All right. Well, welcome to the show, Steven. Great to have you back. It is good to be with you. Well, we're excited to jump into your new book and we have to ask, as a flow state scientist, why park terrain skiing as your book in our country? What's going on with this? What's the backstory? The book is on peak performance agent. And if you're not familiar with the science of flow, right? Flow is an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best, perform our best. And the godfather of flow psychology is Mihai Chicks and Mihai. And he wrote four or five books on sort of flow and creativity and things along those lines. And then like seven books or nine books on adult development and flow's role in adult development. So how we grow up, how we mature, how we become adults, flow goes right through the middle of it. So I've already been working on this concurrently.  So we've been doing hospice care for dogs for 20 years, 18 years, and we've had tremendous success with our healing protocol. So for the past 20 years, the question has been, well, I can, I can take dogs with late stage cancer, heart disease, all kinds of terrible problems that should be dead in a month or two, and we can get four or five more years out of the house. So what's going on there? Is it transfer the humans? All these questions were sort of like floating around in my head, adding up and funny story. Last conversation I had with Mihai Chicks and Mihai passed away during COVID, we had a final conversation. And in that conversation, he said to me, we were talking, it was like one flow junkie to another. And he said, look, man, it's a long story short. He most of his flow, he's lifelong flow junkie, lifelong mountaineer, lifelong rock climber, got a lot of flow in the mountains doing that stuff. And he said to me, he's like, have a backup plan. You don't want to, he's 80. He had a stroke. He could barely get out of that. He was like, have multiple ways to get into flow. As you age, it's so important to peak performance aging. It's so important to successful aging. He had to have a backup plan. So I had been studying peak performance aging, all these ideas. And long story short, the old theory of aging, what we could call the long slow rock theory, right, all of our mental and physical skills decline over time. There's nothing we do to stop the slide. There's a whole bunch of ton of new work that says no, no, no, that's not true at all. These are all user to lose it skills. And if you never stop using them, you can hang on to them, even advance them far later in life than possible. And some of the like core old ideas like you can't teach an old dog new tricks. There's all those new research that says no, no, no. Actually, the older brain changes in really beneficial ways. And older dogs are better at learning certain tricks than new dogs. So I took all this stuff that was in the laboratory and mostly in theory. And I said, if these things are true, I should be able to learn incredibly difficult, incredibly challenging physical activity that's supposed to be impossible for anybody over the age of 40 in my fifties. And I picked park skiing simply because I'm a like, I'm a lifelong skier. And my backup plan, like my plan for my old age and flow was just keep charging down the mountain.  I don't know any tricks. I didn't know how to do any park skiing. And the only way you get into flow in the big mountains is taking bigger and bigger and bigger risks. And while I might want to do that, that doesn't sound like a great plan for, you know, the second half of my life. And I, so I knew, if I could teach myself to park ski, if I get to like intermediate, it would allow me to creatively interpret the whole mountain in really playful and fun ways. And I wouldn't need to always be using risk as a flow trigger. I could use novelty and complexity and all these other things provided I could get like from zero to intermediate. And all the studies said it should be possible. And I figured I made a list of tricks that was zero to intermediate, right? And I figured if the thing takes me five years, what do I care? It's a backup plan. You know what I mean? I started when I was 53. And I really, I figured I'd finish by like 20 tricks, maybe by 60. And that was just fine with me. And what happened was I went zero to 60 in a season. Like I had never learned anything as fast as I learned to park, which was crazy. I'm a bad athlete. I've come up with a family of gifted athletes. I've chased professional athletes around mountains. I know what good athletes look like. I'm a bad athlete. I'm a slow, slow learner. Broken body. I've broken nearly 80 bones, right? And I run a company. I read books. I give lectures. I do all stuff. I'm busy. So I figured if it worked for me, I was so disadvantaged where I was starting from my work for other people. At the same time I was running this experiment, my ski partner who's 20 years younger and was a former sponsored athlete who had walked away from sports because he got injured, had a family, had a career, decided to come back at the same time as I did. And he used the same protocol and he got farther in a season than he'd ever gone before. And we went, wow, this is the most amazing pilot study anybody's ever run.  So the next year we came back and we took 20 older adults ages 30 to 68 and used the same protocol. Like we talked about the protocol was, we'd use the same protocol and in four days on the mountain got them very far into park skiing or park snowboarding. That was amazing.  And there are reasons that action sports are great for peak performance aging. We can talk about it, but maybe it's not for everybody, right? Just, I don't know why I don't know what's wrong with your people, but let's just hypothetically say this. And we ran it with 500 in class form 500 different people of all age groups. And the all age groups is important because the study show we can rock till we drop, but peak performance aging actually starts young. You'd like there's stuff you want to do in your 20s and your 30s and your 40s and 50s sure you could come to it. Like the data also shows you could show up at like 85 start doing this stuff and it's going to make your life better, a lot better actually, but there's reasons to start earlier. And so we taught all ages and the goal was to see if we could reverse the typical mindset towards aging, like that the second half of your life is going to be diminished. And there's reasons to do this. In fact, people ask where does peak performance aging start and say this and I'm going to shut up by the way and let you guys ask another question. I got excited, but the research shows that the most important place to start is by shifting your mindset towards aging, that a positive mindset towards the second half of your life, like in fact, my life is filled with interesting possibilities, essentially a growth mindset towards aging will produce an additional seven and a half years of health and longevity. In other words, your 300 pounds overweight and your choices, do I change my mindset or do I lose weight, which is better for longevity and health, changing your mindset. I'm a smoker, right? I'm a smoker and I've been working for 30 years. What's better, quitting smoking or changing your mindset, changing your mindset. So it's really the place you wanted to start. We wanted to see if we'd explode people's perceptions of what was possible in the second half of their lives and it worked incredibly well without the action sports. There were ways to substitute for the benefits of action sports. That's the book. The book covers the experiments themselves and I'll stop there and let you guys ask your next question. Well, I think to start because a lot of our audience isn't really into maybe flow science or even the view on aging. You talked about a few things there that I like to just give some context around. First, obviously when we talk about flow, I think people's minds do go to action sports, but what are some other use cases for flow for those of us who aren't going to be hopping on a park train anytime soon? So this is a misnomer about flow and it's both me and you sent me high's fault and it's my fault probably more than anybody else who should be blamed for this. It's both of us, but we both were action sport athletes and we were both artists and creatives. So that was what we focused on, but it turns out reading is the most common flow state on earth. Conversations between minimal managers at work is the second most common flow state on earth. And by the way, for those who don't know, we define flow as an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best, but it's anybody, it's being in the zone. It's those moments you get so focused on what you're doing. Everything else just fades away. Your sense of self, time passes strangely in all aspects of performance, mental and physical go through the roof. Now, we won't go, I won't go into all the studies behind the amplification, but just so people understand this isn't, there's some physical amplification, strength increases in flow, fast twitch muscle response increases, pain sensitivity decreases. So endurance tends to go up. So there's physical stuff that happens, but it's mostly cognitive. So flow amplifies motivation, productivity, creativity, learning, empathy, wisdom, all of these core characteristics expand and flow. In fact, even nature relatedness, our ability to see, perceive and care about the natural world increases in flow. So when you're talking about flow as optimal performance, it's, first of all, it's biological. Everybody's hardwired for flow, so all of us can get into flow. And two, it's actually really trainable and not particularly hard to get better at. So I guess that's two. And three is if you've ever performed your best, I don't care what you're doing, right? You can, now that research shows that like, you can win an athletic competition without flow, but you'll only, you won't win a seven game series, you might win a game kind of thing, right? So you can deliver a great speech presentation without being in flow, but not consistently. Usually you're going to be doing it. If you're doing anything creative, coders and flow built the internet, right? Gamers and flow built the video game industry. In fact, just to give you an idea, there are tons of studies on flow and media and studies show that really well designed web pages, web pages with good flow, pardon the pun, actually can drive you into flow. And, you know, marketers know that, you know, driving people into flow is a great way to sell things and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it goes on and on and on. At the Flow Research Collective, we're a research and training organization. So on the research side, we study the neuroscience of peak performance, what goes on in your brain and your body sometimes when we're performing at the best. And we do this, people, folks at Stanford and USC and UC Davis and UCLA and a whole bunch of other institutions. And then we take what we learn and we use it to train people. We train people on 130 countries. So this is global. And everybody from most of the people we train are corporate executives. We work with companies like Audi and Accenture and a Facebook and Bain Capital in the Air Force and the San Francisco Police Department. So it's a huge swatch of everybody. And it's because this stuff works for everybody. It works, you know, it's how we are built biologically to do peak performance. So if you're interested in peak performance, this is what we're doing. Stephen, I talked to hundreds of people a month. And there is a subset of folks, I would say they're in their, at that age of early 30s, where things start to become redundant. And the day to day of that redundant life starts to become absurd. And they're looking to shake things up. However, the hurdle for them to take action and to shake things up seems to be too large of a hurdle for a lot of folks to jump into. Now there's some folks are like, I'm ready. Let's go. I'm tired of it. I'm at my wit's end. But then there's others who have found themselves who have gotten content. And though they want to change their life, they want to make these changes. They want to shake things up. The chains that they have put themselves in have gotten too ungodly for them to get out of. What do we say to those guys? Or what can we point to? Yeah, it's the great questions. Really, really good questions. And so there's, you sort of combine a couple of different archetypes together.  