Steven Kotler: How to Stay Sharp, Strong, and Healthy at Any Age | Mental Health | YAPClassic

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24:29Young and profiters. I know there's so many people tuning in right now that end their workday wondering why certain tasks take forever, why they're procrastinating certain things, why they don't feel confident in their work, why they feel drained and frustrated and unfulfilled. But here's the thing you need to know. It's not a character flaw that you're feeling this way. It's actually your natural wiring. And here's the thing. When it comes to burnout, it's really about the type of work that you're doing. Some work gives you energy and some work simply drains you. So it's key to understand your six types of working genius.

25:03The working genius assessment or the six types of working genius framework was created by Patrick Lencioni. and he's a business influencer and author. And the Working Genius Framework helps you identify what you're actually built for and the work that you're not. Now, let me tell you a story. Before I uncovered my working genius, which is galvanizing and invention, so I like to rally people and I like to invent new things, I used to be really shameful and had a lot of guilt around the fact that I didn't like enablement, which is one of my working frustrations. So I actually don't like to support people one-on-one.

25:34I don't like it when people slow me down. I don't like hand-holding. I like to move fast, invent, rally people, inspire. But what I do need to do is ensure that somebody else can fill the enablement role, which I do have, Kate, on my team. So Working Genius helps you uncover these genius gaps, helps you work better with your team, helps you reduce friction, helps you collaborate better, understand why people are the way that they are. It's helped me restructure my team, put people in the spots that they're going to really excel. And it's also helped me in hiring. Working Genius is absolutely amazing.

26:04I'm obsessed with this model. So if you guys want to take the Working Genius assessment and get 20 % off, you can use code profiting. Go to workinggenius.com. Again, that's workinggenius.com. Stop guessing. Start working in your genius. That's amazing. I have to say it's very inspiring and I can feel your enthusiasm from the camera and sort of like your vigor for life. And so it's really positive that you're spreading this message in terms of how people can basically stay young at heart forever. And like you said, it's totally in your control if you put yourselves in situations. where you're activating your brain in certain ways, you're playing, you're dispelling any sort of internal beliefs that you have about your own abilities, but actually going out and doing these physical things in turn, it's helping improve your cognitive performance.

26:49Just amazing, really cool stuff. And nobody has talked about this on the podcast yet. So it's very exciting. So sticking on this point of mindset, I'd love to talk about this concept of dirty old shame. I know that you had to get over some internal traumas. From my understanding, when you were growing up, you weren't always this sporty. You were sort of the last kid picked on the team at school. And you mentioned in your book that part of you kind of overcoming and taking on this challenge was you getting over these past traumas. So talk to us about that and how we need to do that as well. So another reason peak performance aging sort of starts young.

27:26First, we start with the good news. One of the reasons old dogs can learn new tricks that we haven't talked about yet is as we enter our 50s, it's really in our late 40s, there are a bunch of really profound changes in how the brain processes information. One, certain genes only turn on with experience. They'll only flip these switches later in life. Two, in our 50s, the two hemispheres of the brain, which essentially function in opposition to each other 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.

28:03And I 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 as the technical term, it's an if-then condition. You get this only if you do this, right? And if you want the access to these cognitive superpowers in our 50s, and we'll come back to it, but from a profit perspective, we really want to talk about those superpowers in a second. Let me finish this point. There are a number of gateways of adult development that you have to pass through. 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.

28:49And Erickson thought he used to disappear at 18. It doesn't, but it does. If you haven't solved it by 30, you have a problem. The reason is by 40, you need match fit. Match fit is an economics term. It means there's a tight link between who I am and what I do in the world, right? If you don't know who you are, you can't get match fit because if you don't know your strengths, your values, all that stuff. So that has to be by 30, by 40, we have match fit. And then by 50, we need forgiveness. We got to forgive ourselves for past embarrassments and past shames. And we got to figure those who have done us harm.

29:26And as you pointed out, I spent most of my childhood losing fights to jocks. I was a punk rocker. The jocks didn't like us. I didn't like them. And this was back in the 70s and 80s. And you got to understand, cars of football players would pull up on the side of the road and they'd see a guy with a mohawk and they'd jump out to beat you up. And it was like five against one always. And it was not a great situation. So I had a lot of anger and I knew peak performance aging, you got to put that shit down. You cannot thrive in your fifties. You don't get these superpowers, which is why old dogs can learn new tricks better than young dogs.

