The Future Of Longevity: Gain Health Back & Live More Than 100 Years with Prashant Desai

Hey, this is Joshua with the Flow Research Collective production team. Today's episode is a special one. It's part of our Client Spotlight series where we interview the people that we train directly. We work with executives, entrepreneurs, and business leaders who want to rework how they work so they can get more results in less time with minimal struggle and of course, a whole lot more flow. Now, if you want to level up your performance, then tune in as we dive into their daily routines, tease apart what they're learning, and shine a light on how to achieve your goals faster without sacrificing your personal life.

Flow should be made as part of the curriculum of all the MBA institutes or all the postgraduate institutes. People in school will not understand what flow is. You need a certain maturity. But when they teach this, whether it's at Harvard or at Stanford or even in India, they should have one subject on flow.

What does it take to do the impossible? What does it take to level up your game like never before? What does it take for individuals, organizations, for even institutions to achieve paradigm shifting. Nothing is ever the same again.

Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance, access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Rhian Dorris, and together with bestselling Stephen Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio.

The way I know you, actually, I don't know a lot about you, and I haven't gotten sort of your bio and your extensive professional background, but the impression that I have is that you bumped into Rian at a conference, I think earlier this year, and he had taken, he had taken a selfie message of the two of you, and he sent that to our team, actually.

Oh, okay.

Enthusiastic, and it actually brought a lot of energy to the company. So tell me about that moment. Why were you so enthusiastic, and how did you come to know Flow Research Collective?

Ah, so easy and a tough one to answer. Sometimes I get emotional when I talk about it, and I told that to, to Rianne as well, uh, because, uh, you know, there are, there are times when you sometimes don't realize what you are getting into. It's only after a while when something like this has a very profound impact, not just on your life, but on your lifestyle. It somewhere goes on to redefine who you are as a human. That's where you realize, you know, and that's why I have so much of fondness for everything and everyone at FRC. And I just saw Rian the other day, I couldn't help myself. Walking across, you know, paying my gratitude and debt to him and thanking him for what FRC and all of you guys have collectively done to me. And I just went across and said hi, and then we dispersed. It was a 3-day event of Peter Diamandis. And I think the third day, he just suddenly said, Prashant, can we do a small video together? I said, you're asking me? Obviously, you saw my enthusiasm when you guys reached out to do this. Pod as well, right? So Zero to Dangerous flow, uh, for me, I, I, I write about this extensively on my LinkedIn as well. Uh, for me, it has been a life changer. I won't even use the word game changer, right? Uh, it's, it's completely redefined, uh, me as a person. Uh, I am a, I am a version 2.0, uh, thanks to FRC. So yes, it's been a I just can't even describe in words what this has meant to me.

Oh, well, thank you. Your words do carry a lot of weight, and it was transmitted into the team. So with that transformation that you're talking about, whether we took part in that or there were other influences in your life, this period where you went from zero to dangerous, can you take us back to the zero bit and talk us through that change?

Yeah, so I ended up— it's very interesting how I got to know of something called flow. In my dictionary, the word flow didn't exist, the flow as whether it's Steven or Mihai describes it, right? Flow, you used it more as a verb than as a noun in that sense. So this was COVID. And, you know, I was just off my entrepreneurial venture, where, you know, I was trying to build a truly Indian sports brand. And I failed miserably in that venture. You know, I lost 80% of my lifetime savings in a period of 30 months. And then, you know, I went, I shut that business down, then I was, I joined a private equity firm. My whole life has been in the financial markets. So I joined a private equity firm, we were, I was just easing into my new role. And then COVID hit. And when COVID hit, all of us had a lot of time in hand. And you are spending time either reading or watching Netflix or seeing Insta. And I followed Novak Djokovic on Insta. And actually, Novak Djokovic is how I got connected with Steve. So in that particular live of Novak Djokovic, he had got Jim Quick to come. And Jim was just launching his book called Limitless. And in Limitless, when it goes to the method section, there is a chapter on flow. And in that Insta Live, Jim Quick spoke about flow. And he spoke about Stephen. And I, after that Insta Live, Googled what flow is, Stephen Kotler is, watched a couple of his videos. And I just found it very intriguing. What is this something called as flow, an optimal state of consciousness where you perform your best, where you live your best? And I was certainly neither performing my best nor feeling my best because of what had happened to me. And I like to experiment, but I have only one rule when I experiment is when I experiment, I will take my time to experiment, but I will then completely trust the person whom I'm experimenting with. So I went into Zero to Dangerous with full conviction, knowing that I know nothing, and that I will, I will listen into everything that you guys teach with a very open mind. If there are things that I need to practice, implement, I will do that. With complete honesty. And I guess I did not know what a ride of a lifetime I was in for, right? And it just took me from zero. I still don't know whether I can call myself dangerous, but I can certainly— I know I'm not zero anymore. And it just had that level of profound impact. So thank you. Thank you so much.

