Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Steven Kotler: The Psychology of Aging Well and Why Your Best Years May Still Be Ahead of You | Health and Wellness | YAPClassic

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Starting point is 00:01:52 Yapam. We've been sold this story that aging means decline, a slower brain, a weaker body, fewer big, wins. But what if your later years could actually be your peak? Today we're throwing it back to my conversation with human performance expert and bestselling author Stephen Kotler. He's the executive director of the Flow Research Collective and at 53 years old, he decided to learn park skiing, one of the most intense high-risk sports out there to prove that peak performance doesn't come with an expiration date. In this Yap classic episode, Stephen breaks down the science of training your brain and body for longevity and why your 40s, 50s, and beyond can unlock more creativity,

Starting point is 00:02:31 resilience, and wisdom than ever before. For my young improprieters who are getting a little older, this one is for you. I give you Stephen Kotler. Stephen, welcome back to Young and Profiting podcast. It is so good to be with you again. I am super happy. Young and profiter, Stephen Kotler has been on Yap three times and I still feel like I could have 10 more conversations with him, given his breath of work. And to kick it off, figured we would start with how you got the inspiration to study peak performance. So I learned that you were really shocked by the story of Antonio Stradivaris. And he's a famous violin maker and he had amazing feat of creating two of his most famous

Starting point is 00:03:11 violence when he was 92 years old. And this was in the 1700s, way before medical advancements. And so I'd love to understand why his story was so shocking to you. How did he dispel, you know, the typical, you know, thoughts around traditional aging and how did he inspire you to study peak performance aging? So I had been working, I'd been working researching, looking at the field of peak performance aging for a while in a totally unrelated project, right? I was going to write a mystery novel and I wanted a character, I wanted a cat burglar as a character who was going to steal musical instruments

Starting point is 00:03:46 who made the rarest musical instruments in history. I would stridevarious. And then I found, figured out what you mentioned, which is he made two of the rarest and most expensive musical instruments in his 90s, and I went, well, wait a minute. Everything I've been told about physical abilities is like the older myth about aging, which most of us believe, and I believed at the time of this, is what you could call the long, slow rot theory. It's the idea that all of our mental skills and our physical skills that decline over time, there's nothing we can do to stop the slide. So included in those skills, physical skills would be fast-twitch muscle response, fine motor performance, dexterity, all this stuff you would need to make a violin or a viola in your 90s,

Starting point is 00:04:32 along with like expertise and wisdom and all the like cognitive abilities. And I, it sort of paused me and I was like, well, wait a minute. If this is true, either Stradivarius is like the one and a billion, or most of what we've been told about aging is wrong. And that was, I had already been looking at other aspects of it, but really sort of lit a fire under me to really invest. investigate our physical abilities and what happened to them over time. I've been looking at the cognitive stuff for a while. It's very related to flow. How we age, flow plays a big role there. So

Starting point is 00:05:05 this is not new territory to me. But the physical side was like, holy crap, could this possibly be true? And it is true across the board. It's every one of our physical skills, our user-or-lose-it skills. And the research is really clear. We don't stop using these skills, both physical and mental. we could hang on to them, even advance them far, far later into life than amethal possible. So I love this. So you're saying the long, slow rot theory basically means that our physical mental skills decline over time. There's nothing that we can really do to stop the slide. That's what inspired you to kind of research this in more detail, understand performance peak aging. And like you just said, you said that user lose it skills, we actually have control over

Starting point is 00:05:49 them. We used to think that our physical abilities just decline, but there's a way we can actually keep those skills. So talk to us more about use it or lose it skills, what they are, how we keep them, I guess, healthy. Yeah, so there's a bunch of stuff on the cognitive side. Let's get back there in a second. On the physical side, there's five main categories that matter. And let me, since a lot of your listeners are younger, let me start here, which is peak, performance aging starts young. Like the research is really clear. Like interventions in your 80s, even beyond, matter.

Starting point is 00:06:28 Like really matter. You can really make changes right up to the end and they matter and they're going to have actual big effects. But a lot of this stuff that you want to start working on, you actually want to start working on in your 20s and your 30s. And, you know, this is the biohacking crowd is very aware of this, right? A lot of that crowd is 20s and 30s and they're doing a lot of these things. Now, I might argue that they're doing some of the wrong stuff because they don't quite understand what peak performance aging is.

Starting point is 00:06:55 But besides the point, a lot of this stuff starts young. On the physical side, we want to train five skills that matter most. Strength, stamina, flexibility, agility, and balance. Those are the five skills that you want to train over time. And specifically, we have like the World Health Organization. This is not new knowledge. Like the World Health Organization knows exactly how many minutes a week we should. should be training these things. You want 150 to 300. This is for peak performance aging, not healthy and

Starting point is 00:07:25 successful aging is a little less, but peak performance aging. It's 150 to 300 minutes of hard aerobic training a week, moderate to vigorous aerobic training a week, two strength training days a week, and three flexibility balance and agility days a week. Or you can find one skill I chose park skiing in the book that accompanies all that. In parks skiing, I'm using strength, stamina, balance, agility, flexibility. There's other stuff you want to do. There's ways we have things called prime mover muscles are big muscles. And then we have stabilizer muscles like your rotator cuffs or your hip flexors.

Starting point is 00:08:04 Over time, the body gets more efficient and it will start using the prime movers and not use the stabilizer muscles. So if you've been on the couch for a while and you come back to athletics, you're not going to hurt your quad. You're going to tear the stable out. You're going to tear your hip flexor because it stopped doing the work. Your quad if you're walking around, your ambulatory is working. Your hip flexor has started atrophy. So there's ways you want to sort of think about training that's a little bit different if you've been away for a while.

Starting point is 00:08:34 But those are the physical skills we need to train over time. On the physical side, why are action sports and what you call dynamic activity is so important to help us with these user-lose-it skills? because I think a lot of people who are older, we're used to going to the gym, taking group classes, whatever, but nobody's really thinking about action sports, and you say that they're a great way to leverage these skills.

Starting point is 00:08:58 Okay, we've got to get to the full sentence anyway. So let's go for it. Just go out there, and then we'll break it apart and why it matters so much. So if you want to rock, do you drop, if you really are interested in peak performance aging, you need to regularly engage in challenging, creative, and social activities that is,

Starting point is 00:09:16 you've just pointed out that demand, dynamic, deliberate play and take place in novel outdoor environments. Now, let's unpack this big ass sentence and what it means and why it answers your question. So challenging social and creative, lifelong learning matters for a bunch of different reasons, but short version, if we want to preserve brain function, we need expertise and wisdom. Expertise and wisdom are these very diverse neural nets in the brain, lots of real estate, less of redundancy, impervious to cognitive decline, the more expertise, the more wisdom. And this is why one of the reasons people performance aging starts young. Like literally the guy

Starting point is 00:09:55 who, who did the core research on wisdom, Elkanon Goldberg, his, his core advice is, you know, the more wisdom, the more expertise, the more we have cognitive reserve, the meaning, the more we can stave off Alzheimer's dementia, cognitive decline. All the things that are going to happen could happen to the brain over time. This is how we fight back. And his point was, was wisdom among the many things encapsulated and wisdom are all like the unconscious rules that govern how does systems work. How does behavior work? All the like all that stuff. It's onboarded slowly over time. So you want to start training these things. You want to start learning. Challenging creative and social activities, we learn a lot during. But they're also tend to drive us

Starting point is 00:10:38 into flow. Social activities are really important as we age. Most important thing you can do for your brain is maintain social activity because it keeps the brain active in really important ways and really lowers stress levels. So a lot of stuff we're going to be talking about. There are nine known causes of aging. They're all linked to inflammation. Inflammation is linked to stress. So anything you do that fight stress, that lowers stress, that gives you more emotional control,

Starting point is 00:11:04 is involved in peak performance aging. So social activities lower stress. They give us these pro-social. Oh, there's people around who love me, got my back. I can be a little less stress. So there's a lot of that stuff. Dynamic, deliberate play is the next bit. Dynamic is literally what we're talking about.