You know, that's what there's slightly different answers. But because usually if you're becoming with burnout, you have to start, and this is really useful for anybody, you want to just start by like manicuring your nervous system, right? A little bit of emotional regulation. So like anybody who's burned out, you want to start by trying as much as you can to get seven, eight hours of sleep a night, for example, just like baseline. This is the amount of sleep we need. We know hydration, nutrition, that sort of stuff. And you want to lean on basic tools like social support, make sure you have a good social support network and you reach out and you're actually, you know, really base, this is the basic stuff that helps us manicure our nervous system. And then depending on how jacked you are, do one to two to three of the following a day.  And a little burn, you want to do either a gratitude practice, a mindfulness practice or exercise. And it's literally a five minute gratitude practice. And I could talk for the next two hours about the neuroscience of gratitude and why it's important. But let's just gratitude practice, mindfulness for stress reduction, you want 11 minutes of like breath work a day. It doesn't have to be super fancy. Or I love running loving kindness meditation because it's a fricking script. And you find an online, you know, and you literally just have to run the script. And it does the same thing. It's actually better than most other forms of mindfulness or 20 to 40 minutes of exercise, right? You exercise, when you're exercising for anxiety, you want to wait for your lungs to open up and to get a little quiet upstairs. There's a sign that the brain is released nitric oxide. It flushes all the stress hormones out of your system.  This is how do you just get in the ring. But the thing I want to emphasize, and this is really the place to start. Everybody has what's known as a primary flow activity. For me, it's skiing, meaning like 80, 90% of the time I go skiing, it just drops me into the zone. For my wife, it's hiking with the dogs in the back country. For my best friend, it's playing guitar.  And in fact, the research shows that if there's been three to four hours a week on a primary flow activity, that might be the single best intervention to start with. And here's the thing, it does all kinds of stuff. So flow is a focusing skill. So the more flow you get, the more flow you get. So if you're going skiing on Monday, you know, for you, it's your primary flow activity might mean more flow at work on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. We know the heightened flow massively boosts happiness, well-being, overall life satisfaction, those things. And the afterglow flow seems to last a couple days. The heightened creativity, well, it'll last a flow state by a day, maybe two. And when we move into flow, it resets the nervous system towards zero. So it flushes our stress hormones out of our system. And I'd like to mention our peak performance aging point of view, there are nine known causes of aging, all of them. What do they have in common? Inflammation, stress and inflammation. So anything you can do to combat stress and inflammation is combatting aging. And it's sort of job one. So you get a lot of bang for your buck with your primary flow activity. And the thing about it is, and the reason I wanted to mention it, because you described a certain type of person, and what happens is, as we start to age, whatever, usually around, right around 29, 30, like those exact age group you described, you put away childish things. Oh, no, I got a family. I got a job. I've got responsibilities. I can't ride my skateboard. I can't ride my serpent.  All those things go away. And it's the exact opposite of what you need to be doing, right? Like, so it's very counterintuitive. And it's also, I will tell people, I will say, everything I'm talking about, whether it's this or a handful of other things, they sound, they're not sexy, right? Like there's nothing really say, I always say nothing I talk about if you bring it into a bar on Friday night, it's going to get you laid. You're not injecting rhinoceros horn peptides into your testicles.  It's just, it's the most deadly, effective stuff in the world, period. It's what all the science shows. And everybody wants, they either want a shortcut or they want to whizbang. Where's the app? Where's the technology? And I like simple psychological tools that produce powerful neurobiological reactions. So how is that interplay with flow and aging? And how is this counterintuitive? Because many of us listening have been taught and told that it's just a slow progression downward. And maybe it's 30 for some, maybe it's 40 for some, but it does have that sense and that feeling. And even culturally, it's shared that everything's downhill, right? That's what we tell each other. Yes. It's funny because they've done studies. The most common stereotype and acceptable stereotype in the world is ageism. It's universal. It's the number one. It's like the thing and it's acceptable. It's the one that people don't say, hey, you can't say that. You know what I mean? To any of the other stereotypes, you trot them out into polite conversation and you're going to get creamed today, right? You're going to get canceled, but people are ageist all the time. It's wild. And there's all kinds of stuff about, uh, Beck alleviate Yale has done phenomenal research on how detrimental age, bad stereotypes around aging are to society. Really interesting. Let's just start with, uh, before we even go into flow, you can actually summarize peak performance aging in a sentence. All these words mean very specific things. Some are going to be obvious. Some will have to define along the way, but here is everything we know in a sentence. If you want to rock to you drop, you have to engage in challenging social and creative activities that demand dynamic deliberate play and take place in novel outdoor environments. That is, that's peak performance aging in a sentence as everything you want to, you want to do period. This was why my NAR style quest was so important. It was exactly that. And I can go through each of those and why, why you want them one thing to know challenging and creative and often social, but definitely challenging and creative. Those are both flow triggers for a bunch of different ways. Uh, dynamic when I said dynamic deliberate play dynamics, just a single word that means you're using all five categories of functional fitness at once. So strength, stamina, agility, flexibility and balance, right? Because they all fade and we want to train them all at once, right? Deliberate play. We know what deliberate practice is, right? Anders Erickson, 10,000 hours and you do the same thing over and over a slight incremental advancement, which is great for certain kinds of learning and certain kinds of situations and certain kinds of expertise is a good tool to have. But even Anders will tell you overall, it's not what you want to reach for. And we learn better with deliberate play and deliberate play is literally repetition without repetition, right? It's repetition with opportunities for a little improvisation. Why? Way more fun, way more neurochemistry, way more feel good, way more learning, way more flow, right? Um, and no shame, no embarrassment, all the stuff that blocks learning, especially in adults. Um, and then so that's dynamic deliberate play, novel outdoor environments. One, we talk about information. We know that time spent in nature lowers stress levels for tons of different reasons equal to like most SSRIs for antidepressant purposes. So that's really just great in an overall anti-aging perspective. But here's the, here's the coolest thing. You can stave off cognitive decline to mention Alzheimer's. And it's pretty well established by building up what's known as cognitive reserve. Cognitive reserve means I'm developing wisdom and expertise. Expertise is essentially everything you're learning consciously. Wisdom is all the unconscious stuff that comes in along with that kind of thing. That's not really what wisdom is, but it's a shorthand and we'll use it. But expertise and wisdom and if you can get that in novel outdoor environments, it's the best part because our brain evolved as hunter-gatherers to remember where are we when we have emotionally charged experiences? Like where was that great fruit tree? Where did I get attacked by all that stuff? So neurogenesis, the birth of new neurons, you want to stave off cognitive decline to mention Alzheimer's, you need new neurons. Most of the neurogenesis in the adult brain takes place in the hippocampus. The hippocampus does two things. It does long-term memory and it does place and location. It's got grid cells and place cells. So novel outdoor environments, not only novelties a flow trigger, so you're getting a little more flow, you're also getting all the anxiety, lower stress level of benefits, the psychological benefits. And finally, there's direct neurological benefits like you're literally aiding the brain, birthing new neurons and you're ensuring that the new neural nets that are forming are becoming really robust and resistant to call your decline. So what I like about that sentence and the reason I think it's worth spending five minutes on is, again, it's not what most people think pre-performance aging is. Like you talked to 90% of the people, they're going to talk about longevity science or regenerative medicine or biohacking or how I changed my diet or intermittent fasting or supplements.   