Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - YAPClassic: Steven Kotler, Secrets to Peak Performance in Your 30s, 40s, and Beyond

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Starting point is 00:01:23 You're never too old to learn something new. You've probably said that to yourself before. I know I personally have said it a lot, but is it actually possible to teach an old dog new tricks? How about a really old dog? To answer that question and many others, we're going back to an interview I did in 2023 in episode 211 with the award-winning journalist

Starting point is 00:01:43 and human performance expert, Stephen Kotler. These days, Stephen is a bestselling author and the executive director of the Flow Research Collective. But when he was a kid, Stephen was a skinny, klutzy, and usually the last guy picked for any team. At 53 years old, he decided to conquer his past shame and push his own aging body past preconceived limits. In this episode, Steven shares how to navigate peak performance as we age and how to keep

Starting point is 00:02:11 our use-it-or-lose-it skills. He'll also dispel some myths around our aging brain and provide some tips for how we can stay at the top of our game as we enter our 30s, 40s, 50s, and beyond. So stay right here and listen up. I give you Stephen Kotler. So Stephen, I'm super looking forward to this conversation. My podcast is called Young and Profiting, but I actually have avid listeners of all ages

Starting point is 00:02:37 in their 40s and 50s and beyond. And so I know they'll greatly appreciate this conversation. And to kick it off, I 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

Starting point is 00:02:56 two of his most famous violins 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 the typical thoughts around traditional aging? And how did he inspire you to study peak performance aging?

Starting point is 00:03:16 So, you know, books have a lot of origin stories. There's like 11 different things that come together. I've been working, researching, looking at the field of peak performance agent for a while in a totally unrelated project, right? I was gonna write a mystery novel and I wanted a cat burglar as a character who was gonna steal musical instruments,

Starting point is 00:03:33 who made the rarest musical instruments in history, I would stride of various. And then I found, figured out what you mentioned, which is he made two of the rarest and most expensive musical instruments in his nineties. And I went, well, wait a minute, everything I've been told about the physical abilities is like the older myth about aging,

Starting point is 00:03:51 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, they 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 along with like expertise

Starting point is 00:04:19 and wisdom and all that like cognitive abilities. And I, it sort of paused me and I was like, well, wait a minute, if this is true, either Strativarius is like the one in a billion or most of what we've been told about aging is wrong. I had already been looking at other aspects of it, but it really sort of lit a fire under me to really 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 this is not new territory to me.

Starting point is 00:04:50 The physical side was like, holy crap, could this possibly be true? And it is true, it's true across the boards. Every one of our physical skills are use it or lose it skills. And the research is really clear. We don't stop using these skills, both physical and mental. We can hang on to them,

Starting point is 00:05:05 even advance them far, far later into life than any of you thought possible. 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

Starting point is 00:05:22 in more detail, understand performance peak aging. And like you just said, you said that use it or lose it skills, we actually have control over 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.

Starting point is 00:05:51 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, like really matter. You can, 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 your twenties and your thirties. And you

Starting point is 00:06:19 know, this is the biohacking crowd is very aware of this, right? A lot of that crowd is twenties and thirties 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. 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 this is not new knowledge. strength, stamina, flexibility, agility, and balance.

Starting point is 00:06:45 Those are the five skills that you wanna train over time. And this is not new knowledge. Like the World Health Organization knows exactly how many minutes a week we should be training these things. But peak performance aging, it's 150 to 300 minutes of heart aerobic training a week, moderate to vigorous aerobic training a week, two strength training days a week,

Starting point is 00:07:03 and three flexibility, balance, and agility days 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. Right? In park skiing, I'm using strength, stamina, balance, agility, flexibility. There's other stuff you want to do. There's ways. We things called prime mover muscles are big muscles. And then we have stabilizer muscles like your rotator cuffs or your hip flexors. 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 the stable out.

