How To Sustain High Performance As You Age | Steven Kotler

The best thing about teaching myself how to play the guitar is I'm never going to run out of guitar. I'll never run out of guitar. There's an endless amount of shit that I can keep. I don't run out of anything. I'm going to keep learning, keep learning, keep learning. I think of skiing that way or writing that way. I actually think marriage that way. Like these are the infinite games. You don't win, there's just the progression. Okay, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Jove. I trade and training a high-performance psychologist and I am absolutely thrilled to welcome back Steven Kotler to the pod for this week's conversation. It's safe to say that Steven knows the power of pushing to the edge. Executive director of the Flow Research Collective and one of the world's leading experts on human performance. Steven is not only an 11-time best-selling author and a two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee, he's the kind of person who puts his own safety at the center of his research in order to challenge the perceived limitations of performance and in a body that's not getting any younger. I think this is what they call walking the talk, in this case, skiing. At age 53, Steven set out to prove whether you can in fact teach an old dog new tricks. Quite literally, as he set out to become an expert park skier, meaning jumps and tricks and the potential for broken bones, it doesn't get much more punk rock than that. At the heart of this pursuit was an exploration of what he calls peak performance aging. I can't wait for you to experience Steven's badass approach to high performance as we dig into the importance of Flow and how access to it shifts as we get older. We also explore how engaging with our own developing superpowers like wisdom and creativity and forgiveness can help us and even our teams huck ourselves successfully down mountains literally and figuratively. His expertise isn't just scientific, it's deeply personal. And if you're enjoying this podcast and haven't already, just a quick reminder to hit the subscribe or follow button and to drop us a review wherever you're listening, it is the easiest and zero-cost way to support the show. And with that, let's find out how to grow old and stay rad in this week's conversation with my friend, Steven Collar. Steven, this is number four that you've been on this podcast, and that's a record for us. So we're doing something right here where we're having a little bit too much fun or we're really like our folks want to learn from you. So it's awesome that you're here again. Thank you. We got to do it live. I know. This is the first one live. I think the first one is live. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, this is close enough for you to spit spitballs. I mean, like you did last time. We know it kind of kid you were in high school. That might have been a theme for you. It's really in our country. I didn't realize. Yeah, right. It's coming up again. You can't slip stuff by a psychology. It's just, you know, it just kind of happens automatically. Okay. So we'll get into some of the origin story for you. But when you told me a couple of years ago what you're sorting out to do, and then when I read our country, I was like, oh, he did it. He did it. And when you first told me, I was like, really? Because I would do what you were doing. Yeah, you were part of that. That's a possible crowd. Yeah. Like really? And then I was incredibly inspired by it. Like, I can't wait to see how this goes for you because it's a real thing that you're facing down. But just to just to be clear, let's just start with this question, which is like, what are you doing with your life? Like, what was this really about and explain the whole thing to your best ability? Let me just soak it in from your perspective now. All my work is most of my work is in flow. And flow has deep ties into the world of adult development has deep ties into the world of successful aging, peak performance aging. All of those things flow plays a major role. And so, and it's not just chicks at me, high ended up moving in this direction. The Godfather of Flow Psychology is so in following his work. You know, I started stumbling deeper and deeper onto these things around peak performance aging. And long story, very short, you know, I grew up like most of us grew up with like the traditional theories of aging, which is what I like to call the long, slow route theory, right? It's the idea that our mental skills, our physical skills, they decline over time. There's nothing we can do to stop the slide. And yet there was stuff I was following in Flow Science and in related fields like network neural science, neural dynamics and embodied cognition and some whiz bang stuff. All of it basically said, hey, wait a minute, everything we've heard about performance in the second half of our lives is wrong, right? Is wrong. For example, the long, slow route theory, all our skills decline. There's nothing we can do to stop the slide partially true. Our skills do decline over time, but it turns out they're all user to lose its skills. So if you never stop training these skills, you can hold on to them, even advance them far later in life than any of you thought possible. And that also includes Flow. Flow is really important to successful aging people, performance aging, all those terms, but our access to Flow declines over time. But it's again, trainable. That's a new idea that your access to Flow, the ability to experience Flow as an older adult decline. It's not. So the ability to experience the way you phrased it is not that's, I don't think that shifts. Or does our Flow Prodness, our desire for this date, that in fact, to me, has very last study was on Flow Prodness late into life. That's right. But what changes is our ability to utilize some of Flow's triggers, and we can talk about why that happens. It just shrinks a little bit because of things. So I can have our life that we have to train against. Oh, that's cool. Which is doing things in the backcountry where you break your body if you make mistakes. All that is besides the point right now. Yeah. Okay. Anyways, so the traditional theory of aging, the classic phrase is you can't teach an old dog new track. And I was reading all this stuff and I was like, wait a minute. And this stuff is right, at least in the lab, old dogs should be able to learn new tracks, including really, really hard tracks. When did you start to identify with being an old dog? I didn't. I never really identified with being an old dog, but I would even in skiing, or I would, we call it getting geezer. It's where somebody gets there, oh, I'm too old for this shit juice all over you. And I would find invariably this wild mismatch, I'd go skiing, you know, you're wearing goggles on a mat, nobody can tell how old you are. And I'd be in the chair left talking to people who were clearly like 20 years younger than me. And I'd be like, hey, how are the moguls over there? What's this cliff like? Or you're trying to talk about the stuff I wanted to ski? And I would consistently be like, getting like these looks like I'm to my knees haven't done that for 10, you know, all this stuff. And I was looking at people who were consistently a lot younger than me. And I and I was like, wow, they're they seem like they're old. I don't like none of that makes any sense to me. And I don't that doesn't now I feel or think or anything, though, you know, I'm now 55 years old. And I don't necessarily know if that's old, but it's certainly not young. I don't think. Yeah, right. So when you that phrase can't teach an old dog new tricks, you were not identifying with a dog. No, not at all. Not at all. I was not identifying. I was just all I was saying. So all I knew is that what the research is starting to show is that people over 40 over 50, there are cognitive superpowers that start coming online in those decades, right? And everything I'm reading says, Oh my God, you should be able to really learn difficult skills laid into life. And there was stuff, you know, the big saw was the motor learning window, which supposedly slams closed. And that's not also not true. It's that when we're kids, we predominantly learn through playing. And what's changes so much in adulthood is we start learning in a radically different way. Yes, the motor learning window does thin and there are shifts, but it's actually the way we approach learning that changes the most. And so all this stuff was saying, Hey, wait a minute, we should be able to do this. I wanted a way to test it is part a, right? So and I decided to test it by teaching myself how to park ski, which anybody's listening doesn't know what park skiing is. It's the discipline skiing that involves doing tricks off jumps, on boxes on rails on wall rides, super acrobatics, somewhat dangerous. And as you pointed out, the start of the conversation, right? You're over 35 people say, wow, it's really difficult to learn. You shouldn't even really try over 45. It gets to your that's impossible. And over 50, you're downright crazy, right? Which is what most people really thought. You know what I mean? Like it was very clear to a lot of people that I wasn't running a science experiment. Clearly, I was having some kind of midlife crisis, right? And that wasn't it at all. All right, I was literally