One of the things you mentioned there that is intriguing for us, I mean, our show is all about social skills, networking, relationship building. And so I think for a lot of people, they understand that the physical activity is what they need to do. And for a lot of our listeners, I mean, they work out, they eat right, they're all about that. But you also mentioned creative and novel social interaction. So this is, and this is really clear, like this is in all the research out of all those things out of the whole the big sentence, what's maybe the most important part to actually two things.  Like that sort of thing where there's, because you want is it's the brain stimulates like the social stuff, it calms our nervous system way, way down. We know the psychological safety demands, all that we talk for the next five hours about that. But it also challenges the brain in novel and interest, right? People are unpredictable. So the brain wants like novel challenging whatever and like you get more of it. And the other thing, this is really important and this shows up across the boards and people don't talk about it. You have to make replacement friends. Most people know people their age, right? And as you age older, so I have a dear friend who I work with. He was literally one of the smartest people on the planet during the 20th century, made a colossal amount of money, very famous, very well known giant thought leader. He is very old. I called him just to check up on him a lot during COVID because he was in New York and I was worried about him and he's very old. And he would say things like, Oh, Stephen, it is so great to hear from you. Everybody I know has died. I don't know anybody. And the craziest thing about it is like, he comes out of a particular generation of thinkers like a group of like 70s scientists and they think differently. Like if you know, there's was a really interesting era in like science and it's a very particular way of thinking. So think about this. Everybody who thinks like him, they're all gone. All of them. He's like the last remaining one and he didn't make replacement friends. And it's certainly also a peak performance aging. It shows like the societies where people age the best cross generational friendships. It's better for young people. It's better for old people. Everybody thrives on a society where that exists. You tend to get all the blue zones, right? All the societies where you have really long lived. That's one of the things that they are. They have one of the commonalities is cross generational friendships and sort of respect for all generations, which is another thing. Also, I have to say this, like, I have this great joy of running a company where like the vast majority of every new works for me is almost 30 years younger than I am. And that amazing, right? Amazing for that. And then I've got a bunch of people who are, you know, 30 years older than me as well. It's just, it's wonderful because you like it's, you get kicked out of your fixed thinking. As I was saying for the folks who are in their self made prison, the replacement friends or creating a robust social life because I think their friends have disappeared. These people may now be married or they just let their careers take up much of their lives. And so they hadn't worked on the replacement friends and their friends are getting married and they're having families or they're wrapped up in their careers. And all of these folks know that they need to get back out there. They need to start networking. And they come up with every excuse in the world of why they can't. Just like somebody who may be a bit overweight, who could come up with every excuse in the world of why they don't have time for the, for the gym. So what I always say with people like that is, okay, man, I hear you, but run the experiment. Yeah. Just won the experiment. I mean, like the robot, I'm an introvert. I'm like, I'm an introvert. I am a writer.  My wife and I, like if we spend, she's an introvert too. She, if we spend a half an hour to 45 minutes a day, sort of like trying to connect. And then I have one phone call with one other friend. That's me for a day. I'm good. But I tried it. Like I forced myself at the end of every workday to make a ten minute phone call just to somebody in somebody I haven't, usually I'm looking for somebody I haven't talked to in six months, eight months, whatever. I just like, it doesn't even have to be long, but I'm just, and here's the reason everybody has to care. And this is the thing that people don't understand about social support. Whenever you face a problem of any variety. And just to put it in context, we did some studies. Most top executives face five challenges a day that would fall into this category, like the kind of thing that could be a threat, a problem. It's a hard decision.  And the first program it runs, it says, well, do you got backup? Do you have people who love you? Do you have people who are covering your ads?  And we need to produce a lot of energy and give you a big anxiety reaction. And that all that energy is taking energy away from performance. It's ruining the rest of your day, right? Because it's stealing energy and stealing willpower. And that big anxious reaction, that's Norepinephrine. What does Norepinephrine do? It blocks learning. It blocks creativity. It makes us logical linear.  It wants to reduce choices. I'm scared. I don't want a creative, wild solution. Give me something that's safe, that's secure, that works 100% of the time, right? So you're burning tremendous amounts of energy.  And all this is happening because you didn't want to pick up the phone and make a 10 minute phone call or have a good conversation with your partner or friend.  That's just dumb. That's dumb. It's hard to go on a diet. You know what I mean? Those kinds of fixes are freaking out. I'm saying call a friend. Like the best thing we can do is to go like, that's a crazy thing to not do. And so what I always tell people is never take my word for anything.   Thanks for clarifying. And see how you feel at the end of two weeks. See if you're making better decisions. See if you're performing better. See if your relationships are better. If they're worse, then this was shitty advice for you and stop, right?  Well, the other thing I just want to add to that is in this show over the last 16 years, we have given great tools for amazing social interaction, rapport building and networking. Take one of those tools, one of those frameworks, one of those strategies, and run the experiment. Have fun with it. Be more efficient and more effective in your communication and your network and relationship building with the people around you and run the experiment. And there you go. See how much better you feel. I get the excuse, I get so much as, oh, I've just been so out of practice. I don't even know how to go about doing it. It's like, pick up the phone. There you go. Get on a Zoom, run the experiment. Take one of these strategies that AJ and I have laid out for years and have some fun with it. There's something great in what you just said, also. So I want to pause and say, the coolest thing here is for the people who have really fallen out of practice with this, because all the research shows, because you're going to get started in the pro-social neurochemistry and if you're a star from it, you're going to get the biggest results first, right? And the fun part about it is, and I think this is really core to people. We know how important lifelong learning is and we've just talked about a whole bunch of stuff around it, but the impediment for a lot of us is shame and embarrassment and self-consciousness and we forget how to play, right? This is one of the things about deliberate play that's so cool. And one of my secrets to park skiing that I sort of started to figure out in the research is we've all heard about the motor learning window that shuts after a child and you don't become a ballerina in your thirties and you can't learn languages. Like all these stories, there is some biological truth to it, but it's only to a point and the whole truth is it's not so much that the brain and the body change. They change a little bit. It's the kids learn by playing. There's no shame. There's no self-consciousness. They're not mad that they're bad. They expect to be bad because they've never done it before and they think it's funny. And as adults, all that stuff, somehow you think you're less of a person and if you're bad in public and I'm the same way. I freaking hate being bad in public, right? I don't like it at all. I don't mind being bad, but I don't like being bad in public. So not being out of practice with the social stuff, so cool because you get to like the only way to make social stuff work as you know is it's got to be play. If networking is work, then you're that creepy guy at the conference who nobody wants anything to do with, right? If you're just like a playful, fun person to be around and you're interested in other people, and finally, what is the secret to a great conversation? All of us read our Dale Carnegie, listened to the other person and be interested in them as a person. It's not even rocket science and curiosity is a flow trigger and it's fundamental with so many important things in life that learning how to cultivate curiosity and your conversations with other people, it's such a potent peak performance tool. What I think strikes this conversation Johnny's having with potential clients, but then also in thinking about your own journey through in our country, there is this fallacy, this thought that just go it alone, right? Like I'm just going to figure this out on my own. I'm just going to brute force it. And what I found in reading the book is so many times you are confronted with fear that probably would have stopped you on your own, but watching your partner who's even 20 years younger go pull off that trick, seeing it, realizing that there's a couple missing pieces, but allowing him to come back and conversate with you over the trick that he just pulled or the strategy or what was going through his head allowed you to piece together the path for yourself and take on bigger challenges than you even thought possible on days where you're like, you know what, I'm going to save this trick or I'm going to save this path. I'm going to save this trail for later. And if you had been doing it alone, if you had been on that journey alone, I doubt you would have got to those tricks in the amount of time you did. I can answer that question because oddly, my journey from, so I spent my 20s chasing professional athletes around mountains, okay, got very injured, ended up sort of like spend my 30s surfing, moved back to the mountains in my 40s and decided I was going to really focus on big mountain skiing and I went it alone because I was living in Mexico. I didn't know many people there when I got there and nobody, like even after 10, 14 years there, I knew a couple of other skiers and usually somebody was always hurt. So like I would know like one other person and most of the time I was alone and I can tell you it, I couldn't make the progress I wanted to make until I started skiing with other people. I literally couldn't do it and with Ryan having Ryan as a ski partner and there were a lot of days when I wanted to be alone. Like I would do