thing that comes from a very intuitive place and then we prove it with science so both equally have power but I see that reflected in your work because I feel like there's this blending of the both places where the magic happens right the subconscious the intuitive and the science and you need both but any maybe I'm not clear here but I'd love to know how that works in performance of like problem solving. So it's funny I'm working on a big a really big paper on the on a neural science the neural biology the neural dynamics of intuition and right now I'm working on a book on intuition that's often the future which is interesting because I so I am really cautious with stuff especially what gets set out loud because you know what I mean like wherever it starts it may start with intuition usually starts with I have an experience and it matches something I've read in a science paper from a weird angle right and that's like that that's the first thing and it and it needs more but I'm really you know I've spent my whole career trying to put flow science on a hard science footing and and being really really as rigorous as I possibly could be which is not to say that a lot of it you know a lot of the how things come together the pattern matching pattern recognition you said that's intuitive and for sure in so as you mentioned at the start of the show my wife and I uh run a hospice care and special needs dog sanctuary and my new book not our country is on peak performance aging and my actual first work on peak performance aging was doing hospice care work with the dogs and my wife is one of the best diagnosticians for canine issues in the world and I see it and you know in the beginning first in the beginning I thought she was just making shit up yeah right she would see patterns that I didn't see so like she was referring to things that I literally hadn't even developed the awareness to be able to see so I was like I don't like I don't know if my wife is lying to me or making things up or like I didn't know what was going on for years right until I actually started you know had enough experience I could see the same thing she was seeing and and understand things like that but I've learned um especially around animals um there I mean which is not to say that doctors and you know that's diagnosticians aren't wrong but I've learned to really you know get it I always if something's wrong with that animal I asked you I want her an intuitive opinion as much as I'm going to start turning to articles and you know I'm going to go back to the science but there's nothing um it's the same thing with language right I see things in language they're completely invisible to most of the world or the same thing with being an ex-flow science I see things I read flow papers and I see stuff that most everybody misses um that's expertise right and that's you know and certainly it exists in medicine and it's interesting um um so I uh last night did a podcast with Scott Barry Kaufman and uh Shordan I'm blanking her last name oh my god I feel terrible um she's the founder of positive medicine but uh she's the doctor and um we were talking about she's trying to revolutionize how doctors are trained um and where that's where positive medicine the idea comes from and she's dealing with all the obvious stuff like the burnout and the you know overworking and the fact that you know doctors have heart attacks more frequently than everybody else and they're high in suicide and all that stuff but it it's interesting because I've I've done a bunch of work researchers I've done a bunch of work doctors I was talking to her about it last night none of the none of the medical school training is about flow and that's what doesn't make sense to me because we know when you know we're up in effort and don't mean to show up and flow amplify signal to noise ratios and the brain that you see more patterns now are all those patterns going to be right no so in like diagnostically in the hands of a young doctor flow could probably be a disaster right there's nobody's really done that at work but you know but once there's actual expertise they're amping the pattern recognition up and you know that the dopamine high is something to be suspicious of right like it does amplify pattern recognition but it also makes you feel really good so you think every pattern is great it's why flow is known to produce um convulsive shopping right never go shopping in a flow state you'll buy everything right like everything looks good and uh well in mania could be like this far apart right they're right really close and you know well it's it's funny because when I talk about uh you nor ever everybody thinks oh just give me more of these neural chemicals more nor up in effort more dopamine and if you turn up the crank on both you get either mania or schizophrenia right depending on how much you crank it up and what's mixed in there um so yeah that's there's a you know like everything there's a there's a balance that we want to exist in between of in between I love that because that's I mean even the foundation of what I've been doing is like how do we take great science and not uh lear too far from that but also just expand the idea of of what is possible in healing and what is possible in peak performance and what is possible in finding answers to you know seemingly impossible diagnoses or incurable diseases so I love that because the truth is we have to found it on good science and even if we have an intuitive suspicion like you were sharing with your wife or whatever we still go back and check with the data but it's like where did that meld because the idea is even if you're reading a paper and you get an idea of something that no one's written about you take that idea you go look at the rest of the papers and decide is this worth writing about pursuing or researching and then maybe it