Thriving In The Second Half Of Life

I learned that you were really shocked by the story of Antonio Stradivari. He had an amazing feat of creating two of his most famous violins when he was 92 years old. How did he dispel the typical thoughts around traditional aging, and how did he inspire you to study peak performance aging?

The older myth about aging 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. True across the boards. Every one of our physical skills are use-it-or-lose-it skills, and the research is really clear that we can hang on to them, even advance them far, far later into life than anybody thought possible. If we want to preserve brain function, we need expertise and wisdom. If you want to rock till you drop, if you really are interested in peak performance aging, you need to regularly engage in challenging, creative, and social activities. What really changes is not our ability to learn, it's how we learn. 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. Breakthroughs.

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 fullest goals. I'm your host, Ryan Doris, and together with bestselling author Steven Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio.

Steven, welcome back to Young and Profiting Podcast.

It is so good to be with you again.

I am super happy. Young and Profiter Steven Kotler has been on YAP 3 times and I still feel like I could have 10 more conversations with him given his breadth of work. If you don't know Steven, he is the GOAT of human peak performance. He's the godfather of flow. He's the executive director of the Flow Research Collective, and his work in this space has been nominated for 2 Pulitzer Prizes. Steven is an award-winning journalist. He's the author of over a dozen bestselling books that have been translated in over 40 languages. He's hands down one of the most reputable and well-known authors in the world, and his latest book, Gnar Country: Growing Old, Staying Rad, he tests his knowledge and theories on his own aging body in a quest to become an expert skier at the age of 53. So in this episode, Steven and I will discuss how to navigate peak performance as we age. We'll understand how to keep our use it or lose it skills. We'll dispel myths about our aging brains and we'll gain insight on how we can always stay young and profiting. So Steven, I'm super looking forward to this conversation. My podcast is called Young and Profiting, but I actually have avid listeners of all ages in their forties and fifties 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, Antonio Stradivarius, and he's a famous violin maker and he had amazing feat of creating 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, you know, the typical, uh, thoughts around traditional aging and how did he inspire you to study peak performance aging?

So I had been working on, I'd been working, researching, looking at the field of peak performance aging for a while in a totally unrelated project, right? I was gonna write a mystery novel and I, um, wanted a character, I wanted a cat burglar as a character who was gonna steal musical instruments. Who made the rarest musical instruments in history? Oh, it's Stradivarius. And then I found, figured out what, 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, about physical abilities is like the older myth about aging, which most of us believe, and I believed at the time of this, is what you could call the long, slow rot theory. It's the idea that all of our mental skills and our physical skills, they decline over time. There's nothing we can do to stop the slide. So included in those skill, 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, in your 90s, along with like expertise 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 Stradivarius is like the one in a billion. Or most of what we've been told about aging is wrong. And that was, um, I had already been looking at other aspects of it, but 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, but the physical side was like, holy crap, could this possibly be true? And. Um, 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 onto them, even advance them far, far later into life than anybody thought possible.

Hmm. So I love this. So you're saying the long slow rot theory basically means that our physical mental skills decline over time. There's nothing that we can really do to stop the slide. That's what inspired you to kind of research this in more detail, understand performance peak aging. And like you just said, you said that use-it-or-lose-it skills, we actually have control over them. We used to think that your— 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, um, there's a bunch of stuff on the cognitive side. Let's get back there in a second. On the physical side, There's 5 main categories that matter. And let me, since a lot of your listeners are younger, let me start here, which is peak performance aging starts young. Like the research is really clear, like interventions in your 80s, even beyond matter, like really matter. You can, you can really make changes right up to the end and they matter and they're gonna have actual big effects. But. A lot of this stuff that you wanna start working on, you actually wanna start working on in your 20s and your 30s. And you know, this is the biohacking crowd is very aware of this, right? A lot of that crowd is 20s and 30s and they're doing a lot of the, these things. Now I might argue that they're doing some of the wrong stuff cuz they don't quite understand what peak performance aging is. But, um, besides the point, a lot of this stuff starts young. Um, on the physical side, we want to train 5 skills that matter most: strength, stamina, flexibility, agility, and balance. Those are the 5 skills that you want to train over time. And specifically, we have like the World Health Organ— this is not new knowledge. Like the World Health Organization knows exactly how many minutes a week we should be training these things. You want 150 to 300. This is for peak performance aging, not healthy and successful aging is a little less, but peak performance aging, it's 150 to 300 minutes of hard aerobic training a week, moderate to vigorous aerobic training a week. 2 strength training days a week and 3 flexibility, balance, and agility days a week. Um, or you can find one skill. I chose park skiing in the, in the book that encompasses all that, right? If I, by in park skiing, I'm using strength, stamina, balance, agility, flexibility. There's other stuff you want to do. There's ways we have things called prime mover muscles, our 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 gonna hurt your quad. You're gonna tear the stabilizer, you're gonna tear your hip flexor cuz it stopped doing the work. Your quad, if you're walking around your ambulatory, is working. Your hip flexor has started to atrophy. So there's ways you wanna 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 cognitive side. Cuz yeah, 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 use it or lose it skills? Because I think a lot of people who are older, we're used to going to the gym, taking group classes, whatever, but nobody's really thinking about action sports. And you say that they're a great way to, to leverage these skills.