running a science experiment, but that was the only frame people had to relate to what I was doing is, Oh, this must be a midlife crisis. He's not going on buying a Ferrari. He's going to teach himself how to park ski. I'm going to pause the conversation here for just a few minutes to talk about our sponsors. Finding Master is brought to you by seed. On this podcast, you may have heard me talk about habit stacking. That's basically the idea that you can build a new habit by linking to an existing habit. Literally, you're stacking the two behaviors together and not only is it efficient, but it's a great way to usher in a new habit that you're wanting to build. So a habit that I've been practicing lately is making sure that I'm checking off as many nutritional boxes as I can right in the morning. And so right now that includes seeds, DSO1 daily symbiotic. So what I do is the first thing in the morning is I stack it with something I'm already naturally doing in the morning. So what I do is I put my jar of seeds, DSO1 on my counter next to my water dispenser. Seeds DSO1 daily symbiotic is a plant-based prebiotic and probiotic with 24 strains that have been clinically or scientifically studied for its benefits, a few of which include promoting digestive health, skin health, heart health, gut immune function as well. I've been loving their stuff. If you're interested in learning more about seed or gut health in the microbiome, I want to encourage you to go check out episode 204 of the podcast where I had a fantastic conversation with seeds co-founder Raja Deere. To try seed for yourself and to start a new healthy habit today, visit seed.com slash finding mastery and use the code finding mastery to redeem 35% off your first month of seeds DSO1 daily symbiotic. That's seed S E E D dot com forward slash finding mastery and use the code finding mastery for 35% off. Finding mastery is brought to you by indeed indeed is the hiring platform where you can attract interview and hire all in one place. Instead of spending hours on multiple jobsites searching for the right candidates, indeed can help you find top talent faster with their powerful hiring tools. One of the tools that I think indeed has done a really nice job with is called instant match feature. So what this feature does is basically indeed is doing the hard work for you. As soon as you sponsor a job post, you'll get a short list of qualified candidates whose resumes on indeed match your job description and then you can invite them to apply right away. Indeed knows that if you're growing your business, you got to make every dollar count. And that's why with indeed you only pay for quality applications that match your must have job requirements. So I want to encourage you if you're looking for great talent to punch over to indeed.com slash finding mastery to start the hiring process that way. That's indeed I N D E E D dot com slash finding mastery terms and conditions apply cost per application pricing not available for everyone need to hire need indeed. And with that, let's jump right back into this conversation. I've grown skiing as well. I love it. I think that skiing is an excellent laboratory to figure out edges, not literally, you know, underneath your foot, but just the edges of what you're willing to push on. And so I've loved skiing for those reasons. You know, it's a high speed environment. You get to choose. You can stay in the groomers or you can go explore depends a little bit about your nature and the crowd that you're with, right, which is a cool thing that we can talk about as well. And so but getting there was a phase in my life where I was like, I'm not leaving. I'm not leaving the snow. I don't need to leave the snow anymore. To your point, the old thinking, you know, of the young person, which is like, why do I need to be up in the air anymore? That's for the young kids. And so I know exactly what you're describing as this phase or experience in my life where I pulled back. And knowing what you were doing just last week, I spent about a handful. I spent a good solid week on the mountain with my son. And he's like, Dad, let's go on the park. Did you go? I did go. And yeah, but I'm not doing I, you know, I mean, the most I pull was a 540 kind of safe grab. I'm joking. I'm joking. Yeah, no, no, no, no. Nothing. I mean, I'm like, I am the old guy going, am I going too fast for this lip? And so, you know, like, let me just kind of tuck my knees and see if I can straight and kind of lay into one piece. But so, so I do, I really appreciate that you pushed up against that construction. And you said, now I'm going to use me as a end of one experiment. So you asked for the full story, right? And you know this. So it was good that way. I'd like, yes, but I had so first of all, I had unfinished business from sort of just my childhood relationship with the jocks and athletes in general. Then I had unfinished business in skiing because the, you know, I started my career as a journalist. I chased professional skiers around mountains for a decade. And were you like the little brother? Like, hey, I guess we'll take them on. Or were you like, was it different than it was a little worse than being the little brother? Because you can ditch your little brother. When your little brother is there, you know, covering, you know, skiing for the New York Times or rolling stone or you can't ditch your little brother. So also you are. I was just a reporter covering, right? And this was the beginning of the peak performance research as well from those areas. You know what this is like. I thought I was an expert skier until I got onto a mountain with actual pros. And then you see what that looks like. And you're like, I'm not even a beginner. I've got no skill. Like yourself. It's a different world. Yeah. I mean, it was a crushing blow to yourself. Worth to me. It was most of us experience that part in our country was, so I knew I was going to need a lot of motivation to learn how to park ski in general, right? You're going to hit the ground so many times. It's difficult. It's hard. It's going to hurt. I knew I needed all the possible motivation. Like I knew I wanted to test these peak performance aging ideas. And I knew I had to pick something to test them where I was really, really motivated because it was a challenge to the text. But when I was running, I was very challenging and it needed to be physically or emotionally physically. I will tell you that I make this point at the end of the book. But the two things that were hardest about this project, one, it was once I started having success, the addictiveness of success was like the index is a progression is so delicious. And the other thing was when, and I didn't know this, I mean, I could have probably talked to anybody I knew who would have told me this, but I just didn't know. I didn't realize that when you, even if you do, go up against really like hardcore scary things over and over and over and over again, and you win at them, you're successful, which I was most of the time, you're still going to get PTSD. It's still going to affect your nervous system in that way. So I would step up to the plate every day. What's the PTSD from? Literally from success. I from over the course of the book, I stepped so many hard challenges. And even though I survived them, everyone of them scared me up watching it wasn't any one thing, but the residual, I was scaring myself a lot for an entire for seven months in a row by the end of it. I had seriously, I called Laird Hamilton about it. He was the guy at college. I was like, dude, I didn't know you could get PTSD. He said, oh yeah, it happens to be a great service all the time. Yeah, it's it. And we more talk about adrenal fatigue. Right. You don't use it. Yeah, right. But you're calling your framing. It is like a traumatic stress. The reason I was referring traumatic stress. The reason I was framing it as a reoccurring traumatic stress is in my case, the two of the distinguishing features or my star response was jacked up to 11. And that's a PTSD symptom that it's too much more aponephrine in your system. And I was doing that fixating thing when you fall asleep and you replay it and jerk away. Oh, that's interesting. So this is actually this is relative. This is not adrenal fatigue. Adrenal fatigue is what we see with people that are in in the on the frontier in the back country of whatever it is that they're doing where it's a high speed, high heat, rugged, consequential environment they're operating in where speed and accuracy are required. So what ends up happening is that it's so intense that there's a fatigue system that takes over where not only do you need to do you struggle just to have the normal enjoyment from a good conversation or whatever, but you need to go above and beyond the stimulus that you once had to feel anything that new. And so there's you know this. It's like chasing a bigger, bigger, bigger. And it gets exponentially more dangerous. And one foot bigger in the back country on surfing is when you're at that scale is like a big deal. Whereas one foot in small surface is not necessarily a big way. Right. So it's exponentially harder and more dangerous. So there's an adrenal fatigue that takes place that looks very similar to people that come back from combat. And so but that you're not talking about that. No, I'm literally, yes, that was that was the