Starting point is 00:11:22 It's just a fancy way of saying, it's all five categories of functional fitness, strength, stamina, flexibility, balance, agility. Deliberate play, you've heard of deliberate practice. Anders Erickson's favorite, you know, expertise, repetition with incremental advancement is the fastest path for his expertise. And Anders wasn't wrong. but as he himself said, that's only true in certain very precise disciplines. And when faced with just general learning, deliberate play works better than deliberate practice. Delivered play is repetition with improvisation.

Starting point is 00:11:56 You're going to do the same thing he did last time, but a little bit of flourish, a little flower, a little, something fun. It's playful, meaning there's no shame, there's no embarrassment. If you're bad, who cares, you're having fun. But that feeling of play produces more neurochemistry, more endorphine, this one really boost the immune system, lower stress levels, but amplifies learning. So dynamic, deliberate play, says I'm using all the physical skills that decline, and I'm learning better than any other way.

Starting point is 00:12:25 Novel outdoor environments, the last bit. Why do we care? And this is back. Action sports, demand dynamic, deliberate play, and they take place in novel outdoor environments, and they're challenging, creative, and social. So it's one-stop shopping. The last bit is the most important bit. one, outdoor environments in general lower stress.

Starting point is 00:12:44 We know this is well established in positive psychology. A 20-minute walk in the woods will outperform most SSRIs for treatment of depression. I can talk about why if you care, but like we know that. Good for you, lowers stress. So in itself, being in nature, is anti-inflammatory. So it's, you know, better for healthy aging. But if you want to preserve brain function, you want, how do you do that? you want to birth new neurons and turn those new neurons into neural nets, right?

Starting point is 00:13:13 That's learning. So the adult brain, contrary to what we used to believe for a long time, it actually does continue to birth new neurons. In fact, the adult brain will birth about 700 new neurons a day, even basically until you die. But where do those neurons show up as the key question? They show up in a part of the brain numbers. The hippocampus does two things. It does long-term memory, and it does location, place.

Starting point is 00:13:37 packed with place cells and grid cells. Why we evolved as hunter-gatherers, you've got to, when you were in the wild and something emotionally charged happened, you got to remember where you were when it happened. That's survival. So where did I get attacked by that tiger

Starting point is 00:13:50 so I don't go back there? Where was that ripe fruit tree? So when it comes into season, I'm hungry, I can go there. This is survival. This is what the brain is designed to do. Peak performance and peak performance aging is always getting our biology to work for us

Starting point is 00:14:04 rather than against us. Our biology is designed. to remember when we have novel experiences and outdoor environments. So that's what you want to use it for. Action Sports gives you that. Now, I also say in the book, like if action sports aren't your thing, you can duplicate a lot of this by simply hiking with a weight vest through natural environments.

Starting point is 00:14:25 It's a really great. And weight vests are really key better than a lot of other things because they amplify bone density. So a lot, little known fact, your bone. it's like where you store all your minerals, all your nutrients, right, are stored in your bones and they're released into, so everything that drives the brain, calcium, for example, which is in everything the brain does, it's stored in the bones. So as our bones become less dense over time, which happens, it impacts everything. For women, really important after menopause, where does most

Starting point is 00:15:01 of your estrogen come from? Your bones. So wildly fluctuating hormone levels, which is the problem that most people have postmenopause exacerbated by bone density. If you want to increase bone density, one of the best ways is hiking with a weight vest. There's lots of literature. There's lots of science on that. There's also a bunch of other benefits. But it hits all of those categories if you're not interested in action sports. That said, there's a lot to recommend in action sports, especially, you know, a lot in our country is about a new way of approaching these difficult, challenging physical activities late in life that's much safer.

Starting point is 00:15:37 and much more well-suited to progression. Yeah, because I have to say, like, I'm in my 30s, and I used to ski, and I don't even ski anymore because I'm like, I've got too much slip for it. I don't want to break a bone. I'm not into it. And so I totally love that you're giving another option in terms of the weighted vest on hiking. So in your book, you actually took on park skiing. And this is something that people used to believe that anybody over 35 really couldn't learn.

Starting point is 00:16:06 So talk to us about learning that activity at 53 years old and, you know, what you learned as an old dog learning new tricks. There's a couple things you need to know to flesh this out a little bit. But you are right. Everything you said is totally true. Why did I think I could learn to Park Ski? There's a whole bunch of new stuff in like flow science, my field and body cognition. A couple other whiz-bang fields that I was like, you know, if these things are right, should be totally possible for all the adults to be able to learn really, really difficult skills. I'll give you like one random example.

Starting point is 00:16:39 We have a motor learning window. Like Beverly says don't become a gymnast or a ballet dancer after 25, right? Because that window's closed and you can't just. That's sort of true. There is like a lot of things would be performance aging. It's true, but and here's the but. What really changes is not our ability to learn. It's how we learn.

Starting point is 00:17:00 When we're kids, we play. When we're adults, we have shame. we have embarrassment, we have time crunches, we have a whole bunch of other stuff. If you can shift back into that attitude of play, a lot of that motor learning window reopens. So that's just one example. A lot of the skills that we used to think declined over time. We now know they're used to lose it skills, including the skills we need to learn how to park

Starting point is 00:17:26 ski. And so that was sort of where it came from. And it was, I was an expert ski. I just had never park ski. I knew no tricks, right? I was a big mountain skier. I could go in a straight line very fast really well. But park skiing is like,

Starting point is 00:17:44 it's doing tricks off jumps and on rails and wall rides. It's very acrobatic. It's very dangerous. And so it was a totally not a new adventure for me. There were a lot of reasons to take it up. There were a lot of advantages about like knowing how to park ski later in life was actually what I was after. But it was just a great way to test all this science.

Starting point is 00:18:11 And when we learned, and here's what's cool. So I made to measure progress, I made a list of 20 tracks. This is zero to like intermediate. Intermediate matter because once you get there, you're sort of like, you can take the random shit out of the equation. Like you can control your progress and not have these accidental falls or things that really can get you heard early on. I figured if it took five years, cool, whatever.

Starting point is 00:18:34 Like, I didn't care. I started when I was 53. If it took me into 60, great, whatever. Who cares? I did it in under a season. In fact, I've never learned anything so fast in my entire life. And the cool part was my ski partner who was your age and was a former professional athlete who got very injured, retired, had a family, had his job, came back to the sport.