Starting point is 00:07:46 You're going to tear your hip flexor because it stopped doing the work. Your quad, if you're walking around your amulet or he's working, your hip flexor has started to 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. But those are the physical skills we need to train over time. On the cognitive side, it's a really long list. And let me pause there, let you ask another question, then we'll get to the stuff on the

Starting point is 00:08:09 cognitive side because we'll spend the next 20 minutes, I'll spend the next 20 minutes talking. Yeah, 100%. So on the physical side, why are action sports and what you call dynamic activities 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

Starting point is 00:08:33 to leverage these skills. Okay, we gotta get to the full sentence anyway. So let's- Go for it, just tell me. Throw it out there and then we'll break it apart and why it matters so much. Okay. So if you want to rock to your drop, if you really are interested in peak performance aging,

Starting point is 00:08:47 you need to regularly engage in challenging creative and social activities that is, you've just pointed out that demand dynamic, deliberate play and take place in novel outdoor environments. Now let's unpack what 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.

Starting point is 00:09:16 Expertise and wisdom are these very diverse neural nets in the brain, lots of real estate, lots of redundancy, impervious to cognitive decline, the more expertise, more wisdom. And this is why one of the reasons people performance aging starts young. Like literally the guy who did the core research on wisdom, Elkanon Goldberg, his core advice is the more wisdom, the more expertise, the more we have cognitive reserve, the more we can stave off Alzheimer's, dementia, cognitive decline, all the things that are gonna happen, could happen to the brain over time, this is how we fight back.

Starting point is 00:09:48 And his point was wisdom, among the many things encapsulated in wisdom are all like the unconscious rules that govern how do systems work, how does behavior work, all the, like all that stuff. It's onboarded slowly over time. So you wanna start training these things, you wanna be to start learning,

Starting point is 00:10:04 challenging creative and social activities. We learn a lot during. They're also tend to drive us 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.

Starting point is 00:10:24 So a lot of stuff we're gonna 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 fights stress, that lowers stress, that gives you more emotional control is involved in peak performance aging. So social activities lower stress. They give us these pros social, oh, there's people around who love me, got my back, I can be a little less stressed. So there's a lot of that stuff. Dynamic, deliberate play is the next bit. Dynamic is literally what we've been talking about. It's just a fancy way of saying, it hits all five categories of functional fitness, strength, stamina, flexibility, balance, agility. Deliberate play, you've heard of deliberate practice, Anders Ericsson's favorite expertise, repetition with incremental advancement is the fastest path for his expertise. And Anders play, you've heard of deliberate practice, Anders Ericsson's favorite expertise, repetition

Starting point is 00:11:05 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. Deliberate play is repetition with improvisation. You're going to do the same thing you did last time, a little bit of flourish, a little flower, a little something fun. It's playful, meaning there's no shame,

Starting point is 00:11:30 there's no embarrassment. If you're bad, who cares? You're having fun. But that feeling of play produces more neurochemistry, more endorphins. This one really boosts the immune system, lowers stress levels, but amplifies learning. So dynamic deliberate play, says I'm using all the physical skills that decline and I'm learning

Starting point is 00:11:50 better than any other way. Novel outdoor environments, the last bit, why do we care? And this is back, action sports demand dynamic, deliberate play, they take place in novel outdoor environments and they're challenging, creative and social. So it's one stop shopping. The last bit is most important bit. One outdoor environments in general, lower stress. We know this is as 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.

Starting point is 00:12:21 So in itself being in nature is anti-inflammatory. So it's better for healthy aging. But if you want to preserve brain function, how do you do that? You want to birth new neurons and turn those new neurons into neural nets. 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 is the key question. They show up in a part of the brain known as the hippocampus.

Starting point is 00:12:54 The hippocampus does two things. It does long-term memory and it has location, place, packed with place cells and grid cells, why we evolved as hunter-gatherers. When you were in the wild and something emotionally charged happened, you've got to remember where you were when it happened. That's survival. So where did I get attacked by that tiger 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 rather than against us. Our biology is designed to remember when we have

Starting point is 00:13:30 novel experiences in outdoor environments. So that's what you want to use it for. Action sports gives you that. Now, I also say in the book that like if action sports aren't your thing, you can duplicate a lot of this by simply hiking with a weight vest. And weight vests are really key, better than a lot of other things because they amplify bone density. Little known fact, your bones, like where you store all your minerals, all your nutrients, are stored in your bones and they're released into it. 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 of your estrogen come from?