problem with the addictiveness of progress, right? Yes. Because that's part of the addictiveness of progress. I was talking about that. That said, that this was literally I was developing literally symptoms of actual legitimate PTSD, sorrow, super amplified, like, you know, my wife rolls over and bed, I jumped kind of thing. Oh, yeah, I think that you know what I mean? So like that stuff was real. I didn't I didn't so those things I didn't see coming. The thing that was so unusual about this is I'm a I'm a bad athlete. I become a good athlete, but it's after literally decades of work at it. And what we're so shocking about this in our country experiment is that the protocol we develop from all this kind of whiz bang science that that I applied to parks, game, then Ryan applied, then we applied in our study groups with others. It I mean, like, it worked. I mean, like, I when I started this all out, I figured if it takes five years, cool, it takes five years, I learned, you know, my goals, I got reached all my goals in a single season. To go after something, it's not there's no hacks and shortcuts. There's like, there's no real secrets, but there are fundamental commitments. And so that's me, me talking, not you talking. There are fundamental commitments that the best in the world do. And you made a final fundamental commitment. You move to the base of a mountain. I don't know exactly where, but you went, you organized your life and lifestyle to go after this thing. Is that a fair statement to say? Yes. Yeah. So, and then, and then you had this ticking time bomb at some point, like, I'm going to run out of time. Yeah. And then the pandemic hit. So what totally triggered it was, I had worked nine years without a break, literally, without even a vacation. Now I would go skiing, I would have day trips for skiing, but like, I didn't even go anyplace overnight. My wife and I, I think we went away for maybe two weekends in that period of time. And if you, I don't go out to dinner, I don't have a social, like I work with you, I ski with you, or I'm married to you, or I don't know you, right? Like, and that's always been my life. So when I say I work nine years without a break, I work nine years without a break. And I rearranged my life moved from Northern New Mexico to Tahoe. And I was launching a book that winter, which book future faster than you think with Peter and my plan, we were going to launch the book. I was going to, I knew there was going to be like two months of book tour. And then I was going to come back. And for the first time in nine years, I was going to take a three month break. And I was going to ski from like, basically, marched through May, which you can do in Tahoe. And yes, then COVID happened. And, um, and, you know, COVID, and I first I got COVID, I've got COVID, and then COVID happened, and then they shut down the ski resorts. And out of all the things going on, it was the skiers, or and I remind you, I'm like, everybody else in COVID, like we're trying to save my company. And like, you know, it's like everything else, it's crazy. And but I, I'm so angry that the skiers are closed. Like, not just a little angry, like homosidally murderous, and it's building every day. And I like the whole world is suffering. Billions of people are suffering and dying. And I care that the ski resorts are closed. And I like, and I couldn't stop caring. Like, I was super angry. And the level of anger, like you're dangerous to your marriage, you're dangerous to you. You're like, you're like, you understand rock and roll better. You do understand rock and roll better. Yeah, and I was really good. Yeah. And so what I was picking up on in your experience is that you hit the panic button, like I'm going to run out of time, and I'm not going to go after. I'm not going to go after all those things happen. Like the season went away. And I was like, this has been sweating. I was like, so why am I so mad? That was it. I was like, why? This anger is totally rational. So I started investigating the anger, right? I'm like, okay, why are you so mad? And I was like, oh my God, I've been robbed of progression and I'm running out of time. So that was exactly it. Like I run out of time. Yeah. And so I decided, then coupled with all the peak performance, aging stuff, it seemed like a great way to kind of turn that into a fundamental challenge. And then the other motivators, like the deeper motivators were, it sounds like that you struggled at some level as a kid with your relationship with sport. Oh, yeah. And so you wanted, is part of this that you wanted to prove them in quotes? So no, so we started this conversation. One of the things I said at the beginning is, well, as we enter our 40s and 50s, we get access to legitimate cognitive superpowers. Yeah. So let's go a little bit deeper into that. There are genetic changes that happen. Certain genes are activated on the back experience. So it's actually a bit genetics. And their change is not the brain process information late 40s and 50s. And it's really the two sides of the brain start to work together really well, like never before. And the brain starts to recruit underutilized areas and regions and build backups and redundancies and things like that. And as a result, we gain access to whole new levels of intelligence, creativity, empathy, and wisdom, hugely important traits. So one of the reasons I knew that I had a suspicion that I could learn to park ski later in life was the heightened creativity that you actually got. And even the heightened wisdom, the heightened wisdom means like more emotional control ways to keep myself safe that maybe I didn't have access to when I was younger. So I thought there was some things from this pool working with my advantage. And I want, like, I'm a writer, I want to access to new levels of intelligence and creativity and empathy and wisdom, like as a writer, oh my God, yes. So, but as you know, because you're a psychologist, these are not, this is adult development, but like everything in adult development, it's not guaranteed there are moderators if then conditions. And they're with adult development, especially coming out of the long stays, the Harvard studies and adult development, and some of those we've learned what some of these gateways are. And there are three that take place before 50 that unlock these superpowers. By age 30, you have to solve the crisis of identity. You got to know who you are in the world, right? It's 40, it's match fit, which is there's a tight match between my identity, who I am. And sort of what I do with all my time in my values, my strengths, you put it differently, you need to live in a way with lots of passion, lots of purpose and lots of flow, right? And what you need a tight fit between your identity and what you do in the world to get that. So that's 40, but here's the weird one. And this is the answer to your question by 50. It's forgiveness of self and other that matters. So, and you see, you got to sit down, shame and self consciousness, and you got to golf forgive all the people who have done you wrong. And you know, I've said this before, like I grew up in Ohio. I was a punk rocker in Ohio and I'll have you had a Mohawk, like Carlos, a football players would like pull over on the side of the road just so they could beat you up as a group. Like that was Ohio. So, yeah, like a lot of us carry judges. So, besides everything else that went along with that, but I had unfinished business with these people and their forgiveness was this moderator. And most of the intelligence levels that come online in our 50s, this is about multi-perspectival thinking we want to see things from other people's perspectives. You can't forgive others. You're not going to have access to their perspectives. It's going to be no increase in empathy, no increase in wisdom is going to block the creativity, everything I wanted. And so part of my mission was, and the standard tool, by the way, for forgiveness and wisdom is really love and kindness meditation, compassion meditation. And I've done that on and off for years. Amazing tools, fantastic. But it wasn't big enough, so strong enough to sort of solve some of the grudges I had from back in the day. So, I decided I was, I wanted this kind of challenging athletic quest because I thought if I could go walk a mile in their shoes, like really create a quest where I would have to become a jock to succeed. There would be no, like, you can't teach yourself on a park that's a massively athletic activity that requires all, like the, right? So I was like, okay, I like, I know I want these super hours and I need them to for this question, everything else. But like, I knew there were, that's when I say I had unfinished business, I had unfinished business. And it was bigger than the best tool I had, which was love and kindness meditation. And so this is what I did, I think it was going to work. No, I thought the whole thing was kind of ridiculous, but I had no other ideas. And I knew I needed to do something. So I just ran the experiment and it turns out it did work surprisingly well. Okay, quick pause here to share some of the sponsors of this conversation. Finding Master is brought to you by Thorne. I've got something really special. I want to share with you. Thorne makes nutritional supplements that are NSF certified, which is the highest certification for supplements that you can