Speaker 1: I start most of my days by stepping in or
Speaker 1: cleaning up dog, because that's what happens if you do
Speaker 1: hospice care. Right. What I love about it, that is
Speaker 1: the humility is it doesn't matter how big I get
Speaker 1: in my head or my life. Like when your days
Speaker 1: starts like stepping in and clearing up dogs, it brings
Speaker 1: you back to the planet really fast, which I like
Speaker 1: a lot.
Speaker 2: This is it's okay that you're not okay, and I'm
Speaker 2: your host, Megan Devine. This week on the show, New
Speaker 2: York Times bestselling author Steven Cotler on peak performance even
Speaker 2: when you live in an aging body, and even inside grief.
Speaker 2: Interesting applications for the science of flow states, and more
Speaker 2: coming up right after this first break. Before we get started,
Speaker 2: one quick note. While we cover a lot of emotional,
Speaker 2: relational territory and our time here together, this show is
Speaker 2: not a substitute for skilled support with a licensed mental
Speaker 2: health provider or for professional supervision related to your work. Hi, friends, Okay, look,
Speaker 2: this episode covers a lot of stuff, and it covers
Speaker 2: it very fast. Stephn Cotler kind of does everything that
Speaker 2: way in this rapid fire useful content mixed with some storytelling.
Speaker 2: A little swearing and some tangents thrown in. It might
Speaker 2: take a little adjusting, So I want to give you
Speaker 2: a little structure to hang on to before we get rolling.
Speaker 2: Stephen Coutler is a New York Times bestselling author known
Speaker 2: widely for his work on peak performance and flow states.
Speaker 2: Peak performance, at its simplest, is the performance of a
Speaker 2: task at the optimum level of an individual's physical and
Speaker 2: mental capabilities, or both together. Flow states are where you're
Speaker 2: so immersed in what you're doing it feels effortless, like
Speaker 2: your inner critic is not yapping at you, trying to
Speaker 2: like throw things at you. There's a sense of timelessness
Speaker 2: in what you're doing, being outside of time. You're just
Speaker 2: completely immersed in what you're doing. Peak performance and flow
Speaker 2: states could be these really nebulous, amorphous terms, but once
Speaker 2: they've been broken down into repeatable, measurable parts, you can
Speaker 2: actually apply this stuff to your life and to any
Speaker 2: number of things that you care about. While Stephen focuses
Speaker 2: a lot on what some people call like extreme sports,
Speaker 2: extreme sports and in quotation marks here, especially in his
Speaker 2: latest book, In Our Country, the principles of peak performance
Speaker 2: don't just belong to superhero bodies and superhero minds. Aging
Speaker 2: bodies maybe can't access flow states as rigorously or through
Speaker 2: the same rigorous means as younger bodies. Injured and ill
Speaker 2: bodies don't really quite match up to that extreme sport
Speaker 2: example that is often connected to peak performance ideals. But
Speaker 2: as you'll hear in this show, peak performance belongs to everybody.
Speaker 2: So whether you're interested in exploring the limits of the
Speaker 2: human body, or you're trying on a creative practice, or
Speaker 2: you're curious about the places in your life where you
Speaker 2: feel hell back internally or externally, this stuff is still
Speaker 2: really helpful. The practice of peak performance is basically reaching
Speaker 2: for that flow state, reaching for the place where things
Speaker 2: feel like they have a lot more ease to them,
Speaker 2: where you're not fighting so much against things like self
Speaker 2: limiting beliefs or those sneaky little thought processes that keep
Speaker 2: you from Okay, sorry to say this, those sneaky little
Speaker 2: thought processes that keep you from living your best life.
Speaker 2: I know, but it's kind of accurate though, right, Like,
Speaker 2: we all have these internal narratives, sometimes conscious, sometimes not conscious,
Speaker 2: that cut us off when we are reaching for the
Speaker 2: things that we most want. Yeah, okay, now there is
Speaker 2: something else in this episode that might surprise you. All
Speaker 2: of this work on peak performance, those million best selling books,
Speaker 2: all that stuff, Stephen applies all of that knowledge to
Speaker 2: his work in dog rescue. His wife Joy run a
Speaker 2: rescue organization focusing on dogs in need of hospice care.
Speaker 2: So not only do we talk about flow states in
Speaker 2: an aging body, we also get into grief, gratitude, resilience,
Speaker 2: and the humbling nature of starting each day by picking
Speaker 2: up mountains of dog poop. This episode is a fast
Speaker 2: and furious ride through neurobiologies, sports bodies, wildfires, performance, negative mindsets,
Speaker 2: and caring for the world you're in. It's a lot.
Speaker 2: I'm curious to hear how the principles of peak performance
Speaker 2: apply to your life. Once you've listened to this episode,
Speaker 2: where do you feel that flow or if flow feels
Speaker 2: like it's missing, where do you long for it? Leave
Speaker 2: me a note on social or pop over to leave
Speaker 2: a review of this particular episode and let me know
Speaker 2: all right. On today's conversation with best selling author and
Speaker 2: dog caregiver Stephen Kotler, Steven, I am so glad to
Speaker 2: have you here with me today. We've already been like
Speaker 2: chatting about cool stuff before we got rolling. But officially, Hi,
Speaker 2: why I'm so glad you're here here absolutely Okay. There's
Speaker 2: a lot of territory that I want to get into today,
Speaker 2: but I want to start with just a couple of
Speaker 2: foundational terms. I defined a whole bunch of stuff in
Speaker 2: the introduction, But can you give me just the little
Speaker 2: SoundBite mini definition on flow and flow states, because we're
Speaker 2: going to talk about that a bunch perfect.
Speaker 1: Place to start. Low has a scientific definition, not very useful,
Speaker 1: but it has one which is where we're going to start,
Speaker 1: which is an optmalistic consciousness, where we feel our best
Speaker 1: and we perform our best. More specifically, it's any of
Speaker 1: those moments of rapt attention and total absorption. We get
Speaker 1: so focused on the task, hands so focus on what
Speaker 1: you're doing that everything else just starts to melt away
Speaker 1: and disappear. Action awareness are going to merge your sense
Speaker 1: of self self consciousness, The voice in your head, the
Speaker 1: inner critic gets really quiet, Time passes strangely, it slows down,
Speaker 1: you get a freeze firm effectment and it's been in
Speaker 1: a car crash. Much more frequently, we just get so
Speaker 1: sucked into what we're doing that five hours go by
Speaker 1: and what feels like five minutes, and throughout all aspects
Speaker 1: of performance, both mental and physical, go through the roof.
Speaker 1: So that is a rough definition of flow. To take
Speaker 1: it one step further, when psychologists define flow, it's an
Speaker 1: altered state of consciousness with six core phenomenal logical characteristics.
Speaker 1: Phenomenal loogical is a big fancy word that says, this
Speaker 1: is how the experience makes you feel. And I just
Speaker 1: listed a bunch of them. So complete concentration on the
Speaker 1: task of hand, the merger of action, awareness, the vanishing
Speaker 1: to sell time, dilation, a sense of control which is
Speaker 1: what performance feels like on the inside, and euphoria. So
Speaker 1: when we measure flow, we measure I'll do those characteristics
Speaker 1: show up how much how little kiss? Flow is a spectrum.
Speaker 1: It's micro flow to macro flow. So when those six
Speaker 1: show up in the dial that one or two you
Speaker 1: go to work, you get sit down right and mail
Speaker 1: of your boss and it's so sucked in that an
Speaker 1: hour goes by and you've written an essay. That's microflow.
Speaker 1: Macroflow is when all those show up and they're turned
Speaker 1: up to eleven. Often feels like a mystical spiritual experience
Speaker 1: when that happens.
Speaker 2: I love that distinction because as you were talking about that,
Speaker 2: I was like, how is flow different from like the
Speaker 2: tunnel vision hyper focus of add which is like, I
Speaker 2: just spent sixteen hours composing this email that no one
Speaker 2: cares about. So I like that distinction or that maybe
Speaker 2: that continuum.
