Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 552: Steven Kotler

Episode Date: February 17, 2023

Steven Kotler, NYT Best-Selling Author and member of the Flow Research Collective, re-joins the DTFH! Pre-order Steven's new book, Gnar Country, available everywhere you get your books! If you'd lik...e to learn more about Steven you can also check out his site, StevenKotler.com. Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: ExpressVPN - Visit expressVPN.com/duncan and get an extra 3 months FREE when you buy a 1 year package. Herb Stomp - Use code DUNC15 at checkout to receive 15% OFF your first order! Hello Fresh - Visit HelloFresh.com/21Duncan and use code 21DUNCAN at checkout for 21 FREE MEALS + Free Shipping!

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Today they told me they saw this object or sky thing, a thing we don't know, an uncone thing. They said, you gonna do a down of the vehicle, silver craft, they said it's the size of a car. I said, show me a picture of it. Well, when I was a kid, it would be the size of, well, a 10th of a card. I'll tell you a story, a kid's size of a pebble,
Starting point is 00:00:23 just this big, kid's size. Only had a slink shod, and they said to the kid, you won't be able to get him down. The kid was Daniel, and he took out Belith. And that's what it's about in America. I ordered a shoot down. Now it's down, problem solved. Thank you.
Starting point is 00:00:40 Greetings pals, it's me, Detrusel. And as you can tell, especially if you follow me on Instagram, I've become unhealthily obsessed with deep faking the president's voice and other people's voices. But right now, doing deep fakes of our president is just scratching whatever demonic itch I have inside of me.
Starting point is 00:01:03 It presses all my buttons. I mean, aside from the fact that you can just use 30 seconds of audio to create a near perfect deep fake, the implications are astounding. What's coming is so weird, you won't believe it. Like when you get a call from your mom, your dad, or your brother, your sister, saying that they're in trouble,
Starting point is 00:01:26 you're gonna have to have a personal password that only they know so that whatever AI has stolen their identity and is trying to get money from you won't be able to trick you. And soon it won't just be calls, it's gonna be deep fake FaceTime videos of our loved ones. Oh my God, that's just one tiny little part of the strangeness that is waiting for us just around.
Starting point is 00:01:54 The corner. I love all my podcasts. I love my podcast the way a crab loves its glistening, frothy eggs. I think crabs have eggs. Regardless, every once in a while, one podcast or another will change my life. This podcast that you're about to listen to,
Starting point is 00:02:17 you can hear it. You can hear Steven Kotler using his brilliance to exercise the demon of age that had insidiously crept into me. You might know today's guest, Steven Kotler, from his many books. He is a New York Times bestselling author. He's written The Future is Faster Than You Think,
Starting point is 00:02:39 Stealing Fire, The Rise of Superman, Stealing Fire is one of my personal favorites. He's a member of the Flow Research Collective and an expert on Flow States. He's got an awesome book coming out. It's called Nar Country, Growing Old, Staying Rad. Kotler put his money where his mouth is and taught himself in an insanely fast amount of time
Starting point is 00:03:03 how to do ultra-dangerous skiing. Now, that's just one tiny part of what's cool about this book, which is a journal sort of explaining his path to doing tricks that no one should be able to do, much less someone who's, I can't remember what he is, like 55. The book is all about how age is a psychological state.
Starting point is 00:03:30 Now, that might seem like a cliche to you, but if you're like me, somebody in his 40s, or even if you're not, if you're someone in your 20s, if you're someone who's found yourself saying, I'm getting old, watch out. After this conversation with Steven, I learned how deadly that psychological state can be. Kotler has figured out that people are sort of cursing
Starting point is 00:03:56 themselves with a perception of themselves as being aged out of one activity or the other. This is 100% bullshit. The idea that your brain can't change or grow once you reach a certain age. Complete absolute garbage, and it's deadly garbage, because the more you believe it, the more you wither, the more you atrophy, the more you rot from the inside.
Starting point is 00:04:25 This was truly one of my favorite podcasts of all time, so strap in. Before we get going with this podcast, won't you subscribe to my Patreon? It's patreon.com forward slash DTFH. You're gonna get commercial free episodes of the DTFH access to our beautiful Discord server, and we hang out generally twice a week.
Starting point is 00:04:46 Join your family. It's patreon.com forward slash DTFH. Also, I'm taking the Wildman William Montgomery across, well halfway across the country, to California. You can come see us do stand up at the San Jose improv and the Irvine improv. That's gonna be the 24th, 25th, 26th, and 27th. You can find tickets at the improv website
Starting point is 00:05:14 or at dunkintrussell.com. If you like the conversation you're about to hear with Steven Kotler, do us both a favor. Won't you pre-order his book, Nar Country? Listen, it doesn't matter if you're not walking around in an old body. If you feel like that creepy phantom of self-perceived aging has snuck its way into your body
Starting point is 00:05:40 and is now slowing you down, then Nar Country is going to banish it. So I hope you'll pre-order it. You can go to stevenkotler.com. The links will also be at dunkintrussell.com. Now everybody, welcome back to the DTFH Steven Kotler. Mexico, Mexico. Mexico.
Starting point is 00:05:59 Mexico. Mexico. Mexico. Mexico. Welcome. Welcome on you, that you are with us. Sh Zhao food is yours, welcome to you. Welcome.
Starting point is 00:06:24 Welcome. Thank you for coming back on the show. Wonderful to see you. Donkey is great to be with you. Okay. A little bit of kismet here. The other day, I think I'm watching snowboarding videos with my kid. He's transfixed.
Starting point is 00:06:40 I'm transfixed. And I think he was like, will you go snowboarding? I'm like, no, I'm probably too old for that kid. Then I watched in our country. I watched the videos on your website and there's Kotler. How do you 53? Uh, 55 now. 55.
Starting point is 00:07:00 You've aged two years since I a few days ago. You, there you are doing like, I think what must be the most dangerous form of skiing on earth, rail slides, insane tricks, things that like I, in my mind, getting old, you know, as you get older, you just kind of fall into this weird, sad, hypnotic idea about what lays ahead for you and freestyle skiing is not on that list, man. Diapers are on the list. Diapers.
Starting point is 00:07:46 So tell me about it, man. Tell me about it. How did you do it? So what is happening here? So the field that we now call peak performance aging was like 11 different fields that I've been either actively working in because they're directly on related to the research I do on peak human performance. Or they're sort of tangentially related.
Starting point is 00:08:15 Or my wife and I run a hospice care dog sanctuary we have for 20 years. So like we know these amazing longevity protocols for dogs. And there were questions like, will they work for humans? And that sort of thing. But what ends up happening is we have to start at the beginning, which is what you sort of just gave voice to, which is the traditional idea about aging, right? It was what most people, what I like to call the long, slow, rot theory, right?