get. I've been using Thorne products for over a decade and they have an unparalleled commitment to quality and scientific rigor throughout their entire manufacturing process. To see the full list of nutritional supplements that I use and to get 20% off your purchases, head over to thorne. That's T-H-O-R-N-E dot com slash you. That's the letter you slash finding mastery. Again, that's thorne T-H-O-R-N-E dot com slash the letter you slash finding mastery. Finding mastery is brought to you by our very own Finding Your Best Course. As you know from listening to this podcast, our minds are our greatest asset. And if you want to learn more about how you can train your mind, I want to encourage you to check out our online high performance mindset course where we've pulled together the best practices to help you unlock your potential performance your best in any environment. In Finding Your Best, we teach the same high performance principles and mindset skills and well-being practices we use to train world-class athletes and executives. Over my career, this course has been one of the projects that I'm most excited to share and I hope you find it incredibly meaningful in your life. And I'm really excited to announce that you can now access the course through our brand new website, Finding Mastery dot com. To sign up for the course, check out the new website and because you're listening to this podcast, we want to give you $50 off the course today. Just head over to finding mastery dot com slash course and enter the code Finding Mastery at checkout. Again, that's finding mastery dot com slash course and enter the code Finding Mastery to receive $50 off the Finding Your Best course. And with that, let's jump right back into our conversation. When you were running it by people and like I think about our call when you're telling me what you're doing, did it help you or get in your way when I or others were like, really? Is that what you're going to do? Did that like sometimes that that does wonders for me? So I always say, I'm really fond of spite small as spite is a motivator. Yeah, right. I really am. And I used to be I big at capitalist spite. It feels like it was too, too hot of a fire for me. Like I couldn't manage it. It doesn't like well, so I'm not like I hear about like, you know, some of the football players, even maybe they're just saying it for the microphones. We're not saying I know. I know. Like, like that kind of like competitive. He's like, like, I'm not that way. But like, tell me I can't do something. Tell me it's impossible. That's that's my masking. That's really motivating for me. I'm just wondering like what the insight is when you have an idea and it's relatively clear and you are pinging your community. If you already kind of know what they're going to say and you're using it in your eco chamber to be able to do something with it, or you really hoping that they're going to see you and they're going to say, Steven, I think you can do this. It is incredible. You know this like you don't need many. In fact, many is possibly too much pressure because if ever you expects you to do it, well, you better not screw it up, right? What but if you had just have a couple of like secret allies who believe the other thing that I had going for me is that Ryan who's my ski partner, Ryan had seen me throw. So the whole thing started before the thing is because I because that weird sliding spin story that's in the front in the first chapter of the book, the almost 360. Yeah, the almost 360. I had thrown sliding spins. Explain what a 360 is. So a sliding spin 360, which is the trick we're talking about is a trick 10 year old skiers learn how to do it. You're sliding forward on the snow and you just spin in a circle. You don't leave the snow. Nothing. It's just it's and most skiers stop doing this trick by like age 12 because it's really not cool. Like it's super uncool, but it turns out that novel sensations are a phenomenal flow trigger. And whenever we encounter G forces or polyaxle rotation spinning around your middle, those novel sensations plus some of the flows deep in bodyment triggers, meaning it engages multi senses at once and that pulls our attention to the present. This drives flow. So at the front end of every ski day, I would throw a handful of sliding spins because it would dump some dope meaning to the system prime the system for flow. And so it's the and I didn't even think of it as a trick. It wasn't a trick. It was just this thing. I, you know, I like to do nobody would ever consider it a trick. But if you tilt it and do it in a half pipe or on a rail or on a war, that's a real trick. And so Ryan and I were skiing and it was like the last day before they closed the resort to covid and we're in the middle of a pretty serious shoot like nowhere near a drain park. And I saw this snow pillow like on top of a rock and my brain went try a sliding sin 360 on it. And I got like, I did a 270. Like I never tried anything like that in my life. I don't know why. And you know, Ryan saw it cheered. And so he also like he knew what I was building on like that was what I was going to that was my, I was going to build on that foundation. Right. And so he had seen that nobody else had seen it. And you know, also seen that, you know, I threw it basically on one of the steeper pitches that were run called oops and hoops. That's a heavy run. So like, it wasn't like I just threw around and be getting it a slope. It's I threw in the middle of a really heavy run with consequences everywhere. I don't know why it just sort of came out of me one day. But so he had seen that. And he had a little bit of faith. He didn't he was also very nice about it. I think he had a lot less faith in the beginning that he talked about. But so there no it didn't. And my wife liked the idea, which was the other thing. Oh, she did like it. She's never, she never pushed back against it because she saw that I was starting to have fun. People ask me all the time, like, what do you think? What if there's one thing, right? But if there's one thing that sits as part of the high performers, support mechanisms, what is the number one thing that goes with most of the high performers that you have? Support mechanism? Yeah. Like they're out there doing the thing on the frontier. Like what allows them to do that? That's an interesting question. I a part of me like one, if without regular access to flow, you're not doing it without, but almost every one of them, they've either got a best friend or a girlfriend or a spouse or a boyfriend or, you know what I mean? There's there's somebody who is solving the cognitive load problem, right? There's no way to that's that's part of the heart. Like when you're doing it, trying to do that at that level, you can't hold all the rest of your life in your head, right? Literally you're up against a cognitive load wall. So there's got to be somebody who's filling that gap and there's got to be a lot of flow in a tight loop. Because otherwise you can't keep going. The other thing is, I always think there's a little, there's always a little extra. There's always the, it's a mission. It's not just a there's a little bit of them. There's a little, yeah, especially with the ones who are really, really good and you know, stay for a while. When you say mission, so I'm nodding because that's now how I'm answering the question is like when people ask me, I'm like, it's my life. You know, and they ask like, what is that true for other people? I'm like, yeah, the support mechanism is really important. I mean, it's I couldn't have done. It's an intimate no, I didn't. I couldn't have done our country without joy for sure. Yeah, well, you would have had to choose between let's say if she was like, no, bad idea, like, I'm not, I'm not part of this. I don't think this is smart. And you know what? You want to go move to Tahoe? Go ahead. We're in Nevada. Go ahead. That would have been a choice between marriage. I've written, so I've written two of my books, Joy didn't like, and didn't like when I started writing not when I was done didn't like didn't like the idea. And those are difficult projects. It's hard to work on a multi-year project where your partners is not down with it. I like, I think that's one of the great things about my marriage and strength that like my wife is willing to look at me and be like, yeah, I think the book you're writing, I think that's a bad idea. And I like, I don't I disagree with the premise like that's, that's, I look at that and like, right? That's a healthy marriage. That's great to relationship. So good. And it's also, it forces my books to be better. Right. She's constantly like, you can't sleep on anything because she's you're ready against the idea a little bit. So it makes me better. And I don't mind any of it. And but it does, it is a harder project. It's harder. Yeah, it's harder. There's there's no way around that. Okay. So let's do two words. Let's do one word right now progression. It's a word that matters to both of us, but let's just open that word up a little bit. And then let's get into what the unlocks are that you figured out for other people that want to increase or grow in a multifaceted way in their life. And they're feeling a little bit older, they're over the age of 50, and they're looking for some unlocks. So let's go progression then, then the insight you learn and the unlocks