Starting point is 00:14:16 Your bones. So wildly fluctuating hormonal levels, which is a problem that most people have post-menopause, 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 a lot of our country is about a new way of approaching these difficult, challenging physical activities laid in life that's much safer and much more well suited to progression.

Starting point is 00:14:52 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. So I totally love that you're giving another option in terms of the weighted vest and 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. So talk to us about learning that activity

Starting point is 00:15:19 at 53 years old and what you learned as an old dog learning new tricks. So there's a couple of 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 of other whizbang fields that I was like, you know, if these things are right, should be totally possible for older adults to be able to learn really, really difficult skills. I'll give you like one random example. We have a motor learning window. Like, if everybody says don't become a gymnast or a ballet dancer after 25, right? Because that window is closed and you can't just, that's sort of true. There is like,

Starting point is 00:16:00 a lot of things in big 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. When we're kids, we play. When we're adults, we have shame, we have embarrassment, we have time crunches, we have stress, 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.

Starting point is 00:16:27 A lot of the skills that we used to think declined over time. We now know they're usually lose it skills, including the skills we need to learn how to park ski. So that was sort of where it came from. I was an expert skier. I just had never park skied. I knew no tricks. Right. I was a big mountain skier.

Starting point is 00:16:44 I could go in a straight line very fast, really well. But park skiing is like, it's doing tricks off jumps and on rails and wall rides. It's very acrobatic. It's very dangerous. So it was a totally 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 and when we learned and here's what's cool.

Starting point is 00:17:13 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 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 hurt early on. I figured if it took five years, cool, whatever. Like I didn't care. I started when I was 53. If it took me to a 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's your age and was a former professional athlete who got very injured, retired, had a family, had a job, came back to this sport.

Starting point is 00:17:53 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 29 to 68. They were intermediate at best park skiers or skiers and snowboarders. And 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? Let me tell you what we did and let me tell you what it was.

Starting point is 00:18:24 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 Gnar-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 way. What I really wanted to do was explode the mindset of, oh, I'm too old for this shit. I'm going to get hurt. I got things I want to hold on to. It sets up.

Starting point is 00:19:06 It's really weird. Our biology is designed when we're young, kids, teenagers, young adults, the seeking system sort of drives our behavior. This is exploratory behavior, right? Like I'm going to go out and 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 make a little all that stuff. This is about dopamine and norepinephrine. Those are very potent, feel-good neurochemicals.

Starting point is 00:19:27 They're very addictive. Very, very, very addictive, right? Cocaine is the most widely addictive drug on Earth. All that happens is it causes the brain to release some dopamine and it blocks its reuptake, 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 my bike, whatever it is, we no longer want to be seeking. We want the stuff that is about conserving what we have, protecting what we have, bonding. and anandamide and oxytocin. These are like the pro-social neurochemicals that underpin strong family structures and things like that, 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. The truth of the matter is old people are literally addicted to the wrong

Starting point is 00:20:24 drugs in their bodies. You need all of these systems working together for peak performance aging and there's a penalty for having a mindset of old. And this is the point. There's a big health and longevity penalty. In fact, when you flip it, when you have a positive mindset towards aging, second half of my life is filled with thrilling and exciting possibilities. My best days are ahead of me.

Starting point is 00:20:42 It translates, and this is one of the most well-established facts in peak performance aging, it will translate into an additional seven and a half years of health and longevity. That's huge. That's like quitting smoking huge. In fact, if you're morbidly 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, 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,

Starting point is 00:21:18 this isn't gonna be a problem. Like you're not gonna have to overcome it. One of the reasons the NAR style adventure is so useful for older adults is like for me, didn't matter what I wanted to believe about aging. Once I got out of the mountain, I was learning how to do 360s and nose butter 360s and 180s and all the other stuff I learned. Like it just blew up all my limiting beliefs about what was possible in the future. Because I've just onboarded the most difficult physical thing I've ever done in my life and I

Starting point is 00:21:44 did it at 53. And I've done a lot of difficult physical physical thing I've ever done in my life 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 and I'm still at park skiing at 55 now because I wrote books a couple of years old in terms of when I wrote it. Let's hold that thought and take a quick break

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Starting point is 00:26:49 Additional taxes, fees and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details. I can feel your enthusiasm 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

Starting point is 00:27:11 if you put yourselves in situations 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, but 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.