Speaker 1: Well, the other thing is flow is peak performance. It
Speaker 1: tends to be useful. Right, you can get sucked in
Speaker 1: tent hand, it's just as easily in a flow state
Speaker 1: you can. And when I train writers, for example, out
Speaker 1: to plot discipline is what we call it, it becomes
Speaker 1: like have an outline, stick to your outline because, especially
Speaker 1: if you're in flow, tangents are delicious. Details are delicious,
Speaker 1: and you can you can break something as much as
Speaker 1: you can. You can make it flows you're not called careful.
Speaker 2: I like that. I like that idea of the structure
Speaker 2: within which you can float around in your flow, that
Speaker 2: tangents have a structured.
Speaker 1: Limits are liberating, and it's especially true inside a flow.
Speaker 2: I love that limits are liberating. I love that you
Speaker 2: said that because one of the things that I want
Speaker 2: to talk with you about today, like your your new
Speaker 2: book is about performance aging and all of these sort
Speaker 2: of I know you don't mean it like this, but
Speaker 2: like these glorious ideals of what's possible in the human
Speaker 2: body and the human mind and apply these principles and
Speaker 2: everything is going to be awesome. And that is a
Speaker 2: lot of what you talk about on one hand, and
Speaker 2: then when you sort of dig beneath the surface of
Speaker 2: that and you look at also the other things that
Speaker 2: you've done in your life, which we're definitely going to
Speaker 2: get into. But like limitation is part of this, being
Speaker 2: able to explore what's possible within limitation is sort of flow.
Speaker 1: Is a hardware for people performance because we can all
Speaker 1: get into flow. In fact, most mammals can get into flow.
Speaker 1: So pea performance is a part of it. It's our birthright.
Speaker 1: That said, at any moment of any day, we are
Speaker 1: all facing limits and challenges and like it doesn't that
Speaker 1: that stuff. They may change, some people may have it
Speaker 1: worse today than others, but it's hard here. It's hard
Speaker 1: for everyone, and there's always challenges and opportunities, right, and
Speaker 1: flow can happen despite that, right, Like, that's the really
Speaker 1: cool thing about flow is it shows up in everyone everywhere,
Speaker 1: provided certain initial conditions are met and it doesn't change
Speaker 1: over time. This is one of the things that we
Speaker 1: know about flow. This is some of the last work
Speaker 1: the godfather flow psychology is me how Chick sent me high.
Speaker 1: He was a psychologist the University of Chicago for a
Speaker 1: long time and then moved to H. Drucker in the
Speaker 1: in Clermont and his last study but the best way
Speaker 1: during COVID, his very last study was on flow promise
Speaker 1: in the second half of our life? You want to
Speaker 1: know do we crave flow up until the end? And
Speaker 1: what he discovered is that we crave flow up until
Speaker 1: our body is deteriorate to the point that we can't
Speaker 1: access flow the way we want to. So a lot
Speaker 1: of people performance agent work is one how do we
Speaker 1: continue to access flow lad in life? And two how
Speaker 1: do we protect against phys the physical decline? To protect
Speaker 1: that as well?
Speaker 2: Is that the teacher that you said, you called him
Speaker 2: up and he said, as you age, have as many
Speaker 2: gateways into flow as possible.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he was the last conversation I had with Mike.
Speaker 1: You always asked me to call him Mike, and yeah,
Speaker 1: I called him to ask him a question about the
Speaker 1: role action sports had played in his life and his career,
Speaker 1: because there's all this, a whole bunch of anecdotal data
Speaker 1: that he was a much more serious. Everybody knows he
Speaker 1: was a rock climber because he did work on rock climbing,
Speaker 1: but there was a lot of anecdote the adda that
Speaker 1: like he was a lot more serious about it than
Speaker 1: he'd ever let on. And I'd called him to ask
Speaker 1: him about it and the role flow played in his life,
Speaker 1: and the role action sports played, and specifically climbing the mountaineering,
Speaker 1: and he paused for a really long time. The two
Speaker 1: minutes went by, and I was like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: did I offend him? What did I do? And finally says, Stephen,
Speaker 1: you got to be careful. And I had no idea.
Speaker 1: What was tell you what? I thought he had lost
Speaker 1: the plot. I was like, oh my god, it's like
Speaker 1: write what's going on? And I said, what do you mean, Mike?
Speaker 1: He said, well, you got to be careful. You do
Speaker 1: something your entire life or flow and you get to
Speaker 1: my age and forget about climbing rocks. Some days I
Speaker 1: can't get out of bed. Have a backup plan. You
Speaker 1: got to be careful. And I had been working in
Speaker 1: and around peak performance aging on and for twenty years,
Speaker 1: because there's like nine different things that fold into people
Speaker 1: informt aging, and I've been working in all of those
Speaker 1: fields for literally twenty years, but it didn't come together
Speaker 1: into it like a once. Mike said that that was
Speaker 1: sort of the quest that started in our country and
Speaker 1: led to the quest that was that underled that book.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's something in there about how do you globalize
Speaker 2: so much of the so much of sort of the
Speaker 2: top level SoundBite work of both flow and peak performance
Speaker 2: and all of these things. Like the poster child of
Speaker 2: that is like all of these action sports and all
Speaker 2: of this really physical stuff. And I love that in
Speaker 2: our country. Obviously your vehicle is park skiing, which is
Speaker 2: a very physical, physically demanding action sport. But the question
Speaker 2: is how do I take stock of the reality of
Speaker 2: what is. I don't have the body of a twenty
Speaker 2: year old anymore. There are other things that draw me.
Speaker 2: There are other things that pull me. Is what I've
Speaker 2: believed in for so long? How does it apply to
Speaker 2: who I am now and what I know about myself now.
Speaker 2: It's like that looking for the third option between what
Speaker 2: you call the basically like the mindset of like what
Speaker 2: did you call it? The mindset of aging is the
Speaker 2: slow long rock, the long slow rot, or the opposite
Speaker 2: end of that or the you know, the flip side
Speaker 2: of that is like Nanna na. The body is an illusion.
Speaker 2: Aging is an illusion. Limits are an illusion, just like
Speaker 2: believe in yourself and you can do it. Like That's
Speaker 2: my problem very often with positive psychology is that it
Speaker 2: bypasses the reality of limitation and gives people an unattainable ideal.
Speaker 2: And what I like about, especially in our country and
Speaker 2: some of the other things I've read of yours, is
Speaker 2: there's a third option here where we can acknowledge limitation
Speaker 2: in whatever form that takes and challenge ourselves to wonder
Speaker 2: about what else is possible. And then in our country
Speaker 2: you have like sort of operationalized how do how do
Speaker 2: we wonder about what's possible and push ourselves.
Speaker 1: Let's go back to so that you were talking about,
Speaker 1: which is the long slow rot theory. This is the
Speaker 1: traditional theory of aging, right, and it sort of gets
Speaker 1: set up before it makes an off headed common in
Speaker 1: nineteen ohse seventy puts it a common in psychologics is
Speaker 1: in psychotherapy. His book psychotherapy, and that's sort of where
Speaker 1: it really gets formalized. And by like nineteen ninety five,
Speaker 1: all we've done is proof, right right, right, We've got
Speaker 1: we've figured out that all of our mental skills decline
Speaker 1: over time, all our physical skills decline over time, and
Speaker 1: there's nothing we can do to the south the slide,
Speaker 1: and this is the this is wad.
Speaker 2: Of such a winker. Can we just pause and say
Speaker 2: that Freud is such a jerk anyway?
Speaker 1: A lot right there? Also like he did. There's the
Speaker 1: thing you have to appreciate about Freud and the thing
Speaker 1: that nobody gives them credit for it. And you have
Speaker 1: to understand that the unconscious wasn't a thing. We grew
Speaker 1: up in a world knowing there was an unconscious, right,
Speaker 1: Imagine having to discover the unconscious. Imagine having to in
Speaker 1: like we're coming out of the Enlightenment. Rational materialism is
Speaker 1: the pinnacle of thinking, and suddenly you're going to prove
Speaker 1: and there's a there's a there's an amazing book called
Speaker 1: The History of the Unconscious where it's literally a three
Speaker 1: hundred year road to get to Freud. That's amazing. All right,
Speaker 1: I'll be set this point. So the LONGSLW route theory
Speaker 1: is the traditional idea of aging. Starting in ninety ninety
Speaker 1: five ninety six, data starts showing up that says, hey,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, this is wrong, really wrong. Where we
Speaker 1: are today, thirty years after the data started showing up
Speaker 1: is we now know that every single thing we used
Speaker 1: to think declined over time. They're all used to lose
Speaker 1: its skills. So if you never stop using these skills,
Speaker 1: you can hang on to them and even advance them
Speaker 1: far later in life than any thought possible. Now, you
Speaker 1: made a statement like I'm not twenty years old anymore.