that are applied for folks. So it's funny because the unlock that you're that I'm going to come to in a moment is literally a formula for progression and lifelong learning. So if you want to stay off cognitive decline, Alzheimer's and dementia, you need expertise and wisdom. All right, those are the big, they create big networks in the prefrontal cortex. You need to say, oh, so keep working, keep working. No, no. So when they say, hey, lifelong learning is how you preserve the brain, they're not joking. Expertise and wisdom, which are the expertise, think of it as fact strategies, skills, wisdom, emotional intelligence, writ large. When we suffer cognitive decline, also having interventions predominantly in prefrontal cortex, because the prefrontal cortex is the newest structure in the brain from an evolutionary perspective, most vulnerable disruption. And when expertise and wisdom are really diffuse networks across the prefrontal cortex, and when the brain builds brain networks, as you know, doesn't find one way to do something likes to find 11 different ways redundancy is what is what the brain likes when it builds builds networks. And so the greatest defense against Alzheimer's and dementia and cognitive decline is literally expertise and wisdom. In fact, Yakov Stern, who out of Columbia, who did some of the early, early work on this, he did a really famous study, when he was looking at leisure activities that increase expertise and wisdom. So things like doing puzzles or having rich intellectual discussions with your friends or reading or those sorts of things, you get an additional 8% protection against Alzheimer's cognitive decline and dementia for every additional sort of expertise skill set. That's a cool feature activity. Yeah, really, really neat finding on there. So expertise and wisdom, lifelong learning progression is literally how you have to preserve brain function. So the hack I'm going to give you in a moment does all that. But I want to, I want to come back to progression. I don't think there's a better drug in the world. I think progression is the best drug. I wish that that term wasn't political. Is it political? Progressive. Progressive. I guess that way. It's one of my favorite words, progression. It's definitely an off-access feel to the word. You can look at it and not get the vibe that I think you and I both feel when we say the word. So when I first say the word, my buddy, Michael Ward, one of my closest friends, has been teaching himself how to play the guitar. I mean, for four or five years now, right? And he says, he says, the best thing about teaching myself how to play the guitar is I'm never going to run out of guitar. I'll never run out of guitar. There's an endless amount of shit that I can keep. I don't run out of anything. I'm going to keep learning, keep learning, keep learning. Well, I think of skiing that way or riding that way. I actually think marriage that way, the actual how to be in a good relationship. These are the infinite games, right? But their progression is built in and you don't win. There's just the progression. And the other thing that is weird also is to me, there's a relationship between progression and expectation that kind of destroys more good days than anything I know, right? Which is the going into, could be a writing activity going into amount and expecting a certain level of you're going to make this much progress today. I love this thought. How do you, how does the word standard fold into that? Expectation versus standard as a killer to. This was the, so this was why in my hour, country season, right? My goals were, if I didn't have a lot of energy, I wanted to ski 12 laps a day. If I had a lot of energy, I'd speed 16. And if I felt really great, it was 20 or more. And my goals were never try to learn a trick or ski a big line. If I got into flow, and I was performing my best, then is when I would go learn a trick or ski a big line. But that, so I tried to separate the standard. I had a standard for behavior, right? It was unlinked to performance, unlinked to the things I couldn't control. I wanted my standards or things that I can control. That's an attitude that always meets. Yeah, so standards are about process. Yeah. Not an expectation for outcome, but a standard for how the inputs feel. Yeah, exactly. Feel. I'm going to do this. Yeah. And I had to, I totally had to separate those. I knew, well, then those were motivation reasons because nothing is more demotivating than saying, I'm going to go here and do and learn this. Yeah. And you don't. In fact, I found oddly one of the easiest ways to not learn how to do something while skiing is to turn to my ski partner before the day begins and say, you know what, I'm going to definitely do today. I'm going to get my switch 180s down. You know, 10 of them, at least 20 of them today. And like, the end of the day will come and I'll realize I hadn't even done one. Like, it's almost a guarantee if I say it out loud, it's almost a guarantee that it can't happen. And I don't know why, what that is even about. It's a, it is such a fine line because the, the progressive progression nature, it, I have a hard time relating to people that don't love it. And like, I don't get, I get external goals. I should say that, but I, they don't drive me. And I know that's a pop-ro thing to say, you know, like, but the unlock is so like, it's so rich. When something happens inside of me that I go, got it. Oh my, wow. That thing is, it's like elusive and wonderful. And it's big when it takes place that that, that fuels me big time. Chicks at me high talks about flows and engine of adult development because on the other side of a flow state, because to get into this state, you have to use your skills to the utmost, right? You have to push on your skills. You write at the edge. And so on the other side of a flow state, complexity goes up, adaptability goes up, mastery increases, wisdom goes up. And that's, so he checks at me high, consider it the major driver of adult development. Other people have talked about it as always, as an evolutionary side of mastery. When you get into a flow state, it's a sign that you've actually mastered skills. I think it's more, it's, it's definitely a sign of progression. That's sort of what you're, that, that's, that's for sure. And, but the thing that I think is so neat about progression is this is, it's so empowering. Right. It's really a weird thing. I learned how to throw on 180, which, like, does that have a real world application? I mean, at all, like, besides on the ski hill and water, like, and describe, describe the nuances of what. Skiing forward, jump up into the air and land. So I'm skiing backward. I threw a 180, right? It's 180 degree time. But it's amazing. This shift in real world confidence and competencies and efficacy, like, there is something very strange about progression, something that shouldn't actually matter in a, in a real world frame and how it actually does impact the rest of your life. And that's, it's hard to explain. And I love that you're talking about earning self-efficacy, meaning a sense of power that I can do some stuff. I feel powerful in myself, in the world around me. And you have to earn it. You can't, nobody can give it to you. Same with empowerment. No one can give you, like, this idea that happens in businesses. Like, we want to get after empowerment. We want to know, we want to help people to be empowered. You can't, like, come off of the perch and say, you are now empowered. Because if I'm the one giving you power, then I can also take it away. Yeah, it doesn't, you have to take it. You have to take it. Yeah, you have to earn it. Earn it, right? Yeah. Because there's so many mechanisms inside of us that are saying, hey, play it safe, be small, don't get your head locked off. Like, that's a risk, not worth not taking. There's so many mechanisms that are keeping us away from the edge. But when you get on the edge and you figure out how to dance a little bit on the edge, that's like, oh, I can dance on the edge. And I'm okay. That sense of power is really important. No, I mean, you know, like, my favorite part about all this is I can, I can now ski some really big, big lines. And it's not that I can ski them. I mean, that's cool. But is that on the other side of them? My pulse rate hasn't even spiked. That's right. That's where I was going. It's like, what do you now say to get to say to yourself that you didn't get to say to yourself in 2020? Oh, yeah. There's a million. There's a million of them. What's a couple of those questions around skiing and bravery, where I used to wrestle with them because I would see what the athletes would do. And I wasn't putting myself into those situations. But like, my skiing ability, even in the big mountains, right? Because the thing about park skiing is we were playing this game with, we were lateralizing back and forth with the challenge skills balance. So you'd scare yourself in the train park and like get to the point that you'd just go back into the big mountains. And stuff in the movie suddenly seemed a lot less scary. Or, you know, the big mountains got scary. We'd go into the train park and suddenly the train park wasn't so scary. So it was just back and forth between. And you are more confident in the backcountry. I was more confident in the bigger lines. I've now managed to ski a handful of lines