Starting point is 00:08:42 It's our physical skills, our mental skills, they fall off, right? Our mental skills, our physical skills, our mental skills, they decline over time and there's nothing we can do to stop the slide, right? That's the long, slow, rot theory. And the theory actually dates back to Freud. Something Freud said. He's like 49 and a half years old. He's terrified at turning 50.
Starting point is 00:09:02 And he says, you know, I'm paraphrasing, but he basically says, you know, people over 50 are so stuck in their ways and their brains are so locked up that don't even bother with psychotherapy. Anybody over 50 is no longer educable. So the idea you can't teach an old dog new tricks, the long, all this gets codified by Freud because he's terrified at turning 50. The funny part is Freud goes on to write like six of his most famous books in his fifties and his sixties.
Starting point is 00:09:29 So like, it doesn't even apply to Freud, but that doesn't matter because the damage has been done. And between like Freud in 1904 and like roughly 1995, all we did was prove Freud right. They figured out every single thing in the body that falls off a cliff and that's the story most of us know. And it turns out starting about 1995, holes start popping up in this story. And first it's one and then it's another and then it's another.
Starting point is 00:09:54 And suddenly we arrive where we are today, which is with this, the new idea, which is all the skills we used to think decline over time. They do decline over time, but we now know they're all user to lose it skills. So if you never stop using them, you can hang on to them, even advance them far later than anybody thought possible. So that's the theory. That's what it looks like in the lab. There's tons of research for a bunch of reasons that we can talk about it later
Starting point is 00:10:20 on. I look at this stuff, I take some other ideas out of stuff. I'm directly working on flow science and body cognition, a couple of things like that and say, you know what? If this stuff is all true, I should be able to or anybody should be able to onboard incredibly difficult, challenging physical skills, even very late in life. And so I decided to test this because of course I have to test it.
Starting point is 00:10:42 I'm going to try to teach myself how to park ski at age 53. And as you pointed out park skiing, it's rails, it's jumps, it's boxes, what did your wife say? Wait, 12 different. She was thrilled. She thought it was a great experiment. She was like, go ahead, we have a life insurance policy on you. It's fine.
Starting point is 00:11:01 But so one, we can go and come back to this. One, I think I've made a couple of discoveries on how to do it safely is the first thing. I was like, wait a minute, there's a way to progress safely in this. Two, you know, park skiing was this great thing because for like 12 different biological reasons, people think it's impossible. It's not over 35. It's difficult to learn.
Starting point is 00:11:22 Yes. Over 40 is very difficult. Over 50, you're fucking nuts, right? You're insane. And so we made a list. I made a list of 20 tricks that was essentially zero to intermediate. And I had no parks. I couldn't do any tricks.
Starting point is 00:11:35 I've been skiing my whole life. I'm a good skier, but I like I never went into a terrain park. I didn't know how to do anything. Zero skills. And I'm also worth pointing out. I'm not a naturally gifted athlete. I've been around professional athletes. I come from a family of some gifted athletes.
Starting point is 00:11:50 I've seen what it looks like up close. I'm not that I, it takes me a very long time to learn athletic skills. So I make this list of 20 tricks that covers zero to intermediate. And I figure at the time if it takes five years, so it takes five years. I got there in less than a season. And my ski partner who's 20 years younger than me, former pro athlete, sponsored athlete, not pro, but sponsored athlete who got really injured, left pro park skiing, had a family's three kids, got a job, did all that stuff,
Starting point is 00:12:20 came back, used the same protocol. And he got faster farther than he's ever gone before. And we went, wow, this is incredibly cool. But this is like the world's sexiest pilot study, right? Right. And that's the story mostly documented in the new book in our country. But at the end of the book, you find out that the season afterwards, we went back, we took the same protocol.
Starting point is 00:12:40 We took 17 older adults ages 29 to 68. That's the video you saw. And then in four days on the mountain taught them how to park ski and park snowboard. And most of them were intermediates when they started intermediate skiers or snowboarders. And we still got them into the terrain park and doing stuff as some of them. I told you, we're in the late sixties.
Starting point is 00:12:58 Then we stripped out the action sports because apparently they're not for everyone. I don't understand that, but apparently. And we used it as a class, a pre-performance aging class. We ran about 350 people through it. And what we were trying to do in that class is essentially, so what you were talking about earlier, that voice in your head, this is, I'm too old for this shit, you know, I need diapers.
Starting point is 00:13:21 That has the formula that's basically known as the mindset of old and it's deadly. So we know that if you have a positive mindset towards aging, meaning I think the second half of my life is filled with like really cool, interesting possibilities, my best days might be ahead of me. That mindset will translate into an extra seven and a half years of healthy longevity and there's dozens of studies that show this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can actually, if you're morbidly obese and have a
Starting point is 00:13:48 shitty mindset, you will live longer by changing your mindset. It's rough, the equivalent of quitting smoking. Like it's really significant in terms of helping. And this is not one or two studies. This is dozens and dozens of studies over 50 years. One of the most well-established facts in peak performance aging. In fact, this is incredible. Sorry, go ahead.
Starting point is 00:14:08 Can I tell you a crazy mindset story? Yes, please. It'll blow your mind and you can look it up when we're done. So this is my favorite. I think we ran the weirdest and most radical experiment in peak performance aging. Anybody's ever run? Yes.
Starting point is 00:14:20 Run her up. Run her up goes to Ellen Langer. She, she's like the godmother of positive psychology. And like I call her the eagles of psychology, meaning like if there's a psychological experiment and you don't know who did it, it's probably Ellen Langer. Like when we were growing up, you heard a song on the radio and you didn't know who did it. It was probably the eagles.
Starting point is 00:14:42 Same thing with psychology, right? Okay, okay, I get it. That's what I mean. The eagles. You took your while. Duh. I am dumb. Okay.
Starting point is 00:14:49 Dumb. No, no, no, no. No, it was, I was blaming me for the storytelling. It was, it was my punchline delivery that sucked. It wasn't fault. That falls never on the audience. That had changed my diaper, Stephen. Hold on a minute.
Starting point is 00:15:02 Go ahead. So Ellen does this thing. It's 1981. Her early work in psychology is on language priming, right? How, how language can influence people to behave in certain ways, even subconsciously and she starts to wonder about, so ageism is the most widely held stereotype in the world. It's everywhere.
Starting point is 00:15:23 It's totally socially acceptable. Literally like I walk outside with any other stereotype, tried it out in public and I'm fucking canceled. Like ended me, right? But ageism is totally fine. You know, I got another sense of smell. Here's another sense of smell gone from COVID fucked up from COVID. You go to someone you're like, yeah, I got this disease.
Starting point is 00:15:43 It blinded me. They're going to be like, oh my God. Oh no, I'm so sorry. You go to someone like, yeah, my smell. It's like an attitude piano. Now my piss smells like oatmeal. They laugh. It's the funniest shit ever.