Speaker 1: I'm sixty years old, and the twoth of the matter
Speaker 1: is are fifty years old. That's not really true, Like
Speaker 1: it's just it's like there are there are certain things
Speaker 1: that have changed over time, for sure, But for most
Speaker 1: of the skills that you were to proquire for most
Speaker 1: anything you want to do, with the possible exception of
Speaker 1: being like top one percent athletically in a handful of sports,
Speaker 1: you can pretty much do it. So there is there's
Speaker 1: there's no upper cap to that. But again your point
Speaker 1: was also true. So this is in peak performances a
Speaker 1: very well known, well established difference between affirmations and gratitude.
Speaker 1: Gratitude works. Affirmations fail, and the question you have to
Speaker 1: ask is why, And the reason is because we can
Speaker 1: come with great both built in bullshit detectors and an affirmation.
Speaker 1: If you sit there and stare in the mirror and go,
Speaker 1: I am a millionaire. I am a millionaire. I'm a millionaire,
Speaker 1: and your brain is looking back at you and going, dude,
Speaker 1: you work at Walmart. What the fuck right? That's demotivating.
Speaker 1: That's actually you're going in the other direction. Gratitude. I
Speaker 1: am so happy and grateful. I'm healthy today, I'm so
Speaker 1: happy and grateful. My legs, I'm so happy and grateful
Speaker 1: it sunny outs. Those are all real things. And what
Speaker 1: happens is your brain goes, oh, look, things are better
Speaker 1: than I thought, and it has a real impact in
Speaker 1: the brain. To actually put it specifically, we've all heard
Speaker 1: about the negativity bias. What the negativity bias works out
Speaker 1: to impracticality is we take in on average, nine negative
Speaker 1: bits of information for every positive bit that comes through,
Speaker 1: and conscious awareness mind you, is about one hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty bits of information. So if the ratio is nine
Speaker 1: to one, and we're only going to get about one
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty bits that we can focus on at once.
Speaker 1: That's a problem. And when you start doing gratitude and
Speaker 1: your brain starts going, oh wow, there's good stuff in
Speaker 1: my life. Maybe I don't have to be so panic.
Speaker 1: The ratio shifts about five to one, six to one,
Speaker 1: so it's better, right, That's what happens in the brain
Speaker 1: during gratitude. So there's something to be said for You
Speaker 1: can't pretend that the challenges aren't challenges, that they're not there, right,
Speaker 1: You can't do that. That's going to work against you.
Speaker 1: But nor can you use any of them. There's no
Speaker 1: there are no excuses, parid, there's no viable excuses. You're
Speaker 1: the only person standing in your way, and there are
Speaker 1: very few dreams that you can't chase down.
Speaker 2: I love that you just made gratitude, dude, not the endpoint,
Speaker 2: but a tool in my brain filter. Here is like
Speaker 2: you just made gratitude a tool for curiosity. This is
Speaker 2: like the way that I imagine andidepressant's work. It's like it
Speaker 2: brings your brain to a point where you are able
Speaker 2: to make decisions right. It doesn't make everything sunny. It
Speaker 2: makes your brain come to a place where you have
Speaker 2: more agency and you have more more choices. And that's
Speaker 2: how I just charge you describe gratitude. Is it like
Speaker 2: it's a way to sort of come back to negativity tool?
Speaker 2: And yeah, it's a tool. Can.
Speaker 1: We do a lot of work with Glenn Fox as
Speaker 1: a nuroscientists at USC invice. When I say we, I
Speaker 1: mean the Flow Research Collective, right, there's about one hundred
Speaker 1: people who I get to work with. I lead a
Speaker 1: huge research team and one of the people we work
Speaker 1: with is Glenn Fox, who's a nuroscientists at USC in
Speaker 1: the world's leading expert on gratitude. We did a bunch
Speaker 1: of work either we discovered that people who have regular
Speaker 1: gratitude practices for reasons that have to do with how
Speaker 1: anxiety blocks flow more flow prone. So if you want
Speaker 1: more flow in your life, there's all full toolkit. One
Speaker 1: of the tools you can reach for is gratitude. We're
Speaker 1: actually doing a study. We're going to do it last
Speaker 1: ski season and probably going to do it early next
Speaker 1: ski snes and we're trying to figure out if you
Speaker 1: can use gratitude as an active intervention in a crisis
Speaker 1: situation as a way of calming down the nervous system
Speaker 1: versus we know over time it works, but in acute
Speaker 1: situations there are tools, there are other tools that work better.
Speaker 1: We believe that we don't know, and nobody's done direct comparisons.
Speaker 2: We're trying to do, you know, if they're looking at
Speaker 2: where the gratitude comes from, whether it is a person
Speaker 2: in crisis choosing to put their mind there, or it's
Speaker 2: an intervention from someone else.
Speaker 1: We're going to do it self directed. Thank you, We're
Speaker 1: going to do self directed.
Speaker 2: I don't who, because like, gratitude is one of those
Speaker 2: things that gets sort of weaponized to people like you
Speaker 2: just have to be grateful, like stop doing this, like,
Speaker 2: don't think like that, be grateful. So in my field, right,
Speaker 2: I work in grief, and grief related to death was
Speaker 2: where I started. And for a lot of people, like
Speaker 2: their kid dies or their partner was killed in an accident,
Speaker 2: and somebody's like, be grateful that you still have blah
Speaker 2: blah blah. So this sort of external applied gratitude is
Speaker 2: so not helpful. But I love I mean, I'm a
Speaker 2: big fan of agency and sovereignty, right, so it's really
Speaker 2: interesting to look at gratitude as a tool for when
Speaker 2: your nervous system is starting to spin out from the
Speaker 2: reality of the event, right, and what does that do
Speaker 2: for you?
Speaker 1: Pause? Psychology has a number of high performance basics. This
Speaker 1: is not flow. This is what you have to do
Speaker 1: to get the body ready to even produce flow. And
Speaker 1: you've got to have a regular anti anxiety practice and
Speaker 1: the three most effective ones are gratitude, mindfulness, and exercise
Speaker 1: and mindfulness or stress reduction. Right, breathwork, it's eleven minutes.
Speaker 1: You need eleven minutes of focus meditation of breath work
Speaker 1: or do a loven kindness script or take your pick,
Speaker 1: but it's not very long. Graduate practice takes about five
Speaker 1: minutes right down through things are grateful for it turn
Speaker 1: one into a paragraph, blah blah. You really just want
Speaker 1: to feel the gratitude of your system. That's what you're
Speaker 1: going for. Or eleven minutes or twenty to forty minutes
Speaker 1: worth of exercise. And what we tell people is under
Speaker 1: normal circumstances, if you're having an you know, if you're
Speaker 1: just just a normal day, do one every day at
Speaker 1: a tune your nervous system because anxiety will block flow.
Speaker 1: But if you're stressed, do two. And if you're super stressed.
Speaker 1: Do three and you know when I'm grieving, and we
Speaker 1: run a dog sanctuary and I do hospice care, and
Speaker 1: we love all the dogs in our care greatly. But
Speaker 1: the downside of doing lostice care is they die. That's
Speaker 1: the job, and so there's a lot of grief. And
Speaker 1: I have come to believe that extreme grief is a
Speaker 1: three day cycle, at least in me, that like the madness,
Speaker 1: the like I can't be trusted to make good decisions
Speaker 1: portion of it. Most there are occasions where it lasts
Speaker 1: a lot longer most of the time. And you should
Speaker 1: know that when I say we do hospice care and
Speaker 1: special needs care, my wife and I do this. We've
Speaker 1: had over seven hundred dogs have passed through our facility.
Speaker 1: You know. One of the things about death and grief,
Speaker 1: and people ask me about this. This was also the
Speaker 1: pe performance work, right. We just came out of hospice
Speaker 1: care especial needs anti aging medicine, so this is where
Speaker 1: some of that started. But when you've experienced that much
Speaker 1: death and death of people who you truly love, I
Speaker 1: know terrible things about death and grief, things that know
Speaker 1: human beings should know because you don't. Nobody goes through
Speaker 1: grieving seven hundred times if they're living a normal life.