is maybe it isn't but that idea came from that creative yeah I like I mean I always say that the order of the process and I tell this to the all the folks I work with um and it's sort of it's a rule in my company which is insight research publication meaning put it out there in a peer reviewed way so smart people will be done your idea and then and only then communication really and right like and if you follow that or you can't I don't think get in too much trouble you'll probably still get stuff wrong yeah but not as much yeah and in your field and again in medicine just like the people you're interviewing that's how we change is we have to bring good research because we can't have just an idea without any backing so love love love that foundation briefly let's talk about neurotransmitters we obviously dopamine norepinephrine are clearly part of the blend of flow and there's some more there too but what place I feel like it can even ask you about your childhood you probably genetically were programmed to seek flow just to be curious like there were things that you were genetically born with but some of this can be trained and acquired and you've clearly laid out a map in like art of impossible of how to reach flow states even if you're not naturally drawn to that what portion of this is environmental versus genetics you know nature nurture thing because I see the genetic mutations and I see those people who are achievers and seeking like for example for me I have issues with dopamine breakdown and so I seek motorcycle riding rock climbing scheme because it I love flow states right so to you not everybody I know has that natural intrinsic genetic piece is there how much of that like natural seeking flow is there from genetics and how much is our environment and trainable so um let's start with train let's work back with it first of all massively trainable right at the flow research collective as you know we have an eight week training right it's digitally delivered you go through the phd psychology to neuroscientists as a coach and it's intense as you know um and a lot of work but we see when we were data geeks we measure everything as you know we see on average a 70 to 80 percent boost and flow on the back end this is incredibly incredibly trainable and number one it's trainable and number two trainable and let's let's let's I mean start with the basic idea first of all which is peak performance is nothing more or less than just getting our biology to work for us rather than against us right that's all we're doing and I'd love to tell you that our you know comfort was the absolute best and that's why we're seeing a 70 to 80 percent boost and flow it maybe that's some of it but a lot of it is this is our biology everybody's hard wire for this it's built in part portion being human everybody can get into flow so um teaching people take advantage of what's built into um is really the secret there so very trainable but let's get back to your questions because you asked a bunch of really interesting questions so one uh the trait the trait you're talking about is flow pronus and there have been difference I mean they've looked at flow pronus um genetic perspectives they've looked at it from early childhood experience they they've looked at it from the what personality types tend to be you know big five tend to be the most flow prone and that sort of thing and I am actually a little suspicious of the flow pronus argument and here's why we humans are built on like all mammals six foundational primary emotional processes right jockponsept and neuroscience the university of washington uh did this work in the 90s it's you know we're a phenomenal book called affective neuroscience it's sort of the foundation of this thinking but those you know and they're they're really basic but there's a panic system there's a fear system there's a raid system there's a seeking system that the curiosity we're talking about and so forth and where they how active these systems are and each one are tied to different independent brain structures and neurochemicals there's some overlap but it's usually independent where the levels get set on each of these primary emotional processes um is going to determine at least a large portion of which flow triggers you're most susceptible to right so there is a chunk of that that is sort of genetic now early childhood experience is going to impact that and change it and then ultimately you'll you'll have your personality on top of that none of these things are death sentences right all of these things can be changed even personality traits which we you know used to believe were were written in stone and we now know you can change all of them and in fact peak performance aging requires a lot of that right um working with openness experience to experience and conscientiousness and a couple of personality traits that you absolutely want to cultivate if you want to thrive in the second half of your life um so some of it is that way but usually it's just but the the thing about triggers and the reason like I know it's not a death sentence is because the triggers that most people are susceptible to tend to change over time right would work for you in 20s it's going to be a little different in your 30s it's going to be a little different in your 40s 50s 60s and so forth um so uh they change as we change and um yes certain people are more flow prone than others but I want to point out that I think one of the reasons I'm particularly good at this research is I'm not particularly flow prone and it takes a tremendous amount to get me into flow which is why I had to get really really really good at figuring out how it worked um and I have an incredibly high flow lifestyle right I get into flow all the time but it it was it was learned oh so that's fascinating and very hopeful for anyone listening it's like I don't