I have to highlight you celebrating one of the values that, you know, we, we try to instill amongst our own people internally, but also with our clients, which is this idea of a beginner's mind. Because if you start this process without a clean state, without that open-mindedness, without the grasshopper hat, you know, and, and be willing to take it all in, sometimes it's a, it's a much more difficult journey. So the fact that you did that may— was all you, was a testament to you and how much you were allowing yourself to transform. So was there a moment in the program where stuff started to click for you? I mean, what were some of the highlights that really were instilled? And you don't have to talk about specific chapters or anything, but just from a personal lens.

So what I realized is, at its core, so I used to be a half marathoner, I have done about 40 timed runs. And I could relate a lot back to being in the zone or, you know, having a runner's high kind of, kind of told me where, where this all was going in. Uh, one thing which Rian talks about a lot initially is that at times a lot of what you are seeing, hearing, uh, may not make sense, but go with the flow. At some point of time, the pattern recognition will come into play. You will connect the dots. The mind will do its own bit. And, and I guess, uh, towards the later part, I think week 4 or, uh, when the week on, uh, the positive psychology basics started, I guess that's where everything kind of, kind of somewhere in my mind begin to make sense, that if I have a purpose, if everything that I am doing, or most of the stuff that I'm doing, if it is aligned to that, the attention is very different. When the attention span is very different, focus is very different. And he talks about flow follows focus. And it just kind of tends to make sense. And then when you realize, how do you get that purpose? How do you be in focus? The whole positive psychology piece kind of helped me a lot to do that, by which time I had already started implementing my morning routine and my evening routine. So I'd already bought back a lot of time, right? And now I was utilizing that time to do something more. And what I did in that extra time that I got from, thanks to FRC, was I started writing down the reasons why I failed in my entrepreneurial venture, which then turned out to become a book. Which HarperCollins published it, it's done extremely well, where only two things I talk about, I talk about very honestly, you know, why I failed, failed. And I also did the Flow for Writers course. And there Stephen Kotler teaches us how you can steal a style, right? So I stole from the book behind you, The Art of Impossible. And I was doing a live TV interview on my book. And I kind of borrowed that idea from Steve, and I said, I have a small why I wrote a book, and I have a big why that I wrote a book. And, you know, so it's tough for me to pinpoint one or two things. I think if you are somebody who really wants to get very productive, bring that purpose in life so that everything that you do makes sense to you, so that it doesn't look like the stir piece that Steve talks about, right, whether it's, you know, feeling effortless, whether, you know, where the sense of time goes away, you know, you lose your sense of self, everything that flow represents. For me, and I keep going back, I mean, every 3-4 months to hear that whole piece where he talks about how flow came into being from Jung to Mihaly to William James. And I love history, I love academia, So from there to then going towards the last part of the course where finally everything, you know, comes together from your MTP to today's to-do list, how you should celebrate small wins. I can go on and on. Sorry, we don't have so much time, but apologies for that. But that's the level of profound impact it has had on me. It just feels like yesterday. And now it makes sense, right? Because it made so much of sense. Because my focus, my attention was so sharp when I was doing the course, when I was taking down the notes, all of this, I don't have to go through now books to remember that. It's just, it's got into my long-term memory. I talk about it almost every day to somebody or the other, Romina.