Starting point is 00:18:55 He used the same methodology and got farther than he's ever gotten before. We came back the following year. We took 17 older adults, ages, 20. to 68, they were intermediate at best, park skiers or skiers and snowboarders. We trained them up in four days on the mountain and they got good. But then, because as you pointed out, action sports, not for everyone. So the key thing here is mindset. What am I talking about?

Starting point is 00:19:27 Let me tell you what we did and let me tell you what it was. We then stripped out the action sports. We used weight vest hiking instead. and we put 300 adults, all ages, ages like 30 to 85, I think, through the same kind of training to see if we could explode their mindset towards aging and get them on what I call the NAR-style quest, which is a challenging, social and creative activity that demands dynamic, deliberate playing takes place in not a lot of outdoor environments. I don't care what it is. I wanted them to just start on a quest that would lead to something that. that way. But what I really wanted to do was explode the mindset of old. Oh, I'm too old for shit. I'm going to get hurt. I got I got things I want to hold on to. It sets up. It's really weird. Our biology is designed when we're young. Teenagers, kids, teenagers, young adults, the seeking system sort of drives our behavior. This is exploratory behavior, right? Like, I'm going to go out. I'm going to

Starting point is 00:20:26 check out something new. I'm going to figure out who I am and what I do and how I want to live and how do I want to Michael, all that stuff. This is about dopamine and norapinephrine. Those are very potent feel-good neurochemicals. They're very, very addictive, very, very addictive, right? Dopamine, cocaine's the most widely addictive drug on earth. All that happens is it causes the brain to release some dopamine and it blocks its re-uptake, right? So dopamine is really addictive. When we get stuff that we want to hold on to, oh, I got the right job, I've got the right partner, I've got kids, I've got dogs, I've got a great apartment. I like, I like my bike, whatever it is,

Starting point is 00:21:02 we start trading our addictive, the neurochemicals we want. We no longer want to be seeking. We want the stuff that is about conserving what we have, protecting what we have, bonding. So we get endorphins and anandamide and oxytocin. These are like the pro-social neural chemicals that underpin strong family structures and things like that,

Starting point is 00:21:23 strong company structures, and they're great. But we're trading our addictions. And what happens is it makes us very, very conservative. It shuts down the seeking system. We get the voice in our head that says, hey, don't do that. You're going to lose what you have. And it's an addictive, an addiction. And the truth of the matter is, like, old people are literally addicted to the wrong drugs in their bodies.

Starting point is 00:21:44 You need all of these systems working together for big performance itting. And there's a penalty for having a mindset of old. And this is the point. That very mindset that you described, having, like being scared about the second half of your life, oh, it's not as exciting. That mindset of old, there's a big health and longevity penalty. In fact, when you flip it, when you have a positive mindset towards aging, the second half of my life is filled with thrilling and exciting possibilities,

Starting point is 00:22:08 my best days are ahead of me. It translates, and this is one of the most well-established facts in peak performance aging, it will translate into additional seven and a half years of health and longevity. That's huge. That's like quitting, huge, right? In fact, if you're morbidly obese, obese and have a shitty mindset towards aging, change your mindset first. It actually have a bigger effect on your life and your health and your longevity than losing weight. So it's really,

Starting point is 00:22:38 really important. It's where peak performance aging starts. And one of the reasons that peak performance aging starts young is if you never develop this mindset, this isn't going to be a problem. Like, you're not going to have to overcome it, right? One of the reasons the NAR style adventure is so useful for older adults is, like for me, it didn't matter what I wanted to believe about aging. Once I got out on the mountain, I was learning how to do 360s

Starting point is 00:23:02 and nose butter 360s and 180s and all the other stuff I learned. Like all, like it just blew up all my limiting beliefs about what was possible in the future because I have just onboarded the most difficult physical thing I've ever done in my life

Starting point is 00:23:14 and I did it at 53. And I've done a lot of difficult physical things along the way. This was definitely the hardest and I did it, you know, and I'm still at parks skiing at 55 now because I wrote books a couple years old. in terms of when I wrote it. I mean, that's amazing.

Starting point is 00:23:30 I have to say it's very inspiring and I can feel your enthusiasm from the camera and sort of like your vigor for life. And so it's really positive that you're spreading this message in terms of how people can basically stay young at heart forever. And like you said, it's totally in your control if you put yourselves in situations

Starting point is 00:23:47 where you're activating your brain in certain ways, you're playing, you're dispelling any sort of internal beliefs that you have about your own abilities by actually going out and doing these physical things. In turn, it's helping improve your cognitive performance. Just amazing, really cool stuff. And nobody has talked about this on the podcast yet. So it's very exciting. Yeah, fam, when I started my business as a side hustle, I was working full time at Disney. But once I started bringing consistent revenue and I had retainer clients, I knew it was time to go full swing into entrepreneurship. But nobody warns you about all the

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Starting point is 00:25:15 and start using free resources to build something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent and Northwest Registered Agent dot com slash yap free. Yapfam, as my business keeps growing, I feel like I'm always hiring. I recently added two new video editors and a producer to my team. And I can tell you from experience the right hire can give you leverage. The wrong hire gives you a second job.

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Starting point is 00:28:08 slash profiting. That's P-R-O-L-N-L-I-F dot com slash profiting. Prolonl-L-L-I-F-com slash profiting. To claim your 15% off discount and your bonus gift, prolonlife.com slash profiting. So sticking on this point of mindset, I'd love to talk about this concept of dirty old shame. I know that you had to get over some internal traumas from my understanding when you were growing up, you know, you weren't always this sporty. You were sort of the last kid picked on the team at school. And you mentioned in your book that part of you kind of overcoming and taking on this challenge was you getting over these past trauma.

Starting point is 00:28:47 So talk to us about that and how we need to do that as well. This is another reason peak performance aging sort of starts young. First we start with the good news. One of the reasons old dogs can learn new tricks that we haven't talked about yet is as we enter our 50s, it's really in our late 40s. there are a bunch of really profound changes on how the brain process information. One, certain genes only turn on with experience. They'll only flip these switches later in life.

Starting point is 00:29:16 Two, in our 50s, the two hemispheres of the brain, which essentially function in opposition to each other along the way, they start working together like never before. And finally, the brain starts to recruit underutilized resources in our 50s. So as a result, we gain access to whole new levels of intelligence, creativity, empathy, and wisdom. And I go on and on and on about those benefits.

Starting point is 00:29:38 There's a lot that comes with that. But these are not guaranteed. So psychologists talk about moderators, the technical term, it's an if-then condition. You get this only if you do this, right? And if you want the access to these cognitive superpowers in our 50s and we'll come back to it, but from a profit perspective,

Starting point is 00:30:03 we really want to talk about those superpowers in a second. But let me finish this point. There are a number of gateways of adult development that you have to pass through. So by the age 30, if you really just want to enjoy and kick ass beyond 30, you have to have solved the crisis of identity, which sort of shows up around age 12.

Starting point is 00:30:25 If you haven't solved it by 30, you have a problem. The reason is by 40, you need match fit. Match fit is an economics term. It means there's a tight link between who I am and what I do in the world, right? If you just, if you don't know who you are, you can't get match fit. Because there's no, if you don't know your strengths, your values, all that stuff. So that has to be by 30, by 40, we need to be, we have match fit.