know if I've ever experienced it surely you have but clearly you can also so this is a great way to transition into your new book um and your publicist gave me a copy so I've been in that deep NAR County is coming out country oh that country NAR country and when is it coming out it's coming out February 28th fantastic so we'll be sure and include links for pre-sales and everything thank you so uh I am an avid skier I started skiing at four years old so I loved your story I am I consider myself an expert but not not at your level I have not done any freestyle but almost everything else so I love this just I want to go into the discussion on skiing and you mentioned skiing at a young age first of all how did you start and then let's talk about the book and and where you've been lately but when when was your first skiing experience so we had this discussion recently my house I was either seven or eight and you know skiing swept America in the 70s yes right hundreds of ski resorts got open and in Ohio where I was growing up and all over the Midwest but Ohio Michigan Pennsylvania they built they literally took garbage dumps piled dirt on top of the garbage and that was right we learned to ski unconvert garbage dumps right I did 2000 Illinois Wisconsin Michigan same thing yeah same thing right so that's all over the west uh yeah I learned to ski and convert garbage those are when I when I started my career um as a journalist right uh I always say that like you know journalism is a crazy uh field because they let you they pay you to be curious right which is the weirdest thing in the world right and I was super curious about neuroscience and it's also super curious about action sports so I you know got to spend 10 years or so chasing professional athletes around mountains across oceans and a lot of them were skiers because I was a skier I was living in Squaw Valley at the point that it was sort of like the birth of what was back then extreme skiing right and is now big mountain skiing and and and what not um so I've done it my whole life you know and uh then sort of I think lost my mind a little bit when it came to our country but in a good way I I agree I was like wow this is it's actually motivating because as I've gotten busier and older I don't and now the 70 tell my ski reserves I'm in Boulder so obviously have a lot of access to skiing but it's the the traffic is so difficult that you really have to make sure you're a weekend versus a day or two like I used to go every Friday when I came out here I set my clinic schedule the money through Thursday so Friday was ski day and now I get too busy so that doesn't happen like it used to but um totally totally love skiing so um first question is uh what was the what was the factor that was like the the switch for this book and this idea because you did you have the idea before COVID because I read yeah so no I'm what I had been and peak performance aging is about 11 different fields right come together into into one field and they're and they're all over the place from like embodied cognition and flow science and adult development to you know longevity technology and regenerative medicine a whole bunch of stuff so I have a long history with all the subjects that beat into it and I've been researching you know some of it was the dog work some of it was just as an athlete you know breaking myself and having to fix myself some you know but for 20 years but what happened is so I worked because I'm a psychopath nine years about a break literally like I would ski but I would work get up at three o'clock in the morning work till like eight a.m. and then go to ski I saw some of your hours and I'm like that's insane but like so I literally had nine years about a break and we were moving we moved from New Mexico to Nevada and I was just burned out the unbelief and I was and my break was going to be April I was publishing a new book with Peter Diamandis it was launching in February I knew I was going to do the book stuff in March and then April and May I was just going to ski I was going to take two months off and I was going to ski was going to my birthbreak in nine years and COVID happened they shut the ski resorts down and and I had COVID actually all those things happen right like I write it once and I sort of lost my mind like we were in the middle of pandemic I was trying to save my company I was like I was doing all the stuff that everybody was doing at the start of the pandemic and yet they had shut the ski resorts down and I was like I was so angry and I was so angry and I come in I was like and I wasn't going the way was the thing like I could angry sure but I've got a really like I've got a flash temper I get really hot and then it goes away a minute later and it's gone and I'm really good at that and it wasn't going away and I was like day after day I was waking up and I was madder and I was madder and there was snow in the mountain and I didn't even like go hike at that point because I was so sick with COVID and um but was just really really really frustrated and I was hiking my dog through the back country and um sort of talking to myself in my head like what what is this about like where is this like you got to put this anger down like there's stuff going on that's really serious and you need to be right how did I get rid of it and I was like well I was like well why are you so mad and I was like well what was stolen from me I realized that progress had been stolen like I'm getting older this is the thing I love most I haven't accomplished all I wanted to accomplish on skis at all not close and they just took like three months of my ski season away from me and two of them were going to be spent like I was mad and I was like okay so at least now you know why you're bad what makes this okay and I and I sort of realized that if I could find a way to progress as a skier