Well, let's talk about this integration piece, because I think, you know, sometimes in the learning process, there's a belief that once you graduate, you can put on that fancy cap and have the certificate, and you're, you know, you've arrived, you've arrived to this learning, this precipice. But obviously, I see compounded effects. Of the principles that you picked up in the course, and they sound like they are kind of embedding in your life even more right now. So what's been the snowball effect of becoming more dangerous, as you've said?

So let's, let's— maybe if you're somewhere asking the before and the after, uh, what does the after look like? Uh, and, uh, I look at the current after as the before because there is a, a new version 3 I need to work on. Uh, but So what would my day look like, right? I would wake up in the morning, there were random stuff and random shit that I would do, including exercise, but it was random. Nothing was thought through, nothing was planned and made routine in a manner that it would put less load on the prefrontal cortex. Then you would come back, eat your breakfast, go to work, you were working, you were chatting. So basically it's like what 99% of the world lives. There is nothing wrong in that, don't get me wrong, but what is it Today my morning routine is set. I wake up at 5:30. From 5:30 to 6:30, I write. I find my flow when I write, okay? And it could be as trivial as writing a letter to my daughter as to what happened yesterday. But when I am in the morning with my laptop writing, I just feel I'm with myself. There is something that happens, right? After that, my routine is set. What I need to do before I go for my exercise, including laying out my clothes the previous night in my washroom so that I don't have to think what clothes to wear. Everything is now to that extent made very routine. When I come back, I know what I have to eat, what my breakfast is. Now I don't eat breakfast, I'm on 2 meals a day. So I have just bought back so much of time. So look at my life today, I think my productivity probably would have gone up 4x or 5x from where it was before Flow. And in that 4 or 5x, today I have already written a book. Um, I have now become a longevity biohacker. There is a lot of stuff that I do on longevity, I share with people on longevity. Initially I had also become a financial influencer, uh, but then it conflicted with what my firm used to do, so I backed out of it. Uh, my weekends are jam-packed. I don't consume on a weekend, I only produce on weekend. I go and give lectures to kids, universities. I don't work more than 7 hours a day. I read at least 1 hour a day. I am reading between 50 and 70 books a year. But more importantly, I'm teaching those books to people. I have already taught 25,000 people how to become a trained speed reader. I am now— so if you look at, there are no more dimensions to my life. I am spending quality time with my friends. I have— so when you do that value exercise, right, and you cannot go beyond 5, I keep revisiting that every 6 months. And basis that, this piece kind of gets redone. There is an external manifestation of that. When I talk to my colleagues, when I talk to my friends, when I go and speak at events, people see me beyond my work.

Say more on that piece. Talk to me about the dimensions of that, because that's quite a grand statement. People see you beyond your work.