Speaker 1: That's not like a exactly same thing to do. So
Speaker 1: you learn really wild ass things about grief, at least
Speaker 1: I have. And for me, one of the things I've
Speaker 1: learned is a three day cycle of madness. And during
Speaker 1: those three days, I end up doing a lot of
Speaker 1: I'll do a lot of meditation, and I'll usually go
Speaker 1: for a lot of walks. I'll sometimes I'll force myself
Speaker 1: to go to the gym, but like, weeping at the
Speaker 1: gym is never a great look. It tends to freak
Speaker 1: people out, so sometimes all avoid that. But like after
Speaker 1: those three days are up, where I sort of give
Speaker 1: myself a pass on whatever every day, then it's gratitude.
Speaker 1: Like every day I'll make sure I hit all three
Speaker 1: of those like during that recovery period, just to keep
Speaker 1: my nervous system in check.
Speaker 2: It's interesting, like I can hear in my head people
Speaker 2: listening and saying, like three days, what I hear you
Speaker 2: saying is you have become so accustomed to having your
Speaker 2: heart broken, You have become so accustomed to goodbyes that
Speaker 2: you know what you go through and familiarity gives you
Speaker 2: a chance to apply skills, apply tools, to take care
Speaker 2: of yourself, to know yourself in the ways that you
Speaker 2: understand yourself. It's not I got three days and then
Speaker 2: I nothing bugs me anymore.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, no, no, I mean no, no, I just mean
Speaker 1: when I say three days, what I mean is I
Speaker 1: should not have havy machinery. I should not sign legal documents.
Speaker 2: Like impact zone.
Speaker 1: I should be really careful because I'm not. Like grief,
Speaker 1: as you know, was treat was considered a mental illness
Speaker 1: into the twentieth century, right, so like there's a reason
Speaker 1: it still is. Yeah, I mean, and I think it'd
Speaker 1: probably still right, So there's a reason. So when I say,
Speaker 1: I mean no, the griefing process lasts as as long
Speaker 1: as it lasts. And I mean like there are certain
Speaker 1: certain dogs, like certain friends of mine who pass where
Speaker 1: I mean, I can still like if I think I
Speaker 1: see that, I can like burst of tears at any moment, right,
Speaker 1: Like some of this stuff never goes away, and you
Speaker 1: know that. But I'm literally like three days is my
Speaker 1: rule of like when I can't be trusted decision making wise, right,
Speaker 1: I've also seen literally like early on in this work.
Speaker 1: I write about this in Small Furry the first time
Speaker 1: we had a string of dogs that I was like
Speaker 1: aid in a row. I literally lost my mind. I
Speaker 1: mean like not figurrely lost my mind. I was hit
Speaker 1: crazy doing nonsense of like grief can really drive you
Speaker 1: over the edge. It's scary because you years olf doing
Speaker 1: stuff and you're like, I know this is not sane,
Speaker 1: and I'm doing it. Anyways.
Speaker 2: In Small Furry Prayers, you you talk about sort of
Speaker 2: an ex multiple crises overlapping, right, like an existential crisis,
Speaker 2: a financial crisis. You had lime at the time right
Speaker 2: now recovering, had lupus, recovering from lime, so like all
Speaker 2: of these things dissolving.
Speaker 1: So I've always said this, and I say this is
Speaker 1: my in West of Jesus. I am a person who
Speaker 1: will follow an idea right off the edge of the world.
Speaker 1: I absolutely will. I get obsessed, I stay obsessed will.
Speaker 1: And my wife and I from the moment we met,
Speaker 1: would have this argument. Now she was a writer and
Speaker 1: she did dog rescue work, and we would argue about
Speaker 1: art versus altruism, which is in the book which is
Speaker 1: in Small for her right, And it was literally like
Speaker 1: we're trying to figure out what is the best way
Speaker 1: to live in the world, What is the best way
Speaker 1: to do The most good in the world is art.
Speaker 1: So many people believe in art, so many people believe
Speaker 1: in altruism and enjoy. My wife thought art was bullshit,
Speaker 1: totabull shit. She she didn't like inspire people to change. Well,
Speaker 1: it's crap. The only thing that matters is frontline altruism.
Speaker 1: Has on altruism, and I had had the art experience,
Speaker 1: but I had not. I had done some frontline altruism work,
Speaker 1: and I had run a different nonprofit. It wasn't like
Speaker 1: I was new to this stuff, but not on the
Speaker 1: day to day grind that is dog hospice work. So
Speaker 1: I like, I said yes to settle an argument, to
Speaker 1: win a bet. I thought I was right, and I
Speaker 1: couldn't prove it. I couldn't prove it wrong until I
Speaker 1: had had done both her satisfaction and then my opinion counted.
Speaker 1: So like, let's not kid ourselves. I got in for
Speaker 1: a lot of reasons, but I really wanted to win
Speaker 1: an argument.
Speaker 2: Wait, so who won?
Speaker 1: So it's interesting because my books have had a pretty
Speaker 1: big impact, like in terms of art, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean? Like in terms of its ability to impact
Speaker 1: change from the world. So I do believe that you
Speaker 1: can really make a difference with art because I've seen it.
Speaker 1: But I also get Joy's point because has on altruism
Speaker 1: is a very difficult, trying strenuous, you know, it's hard,
Speaker 1: and art is also hard and very and can be
Speaker 1: extremely painful. So I don't know if one, but I
Speaker 1: get Joy's point that there's something to be said for
Speaker 1: frontline altruism and if you haven't done it, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean. Like, I go into rooms with people
Speaker 1: millennials who love to talk about their purpose. Him my
Speaker 1: name Sandra, and my purpose is blah blah blah, and
Speaker 1: I want to punch Sondra in the face. And the
Speaker 1: reason I do is because it's like, I know, you're not, like,
Speaker 1: spend twenty years on the front lines of something and
Speaker 1: then come to activing and talking about your purpose, right,
Speaker 1: and then I'm going to have that discussion with you.
Speaker 1: But until that point, you're just an airhead. As far
Speaker 1: as I'm concerned that.
Speaker 2: There hasn't been enough time to live in the reality
Speaker 2: of the reality of the front line.
Speaker 1: I don't like virtue signaling, like at all even though
Speaker 1: the dog work I don't talk about it a whole lot.
Speaker 1: It's just what we do, right, I talk about all
Speaker 1: the other stuff. One of the things I love about
Speaker 1: the dog work, though, is because I start most of
Speaker 1: my days by stepping in or cleaning up dog shit,
Speaker 1: because that's what happens if you do hospice care. Right.
Speaker 1: What I love about it, that is the humility is
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter how big I get in my head
Speaker 1: or my life, Like, when your days starts like stepping
Speaker 1: it and clearing up dog shit, it brings you back
Speaker 1: to the planet really fast, which I like a lot.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it would be so easy in a way too,
Speaker 2: with all of the peak performance stuff in flow and
Speaker 2: all of this really exciting stuff about mindset jails and
Speaker 2: how we get out of mindset, like all of this
Speaker 2: really cool stuff, it would be easy to sort of
Speaker 2: float off into the ethers and not be grounded in
Speaker 2: the visceral embodied world. And literally, as you said, stepping
Speaker 2: in dog shit like it would have to keep you
Speaker 2: in some ways rooted in the visceral world, which to
Speaker 2: me makes all of the science beautiful and useful, right,
Speaker 2: because if it's not rooted in the visceral shit of
Speaker 2: the world. Then it's just a cerebral exercise.
Speaker 1: There is a lot of super cerebral exercises that I
Speaker 1: think are really worth a dam Like they really are.
Speaker 1: They're very, very useful. But ultimately, and I don't know
Speaker 1: if this is everybody, but ultimately I'm wired sort of
Speaker 1: like it sounds like you, I want things practical and useful. Yes,
Speaker 1: So at the Flow Research Collective, what I've spent my
Speaker 1: life studying in the neurobiology peak performance. And the reason
Speaker 1: I like neurobiology so much is if you want to
Speaker 1: make stuff reliable and repeatable and work for everyone, neurobiology
Speaker 1: is your friend. Personality. Psychology is squishy, it's subjective, it's
Speaker 1: different in everyone, and you can't you can't coach for it.