in the middle of pandemic with the ski resort shut down with no snow because it was but it was summer um that would make it okay like if I somehow found a way to enter next ski season a better skier than I had ended the last season that would be okay and okay so how the hell do you become a better skier I'm hiking my dog through uh through the back country and I came across an abandoned gold mine and there were these enormous tailing piles everywhere and I realized I'm looking at the tailing piles and I'm like they're steep and like you can't ski down them they're not big enough to like make real turns of 50 feet 60 feet but I was like you could certainly shape them into like a hill that like get to a jump but I've fallen on dirt a lot and broken things so that's a bad idea I was like what about a rail never stood a rail in my life or a box never even thought about it I was never a free skier I was never a park skier it wasn't it didn't even interest me right I didn't know how to do any tricks I was a big mounted skier but I was like well hell rail sliding is you know and so that one thing led to another we built a rail set up in a abandoned gold mine it's a nightmare trying to learn how to slide rails on dirt you would think I can't imagine when I read that I was like you're great it was yeah it was that was that was actually one of the crazy things we actually did the whole book um but didn't know any better and then uh uh one thing led to another and I was like okay I'm gonna there are by the way 10 or 12 different biological factors that say there is no way anybody over the age of 35 should be able to learn how to park ski right it's really there's a lot going against you in this particular sports like gymnastics or ballet the winter shuts early in people's mind but all this stuff I've been reading and studying right said no no no this is wrong and I was like well let's see if theory if theory works in practice I should be able to teach myself how to park ski at age 53 using these things and I like so I made a list of 40 tricks 20 tricks I wanted to learn and it was really a list of like zero to intermediate and there's a reason for all this like I can oh we can talk about the backs of this so there's a final conversation with me I just sent me hi with Mike that triggers the whole thing that it's not in the book that I'll tell you in a second um but trigger triggers this out but I you know and I was like you know fuck if it takes me five years to learn all this stuff great I'll be into my 60s and I'll be a I'll be a better skier cool and we took all these ideas we blended them together and I went zero like no skills whatsoever to intermediate in a single season wow wow that would right and my ski partner who is a former pro athlete but had gotten hurt and hadn't been a pro athlete in a lot of years he started applying the same stuff I was using he's younger but he started making crazy progress so that's the story told in our country what's not in our country that I should finish the story with now with you is a that's a pilot study it's cool pilot study two subjects but as a pilot study so this past winter we took 17 older adult ages 30 to 68 with the exact same protocol the same formula and we brought them into the mountains for four days gave them four days on the hill none of them had park skiing experience some of them like I came as at least as an expert skier we had like low level intermediates in this group all the way up to and everybody in the group got a mate like the experiment was a runaway success and they learned a park ski and their whole you know attitudes towards aging the second half of their life all of it all it was fixed and you know my whole goal this was the chick set me high story the last conversation I ever had with Mike he basically told me and we were talking like one action sport to an athlete to another he said look um the story's long but the short version I'm paraphrasing what Mike told me he said look as you get older have a backup plan like whatever it is that gives you the most flow if your body's going to fall apart and you're an athlete have a backup plan and with skiing the only way I could get into flow was big mountain ski really gnarly lines or ski really really fast or do stuff that's really dangerous right and I was like well that's not going to work as I get older and I was like if I learned a park ski if I can get to intermediate intermediate is when you stop falling down and hurting yourself and you can sort of control your progress it was like I will have a million more entrances into flow because I can use it doesn't matter what slope I'm on I could just be creatively interpret and you don't even need to kind of snow because the parks always have no I was laughing so we were at north star two days ago three days ago it was me and my ski partner and they had two lifts open one was the one lift that was going half up mountain and the the lines were like right it was crazy and the other was the beginner lift that nobody was on but the beginners and us because we could turn the side hits yes into a terrain park and so now it's like we did 25 laps in a day that like most people got four and this is the powder days you wait for the back bowls and you have to wait till you know january till it happens yeah and it's all you know it so I have a million more entrances into flow than my favorite activity in the world but the really like the the wild stuff was what came out of the people performance aging research and it's sort of the methodology that we use which isn't the core so take say someone's listening like what do I do I'm aging so we did so we there's really there's two halves to it in a sense part one is you want to try to turn your life into a high flow blue zone right we know what the blue zones are this is just sort of standard health well being longevity