Yes. So if you look at my work, I'm a finance professional, right? I'm married into capital markets. I love the stock markets. And a lot of people used to look at me just as that. Today, when I go to events, I don't talk about finance. So I can talk about entrepreneurship or why I failed. So last weekend I had gone to a city in India called Calcutta. I addressed 200 entrepreneurs and I told them what they should not do, then what they should do. And it's very interesting, uh, somebody from the audience will always come back and say, what you are saying, all good, but tell me what can I do with my life? Then I wear the longevity hat. And then I tell them, you know, how every single day your body, your inner age is aging faster than your outside age. Why you need to get yourself tested. You feel you are 20, feeling great, nothing is wrong. Sorry, if you are smoking, I can tell you one smoke or two smoke takes away close to about 20-25 minutes of your life. And I present the science behind that. Uh, then somebody talks about, you know, reading because my Insta profile talks about I've launched a course on speed reading. And somebody will want to talk to their kids. 25,000 is not a small number over a 2-year period to influence people why and how they can become better readers. There is no such thing as a good reader and a bad reader. There is a trained reader and an untrained reader. I talk to kids about how to sharpen their memory. I sometimes go and talk to housewives above 50, in terms of what food they should do. The biggest thing is health is wealth. How each one— in India, most women don't work, they are housewives or homemakers. How they can add years to their family's life by just tweaking what and how they cook. Prashant, they say going and talking about cooking, but I am— I only talk science, I don't talk anything which is beyond science. But that's because I have time. Because I have time, I read. I have read Max Lugavere's book, I talk about genius foods. But it just— people see a lot to you than just your work. And when you say things that make sense to them, when they implement some of them, and then they write back to you saying that you told me to do this, and now I feel good, at least you feel you've changed one person's one moment or one life. But if you go back, Amina, to why was this possible. It could have only been possible when I had more time. And I think in one of your chapters, you guys cover, right, uh, that time is more important than money. So you guys have given that FRC taught me that time is more important. Make time. Now the second thing is, when I am talking, people are connecting with my passion, right? Uh, it's not just the words that I say, but the way I say it. Where does that passion come from? That passion comes from the fact that I have a purpose in life. Now, if I don't have that purpose, if everything that I'm doing is not aligned to that purpose, somewhere that people will see through, it's a more cosmetic, superficial. So at its core, every time I do something, and I go back, it takes me back to that time that I spent with FRC. And I don't know whether I mentioned this to you, or to Rian, But I not only did Zero to Dangerous, then I did a Flow Training Accelerator. Also, I did Flow for Writers, and I have already told Rhiannon, the day you launch Flow and Aging, I am the first person signing up.

So I would love to actually put on both of your hats for a moment. The financier, the invest— the investment banker, and then also the biohacker, long longevity guy, right? So if we start getting into the age of, you know, sort of the 50+ brackets, can you make asymmetrical moves, um, in order to gain more of that wealth slash health back?

What would be your— absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. I was in the car with my boss who's down from Singapore, and we, we were discussing— he's 52— and we were just discussing that. And there are a lot of things you can do, but let's look at the 3 basic things that you can do. Everything is food, but we all get mixed up, right? Because There is a science of food and there is an emotion of food, and emotion always wins, right? And rightly so, right? Not just in India, all over the world food is celebrated. Food was always in evolutionary sense seen as celebration. Celebration was when you indulged. But now we've moved to the world of food abundance where I don't even say that obesity is an epidemic.

No.

For me, food is an epidemic— the quality of the food, then the quantity of the food. So I think the first thing all of us can do is eat less often. So for example, I am on 2 meals a day. I eat my lunch at 2 and I eat my dinner between 7 and 8. I have an 18-hour fasting window. From a longevity standpoint, we have, you know, longevity genes which Dr. David Sinclair came up with, the sirtuins, and It has two more cousins, the AMPKs and the mTORs. Uh, all these three pathways are called the longevity pathways, uh, sirtuins being the most important. When you put your body through 18 hours of fasting, you are creating adversity. You are telling your body you will not get food for 18 hours, and the body then turns on its survival mode. and its survival mode is to increase the production of SIRT2 genes, sirtuins, AMPK, mTOR. As these 3 survival pathways get activated because of 18 hours of fasting, essentially you are getting younger because the body is now setting up mechanism to survive, which is the strongest evolutionary mechanism. So that's the first thing that you can do. Remove snacking, remove midnight snacking. Please omit breakfast. Breakfast is not the most important meal of the day. Sorry, science doesn't support that. But how you break your fast— I break my fast with lunch— is important, right? Remove sugar. Sugar is poison. Stuff like that. So that's first thing everybody can do irrespective of 20, 30, 40, 50, because in 20s also this is as relevant. Because when I reflect back on my age, the mistakes that I made in my 20s compounded and made me— I was 92 kg, Ameena, before this. I last week did a post on LinkedIn showing my before-after picture. So that's first thing you can do. Second is exercise. The highest ROI from a longevity standpoint is exercise. Not people realize, but muscle, your muscle is your biggest weapon when it comes to fight aging. When you eat more glucose, more sugar, that caramelized glucose that floats in the blood ultimately will get absorbed by the muscle. And you have more glucose in your muscle, muscle is getting weaker. How do I make the muscle more— how do I use the glycogen that is stored? Through exercise. So the highest ROI is exercise. Third thing which I learned from FRC which works brilliantly well, is sleep. Sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep and sleep.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. Thanks for listening to Flow Research Collective radio. Before we dive back into our conversation, there's something to consider. It may be that today we are under challenged. We're drowning in comfort. Now, in his book, antifragile statistician Nassim Taleb pointed out something that's of keen key importance. Quote: Undercompensation from the absence of challenge degrades the best of the best. The best horses lose when they compete with slower ones and win against better rivals. Now, put another way, who we could be, or our highest potential, is squandered by safety, coddled by comfort. If you want to train with us at the Flow Research Collective, it will require boldness. But what's life without a little adventure, right? To learn more about how you can get more flow in your life and achieve your professional and personal goals in less time and with more ease, go to getmoreflow.com. If you're a good fit, we'd love to train with you. All the best.