Okay. We gotta get to the full sentence anyway. So let's, let, let's go for it. Just throw it out there and then we'll break it apart and why it matters so much. Okay. So if you wanna rock till you drop, if you really are interested in peak performance aging, 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, what it means and why it answers your question. So challenging, social, and creative. Um, lifelong learning matters for a bunch of different reasons, but short version, if we want to preserve brain function, we need expertise and wisdom. Expertise and wisdom are these very diverse neural nets in the brain. Lots of real estate, lots of redundancy, impervious to cognitive decline. The more expertise, The more wisdom, and this is why one of the reasons peak performance aging starts young, like literally the guy who, who did the core research on wisdom, Elkanan Goldberg, um, his, his core advice is, you know, the, the more wisdom, the more expertise, the more we have cognitive reserve, the meaning, the more we can stave off Alzheimer's, dementia, cognitive decline, all the things that are gonna hap— could happen to the brain over time. This is how we fight back. 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, it's onboarded slowly over time. So you wanna start training these things. You wanna be start learning challenging creative and social activities. We learn a lot during, mm-hmm. But they 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 cuz it keeps the brain active. Um, in, in really important ways and really lowers stress levels. So a lot of the stuff we're gonna be talking about, there are 9 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, um, social activities lower stress. They give us these prosocial, 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 5 categories of functional fitness: strength, stamina, flexibility, balance, agility. Deliberate play. You've heard of deliberate practice, Anders Ericsson's favorite, you know, expertise. Repetition with incremental advancement is the fastest path towards expertise. And Anders wasn't wrong. But it, 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 gonna do the same thing you did last time, but a little bit of flourish, a little flowery, a little something fun. It's playful, meaning there's no shame, there's no embarrassment. If you're bad, who cares? You're having fun. But that feeling of play produces more neurochemistry, more 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 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, uh, outdoor environments in general lower stress. We know this, this is well established in positive psychology. A 20-minute walk in the woods will outperform most SSRIs for treatment of depression. I can talk about why if you care, but like we know that good for you, lowers stress. So in itself, being in nature is anti-inflammatory. It's so, it's, you know, better for healthy aging.

Mm-hmm.

But if you want to preserve brain function, you want— how do you do that? You want to birth new neurons and turn those new neurons into neural nets, right? 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. And 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. The hippocampus does two things. It does long-term memory and it does location, place.

Mm-hmm.

It's packed with place cells and grid cells. Why? We evolved as hunter-gatherers. You gotta, when you were in the wild and something emotionally charged happened, you gotta 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 novel experiences in outdoor environments. So that's what you want to use it for. Action sports gives you that. Now, we— 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. Through natural environments. It's a really great— and wave vests are really key, better than a lot of other things because they amplify bone density. So a lot— little known fact, your bones, it's like where you store all your minerals, all your nutrients, right, are stored in your bones and they're released into— so everything that drives the brain, calcium for example, um, which is in every— everything the brain does, it's stored in the bones. So as our bones become less dense over time, which happens, it impacts everything. Mm-hmm. Um, uh, for women, really important after menopause, where does most of your estrogen come from? Your bones. So wildly fluctuating hormonal levels, which is a problem that most people have post-menopause, exacerbated by bone density. If you wanna 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. Um, especially, you know, a lot of our country is about a new way of approaching these difficult, challenging physical activities late in life that's much safer and much, much more well-suited to progression.

Yeah, because I, I have to say, like, I'm in my 30s and I used to ski, and I, I don't even ski anymore because I'm like, I've got too much to live for. I don't want to break a bone. I'm not into it. Um, and 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, like, really couldn't learn. So talk to us about learning that activity at 53 years old and you know what you learned as an old dog, uh, learning new tricks.

There's a couple things you need to know to flesh this out a little bit. But you are right. Everything you said is totally true. Why did I think I could learn to park ski? There's a whole bunch of new stuff in like flow science, my field, and in body cognition, a couple other whiz-bang 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 you, Beverly says, don't become a gymnast or a ballet dancer after 25, right? Cuz that window's closed and you can't just, That's sort of true. There is like, like a lot of things in peak 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. A lot of the skills that we used to think declined over time, we now know they're use-it-or-lose-it skills, including the skills we need to learn how to park ski. And, um, so that was sort of it, where it came from. Um, and it was— I was an expert skier. Um, I just had never park skied. I knew no tricks, right? I was a big mountain skier. I could go in a straight line very fast, really well. But park skiing is like, it's— you take— it's doing tricks off jumps and on rails and wall rides. It's very acrobatic, it's very dangerous. Um, and, uh, so it was a— it was a totally not a new adventure for me. Um, there were a lot of reasons to take it up. There's— there were a lot of advantages about like knowing how to park ski later in life was, was actually that 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. So to measure progress, I made a list of 20 treks. This is zero to like intermediate. Intermediate mattered because once you get there, you're sort of like, you can take the random shit out of the equation. Like you can control your progress and not have these accidental falls or things that really can get you hurt early on. I figured if it took 5 years, cool, whatever. Like I didn't care. I started when I was 53. If it took me to 60, great, whatever, who cares? I did it in under a season. In fact, I've never learned anything so fast in my entire life. And the cool part was my ski partner who was your age and was a former professional athlete who got very injured, retired, had a family, had his job, came back to the sport. 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. Who were— they were intermediate at best park skiers, or skiers and snowboarders. We trained them up in 4 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. 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, uh, the same kind of training to see if we could explode their mindset towards aging and get them on what I call the NAR style quest, which is a challenging social and creative activity that demands dynamic, deliberate playing, takes place in non-electric environments. I don't care what it is. I wanted them to just start on a quest that would lead to something that way. But the, what I really wanted to do was explode the mindset of old, oh, I'm too old for this shit. I'm gonna get hurt. I got, I got things I wanna hold onto. It sets up, it's really weird. Our biology is designed when we're, when we're young teenagers, uh, kids, teenagers, young adults, the seeking system sort of drives our behavior. This is exploratory behavior, right? Like I'm gonna go out, I'm gonna check out something new. I gotta figure out who I am and what I do and how I wanna live and how do I wanna make a living? All that stuff. This is about dopamine and norepinephrine. Those are very potent feel-good neurochemicals. They're very addictive. Very, very, very addictive, right? Dopamine, cocaine's the most widely addictive drug on earth. All that happens is it causes the brain to release some dopamine and it blocks its reuptake, right? So dopamine is really addictive. When we get stuff that we have that we want to hold onto, 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've like, I like my bike, whatever it is.