Speaker 1: You can't train from it or teach from it because
Speaker 1: it doesn't work. It's ineffective. But when you get to
Speaker 1: the level of neurobiology, it shared, It shaped evolutions the
Speaker 1: same in all humans. So I like that because neurobiology
Speaker 1: turns out to be a much more practical interface. In fact,
Speaker 1: if you go back to the nineties, so miactually sent
Speaker 1: me high we've mentioned before, teamed up with a brilliant
Speaker 1: Australian sports psychologist Susan Jackson, and they wrote a book
Speaker 1: together called Flow in Sports where they tried to use
Speaker 1: what we knew about flow psychologically to train it. And
Speaker 1: you can read the book. They're lousy at it. The
Speaker 1: success rate is mediocre at best, maybe sometimes never on Thursdays,
Speaker 1: occasionally on Tuesdays Wednesdays are out like it's just it's absurd.
Speaker 1: And yet so with the collective we use the flow
Speaker 1: short scale, which is literally the same measurement tool that
Speaker 1: Susan Jackson and might develop for this book. So we
Speaker 1: use her same measurement tool and we train. We measure
Speaker 1: pope pre and post in our trainings and on average
Speaker 1: we see a seventy to eighty percent boost in flow.
Speaker 1: Our confu is good. We know we're doing or good
Speaker 1: at it. But that's really about the biology. That's everybody's
Speaker 1: wired for this, and if you can get your biology
Speaker 1: working for you rather than against you, this is what's possible.
Speaker 1: But you want to come in neurobiologically. You don't want
Speaker 1: to come in psychologically because it's not practical.
Speaker 2: I like that you said called it squishy, right, Like
Speaker 2: it's just it's just it's not practical. It's not practical,
Speaker 2: and it's like it's there's so much room for interpretation
Speaker 2: and misapplication and all of those things, and I cannot
Speaker 2: stand it.
Speaker 1: Coaches bug the shit out of me sometimes for this
Speaker 1: because they figure they're usually people who figured out what
Speaker 1: worked for them, and then they're trying to teach to
Speaker 1: other people and it's disaster just as right, And it's
Speaker 1: I mean, and this is basically I mean. This is
Speaker 1: like literally things like where are you the introversion to
Speaker 1: extroversion scale? What are your risk tolerances? Those are individually different,
Speaker 1: and how you answer those questions changes everything about how
Speaker 1: I would train you in peak performance. Right.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, It's one of my favorite things about the way
Speaker 2: that you frame the work is it is a container
Speaker 2: for individuality and curiosity. Right, it's not drink this thing,
Speaker 2: do these supple Like, it's not that it's not prescriptive.
Speaker 2: It is a framework that encourages you to be curious
Speaker 2: about who you are and how you work and what
Speaker 2: is possible for me. Like I love that we.
Speaker 1: Could literally spend the rest of our time together drilling
Speaker 1: down and what these two are really mean. But let's
Speaker 1: not do that. Perhaps But let me just give you
Speaker 1: peak performance aging in a sentence, and I want to
Speaker 1: point out a couple things about the sentence after it.
Speaker 1: So you want to rock to you drop, You want
Speaker 1: to regularly engage in challenging, creative and social activities that
Speaker 1: demand dynamic, deliberate play. And dynamic literally means requiring strength, stamina, agility, flexibility,
Speaker 1: and balance. When you put them all five together, that's
Speaker 1: dynamic dynamic deliver play in novel outdoor environments. That's peak
Speaker 1: performance aging in a single sentence. And that's sixty years
Speaker 1: of research, hundreds if not thousands of studies, scientists global,
Speaker 1: very well established. Now, what was not on that list?
Speaker 1: When I talked to most people at anti aging, what
Speaker 1: the first thing they start talking about is supplements, pharmaceuticals, ice, bass,
Speaker 1: et cetera, biohacking. And one usually when pharmaceuticals are involved,
Speaker 1: somebody's making a buck, so it's hard to get unbiased anything.
Speaker 1: The thing I want to point to you out out
Speaker 1: about that sentence is none of those terms, those are
Speaker 1: not substances. That's not biohacking there, it's all psychological tools
Speaker 1: that have neurobiological impact. And there's sixty years of data
Speaker 1: on this. I always tell people of you talk to
Speaker 1: them about like the stuff going on in the biohacking community,
Speaker 1: and you know this supplement and that's I'm like, guys
Speaker 1: that you're at the cutting edge of peak performance aging.
Speaker 1: And historically in regenitor medicine, what we've learned from and
Speaker 1: this is another field I've worked in and around for
Speaker 1: thirty years, ten percent of regender medicine tends to hold
Speaker 1: out and be true over time, and the other ninety
Speaker 1: percent gets thrown out. So, like all the cutting edge
Speaker 1: stuff that people are doing, historically, what we know is
Speaker 1: ten percent of it's real and ninety percent of it's fake.
Speaker 1: Everything I just listed, there's sixty years of data saying
Speaker 1: this is really, really real and some of it like,
Speaker 1: let me give you a simple example, a positive mindset
Speaker 1: towards agent. I am excited about the second half of
Speaker 1: my life that I think is filled with interesting possibilities.
Speaker 1: We have sixty years of data showing that a positive
Speaker 1: mind towards agent will add eight years healthy years to
Speaker 1: your life. If you have a negative mindset towards agent
Speaker 1: or inverted, are exposed to negative stereotypes around aging. The
Speaker 1: most common stereotype in the world. This is Becca Leavey's
Speaker 1: work at Yale. She found that by the time you're sixty,
Speaker 1: if you're exposed to negative stereotypes around age young, or
Speaker 1: have a shitty mindset towards aging in your thirties, forties,
Speaker 1: and fifties, by the time you're sixty years old, you
Speaker 1: exhibit thirty percent greater memory decline than people without that mindset.
Speaker 1: So the benefit is eight extra years. The detriment is
Speaker 1: a thirty percent greater memory decline. This is what's this
Speaker 1: is where, this is what's possible. This is what we
Speaker 1: know is possible versus you know, roll the dice on
Speaker 1: a bunch of other stuff. And I'm not saying I
Speaker 1: run all the experiments with all the other stuff I do,
Speaker 1: but it's experimental and I'm just checking it out and
Speaker 1: I'm learning and I'm not expecting anything because I know
Speaker 1: I'm playing on the cutting edge and I'm just data
Speaker 1: gathering and in twenty years maybe i'll have I'll know
Speaker 1: something real, right, But like the stuff like I do
Speaker 1: this for people performance aging, those are different things.
Speaker 2: Before we get back to my conversation with Steve, I
Speaker 2: want to talk with you about peak performance in working
Speaker 2: with grieving people. I mean peak performance here might be
Speaker 2: a stretch, but look, working with grief is hard, and
Speaker 2: the ways we've been trained to do it usually make
Speaker 2: things worse. If you are a therapist or a nurse
Speaker 2: or an educator, or you work in end of life issues,
Speaker 2: looking at you, funeral directors and hospice folks. When you
Speaker 2: work with humans, grief is always in the room, whether
Speaker 2: it is outwardly spoken of or not. If you want
Speaker 2: to know how to be truly helpful to people grieving
Speaker 2: any kind of loss, let me help you. Spots are
Speaker 2: still available in my six month grief Care Intensive training.