Starting point is 00:30:51 And then by 50, we need forgiveness. We've got to forgive ourselves for like past embarrassments and past shames. And we've got to figure those who have done us harm. And as you pointed out, I spent most of my childhood losing fights to jocks. I was a punk rocker. The jocks didn't like us. I didn't like them. And this was back in the 70s and 80s.

Starting point is 00:31:11 And you got to understand like cars of football players would pull up on the side of the road and they'd see a guy with a mohawk and they'd jump out to beat you up. And it was like five against one always. And it was not a great situation. So I had a lot of anger. And I knew peak performance aging, you've got to put that shit down. You cannot thrive in your 50s. You don't get these superpowers, which is why old dogs can learn new tricks better than young dogs. It's why one of the reasons I learned parks skiing so fast is I have more intelligence.

Starting point is 00:31:44 I've got more creativity. I've got the stuff I need. And they've got even more wisdom, which means I could keep myself safer than when I was making better decisions along the way. That stuff is great. but I don't get it if I can't forgive those who have done me wrong. So this is the standard best way to do that. And there's tons of research, it's loving kindness meditation and passion meditation. It's an incredibly potent tool.

Starting point is 00:32:08 It's amazing for a ton of different stuff. It's been studied for probably longer than any other meditation style. And we understand all the neuroscience. But when it came to people who I got in fistfights with and worse for 10 years, it wasn't enough. I could like all the loving guidance meditation of the world like I could forgive a lot of stuff

Starting point is 00:32:31 and clean out a lot. I was left with like it just like wasn't going away. So I decided one of the reasons I took on an incredibly difficult physical jockey challenge is okay I'm going to go like this is my problem.

Starting point is 00:32:45 Let's go walk a mile in their moccasins. Right. Let's take this on and it turns out it worked. By the way, I didn't think it was going to work. I just knew I needed to do this to thrive. And I was like, well, I'm out of any other ideas. Loving kindness meditation, which is what everybody, right, is not getting it done. And there's still anger there.

Starting point is 00:33:07 There's still resentment there. There's still stuff there. So let me see if taking on, you know, this kind of putting myself on a physical mission could clear that out. And it did. And, you know, the story is sort of in the end of the book. And I won't, I want to sort of ruin it. A spoiler alert, right? I'd be giving away sort of that one, and I'm not going to.

Starting point is 00:33:27 But that was one of the neater things that happened along the way, is I got to put down like a bunch of sort of shame and embarrassment and, like, stuff that I, you know, I've carried since I was probably 10 or 12, definitely 12. That's amazing. Do you feel like much lighter now and that you just can approach things differently? Like, how did that impact you getting over that trauma like that? after so many years of having the same issue. I don't know if it, it, I always say this is one of the myths that a thing a lot of people

Starting point is 00:34:04 have about their life is that people think it's going to get easier. Like you think, oh, I'm going to get older. I'm going to get better at this. I'm going to be able to sort of like, oh, I know exactly what I like and I can manicure my life. And it just doesn't get easier. It just doesn't. what it gets is more meaningful. And more in like life satisfaction and overall well-being.

Starting point is 00:34:29 And that's what this really impacted. Somehow, like, it made life more meaningful, like, in those ways. Like, I don't know. Do I feel lighter, perhaps? But what, it just sort of, it closed that loop. You know what I mean? Like, okay, done. Check.

Starting point is 00:34:50 I don't have to like, I don't have to worry about that anymore. And literally what it really does is when certain memories just like pop into my head, now they just last a half second. And I'm like, oh, yeah, there's that thing. And it goes away. Whereas before, no, I could start to think on it and dwell on it. And then I'd have a problem. So I want to talk about our brain biology.

Starting point is 00:35:13 Have you ever heard of Arthur Brooks? I think so. Arthur Brooks. Okay. He's somebody that I think you should definitely look into. So I had Arthur Brooks on the podcast in 2021, sorry, 2022. And he was like one of my favorite interviews. And he wrote this book called Cracking the Code to Happiness.

Starting point is 00:35:29 He's a Harvard professor, social scientist. And basically he talks about how your brain biologically is different before 40 and after 40. And he talks about fluid intelligence versus crystallized intelligence. And so this was like a big conversation that we had on the podcast. And something that made us think a lot. I had a lot of feedback from my listeners. And I feel like what you say is pretty different from what he says. There are some similarities.

Starting point is 00:35:57 But basically what he's saying is that you have a biological clock ticking, your ability to reason, think flexibly, learn new things, problem solve, be innovative. That starts to decline in your 40s and 50s. And that doesn't mean that your brain starts to go bad. You just start to have crystallized intelligence or you accumulate knowledge, fact, skills, and you can use that throughout your career as a way to teach other people. And essentially what he's saying is like, you've got to like be ready for the second half of your career and not miss that and be like trying to chase your younger self and your younger brain essentially. So for example, the professional athlete becomes the coach, the star litigator becomes a partner.

Starting point is 00:36:33 The singer becomes an A&R exec. And you're basically teaching younger people your knowledge and taking on that second wave of your career. So I know that was a handful, but I just wanted you to understand. great. So he is, he is right, he is right, and he is wrong, as far as I could tell. Where he's really right is passing along knowledge is absolutely key to peak performance aging. It's key to, like, so, in fact, the societies where people age the best, two things are very true. One, they don't have negative stereotypes towards aging. So ageism is the most common and socially accepted stereotype in the world. It's the only stereotype in the world. I go out in the public these days with any stereotype,

Starting point is 00:37:25 somebody's going to punch me in the mouth and cancel me, except for ageism. Ageism, you can, people are like, oh, you're too old to do that shit. Like, we geese are each other right and left, and it's crazy. Becca Levy at Yale has done tons of work on ageism and the stereotype of aging, and it's incredibly detrimental. In fact, I, I would, you could go so far as literally we are killing older adults with how we talk about them. So that is really, really clear. The societies where there's no ageism, there's also cross-generational friendships. So the old are passing along knowledge, the young, this is really, this is a natural part of brain development.

Starting point is 00:38:07 So he is not wrong. We do shift from fluid intelligence into crystallized intelligence. That transition does happen. happen. But, but, but, but, but a bunch of the skills that we thought declined over time, like the fluid intelligence skills that we thought went away. No, it turns out that's, that's not true at all. We get actually new levels of intelligence and creativity in our 50s, right? So that's not actually true. There's certain things. The article I like best, Martin Seligman from Penn and Scott Barry Kaufman wrote a great article on creativity over

Starting point is 00:38:41 time where they talk about what goes away from creativity and what stays or comes on. And the list of like what comes on and stays is much longer than what goes away. Now, there's stuff that does go away. So the question you've got to now ask is, is it permanent? Is this real or have we just not figured out how to train it? So let me give you an example. Adam Gazali is a friend of mine. He's on my board. We do a lot of research together. He's at UCSF. And he had these neuroscientists, you know, the cover of nature a bunch of years ago for a video game he designed. It's the very first video game to be approved by the FDA. It treats cognitive decline in older adults.

Starting point is 00:39:22 And what it specifically focuses on is task switching. So if you go back to fluid intelligence, one of the things that declines over time is task switching, our ability to focus on this and then focus on this, right? And that's a real problem. He's got a video game that will take your brain if you're sick. You play it literally, I think it's three hours a week or three 20 minute sessions a week for six weeks is the standard doctor prescription for this video game and it will reset your 60-year-old brain back to 20. So there's a bunch of stuff like that where it's user or lose it. We just have to figure out how do you train it up? The other side of it is.