Mm-hmm.

We start trading our addictive, our, our, our, the neurochemicals we want. We no longer wanna be seeking. We want the stuff that is about conserving what we have, protecting what we have, bonding. So we get endorphins and anandamide and oxytocin. These are like the prosocial 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 gonna lose what you have. And it's an addictive, an addiction. And the truth of the matter is like old people are literally addicted to the wrong drugs in their bodies. 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. That very mindset that you described having, like being scared about the second half of your life, oh, it's not as exciting. That mindset of old, there's a big health and longevity penalty. In fact, when you flip it, when you have a positive mindset towards aging, second half of my life is filled with thrilling and exciting possibilities. My best days are ahead of me. It translates, and this is one of the most well-established facts in, in, in peak performance aging. It will translate into additional 7.5 years of health and longevity. That's huge. You, that's like quitting smoking huge, right? Um, in fact, if you're morbidly obese and have a shitty mindset towards aging, change your mindset first. It'll 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, this isn't gonna be a problem. Like you're not gonna have to overcome it, right? 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 on the mountain, I was learning how to do 360s and nose butter 360s and 180s and all the other stuff I learned. Like all, like it just blew up all my limiting beliefs about what was possible in the future. Cuz I have just onboarded the most difficult physical thing I've ever done in my life. And I did it at 53. Um, and I've done a lot of difficult physical things along the way. Um, this was definitely the hardest and I did it, you know, and I'm still do, still park skiing at 55 now cuz I wrote, you know, the book's a couple years old. Um, in terms of when I, when I wrote it.

I mean, that's amazing. I, I have to say it's very inspiring and I can feel your enthusiasm from the camera and sort of like your vigor for life. And so it's really positive that you're spreading this message in terms of how people can basically stay young at heart forever and And like you said, it's totally in your control. If you put yourselves in situations where you're activating your brain in certain ways, you're playing, you're, uh, you know, 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. Uh, just amazing, really cool stuff. And nobody has talked about this on the podcast yet, so it's, it's very exciting. So sticking on this point of mindset, I'd love to talk about this concept of dirty old shame. Um, I know that you had to get over some internal traumas. Um, from my understanding, when you were growing up, you know, you weren't always this sporty. You were sort of the last kid picked on the team at school. And you mentioned in your book that part of you kind of overcoming and taking on this challenge was you getting over these past traumas. So talk to us about that and, and how we need to do that as well.

This is another, 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 fifties, it's really in our late forties, there are a bunch of really profound changes in how the brain processes information. One, certain genes only turn on with experience. We, they, they'll only flip these switches later in life. Two, then in our fifties, the two hemispheres of the brain, which essentially function in opposition to each other along the way. They start working together like never before. And finally, the brain starts to recruit underutilized resources in our 50s. So as a result, we gain access to whole new levels of intelligence, creativity, empathy, and wisdom. And it's— I'd go on and on and on about those benefits. There's a lot that comes with that, but these are not guaranteed. So psychologists talk about moderators is the technical term. It's an if-then condition. You get this only if you do this, right? And if you wanna keep the access to these cognitive superpowers in our 50s, and, um, we'll come back to it, but from a profit perspective, we really wanna talk about those superpowers in a second. But mm-hmm. Let me finish this point. There are a number of gateways of adult development that you have to pass through. So by the age, age 30, You sort of, if you really just want to enjoy and kick ass beyond 30, you have to have solved the crisis of identity, which sort of shows up around age 12. If you haven't solved it by 30, you have a problem. The reason is by 40, you have, you need match fit. Match fit is an economics term. It means there's a tight link between who I am and what I do in the world, right? If you just, so if you don't know who you are, you can't get match fit. Um, 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 gotta forgive ourselves for like past embarrassments and past shames. And we gotta 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, you know, in the '70s and '80s and like, you gotta understand, like, cars of football players would pull up on the side of the road and they'd see a guy with a mohawk and they'd jump out to beat you up. And it was like 5 against 1 always. And, you know, it was not a great situation. So I had a lot of anger and I knew peak performance aging, you gotta put that shit down. You cannot thrive in your 50s. You don't get these superpowers, which is why old dogs can learn new tricks better than young dogs. It's why I, 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 is, means I could, I could keep myself safer than, and 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, is loving kindness meditation, compassion 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. Um, and we, we have, we understand all the neuroscience, but when it came to people who I got in fistfights with and, and worse for 10 years, it wasn't enough. I could, like all the loving kindness meditation in the world, like 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 jockey challenge is, okay, I'm gonna go like, this is my problem. Let's go walk a mile in their moccasins, right? Let's take this on. And it, and it turns out it worked. It, by the way, I didn't think it was gonna work. I just knew I needed to do this to thrive. And I was like, well, I'm out of any other ideas. Loving kindness meditation, which is what everybody, right, is not getting it done. And, um, there's still anger there. There's still resentment there. There's still, there's still stuff there. So let me see if taking on, you know, this kind of go, putting myself on a physical mission could clear that out. And it, and it did. And, uh, you know, the story is sort of in the end of the book and I won't, I won't sort of ruin it as spoiler alert, right? I'd be giving away sort of that, that one and I'm not going to. But that was one, it was, um, it was one of the neater things that happened along the way as I got to put down like a bunch of sort of shame and embarrassment and like stuff that I, you know, I've carried since I was probably 10 or 12, definitely 12.