Starting point is 00:27:33 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 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 traumas.

Starting point is 00:27:57 So talk to us about that and how we need to do that as well. So 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 in how the brain processes information. One, certain genes only turn on with experience. They'll only flip these switches later in life. Two, in our 50s, the two hemispheres of the brain, which essentially function in opposition to each other

Starting point is 00:28:28 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. There's a lot that comes

Starting point is 00:28:45 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 to, the access to these cognitive superpowers in our fifties, and we'll come back to it, but from a profit perspective, we really want to talk about those superpowers in our 50s. And we'll come back to it, but from a profit perspective, we really wanna talk about those superpowers in a second. Let me finish this point. There are a number of gateways of adult development that you have to pass through.

Starting point is 00:29:15 So by the age 30, you sort of, if you really just wanna enjoy and kick ass beyond 30, you have to have solved the crisis of identity, which sort of shows up around age 12. And Erickson thought he used to disappear at 18. It doesn't, but it does. If you haven't solved it by 30, you have a problem.

Starting point is 00:29:34 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. 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 a match fit. And then by 50, we need forgiveness. We've got to forgive ourselves for like past embarrassments and past shames.

Starting point is 00:30:02 And we've got to forgive those who have done us harm. And as you pointed out, um, 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. And you've got to understand, 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.

Starting point is 00:30:35 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 park skiing so fast is I have more intelligence. I've got more creativity. I've got the stuff I need and they've got even more wisdom, which means I can 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 the standard best way to do that, and there's tons of research,

Starting point is 00:31:06 is loving kindness meditation and passion meditation. It's an incredibly potent tool. It's amazing for a ton of different stuff. It's been studied for probably longer than any other meditation style. We understand all the neuroscience. But when it came to people who I got in fist fights with, and worse, for 10 years, it

Starting point is 00:31:26 wasn't enough. Like all the loving guy in this meditation of the world, I could forgive a lot of stuff 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, chalky challenge is, okay, I'm going to go, like, this is my problem. 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.

Starting point is 00:31:54 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 is not getting it done. And there's still anger there. There's still resentment there, there's still stuff there. So let me see if taking on this kind of putting myself on a physical mission could clear that out. And it did. And the story is sort of in the end of the book and I won't sort of ruin it as spoiler

Starting point is 00:32:21 alert, right? I'd be giving away sort of that one and I'm not going to. But it 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've carried since I was probably 10 or 12, definitely 12. That's amazing.

Starting point is 00:32:39 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 always say that one of the myths that I think a lot of people 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.

Starting point is 00:33:01 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, overall well-being. And that's what this really impacted. Somehow, like it made life more meaningful in those ways. I don't know, do I feel lighter perhaps, but it closed that loop. You know what I mean?

Starting point is 00:33:34 Yeah. Okay, done. Check. I don't have to worry about that anymore. Literally, what it really does is when certain memories just 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.

Starting point is 00:33:48 Whereas before, no, I could start to think on it and dwell on it and then I'd have a problem. Yeah. Have you ever heard of Arthur Brooks? I think so. 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.

Starting point is 00:34:06 And he wrote this book called Cracking the Code to Happiness. 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

Starting point is 00:34:23 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, 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 forties and fifties. And that doesn't mean that your brain starts to go bad. You just start to have crystallized intelligence or you accumulate knowledge, facts, skills, and you can use that throughout your career as a way to teach other people. And essentially what he's saying is like,

Starting point is 00:34:57 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, 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 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, in fact, the societies

Starting point is 00:35:33 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. I go out in the public these days with any stereotype, 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 geezer each other right in the, and it's crazy. Becca Levy at YALYST has done tons of work on ageism and the stereotype of aging and it's incredibly detrimental.