that I would actually consider significant. And so like those issues are done. They're off the table. My ability to learn a really, to accept my stuff. I had never in my entire life said an athletic challenge. And meeting it. Like I've never, I was not one of those jocks. Like I was an artist. I was a creative. That was not what I did. And I came skiing, skating, the things I was doing. Those were not sports, Ohio in the 70s and 80s. Right? That's, they weren't, we were arrested for it. We were arrested for it. Exactly. That's exactly right. They were against the law. It's crazy to see my local community now have like not one skate park, but two. And we were, we were run out of town. It's, it's awesome. Like what, what's happened over the last 30 years. And now one final word from our sponsors. Finding mastery is brought to you by matcha.com. Matcha.com sources and provides some of the world's highest quality matcha in Japanese teas. I've been a consumer of matcha and teas for decades now. Their matcha is legit. Matcha.com was co-founded by Dr. Andrew Weil, a legend in integrative medicine and a two time guest on finding mastery. If you haven't had the chance to listen to his episodes, I highly recommend you check those out. You can find them on our website, finding mastery.com and their episodes 250 and 334 if you're looking for. Originally created by Japanese tea farmers over 1000 years ago, matcha was celebrated by Zen monks for its ability to help them focus during long periods of sitting meditation. So you know I'm into it. One of the things I love most about matcha.com is their deep commitment to honoring the roots of this ancient tradition. One of their top priorities is working closely with the few remaining authentic matcha tea farmers in Japan. In order to help support them to ensure access to real high quality matcha remains available. So I really want to encourage you to go check them out. And if you're new to matcha, their starter kits and sampler packs have everything you need to get started. Just head to matcha.com you spell that M-A-T-C-H-A.com and enter the code finding mastery at checkout for a generous discount on your order. Again, that's matcha.com and enter the code finding mastery to receive that exclusive discount. And with that, let's jump right back into our conversation. Well, so this is where we're talking about self-efficacy. This is actually how self-efficacy self-efficacy gets paid is that there's five mechanisms to increase self-efficacy but it really has to push through a filter which is something about I can do hard things. Well, to me, some of it, okay, I'll give you a random example. We skied a line the other day at Kirkwood called Jim's that it's not only on the edge of a cliff, it's normally dropping into a shoot or something like that. You can come in and where here you have to come in right off next to the cliff edge. And I have vertigo and blah, blah. And three years ago when we started the NAR Country Project, I literally 25 feet from that edge. I could sort of stand 25 feet away and look and sort of see the edge of Jim's and the world would start to spin and I would start to shake and I would collapse. There were times I would have to crawl back, like crawl just to the main run to just get out of sight of it literally because my whole body had collapsed and we skied it the other day and afterwards I looked around and I was like, you know, what's funny is I don't just think I just skied that. I think that's the first time I stood on the edge of that cliff without even collapsing, which was really like, so like those are, it's not just a little bit of courage, you know what I mean? That's a totally different kinesthetic bodily response that's really completely different. Would you say that so you're the artist focusing on doing an athletic feat or having an athletic process with clear goals? Is that similar to the athlete or the executive even, but let's do athlete trying to now really push in and write a book or they've always been fascinated with, you know, canvas art and they're going to go for it. Would you say that the corollary is similar or does it fall apart because it's not physical? Oh, I think it's really similar. Okay. Because I mean, certainly, let's just talk about the business for a second. We process financial fears and money, as you know this, in the same structures that we process physical fears, right? So there's no difference in the brain between physical pain and financial pain. And it doesn't appear there's much of a difference between physical pain and financial pain and social embarrassment, shame, all that stuff, which certainly all creatives are going to face when they bring their stuff into the public eyes. So no, I think, and that's what I like about it is because, and you know as well as I do, this doesn't always translate. You know, you and I both know members of the special forces or professional athletes who like try to transition to the real world and they go into a boardroom and fall apart or write they can't do it. But those that stick with it end up really kicking ass. And the reason is the skills are transferable. It takes a while to figure out how to transfer and not every sticks around long enough to really be able to figure it out. But the skills are transferable and the patterns are the same and the learning patterns are the same. And you know, the order is always crawl, walk, run, it's always going to suck to be a beginner like certain it doesn't matter when you're learning a hard physical challenger, you know, certain challenges skateboarding. It's so painful to learn this. It's so painful. Falling has set what are your shins look like. Man, I broke my back. I forget my shins. I've got like back art to show up in my back that you know, like you leave ass, you leave blood and skin on the asphalt. Yeah, I mean, I took all the skin off my body. I broke my arm in four places. I broke my back in two spots. Skateboarding hurts. And I understand when you said you were not an athlete. Yeah, that's the other thing. No, no, no, that's exactly right. Yeah, you're totally, I tried. I did, I was devoted all this way. Right on the edge. No, but I'm not like I'm not naturally quite. I know what sort of naturally gifted athletes look like I've been around a lot of them. I'm not that. I really am not. So when you okay, so let's get to the unlocks. And like when people read or and or they're listening at this moment, what do you hope they take away? What is the process that you. Oh, I mean, the two, the two take away. I mean, like what's the so one you asked for the hack? So like, no, I did not ask not the hacks. Well, you and I, you and I know there's no such thing as a hack. There are no shortcuts, but like the formula, peak performance, age in a single sentence. Right. If you want to rock to drop, you have to regularly engage in challenging social and creative activities that demand dynamic, deliberate play, and I can define, I'll define dynamic in a second, and take place in novel outdoor environments. And let me dynamic is right. As you know, dynamic basically means there are five categories of functional fitness, strength, stamina, flexibility, agility, and balance. All five need to be trained over time. I'll find decline over time. All five are very trainable. So dynamic is one word for all five at once and bonus when activities are dynamic, when the brain has to coordinate strength, stamina, and balance at the same time, for example, that not only does a bunch of good stuff for the body from an exercise perspective, but dynamic motion boosts the angiogenesis and neurogenesis. Two big fancy words, but angiogenesis is the birth of new blood vessels in the brain that support right new neurons and neurogenesis is neurons, right? And you want to fight off Alzheimer's and dementia and preserve cognitive function. You need new neurons, right? So dynamic motion is an extra it's a it's all the physical categories, but it's also helps you preserve the brain. It's also one of the reasons that action sports are such great anti-aging tools. They're phenomenal for it. But that's the formula. And before we drill down into those parts, I want to say a couple of high level things. First of all, a lot of those words are flow triggers. Right. So a lot of this formula flow really matters for peak performance agent for a bunch of reasons. We can talk about why in a second, but so a lot of these things do double duty as a flow trigger. A lot of them help unlock the so creativity. We talked about the super hours of aging. Creativity is a moderator. If you want multi-perspectival thinking, this boost in intelligence and creativity and what you actually creative activities in your fifties are what unlock it and totally train the brain. So you have to have them challenging activities. What type of creative doesn't actually matter? It's literally so you got to remember creativity. Could it be everything from my drove a new route to work for the very first time to I'm doing fun things with words as a writer and sentences to I'm creatively interpreting terrain features with my body in a new way as a skier or as a snowboarder or whatever. So creativity, it's and it's the act of connecting ideas together in novel ways that starts to unlock these really beneficial changes. So challenging social and creative activities, social, huge boost, right? If we robust social