something with Ryan and then I'd want to go back to the mountain alone and practice it by myself over and over and over and over again. But no, like so one of my cardinal rules was if Ryan can do it, I can do it. Thus I have to, right? And there were caveats, there were ways I like there were when points at time I said no, don't do it under these conditions, these conditions, these conditions. And there were a lot of reasons for it but it was amazing is that I got one of the things having a ski partner and having these kinds of rules in place for is I knew going in I needed to make decisions ahead of time because I was going to be doing scary shit. And when you're doing scary shit, you don't make good decisions, right? Too much fear, bad decisions. So I had to take decision making as much of it as I possibly could off the table. I always say that like in the moment, I like to tell people I work for the boss. The boss is the guy sort of creates the rule book in the playbook and has my best long-term interests at heart because in the moment, I'm like all of us. Give me the easy high, give me the easy way out. I'm scared. I want to avoid like I'm no different than anybody else. One of the big differences is I know that I don't get to make those choices in the situation. I've delegated it to a rule book that I'm playing by because it's designed to keep me safe and keep me moving forward. Having a ski partner is great. The other thing that was really cool about having a ski partner is just having that little bit of extra encouragement, you know what I mean? It's one thing to do something great. It's the other thing like my ski partner Ryan's a very reticent kind of quiet, mellow guy, but every now and I need to see me do something to cheer.  And so hearing him cheer every now and again was like I could go for like a month on that. Yeah, very empowering. And we'll talk about the protocol outside of adventure sports, but I do want to hone in on the initial fear at your age with your injury history, many people saying you can't even learn this, why even try. And if you've ever been around park terrain on the mountain, you notice more falls than your successful tricks. Like falling, eating it is the name of the game. And as a big mountain skier, you're trying to avoid eating it as much as possible. So how did you get over that initial hurdle of fear to actually throw yourself into the arena? Because I think that leads many of us to even stay on the sidelines far longer than necessary. There's a couple things you need to know before I can answer that question about flow. Flow states, I mentioned this earlier, flow states have triggers, preconditions that lead to more flow, right? And the most famous of them is the challenge skills balance. Flow follows focus. So it only shows up when all of our attention is in the right here right now. That's what all the triggers do. There's 26 that are known to science, they all drive attention in the present moment. The most famous is the challenge skills balance. It says we pay the most attention to the task at hand, meaning it has the greatest chance of driving us into flow when the challenges has slightly exceeds our skill set. If you were to put a number on, and this is not a real number, this is a metaphor, so this is not science, this is just metaphor. It's about 5%, right? When the challenge level is about 5% greater than your skills, that's a sweet spot. Here's the thing that I sort of answer your question. One, I'm going to tell you what we did on the mountain park skiing. And two, I want to start with the fact that in older adults, there's something called allostatic load. Allostatic load is the sort of physical impact of trauma over time.  We realized that because of allostatic load in most people, and sometimes this could show up as early as 30, right? When Jenny earlier was talking about his friends who were starting to get really conservative at 30, there's reasons for that neurobiologically, why that happens. But that constriction that starts to show up, our challenge skills switched by especially for things that we're scared about like park skiing, it's down to like 1%.  So here's what we did just with park skiing and snowboard, and then we talked about otherwise, but we didn't teach anybody. It wasn't about learning new tricks, right? It was park riding for skiers and snowboarders. There are eight foundational movements. You have to know how to jump. You have to know how to crouch. You have to know how to slash. You have to know how to grind. You have to know how to throw a 180, a 360, and a shifty. Those are the foundational movements. Our goal wasn't to teach people how to do tricks. It was to teach them the foundational movements so that they could start with one of those that they already knew how to do and could execute with zero fear and no conscious interference and build on that one micro movement at a time. So here's the other thing. Even everybody who's ever been on skis or a snowboard, if you've made it to advanced beginner, you know how to do a hockey stop, how to turn your skis or your snowboard sideways. Now, if I take a hockey stop and I do it on a slightly diagonal, that's a grind or a slash depending on which way you turn your body into it. So I knew going in, myself included, but everybody else, we've all got a basic movement that we can start with. Because everybody has, you have to know how to do this to get in the gateway of the sport. So start there and build one shouldn't at a time. Creativity is a flow trick or pattern recognition. When you see a small hill that you're skiing through, like me, what would people look at the train park and they see like the big jump and they don't notice that it's on a roller hill known as a knuckle and you can do all kinds of tricks on the knuckle without ever leaving the ground or this is just shapes of snow. You can move your body in creative ways. We wanted to teach people how to use their body in new ways with these foundational motions because that's creativity and creativity produces pattern recognition and pattern recognition drives dopamine and dopamine drives flow and flow amplifies learning. So start with these really basic movements, go one at a time, do something totally safe and don't try to learn tricks. When let the flow state take care of that, like you'll do more in the flow, right? Your job is just to creatively interpret train features in novel ways and like playful ways. That's the only thing people were aiming for.  We played follow the leader games. I would follow Ryan. I would do what he did. We didn't talk. So flow requires the prefrontal cortex to stay quiet, meaning you don't want your ego involved at all. So you don't ever want to talk about yourself. You don't want to talk about world events like anything you scared or whatever. The R rule was we could make each other laugh.  That was our rule, right? And when we ran the experiment that was the rule. And I will say people were shocked by it. And there was some resistance at the beginning and like we were shushing people on the chairlift, but after like two hours of it, everybody got it. We was like, oh, wow, this is really important. It's the same reason, by the way, why if you're like, you don't want to check social media between tasks, if you can avoid it, because it like gets your emotions all stirred up and it'll break your focus and pull you out of flow. It's a bad distractor. You know what I mean? Whereas like two minutes of exercise is probably a little bit better if you just like want to break up the task because same reason you want to keep that prefrontal cortex turned off to keep yourself in flow, if you can, especially when you're task switching. Understanding initially we're not looking at it as there's the terrain park.  We're relying on basic motions, basic movements that we already have a skill level that's a little bit stretching us, but not 200 plus percent outside of our reality. It also sounds like even in the protocol with you and then this larger group, like there is that group happening where you're also seeing others do it around you. That creates a sense of physical safety. You're also seeing others be bad at it also. It is so much easier to be bad with a group of people. That's sort of the other thing. It made it way more fun. The group, yeah. Thank you for bringing that up because if you notice in our country, it's a real book about applied people for instance, applied people for instance, aging, but it's also the most thorough book I've ever written about group flow, the shared collective version of flow state. I mean, I talked about group flow a bunch in stealing fire, but it's really like the most detail is actually in our country in the new book, and I was shocked by it because I'm an introvert and group flow has always been really hard for me. I don't like that. I actually got great group flow over the course of the season, and it was so important to my learning. People prefer, so group flow is everybody's favorite experience on the planet. It wins. We'll take it over drugs, we'll take it over sex, we'll take it over flow. It's the shared collective version, and there's evolutionary biological reasons for that that makes a lot of sense, but it's crack cocaine for the soul. Here's the thing that I think that is most important about group flow for your listeners around the pre-performance aging tip. We know we've been talking about for 20 minutes now the importance of social activity for pre-performance aging. I'm really fricking busy and I'm an introvert. If you tell me I have to go, like if you look at the Blue Zone data, people will spend six hours a day in social conversation with friends, with family, like that's what's common in most Blue Zones. Are you kidding?  