Starting point is 00:40:02 So let's talk about the other weird one of the things he said. one of the reasons our brain performance declines over time is white matter density decreases over time and we lose certain neurochemicals. So what he's not telling you is, well, you can replace those neurochemicals. In fact, SSRIs, which actually suck for depression, turn out to be great for older adults. Low-level SSRIs because serotonin levels decline over time and SSRIs can boost them. If you don't want to take a drug, hike with a weight vest. Most of your serotonin is manufactured in your bones. And one of the reasons the brain has less is because you're making less in your bones. And if you increase bone density, you get the serotonin back. You get a bunch of those neurocomicals back.

Starting point is 00:40:45 So he's not wrong in what he's presenting. He's wrong. Like some of this stuff has changed since then. The general thinking is sort of true. But a lot of those skills are used it or lose it. And either we've already figured out how to fix them or this stuff is also progressing really, really, really quickly. That's the whole other side of this is regenerative medicine, longevity, science, all that stuff is moving at exponential rates. So, you know, for example, five years ago, we could not deal with most tendon, bone, and ligament problems.

Starting point is 00:41:22 Like, we are good at that stuff now. It's advanced really far. Now, if anybody is making you promises about stem cells that go, like, beyond bones, ligaments and tendons. No, no, they're lying and they're exaggerating what the, what's real right now. But up to that point, no, no, we sort of got a dial. So technology is advancing and it's going to solve a lot of those issues, right? A lot of those issues are not what we thought they were in the week. And you can train a lot of that stuff in unusual ways. We're just figuring out. And some of the early ways, like all the brain games, they're worthless.

Starting point is 00:42:01 They're totally worthless. They train nothing other than the ability to play that game. That's not how this works. But learning a foreign language, learning to play a musical instrument, learning a challenging dynamic activity, like all that stuff. No, no, that's the real medicine. And that really actually does work. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:42:21 I mean, I love what you're saying because I remember leaving that conversation with Arthur Brooks, although it was really really. enlightening and he said a lot of smart things. I felt depressed. I was like, oh man, I got like, you know, less than 10 years to figure, like, to do all my innovative stuff. And it's good to know what you're saying that we are actually in control. Like, of course, you can be passive and the inevitable will happen with your cognitive decline. But if we're proactive and kind of fight that natural tendency that's going to happen, plus with modern medicine, like you said, there's a lot that we can do to slow it down, reverse it. So that's amazing.

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Starting point is 00:46:32 at cash.app slash legal slash podcast. So let's dig deep on these three types of thinking. You alluded to them at a high level that we get better at as we're 50 and beyond. So you say it's relevistic thinking, non-dullistic thinking, and systematic thinking. Yeah, so short version,

Starting point is 00:46:52 our ego quiets down and our perspective widens, right? So essentially, we learn to see things from multiple perspectives. We learn that there are very few black and white truths, and most things are gray. That's relativistic thinking and probabilistic thinking. Then the last category, we learn to see the forest through the trees. We get good, better at systems thinking and seeing the big picture. And because of these skills, this is where that extraterintelligence. creativity, empathy and wisdom comes from and builds out of this intelligence. Let's talk about

Starting point is 00:47:30 for a second because the name of the podcast and so many, so many people care here because we are, there's a huge business opportunity here and nobody's paying attention to it. So that little backstory, when I wrote a bold, which is a book about like honor and entrepreneurship and people like Larry Page and Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and how to really use exponential technology and some human capability flow science stuff to really level up organizations. I spent so much years talking to CEOs. And a lot of the time and a lot of those discussions, we would talk about hiring. Who are the ideal employees? How do you find them? What do you need for the 21st century? And over and over again, thousands of times, I heard the same two things from CEOs, which was I need employees

Starting point is 00:48:21 who are really intelligent and really creative and really innovative because the rate of change is really fast and I got to keep pace and stay ahead of it. Otherwise, I don't have a company. I don't have a business. I can't do any of that. The other thing I need is I need employees who are empathetic and wise, because if I don't have psychological safety, nobody can do their job. If I don't have psychological safety, I don't have great team performance. Without team performance, you can't be a company. You can't do those things without empathy and wisdom. Most importantly, the mantra of 21st century business, and maybe we thank Jeff Bezos for this, but it's always been, it's customer-centric thinking, right? And if you're not empathetic or you're not wise,

Starting point is 00:49:01 nobody's thinking like a customer, right, at all, at all. So it turns out a well-trained 50-year-old, and it well-trained is key, right? There's a whole bunch. We have, like, you want those gateways of adult development, I've turned about these, it should be a hiring checklist. And in your. 50s, you want access to these superpowers, you need to engage in creative activities that sort of unlocks these new thinking styles. That's another reason why challenging creative and social activities matter. And you need to fight off risk aversion and train down physical fragility. Because if your body is rotting, what good is all this new mental skills? You can't use it.

Starting point is 00:49:41 And risk aversion, which increases over time, this is why challenging activities matter so much. risk conversion increases over time and has a lot to do with like literally great a white banner volume in the brain we have to train back because the more risk averse you are the more afraid you are the more norapinephrine you're producing that will block creativity it blocks empathy and it blocks wisdom so like you have to train back rest of version a really flower in your 50s 60s and 70s but if you get it right and you've got all that stuff these are dream employees this is a business revolution way to happen the very very people that are getting forced out of companies. No, no, no, no. They're the very people we need in our companies most overall. And in fact, you know, this is not my line. I think it's Daniel Levinton might have said it. It's the first person I heard to say it this bluntly.

Starting point is 00:50:35 But Daniel Levitin is a neuroscientist who wrote a just wrote a book called Successful Aging, where if you want in my book, my book sort of a fun adventure story, the sciences and the footnotes and sort of a thing. the end. If you really want every itch of the science, you can either take my peak performance aging training or you can read successful aging and like he goes through all of it. We came to all the same conclusions. Though I think I took my conclusions farther because I ran a bunch of weird ass experiments along the way. But he said flat out it's like the best, the best advice I can give you on retirement is don't retire. Don't ever retire if you want. If you're interested in peak

Starting point is 00:51:10 performance aging, retirement is a bad idea. Reinvention, maybe. right? Maybe I don't want to do the same thing I've been doing my whole life and I want to do something new. Great. Fantastic. Retirement. Death sentence. Yeah. So I have a couple follow-ups to this. A lot of my listeners are young entrepreneurs, business owners. So if we're going to take your advice, give older people a chance when it comes to hiring. I mean, I know there's a big ageism issue, especially in the tech world. I used to work at Disney streaming services. Like you were old over 40, you know, and like people looked at you sideways, you know. and didn't trust you to do your job, essentially, if you were older than 40, 45. So if you were to interview somebody in their 50s, what questions would you ask them to make sure that they've been training their brain?

Starting point is 00:51:57 I would ask, one, how physically active you are, right? If you're not dealing with somebody who has been regularly exercising for a while and hitting all five dynamic categories, you don't want to go near them. The number one correlate with health and longevity over time is leg strength, believe it or not. I know.