connections, people with robust social connections will live about eight years longer than other people, right? It really matters. Dynamic, I explain deliberate play is just the it's sort of the inverse of deliberate practice, right? And deliberate practice, repetition with incremental advancement is great for learning certain kind of skills, but as a general with most skills, deliberate play, repetition without repetition, repetition with improvisation outperforms deliberate practice for a million different reasons. If the first is that like the more neurochemicals purgues during experience, the better chance we're going to remember it, right? That's what neurochemicals do. They tag experiences. When we do deliberate practice, the best we're going to get is like, I incremental advancement and you're going to get a little bit of dopamine, right? From goals with deliberate play, you're going to get that dopamine, a bigger hit of dopamine, you're also going to get an door fence, which is what underpins play. So you're getting two really potent reward chemicals instead of ones, you've got a much better chance of increasing learning. And with deliberate with deliberate play, deliberate practice, there's one right answer. I did the thing I did before and a little bit better with deliberate play. There's only one wrong answer. I did the thing I did before. Everything else is a right answer. So there's a lot of feel good neural chemistry and less shame and embarrassment. So challenging social and creative activities, right? The demand dynamic deliberate play, take place in novel outdoor environments. And novelty is another flow trigger, right? Well, pushes dopamine into our system, drives focus into the now, drives us into flow. So there are nine known causes of aging, what they share in common is inflammation, stress inflammation. So anything that fights stress is an anti-aging technology, right? So this includes mindfulness and breath, all that stuff. But as we know, a 20 minute walk in nature outperforms most of the SSRIs on the market, pushes that much serotonin in your system, removes stress hormones. So a novel outdoor environments, you want the stress component there on the de-stressing component, but most importantly, is if you want to preserve cognitive function, you want neurogenesis, right? The birth and the neurons, nactopesticity, those neurons, four networks. We evolved as hunter gathers the brain evolved to remember where we were when we had emotionally charged experience in outdoor environments, which is why they have a campus, which does long term memory. Also does mapping and location, right? So the easiest way to get the brain to do what it's supposed to do in birth new neurons is to have powerfully emotionally charged experiences in novel outdoor environments, which is why the longest lived communities in America, Summit County, Pickon County, Eagle County, all in Colorado. This is Vale, Beaver Creek, Aspen, Copper Mountain. And if folks in Summit County, which is the longest lived community in America, they will outlive the rest of America by an average of 10 years. So we're going to talk about the power of action sports and outdoor activities for longevity. The most, think about my formula, a lot of that is packed into outdoor sports and action sports. Summit County is your example of it working. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, that's a good find. Wow. So you consider a park, a terrain park to be a novel outdoor experience? Have you bitten into a terrain park recently? Yeah, but they don't change like, so I want to just pull on it. Oh, they do change, by the way. Well, they change, let's say, every X number of days, but when you're doing 12 laps, the same features haven't changed. Your line on it can change. The future, which is a good thing, right? Because you can get those repetitions, but every couple of weeks, they do change the park. So I naturally went to surfing, which is like every wave is fine. Every wave is different. Yeah. So you're fitting that in. So is that basically any outdoor environment? Any app? So any, it's the emotionally charged experiences, right? So that's like, as long as you're having emotionally charged experiences in outdoor environments, the brain, like, you know, our brain evolved to remember, where was that right fruit tree after the long winter? Or where was the cave that housed the bear that tried to kill us? That's right. Right. All that stuff. That's what the brain evolved to do. So it doesn't really know the difference between like I scared myself jumping off a jump and I saw a bear. It's still a bunch of nor epinephrine and cortisol in the brain is treating it the same way. So you get the same kind of reaction, but you get neurogenesis, which is what you're looking for. So that's the, like that's really peak performance aging in a formula. Is that your term peak performance aging? Yeah. So it's been, I think the first adaptive aging successful aging, there were a bunch of those, right? Yeah. And they were all about, and they still are, they're about maintaining quality of life and sort of lifestyle and inventions. They weren't about peak performance, keeping like performing at your best. Where peak performance started showing up, it was some, it started emerging as a term when people started looking at the skills like VO2 Maxx. I think this was one of the first times I saw it. VO2 Maxx is one of these user to lose its skills, right? And it used to be. We know VO2 Maxx, which is our upper aerobic capacity, it starts declining at 25. By 50, it really starts to fall off a cliff. And in the successful aging community, in the whatever community, this is one of those things we used to beat you with. Like you're never going to be able to do, because what about VO2 Maxx? Like we all know it falls off a cliff. And what happened was, there's this weird thing you might have heard about it in sort of triathlons, ultra running, these really difficult endurance advanced older athletes, folks in there, men and women, there's 70s and 80s are outperforming those in their 50s and 60s. And they started wondering like, how is this happening? Why is it going on for a while? Why is a question? So they decided they were going to, well, let's measure the VO2 Maxx of some like octogenarian triathletes and see what we find. Turns out they have the help, the VO2 Maxx of like healthy 35 year olds. So that was, but they've been training it for about three decades, right? So that was some of like, that was some of these users lose it ideas, right? Yeah, if leaders in business knew what you knew, how would they lead differently? The two things I'm going to speak to, one is obviously flow is becoming sort of really fundamental, right? For business. And, you know, the said I always like to point to is McKinsey, they spent 10 years trying to figure out how much more productive top executives are in flow versus out of flow. They went around the world and they asked executive CEOs, C-suite executives, and it's self reported. So you don't grain assault with the numbers, but on average, they reported being 500% more productive. That's enormous. And what's so weird about that number is it's not out of line when the department of defense measured how much faster soldiers learn and flow is 245% faster than normal when they measured how much we boost creativity and flow at the university of Sydney was 600%. So that's sort of in line with the other things that we see in flow. But, you know, the collective now, I mean, we're working with companies and people in 130 countries training them in flow. And like, just we're training Facebook, the San Francisco Police Department, the Air Force, Bain Capital, Accenture, Audi, I mean, like what I'm trying to give you is examples of companies in tech, in industry and manufacturing. Like, every industry can imagine peak performance. You know this because you do this. We do the same job, basically, like companies are starting to figure out that, oh my God, mental high performance is the ball game. And if you're not training it, you're going to get your ass kicked. This is like, this is one of those advantages. I mean, with flow, it's easy. I can say, look, if the competition is going to be a thousand percent more productive than you are, if they get their employees to spend two days a week in flow, like, what are you doing? Right. So that's a the second one. This is the cool one. And this is the message in our country that I think business leaders really want to listen to is we gain access to new levels of intelligence, wisdom, creativity, and empathy in our 50s. So I have trained a ton of CEOs, met a ton of CEOs, worked with a ton of CEOs, had dinners with a ton of CEOs. And often the conversation is I'm sure this is your experience as well, is about hiring for peak performance skills or training them, right? And whenever that conversation comes up, my first question, probably your first question as well is, well, what skills are you really interested in? What are you trying to get? What are you trying to do? Right. And over the years, I've heard two answers and usually they come together, but I want creativity and innovation because the rate of change in the world is blitzkrieg. And how do I keep pace if we can't out innovate the competition? I hear that all the time. So I need intelligence, I need creativity, I need innovation, or