Does anybody work in the Blue Zone? A lot of that is because some of the Blue Zones, they're things like they're sheep herders and they're walking through the back country historically with their friends all day long and stuff like that. My point is the reason you want all this pro-social activity is you want the pro-social, you want oxytocin, serotonin, endorphin, that's what you're trying to get. You get all that in flow and you get it really fast and you get maximum concentration. You can use group flow to massively, it's a peak performance tool for, it's a hack for social support. For me as a busy introvert who if you tell me, hey Stephen, you need really good social support so you're going to have to go out to the bar three times a week and hang with your friends, I'm going to tell you that I'm going to die without that social support. It's just not happening. Forget about folks. I can't, it's just not there so I had to but in like skiing with Ryan once or twice a week and getting like that full blast of neurochemistry plus my like trying to 10-minute phone call every day in a conversation with my wife, box checked, peak performance aging, social needs taken care of in far less time and on a certain level what I like about using sort of like the group flow, the flow thing for that is how do you know if you're getting the right amount of social support for peak performance aging? It's an interesting question, right? Like how do you have, what's the quality of interaction? Like all those are open questions that nobody's like exactly studied because how would you and it's going to be different for everybody but I like with flow and when I'm spending time in group flow I don't have to wonder like I know those neurochemicals are there and I could take care of it. Let us also point out that there's another ridiculous side of this which is like you can get a lot of those same chemicals by petting your dog for 10 minutes, right? That's not sleep on that fact like if you don't have any friends and you're like you can pet an animal for five minutes and you get oxytocin flowing both you and the animal and it's really good for both of you. So you know there's not really an excuse. In fact this research that shows that people who are really fond of nature can get those pro-social neurochemicals from being with trees and being actually natural. Well I had a really long conversation with Paul Zach who's sort of the god of oxytocin research about this very question like if you're a nature lover this time does nature work as a substitute for people and it sort of does. That is pretty fascinating although highly I would be remiss in the work that we do to be recommending our clients spend more time with trees. I always tell people that some of my best friends are trees. Makes sense reading to our country. The other part to this obviously in learning a skill that is physical in nature at your age on terrain are injuries and the recovery from those injuries. So when we talk about aging injury is one of the things on everyone's mind and is this going to be the injury that ends my favorite activity that robs me of something that does create flow in my life. So how did you approach the potential for injury and recovery from injury through this protocol? One you have to understand that my plan was to get me to intermediate. I didn't I wouldn't want to become like Alex I don't have to win the Olympics.  So getting intermediate dangerous right but once I'm at intermediate I have way more control and now I have like all these new tools for getting into flow. So there's a little bit of method to my madness point A point B my undergraduate degree is and graduate degree is in writing. I'm trained as a poet. You don't take medical advice from a guy trained as a poet first and foremost. So you can take peak performance advice but like I don't I'm not a doctor but I'm about to give some medical advice. I will regenerative medicine which is stem cells peptides exosomes placental matrix PRP that whole toolkit. I have been both as a researcher studying it. I've written about it in four or five of my books. I've been experimenting personally with it. I've broken a bunch of 80 bones right. And so I've been using it myself for 20 some years. I've been studying it for 20 some years and I don't think I'm an expert in it at all. But here's what I've noticed for myself and this is what I believe is true forever until like five years ago. It wasn't even real.  It was just make believe it. None of the stuff worked the way anybody wanted it to work and it wasn't actually real. But five, six years ago it started to get real for ligaments and tendons. It wasn't really real and now it's progressed to ligaments, tendons and bones. If there's people out there trying to sell you on organ regeneration or a bunch of that like complicated stem cell stuff maybe I don't know. You know what I mean? Like we're getting we're moving in those directions but I don't think we're there yet with ligaments and tendons and sometimes bones. The stuff is ready for prime time and it's very expensive is the problem. But like five years ago PRP platelet rich plasma was $10,000 to $20,000 unless you were in New Mexico where there's a weird loophole in the law that allows acupuncturists to do that work. So you can get it for cheaper. Now my mom just had it on a shoulder injury and her insurance covered it. So this is what changed. Is it about six years? The placental matrix, exosomes, all that stuff and we can talk more about what those words mean if anybody cares. But it's still like right now the cost has come down enough that like it's the rough equivalent. I've got like an $8,000 deductible on my healthcare. So if I want to go have surgery that's what it's going to cost me. That's about like most people it's somewhere $8,000 to $11,000. So that's what you're going to pay out of pocket for surgery. That's roughly what you're going to pay regenerative medicine to like fix a shoulder or a knee or if you want to fix your back, I've broken my back and fixed my back with regenerative medicine, you'll spend a lot more. You can do it. You'll spend a lot more and it'll take longer. Now the couple things, it's still not like one stop shopping. You may have to have a bunch or number of rounds of regenerative medicine. You may have to do some physical stuff on top of it. So all of that is true. I'm not saying that injuries aren't real and you aren't wrong. Older adults take longer to heal young people. That's still biology. We're not past that yet. By the way, but the stem cell stuff that is coming over the next three to five years, we may actually get past that stuff. But like my point is we're better at the healing than you expect. My second point is unless you have bone density issues and then there are specific things you can do, you're not as fragile as you think you are. You're just not. And you have to get over that idea that like you're suddenly gun us.  Like there's realities, but if you're under a certain age, like you're thinking of yourself as way, way, way more brittle than you, I mean, like I hit the ground so many times during my experiment and I'm brittle. I mean, I break by the proof is that I've broken fricking everything, right? And no, I'm not as brittle as I think. And here's the third thing I want to say because this is true. And this is the most important thing to know if you're going to go with this kind of quest. One of the things that is true is our pain load goes up over time, right? Because you're just too many nicks and cuts. There's ways to reverse it in terms of like really good movement protocols. And the best, I think the best thing in the world is revolution in motion with Edith House. So if anybody wants to know what to do, revolution in motion is the best of the movement protocols in the world. She's absolutely the best person out there. And that's where I would, that's where I would start. But what I have found is that as you get older, and this probably starts to get really real late 30s, 40s, you're going to wake up and feel bad in the morning, especially if you've been performing athletically. If you're a lifelong athlete, you're used to feeling this way, right?   You cannot judge what you're physically capable of by how you feel in the morning. What I learned on my in our country adventure is there were so many days I would wake up and I'd feel like somebody beat me with a baseball bat. But I learned I was like, you don't judge anything until I've taken a long walk with my dog, like 20 to 30 minutes and done some yoga. And then if I felt better, I would just go to the mountain and I was not trying to learn anything. I was just, it was my minimal workout. I would ski 12 laps, but invariably on days where I kept would get up and I'd be, you know, beaten up and I feel terrible. Then I'd walk and I'd feel a little better and stretch to feel a little better. I'd go to the mountain, I'd warm up very slowly. But by that, like three or four warm up runs in, I would then learn like five new treks and ski two of the three of the biggest lines in my entire life. And I started to realize that a lot of what we feel, what feels like old is actually performance anxiety. So it's very hard to tell the difference between performance anxiety and the feelings of age. They feel almost the exact same in our body.  And really, it was, I was scared to sort of like go back to the mountain and learn a new trick or something. You know what I mean? Like it was, it was, it was, it was fear, it was stuff like that. And it wasn't real, but there was no way I had to learn that by experimenting with my body. You could have told me this. I wouldn't have believed you. But after, you know what I mean? Like a time after time, it kept happening and happening and happening. The thing that like was so amazing to me, it's not even the tricks that were so amazing to me. It was I skied 88 days. That's like three months of, right. And I was skiing six to eight hours a day. And I skied 88 days over, over the course of like a five month season. That's a massive load on a 53 year, like I didn't think it was even, I didn't think I was going to get to, you know, my 43 was my best previously. My goal was 50. And when I got to 50, I was like, Oh wow, I've got so much time left to keep skiing. Let's, you know, and I figured I doubled 43 was my best. So I doubled it. I was, my goal was going to be 86. I got to 88. And I could have gone longer, but the snow melted with that. I'd love to touch on any other sort of surprising unexpected perspectives you come out of this journey with, because obviously you went in with a lot of science. You had a lot of things to plan out and build out a protocol. But what surprised you on the back end of the journey and after writing the book? So I touched on this earlier. One of the things that's very shockingly weird is the importance of leg strength for peak performance aging. And we're not just talking about preserving physical health, though it's the number one, the most important thing for physical health, it's actually cognitive. And you guys are going to like this. They think, they don't really know why. There's tons of data that shows strong legs lead to less Alzheimer's, less dementia, less cognitive decline. Why? There's four or five theories, but the most obvious is you can't walk around, you can't actually have a social life. And if you don't have a social life, right, we talked all about that. So like one, I was sort of shocked by how much strong legs play a role. And they also like in terms of balance and staving off broken bones and all that stuff, really huge. That one really caught me. I will also say I have been shocked by the, just the incredible importance of flow in adult development and in successful aging. I'm often very wary of like finding, if I find flow in the middle of a thing that I'm doing, I'm suspicious because I'm like, Steven, you're biased, you're the flow guy, you know what I mean? It was reading like really obscure stuff, I should accept me high that most people don't read or stuff that was written back in the 80s and the 90s and so like really older stuff. But finding out how much work he was doing on adult development. And I'm like, this is a crazy thing. His last study, like there was a reason we had the conversation we had. They just published a study of his post-Demisly and it was on flow, promise. And he wanted to know, does it go away at all in our lifetime? And it literally, you stay as hungry for flow as you always were right up until the end. I mean, it was cool to find out, but I was sort of shocked a little bit by that. You know what's the most shocking thing to me is actually the inverse of it is how often we coined a term for it. We call it getting geysered.  