Say it one more time for our audience.

Sleep. 8 hours, but not the quantum of sleep, my friends. Quality of sleep. What's your REM sleep? I wear a Whoop. I measure my sleep every single day. I spoke to you about my pre-COVID times. My resting heart rate was 62 or 63. My resting heart rate today is 50. Usain Bolt is at 45.

It's funny, I think they've actually lowered the, um, the sort of the resting heart rate average when you do body health checks because the mean average of populations has got— had gotten so out of whack.

And then when you get into deeper quality of sleep, then, you know, dark room, cold, no device for an hour. Once you decide, I want 8 hours of quality sleep, it's not going to happen overnight. You will have to do something. You will have to take your sauna, you will have to take your cold shower. I do that 6 days a week. Cold room. It's okay to be bored for half an hour in a day. Just lie down, sleep will come. But that sleep that comes is, is so important, right? I think the biggest contribution FRC made to me was not just making me productive, but making me realize that sleep is the most important. And I think somewhere, I think Rihan mentioned in the lecture that sleep is a flow state. For me, it was poetry.

These are such important points, and I know that the three that you just touched upon, they're kind of like You know, they're the, the, the, the rubric that's told to us throughout life, you know, food, exercise, sleep, but to break it down in a system from, from whence you just did, that makes sense. And stress is important.

Don't, don't give it time, right? Everybody thinks that I have started fasting in a one week, I want to see the weight coming down. No. Any habit takes anywhere from 30 to 90 days to get formed.

So when did it click for you? When, when did it become automated for you, all of this?

So I have now been on 2 meals a day for about 5 months, 1 month. But I started slow. Today my post on LinkedIn goes live on that. I started first eliminated midnight snack, then I eliminated evening snack, then I eliminated afternoon snack, then I eliminated morning snack, then I went to eliminate breakfast. When I eliminated breakfast, I started by eliminating all breakfast alternate days. It took me a 90-day cycle. You write, and I think Stephen writes in his book, right? Little by little, a little becomes a lot.

Absolutely.

So it is important to start small.

For sure. And I think the small also makes it easier for those around us, right? So how did you, how did you bring everybody else on board in your life? Because I grew up in Asia, I grew up in mostly China, actually. But there is, of course, there is a very amplified presence around food or attention on food and food culture and food history and food in the household and mothers having a say around food and things like this. So there's definitely the pressure of that. So I don't know if that existed for you in your household. How did you overcome that with some of these protocols from either the Western lens, even though it's science, it's neutral. It's neutral.