I hear I need empathy, wisdom, and those kind of emotional intelligence skills because I can't do my job without team performance. I can't do team performance without psychological safety and cooperation and collaboration. And or I hear the Jeff Bezos mantra of 21st century business, which is customer centric thinking. And if you don't have empathetic wise employees, nobody can even think like your customers, like you're just screwed. So I, these are the four skills that come online in adults in their 50s. Now it's not a guarantee, right? There are moderators we talked about it. And there are things that you have to do post 50, you need creativity to unlock it, and then you have to constantly be training down risk aversion because that increases over time and it will block all this stuff. And you got to train up your physical skills because physical fragility, because I would hear this and I said, well, why aren't you hiring older? Like these are older workers and they'd be like, well, yeah, but they get so risk adverse that they're unwilling to innovate even though they're super creative. And I was like, okay, you know, that's a fair answer. And physical fragility, I don't want them to take six days or time off or all that stuff. So you have to train against those things. And we can talk about that if you want. But this is the dream workforce of the 21st century, right? Like the very people are getting pushed out of companies right now. Are the very people companies should be hiring for exactly what we want to do in the 21st century. And there's a these crazy biases towards younger workers, which is not I don't like there. I think the best blends, you know, it's like the best the best companies all are companies that figure out how to use humans and AI. I think the best companies are also going to be the companies that have older and younger workers and really blend them together and get the most the best out of both. But that's I mean, if I'm talking to business leaders, those are the messages like, if you're not training flow, what the hell you do and get the competition sure is. And to if you're looking for your dream workers, it's, you know, if you if you can screen for adults who regularly engage in challenging creative and social activities that demand, you know, that formula, some variety that that's a pretty good form barometer for, oh, are they, you know, gonna be successful in their 50s and 60s to have what we want? These are dream workers. So those are my two messages. Let me give you a couple quick hits. It all comes down to this is good. This is good. It sounds like a freaking cliche. So it all it all comes down comes down to showing up. Cool choice. Like if you can't show up every day, there's yeah. Okay, so that's cool choice. But the way you said it's a little punk, because you didn't say, you know, being present, right? You said showing up. It's a little off as a sir. Okay. I am. Yes. Okay. My vision is. What the hell? Giving you one word answers. Money is. My friend. My friend. Who tells you no? No, very many people successfully. Where do you want to belong? That's an interesting question. Right. I don't really want to belong. Most of the places they'll have me. I want to belong a lot of places really would have me. I think that's an interesting. Yeah. I was wondering how you can do that with the early childhood, like early adolescence. It just reminds me of the Woody Allen quote, which is like, I don't want to be a member of any country club that would have me as a member. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. Success is. It's going to take some explain, but I always think of success as having having something exciting to go to next. I always think about how you define a creative to me is like the difference between, and there's lots of reasons people write books, right? And you don't have to be a creative. You can write books because you're a businessman. You have an idea that you think it'll help your career, whatever. But the mark of it's your creative is they're always about what's next. So like a book comes out, a movie comes out, art happening. They don't like the real creatives. I'm going to give a fuck what people think about that stuff. They're on to the next thing already, right? So like, to me, not having that next thing, not having success to me is being able to wake up every day and be creative for a living. That's what success is. You're ready for this? I'm going back to it. Relationships are probably the hardest thing I do with my day. Congrats on so much. Congrats on the clarity. I think back to our days over at Red Bull. You know, the clarity that you have now. Now being the operative word, Michael. Nice job. And just the knowing in what you've earned over the last three years, the way you've tested yourself and put your science and your art to work and to be able to have the systems thinking mind and the artistic, you know, ability to write, to be able to share those insights and those practices with people. Like it reads like butter. And so when I was reading, I was like, were you laughing? Yeah, I'm so glad. And it was like there's ample vulnerability in there too. Like I know you now in a different way, which was really fun. Yeah, I had to, for the book to work, I had, I mean, I always had the secret to good writing is tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth. This was one of those situations where and when I realized like what I was going to have to talk about in the book for it to work, I was like, couldn't we have another maximum? Could there be another? Like another, really? Everyone's in a while. Tell the truth. Exactly. Yeah, you did it. But yeah, that took, that was a little bit of a leap of faith. You know what I mean? Like I didn't, I didn't know people were going to react poorly or well to that as well. That was a little scary. Yeah, it's cool, man. Yeah, are you enjoying the feedback that's coming or are you not taking a look at the feedback? How are you? So how do you work with that? Once you learn? That's been the most fun is, yes, we built this, we turned this into a training, right? So now we have our standard flow training, then we have forever dangerous, which is the second half. And it, you know, it's really focused on our ability, as I said, flow, our ability to get into flow matters over time, but it decreases. So we've got a training for it. But people in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s are, because it's about, we can teach a bunch about people for unsated, but I'm also trying to create a NARS-style mission for people. Mine was learning how to par escape, right? But it's whatever kind of impossible challenge you can set for yourself that would essentially explode your mindset towards what's possible in the second half of your life. And some of the stuff people are doing and have done, that's been really cool. That's been really, really cool. Yeah, like I'll see things on like, you know, the other day, there's something on Instagram where it was like, Grandpa joined the climbing gym, you know what I mean? Like red in our country, and like that kind of stuff at him like that is so, so cool. There's a, and you know, it's not just for ex-sports aren't for everybody. So there's, people have done everything from like, there's a woman who first solo art show, right? Because that was like the impossible, there's been a whole diversity of things people have done. And it's new, it's early. So like, there's more of this coming, right? That's what's up. It's really mean, but like, you know, 70 year old folks who are like trying to run IRM ends or do, or learn how to kite surf for, you know, it's just cool. It's just cool. Congratulations, brother. Thank you, sir. Yeah, thank you for coming in. Thank you for sharing eloquently, wisdom and insights and using your body as a bit of a tool for the last three years to heighten our understanding of peak performance aging. Appreciate you, sir. Yeah, thanks for having me. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no-cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for the support and feedback. If you're looking for even more insights, we have a newsletter we send out every Wednesday. Punch over to findingmastery.com slash newsletter to sign up. The show wouldn't be possible without our sponsors. And we take our recommendations seriously. And the team is very thoughtful about making sure we love and endorse every product you hear on the show. If you want to check out any of our sponsor offers you heard about in this episode, you can find those deals at findingmastery.com slash sponsors. And remember, no one does it alone. The door here at Finding Mastery is always open to those looking to explore the edges and the reaches of their potential so that they can help others do the same. So join our community, share your favorite episode with a friend, and let us know how we can continue to show up for you. Lastly, as a quick reminder, information in this podcast and from any material on the Finding Mastery website and social channels is for information purposes only. If you're looking for meaningful support, which we all need, one of the best things you can do is to talk to a licensed professional. So seek assistance from your health care providers. Again, a sincere thank you for listening. Until next episode, be well, think well, and keep exploring.