It's amazing if you start listening for like, that's the exact mindset for old. You want it, like that's death. That's like, you know what I mean? It's literally death and it's amazing when you go into the world. So the most shocking period, the most shocking thing that happened along the way is Ryan and I, we kept noticing we were like getting geysered by like younger and younger people. And so I was looking for, I don't weigh a lot. So I need very specific kind of park skis that I can bend. And I was looking for new ski. So I was talking to everybody I saw who had skis that I didn't know anything about. I'd ask them questions about it. So we parked with Kirkwood, this guy and this woman get out of the truck next to us and they're younger. Ryan's 34 and they're both like five years younger than he is. So in the late 20s, the guy's skiing a ski, the death wish by moment and I never skied it. It's supposed to be a great park ski among them. And I was like asking them questions. Hey, is it good for this kind of skiing and this kind of skiing and this kind of skiing, this kind of skiing? And then I said, Hey, can you use it for nose butters and tail butters and things like that? And he's like, well, I don't know what, what is that? And I was like, Oh, it's park ski tricks. And his girlfriend gets out of the truck and looks at us and just goes like screams it. She's so mad.  What do you think? We're children. 28 and like Ryan is looking at me and he's like, Oh my God. And I was like, dude, I told you it's everywhere. It's crazy. But it's everywhere. You start noticing like this ageist mindset that people have towards their own life. It's so crippling. I guess the final thing I'm going to say to answer your question is, and this is not my line. This is Ellen Langer who's one of the she's sort of the godmother peak performance aging. She was at Harvard forever. She has said over and over for the years that aging is as much a mental event as a physical process. And the data is really crazy. And I'll just tell you about one of her studies because it's the most famous. It's maybe I probably ran the weirdest study in peak performance aging. Anybody's ever run the second weirdest is, is the, what I'm about to tell you are counterclockwise study. So this is, she does her early work on language priming and how language priming really, really, really impacts perception. And she, she does early work on the mind, body per connection. So she's really interested in how language priming can impact health and like physical stuff. And she starts to wander after some early experiments, if aging is like a language priming thing, if what we think of as old is actually like a language, like, et cetera. So she designs this famous experiment known as the counterclockwise experiment. It's 1981. She's at Harvard. She gets 1675 to 85-year-old men. She drives them three hours north of Boston to a monastery. They repurpose the monastery. It looks exactly like 1961. All the magazines are from 1961. They turn back the clock and they divide the groups of people into two groups of eight. One group just talks about 1961, like, oh, they reminisce. Back then, I was blah, blah, blah. The other group has to pretend it's 1961, right?  What is Kennedy going to do? Like that kind of stuff.  The changes in the group that play acted 20 years younger are so significant. I mean, every measure of health improves. They're hearing improves. Their eyesight improves. Their arthritis goes away. This is after five days. Arthritis goes away so much that they get taller and their fingers got longer. It's crazy. In fact, it was so crazy that nobody believed it was true. So they've rerun the damn experiment four times. They've made television shows. There's three different television shows where they ran the experiment and filmed it in Europe because nobody believed it. And they just recently, this data hasn't been released yet, but they just recently rerun it right at the start of COVID. I don't know if they got to finish it because of COVID. So they may still be doing it with every modern biological measure they could make. But the results of that have been like that. When you talk about aging as a mental event, what she's saying is the link between mind and body and aging is so much stronger than you could possibly imagine. And the deeper you get into the research, the counterclockwise study is crazy. Arth, my study was crazy.  Oh my God. So again, people reach for all these, they reach for diet and supplements and going to the doctor and with the wrong kind of exercise and they're not reaching for the most powerful tools available. So those are the things that were most shocking to me along the way. That study sounds amazing. And it's so great to hear. Steven, you've been on the show before and we've asked you this. What is your X factor, Steven? What is that unique quality about you that makes you unique? I think if there's anything that makes me unique, and I don't think it's unique to me, but I may have because of certain things that I've done in my life, I may have learned it earlier. I can always point this out to other people. I do not mind spending 10 years on a project. Like if that's how long something, like I don't care. And the reason is this, it's just really simple.  The stuff that I am proud of stuff, the stuff that has the most meaning, the stuff that like when you come to me and say, Steven, what like the fact that I've been married for 17 years, I'm fricking proud of that. Cause do you know how hard that is? Yes.  It took me 10 years to go. I was, I was 119 pounds when I graduated from high school and the same light I am now. It took me 10 years in the gym. Till I had like a body that could actually perform as an athlete the way I wanted to because I was started so far beyond the curve. My first book took 11 years. I threw out 400 pages four different times. So I got this really great and I, and as a kid, I was a professional magician and to learn some of the great tricks you would have to practice. I had tiny hands. I still have tiny hands. So I would have to practice twice or three times harder and longer than anybody else to learn any trick and to get like the good ones. You know, there was a saying in professional magic that I think when I learned it as a really little kid, which is anything's easy with 10 years practice and it's stuck with me. I don't get discouraged is I'm not going to wake up and do the thing that I'm trying to do. I don't, I'm unattached to outcome. I just show up and I do the work. And if it is today a good day, a bad, like I don't, none of that matters because as long as I show up and do the work 10 years from now, that box is checked. And I like that to me, like if there's any, it's anything, it's I'm not afraid of the long term project because I realized that that's the stuff that really makes life wonderful. And I will, a final statement on this Stewart brand. I know people have trouble with some of his stuff today, but I do think he's just a brilliant polymath. And he once said something that I love, which is the only sustainable happiness is the satisfaction of a job well done or the satisfaction of a hard job well done. And his words are very, the only sustainable happiness. And I think that's actually very true. I don't like one of the lessons about performance aging is of course, life doesn't get easier. We keep thinking it's going to get easier. Keep thinking, Oh, I'm getting it, but it never gets easier. It is hard from start to go. It's hard here. Planet Earth is hard. And it's hard for everybody. Nobody has an easy time. And it's hard most days. The only thing that changes is not happiness isn't going to change. Your happiness levels are basically your happiness levels, but life satisfaction and meaning grows spectacularly. And that's the stuff that makes the hardness worthwhile. And that's you only get the life satisfaction, the meaning and that stuff through these long, I worked really hard, right? Nobody, if I nobody, if you ask them like what was the most important thing that ever nobody says, Oh, I got lucky him on the lottery. Even if you talk to lottery winners, they don't talk about that. They talk about this, you know, no, it was the five years I had to drive a cab in New York City to pay my way through film school like so I could make, you know, it's those stories that you hear again and again and again. We don't actually like easy. We just think we like easy. I agree. Thank you for joining us again. Where can our audience find out more about the protocol in our country and the work you do? On this one, you go to the website for the book, which W. W. NAR is G. N. A. R. chart for gnarly. Yeah. Right. G. N. A. R country.com. And the reason you should go there is one, if you don't know Park skiing, as you want to read the book, there's a really fun introduction of our skiing video that's really funny to the peak performance aging experiment, which I've been blabbing about. We videotape the white papers there, but we also we filmed everything. It's how we judge progress. Yeah, at least we filmed everything so you can watch. We had a great National Geographic filmmaker following us around during the experiment. So like, there's a great five minutes, seven minutes. I don't know how long it is. Um, peak performance aging experiment video that is super funny. I'm really proud of that video because the thing that nobody knows is there's a guy in at the end.  And I definitely caught some air in the NAR country program. And I thought that was pretty good for an old guy. What nobody knows is that same dude in our foundational program. Like we had a meeting, a zoom meeting, right? Every, I've ever, and he was the most, I mean, they were all skeptical, but he was, he was like, I'm 60 years old. I was skiing for 50 years. I've never left the ground in my life. I'm not going to, not safe. I'll never do this. You're out of your mind, but I'll still take part in the experiment. Just cut.  It's fine. And so like, I'm really, I hear him say that. And I'm like, yeah, we got you. I love it. Thank you so much, Stephen. It was great having you back. My pleasure, gentlemen. It was so good to see you again. Thank you for the interest in my work. I appreciate both.