I'm not a you I don't know how I come out on the risk bear tall drink wine research but so ignore that but the other eight things that that make up you know the those requirements are pretty straightforward and what we did is we took a deliberate dynamic play-based approach to learning so dynamic meaning you're using your whole body in body cognition you know tells us that the the more we're using our whole body the faster we're going to learn anyways right um so there's a whole bunch of stuff that comes out of body cognition uh deliberate play you've heard of deliberate practice yes deliberate practice is Anders Erickson's fabulous idea about the path to mastery and um his stuff works very well but uh it doesn't have to produce a lot of flow deliberate play so deliberate practice is repetition with tiny micro changes right you build on what you did before over and over again uh deliberate play is often described as repetition without repetition or repetition with improvisation so you do exactly what you did last time but you improvise a little bit on top of it right deliberate play is way flowier than deliberate practice and because flow massively amplifies learning you tend to go farther faster dynamic deliberate play um is even more so like your body cognition does look at the couple movement with uh thinking or talking or whatever you enhance right you want to learn a foreign language if you move when you say the words just move your hand around you will learn it faster right like that's just standard embodied cognition stuff but there's all kinds of stuff about vestib- activating the vestibular system so balance or all the dynamic movements really amplify take that up a notch and play is so foundational um especially as we get older if you look at like what do you need so and when the research is really really clear if you want to thrive in your later years you want to have challenging social creative activities that's what a dynamic deliberate play-based approach to to whatever is exactly um so we found a way to put it all together um there's a ton more I can talk about flow plays a major role in adult development as well so I don't know if you know this but uh to accept me how I worked on adult development for almost half his career and he argued which has been a long-standing argument in the field of adult development that flow was actually the engine of adult development it's going through flow states because we've become more complex people on the back end of them we learn we grow we become more complex his argument was that was actually the engine of adult development and pushing us forward so there's a lot of stuff there that's just baked into the flow that that that makes it you know even a tighter fit and you have this perfect formula because you're you're like you said you group you're social you're one thought as you're talking is um obviously in anything you mentioned this in the book we have trauma we have experiences we have accidents we we shatter our knees skiing what do you do with those blocks mentally yeah so that's a really so this is a really interesting question we developed a methodology so what's at the core of my methodology one inch at a time one inch this is the this was the most important thing that we did is um so allostatic overload right is the technical term for that build up all that all of the trauma and the crap shit that happens over time allostatic overload has a huge impact on the challenge skills balance which is flow's most important trigger right flow follows focus only shows up when all of our attention is the right here right now so that's what the triggers do they drive our attention into the present moment the most famous the challenge skills balance says hey we pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge of the task slightly exceeds our skill set you want to stretch but not snap bunch of years ago chicks sent me high and a google mathematician sat down tried to figure out what's the actual difference between challenges and skills and can we put a number on it did a back of the envelope calculation that was not real and they came up with four percent and we took their fake number into the in and studied it for a while and discovered that it was a lot less fake than they thought that it was a really good approximation of the difference for most people right goes up and down whatever but what we discovered in older adults is instead of being a four percent difference between challenge and skills uses about a one percent difference because there's stuff that has built up and so I'll give you a great example as an athlete I'm sure you're familiar with this you where this shows up so you know if you injure yourself say ski it right you break something leg finger hand whatever bad enough that like you have to take time out you may heal from the injury within a month or two but psychologically it's going to take about a year or two a year and a half to your brain will let you ski at top speed again there's an unconscious governor that will right regulate behavior and I you know I've been hurt a lot different times and it's I'm always been fascinated with it because I'm like I know I'm not skiing it feels like I'm skiing at top speed but I can't keep up with people who I normally can keep up with and it was a physical right it's not like you're physically not physical I'm like I'm in the gym I'm lifting right as much as before the injury I can do all the physical stuff it's completely psychological and there's nothing you can do about it until like about a year year and a half in and then it tends to fade away but it's and I was like well that is going to that same governor is you know that's an all aesthetic overload thing in a crisis situation but it's going to impact it so I was like I think one of the problems that most older adults have with uh dynamic