Starting point is 00:52:19 I was going to ask that. It's one of my favorite facts. Yeah, it's wild. And we can talk about why and whatever. And I, like, I don't think you can ask incoming, you know, employees, hey, what do you squat? Maybe you can. But it actually, like, if we're going to ask, put politicians in office in their 80s,

Starting point is 00:52:37 those questions become really freaking relevant. Like, that's the, those are things you really want to know. Are you engaging in challenging creative social activity? Like, are you, those things become. checklist, right, for folks over 50, identity, match fit, self-forgiveness, forgiveness of others. You don't get access to the cognitive superpowers without those things. So those are the kinds of questions you want to poke at to make sure, you know, are being checked off, right?

Starting point is 00:53:05 Those sorts of things. Are you engaging in, you know, challenging creative social activities at demand, dynamic, deliberate play and take place a novel outdoor, like that, those things, not they become a checklist. And they become, if you want to work here and you're over this age, you got to do this. Because we need you, but we need this version of you. And the most important thing is I look for older adults with much younger friends. I want to see those cross-generational friendships because older adults over 40, 50, one of the reasons they're not to be

Starting point is 00:53:46 trusted is because they don't get the job because they're just too out of touch, right? And things have changed. And, you know, there's, there's a lot of stuff that changes and stays the same, right? And you sort of want the older adults around for that reason. But you also, you know, being old is not an excuse for not keeping up, right? Yeah. Either. Like, what I'm telling you is you've got access to more brain power. So, like, you know, it's, it's really not an excuse as far as I'm concerned. So I think it's got to be mutual, and I think the benefits are going to be amazing if it can be mutual. Yeah. I want to get into authentic learning and how older people can learn new skills, but let's go on the tangent of why we should never skip leg day.

Starting point is 00:54:30 It turns out that both preserving physical abilities and cognitive function, leg strength is the single largest factor. Now, the cognitive function is weird. Some of it has to do with bone density. again, we're back to the bones and big bones in your legs. And if they're dense, they're not losing their minerals, their nutrients, they can feed the brain. The second part is that if you're not mobile, you don't have a social life. It's a lot harder to have a social life. If you don't have a social life, you are not going to aid successfully.

Starting point is 00:55:07 And in fact, if you don't have a social life peak performance, you're just sort of lock out of peak performance because social support for a lot of different psychological safety reasons and just performance reasons, it's really important to have social support and part of that. You can get really great

Starting point is 00:55:22 social support on the telephone, on Zoom. We all learn that during COVID, but there is something to be said for in-person, oxytocin, right? I always tell people if for whatever reason

Starting point is 00:55:33 you're like stuck with the phone and Zoom, make sure you pet a dog for at least eight minutes a day, a dog or a cat, petting an animal for about five days. eight minutes also releases oxytocin and some of those other pro-social chemicals. So, like, if you're

Starting point is 00:55:49 stuck on, like, if we need social support for performance, we definitely need for peak performance aging, right? Animals are our friends here. Yeah. So I love that. I feel like you're giving us so much great tips in terms of how we can age gracefully and, you know, be impactful at an older age and still innovative and creative. So this is such a meaningful episode to me, because honestly, we don't talk about this enough on the podcast. So we do need to learn as we're older. Obviously, it's possible. You learned how to park ski at 53. So let's talk about how we can learn and embrace authentic learning. So let's back up one step. And talk about learning. Like, where you started. I just want to start where you started, which is, so if you want to stave off Alzheimer's,

Starting point is 00:56:38 dementia, cognitive decline, right, fluid intelligence, what matters. Lifelong learning. Why is that? Expertise and wisdom are the two most important things we can do to develop what's known as cognitive reserve. So if you have a high cognitive reserve, you could even have advanced Alzheimer's. I mean, you die, they autopsy your brain. You've got tangles and plaques everywhere. And it just looks like your brain's mush and you're still, nobody would notice if you were alive. This was so some of the early research that happened, they started autopsying brains and being like, whoa, this person had advanced Alzheimer's. how the hell did they function so well up till age 100, right? What is it? It's expertise in learning

Starting point is 00:57:17 and or to expertise in wisdom, which are two different things, but important thing here is they're big, broad networks and they're in the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is where it's most vulnerable to cognitive decline. It's the newest brain structure from an evolutionary perspective, and it's the most vulnerable. You don't suffer cognitive decline like deep in your brain stem, right? It's impervious. But the preemptive. But the pretexture. Prefrontal cortex is where it shows up. Expertise and wisdom live in the prefrontal cortex. And there's these diverse networks, lots of redundancy, lots of backup.

Starting point is 00:57:49 So this goes down. You got seven other copies over here. Don't worry about it. So that's where you have to start with lifelong learning. And you want to do everything you can to maximize learning for that very reason. So what do we know about learning? One of the best ways to maximize learning is authentic learning. This is a big movement in education right now, and it's based on a whole bunch of different stuff, but let me just talk about one thing.

Starting point is 00:58:20 Attention, you can't learn anything obviously without focus or attention, right? Like paying attention is the gateway for learning. Attention is a coupled system. It's linked to autonomy. And autonomy means we like driving the bus. We like being in charge of our own lives, right? We can't pay maximum attention to something if it's not sort of by choice. authentic learning means we learn based basically exactly on who we are. So it got a bad name

Starting point is 00:58:48 early on because people started talking about learning styles. Are you a visual learner or an auditory learner? And that's absolute nonsense. Like that's actually not true. No, we're all those things. It depends on what we're learning, right? And how we're wired and it changes over time and that's not actually. But what is true is everybody shows up somewhere on the introversion, extraversion scale, right? Introverts need to learn in private. Extroverts want to learn in public. We're somewhere on the risk aversion scale, right? Like we all have, I'm this fearful. And you can only be pushed so far. And like, so those authentic learning is about like those kinds of questions, the questions that really matter. And so, you know, one of the most important things for me is I'm an introvert. I don't mind

Starting point is 00:59:34 being bad at stuff, but I don't like being bad in public. So, We, and most terrain parks are actually under chairlifts and very, very visible. So I would take these park tricks into the side country, in the back country, in the woods, and I'd learn them out of sight with my friends. And then I could go back and try to do it the other way. It was impossible for me. I don't, don't work that way. And you can keep, there's a lot more to authentic learning.

Starting point is 01:00:00 But the big point here is also taking on these kind of NARA style challenges late in life. like learning how to park ski or whatever. It's phenomenal for peak performance aging, but you need a lot of motivation. And it turns out we have like we are driven towards authenticity. Carl Rogers argued that it functions as a fundamental drive. And a fundamental drive meaning it's got as much power as a drive for sex or food or, you know, shelter.

Starting point is 01:00:29 You have a drive to be yourself, your authentic self. And if you get it right, you get a huge boost in motivation. which is crucial for all this stuff. So you learn better on the back end and you're more motivated to learn on the front end. And being that there's a lot to do in peak performance aging and it can be challenging, you want all the help you can get. Right. In Ardenboss, I talk about one of the things peak performers are really good at is they never meet a challenge

Starting point is 01:00:59 around a single fuel source. We know this food-wise, right? Like you want carbs, protein, and fats before you're going into it. work out, right? Same thing with motivation. You want authenticity. You want autonomy. You want passion, purpose. All these big intrinsic motivators, curiosity, you want to stack them on top of each other because it maximizes our motivation. I love that. So to wrap up this part of the interview, I'd love for you to just sort of summarize what skills generally do you think older people are better at than younger people.