30:04It's why one of the reasons I learned park skiing so fast is I have more intelligence. I've got more creativity. I've got the stuff I need. And you've got even more wisdom, which is means I can keep myself safer than when I was making better decisions along the way. That stuff is great, but I don't get it if I can't forgive those who have done me wrong. So the standard best way to do that, and there's tons of research, is love and kindness meditation and passion meditation. It's an incredibly potent tool. It's amazing for a ton of different stuff. It's been studied for probably longer than any other meditation style.

30:40We understand all the neuroscience. But when it came to people who I got in fist fights with and worse for 10 years, it wasn't enough. I could like all the loving guidance meditation of the world. Like I could forgive a lot of stuff and clean out a lot. I was left with like, it just like wasn't going away. So I decided one of the reasons I took on an incredibly difficult physical jockey challenge is okay. I'm going to go like, this is my problem. Let's go walk a mile in their moccasins, right? Let's take this on. And it turns out it worked. By the way, I didn't think it was going to work. I just knew I needed to do this to thrive.

31:19And I was like, well, I'm out of any other ideas. Loving kindness meditation, which is what everybody, right, is not getting it done. And there's still anger there. There's still resentment there. There's still stuff there. So let me see if taking on this kind of putting myself on a physical mission could clear that out. And it did. And, you know, the story is sort of in the end of the book and I won't, I won't sort of ruin it, a spoiler alert, right? I'd be giving away sort of that one and I'm not going to, but it was one of the neater things that happened along the way as I got to put down like a bunch of sort of shame and embarrassment and like stuff that I have carried since I was probably 10 or 12, definitely 12.

32:00That's amazing. Do you feel like much lighter now and that you just can approach things differently? Like how did that impact you getting over that trauma like that after so many years of having the same issue? I always say that one of the myths that I think a lot of people have about their life is that people think it's going to get easier. Like you think, oh, I'm going to get older. I'm going to get better at this. I'm going to be able to sort of like, oh, I know exactly what I like and I can manicure my life. And it just doesn't get easier. It just doesn't. What it gets is more meaningful and more in like life satisfaction, overall well-being.

32:39And that's what this really impacted. Somehow it made life more meaningful in those ways. I don't know, do I feel lighter? Perhaps. But it just sort of closed that loop. You know what I mean? Like, 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. Have you ever heard of Arthur Brooks? I think so. He's somebody that I think you should definitely look into.

33:22So I had Arthur Brooks on the podcast in 2021. Sorry, 2022. And he was like one of my favorite interviews. And he wrote this book called Cracking the Code to Happiness. He's a Harvard professor, social scientist. And basically, he talks about how your brain biologically is different before 40 and after 40. And he talks about fluid intelligence versus crystallized intelligence. And so this was like a big conversation that we had on the podcast and something that made us think a lot. I had a lot of feedback from my listeners. And I feel like what you say is pretty different from what he says. There are some similarities.

33:57But basically what he's saying is that you have a biological clock clock ticking, your ability to reason, think flexibly, learn new things, problem solve, be innovative. That starts to decline in your 40s and 50s. And that doesn't mean that your brain starts to go bad. You just start to have crystallized intelligence or you accumulate knowledge, facts, skills, and you can use that throughout your career as a way to teach other people. And essentially what he's saying is like, you've got to like be ready for the second half of your career and not miss that and be like trying to chase your younger self and your younger brain, essentially.

34:28So for example, the professional athlete becomes the coach, the star litigator becomes a partner, the singer becomes an A &R exec, and you're basically teaching younger people your knowledge and taking on that second wave of your career. So he is right and he is wrong, as far as I could tell. Where he's really right is passing along knowledge is absolutely key to peak performance aging. It's key to, in fact, the societies 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.

35:07I go out in the public these days with any stereotype, somebody is going to punch me in the mouth and cancel me, except for ageism. Ageism, you can, people are like, oh, you're too old to do that shit. Like we geezer each other right in the, and it's crazy. Becca Levy at Yale has done tons of work on ageism and the stereotype of aging, and it's incredibly detrimental. In fact, you could go so far as literally we are killing older adults with how we talk about them. So that is really, really clear. The societies where there's no ageism, there's also cross-generational friendships. So the old are passed along knowledge.