physical activities is they remember what it was like to be younger and they try to push themselves at like four or five percent when instead they need to go like it was literally one inch of time and my rule was I want to do start with an automatic a movement I can execute 100 of time with zero fear no conscious interference and then advance it one micro bit of time practice that you know in using a dynamic deliberate play kind of improv around it but very very slowly until that new bit of movement is hardwired code and then repeat and that was that was sort of the core of it and it's you know there's some good motor learning stuff in there there's a whole bunch of stuff baked in there but it was the real and you're really describing neuroplasticity right because you're retraining those lines that we got stuck in and and and just going really slowly and it just required way more patience and the hardest thing for me um is there's a line in the book and I was actually just talking to a friend of mine about this yesterday the line was one inch at a time is no longer fast enough for my ego yeah which is true right like progress is really addictive and like you know in the beginning you're just like oh my god I just landed backwards or oh my god I figured out how to ski backwards or oh like it's such a freaking miracle in your mind that you can do any of it but pretty soon I was like okay I can do some I want to get good and that was you know holding myself back sometimes so I didn't put myself in the hospital so I didn't do something stupid and you're rerouting the neuroplasticity wow that's fascinating that is such a great takeaway I've got two more questions um first thing is just this random I remember in Jackson Hole when I first got off the big gondola and went down and there's a shoot and like I remember that that one time when I was just like I don't know if I can freaking do this right and it did and it was great but do you remember any time skiing in all of your years where you clearly are an expert above expert level you've learned a brand new skill with freestyle but do you remember any specific times where you're looking down a shoot or a cliff or something where you're just like you have the fear you did it anyway but that you remember being like scared out of your gourd so the first time I went to Chamonix professional athletes I was 23 years old I was with the so the extreme ski movement with the earliest two people in the world there was two sets of twin brothers or two sets of brothers the eagles and the DeLauriés uh John and Dan Egan and and Eric and Rob DeLauriés and we went to Chamonix and there were a couple other people there and I am a pretty staunch agnostic and I spent the every night I didn't sleep I prayed all night long please God let me live tomorrow please God let me live through tomorrow please God I don't quite believe in you or no reason but let me live I mean like literally didn't sleep for a week prayed yeah I mean like we tell everybody I was I helped start a magazine called I helped start friends of mine started a magazine called freeze which was one of the early extreme ski magazines I was uh one of their I was there Squaw Valley correspondent what's now Palisades Tahoe um but every journalist who is on staff at freeze we all got PTSD on store literally all PTSD like nightmare flashbacks not I'm not joking I'm not being physically got PTSD our first year on the job yeah I like I I I cannot tell you how many times I had to do things that I was mortally terrified of and you know didn't think I was going to live over it's letting us feel normal because I think people what was your obviously the the what's the tip in the midst of like you look down like I remember that moment and thinking I might die but I'm going to do this but like what what where's your edge and what is that yeah there's I mean there's a bunch of stuff but I want to point out that when you are a freelance journalist and for yeah saying no like not getting the store like you have to say yeah so like that's the thing I need to eat and I want a career and there's there's a hundred people are going to say yes if so if I say no somebody's got my job right like so um that's a lot of motivation but that's one of the cardinal rules um and this this is in life this is not just action sports but you go where you look and so one of the things that's really hard for people when they get into scary shit is they look at the scary stuff right yeah look at the scary stuff because your body is just like in skiing or all action sports you're moving faster right than the conscious mind can process information so how like we don't steer the muscles with the mind we steer the muscles with the eyes we go where we look that's how that's how we do this so people get into gnarly situations they're skiing through the trees they're staring at the trees they hit a tree like so that's that's you know that's good there's a bunch of stuff that you can do in the moment you know and this is really Andrew Newman's work at Stanford to regulate fear but peripheral vision that's an experiment I run in the book right so if you look out the corners of your eye or really far out that automatically your brain goes oh you're checking shit out oh and that's a way the Olympics can be right yeah it totally it totally it's parasympathetic activation there's also the physiological size so you right you inhale all the air you possibly can and then you sniff air on top of it so that that automatically triggers parasympathetic activation um calms down so there are there's some breath work there's there's some physiological interventions that you can use in the moment and um now I will also say and this is another rule that I had in the book I then this is the hardest thing about anything I had to do I think in the book which is when I was feeling too much fear