If you think China is where it is, come to India. China is at level 2. We are at level 20. Oh my God. So no, no, you are right. Everywhere food is celebration. There are cultural things around food. Like in one of the things in our culture is you don't count the food you eat. Science doesn't say that. Of course you should count what you eat, right? They said you don't count food when you eat at a time when food was scarce, not when time when food is abundant, right? But for me, it was easy. One, because, you know, in India, your help who will help you cook the food is very moderate, very reasonable. I have a full-time cook. And my cost of full-time cook is $200 a month. Amazing. So I have liberty to— so I use leverage, as Stephen calls it. And then you define him, this is what I want. So I tell him he cannot use more than 3 teaspoons of oil, uh, the vegetables have. So for me, it was not very difficult. The difficult part was not the— it was the mindset. Because as you said, you walk down any street in India, there'll be at least 30 to 40 street food vendors, each of them better than the other guy. How do you avoid that? So it was— my challenge was with myself. It was not my family, nobody forces me and stuff like that. It was my battle with my own self. And I guess it's true for most people, your biggest challenge is how do you— and I think Stephen only writes in one of his books, right, that all behavior is belief-driven. Believe you can, believe you can't, either ways you are wrong. Henry Ford said that. And I just— it was for me, the battle was my belief more than anything else. Yeah, I didn't find it that difficult, honestly.

For sure. And it sounds like you had created the type of autonomy to allow for that to be easier. And also now you're kind of, you're kind of evangelizing it now, you're advocating for this. So it's, it's when you're, when you're trying these things.

I'm trying, and this is one area where I fail, or two areas where I fail, is changing people's mindset. Because when it comes to food, it's so much emotion than science. And people do give it a shot. But it's a matter of time before the switch is then again switched off. It's a, it's a tough one.

It is. Well, what do you think is the biggest thing that they are missing? Science. The science. Okay.

Like I wear a CGM. So it's now been 6 months that I monitor my glucose every day. So I know when, for example, yesterday I was very hungry. At 6 o'clock, and I knew I will take time, so I ate a sandwich. My blood glucose doubled. And believe me, yesterday I swore, sorry, I will not eat bread. If I eat, I will eat in moderation. I could have taken the vegetables out of the sandwich and just had the vegetables and one slice of bread. I didn't do that. So you get better at it. I think if people— a lot of people are only scared to measure themselves because they know how bad that measurement is going to be, right? It should be a a way to liberate yourself, not to— the amygdala does not need to go high when you measure yourself. It needs to be a liberating experience.

Well, luckily it's slowly come— like these indicators and measurements are slowly coming out of the clinical setting and becoming more norm now, and even out of this athletic setting. So it's normal people can experience them. What is sort of your future vision around what biohacking looks like? For new markets, new emerging markets, and how you would create some kind of an exponential effect on that.

So I would say the whole world of longevity is where flow was in 1865. We have a long way to go. It's a new field. Therefore, it will require a lot more convincing. It will also require a lot of effort from scientists, which they are doing. If you listen to the podcast of Dr. Morgan Levine or Rhonda Patrick or David Sinclair and Andrew Huberman, they are doing their bit now. Stephen is doing his bit. We are, I think, going through an education phase. The world, I think, is looking for a magic pill that I can pop. That pill is there, it will come in the next 7 to 10 years' time. The work that is happening on rapamycin, all of that will come. But we have to be alive. And I, when I do my talks on longevity, I tell them, the first thing you need to do is ensure that you don't kill yourself. Right? And there are 4 more, 4 major killers: heart attacks, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's. So first, do something that you will not get all 4. And that all 4 not getting starts with the 3 things that we spoke about. Science is doing its bit, whether it's organ transplant, uh, whether it's stem cell research, whether it's CRISPR, whether it's gene editing, whether it's pills. But you will have to be alive till then, right? But as of now, what Stephen Kotler is doing for flow— where are you with flow? I would say you have miles to go before you sleep, right? That's where the world of longevity is. It's probably even younger than the field of flow. There is a lot of work ahead of all of us. And like flow, there will be believers and there will be non-believers, and you will never be able to make the entire world believe. But even if we are able to make that 5% believe, I think the ripple effect of that, the compound effect of that 5%, making the other 5% believe will be even more important. So I guess all of us currently have to lay the foundation, we are all playing a role to kind of dig the ground deep, ensure that the foundation is strong. But the real impact of whether it is flow or longevity will be felt by my kids. And the even bigger impact of that will be found by my grandkids. But it has to start somewhere, right? If somebody did not discover paper, you would not have had Amazon, right? Because Amazon would not have been able to move the parcels. I think we are doing that work of laying the factory that will start building paper. Amazon will happen after 50, 80, 100 years. So still a long way to go. But education, in my view, is the most important piece.