That's amazing. Do you feel like much lighter now and that you, you just can approach things differently? Like how did it, how did that impact you getting over that trauma like that after so many years of having the same issue.

I don't know if it felt— it, it— I always say, and this is one of the myths that I think a lot of people have about, um, their life, is that people think it's going to get easier. Like, you think, oh, I'm gonna get older, I'm gonna get better at this, I'm gonna be able to sort of like, oh, I know exactly what I like and I can manicure my life. And, and it just doesn't get easier. It just doesn't. What it gets is more meaningful, it, and more in like life satisfaction, overall well-being. And that's what this really impacted somehow. Like, it made life more meaningful, like in those, in those ways. Like, I don't know, I, do I feel lighter? Perhaps. Um, but what it just, it just sort it closed that loop, you know what I mean? Like, yeah, okay, done, check. I don't have to worry about that anymore. And 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. Whereas before, no, I could start to think on it and dwell on it and then I'd have a problem. Yeah.

So I want to talk about our brain biology. Have you ever heard of Arthur Brooks?

I don't think so.

Arthur Brooks. Okay. He's somebody that I think you should definitely look into. So I had Arthur Brooks on the podcast in 2021, uh, sorry, 2022. And he was like one of my favorite interviews. 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 biology, uh, biologically is different. Before 40 and After 40, and he talks about fluid intelligence versus crystallized intelligence. And so this was like a big conversation that we had on the podcast and something that made us think a lot. I had a lot of feedback from my listeners and I feel like what you say is pretty different from what he says. Uh, there are some similarities, but basically what he's saying is that you have a biological clock ticking, your ability to reason, think flexibly, uh, 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 a, as a way to teach other people. And essentially what he's saying is like, you've gotta like be ready for the second half of your career and not miss that and, 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, the singer becomes an A&R exec. And you're basically teaching younger people your knowledge and, and taking on that second wave of your career. So I know that was a handful, but I just wanted you to understand.

And so he is, he is right, he is right, and he is wrong. Um, uh, as far as I could tell, where he's really right is, um, passing along knowledge is absolutely key to peak performance aging. It's key to like— so in fact, the societies where people age the best, two things are very true. One, they don't have negative stereotypes towards aging. So ageism is the most common and socially accepted stereotype in the world. It's the only stereotype in the world. I go out in the public these days with any stereotype, somebody's gonna punch me in the mouth and cancel me, except for ageism. Ageism, you can like— people are like, oh, you're too old to do that shit. All like, we We geezer each other red enough and it's crazy. Becca Levy at Yale has done tons of work on ageism and the stereotype of aging, and it's incredibly detrimental. Um, in fact, I would, you could go so far as literally we are killing older adults with how we talk about them. So, um, that is really, really clear. Societies where there's no ageism, there's also cross-generational friendships. So the old are passing along knowledge to the young. This is really, this is a natural part of brain development. So 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 the skills that we thought declined over time, like the fluid intelligence skills that we thought went away, no, it turns out that's, that's not true at all. And we get actually new levels of intelligence and creativity in our fifties, right? So that's not actually true. There's certain things. The article I like best, Martin Seligman from, uh, uh, Penn and Scott Barry Kaufman wrote a great article on creativity over time where they talk about what goes away in creativity and what stays or comes on. And the list of like what comes on and stays is much longer than what goes away. Now there's stuff that does go away. So the question you've gotta now ask is, is it permanent? Is this real or have we just not figured out how to train it? So let me give you an example. Adam Gazali is a friend of mine. He's on my board. We do a lot of research together. He's at UCSF, uh, and he had— he's a neuroscientist— you know, the COVID 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. So if you go back to, to, um, Um, fluid intelligence, one of the things that declines over time is task switching, our ability to focus on this and then focus on this, right? And, um, 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 3 hours a week or 3 20-minute sessions a week for 6 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 have 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.

Mm-hmm.

One of the reasons we, uh, our brain performance declines over time is, uh, white matter density decreases over time and we lose certain neurochemicals. So what he's not telling you is, well, you can replace those neurochemicals. In fact, SSRIs, which actually suck for depression, turn out to be great for older adults. Low-level SSRIs because serotonin levels decline over time and SSRIs can boost them. If you don't wanna 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 cuz 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. So he's not wrong in what he's presenting. He's wrong. Like some of this stuff has changed since then. Um, the general thinking is sort of true, but a lot of those skills are use it or lose it. And either we've already figured out how to fix them, or this stuff is also progressing really, really, really quickly. That's the, the whole other side of this is regenerative medicine, longevity science. All that stuff is moving at exponential rates. So, you know, for example, 5 years ago, we could not deal with most tendon, bone, and ligament problems. Like, we are good at that stuff now. It's advanced really far. Now, if anybody's making you promises about stem cells that go like beyond bones, ligaments, and tendons, no, no, they're lying and they're exaggerating what the— what, what's real right now. But up to that point, no, no, we, we've sort of got it dialed. So technology is advancing and it's going to solve a lot of, a lot of those issues, right? A lot of those issues are not not what we thought they were in, in the week. And you can train a lot of that, that stuff in, in unusual ways. We're just figuring out, and some of the early ways, like all the brain games, those, that 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, learning to play a musical instrument, learning a challenging, uh, dynamic activity, like all that stuff. No, no, that's the real medicine, and that really actually does work.