This is Dennis McMahon and welcome to Positively Vermont and Today we have with us Anson Tebbets the secretary of the agency of agriculture food and markets For the state of Vermont welcome mr. Secretary. Thank you. That's great to be here. Nice to be talking about agriculture that's great and today it's right in the middle of the harvest season for some and and We're going to be talking about everything agricultural in Vermont, but first tell us a little bit about yourself Well, I grew up on a dairy farm in the town of Cabot, Vermont And we had a hillside farm. We had a jersey cows. We had some sheep when I was growing up a flock of sheep we had sugaring operation your traditional dairy farm on a hillside in in Cabot and And I still live pretty close to where it all started And how did you get involved in the agriculture of the park? Well, it's always been sort of part of what I've done. I I've always been involved even though I had other jobs off the farm I was when we were milking cows. I was always milking cows with my dad even then I would go off to To work and so forth. So I was always been involved in agriculture one way or another and I've done, you know part of my world has been media and marketing with that So when Governor Scott came calling and asked me if I'd be interested in taking the position of Secretary, I said yes because it was kind of the two worlds. I've always been in Agriculture is always something I've had it interest in even when I covered it when I was at WCAX and my early careers part of my beat was covering agriculture and and So it's it's always been something I've done and and enjoy How has the transition been from journalism to it's been it's been wonderful. It's a it's a very rewarding Busy job. I haven't had really a chance to think about Covering stories or thinking about the media at all since transitioning It's met in some ways. It's much the same. There's a lot of different variety What we do at the agriculture agency in the media as you know is is something different every day and Some of the projects are a little bit longer and what we're doing, which is good but for the most part been so busy and the transition was great and Having a good time with it some challenging times, but all always having a good time doing it. That's great I'm trying to give us an outline of the scope of the agency. How big is it and what it does? Yeah, it's it's it's there's a lot of variety of what we do at the agency. Of course we have You know the biggest industry in Vermont is dairy. It's about a two billion dollar year industry in dairy with People processing milk and cheese and some of our cheeses are known around the world We know the big brands like Cabot and Jasper and we have some artisan cheese makers everything from cow's milk and sheep's milk to To goats milk and so forth, but we do other things outside of some of those commodity things We have a program called weights and measures So people are going to their gas pumps and they pump up with a gas pump Check there's a little sticker on it and the sticker will say when it's been inspected And we have inspectors that go to the to the gas pumps and making sure that the consumers are getting what they paid for We also people that check scanners inside stores with our weights and measures program So what supposed to be at the in the aisle when you buy something? The price there should match up when you get to the checkout counter So we have inspectors that do that. We have animal health We have veterinarians to make sure that our animals our livestock are not spreading diseases So there's certain rules and regulations about transporting animals. So that's part of it. We have meat inspections So both federal we do federal meat inspection and help them out with that We do local inspection so that meat that you're buying in a store is is Safe we have that going on We have a big division of water quality of farmers have a numerous Regulations that they have to comply with to manage their operations how they spread manure Where it's spread when it can be spread and make sure they're complying with something called the required Agriculture practices which are the rules and regulations Relating to making sure that we protect our water. So there's no manure runoff into our waterways So that's one thing we do. We have an entomology department and we're always tracking whether They're Invasive species you may have heard about the emerald ash borer that has arrived in Vermont our agency was involved And helping to identify and confirm that it indeed had arrived in Vermont. So we're managing that mosquitoes We'll make sure some mosquitoes because some mosquitoes can spread some very serious diseases. So they do that So there's a wider array of things We also have economic development through our agriculture development division and they're working on promoting and getting Some of our small companies to bigger markets and so forth So there's a lot of variety of what we do and we have about about 130 employees statewide That are working in the agency of agriculture. That's amazing. Tell us about Farmers assistance the farmers you have a program for that. Yes, we have a lot of we mentioned water quality A lot of our water quality Programs are centered around making sure that the manures manage correctly and it doesn't have a chance to run off into our waterways So at times farmers have to invest in some of that big infrastructure manure pits Making sure their barnyards so the manure doesn't run off. So we have cost share programs That we we help them with and they can apply for federal federal and state assistance And so some of those projects Say a farm wants to build a manure pit and some of those manure pits can range up into a half a million dollars $650,000 depending on the size So a farmer really can't afford that full cost So there are programs for the state of Vermont to invest in that and also federal programs as well What about educating the people in the industry how to farm how to just basically run their businesses Yeah, we have we have a lot of educational programs centered around mainly around The water quality division we do have some in technical assistance where we provide through the agriculture development division But for the most part where we we work with U of M extension closely They have agronomists that are on on staff and we work with them closely We work with some folks with USDA to help on technical assistance but many of our programs that can assist our farmers say they want to look into Cover crops or no-till etc to sustain the water in the soil because we're really focused on making sure that our water quality and our soil health is is healthy and We we offer technical assistance Through that as well through education. What is the state of the agriculture right now in Vermont? in terms of either the country Or even our near neighbors What is the scope of this and are there any particular problems that being faced right now? Well, I would let's let's talk about Dairy Dairy has gone undergone a very difficult time over the last five years and The farmers have not been paid an adequate price to meet their production costs And that's related because there is too much dairy across the country in the world And when there's too much dairy out there particularly fluid milk drinking milk That lowers the price to the dairy farmer It has started to go up a little bit. So there's a little bit of encouraging news going on with that But for the most part on the dairy sector it has not gone well other industries that seem to be doing okay And continue to grow our maple industry continues to grow We continue to be the number one producer of maple products in the United States And it's more than just for your pancakes now with maple You're seeing infused in and products like barbecue sauce and spirits and beer Salad dressings. So there's continues to be growth in that a lot of investment has gone on over the last Decade in maple. So that's happening another industry. That's new relatively new to Vermont It's been here for a couple years, but it's growing tremendously this year is hemp We're in the midst of harvest season with hemp It was legalized by the federal government and we've had a pilot program Vermont for the last couple of years But now it's legalized. So a lot of farmers are taking a look at that. They're growing it We have about 900 people growing hemp in the state of Vermont So that's a new industry that's happening and our food our small food processors Artisan cheese folks they continue to make inroads and You know Vermont's brand as far as quality over quantity continues to be Stellar across the United States. And what about meat? How does Vermont stand in terms of meat production and Is it a something that is marketed nationally or even regionally? Mostly our our we have a number of grass-fed beef operations that are in Vermont And they are they are making their product mainly for our robust co-op market that we have in Vermont our co-ops across the state like to see and like to support local farmers, so they're buying buying a lot of local meat and That's that's that's generally that where their audience is Folks are continuing to support our farmers because they want to know where their product is coming from how they're treating their animals How they're treating their land and so forth, and that's one avenue. I think people are supporting Particularly meat local meat through their local co-ops in some of our smaller supermarkets. That's great What about the agricultural development? How does that work in terms of the land? We seem to be having a lot of mall development and maybe some other types of housing developments How does agricultural development fit into that? Well agriculture has to be done in the in the rural areas because that's where the land is We have a number of small food companies That are making incredible products, and we try to support them through Maybe getting them to a farmers market Maybe getting them to a trade show where they can get a another buyer or a bigger buyer in front of them And we have cost-share programs to help with that But those those are those are a difficult You know it may start in someone's kitchen you have a recipe in your kitchen It's great you show it to your friends They like it and then you may want to go to a commercial kitchen and rent out some space for a couple days a week and make that product Get it to a farmers market. Maybe get it in a few stores in Vermont, and then the next level is you want to get it to Either statewide or into some of our bigger markets Vermont is blessed that we have a great agriculture roots, but we're also blessed that we're close to people who do have Enough income that can support a quality product from Vermont So we try to get our some of our products into Boston into New York into Philadelphia into Washington sort of on the east side so that's that's a big market for them and a lot of people in those regions identify With Vermont because of its commitment to its its its agriculture its land and its environment The department the agency get into things like the use of the term Vermont I know there might have been an issue of it Vermont Vermont maple syrup using that term Vermont when it's really not from Vermont Do you get into that? Yeah, we we're always looking to make sure we protect The Vermont brand and the name Usually when it gets to a point where there may be dispute or someone abusing that That would be turned over to the attorney general's office, and they'll look into it through the consumer consumer laws because we do want to make sure that that That the Vermont name is not abused in some of our products Now suppose someone is watching this and they're in college or they're Thinking about a career. How does