Starting point is 00:36:06 In fact, 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 passed along knowledge. This is a natural part of brain development. Now you have to put things into categories. He is not wrong. We do shift from fluid intelligence into crystallized intelligence. That transition does happen. But, but, but, but, but a bunch of

Starting point is 00:36:38 the skills that we thought declined over time, like the fluid intelligence skills that we thought went away. No, it turns out that's not true at all. We get actually new levels of intelligence and creativity in our 50s. 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 time where they talk about what goes away from creativity and what stays or comes

Starting point is 00:37:05 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 it permanent? Is this real? Or have we just not figured out how to train it? So let me give you an example. Adam Ghazali is a friend of mine. He's on my board. We do a lot of research together. He's at UCSF and he's a neuroscientist, 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. And what it specifically focuses on is task switching. If you go back to fluid intelligence, one of the things that declines

Starting point is 00:37:46 over time is test switching, our ability to focus on this and then focus on this. And that's a real problem. He's got a video game that will take your brain if you're 60, 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 use it or lose it. We just had to figure out how do you train it up? The other side of it is, so let's talk about the other weird, one of the things he said, one of the reasons we, our brain performance declines over time is white matter density decreases

Starting point is 00:38:25 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 neurochemicals back. The general thinking is sort of true, but a lot of those skills are use it or lose it.

Starting point is 00:39:02 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 for example, five years ago, we could not deal with most tendon, bone, and ligament problems. Today, there's very little you can do to tendons, bones, or ligaments, exosomes, stem cells, certain other things. We are good at that stuff now. It's advanced really far. Now, if anybody is making you promises about stem cells that go beyond bones, ligaments, and tendons, no, no, they're lying and they're exaggerating what's real right now. But up to that point, no, no, we've sort of got a

Starting point is 00:39:49 dial. So technology is advancing and it's going to solve a lot of those issues. A lot of those issues are not what we thought they were. 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. 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,

Starting point is 00:40:19 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, I love what you're saying because I remember leaving that conversation with Arthur Brooks, although it was really enlightening and he said a lot of smart things.

Starting point is 00:40:35 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

Starting point is 00:40:52 that natural tendency that's gonna 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. 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 relativistic thinking,

Starting point is 00:41:13 non-dualistic thinking and systematic thinking. Yeah, so short version, our ego quiets down and our perspective whines. 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.

Starting point is 00:41:33 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 extra intelligence, creativity, empathy, and wisdom comes from and builds out of this intelligence. There's a huge business opportunity here and nobody's paying attention to it. So that little backstory.

Starting point is 00:41:59 When I wrote Bold, which is a book about like 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. I need employees who are really intelligent and really creative and really innovative

Starting point is 00:42:36 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. That team performance, you can't be a company. You can't do those things without empathy and wisdom. Most importantly, the mantra of

Starting point is 00:43:02 21st century business, and maybe we thank Jeff Bezos for this, but it's always been customer-centric thinking. If you're not empathetic or you're not wise, nobody's thinking like a customer at all. It turns out a well-trained 50-year-old, and well-trained is key. There's a whole bunch. Those gateways of adult development have turned about. These should be a hiring checklist. In your 50s, you want access to these superpowers.

Starting point is 00:43:29 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. 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. And risk aversion, which increases over time, this is why challenging activities matter so much. Risk aversion increases over time and has a lot to do with like literally white banner

Starting point is 00:43:58 volume in the brain. But we have to train back because the more risk averse you are, the more afraid you are, the more norepinephrine you're producing that will block creativity. It blocks empathy and it blocks wisdom. So like you have to train back rest aversion to 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 we have. and the 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.

Starting point is 00:44:32 And in fact, this is not my line. I think it's Daniel Levitan might have said it is the first person I heard say it this bluntly but Daniel Levitan is a neuroscientist who wrote a just wrote a book called Successful Aging where if you want in my book, a book called Successful Aging, where if you want, in my book, my book's sort of a fun adventure story, the science is in the footnotes and sort of at the end, if you really want every inch of the science, you can either take my Peak Performance Aging training or you can read Successful Aging and he goes through all of it.

Starting point is 00:44:59 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 advice I can give you on retirement is don't retire, don't ever retire. If you're interested in peak performance aging, retirement is a bad idea. Reinvention, maybe.

Starting point is 00:45:19 Maybe I don't wanna do the same thing I've been doing my whole life and I wanna do something new. Great, fantastic. Ret retirement, death sentence. So I have a couple of follow ups to this. A lot of my listeners are young entrepreneurs, business owners. So if we're gonna take your advice,

Starting point is 00:45:34 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.