Pardon the interruption, and thanks for tuning in to Flow Research Collective Radio. If you're listening to this, here's a bold bet I'm willing to make about you. My guess is, even though you're a high performer, you're still only performing at about half of your capacity, maybe even 10%. Now, even if I'm wrong, assuming that you're performing at less than your full potential opens up the possibility for you to improve, and that's good when you've already outperformed most of your peers by a long shot, you've got a skill stack that people envy, it's why you earn what you earn, and yet you're just warming up. You know those days when you knock out more in your morning than most do in an entire day? Well, what if you could perform at that level every day, reliably, consistently? What would that unlock for you? Now, here at the Flow Research Collective, we study the human nervous system when it's functioning at its absolute best. After training thousands of high performers, from Navy SEALs to Fortune 100 executives, Here's what we found. You're evolutionary hardwired to perform at your best. All it takes is pressing the right mental buttons and pulling the right biological levers, so to speak. It's about getting your neurobiology to work for you instead of against you. Now, if you want to make operating at a 10 out of 10 level as natural as breathing, just go to getmoreflow.com. We'll show you how to reliably trigger a flow state where you feel limitless and you do your very best work. This won't require any biohacking, or nootropics or gadgets or caffeine guzzling. This higher gear is endogenous, which means it's a state that your brain produces on its own. No external stimulus is required. Just go to getmoreflow.com to learn how to get your biology working for you instead of against you so you can make peak performance second nature.

All the best.

Yeah, I mean, 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, I felt depressed. I was like, oh man, I got like You know, less than 10 years to figure, like, to do all my innovative stuff. And it's good to know what you're saying, that we are actually in control. Like, of course you can be passive and the inevitable will happen with your cognitive decline, but if we're proactive and kind of fight that natural tendency that's gonna happen, plus with modern medicine, like you said, there's a lot that we can do to slow it down, reverse it. Uh, so, so that's amazing. So let's dig deep on these. 3 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, uh, relativistic thinking, non-dualistic thinking, and systematic thinking.

Yeah. So short version, our ego quiets down and our perspective widens, right? So, um, 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. And, 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. It builds outta this intelligence. Let's talk about for a second, cuz the name of the podcast and So many, so many people care here cuz we are, there's a huge business opportunity here.

Yeah.

And nobody's paying attention to it. So, mm-hmm. That little backstory, when I wrote, uh, Bold, which is a book about like entrepreneurship and, and, and people like Larry Page and Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and, and how to really use exponential technology and some human capability flow science stuff to really level up organizations. I was, I spent so much years talking to CEOs and a lot of the time in a lot of those discussions, we would talk about hiring. Who are the ideal employees? How do you find them? What do you need for the 21st century? And over and over again, thousands of times, I heard the same two things from CEOs, which was, I need employees who are really intelligent and really creative and really innovative. Cause the rate of change is really fast and I gotta keep pace and stay ahead of it. Otherwise, I don't have a company, I don't have a business. I can't do any of that. The other thing I need is I need employees who are empathetic and wise, because if I don't have psychological safety, nobody can do their job. If I don't have psychological safety, I don't have great team performance. Without team performance, you can't be a company. You can't do those things without empathy and wisdom. Most importantly, Um, the mantra of 21st century business, and maybe we thank Jeff Bezos for this, but it's always been, it's customer-centric thinking, right? Mm-hmm. And if you're not empathetic or you're not wise, nobody's thinking like a customer, right? At all. At, at, at all. So it turns out a well-trained 50-year-old, and well-trained is key, right? There's a whole bunch. We have like, you want those gateways of adult development. I've turned about these It should be a hiring checklist. And in your fifties, you want access to these superpowers. You need to engage in creative activities that sort of unlocks these new thinking styles. That's another reason why challenging creative and social activities matter. And you need to fight off risk aversion and train down physical fragility because if your body is rotting, what good is all this new mental skills? You can't use it. And risk aversion, which increases over time. This is why challenging activities matter so much. Um, risk aversion increases over time and has a lot to do with like literally gra— uh, white matter volume in the brain. 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 risk 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 waiting to happen. The very people that are getting forced out of companies, no, no, no, no. They're the very people we need in our companies. Um, most overall, and in fact, um, you know, this is not my line. I think it's, uh, Daniel Levitan might have said it. It's the first person I heard say it this bluntly. But, uh, Daniel Levitan is a neuroscientist who wrote a just wrote 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 like he goes through all of it. We came to all the same conclusions. Um, though I think I took my conclusions farther cuz I ran a bunch of weird-ass experiments along the way. But, um, he said flat out is like the best see, the best advice I can give you on retirement is don't retire. Don't ever retire. If you want— if you're interested in peak performance aging, retirement is a bad idea. Um, reinvention, maybe, right? Maybe I don't want to do the same thing I've been doing my whole life and I want to do something new. Great, fantastic. Retirement, death sentence.

Yeah. So I have a couple follow-ups to this. A lot of my listeners are young entrepreneurs, business owners. So if if, if we're gonna take your advice, give older people a chance, uh, when it comes to hiring, I mean, I know there's a big ageism issue, especially in the tech world. I used to work at Disney Streaming Services. Like you were old over 40, you know, and like people looked at you sideways, you know, and didn't trust you to do your job essentially if you were older than 40, 45. So if, if you were to interview somebody in their fifties, what questions would you ask them to make sure that they've been training their brain and, and, oh, I would ask one, how physically active you are, right?

If you're, if you're not dealing with somebody who, who has been regularly exercising for, for a while and hitting all 5 dynamic categories, you don't want to go near them. The number 1 correlate with health and longevity over time is leg strength, believe it or not.

I know, I was going to ask. That's one of my favorite facts.