So beyond the daily habits that you have now, what would be the first sort of personal investment, whether it's time or resources, into a new technology or or a new mechanism or a new whatever energy pathway in the body? What, where would you place your attention on your, on your next bet? Basically, if you were to invest in your longevity measurements?

I think what gets measured gets done. I want to spend time educating this. First, you have to figure out what your biological age is, right? Then you know where you stand. Till you know where you stand, how will you work upon it? And, uh, you know, Morgan Levine writes very beautifully in her book True Age, and she says that, uh, one biological age will not tell you. So my, when I do an inner age test, say with, uh, InsideTracker, for example, and it gives me my biological age, it has taken all parameters to come to, but my heart probably could have aged more. My skin could have aged even more. My liver could have a different biological age. And I think over the next, uh, 12 to 24 months, we will move from a single biological age to multiple biological age. So biological age of your brain— today I have a 7 o'clock call with a scientist out of US in Silicon Valley, he's an Indian, Sean Patel, uh, where he's doing a lot of work. How do you measure, uh, what's your biological age of your, of your brain? What is the biological age of your eyes? So I, I'm betting a lot more on variables. I think it's the med-tech world And the prevention side is, in my way, I would want to bet very big on that.

It makes a lot of sense. I can't imagine even more dangerous you with all your dangerous organs.

I hope to— I write in my MTP, I say, is to make people live 100+, but younger and disease-free. And I write very jokingly, I just don't want to be there for my granddaughter's wedding. I want to dance at her wedding.

So yes, I was just going to ask you, what does dangerous look like at 100 years old for you personally?

It should give me the energy of an 80-year-old. At 100, I don't want to feel 100. Yeah, Dr. David Sinclair's dad is now 84 or 85. He runs 5 miles a day. He parties. Dr. David Sinclair says he parties even harder than him. He goes and does these wild treks. So he has a body of a 60-year-old. So when I am 100, I wish and I hope, and I'm working towards having a body of an 80-year-old.

Yeah. Oh, it's nice to have these things to look forward to, to look forward to aging than to dread it, right? There's a lot of it is mindset. Is there anything that you'd love to either share with our audience? You've done a lot of sharing, but is there anything anything you'd like to sort of, you know, throw out as an ask for the audience too? Or even please do mention your book because you, uh, something that you recently wrote and completed. So share, share a little with us.

So the book I wrote was Why I Failed. I lost, in Indian currency, I lost 30 crores in 30 months. Uh, 1 crore is roughly about, uh, $200,000 US. So I lost $200,000 a month for 30 months. So that's the kind of, uh, damage I did to myself. And during COVID I was thinking, you know, your first phases of denial, you think the whole world has conspired against you to fail. You've done nothing wrong. But it's when all of these kind of subsides, and in COVID, you had a lot of time, and I would see my daughters running. And I honestly told myself that it's not my wealth that I lost, it was their wealth that I lost. And at least I owe it to them, at least to be very honest with them and tell them how their dad lost so much of their wealth. And I actually, it started as a journal where I started talking about the mistakes that I made, but I realized I was still being very superficial. So one of the things I write is I was arrogant. You were arrogant means what? It doesn't mean a shit. But tell people why were you arrogant. So I then, when I went second level, why third level, why fourth level deep to the first principles, I realized I was arrogant because 5-7 years before I did my venture, I met with a lot of success. And that's what I write about, how success makes you arrogant. That somewhere comes in. I write in my book that the worst of the mistakes are made in best of times. So I explained that, right? I always— I told— I write in the book that I started the business for wrong reason. You start a business when you are either passionate about a product or about a service. Or a problem you want to solve. I started a business only to make money, to create valuation. But okay, but why? That took me back to my childhood. I lost my father when I was 7 years old. We were in abject poverty. We used to eat 2 times a day. We used to get only 2 pairs of clothes to wear in a year. We were very, very poor. And every bad memory of my life is associated with poverty. I think when I was 14, 15 years, one thing I had made up, that whatever happens in my life, I will not be poor. For that, if I have to beg, borrow, steal, kill, I will do anything, but I will not be poor. That manifestation of money greed played out in my venture. So I, I wrote a book, it's called The Biography of a Failed Venture. It will take you to my voice of why I failed. Uh, it was an honest, candid, uh, confession of, of, of sort. So that's what the, what the book kind of went— sorry, what was your first question, Amina?