Starting point is 00:45:51 So I know there's ageism. 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 and- So I would ask one, how physically active you are. 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.

Starting point is 00:46:18 I know, I was going to ask. That's one of my favorite facts. Yeah, it's wild. And we can talk about why and whatever. I don't think you can ask incoming employees, hey, what do you squat? Maybe you can, but it actually, if we're gonna ask, put politicians in office

Starting point is 00:46:34 in their eighties, those questions become really fricking relevant. Like those are things you really wanna know. Are you engaging in challenging creative social activity? Like those things become a checklist 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 are being checked off. Those sorts of things. Are you engaging in

Starting point is 00:47:06 challenging creative social activities that demand dynamic, deliberate play and take place in novel outdoor? 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 trusted is because they don't get the job because they're just too out of touch and things have changed. And there's a lot of stuff that changes and stays the same.

Starting point is 00:47:47 And you sort of want the older adults around for that reason. But you also, being old is not an excuse for not keeping up either. Like what I'm telling you is you've got access to more brain power. So like 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 gonna be amazing

Starting point is 00:48:06 if it can be mutual. We'll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors. Yeah, fam, if you're anything like me, you didn't start your business to spend all your time managing finances, budgeting, invoicing and tax prep, not exactly the fun part of entrepreneurship. My CEO, Jason, on the other hand is great at finances,

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Starting point is 00:52:35 Some of it has to do with bone density. Again, we're back to the bones and the 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. And in fact, if you don't have a social life, peak performance, you're just sort of locked out of peak performance because you social support for a lot of different psychological safety reasons and just performance reasons. It's really important to have social support.

Starting point is 00:53:09 And part of that, like you can get really great social support on the telephone, on Zoom. We all learned that during COVID, but there is something to be said for in-person oxytocin, right? I always tell people if, for whatever reason, 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.

Starting point is 00:53:28 Petting an animal for about five to eight minutes also releases oxytocin and some of those other pro-social chemicals. So like if you're stuck on, like if we need social support for performance, we definitely need for big performance agent, animals are our friends here. Yeah, I love that.

Starting point is 00:53:43 I feel like you're giving us so much great tips in terms of how we can age gracefully and 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.

Starting point is 00:54:00 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 into 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, dementia, cognitive decline, right? Fluid intelligence, what matters? Lifelong learning.

Starting point is 00:54:26 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, meaning 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're alive. This was so some of the early research that happened. They started autopsying brains and being like, Whoa, this person advanced Alzheimer's. How the hell did they function so well up till age 100?

Starting point is 00:54:55 What is it? Expertise and learning and or to expertise and wisdom, actually, 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

Starting point is 00:55:11 from an evolutionary perspective, and it's the most vulnerable. You don't suffer cognitive decline like deep in your brain stem. It's impervious, but the prefrontal cortex is where it shows up. Expertise and wisdom live in the prefrontal cortex and there's these diverse networks,

Starting point is 00:55:27 lots of redundancy, lots of backup. So if 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,

Starting point is 00:55:50 but, and it's based on a whole bunch of different stuff, but let me just talk about one thing. So there 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

Starting point is 00:56:22 a bad name 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 and how we're wired. And it changes over time and that's not actually, but what is true is everybody shows up somewhere

Starting point is 00:56:40 on the introversion to extroversion scale. Introverts need to learn in private. Extroverts want to learn in public. We're somewhere on the risk aversion scale. We all have, I'm this fearful, and you can only be pushed so far. Authentic learning is about those kinds of questions, the questions that really matter. One of the most important things for me is, I'm an introvert. I don't mind 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.

Starting point is 00:57:14 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 like trying to do it the other way was impossible for me. I don't work that way. And you can keep, there's a lot more to authentic learning, but the big point here is also taking on these kind of NAR style challenges late in life,

Starting point is 00:57:36 like learning how to park ski or whatever, 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, a fundamental drive meaning it's got as much power as our drive for sex or food or shelter.

Starting point is 00:57:56 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 the art of muscle, I talk about one of the things peak performers are really good at is they

Starting point is 00:58:24 never meet a challenge on a single field source. We know this food wise, right? Like you want carbs, protein, and fats before you're going into workout. Same thing with motivation, you want authenticity, you want autonomy, you want passion, purpose, all these big intrinsic motivators, curiosity, you wanna stack them on top of each other

Starting point is 00:58:46 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? And older people, I guess, who have trained their brain properly, let's say.