Yeah, it's wild. Um, and we, we can talk about why and, and whatever, And I like, I don't think you can ask incoming, you know, employees, hey, what do you squat? Maybe you can, but it actually, like if we're gonna ask, put politicians in office in their 80s, those questions become really fricking relevant. Like that's the ex— those are things you really wanna know. Are you engaging in challenging creative social activity? Like, are you that those things become a checklist, right? For, for folks over 50. Identity, match, fit, self-forgiveness, forgiveness of others. You don't get access to the creative cognitive superpowers without those things. So those are the kinds of questions you wanna poke at to make sure, you know, are being checked off, right? Those, those, those sorts of things. Are you engaging in, you know, challenging creative social activities that demand dynamic, deliberate play and take place in novel outdoor? Like that, those things be not, they become a checklist and they become, if you wanna work here and you're over this age, you gotta do this cuz we need you, but we need this version of you. And the most important thing I, is, um, I look for older adults with much younger friends. I wanna see those cross-generational friendships. Um, because older adults over 40, 50, the one of the reasons they're not to be trusted is cuz they don't get the job cuz they're just too out of touch. Right. And things have changed and, you know, there's, there's a lot of stuff that changes and stays the same. Right. And, and you sort of want the older adults around for that reason, but you also, you know, being old is not an excuse for not keeping up. Right. Yeah. Either. Like what I'm telling you is you've got access to more brain power. So like, you know, it's, it's, it's really not an excuse as far as I'm concerned. So I think it's gotta be mutual and I think the benefits are gonna be amazing if it can be mutual.

Yeah. I wanna get into authentic learning and how older people can learn new skills, but let's go on the tangent of, uh, why we should never skip leg day.

It turns out that both for preserving physical abilities and cognitive function, leg strength is the single largest factor. Now, cognitive function is weird. Some of it has to do with bone density. Again, we're back to the bones and legs, 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, 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 gonna age successfully. And in fact, if you don't have a social life, peak performance, you're, you're just sort of locked out of peak performance cuz you social support for a lot of different psychological safety reasons and just performance reasons. It's really important to have social support. And part of that, 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 you, if, if for whatever reason, you're like stuck with the phone and, and, uh, um, Zoom, make sure you pet a dog for at least 8 minutes a day. A dog or a cat. Petting an animal for about 5 to 8 minutes also releases oxytocin and some of those other prosocial chemicals. So like if you're stuck on, like if you, we need social support for performance, we definitely need for peak performance aging, right? Uh, animals are our friends here.

Yeah. So, I love that. I feel like you're giving us so much great tips in terms of how we can age gracefully and, you know, be impactful at an older age and still innovative and creative. So this is such a meaningful episode to me because honestly, we, we don't talk about this enough on the podcast. So we do need to learn as we're older. Obviously it's possible you learned how to park ski at 53. So let's talk about how we can learn and embrace, uh, authentic learning.

So let's back up one step.

Okay.

Into you and talk about learning, like where you started. I just wanna start where you started, which is, so if you wanna stave off Alzheimer's dementia, cognitive decline, right? Fluid intelligence, what matters? Lifelong learning. Why is that? Expertise and wisdom are the two most important things we can do to develop what's known as cognitive reserve. So if you have a high cognitive reserve, you could even have advanced Alzheimer's, 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 were alive. This was so some of the early research that happened. They started autopsying brains and being like, whoa, this person had advanced Alzheimer's. How the hell did they function so well up till age 100? Right? What is it? It's expertise in learning. And, or to expertise and wisdom, which are two different things. But important thing here is they're big broad networks and they're in the prefrontal cortex. So the prefrontal cortex is where it's most vulnerable to cognitive decline. It's the newest brain structure from an evolutionary perspective, and it's the most vulnerable. You don't suffer cognitive decline like deep in your brainstem, right? Mm-hmm. 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. Lots of redundancy, lots of backup. So if this goes down, you got 7 other copies over here. Don't worry about it. So that's, that's where you have to start with lifelong learning. And you wanna 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. But, and it's based on a whole bunch of different stuff, but let me just talk about one thing. Mm-hmm. 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, it got a bad name early on cuz people started talking about learning styles. Are you a visual learner or an auditory learner?

Yeah.

And that's absolute nonsense. Like that's actually not true. No, we're all those things. It depends on what we're learning, right? And, and how we're wired and it changes over time. And that's not actually, but what is true is everybody shows up somewhere on the introversion extroversion scale. Right? Introverts need to learn in private. Extroverts wanna learn in public. We're somewhere on the risk aversion scale, right? Like we have all have, I'm this fearful, I'm right. And you can only be pushed so far. And like, so those authentic learning is about like those kinds of questions, the questions that really matter. And, and so, you know, 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. 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 and try to do it the other way was impossible for me. I don't, don't work that way. Um, and you can keep, there's a lot more to authentic learning, but the big point here is also turns out taking on these kind of gnar style challenges late in life, um, like learning how to park ski or whatever, it's phenomenal for peak performance aging, but you need a lot of motivation. And it turns out we have, like, we are driven towards authenticity. Carl Rogers argued that it, it functions as a fundamental drive and it, a fundamental drive, meaning it's got as much power as our drive for sex or food or, you know, shelter. Um, 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's challen— can be challenging, you want all the help you can get, right? I, in, in Art of Impossible, I talk about One of the things peak performers are really good at is they never meet a challenge on a single fuel source. We know this food-wise, right? Like you want carbs, protein, and fats before you're going into workout, right? Mm-hmm. Same thing with motivation. You want authenticity, you want autonomy, you want passion, purpose, math, all these big intrinsic motivators, curiosity. You wanna stack them on top of each other. 'cause 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?