the agency foster an interest in an agricultural career? we try to foster that through Partnerships and we always are encouraging folks if you're interested in agriculture Hook up with a Farmer maybe try it for a while Maybe spend a summer on the farm if you're into vegetables and cropping and so forth like that do that If you want to work on a dairy farm, there are numerous jobs that are available on dairy farms right now I'll try it out learn from someone who has experience and There are programs out there Either through the Vermont lands land trust land link if people are interested in actually purchasing their own farm or Taking it to the next level, but we're always encouraging either internships or Just learning from a neighboring farmer to see if it does work for you because it's something You don't want to jump into lightly Well, I see that there's a number of other projects that the states involved in your department What is the working lands project the working lands enterprise group that is a an organization where we provide assistance to say you're a cheese maker and You're at a certain level and maybe you have two or three employees and you're making a certain amount of cheese But you want to take it to the next level that may employ more people may buy more product We provide a grant program for them. So there's an independent board We manage the program through the agency they make a proposal to the board about hey I need to buy this piece of infrastructure to take it to the next level which will create jobs or provide more more stability to To their operation so they come before them they apply and then we may buy them say they need a Cream separator or they need a truck to haul their milk That particular board can provide assistance to them this year the legislature appropriated an extra half a million dollars to that program and that money is earmarked to the dairy sector or the environmental sector So that was important as people look at new ways to grow their operations. That is what that particular Enterprise board does I mean you notice you mentioned the legislature. What what types of Developments or achievements or issues has the agency dealt with in this this first half of this session Yeah, we've we've dealt with a number of Particularly issues a lot of it sent it around which is we just talked about with the Enterprise board We were working with them trying to find the necessary dollars that would be able to go to that particular Sector we write Various laws around hemp We're able to add a couple of new employees to grow the hemp program in Vermont because in the hemp program We want to have it focused much like our artisan cheese Industry and it has to be centered around safety and also on quality we also are able to add a couple of employees to support our Apriaries and our be a sector we have it's important that our bees remain healthy and flourishing And to do that we need to get people out checking on hives more making sure that Disease is not spread so we were able to get a couple of more employees to work on that So all those things are things we worked with the legislature on and of course a lot of it spent along Our budget and and how we maintain the resources we need to run the organization and support our farmers What about the relationships with other state agricultural agencies and with Congress Is there anything coming up that Concerned you in the in Congress? Well, we did get some From USDA. We have a good relationship with USDA. We we were awarded one or three around the country This is a dairy innovation Center And that it's going to provide money for us and our dairy farmers to look at new ways to Innovate maybe develop new products. Maybe change their farming habits, maybe go to Possibly a grass-based dairy all those things were very very important We we've just received word of that in the last a few weeks and that will continue to be part of what we do over the next A few years and Congress has assured us that there will be some more money available to continue to grow that Program to help our our dairy industry over the over the coming years How about community involvement? What types of programs that you have that perhaps? Town boards or civic organizations or other types of groups 4-H clubs can can get involved with? Yeah, it's very important that Agriculture get out tell the community what they're doing Over time people are not as close to where their food has is being grown and that's in Vermont as well We're still a very very rural state But there are pockets of rural areas where people are not visiting farms seeing farms We have something that the agency supports in the summertime called breakfast on the farm And that's an opportunity for the public to walk on to a dairy farm early in the morning a get a free breakfast and then see How milk is produced see how the cows are cared for see how they're fed? And there's a couple of those each summer. Those are important We have a program that we support called two plus two where it's a College program or if you spend this a scholarship program that we help support with the help of the legislature where a farmer may have a Kid that's going to college they go to VTC for two years They go to VTC for two years and they can go to University of Vermont in their agriculture program And this is a scholarship program So those are all a very important we sponsor 4-H clubs, but it's very important that we continue to Expose the public that's not involved in agriculture of what's happening. Let me ask you about some of these Issues I understand you have a problem with phosphorus and there's a Vermont phosphorus innovation challenge. What's that about? This is related to improving our water quality over time in Vermont With the help of the agency of natural resources and the agency of commerce We all got together and we just challenged companies to look about removing phosphorus Safe from manure. How could we remove some phosphorus from manure? and So that would not Necessarily make its way to a waterway now phosphorus is is very needed And it's essential for plant growth, but if there's too much in one particular area that is where the problem is So we're looking at companies are looking at It's a company called rock dust and rock dust is is comes out of a quarry and it's not really dusty It's a very small pebble, but that can absorb phosphorus. So they've been part of this phosphorus challenge We gave them some seed money to do some studies and We're continuing to monitor those. We've got stuff called biochar where that's another thing. It's a it's a wood based Product and that absorbs phosphorus. So the phosphorus doesn't have a chance chance to Leak into the waterways that is one so all these things are part of the Vermont phosphorus innovation challenge and we continue to Evaluate those and there could be some more funding coming up in the coming months for those particular projects that could be used statewide and advance those companies as well and you mentioned the bees and there's always a Great deal of information lately in national news and scientific journals about the bee population How we doing on that the bee population is always a challenge tremendous interest from our there's a a lot of bee clubs around the state of Vermont backyard beekeepers and It's very important because We've had issues with mites and disease over time But a bee can travel as much as five miles in its daily journey So if it's if it's carrying a disease it could get into another hive and cause trouble there So we're always looking to make sure that if we identify that there could be a problem in one sector That the neighboring a beekeeper knows about it and they can deal with it But there's tremendous amount of science and research going on particularly at UVM Related to the health of bees bees because they are important for our apple crop vegetable crop All of our farmers rely on bees is for pollination. That's great. Now. We're looking now at the the Middle of October, how do you project the the next season to do in terms of issues or problems? How are we doing going to be doing as we go into the winter if you can well a lot of a lot of agriculture is controlled by the by the weather and If we look back in the spring, it was very wet and then it recovered Nicely for the most part for a lot of our farmers throughout the summer Now going into you know the winter months most farmers really don't like really really cold weather because that can impact What's happening on farms? But there's some concern about you know, it's in particularly when you talk about maple We have wild fluctuations in our weather now You know the day we were recording this this broadcast. It was really having a really hard Consistent rain not a soft rain. We're having a lot of one inch two inch rain events Those are something new that farmers are coping with and one of the hopes is they're gonna have to adapt that over The time is because they're working to improve their soil health and that will act as a sponge So some of these are really strong particularly Rainy days There were been experienced that they the soil can take that and then that has a long-term impact on the health of our waterways so weather is is one of the biggest challenges that farmers face on a Daily basis and it's something that they're always watching that weather forecast to say what's next What about issues like soil erosion? Is that a problem because of the last few years anytime anytime? There's a big rain. It has a lot of impact even in non agriculture world So you know it rains goes on the roof can go under the parking lots goes into the drains has to go somewhere Goes into our treatment plants in the more urban areas You know our rural areas it goes down our back roads. It can find its way to water. So anytime There's a hard rain event it has a has an impact maybe two months three months down the road and then maybe it warms up and So we face we face water quality issues from there, but anytime you have a dramatic Especially rain event it can impact water quality months down the road we've managed to cover quite a bit and Before we conclude I'd like to give you the opportunity perhaps to address The reminders who are watching and with any special message or any special concerns you have well Thank You Dennis. It's been it's been great talking agriculture I would just encourage everyone to learn and listen engage with their farm farmer or farmer Buy as many local products as you can Particularly in milk if you look on milk if you look for the number 50 code 50 on your milk That means it's produced in Vermont and bottled in Vermont. So code 50 on your milk Shop around get out look around support your farmer in any way and learn and listen and what they're doing Most of them are absolutely needed for our communities and We're blessed to have such abundance of tremendous local products that we can eat and share here in the Green Mountain State That's great. Well. Thank you very much My special guest today has been answering tablets the secretary of the Vermont Agency of Agriculture Food and Markets Thank you for watching