Starting point is 00:59:02 Well, anything that requires seeing things from other people's perspectives and multi-perspectival 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. You can meditate a lot to sort of lower cognitive bias

Starting point is 00:59:19 and do those things, but it's gonna start to happen naturally when you're older. So to me, the big one, the cool one is the systems thinking part. Cause I like one of the commonalities among all the biggest brains I've ever met, all the real, the people who 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,

Starting point is 00:59:54 because you have to hold 400 pages in your head 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, especially in the modern world. We specialize, we specialize, we specialize.

Starting point is 01:00:12 And 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. 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. And suddenly there's a revolution waiting to happen.

Starting point is 01:00:34 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. So the thing that I think is, is the most exciting over 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.

Starting point is 01:00:56 I'm gonna include it in my book and credit you. Okay, so Stephen, I wanna 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 live longer, happier.

Starting point is 01:01:16 Let me back this story up a little bit to tell you a story that's not in the book. Yeah. 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 01:01:39 It's flows. 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 specialize in the worst of the worst. So if you are a geriatric chihuahua with an abusive past, three legs, one eye, cancer, heart disease, mange, and flatulence, you're our guy.

Starting point is 01:02:05 That's who we work with. And the vets would be like, we'd get these dogs, the dogs would be like, don't get attached. This dog is gonna live a month, month and a half at most. This is about to provide a very good death. And we'd bring the dogs in and mind you, we've over 700 dogs passed through our facility and over 5,000 are in our programs, so big sample size.

Starting point is 01:02:28 And on average, our dogs wouldn't live another month or six weeks, they would live another three, four, five years. Oh, wow. 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

Starting point is 01:02:45 fuck is going on? Pardon my language. 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 this stuff work in humans? Right. And it turns out almost everything I were doing with the dogs exists in these so-called blue zones, which is what led me to the blue exists in these so-called blue zones, which is what led me to the blue zones in the first place. So, Dan Buhler is a National Geographic reporter in the early 2000s noticed that there were places on the planet where people lived on average 12 years longer than everybody else. And they're all over the place. And he wanted to know what are the commonalities.

Starting point is 01:03:22 And he did a whole bunch of research. The research is a little controversial. The controversy is not on the lifestyle stuff. It's on the, there's some stuff that has been turned into supplements and is dietary and 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.

Starting point is 01:03:57 A ton of stuff on social belonging and connection. This is why challenging social activities matter so much. This is built into Blue Zones. There's also this respect for 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 there's no one

Starting point is 01:04:20 diet across the boards that works for everybody. But those are 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 and very like, for example, they get social belonging and connection. They really emphasize it. You're in the blue zones.

Starting point is 01:04:37 Some of them people 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 when you have a lot of dogs, like we had 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. 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.

Starting point is 01:05:12 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 the diseases of aging. So when we get into flow, it lowers inflammation, which is tied to and other 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, killer, 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 the stuff that's going on in the blue zone.

Starting point is 01:05:38 This is stuff we now widely know correlates to healthy longevity. 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 actions for outdoor athletes too.

Starting point is 01:06:03 Colorado, Pitkin County, Colorado, and Eagle County, Colorado, and Loma Linda, California are the four places in America where people, these are the blue zones. Summit, Pitkin, and Eagle, this is Colorado, that's Vale, Aspen, Beaver Creek, all the big ski areas, a lot of outdoor stuff. And in Loma Linda, that's a Seventh Day advantage population

Starting point is 01:06:24 and they're 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, and because it's California on the ocean, right? And they take advantage of that stuff too. Yeah. So I'd love to get a couple of examples here. First of all, what are examples of getting into flow aside from sports as an adult?