Starting point is 00:15:56 So I'll add to it. You can lose it. That is, but yes, I don't mean to derail you for sure. Making fun of old people. It's totally fine, right? Like it's totally, totally kosher. Totally kosher everywhere, but it turns out, and we know this now, like a woman named Becca Levy, she's at Yale.
Starting point is 00:16:16 She's done most of the work on aging and stereotype. It's deadly. Like we are literally killing old people by how we talk about them. It's, it's amazing the impact of stereo of stereotypes on health and longevity, but anyways, it's early days. It's like 1981 and Ellen Langer dreams of this fucking insane experiment. She takes a group of 80 year old men. She's at Harvard.
Starting point is 00:16:37 She drives them two hours north of Boston. They've taken over a monastery and they've made them. It's 1991. They've made the monastery look exactly like 1961. So the posters in the wall are from 61. All the magazines are from 61. All the books are for 61 and brings people in and she takes the group of the 16 of them, eight of them just sort of reminisce about 1961.
Starting point is 00:16:58 What was it like? Oh, I remember Kennedy was blah, blah, blah on the Cuban. The other group, the study group pretends it's 1961. They play act as if it's 20 years younger. They talk about the Cuban Missile Crisis is an ongoing current event. They watch movies from 90s, et cetera, et cetera, and they measure everything cognitively and everything physically could possibly measure. Use list all the way along.
Starting point is 00:17:24 Five days later, just five days, the subjects who pretended, they both saw benefits, but the subject who pretended it was to be 20 years younger. Their vision improved on a snelling eye chart. They're hearing improved. Their disease symptoms fell away. Their gates improved. Their arthritis went away so much. This is the crazy one.
Starting point is 00:17:46 They got taller and their fingers got longer. Five days. Yeah. In fact, there's video, a touch football game breaks out. They're waiting for the bus to go back to Harvard and this group of 80 year old men start playing football, touch football on the lawn. Like it's crazy. They don't, the experiment is so well, nobody believes it.
Starting point is 00:18:06 So they redo it three different times for three different TV shows in Europe, two different, three different networks in Europe, redo the experiment for TV shows. They still don't believe it's possible. So they redo it again in 2019 with all full modern data gathering. And my point is, and this is Ellen's point, aging is as much a mental event as a physical process. Have you ever heard of data brokers?
Starting point is 00:18:48 Neither had I until I read this ad and it's super creepy. They're the middleman collecting and selling all those digital footprints. You leave online. They can stitch together detailed profiles, which include your browsing history, online searches, Jesus Christ and location data. They then sell your profile off to a company who delivers you a targeted ad. No biggie, right? Well, you might be surprised to learn that these same data brokers are also selling
Starting point is 00:19:14 your information to the Department of Homeland Security, the IRS. I for one, don't want anybody to know my web history. God forbid people should see that I just keep watching German foot fetish porn. It would ruin my career. So to mask my digital footprints, I protect myself with ExpressVPN. You better believe when I go to a hotel. I feel like that sweet ExpressVPN button, boom, protected. It's easy.
Starting point is 00:19:51 When you're connected to ExpressVPN, your IP address is hidden. That makes it much more difficult for data brokers to identify who you are. It also encrypts a hundred percent of network traffic to keep your data safe from hackers on public Wi-Fi. That's why I have ExpressVPN app downloaded on all my devices, phone, computer and even my home Wi-Fi router. All I do is tap one button to turn it on and I protect it. It's that easy.
Starting point is 00:20:17 So make sure your online activity and data is protected with the best VPN money can buy. Visit ExpressVPN.com slash Duncan right now and get three extra months free through my special link. That's E X P R E S S VPN.com slash Duncan Express VPN.com slash Duncan. I use it. So should you. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:20:57 So a lot of the biggest interventions that we can do for peak performance aging are psychological, not physical, which is very counterintuitive. Like most people want to take care of themselves. They're getting older. They are immediately they're changing their diet and things like that. And exercise is usually important. Human growth hormone, testosterone, supplements, steroids, you know, seriously, like, and I'm not, and those are, so let me give you,
Starting point is 00:21:25 this is what's funny about it. If I were to give you peak performance aging the sentence, this is the sentence. If you want to rock to your drop, you want to regularly engage in challenging creative social activities that demand dynamic, deliberate play. And I'll talk about what the word dynamic means in a second and take place in novel outdoor environments. But point I want to make on that is you didn't hear supplements.
Starting point is 00:21:50 You didn't hear diet. You didn't hear all the long list of stuff. You just tried it out. None of it is on the list. Why dynamic? So let me walk you. So let me start with dynamic and walk you through that. Okay.
Starting point is 00:22:01 Dynamic is, is, is. So I said there are a bunch of uses of losing skills on the physical side. You need to train and we know exactly how long you're supposed to train each of these as we age, strength, stamina, flexibility, balance and agility on a regular basis. Dynamic is one word that means all five of those things. So skiing, tennis, these are dynamic activities. What does that mean?
Starting point is 00:22:24 It means they need strength, stamina, agility, balance and flexibility. That's what they mean. Dynamic, deliberate play is the opposite. Deliberate practice is like repetition of incremental advancement. Deliberate play is repetition with improvisation and it's just way more fun. There's less chain. There's less self-consciousness and uses far better learning and lifelong
Starting point is 00:22:44 learning is what we're after here. Novel outdoor environment. So why do you want this a novel outdoor environment? So if you want to preserve brain function, you want to birth new neurons. You want new neurons, new neurogenesis and you want to form new neural networks. So we know specifically that this is why so you have something called cognitive reserve. It's what protects you against cognitive decline, Alzheimer's dementia.
Starting point is 00:23:11 People with high cognitive reserve, you can even have Alzheimer's, they are tops of your brain upon death. It's filled with tangles and plaques. If you've got a big cognitive reserve, you won't show any symptoms. And this is one of the findings that goes back to the 90s and we can talk about why but really and if you want to build a cognitive reserve, this is why you need lifelong learning. So you want lifelong learning because it produces cognitive reserve.
Starting point is 00:23:34 What is that? What am I talking about? Lifelong learning is I want expertise and wisdom. Those are the two things that matter. Expertise is sort of all the stuff we learn consciously. Wisdom is often the stuff we learn unconsciously, but that's those aren't good definitions. Here's what you need to know.
Starting point is 00:23:50 The part of the brain that is most vulnerable to cognitive decline, Alzheimer's dementia to prefrontal cortex parts right behind your forehead, right? It's the newest part of the brain from an evolutionary perspective. So it's the most vulnerable. The stuff that's deep in the brain stem and whatever. Not age doesn't touch it at all. It's the new stuff that's really vulnerable. So when we have expertise and wisdom, what those things are are really diffuse
Starting point is 00:24:14 networks of neurons in the prefrontal cortex and they're very redundant. Expertise, one of the properties of the brain is redundancy. Like you never just learn one way to do something. You learn six or seven and so there you have these backup networks running through the entire prefrontal cortex that protects the brain. So to maximize lifelong learning, to maximize these new networks, to maximize neurogenesis, you have to ask a simple question, which is, okay, if I need new neurons to protect my brain, where are they born in the brain?