Well, any, anything that requires seeing things from other people's perspectives and multiperspectival thinking, um, you're just better at. It's harder to do when you're younger because of how the ego functions and how the brain functions. You're just better at it when you're older. A lot of people, you can, you can meditate a lot to sort of lower cognitive bias and do, and, and do those things, but it's gonna start to happen naturally when you're older. So that's, that's really important. I, to me, the big one, the cool one is the systems thinking part cuz Like, you know, one of the commonalities among all the biggest brains I've ever met, all the real, the, the people who really can affect change in the world, um, 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 it. You know, certain careers, um, force you to learn it in, in different ways. Writing, especially if you write books. 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. Um, mostly we specialize, right? Especially in the modern world, we specialize, we specialize. One of the things that I wanna point out here is, and anybody who's ever worked in entrepreneurship innovation, like, you know, all the big innovations are in the cracks between disciplines, right? They're not in the specialized. It's very hard to innovate inside that same funnel that everybody's been in for 50 years, but you move adjacent to where that funnel touches something, right? And suddenly there's a revolution waiting to happen. Mm-hmm. And that's how you build companies and, and world-changing companies and everything else. You can't see that shit if you're not a systems thinker. It's completely invisible to you. and that, so the thing that I think is, is, is the most exciting over is, is that. Hmm.

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, uh, really inspiring. I'm gonna include it in my book and credit you. Okay, so Stephen, I wanna wrap up this interview talking about your research in the, about the blue zones, these long-lived communities around the world. Uh, you alluded to some of it, but I'd love for you to sort of dive deeper on what you found in terms of how, why these people—

Yeah, I got it. So let me, let me back this story up a little bit to tell you a story that's not in the book.

Yeah.

Um, that is, is where this actually starts. So, sure. People may know this or not know this. For almost the past two decades, my wife and I run a hospice care dog sanctuary. So, mm-hmm, for two decades. We've done hospice work with dogs. We have a healing methodology that's based on, it's very low tech. It's some flows. It's, it's, it's like lifestyle interventions in a sense. Some flow science, some evolutionary psychology, nothing really fancy. Our dogs all get checked out by vets when they come to us. Before they come to us, they come from shelters. But we, I mean, we specialize in the worst of the worst. So if you are a, geriatric Chihuahua with an abusive past, 3 legs, 1 eye, cancer, heart disease, mange, and flatulence. You're our guy. That's who we work with. And the vets would be like, we did get these dogs and be like, don't get attached. This dog is going to 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 have passed through our facility and over 5,000 through our average program. So big sample size. And on average, our dogs wouldn't live another month or 6 weeks. They would live another 3, 4, 5 years. Wow. And you translate into that human numbers. That's right. You get 7 years for every year. So like the top end of that, you're getting an extra like 28 years, 30, like what the fuck is going on? Pardon my language. And so I started to ask questions like, what's going on? Why is this working? What, 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 zones in the first place. So Dan Bueller is a National Geographic reporter. In the early 2000s noticed that there were places on the planet where people lived on average, uh, 12 years longer than everybody else. And, um, they're all over the place. And he wanted to know, well, what are the commonalities? And he did a whole bunch of research. The research is a little controversial. The controversy is not on the lifestyle stuff. It's on the, there's some stuff that has been turned into supplements and is dietary. And those are the open, and those, 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?

Mm-hmm.

De-stress regularly. So have rituals, meditation, exercise, gratitude practices, breathing work, whatever it is, walking in nature. I don't like have rituals to de-stress regularly. A ton of stuff on social belonging and connection. This is why challenging social activities matters 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, they eat less than most people and they eat very, very healthy diets. But like, there's no one diet across the board that like works for everybody. Um, and, but those are sort of the commonalities and they live with passion, purpose, and regular access to flow. And these were all things that we were providing for our dogs in very, like, for example, they get social belonging and connection and they really emphasize it. You know, in the Blue Zones, some of them, people will spend 6 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, you know, we, we at various times in, in, we've had 40, 50 dogs. It's hard to individual petting time. You have to like, oh, I gotta hang out with this dog. But we would do it because we wanted these neurochemicals underneath it. Same thing with flow. We'd find ways to put our dogs into flow. Um, flow is really important to peak performance aging for a lot of different reasons, but the state is, it's just a really positive, powerful emotional state. And some of the emotions that show up in flow stimulate the production of T-cells and natural killer cells. So T-cells fight fight, uh, diseases, and natural killer cells fight tumors and sick cells and other of the diseases of aging. So when we get into flow, it lowers inflammation, which is tied to all the causes of aging. It produces T-cells, 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 stuff that's going on in the Blue Zone. 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, there are blue zones, you see a lot of action sport and outdoor athletes too. Some in Colorado, Pitkin County, Colorado, and Eagle County, Colorado. Loma Linda, California are the 4 places in America with the, where people, these are the blue zones. Mm-hmm. Summit, Pitkin, and Eagle. This is Colorado. That's Vail, Aspen, Beaver Creek. All the big ski areas, a lot of outdoor stuff. And in Loma Linda, that's a Seventh-day Adventist population and they're very, very social, very flowy, good dietary stuff. Um, a lot of belonging, a lot of, so like it's, it's the same stuff. Um, and a lot of outdoor activities, surfing and, and, and cuz it's California on the ocean, right? They, and they take advantage of that stuff too.

Yeah. So I'd love to get a couple examples here. First of all, what are examples of getting into flow aside from sports as an adult? That's number one. Um, and then number two, like what are some examples of creative social activities as an adult?