I backed off that was one I did not push through in our country right um I did a ton of really really scary stuff but everything was within like within range I actually like I if I felt too much fear because it interferes with performance and earlier younger Stephen who had a less healthy ego or more of a need to prove himself you know I've broken 87 bones I don't want to have any more surgery ever ever ever um so I would break bones because I would go for it now I it's not that I won't go for it is that there's a line and if fear is interfering with my performance or my perception back off come back later I'm not gonna I'm not gonna win that one so that was really you know important but the thing about fear and this is the most important thing about about it in my opinion um and I've done a lot of writing on fear we're about an hour possible but like there was in in our country um I uh I always say I always tell people I talk right about this at the end of the book I work for the boss the boss is the version of myself that like makes to do lists and sets up the rules and that stuff in the moment I'm the same as everybody else I want the cheap hide the easy out if I'm scared I want to run away but if I've set goal you know what I mean that's the boss version and the boss is my long-term best interest at heart so I what I know is also with me in fear is most of the time if there's something I want to do and I check it out the question I have to ask myself is am I checking out because I'm scared in which case I should do it immediately or am I checking out because I don't have the skills in which case I should back the fuck off and come back later and the reason to do it immediately is if I don't I am literally going to beat myself up and regret it every day until I eventually do it like it's not going to stop right so when I choose to do it in the moment I'm saying okay I rather feel intense fear for the next 10 seconds 20 seconds 30 seconds whatever it is then beat myself up and have to deal with the voice in my head for the next year to you like however long it takes me to get back here and do this thing and I know by walking away something that is probably easy and within my skill set it's going to get gigantic in my mind right and now I've got more fear which is going to have had performance and it's a you know it's a downward spiral so I really um I sort of I set rules in the beginning of my quest for like this is when I'm going to take risks and I followed the rules I worked for the boss the boss created the rules and they were designed you know they were designed to keep me safe in dangerous situations but they were also designed to push me through it so I wouldn't I just learned that those those regrets that I have to live with this may not be for everybody but for me it's so much worse than like short-term fear I will much rather take short-term fear which is I'm fucking pleasant um then like beating myself up for years which I will absolutely do I love that because there is a place of override and I've seen that with patients like teaching them to not always override because there is a place for fear to protect us when the skills you know it's a wonderful healthy emotion but it lies to us a lot and you gotta know when is it telling the truth and when is it lying and that was I said the hardest thing that I had to do is a lot of you know interior reception is a lot of a lot in is deeply involved in embodied cognition absolutely yes one of the hard one of one of the reasons I think interior reception is so important in this kind in peak performance aging on top of the fact that it amplifies learning and a whole bunch of other stuff you want to talk about pattern recognition right those of us with better interior reception have better pattern recognition skills that's been well established in the science but the line between fear and too much fear is the most complicated out of every internal signal right and they know so they know this in intuition there's a there's so they if you go deep into the intuition literature this is where people screw things up a lot so it turns out intuition at an end before we have words before we have language around us not insight insight is once we get language but intuition is the the sense the feeling it turns out it's actually not subject to cognitive bias or it's less subject to cognitive bias so we tend to get a clearer signal the problem is when the intuition you're getting has to deal with something that's instinctive so oh that that woman at the bar I think she's really hot for me I've got this into no no no no no no like that's instinct right sex hunger that like those basic things when instinct is involved don't trust the intuitive signal there's there's really good evidence for this on a certain level dopamine which is one of the things that right you can get that will mask in an intuitive signal and things like that so but trying to figure out where the hell is the line between fear and too much fear is still I think the most complicated interceptive task that people farmers have to solve that will be another book for you I can see that last thing I know I want to get you going about the dogs I love animals and love dogs and I love that about you and what it says to me is you're a badass you're brilliant writer you're award-winning you I admire you in all those ways but the thing I admire most is what you're doing for those animals because I start every day by stepping in dog shit I mean how did that is I always been a dear to your heart or like well obviously this you want the long story the medium story the short story if you have time I have time but I'm honoring I'm happy to give you the side of the long story so I have always sort of believed that a big chunk of your life or a chunk of your life should be service and some of this by the way like it sounds