Starting point is 00:24:45 Like, where do I get them? Where do they come from? Right? So it turns out the adult brain will produce like 700 new neurons every day, even until like, basically you die, but they come out of a place in the brain and notice they have a campus. The campus does two things. It does long-term memory and it does location.
Starting point is 00:25:02 It's filled with like place cells and grid cells. Why? We have followed this hunter-gatherers. So the brain is designed to remember exactly where you were when you had emotionally charged experiences in other outdoor environments. Why? Where's the ripe fruit tree? Okay, I got to remember that next spring when I'm looking for food.
Starting point is 00:25:19 Where did I get attacked by that tiger? Okay. I don't ever want to go back there. Where was that watering hole? Yeah. Those, that's survival, right? So the brain is designed to specifically remember that. So I always say that peak performance is getting our biology to work
Starting point is 00:25:32 for us rather than against us. Right. Performance aging is the same thing. It's getting your biology to work for you rather against you. Supplied to the challenges and opportunities of aging. So all these new neurons are showing up in the part of the brain that is designed for map making and path finding. So if you have, if you're getting your, these experiences, you're doing
Starting point is 00:25:49 your learning and novel outdoor environments, that's what the brain was designed to remember. So you're using the system exactly like it was built for. And so what you end up with is more neurogenesis, more new neurons and more robust neural networks. You know, you've, you've discovered here, Steven, you know, you've discovered you've discovered that outdoor sex will heal the brain. Cause it fits in.
Starting point is 00:26:12 It's a physical activity. It's physical dynamic. It's dynamic. It's definitely very playful. Improvisational. Bring peanut butter. Peanut butter? You've been hanging out with dogs too long.
Starting point is 00:26:27 Nothing, right? That was the first thing that popped into my mind. Listen, whatever floats your boat and this is what you're saying is incredible. Like, like you're sitting here, it's like we have this like an aspect of our brain that is being underutilized compared to what we used to, what we needed it for, right? We're, we have our GPS. We've got our technology.
Starting point is 00:26:56 We don't need to know where anything is anymore. And most of us are stuck in a pattern where we're definitely not going to novel outdoor environments. We're going from point A to point B, point A to point B. And so you're saying it's sort of like we have these. I mean, there's, there's, there's new apps now. I just saw this. There's an app now that will, so let's say you got to go to the store, you
Starting point is 00:27:18 know, make you a map based on greenery. So you can, I got to go to the store. It will give you a novel environment that maximizes your exposure to trees. So there, there does seem to be some benefit to technology after all. Oh my God. That's so crazy. But just to clarify, it's, it's, it's like, you're saying that if you want to grow new neurons, the place they're coming from is this theoretically
Starting point is 00:27:42 underutilized part of the human brain that it's like, it's, it's the redundant. It's not underutilized. I mean, it's, it's, I mean, they have a campus is not, it's underutilized is an interesting word there. But it's the, I mean, it's just designed to figure out, you know, it's designed to remember emotionally charged incidents and novel outdoor environments. That's how to get it to be the most active. And that's how it also knows, oh, shit, this is really important.
Starting point is 00:28:06 I need to save this. I need redundancy. I need backup because you're having a novel experience outdoor, right? Cause that's what it was designed to do. Unbelievable using that, but that's always been sort of one of my sort of approaches is evolution designed all these systems for a purpose. And if you can, you know, evolution of psychology, evolution in our biology is about seeing if you could align that closely.
Starting point is 00:28:31 Cause it's, you're just using the system the way it's designed to be used. You get better results. I'm telling you, this is a lightning rod. Like you have done, like to me, what, what you've done here is not just great for people my age or older people. But you know, if you're in your twenties and you've got that old mindset and I think some, I think right now, so we can talk about where that comes from.
Starting point is 00:28:55 No, you're totally right. It sets up for some people and it's insidious. It comes from a good place, but it's, it can set up as early as like 25, 26. And you're literally killing yourself. Like you think this mindset is keeping you safe and it's actually killing you, which is crazy. And so let me tell you where it comes from cause you'll, you'll totally get it. As you know, we have all these reward neurochemicals and we get addicted
Starting point is 00:29:20 to them, right? People with the cell phones are addicted to dopamine, right? That's a dope. Absolutely. So when we're younger, teen kids and into teenage years and early twenties, we're dominated. So we're dominated by the seeking system and the place system. We're going out in the world.
Starting point is 00:29:39 We're trying to figure out who we are. How do we want to live? Yeah. What do we want? What don't like all that stuff. We, some of the social neurochemistry comes in, but the seeking system is predominantly norepinephrine and dopamine, right? Those are the drugs we're addicted to.
Starting point is 00:29:52 As soon as we start getting stuff, we found stuff that we want. I've got the right partner. I've got the right job. I've got the apartment. I like, I've got the car. Yeah. Trade our addiction to norepinephrine and dopamine, which are about seeking. Give me something new to serotonin, oxytocin and endorphins.
Starting point is 00:30:10 Protect what I have. Now we do this switch naturally when we have kids, right? Cause you don't, you don't want to shut, you want to shut down the seeking system cause you've got to stay with your partner to raise the kids, right? Yes. So it's a healthy biological trade. It turns out for peak performance aging, you need all these systems. So you have to reignite the seeking system and the place system.
Starting point is 00:30:31 Reignite the seeking system. Ah, I love it. Oh my God. That's my new mantra in life. Thank you. Hari Krishna. No more reignite the seeking system ring. Oh my God.
Starting point is 00:30:46 That's giving me goosebumps. It's, you know, yeah, I'm a, I've got a two year old, a four year old and a baby on the way. So you are describing to me my life, but from a neurological perspective, which I didn't even realize everything you just described. It's what I'm doing. This is a funny story. This is a funny ski story and this is, so we call it getting geysered.
Starting point is 00:31:09 Which is when somebody gets there like, I'm too old for this shit. Juice on you. So halfway through my ski season in the NAR season, um, I decide that I've got the wrong skis that I like there. I wait, I don't weigh enough. I can't bend my ski. So I'm talking to other people about their skis and in these parking lessons, um, we're in the, this is the most extreme example.
Starting point is 00:31:32 We were at Kirkwood and I'm with my ski partner and this truck pulls up next to me and a guy and a girl get out, a man and a woman get out. She's, she's maybe like 27. He's maybe 30 and he's skiing a pair of skis. The moment death wish that I'm really interested. I was like, Oh, tell me about those skis. Are they good? Did they do this to this?
Starting point is 00:31:49 And, and, and I was like, well, what are they like with like nosebutters in three sixties and things like that? And he's like, well, what is that? I was like, Oh, park, park tricks, you know, stuff you do in the train park. His girlfriend jumps out of the cab turns with the most anger I've ever seen. And she's like, we are too old for that shit. They can't tell how old I am cause I've got a ski helmet on. I've got goggles on.