The most common flow state on earth is reading or interpersonal flow. Interpersonal flow is like the group flow. You and your best friend, you get into a great conversation and a whole hour goes by and you don't notice it's gone. That's interpersonal flow. Happens all the time. So one of the reasons you wanna 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 hikes, very, very flowy. Coding, architecture, drawing, drumming, dancing, you know, on and on and on. I mean, there's a ton of flow at work. In fact, flow is much more common at work than it is during leisure, um, for a bunch of different reasons. But, um, you know, the, the list sort of goes on and on and on. And flow is really, if we want to enjoy the second half, if we wanna enjoy our lives in general, but if we really wanna throw drive during our second half of our lives, you can't do it without flow. Flow is actually the engine of adult development. It's one of the— it's how we grow up. We grow up by getting into flow states. Coming out the other side is more complex, more skillful, more adaptive, more empathetic, wiser. Um, and so, and, and, and we move forward. Like, so it plays a big role in adult development and successful and peak performance aging.

So Stephen, I end the show with a couple of questions that I ask all my guests, and then we do some fun things at the end of the year. The first one is, what is one actionable What's the most powerful thing that our young improfiters 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 of your life that just drops you into flow. For me, it's skiing, right? For my wife, it's long walks with the dogs. For my best friend, it's playing guitar. Um, whatever that thing that most likely drops you into flow. Flow massively amplifies, among other things, uh, motivation, productivity, and creativity. And here's the cool thing, even though a flow state lasts about 90 minutes. Sometimes I can stretch out for longer. The heightened productivity and creativity will outlast the flow state by a day, maybe two. Flow also resets the nervous system. It calms you down, flushes stress hormones outta your system. So, um, emotional regulation, emotional management, fear blocks performance on every level. Flow resets the nervous system. So really, and, and the thing is, It's most people, and especially all the people listening to this podcast, are gonna be like you. You got to your 30s and you stopped skiing. You put down childish things, right? Skis go away. The surfboard goes away. The skateboard goes away. You stop samba dancing and salsa dancing and all that stuff. And the research shows that's a disaster. It's a disaster. In fact, when we, uh, we, 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 3 to 4 hours a week on your primary flow activity. Um, 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 of 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 USCSF and a whole bunch of other academics. And we take the science and, and, and we use it to train people. And we train, we train people in 130 countries and we train everybody from like professional athletes and, and members of the special forces to to, you know, soccer moms and insurance brokers and, you know, teachers and folks in the Air Force. And we work with a lot of companies in between. So which I think now we're training Facebook or Meta, um, Accenture, Bain Capital, Audi, San Francisco Police Department, the Air Force, you know, a wide swatch of people. And, um, 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 getmoreflow.com, despite the fact that I'm embarrassed to say it out loud. Um, uh, but you can go there and sign up for a free, uh, hour-long coaching call with, with somebody on my staff. So you'll hear all about the trainings, you'll learn everything. Is it right for you? Is it wrong for you? Nobody on my staff gets every— I'll fire somebody if they're— they try to sell you anything. They're just, 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.

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 even have, have to do with the topic of the episode. It's up to you. What is your secret to profiting in life?

It's. It's just the re— I mean, it's just hard work, you know what I mean? I like, I just always, I go outta my way to figure out what, like, I'll give you an example. I came up as a journalist and I figured out very early on that most journalists hated rewriting. They'd write their story, they'd edit it, they'd turn it in, the editor would make changes and they'd rewrite it once and turn it back in. I found that out. I was like, okay, you guys are doing it 3 times. Clearly my job is to make my editor's job easier, right? Like my job editor has to like really comb through my articles and takes months. He hates me. That's not, I'm not being a, you know, I'm not a good employee. So I started editing my stories 12 times. I just figured out, I'd figure out what everybody else would do and I'd triple it or quadruple it for really, I did that for years. So I mean, it wasn't much of a secret. I just figured I wasn't as smart, as well connected, as handsome and all the other things as everybody else. But I just figured out how to outwork 'em. I mean, I, I, a lot of it is about smart hard work, not just hard work, smart hard. There's, there's better ways to do it. I talk a lot about that in our country, about the advantages of smart hard work and smart hard play. Um, uh, and the, and the difficulties with just have 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. Where can everybody learn about you? Where can they get in our country and, uh, how can they find more about you, Stephen?

Mm-hmm. 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. And 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.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. Question for you. When was the last time you were in the zone? When you were in so deep that afterward you were stunned by how much you got done, even though very little time had passed? Now you've got bold goals, yet you're slammed with work and you're short on time. You know the heights of productivity you can achieve when you get into the zone because you've been there before, but it's a mild form of torture knowing how productive you're capable of being without access to that level of output all the time. So how do you get into the zone whenever you need it? There's still a lot that we don't know about flow states, but over the last 25 years of researching it, we've learned a lot, and we've shared our findings with thousands of high performers. You're in flow during those moments of total absorption when you're so focused on the task at hand that everything else disappears. Time passes strangely and performance just soars. I mean, motivation and productivity, creativity and innovation, learning and memory, cooperation and collaboration all skyrocket. In some studies, as high as 500% above baseline. Now imagine what you can accomplish if you could reliably increase your productivity by 5x? And the best part? Flow is accessible to everyone, anywhere, at any time. You don't need to pop a pill. You don't need to be surfing a monster wave. You don't need to meditate on a mountaintop for 10 years to get there. Flow is accessible to you right here, right now. If you'd like to amp up your productivity and get leverage on every second, go to getmoreflow.com. Just think of your 10 out of 10 days when you get more done in the morning than you typically do in a full day. Now imagine if you tapped into that level of performance with push-button consistency every day. All this is possible when you trigger flow frequently and reliably. Just go to getmoreflow.com to unblock your flow and unlock peak performance.

If what you've heard on Flow Research Collective Radio has been helpful, please consider doing us a solid and leaving us a review on Apple, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you are listening to this. Reviews help us connect to a wider audience so we can get these peak performance principles out to more people.