Speaker 2: It's designed for people in the healing professions, but you
Speaker 2: don't have to be a therapist to join. This session
Speaker 2: begins on September fourth, twenty twenty three. All of the
Speaker 2: information is that the registration link in the show notes
Speaker 2: to this episode, and you can also find it in
Speaker 2: my Instagram bio at Refuge in Grief. All right, let's
Speaker 2: get back to my conversation with Stephen Cutler. There's so
Speaker 2: much that I want to get into, and we don't
Speaker 2: have time for all of the things, so I'm like
Speaker 2: actively trying to sort through my brain of preferred topics
Speaker 2: to find which one, and I think I want to
Speaker 2: go with. You know, I was listening to you on
Speaker 2: some other podcasts and one of the things that I
Speaker 2: like put in bold in my notes was, you know,
Speaker 2: all of this stuff about strength and stamina and agility
Speaker 2: and balance and flexibility, dynamic movement, all of this stuff,
Speaker 2: like before we even get there. Your two foundations were
Speaker 2: social connection and deliberate play, which I feel like if
Speaker 2: there's a sub thread through a lot of the conversations
Speaker 2: that I've had over the last couple of months, and
Speaker 2: we've talked to Chase Jarvis and we've talked to Chip Conley,
Speaker 2: you know, a couple of people talking about aging and
Speaker 2: for a long time. Right, But there's there is this
Speaker 2: social connection and deliberate play. You would never think that
Speaker 2: play is like something that is scientifically valid and necessary
Speaker 2: for our survival.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: I was talking to Martunde Thurston earlier this season and
Speaker 2: we were talking about how difficult it is to feel
Speaker 2: safe enough to play with other adults. So there's just
Speaker 2: all of this really interesting stuff about social connections, social bonds,
Speaker 2: the willingness to take risks and to be playful together
Speaker 2: and that that really are those are the preconditions to
Speaker 2: flow and performance aging. Am I on there?
Speaker 1: You are? So PEA performance flow is foundation with PEA
Speaker 1: performance aging. Let's do this first and then I'll type
Speaker 1: play yeah, yeah, because it will be easier. Okay. So
Speaker 1: when we say flow is fundamental performance aging, what are
Speaker 1: we talking about? This A couple of things. One, there
Speaker 1: are nine known causes of aging. Biologically, they all have
Speaker 1: one thing in common, which is stress and information. So
Speaker 1: anything that fights stress and information is an anti aging tool.
Speaker 1: When we drop into flow, stresshorns are flushed out of
Speaker 1: our system and replaced by positive, feel good neuro chemistry.
Speaker 1: So anti aging for starters. Two, flow underpins while being
Speaker 1: life satisfaction, mastery, purpose, all these things that really impact
Speaker 1: the quality of our later years. Three, Flow produces a
Speaker 1: sense of mastery because we're always pushing on our skills
Speaker 1: and learning and flow and control. That's one of the
Speaker 1: core characteristics of the flow state. With the phenomenal flow
Speaker 1: is the sense of control. Its peak performance on the inside,
Speaker 1: and when we experience those feelings, it boosts the production
Speaker 1: of T cells, which fight diseases and mental killer cells
Speaker 1: would target tumors and cancer. And other six cells. So
Speaker 1: flow has huge anti aging benefits all tied up in there.
Speaker 1: So getting into flow really matters over time. Play is
Speaker 1: fantastic because there's a lot of built in flow triggers,
Speaker 1: as a lot of stuff that will block flow that
Speaker 1: isn't present in play. One of the biggest things about
Speaker 1: play that's so important from a people from its aging
Speaker 1: standpoint is so if you want to lifelong learning matters
Speaker 1: because if you want to prevent cognito decline Alzheimer's dementia,
Speaker 1: the two things that matter most are mastery and wisdom.
Speaker 1: Both mastering wisdom when we learn new skills. Think of
Speaker 1: wisdom as emotional intelligence written large, and mastery is like
Speaker 1: skills writ large. Right, the bolth of them produce very
Speaker 1: diverse networks across the prefernal cortex that are impervious to
Speaker 1: cogno decline, So this is like backup for the brain,
Speaker 1: and float has to be a signal of mastery. That's
Speaker 1: one of the things the state kind of signifieses, oh,
Speaker 1: I've learned all these skills and now they're coming together
Speaker 1: in this new way. So there's an argument from an
Speaker 1: evolutionary perspective that that's where flow came from. One of
Speaker 1: the reasons is because we needed a signal for mastery.
Speaker 1: All this is sort of besides the point, but learning
Speaker 1: in play, first of all, it's so much easier to learn.
Speaker 1: But second of all, when we learn normally, you get
Speaker 1: a little bit of dopamine and that's about it. When
Speaker 1: we play, you get a little bit of dopamine and
Speaker 1: you get endorphins, so an totally additional feel good neurochemical.
Speaker 1: The more neual chemicals that show up during experience, the
Speaker 1: better chance to move from short term holding into long
Speaker 1: term storage. So you get this huge neurochemical dump when
Speaker 1: we play, and we tend to augment and massively improve learning.
Speaker 1: There's also about eleven different kind of nervous system benefits
Speaker 1: to play and psychological but we could go on and
Speaker 1: on and on and on and on. The most important
Speaker 1: thing about play, and this is the coolest thing, is
Speaker 1: one of the reasons that they don't believe older adults
Speaker 1: can onboard difficult skills like parskiing, right, is because we've
Speaker 1: got a quote unquote a motor learning window. We heard
Speaker 1: about that slam shot at the end of childhood or
Speaker 1: young adulthood. We've all heard this don't become a ballerina.
Speaker 1: If you haven't learned by the time you're eighteen, don't
Speaker 1: become a gymnast, haven't learned by the time mean twenty
Speaker 1: two whatever. But parkskier don't become a parkski if you
Speaker 1: haven't learned by the eight thirty. It's all because this
Speaker 1: motor learning window. And it turns out, like a lot
Speaker 1: of things in people, performance aging, sort of true, sort
Speaker 1: of true, there's a motor learning window. There's certain things
Speaker 1: that do shut down. But as a general what changes
Speaker 1: is not the motor learning window. It's how we learn.
Speaker 1: Kids learned by playing. When you play, there's no self consciousness,
Speaker 1: there's no wrong, there's no shame, there's no blah blah
Speaker 1: blah blah blah, and so a lot of stuff about
Speaker 1: that blocks flow can't show up when you're playing. So
Speaker 1: play tends to produce a lot of flow for all
Speaker 1: those reasons. It tends to amplify learning. And if we
Speaker 1: actually go back to a deliberate play approach to learning,
Speaker 1: we sort of reopen not one hundred percent, but we
Speaker 1: can wedge it open pretty far. Same motor learning window,
Speaker 1: and we get these endorphins to go along with our
Speaker 1: don't mean good chance. The things that happen in play
Speaker 1: work I don't remember for later.
Speaker 2: I love a good scientific explanation of the benefits of play,
Speaker 2: because play is just I think we also get into
Speaker 2: that binary of like the world is too serious to
Speaker 2: be playful, or like the world is frivolous. I don't
Speaker 2: need to care about anything. I'm just going to go play,
Speaker 2: like all these binary, crappy things, right, And so much
Speaker 2: of what you talk about and how you talk about
Speaker 2: it is like there is a vast middle ground here
Speaker 2: that has so much opportunity and so much joy and
Speaker 2: so much goodness. And it's that orientation of play and
Speaker 2: curiosity and finding those places where we get to mess
Speaker 2: around with life and see what's possible, backed up by science.
Speaker 2: So I want to add just one more circle into
Speaker 2: our overlapping ven diagram.
Speaker 1: Here.
Speaker 2: We've been talking a lot about peak performance and flow
Speaker 2: and performance aging and all of these things. We talked
Speaker 2: a little bit about end of life care and hospice
Speaker 2: and dog rescue, one of the favorite things in our
Speaker 2: country for me because of who I am. So towards
Speaker 2: the end of the book book, you write about watching
Speaker 2: the wildfire reach your ski resort in Tahoe, and you
Speaker 2: wrote all of the peak performance training in the world
Speaker 2: couldn't stop me from sobbing like a baby.
Speaker 1: And I'm just reading that and I'm like.
Speaker 2: Okay, we always know that I'm going to cry at
Speaker 2: some point during an episode, but there was so much
Speaker 2: in that for me. A lot of your work sort
Speaker 2: of off off of the books and off of the stage,
Speaker 2: is in dog Hoss Best, but it's also in facing
Speaker 2: the environmental crisis, and I wonder we've brought in three
Speaker 2: big things that for a lot of people like that
Speaker 2: would be the entire focus of one episode. Is like
Speaker 2: just this piece or just this piece, or just this piece.
Speaker 2: You're clearly a person who synthesizes a lot of complexity
Speaker 2: all of the time at rapid speed. But is there
Speaker 2: a through line for you just in those three things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So let me just answer this question very simply.