Starting point is 00:32:10 I took my helmet off and I'm like, lady, you are literally 35 years younger than me. I don't know what's wrong with you, but you are 35 years younger than me. That's what I'm saying, man. That's what you're doing is like, this is like, you know, upstream. Well, the, yeah, there's another, sorry to interrupt you. There's one other point here that I want to mention cause it's important. I think cause people don't get it.
Starting point is 00:32:34 So what the cool thing about peak performance aging is on both sides of the spectrum on the late in life side, there's all kinds of data that says interventions will like make a difference even into your late eighties. They probably make a difference into your nineties, but we just don't have data showing that. But like you can be a sedentary couch potato and be 85 years old. And if you start any of these invent interventions, they're going to make a difference.
Starting point is 00:32:59 But what the flip side is, what the data shows is for certain categories of things, peak performance aging starts young really clearly starts young. I guess there's a bunch of stuff you want to pay attention to even in your twenties, your thirties, your forties, your fifties. There's a lot of stuff in those decades that sort of matter here or could really, you know, move the needle for you on the back end. You're so it's, it's, I think like a big part. What did you call the name of it?
Starting point is 00:33:29 Getting geysered. I think a big part of getting geysered is it's like a coping mechanism to deal with fear. So one way to avoid whatever it is you're afraid of is to do what those people did to you and say, I'm too old. So you make that assessment of whatever the situation is and, and now you can without feeling like a coward, you can ride off. You can ride it all off.
Starting point is 00:33:55 Like I'm too old. So there is a benefit if you try, if you have cognitive dissonance associated with not wanting to go outside the boundaries of whatever your habits are. And that's why what you're doing is like so devastating in the best way possible to people who are utilizing that trick and they don't even realize that's what they're doing. You know, it's like, no, you're afraid. You don't want to get hurt.
Starting point is 00:34:16 That makes sense, but don't blame it on the fact that you're old. Blame it on that you're afraid because that's what it is. It's fear, right? I mean, this is it. It's like, we want to avoid fear. I, we want to death. I mean, we want to avoid injury. We want to avoid like paralysis and the assessment any of us make regarding
Starting point is 00:34:36 our own personal bodies, unless you're a Kotler is this shit is not doing nose butters. This shit is not jogging out of what it's doing. But, and so I love what things that you're doing, what you're doing here because it's like, it's, um, it's like you're banishing. A mimetic cultural demon or something that we don't even realize we've been trying. Yeah, I, I, I'm trying and, um, and you have to understand for like those of us
Starting point is 00:35:06 who have been in and around this, this field for a while, like I'll give you a random example. I ski when I go to, when I go to Palisades, Tahoe, Squaw Valley, I'll ski with a posse of like pros, ex pros and whatever. And invariably we're chasing Tom day around the mountain. He's usually in the pack. He's usually in charge. Tom day is in his late sixties.
Starting point is 00:35:31 Yeah. He was like one of the first extreme skiers when Warren Miller started making movies about skiing and then he became like Warren Miller's camera ran forever. He's amazingly talented, but like there are like young Olympic athletes in the posse and the guy who's leading the charge who you can't catch is 65. And so in the action sports community, Tom's not that much of an anomaly. We see a lot of that fairly frequently.
Starting point is 00:35:57 You see it in surfing. You see it in skiing snowboard and like it's rock climbing. It's, it's there. It's visible and for a while you just don't notice it, but like when I started to look at it, I was like, well, wait a minute and here. So here's something interesting about that. If you look at the longest lived communities in America, there's four. It's Loma Linda, California, Summit Eagle and Pitkin County, Colorado.
Starting point is 00:36:22 So some of the Eagle and Pitkin are where Vale Beaver Creek, Aspen, Copper Mountain, all the big outdoor mechas are there and Loma Linda, California, it's a, there's a seventh day Advent community there. They've got certain dietary practices that work really well, but they, they go on these marathon hikes together all the time. And so you have these pockets of, and by the way, like Summit County, Colorado, on average, people live 10 years longer than any place else in America.
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Starting point is 00:38:27 When you check out at Herbstomp.com free shipping for orders over 100 bucks. Herbstomp, America's most trusted Kratom. I want to just, just put in italics here. Just make sure that I understand this correctly. Because you know, what, you know, as an older person, I'm an older person. There's something really like weird when someone in their 20s or someone who just turned 30 says, I'm old, I'm old. And you're like, shut the, no, no, it's like number one, you know, you're
Starting point is 00:39:14 implicitly saying I'm a fucking fossil, right? Like if you think you're old, how old do you think I am? Number one, but, but, but I don't know what the number two is there. I don't know why he started a number list. But what you're saying is that habitual assessment of one's self is actually, has been scientifically proven to reduce. So let me actually take it far. Let me take it farther than that for you Duncan.
Starting point is 00:39:45 So not only is the idea that the old dog can't learn new tricks false. It turns out that old dogs are actually better at whole new types of learning and thinking than young dogs. When we enter our fifties for three different reasons. One, there's a bunch of genes that only turn on through experience. We call that epigenetics, but like it basically right. Um, the second part is wait, what I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
Starting point is 00:40:12 What genes? I'm really interested in this. I'm, I'm very curious about, let's go to the next two cause it's easier and I'm not an expert in genetics. I'm better on, I'm better on the brain and we'll have a more fun conversation. Okay. Great. Cool.
Starting point is 00:40:23 The bigger news, the bigger news is that in our fifties. So the two halves of our brain do different things. Sort of they work together, but sort of they work in opposition. In our fifties, they start working together like never before. And it progresses from our fifties, sixties, seventies into our eighties is what it's at its peak. And finally, this is why I lit on the word underutilized that you used earlier, the brain starts, you know, bowed in our late forties, but in our fifties,
Starting point is 00:40:50 it, it'll say, okay, you've got this underutilized region over here. You never learned to play a musical instrument. So this is a gap. Um, we're going to colonize it and use it for redundancy and we're going to back some stuff up. We're going to use it for new learning. Yeah. The brain starts to colonize these underutilized regions.
Starting point is 00:41:05 The two hemispheres start talking to their bunch of genes turn on and as a result, as we enter our fifties, we gain access to three new thinking styles that we, that are mostly offline before. Uh, and, um, we, we, we basically gain the ability. It's relativistic thinking, which sort of like says, Hey, look, there are black and white thinking as a folly youth. It's all gray and it's all shades of gray. Okay.