Starting point is 01:01:34 And older people, I guess, who have trained their brain properly. Well, anything that requires seeing things from other people's perspectives and multiple respectable thinking, you're just better at. It's harder to do when you're younger because of how the ego functions and how the brain functions. You're just better at it when you're older. A lot of people, you can meditate a lot to sort of lower cognitive bias and do those things, but it's going to start to happen naturally when you're older.

Starting point is 01:02:03 So that's really important. To me, the big one, the cool one is the systems thinking part because, like, you know, one of the commonalities among all the biggest brains I've ever met, all the real, the people really can affect change in the world. They're all systems thinkers. and it's really hard to train people how to be systems thinkers. It's a tough skill to bring on. Certain careers force you to learn it in different ways, writing, especially if you write books, because you have to hold 400 pages in your head

Starting point is 01:02:46 and move it around and be able to do stuff like that. You have to be able to hold the big picture. It's sort of built into the job and it's trained up over time, but it's not trained up in a lot of jobs. Mostly we specialize. right, especially in the modern world, we specialize, we specialize, we specialize. One of the things that I want to point out here is, and anybody who's ever worked in entrepreneurship, innovation, like, you know all the big innovations are in the cracks between disciplines, right? They're not in the specialized. It's very hard to innovate inside that same funnel that everybody's been in for 50 years, but you move adjacent to where that funnel touches something, right?

Starting point is 01:03:24 And suddenly there's a revolution waiting to happen. And that's how you build companies and world. changing companies, everything else, you can't see that shit if you're not a systems thinker. It's completely invisible to you. And that, so the thing that I think is the most exciting overbook is that. Yeah, that was really inspiring to me. I'm actually writing a book with Penguin Random House coming out in 2025. And that little bit of information was really inspiring. I'm going to include it in my book and credit you.

Starting point is 01:03:55 Okay. So, Stephen, I want to wrap up this interview talking about. your research about the blue zones, these long-lived communities around the world. You alluded to some of it, but I'd love for you to sort of dive deeper on what you found in terms of why these people are more or happier.

Starting point is 01:04:12 Let me back this story up a little bit to tell you a story that's not in the book that is where this actually starts. So people may know this or not know this for almost the past two decades. My wife and I were on a hospice care dog sanctuary. So for two decades, we've done hospice work with dogs. We have a healing methodology that's based on, it's very low tech.

Starting point is 01:04:39 It's like lifestyle interventions in a sense. Some flow science, some evolutionary psychology, nothing really fancy. Our dogs all get checked out by vets when they come to us. Before they come to us, they come from shelters. But we, I mean, are we specialize in the worst of the worst? So if you are a geriatric chihuahua with an abusive pass, three legs, one eye, cancer, heart disease, mange and flageulence, you're our guy. That's who we work with. And the vets would be like, we did get these dogs.

Starting point is 01:05:11 Dogs would be like, don't get attached. This dog is going to live a month, month and a half at most. You know, this is about a provider of very good death. And we'd bring the dogs in. and mind you, we've over 700 dogs have passed through our facility and over 5,000 are our programs, so big sample size. And on average, our dogs wouldn't live another month or six weeks. They would live another three, four, five years.

Starting point is 01:05:39 And you translate into that human numbers. That's right. You get seven years for every year. So like the top end of that, you're getting an extra like 28 years, 30, like what the fuck is going on, pardon my language. And so I started to ask questions like, what's going on? Why is this working? What are we doing? And will it work in humans? Like, would any of the stuff work in humans, right? And it turns out almost everything I were doing with the dogs exist in these so-called blue zones, which is what led me to the blue zones in the first place. So Dan Bueller is a national

Starting point is 01:06:17 Geographic Reporter in the early 2000s noticed that there were places on the planet where people lived, on average, about 12 years longer than everybody else. And they're all over the place. And he wanted to know, what are the commonalities? And he did a whole bunch of research. The research is a little controversial. The controversy is not on the lifestyle stuff. There's some stuff that has been turned into supplements and it's dietary. Those are the open. And those questions are open. There's no argument on. sort of the lifestyle stuff with the blue zones. And the commonalities are really, like, move around a lot, regular exercise, right? De-stress regularly. So have rituals, meditation, exercise, gratitude, practices, breathing work, whatever it is, walking in nature. I don't, like, have rituals to de-stress regularly. A ton of stuff on social belonging and connection.

Starting point is 01:07:10 This is why challenging social activities matter so much. This is built into blue zones. There's also this respect for the. the elders and these cross-generational friendships, they're built into blue zones. There's some evolution. I mean, they eat healthy. They eat less than most people and they eat very, very healthy diets. But like, there's no one diet across the boards that, like, works for everybody.

Starting point is 01:07:35 But those are sort of the commonalities and they live with passion, purpose, and regular access to flow. And these were all things that we were providing for our dogs in very, like, for example, they get social belonging and connection. They really emphasize it. You're in the blue zones. Some of them, people will spend six hours a day hanging out with friends or family. So a lot of it. With our dogs, we had enforced petting time. So we have a lot of dogs. Like, you know, we at various times, we've had 40, 50 dogs. It's hard to individual petting time. You have to like, oh, I got to hang out with this dog, but we would do it because we wanted these neurochemicals underneath that. Same thing with flow. We'd find ways to put our dogs into flow.

Starting point is 01:08:17 Flow is really important to peak performance aging for a lot of different reasons, but the state is just a really positive, powerful emotional state. And some of the emotions that show up in flow stimulate the production of T cells and natural killer cells. So T cells fight diseases and natural killer cells fight tumors and sick cells and other of the diseases of aging. So when we get into flow, it lowers inflammation, which is tied to all the causes of aging. it produces T cells, natural killer cells, a lot of benefits, and it boosts the immune system. So this was the stuff we were doing in our dogs. This is stuff that's going on in the blue zone. This is stuff we now widely know correlates to healthy longevity.

Starting point is 01:08:59 This isn't really peak performance aging. It's sort of successful aging, healthy aging, right? At this point, it's like it should be common sense for everybody, really, is really what it should be. But one of the things that's interesting is you also see a high. A lot of the places where there are blue zones, you see a lot of action sport and outdoor athletes, too. Summit, Colorado, Pitkin County, Colorado, and Eagle County, Colorado. In Loma Linda, California are the four places in America where people,

Starting point is 01:09:32 these are the blue zones. Summit, Pitkin, and Eagle, this is Colorado. That's Vail, Aspen, Beaver Creek, all the big ski areas, a lot of outdoor stuff. And in Loma Linda, that's a seventh-day-advannis population. and they're very, very social, very flowy, good dietary stuff, a lot of belonging, a lot of, so like it's the same stuff, and a lot of outdoor activities, surfing, because it's California on the ocean, right? They take advantage of that stuff too.

Starting point is 01:10:04 Yeah. So I'd love to get a couple examples here. First of all, what are examples of getting into flow aside from sports as an adult? That's number one. And the number two, like what are some examples of? creative social activities as an adult. The most common flow state on earth is reading or interpersonal flow. Interpersonal flow is like the group flow, you and your best friend, you get into a great

Starting point is 01:10:25 conversation and a whole hour goes by and you don't notice it's gone. That's interpersonal flow happens all the time. So one of the reasons you want to engage in challenging creative and social activities, they all trigger flow. So singing and a choir, very, very flowy, group flow, lots of research on that. gardening, very flowy, long walks in nature. You know, nature hikes very, very flowy, coding, architecture, drawing, drumming, dancing, you know, on and on and on. I mean, there's a ton of flow at work.