Speaker 1: I always tell this to people, so people think of
Speaker 1: look at my flow work, and they get I get
Speaker 1: all these crazy comments like, oh my god, you're doing
Speaker 1: such good in the world, and you know, blah blah blah,
Speaker 1: thank you that all that stuff and whatever on it.
Speaker 1: Because I started the flow work it has nothing to
Speaker 1: do with anybody else. It's completely selfish. I want it
Speaker 1: more flow for myself, for my friends, and I like
Speaker 1: the puzzle, like the intellectual puzzle of the neural biology
Speaker 1: of decoding this hard thing. Flow is my altruism is
Speaker 1: about making the world a better place for animals. So
Speaker 1: if you want to through line in my life, I
Speaker 1: want to make the world better place for animals is
Speaker 1: the central through line. I train people and flow. People
Speaker 1: want peak performance. They condu because they want to be
Speaker 1: more productive at work. Fine, I'll take the trade because
Speaker 1: on the other side of flow, empathy increases, ecological awareness increases,
Speaker 1: and cross species altruism increase, and wisdom increase. So you're
Speaker 1: going to have all the peak performance in the world. Right,
Speaker 1: you want to be more productive at work? Most people
Speaker 1: like to God like they want to take my stuff
Speaker 1: and use it to like make better widgets or more
Speaker 1: widgets in the world. And honestly, like I could give
Speaker 1: a fuck, right, Like, if that's what you want to do,
Speaker 1: this okay, cool, I'm not going to stop you, but
Speaker 1: I'm not interested in your widget making ways, that's not
Speaker 1: really my thing. What I want is you're going to
Speaker 1: be more empathetic and altruistic and care more about plants
Speaker 1: and animals and ecosystems on the other side of a
Speaker 1: flow state, and that's what I care about. It's totally like,
Speaker 1: I'm in it for the animals and I'm willing to
Speaker 1: train you and flow because i think it's going to
Speaker 1: make the world a better place for animals. And right
Speaker 1: or wrong, that's sort of how I approach it. And
Speaker 1: it's sneaky, but like I've tried to go at environmental
Speaker 1: stuff head on for thirty years, I've all you do
Speaker 1: is get your ass handed to you, to you. I mean,
Speaker 1: even the dog work. People are like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: you've helped seven hundred dogs. That's so amazing. No, it's not.
Speaker 1: We killed twenty million dogs a year in America. That's
Speaker 1: what we euthanize ten to During COVID it was twenty
Speaker 1: million a year. You know. Good years is down to
Speaker 1: eight million. Me and my wife have given up our lives.
Speaker 1: I literally can count on both hands the times I've
Speaker 1: been out to dinner since I've been married in eighteen
Speaker 1: years because of the dog work. Right, there's enormous about
Speaker 1: the sacrifice, and we haven't done it. We haven't made
Speaker 1: a dent. We didn't even dent October, right, if it's
Speaker 1: twenty million dogs a year and we saved seven hundred,
Speaker 1: Like with twenty years of work, we didn't even we
Speaker 1: didn't even make a dent in a month. So I
Speaker 1: don't know, But you push the rock up hill because
Speaker 1: that's what you do, right, And I've always said this
Speaker 1: like this, this is from last ten of Cyruss where
Speaker 1: I wrote the line, But it's really important to me,
Speaker 1: which is all you can do is your inch, like
Speaker 1: and that's all it's going to be in the end.
Speaker 1: Like even if you think back, think about people who
Speaker 1: you know, you and I grew up Mahatma, Gandhi, Martin
Speaker 1: Luther King, like right, like these were huge legendary people
Speaker 1: who had changed the world in ways, And go ask
Speaker 1: fifty percent of gen Z who Gandhi was, and they
Speaker 1: don't know. They don't know Martin Luther King maybe maybe.
Speaker 2: Maybe they might know the names, they don't know the reality,
Speaker 2: but they.
Speaker 1: Don't know who any of these people are. And my
Speaker 1: point is, like even fifty years later after Gandhi, this
Speaker 1: guy that like literally was worshiped globally and most people
Speaker 1: don't even remember, like all we get is our inch.
Speaker 1: All you can do is your inch. It doesn't like
Speaker 1: maybe maybe there are a handful of people in history
Speaker 1: who did more more than an inch, but like they
Speaker 1: didn't know it ahead of time, and so like I
Speaker 1: tend to be very humble about it, but like, I
Speaker 1: think you got to sort of do the work. So
Speaker 1: I don't know. The animals tend to be at the
Speaker 1: center of most things that I do.
Speaker 2: I love that we not only brought the then diagram together,
Speaker 2: but that the center of that is care for other beings, right,
Speaker 2: empathy and relatedness and respect and stop being assholes. Right.
Speaker 2: Like I feel like that if you had to look
Speaker 2: for the through line of my life, it would be
Speaker 2: like everything I do is to make people stop being
Speaker 2: jerks and making things worse and just be awesome. I
Speaker 2: think that's all of it.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: I end every conversation asking about hope. So I'm going
Speaker 2: to ask you the same question, although I think that
Speaker 2: we just covered it and what you just said, but
Speaker 2: I'll ask you anyway, knowing what you know and living
Speaker 2: what you live, what does hope look like for you
Speaker 2: at this time?
Speaker 1: So this is a whole other kettle of fish because
Speaker 1: a lot of my work has been on technology and
Speaker 1: the ability to use technology solve global grand challenges, which
Speaker 1: I written six books about. And I stand by what
Speaker 1: Peter Dmanus and myself said in Abundance, which is because
Speaker 1: of exponentially accelerating technology, for the first time in history,
Speaker 1: we as human beings have the power to solve all
Speaker 1: our grand challenges. There's nothing we're up at, poverty, energy scarcity,
Speaker 1: water shortages. We can solve these problems we have. We
Speaker 1: actually have the technology at this point. There's a willpower issue.
Speaker 1: But when it comes to like can we actually solve
Speaker 1: the problems that are that are in front of us? Yeah,
Speaker 1: actually we we can. So I'm incredibly hopeful as far
Speaker 1: as like is it within our ability? But I've said
Speaker 1: forever this is also the work on flow that like,
Speaker 1: if we're going to meet these grand challenges, it's going
Speaker 1: to require the largest cooperative effort in history, and that's
Speaker 1: it's all of us working together at our best. So
Speaker 1: in Flow, like never before, we have the tools, but
Speaker 1: like hope is, hope is about the collaborative effort. So
Speaker 1: there's a lot I mean, we know about flow technology
Speaker 1: at this point, like we peak performance at a level
Speaker 1: that's never been available before, and we have the most
Speaker 1: potent technology in the history of the world at our fingertips.
Speaker 1: So these are these are this is amazing, This is astounding.
Speaker 1: There's a ton of reason for hope. But you know,
Speaker 1: as as you pointed out, we've got to get out
Speaker 1: of our own way.
Speaker 2: I love that the answer for hope here is like
Speaker 2: collaborative effort using the tools and technology that are available
Speaker 2: to us, and that peak performance and flow are in
Speaker 2: the service of a collaborative effort towards goodness.
Speaker 1: So I spent my career right all of it like
Speaker 1: if there's a central through line, it's tracking down those
Speaker 1: moments of time and the impossible become possible. Right. That
Speaker 1: really was the center of the work I did, including
Speaker 1: a small farry prayer, because like people work on the
Speaker 1: front lines of animal altruism. It's one of the most
Speaker 1: impossible jobs in the history of the world. Right. The
Speaker 1: most impressive people to me are people like Patricia Wright
Speaker 1: is a good friend of mine. Patricia Wright built a
Speaker 1: Ramanafona National Park in Madagascar, right, And I love pat
Speaker 1: but pat literally like has been like trying to keep
Speaker 1: lemurs alive almost single handedly, you know what I mean?
Speaker 1: In madicaa gard, which is not a particularly same place
Speaker 1: governed by the rule of law or anything else like like,
Speaker 1: and I look at that stuff and I'm like, oh
Speaker 1: my god, you want to talk about an impossible challenge.
Speaker 1: I would go nuts in a month, and she's done
Speaker 1: it for fifty years. So but all of it is
Speaker 1: about like these impossible challenges. And always you always see
Speaker 1: the same thing. It's always people harnessing accelerating technology and
Speaker 1: people extending even capability. When everything impossible comes possible, it's
Speaker 1: those two things coming together always. So you tend to
Speaker 1: see people in flow, but you always tend to there's
Speaker 1: some kind of technological thing underneath there. When you put
Speaker 1: those things together, you tend to see the impossible come possible.