Starting point is 00:41:30 Right and wrong is, is, is wishy-washy. And then we can multi-perspectival thinking our ego quiets down. So we can now see things from other people's point of view and all around. And finally we get levels of systems thinking, big picture thinking that we don't have access to before as a result in our fifties, whole new levels of intelligence open up, whole new levels of creativity open up, including divergent thinking, which spikes that's outside the box, like the far flung connections between ideas, hardest aspect of creativity to train, really
Starting point is 00:42:00 difficult to train, but it starts blossoming in our fifties. Equally important. We gain access to whole new levels of empathy in our fifties and wisdom. And all this stuff, um, doesn't, isn't available before all this stuff means that like not only are we, you know, all the skills we used to think fall off a cliff and we now know their user to lose it skills, we're gaining genuine cognitive superpowers. Now you have to, this is another one of those people performance aging starts
Starting point is 00:42:30 young things because there's certain things you have to do in your twenties, thirties, forties, and actually early fifties to make sure you get full access to these cognitive superpowers. But if you get it right, um, the, you, we are just so much better at so much stuff post 50 and pre 50. So if you can keep the body up and train down the risk aversion, what becomes possible is really exciting train down the risk aversion. Now that to me, see, this is the, the paradox, isn't it?
Starting point is 00:43:00 It's like this is where the, uh, the, the, the creeping mental disease if I'm too old, this is where it really fucks you up, huh? Because it's like the idea is my bones will break easier. I'm going to break my hip. I, you know, I won't heal us. I won't heal as quickly if I do injure myself. So this would, if you believe those things, you are naturally going to become increasingly adverse to risk.
Starting point is 00:43:27 And you're saying that this will actually slow down or potentially eliminate your access to these new. Yeah. So, um, if you really want access to these skills, uh, in your fifties, you have to creativity is sort of one unlocks them. So if you're being creative, forcing the brand to be creative, um, that actually is what starts to really turn these things on. So that's important.
Starting point is 00:43:58 That's one of the modifiers or gateways that you need for this. You also have to fight off physical fragility, right? Like if your body's falling apart, who cares if you've got new mental skills, right? It's not going to do you any good. So you have to, that's when you have to start training up all five categories of functional fitness and get really serious about that. And finally, risk aversion increases over time.
Starting point is 00:44:19 As you pointed out, and you have to train it down. And the reason is this under that risk aversion is fear as we talked about. And here is predominantly cortisol and norepinephrine, right? Cortisol hormone and norepinephrine. Norepinephrine is literally adrenaline in the brain, right? It's the brain's version of adrenaline and a little bit is great. It's sort of primes learning makes you attentive and alert too much makes you super anxious and it blocks learning.
Starting point is 00:44:46 It blocks creativity. So this is obvious. Like when you're stressed out, your brain doesn't want to, you know, when you're, when you're scared, your brain doesn't say, okay, let's find a really creative solution. No, no, give me the same old, give me the thing that works. You know what I mean? So it becomes very logical, very linear, very conservative.
Starting point is 00:45:04 And if you can't access the creativity, right? Cause you're too risk averse. You're not going to gain access to any of these super hours and if you're too risk averse, right? The other one in your fifties that matters is you have to self forgiveness and forgiveness of others. You have to forgive those who have done you wrong. You're to forgive yourself in your fifties.
Starting point is 00:45:23 Otherwise you can't get access to the empathy and wisdom that comes your way. Whoa. Okay. I want to give you a comedy example of what you just said. So when you start doing stand up naturally, you are terrified. You know, you're not sure you've studied the, the evolutionary biology, the explanation for why we don't like to eat shit in front of strangers. Not later.
Starting point is 00:45:45 Well, we don't like to do it literally, but we don't like to bomb on stage in front of strangers. It apparently affects a part of your brain that is different than other psychological pain centers. I am clearly not a scientist, but, but, uh, so what can happen to a comic because of that fear is that you get stuck in the same damn material. You go on stage, you do the same material over and over and over again. You get stuck in this rut, this terrible loop.
Starting point is 00:46:14 The minute you're, you, you can kill actually, you can do great on stage, but you'll drive home with the same feeling that you bombed because you know, you've been saying the exact same words in the exact same order for years potentially, but the moment you get your, the nervousness starts going away. When you're up there, your brain, and this is the dream of all comics is what we love. Sometimes your brain will spit out a joke. It will complete a joke.
Starting point is 00:46:41 It will find a punchline. It will pull out of the air like an angle that you never thought of. It won't, when you're writing, it will not happen the way it will happen on stage. You just described why and what that is. It's because if you're too freaked out, when you go on stage, you're going to get rigid, systematic. Yeah. And, and stuck.
Starting point is 00:47:02 Well, it is so, I mean, the brain limits choice and we all know this because the extreme example is fight or flight or freeze, right? Where the brain goes, Oh shit, crisis situation. You have three options, right? It takes all the others off the table. What people don't realize is it's true with any level of anxiety, any level of time stress, when we're time stressed. It's why I like to get up and write at like four o'clock in the morning
Starting point is 00:47:26 because nobody calls me from four to seven a.m. It's non time. It belongs to no one. So if I got to take two hours to get a sentence, right? Who the fuck cares, right? Like it doesn't, it doesn't matter. And the opposite time stress. I'm, there's no way I'm going to get that.
Starting point is 00:47:41 I'm going to have access to the same level of creativity. It will work in the middle of the day. Steven, this is, I mean, you know, you've been on the bar guys before and you have changed my life. You're doing it now. Anytime we talk, my life improves. I to this day, to this day. When I am freaking out from weed refer to a podcast.
Starting point is 00:48:03 We did where you just described this. I hear your voice. Do you know that? Like when I'm about to like go down the hell, that the hell tunnel that you want to, I hear your voice like Obi-Wan Kenobi. I'm like, you know, yeah, maybe talking you down, maybe these problems. Like you're like, okay, you're, it's your amygdala. It's cortisol.
Starting point is 00:48:27 It's presenting problems to you that maybe you need to deal with. But if you just wait a little bit, some of that stress chemical will reduce, but if you obsess on what it's presenting, it's going to amplify. It's going to create a feedback loop. And so yeah, I always, whenever it's like, oh, fuck, I forgot to send the email. I didn't respond to that person or oh my God. I'm like, okay, brain, we'll deal with that. But right now I'm just going to relax and then sure enough, 20 minutes,
Starting point is 00:48:54 30 minutes suddenly, every, you get that nice warm high that we all love, which is why we like cannabis. I don't know if you still indulge in that wonderful, wonderful. Yeah. I'm not a quitter. So yeah, this is, so yeah, it's what you're, what you're, what you're doing here is, is really perfect for people like me. I mean, and you know, with the pandemic, Steven, it's like, if anything
Starting point is 00:49:23 triggered our amygdalas, if anything created fight, flight, freeze. I mean, you could literally go through Twitter and analyze tweets. That's a fight tweet. That's a flight tweet. That's a frozen tweet. You know what I mean? That's really funny. You can just see what's happening there.