It was basically just any shares that you might have, or even an ask for the community. But I love the way—

I will tell one thing to the community, and not just the community who is already on FRC. I would— I, and I tell this when I do my lectures, that flow should be made as part of the curriculum of all the MBA institutes or all the postgraduate institutes. People in school will not understand what flow is. You need a certain maturity. But when they teach this, whether it's at Harvard or Stanford or even in India, they should have one subject on flow. Because if you are not aligned to your purpose, if you don't know why you are doing what you are doing, it's game over at the first step. You will realize it at step 100. So I think it should be made a compulsory subject. For those who are listening and those who all we can reach out to, guys, please, please, please sign up for Flow. You have no idea what— how liberating this is. The most expensive thing in this world is time. And not only do they make you productive, they will help you make time. Then you decide what you want to do with that life. I think it's an absolute necessity.

Beautiful. There's nothing I can say that could top that. That is a beautiful way to land the conversation, unless there's anything else you would like to share.

No, I just want to express my gratitude to Stephen for being so committed to doing this, right? Writing books, doing podcasts. It requires very different, you know, thought process to kind of be able to do that. And the entire team at FRC to follow that man, his vision. He can dream, but you guys are what make it happen. So I just want to pay my debt of gratitude to all of you. And yes, I just want to remind you, you have to send me the link for the NAR course.

I absolutely will. And, you know, I think Stephen's commitment, our commitment on the team, that only happens because of people like you who we want to support because you're committed in the things that you're doing. So thank you so much for your time and your stories.

So much. Tell Stephen one thing from my side. In India, we have a culture that when we meet our elders or gurus or teachers, we touch their feet and ask for their thankfulness. We pay our debt of gratitude by touching their feet. Just tell him, in my mind, I've touched his feet many times. And when I meet him in person, if I ever do, I will be doing that. So thank you so much for everything. Really appreciate that.

Thank you, Prashant. I'll pass the message along.

Thank you.

Cheers.

See you.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. And one of the biggest challenges of high performers is a lack of time or inefficient time management. Now, without leverage on your time, it doesn't matter the size of opportunities that come your way. It doesn't matter how excited you are about pursuing your goals. Time scarcity or poor time management blocks you from performing at your best. But here's the good news: you don't necessarily need more time. What matters is more flow. Research shows that a flow state makes you up to 500% more productive within the tiny bit of time that you have. Flow is the experience of being in the zone. It's a state of total immersion and focus where you feel limitless and you perform at the highest level. Flow Research Collective is founded by Pulitzer Prize nominee Steven Kotler, and we've trained thousands of high achievers to free up more time through flow. Here's the sad truth that we've seen: most skilled professionals find flow by accident. It's intermittent and inconsistent instead of inevitable. But what happens when you make flow a readily accessible and automatic part of your day, as natural to you as breathing, eating, or tying your shoes, for example? Well, for starters, time constraints start to matter a whole lot less. Now, multiplying your productivity by 5x sounds hyperbolic, so let's just back up a minute. Even if you only double what you can currently get done in a given day, Wouldn't that be worth learning how to access flow reliably and consistently? This is exactly what we train together at the Flow Research Collective. Just go to getmoreflow.com. We'll train you in the same protocols we teach to Navy SEALs and to executives in the boardrooms of Google and Facebook. What you'll learn is backed by research out of Harvard, DARPA, Deloitte, and others. Tapping this high level of productivity through flow and freeing up your time exponentially is a measurable outcome you can expect. It's time to get your time back. Just go to getmoreflow.com right now.

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