Starting point is 01:10:57 In fact, flow is much more common at work than it is during leisure for a bunch of different reasons. But, you know, the list sort of goes on and on and on. and flow is really, if we want to enjoy the second half of, if we want to enjoy our lives in general, but if we really want to thrive during our second half of our lives, you can't do it without flow. Flow is actually the engine of adult development. It's how we grow up.

Starting point is 01:11:22 We grow up by getting into flow states, coming out the other side is more complex, more skillful, more adaptive, more empathetic, wiser. And so we move forward. So it plays a big role in adult development and successful in peak performance aging. Stephen, I end the show with a couple of questions that I ask all my guests and then we do some fun things at the end of the year. The first one is what is one actionable thing that our young improfitors can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?

Starting point is 01:11:49 You can double down on your primary flow activity, which is whatever the thing you've done most to your life that just drops you into flow. For me, it's skiing, right? For my wife, it's long walks with dogs. My best friend is playing guitar. whatever that thing that most likely drops you into flow. Flow massively amplifies, among other things, motivation, productivity, and creativity. And here's the cool thing. Even though a flow state lasts about 90 minutes, sometimes I can stretch out for longer.

Starting point is 01:12:18 The heightened productivity and creativity will outlast the flow state by a day, maybe two. But also resets the nervous system. It calms you down, flushed stress hormones out of your system. So emotional regulation, emotional matter, fear blocks performance on every level. Flow resets the nervous system. So really, and the thing is, it's most people, and especially all the people listening to this podcast, are going to be like you. You got to your 30s and you stopped skiing.

Starting point is 01:12:49 You put down childish thing, right? Skis go away, the surfboard goes away, the skateboard goes away. You stop samba dancing and salsa dancing and all that stuff. and the research shows that's a disaster. It's a disaster. In fact, when we work with tons of people all over the world and burnout is a real big issue, the first thing we do to treat burnout is have them double down on the primary flow activity. Research shows that if you want peak performance, you need to have like about three to four hours a week on your primary flow activity just to keep your nervous as to where it needs to be.

Starting point is 01:13:23 Yeah, I'd love for you to tell everybody about the flow research collective and all the trainings you guys have available. flow research collective is my organization. We're a research and training organization on the research side. We studied the neurobiology of peak human performance. What's going on in the brain and the body when we're performing at our best? We did this work with scientists all over the world at Stanford and Imperial College London and UCSC and UCLA and UC Davis and USCSF and a whole bunch of other academics. And we take the science and we use it to train people. We train people 130 countries. We train everybody from like professional athletes and members of the special forces to, you know, soccer moms and insurance brokers and, you know, teachers and folks in the Air Force. And we work with a lot of companies in between. So I think now we're training Facebook or meta, Accenture, Bain Capital, Audi, Severusic Police Department, the Air Force, you know, wise watcher people.

Starting point is 01:14:21 And training is up for everybody. And if you're interested, if you go to getmoreflow.com, cheesiest URL in the world, but nobody was remembering any of the others. So I've given in. And it's now getmoreflow.com, despite the fact that I'm embarrassed to say it out loud. But you can go there and sign up for a free hour-long coaching call with somebody

Starting point is 01:14:43 on my staff. So you'll hear all about the trainings. You'll learn everything. Is it right for you? Is it wrong for you? Nobody on my staff, I'll fire somebody if they try to sell you anything. It's just an information. international conversation. So it's really mellow and most people get a lot out of it and it's

Starting point is 01:14:58 free get more flow.com. Amazing. I'll stick that link in the show notes to make it super easy for you guys. Okay, last question of the episode. And this is where you can feel free to add something that we didn't get to talk about or just something that's on the top of your mind. Doesn't you have to do with the topic of the episode? It's up to you. What is your secret to profiting in life? it's it's just through i mean it's just hard work you know what i mean i like i just always i go out of my way to figure out what like i'll give you an example i came up as a journalist and i figured out very early on that most journalists hated rewriting they'd write their story they'd edit it they'd turn it in the editor would make changes and they'd rewrite it once and turn it back yet i found

Starting point is 01:15:44 that out i was like okay you guys are doing it three times clearly my job is to make my editor's job easier, right? Like, my job editor has to, like, really comb through my articles and takes months. He hates me. That's not, I'm not being a, you know, I'm not a good employee. So I started editing my stories 12 times. I just figured out, I'd figure out what everybody else would do, and I'd triple it or quadruple it for really, I did that for years. So, I mean, it wasn't much of a secret. I just figured I wasn't as smart, as well connected, as handsome and all the other things as everybody else, but I just figured out how to outwork them. I mean, a lot of it is about smart hard work, not just hard work.

Starting point is 01:16:22 Smart hard. There's better ways to do. I talk a lot about that in our country, about the advantages of smart, hard work and smart, hard play. And the difficulties with just hard work is the only tool you reach for. But really, like, there's no secret. I just put my butt in the chair and I did the work. I love that answer. Thank you for sharing that.

Starting point is 01:16:41 Where can everybody learn about you? Where can they get in our country? And how can they find more about you, Stephen? NARCountry, you can go to NARCountry.com or Amazon and wherever books are sold. Steven Kotler.com gets you to me. Flowresearchcollective.com gets you to the flowresearch collective. Get more flow.com gets you to our trainings. And I think that's it.

Starting point is 01:17:04 Amazing. Always such a great conversation with you, Stephen. Thank you so much for your time. My pleasure. It was great hanging out with you again. Hey, yeah, fam. We're about to launch something that might be my favorite thing we've ever done on the podcast. a brand new series called How We Profit.

Starting point is 01:17:22 Now, I've been doing Young and Profiting Podcast for eight years, and my listeners are successful. We are real entrepreneurs with real businesses, and a lot of you guys are crushing it behind the scenes. You may not be super famous, you may not be a billionaire yet, but you've got a business that you've learned how to scale. And we want to hear from you. One of the best ways to learn as an entrepreneur is from your peers,

Starting point is 01:17:44 and I found it super helpful to be in these peer entrepreneurship groups and learn from other entrepreneurs who are at my level, but just in a different industry. So that's what I want to bring to this podcast. I want this to be our own peer group, but on the podcast. And so I'm going to be interviewing people who are making anywhere from $500,000 to $10 million a year. They're not super famous. They're not the typical billionaires that are on my show. These are real entrepreneurs who are crushing it behind the scenes, and we're going to uncover

Starting point is 01:18:11 what they do to sell, how they get their customers, what their profit margin looks like, how they market, and so much more. If this sounds like you and you want to be featured on Young and Profiting Podcast for our How We Profit Series, just head to younginprofiting.com slash apply. And share your story. Let me know why you think you should be featured on the show. Again, that's young and profiting.com slash apply. And who knows, maybe you'll be our next guest on Young and Profiting Podcast.

Starting point is 01:18:38 Hey, y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love. and quality you can trust. Visit wayfair.ca.

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Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Steven Kotler: The Psychology of Aging Well and Why Your Best Years May Still Be Ahead of You | Health and Wellness | YAPClassic

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