Starting point is 00:49:46 And, and, and it's, you know, it's cause we all just went through this bullshit. And I think we've left it, but we're still scared where we've, our, our risk aversion is so high right now and the implications for society, if creative people, if philosophers, if scientists have managed to get into a trauma state from the pandemic, it's bad news, man. We're, we're not going to get the innovation. We're not going to get the, you know, you're, you're, you're right about that. And, um, yeah, I mean, the other thing is that, so there are nine known causes
Starting point is 00:50:24 of aging, we get older for nine reasons, but the thing they all have in common is inflammation. That's what that's the root cause of all of them. And inflammation is always tied to stress. It's always tied to stress. Right. This is one of the reasons and Langer says aging as much a physical as a mental event is a physical process.
Starting point is 00:50:45 Aging is tied to stress. And now we're hyper, like first of all, in modern society, we're, we're hyper vigilant in general. The pandemic has made it worse. And it's interesting. The, um, there's the, the long-term effects, um, are, are considerable because these are the very things that age us the most. Right.
Starting point is 00:51:08 Right. Right. This is, you know, it's like the old cliche in like, like cheesy old movies. You look at the vampire and your hair turns white. It's like, you know, that's the metaphor. It's like the vampire in this case is like you're, you're staring at this like life-sucking idea of your future that is not real.
Starting point is 00:51:30 And, and, and so you age, you get, you get, that's when you get the stress wrinkles. That's when you get the tremors. That's when you get all this stuff. Why wouldn't you? You're freaking out. One of the reasons I thought the, we talk about like a NAR style. NAR, by the way, if anybody doesn't know is. I didn't know when I felt like it was named act.
Starting point is 00:51:51 Oh, what is it? It's action sports slang. It's short for gnarly. And it's a very defined as any situation that's high in perceived risk and high in actual risk, which as it turns out is a great description for later years, high in perceived risk, high in actual risk. So NAR country, right, is a finale. And it turns out also that NAR country is also sort of a good descriptor
Starting point is 00:52:17 of like the gritty mindset you need to thrive in your later years too. Yeah. So that's where, that's where the title came from. But we talk about we at the flow research collective when we're training people in this stuff, we talk about sort of a NAR style adventure. I'm not saying you should go out and learn to park ski. One of the things I will tell you is, and I'm me, right? I'm, if I know I did all the work, I read all this.
Starting point is 00:52:42 I still, there was like residual, the mindset of all this is sneaky. Like it gets in there and like deep levels that you don't even notice. One of the things that I found is, you know, like halfway through my skis and it didn't matter what I thought about the second half of my life, because once I started learning how to do a nose butter 360, you know what I mean? Like whatever I thought was possible, the second half of my life was out of the freaking window because it got exploded by what I'm doing in the real
Starting point is 00:53:08 world. That was the weirdest thing about going after this kind of quest is like, I thought it was going to take five years. It was going to be possible at all. Almost everybody else thought it was impossible. Even my friends who were pro athletes would hear about it and be like, well, how many bones have broken so far? Like they just didn't believe you could do it safely without
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Starting point is 00:56:48 You are the psychological equivalent of that doctor who cured ulcers, but to get the ulcers, he had to give himself ulcers to make himself the lab rat to cure the ulcers. Yeah, totally. You know what I mean? I mean, you know, Duncan with all the peak performance stuff I've done over the years. I'm usually the first lab rat.
Starting point is 00:57:24 I just don't ever talk about it because I don't believe it works for me. I don't trust that it's going to work for you. Most other people are like, oh, it worked for me. It's going to work for you. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, there's a lot of psychology that says that's not true. There's a lot of stuff that says that's not going to be the case.
Starting point is 00:57:37 So I just never talk about my experiments on the front end because I don't like, I know enough science to know that they don't mean it. I'm just proving it to myself and then I have to go figure out if it's going to work for other people and do all that stuff. Those experiments have kind of been prevalent my whole life. I just like never this is the first time I was like, okay, let's just tell everybody about the experiment as a way to
Starting point is 00:58:01 talk about the science rather than just talking about the science in a million other ways and telling. I wish you could have seen the grin on my face watching you on the ski slopes, watching the analysis from that. What's his name? The Nick Nick. Isn't he funny as shit? Funny as shit and a very impressed with you.
Starting point is 00:58:19 Like what the fuck? Like definitely like what? This is not. It was he was great. So I stumbled upon. So when I stumbled at a parks gate, one of the things is they speak their own language. I didn't even know the names of the tricks.
Starting point is 00:58:31 Right. So like how to figure out the names of the tricks. I had to find commentators online who were accommodating and they would name you like, oh, that's what the fuck that is. Okay. Right. So I stumbled upon this kid during like the COVID lockdown
Starting point is 00:58:46 right when everything's closed and all I'm doing is I'm watching him and this other slush is another free skiing channel. That's how I learned the names of the tricks. But as I was watching him, I was like struck by two things. I was like one, he's funny and two, he tells the truth like a lot like he's not like he's honest. I was like, I'm going to send him footage of me three months
Starting point is 00:59:07 in the experiment. He's an idiot. We now know each other a little bit, but I literally sent it to him. I called him. I was like, this is who I am. This is what I do. This is footage of me three months into my experiment.
Starting point is 00:59:17 Grade me, judge me, make as much fun of me as you want. Just use the footage, explain to me what the fuck park skiing is so they know and just just frame it up and whatever you want to say is totally just be honest. And that's what showed up. He was honest. He was honest. And okay, look, we've got only a little bit of time left
Starting point is 00:59:37 and we have a hard out. I've been reading about there's a new movement in the world right now. The movement is go outside. It doesn't seem like that original movement, but relative to the world that we're in right now. It's a it's a kind of unplug, get out there, pull yourself away from the dopamine addiction of your phone.
Starting point is 01:00:00 Do you consider yourself part of that movement? I think you are. Do you see yourself in what you mean? Well, so the thing you have to understand is I was never I like I like technology and I've as a writer, you know, I've covered technology. I mean, I work for wired. Like, you know, I covered I covered this stuff, but as far
Starting point is 01:00:21 as personal technology goes, I've never I've never been suckered in by it. So I have very little of it in my life and I've never not gone outside. I'm outside. I mean, you know, ever since I got a dog, I'm at least outside a couple hours a day just walking my dog. Right.
Starting point is 01:00:37 Um, but I've like, I live, I don't live in cities. I live in the country. Like I like this is so for me, I never had to be told to put down my phone. I don't like I'm the guy in the airport who's not looking at his phone is looking at all you motherfuckers looking at your phone. What is wrong with you people?
Starting point is 01:00:54 Don't you have books like it's so strange to me and I and I will say you should have her on the podcast because she's lovely. My dear friend, Catherine Price, who wrote a great book called how to divorce your phone and is probably the world's leading expert on that right now. Yes. Yes.
Starting point is 01:01:10 She's awesome. Please happily, happily. Um, you'll love her. Let me make a note of that. Thank you. I appreciate it, Stephen. I mean, God knows how many how to divorce your phone. How many?