Starting point is 01:06:47 That's number one. And then number two, like what are some examples of creative social activities as an adult? Well, one, it is completely erroneous though, myself and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi are totally at fault for this. Like we are to blame, but the idea that flow only shows up in athletes and artists is not true. We focused a lot on athletes

Starting point is 01:07:10 and we focused a lot on artists. So people think it's only athletes and artists, but the most common flow state on earth is reading or interpersonal flow. Interpersonal flow is like the group flow, you and your best friend get into a great conversation and a whole hour goes by and you don't notice it's gone. That 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 in a choir, very, very flowy group flow, lots of research on that gardening, very flowy long walks in nature, you know, nature is very, very flowy, coding, architecture,

Starting point is 01:07:46 drawing, drumming, dancing, on and on and on. I mean, there's a ton of flow at work. In fact, flow is much more common at work than it is during leisure for a bunch of different reasons. But the list sort of goes on and on and on. If we want to enjoy the second half of our lives, 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 01:08:13 We grow up by getting into flow states, coming out the other side is more complex, more skillful, more adaptive, more empathetic, wiser. And we move forward, like, so it plays a big role in adult development and successful in peak performance aging. Yeah, so just for all my young and profitors, I'm gonna do a sort of Steven Kotler marathon

Starting point is 01:08:32 when this episode comes out and I'm gonna replay all of our older episodes about flow, about all the different things that I've talked to with Steven over the past. So it will be a great educational value for all of you guys. So Steven, I end the show with a couple of questions that I ask all my guests

Starting point is 01:08:48 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 and profitors can do today to become more profitable tomorrow? 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?

Starting point is 01:09:05 For my wife, it's long walks with the dogs, for 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 it can stretch out for longer, the heightened productivity and creativity will help us the flow state by a day, maybe two. Flow also resets the nervous system, it calms you down, flushes stress hormones out of your system. So emotional regulation, emotional management, fear blocks performance on every level, flow resets the nervous system. And the thing is, it's most people,

Starting point is 01:09:46 and especially all the people listening to this podcast, are gonna be like you. You got to your 30s and you stop skiing. You put down childish things. Skis go away, the surfboard goes away, the skateboard goes away. You stop samba dancing and salsa dancing and all that stuff.

Starting point is 01:10:01 And the research shows that's a disaster. It's a disaster. In fact, 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

Starting point is 01:10:19 on your primary flow activity, just to keep your nervous system where it needs to be. 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 study the neurobiology

Starting point is 01:10:35 peak human performance, so 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 USC, SF and a whole bunch of other academics. We take the science and we use it to train people. We train people in 130 countries and we train everybody from like professional athletes and members of the special forces to soccer moms and insurance brokers and teachers and folks in the Air Force. And we work with a lot of companies in between.

Starting point is 01:11:08 So I think now we're training Facebook or Metta, Accenture, Bain Capital, Audi, San Francisco Police Department, the Air Force, a wide swath of people. And our trainings are 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 get more flow.com despite the fact that I'm embarrassed to say it out loud, but you can go there and sign up for a free, uh, hour long coaching call with somebody on my staff.

Starting point is 01:11:37 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 gets every, I'll fire somebody if they try to sell you anything. It's just an informational conversation. So it's really mellow and most people get a lot out of it and it's free, getmoreflow.com.

Starting point is 01:11:54 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 have to do with the topic of the episode it's up to you. What is your secret to profiting in life? It's just hard work. I'll give you an example. I came up as a journalist and I

Starting point is 01:12:16 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 in. I found that out. I was like, okay, you guys are doing it three times. Clearly my job is to make my editor's job easier. My job editor has to really comb through my articles and takes months. He hates me.

Starting point is 01:12:38 That's not, I'm not a good employee. So I started editing my stories 12 times. I just figure out what everybody else would do, and I tripled it or quadrupled 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. A lot of it is about smart hard work, not just hard work. There's better ways to do it. I talk a lot about that in our country,

Starting point is 01:13:08 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 01:13:21 Where can everybody learn about you? Where can they get in our country? And how can they find learn about you? Where can they get Nar Country? And how can they find more about you, Stephen? Nar Country, you can go to narcountry.com or Amazon or wherever books are sold. StephenCotler.com gets you to me. Flowresearchcollective.com gets you to the Flow Research Collective. GetMoreFlow.com gets you to our trainings.

Starting point is 01:13:41 I think that's it. 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.

Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - YAPClassic: Steven Kotler, Secrets to Peak Performance in Your 30s, 40s, and Beyond

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