all enthusiastic and nice and things like that but it was really like I grew I knew very early on that that I didn't really want to be poor and I wanted to be a writer and the only way you get to be not poor in a writer is you have to get well-known and I came up out of a very weird sort of punk rock community where a lot of people became rock stars and got really famous it was very 2000 people out of Ohio but a lot of major bands came out of there and a lot of filmmakers and artists and whatnot and as you know especially when it happens when you're younger nothing does not always the best thing for for people right turned a lot of my dear friends into assholes and I watched it happen and I was like whoa I don't want that to happen to me but I like this is the only way I know how to get paid so I'm going to guard against it by like authorism and service I'm going to build that into my life so it's not like that was sort of the thinking and I was at the time my I built a a nonprofit called the reporters gym is with the LA Lakers and Dave Eggers organization 86LA we were teaching inner city kids how to be sports writers as a way out of the ghetto and it was fantastic and it was a really great program but it was it had two problems one I was living with the woman who become my wife at the time and we were living all the way across Los Angeles so I would have to drive all the way across Los Angeles to get to the Staples Center where we were having these things and it was like three hours to get there right and like I'm giving my time away anyways and I'm like okay this is this is really painful but the other thing is I don't like children like I've never really liked children I don't have any I don't want any be I don't like your children I'm not child proof my friends who my friends who have children no don't bring them around me and here I am trying to like teach teenagers how like and I was like this is not a good fit and at the same time I was I just sort of gotten together with Joy and she was doing dog rescue and I have a lifelong animal geek I mean and I started I go really far out of my way to hang out with scientists who were hanging out with animals so like I would spend two years trying to figure out how to get plane tickets and assignments to go to Madagascar so I could hang out Patricia Wright who studied lemurs because I really wanted to hang out with lemurs right and I was like well two years along right like I've gone really far out of my way to hang out with animals and then I met my wife and she was doing dog rescue and she was living the time of the pack of like nine dogs and I was like well wait a minute I don't like this altruism thing I'm doing because I don't like the kids and I got it but like I can do this thing with dogs which I like a lot better and it's in my house and I was like I think I am going to be better at being a little uncomfortable all the time which is what running a dog sanctuary out of your house is sort of like versus massively uncomfortable a couple times a week what I didn't actually realize is running a dog sanctuary is actually you're a little uncomfortable all the time and then usually I have one or two crises a week yes like something terrible happens right whatever and so it the math wasn't exactly how I thought that was really it I was like okay I'm gonna switch and it was such a good fit because I'm such an animal geek that you know it it's stuck and I never you know I never I never wanted to stop doing it and I you know it's on a certain level like it's an excuse that I get to live with a big pack of dogs um but it it's fun and you know when we were running Rancho de Chihuahua um which we ran for like 15 years I had 670 dogs passed through that facility so you made a mess did some good yeah in the world love it love your story and I just want to honor your time but where can people find you I've so enjoyed our talk and I thank you again because I know your time is precious my pleasure so Stephen Kotler dot com uh is is me flow research collective dot com is uh flow research collective and NAR country by the way NAR which is short for gnarly is spelled G N A R right but NAR country uh dot com is uh is the website for the book too you can find all that and I tell just briefly flow research for I guess I speak to a lot of other doctors professionals who listen to this if people want to get into this what they can oh yeah let me brief over you on the flow research perfect um thank you um we're a research and training organization on the research side uh we team up with with with folks at USC and UCLA and USC Davis and Imperial College London and a bunch of other places and we study the neurobiology of peak human performance so what's going on in the brain of the body when human beings perform at their absolute best and we use this information to train people and we work in 130 countries so we're global um and we train everybody from professional athletes in like US special forces through uh you know a lot of major companies everybody from like Facebook to the Air Force to Bain Capital Accenture Audi the list goes on to normal folks right like you know soccer dads from Idaho I've done your program it's phenomenal in research we we we we train a lot of doctors um uh along the way uh and we we have done so we have been working on with two different groups trying to do research on the flow and surgery because there's a long history of flow and surgery and flow and doctors and you know so we've we've been doing more research there and trying to sort of like figure out how to work with medical programs and things like that um as well exciting I think docs will love this so I will include all the links if you're listening wherever you're listening um Steven Kotler thank you sincerely I loved our time together so appreciate it my pleasure thanks for having me you're welcome