Starting point is 01:01:21 No, it's a great little book. She wrote and it's really so for older adults, older adults, anybody who's sort of the mindset of older, anybody over 50, there's like seven or eight or nine or 10 or 11 or 12 reasons you really want to put down your phone. There's a lot of yeah, there's a bunch of stuff. So there's a bunch of stuff that cell phones make a lot worse that are already issues for people over 50 and so literally
Starting point is 01:01:50 like these are the stuff that you need to be training up and your cell phone is training them in the other direction. Yeah, um, totally. So there's a bunch of like you really want to be putting down that phone and so in the course that in we in the course that we spun out of this, the peak performance agent course, um, it's one up based on Catherine's work, some other stuff is one of the things that we ask people to do for the duration
Starting point is 01:02:13 of the course, but divorce your phone. I'm taking your course. How do I take your course and also when is this when is your book coming out man? It's not out yet. It comes out in 14 days. Yeah, it's 14th. It's on the February 28th is when the book when the book
Starting point is 01:02:30 drops, um, if you go to our country.com and you want to pre-order, there's this ton of really amazing people from his training bonuses that are free, um, that you get for pre-ordering because pre-order. Oh, really? Yeah. If you want the pre-order, everybody pre-order this book. It's up.
Starting point is 01:02:47 It's up to you guys. I mean, you can get it anywhere, but if you go to our country.com and pre-order it, we're going to give you a lot of free peak performance tools and trainings to help. Um, when do I get to, when do I get to do nose butters? How do I take your course? Is this like a scheduled course or is it? So do you want to, I mean, the, we haven't done the course
Starting point is 01:03:08 it doesn't, isn't, isn't skiing snowboarding. The skiing snowboarding, we don't know when the next time we're going to do one of those is, but, um, I could, the book walks you through exactly what we did to sort of the approach. So it makes it like there's, there are very safe, safe ways to do it, but, um, we haven't, uh, we're, at some point we'll start doing ski like on the hill stuff again. Um, we just haven't put it together.
Starting point is 01:03:33 Uh, there seems to be a lot of interest in it though, which I didn't like in the beginning, I look, I use skiing in a sense as a metaphor and I wanted, one of the advantages of the book is the book is functions as a, it's almost, it's almost a diary, right? It starts pre-season training and goes all the way through the season and covers every day. And the reason is it's really hard.
Starting point is 01:03:54 Nobody's ever written a book on applied peak performance. There's this detailed cause it's really hard to make it not terribly boring for the reader. Like there's a lot of writing challenges in doing that, right? And, and, and it took, it actually took a very long time to get it right. But what it gives you is a look at like, oh, this is what
Starting point is 01:04:13 it looks like. This is how it's applied on a daily basis over a very long time. And you start to realize you're like, oh, wow, this is a lot more accessible. There's, yeah, he's doing some crazy stuff that maybe I wouldn't do, but like, I can do these things. I can do my versions of these things.
Starting point is 01:04:28 This is available to me. Cool. I love it. And in the course, what is the core? Like, is it a, is it the courses? The course is called, um, enter the NAR. It'll be, uh, we will, it'll be available through the flow research collective, um, like our, you know, like our flow
Starting point is 01:04:45 trainings and other things. Um, and we, it goes, I think it'll go on sale, uh, probably April 1st. I think we're going to wait and give the book a month and then put the course on sale April 1st, but I can, you know, we can let you know. Can't wait. Steven, you're doing the Lord's work.
Starting point is 01:05:02 Thank you for this. You have no idea all the synchronicities involved in this conversation. Thank you for your work and, uh, everybody, please pre-order NAR country. Well, you remind me of my mantra. Usually I say Hari Krishna when I'm getting offline, but what is my mantra?
Starting point is 01:05:19 What was it? It was, uh, what do we see? It was C. That's cause I'm not. Hold on. Hold on. Everybody's like, uh, God, what did you say? I remember it was so beautiful.
Starting point is 01:05:34 Activate the mother fuck. This is why I need to take it. You know what? You know what? If somebody would have only recorded this conversation, I don't record my podcast. I don't go back. It's just, it's just, it's just like we do it in the ether.
Starting point is 01:05:51 I know I hijacked the greatest life coaches on earth for an hour and don't release the podcast. This is a great scam. Activate their power points to distract them so they don't realize it's not recorded. This is it. This is it. Steven, thank you so much.
Starting point is 01:06:08 I know how you are. I know how you are. You, you are a, this is one of my favorite conversations in a long time. Thank you for your time. And, uh, Duncan, my pleasure. It's great seeing you again.
Starting point is 01:06:21 What's the website? Well, sir. What's your website? Mr. Kotler. No, uh, my Steven Kotler. Dot com. No, our country.
Starting point is 01:06:27 Dot com. Flow research collective. Dot com. Duncan trestle. Dot com. Yes. Um, you, we've taken it over to actually all that Steven Kotler stuff.
Starting point is 01:06:37 You don't know this. This was going on. Why are you podcasting and stealing my. I know you, you're hijacking your website. I'm sorry. Steven. Thanks. I'll, you could hijack my website anytime.
Starting point is 01:06:47 That's Steven. Call everybody. Thanks for coming on the show. A good time starts with a great wardrobe. Next stop, JC Penney family get-togethers to fancy occasions. Wedding season two. We do it all in style. Dresses, suiting and plenty of color to play with get fixed up
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Starting point is 01:07:22 A good time starts with a great wardrobe. Next stop, JC Penney family get-togethers to fancy occasions. Wedding season two. We do it all in style dresses, suiting and plenty of color to play with get fixed up with brands like Liz Claiborne, Worthington, Stafford and Jay Ferrar. Oh, and thereabouts for kids. Super cute and extra affordable.
Starting point is 01:07:43 Check out the latest in store and we're never short on options at JC P dot com. All dressed up everywhere to go. JC Penney. That was Steven Kotler everybody. Don't forget to pre-order NAR country. A tremendous thank you to our sponsors. Come see me in William Montgomery next week at the San Jose and
Starting point is 01:08:01 Irvine Improv and I love you. I'll see you next week. Until then stay young. Hare Krishna. A good time starts with a great wardrobe. Next stop, JC Penney family get-togethers to fancy occasions. Wedding season two. We do it all in style dresses, suiting and plenty of color to
Starting point is 01:08:23 play with get fixed up with brands like Liz Claiborne, Worthington, Stafford and Jay Ferrar. Oh, and thereabouts for kids. Super cute and extra affordable. Check out the latest in store and we're never short on options at JC P dot com all dressed up everywhere to go. JC Penney. A good time starts with a great wardrobe.
Starting point is 01:08:44 Next stop, JC Penney family get-togethers to fancy occasions. Wedding season two. We do it all in style dresses, suiting and plenty of color to play with get fixed up with brands like Liz Claiborne, Worthington, Stafford and Jay Ferrar. Oh, and thereabouts for kids. Super cute and extra affordable. Check out the latest in store and we're never short on options
Starting point is 01:09:05 at JC P dot com all dressed up everywhere to go. JC Penney.

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