Speaker 1: So they seem very very far apart, but they come
Speaker 1: together in a really cool, hopeful place.
Speaker 2: All Right. I want to be mindful of our time here,
Speaker 2: so I'm going to put so many things in the
Speaker 2: show notes, and hopefully people will go and find you
Speaker 2: and find more. I'm going to put some of your
Speaker 2: environment stuff in the show notes so people can look there.
Speaker 2: But is there somewhere that you want people to go
Speaker 2: looking for you or anything else you want people to
Speaker 2: know before we close up.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm an introvert, so please don't come looking for me.
Speaker 2: Please don't.
Speaker 1: But if you want to find me, outline at Stephen
Speaker 1: Cootler is me on social Stephencoller dot com is my website.
Speaker 1: The Flow Research Collective dot com is the Flow Research Collective.
Speaker 1: So if you're interested in flow anything performance, that's where
Speaker 1: to go. You're interested me Stephencoller dot com. I want
Speaker 1: to learn more about our Country, There's a website for
Speaker 1: the book No Our Country dot com.
Speaker 2: Forest and Fire Initiative.
Speaker 1: The Forest and Fire Initiative is parked sideways because there
Speaker 1: were five things that we wanted to do. Two totally
Speaker 1: fell apart and three got a call like that somebody
Speaker 1: else built the fund while I was trying to start
Speaker 1: at somebody else me do it. We wanted to get
Speaker 1: the Xprize, the Wildfireexprize funded. It got funded, so like
Speaker 1: a bunch of that stuff got done on and moved
Speaker 1: elsewhere and some bit on it. We don't know how.
Speaker 1: I still don't know how to solve it. By the way,
Speaker 1: wildfire is the single most heartbreaking thing I've I thought
Speaker 1: I knew for heartbreaking. No, getting into wildfire was truly
Speaker 1: the one of us start breaking things. Ever, I like
Speaker 1: you and if I were banging your head against a wall.
Speaker 1: So yeah, we we parked the forest Fire Collective on
Speaker 1: the sideline because of the five there was it was
Speaker 1: a five wrong platform. Actually three of the things got done.
Speaker 1: One of them got turned upside down in such a
Speaker 1: significant way that we still haven't been able to come
Speaker 1: back from it. It's a Nevada it was a Nevada
Speaker 1: environmental problem. That like, it's a mess. Stay two for
Speaker 1: that one. That one's parked by the sideline for I'm
Speaker 1: licking my wounds and I'll be back in a year
Speaker 1: and there's something new on that one.
Speaker 2: We will keep watching for the intersection of peak performance
Speaker 2: and environmental work, and I'm sure or it will happen soon. Okay,
Speaker 2: thank you so much for being here. Everybody, stay tuned
Speaker 2: for your questions to carry with you.
Speaker 1: We will be right back.
Speaker 2: Each week. I leave you with some questions to carry
Speaker 2: with you until we meet again. We covered a lot today.
Speaker 2: We jumped from the internal to the external. We went
Speaker 2: from the global view, then back to the intimate view,
Speaker 2: So there is a lot here. This conversation left me
Speaker 2: with some questions about what my own flow states are
Speaker 2: and how in touch with them or out of touch
Speaker 2: with them I am. It also made me wonder what
Speaker 2: peak performance within limits might look like for me at
Speaker 2: this point in my life. I also really like the
Speaker 2: ways to even operationalized his grief. Like he's so familiar
Speaker 2: with the devastation that each new death brings. It's become predictable.
Speaker 2: Not easy, that's not what we were talking about, right,
Speaker 2: but like predictable, and in being predictable, he knows what
Speaker 2: he needs and the people around him know it too.
Speaker 2: These practices of peak performance might seem irrelevant to things
Speaker 2: like grief and loss, but here they are right in
Speaker 2: the mess with everything else. Just because we can't fix
Speaker 2: grief itself doesn't mean there aren't measurable, tangible, effective ways
Speaker 2: to live inside it. I think that's really cool. All right,
Speaker 2: how about you? What stuck with you in this conversation.
Speaker 2: Everybody's going to take something different from the show, But
Speaker 2: I do hope you found something to hold on to.
Speaker 2: If you want to tell me how today's show felt
Speaker 2: for you, or you have thoughts on what we covered
Speaker 2: let me know. Tag at Refuge and Grief on all
Speaker 2: the social platforms so I can hear how this conversation
Speaker 2: affected you. You can also leave a review of this
Speaker 2: show or this episode so I know what you're thinking.
Speaker 1: I love reviews.
Speaker 2: Follow the show at It's okaypot on, TikTok and Refuge
Speaker 2: and Grief every everywhere else. To see video clips from
Speaker 2: the show, use the hashtag It's okay pod on all
Speaker 2: the platforms, so not only I can find you, but
Speaker 2: others can too. None of us are entirely okay, and
Speaker 2: it's time we start talking about that together. Yeah, it's
Speaker 2: okay that you're not okay. You're in good company. That
Speaker 2: is it for this week. Remember to subscribe to the show.
Speaker 2: Leave a review for the show. Not only do I
Speaker 2: love them, but it makes it easier for other people
Speaker 2: to find right, Like if they hear, hey, this is awesome,
Speaker 2: then they're more likely to listen. And the whole point
Speaker 2: here is that we want more people having interesting conversations
Speaker 2: about difficult things together. All right? Coming up next week
Speaker 2: author ten bay Lock on Love, Loss, food, and Hollywood.
Speaker 2: Follow the show on your favorite platforms so you don't
Speaker 2: miss an episode want more on these topics. Look, grief
Speaker 2: is everywhere. As my dad says, daily life is full
Speaker 2: of everyday grief that we don't call grief. Learning how
Speaker 2: to talk about all that without cliches or platitudes or
Speaker 2: simplistic dismissive statements is an important skill for everyone. Get
Speaker 2: help to have those conversations with trainings, professional resources, and
Speaker 2: my best selling book, It's Okay that You're Not Okay,
Speaker 2: plus the guided journal for Grief at Megandivine dot Co.
Speaker 2: It's Okay that You're Not Okay. The podcast is written
Speaker 2: and produced by me Megan Divine. Executive producer is Amy Brown,
Speaker 2: co produced by Elizabeth Fozzio. Logistical and social media support
Speaker 2: from Micah, Post production and editing by Houston Tilley. Our
Speaker 2: intern this season is Hannah Goldman. Music provided by Wavecrush
Speaker 2: and background noise provided by me Vigeting in a slightly
Speaker 2: squeaky chair because I have had too much coffee. I
Speaker 2: will say that very often when I meet somebody with
Speaker 2: a similarly fast brain and multiple different threads that all
Speaker 2: need to overlap, it comes out as disorganized chaos. And
Speaker 2: I don't find that with you. There's a lot in
Speaker 2: there and a lot to track, but sometimes it's just like, wo, I.
Speaker 1: Tend to tie things together if I can, because I can't.
Speaker 1: I've seen that if you don't, it looks like narcissism
Speaker 1: on parade.
Speaker 2: Yes, exactly, that's.
Speaker 1: What it looks like. If you don't tie it together,
Speaker 1: you're like, well, the host had fun and the other
Speaker 1: guy had fun, but we it wasn't useful at all.
Speaker 1: It wasn't practical, and it's.
Speaker 3: Just ego on display. So I do try to tie
Speaker 3: it and tie it up a little bit. It's also
Speaker 3: all the same thing for me. It's all of a thing, right,
Speaker 3: I mean, I don't separate out the parts, and I'm like,
Speaker 3: I'm sure you don't separate out the you know what
Speaker 3: I mean, the parts of your life.
Speaker 1: It's at all. It ultimately all blowns together and the
Speaker 1: advantage one of the great things about getting older is formal,
Speaker 1: compartmentalized stuff hands to you bleed together. Right, there's those
Speaker 1: walls that you tend to come together, and I like that.
Speaker 1: It's one of the one things about getting older. You
Speaker 1: get to be more complete or whole or whatever whatever
Speaker 1: that is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the solution of boundaries in a good way