35:45This is a natural part of brain development. Now, Now, you have to put things into categories. He is not wrong. We do shift from fluid intelligence into crystallized intelligence. That transition does happen. But, but, but, but, but a bunch of the skills that we thought declined over time, like the fluid intelligence skills that we thought went away. No, it turns out that's not true at all. We get actually new levels of intelligence and creativity in our 50s. So that's not actually true. There's certain things. The article I like best, Martin Seligman from Penn and Scott Barry Kaufman wrote a great article on creativity over time where they talk about what goes away in creativity and what stays or comes on.

36:28And the list of what comes on and stays is much longer than what goes away. Now, there's stuff that does go away. So the question you've got to now ask, is it permanent? Is this real or have we just not figured out how to train it? So let me give you an example. Adam Ghazali is a friend of mine. He's on my board. We do a lot of research together. He's at UCSF. And he's a neuroscientist. He had the cover of Nature a bunch of years ago for a video game he designed. It's the very first video game to be approved by the FDA. It treats cognitive decline in older adults. And what it specifically focuses on is task switching.

37:04If you go back to fluid intelligence, one of the things that declines over time is task switching, our ability to focus on this and then focus on this. and that's a real problem. He's got a video game that will take your brain if you're 60, you play it literally, I think it's three hours a week or three 20 minute sessions a week for six weeks is the standard doctor prescription for this video game and it will reset your 60 year old brain back to 20. So there's a bunch of stuff like that where it's use it or lose it. We just 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, one of the reasons our brain performance declines over time is white matter density decreases over time and we lose certain neurochemicals.

37:50So what he's not telling you is, well, you can replace those neurochemicals. In fact, SSRIs, which actually suck for depression, turn out to be great for older adults. Low-level SSRIs because serotonin levels decline over time and SSRIs can boost them. If you don't want to take a drug, hike with a weight vest. Most of your serotonin is manufactured in your bones. And one of the reasons the brain has less is because you're making less in your bones. And if you increase bone density, you get the serotonin back. You get a bunch of those neurochemicals back. The general thinking is sort of true, but a lot of those skills are use it or lose it.

38:25And either we've already figured out how to fix them or this stuff is also progressing really, really, really quickly. That's the whole other side of this is regenerative medicine, longevity, science, all that stuff is moving at exponential rates. So for example, five years ago, we could not deal with most tendon, bone, and ligament problems. Today, there's very little you can do to tendons, bones, or ligaments that exosomes, stem cells, certain other things. 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's real right now.

39:09But up to that point, no, no, we've sort of got to dial. So technology is advancing and it's going to solve a lot of those issues. A lot of those issues are not what we thought they were. And you can train a lot of that stuff in unusual ways. We're just figuring out. And some of the early ways, like all the brain games, they're worthless. They're totally worthless. They train nothing other than the ability to play that game. That's not how this works. But learning a foreign language, learning to play a musical instrument, learning a challenging dynamic activity, like all that stuff. No, no, that's the real medicine.

39:48And that really actually does work. Yeah. I love what you're saying, because I remember leaving that conversation with Arthur Brooks, although it was really enlightening and he said a lot of smart things. I felt depressed. I was like, oh man, I got like, you know, less than 10 years to figure like to do all my innovative stuff. And it's good to know what you're saying that we are actually in control. Like, of course, you can be passive and the inevitable will happen with your cognitive decline. But if we're proactive and kind of fight that natural tendency that's going to happen, plus with modern medicine, like you said, there's a lot that we can do to slow it down, reverse it.

40:22So that's amazing. So let's dig deep on these three types of thinking. You alluded to them at a high level that we get better at as we're 50 and beyond. So you say it's relativistic thinking, non-dualistic thinking, and systematic thinking. Yeah. So short version, our ego quiets down and our perspective widens. So essentially, we learn to see things from multiple perspectives. We learn that there are very few black and white truths. And most things are gray. that's relativistic thinking and probabilistic thinking. 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.

41:05And because of these skills, this is where that extra intelligence, creativity, empathy, and wisdom comes from and builds out of this intelligence. There's a huge business opportunity here and nobody's paying attention to it. So that little backstory, when I wrote Bold, which is a book about like entrepreneurship and people like Larry Page and Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and how to really use exponential technology and some human capability flow science stuff to really level up organizations, I spent so much years talking to CEOs. And a lot of the time, in a lot of those discussions, we would talk about hiring.

41:42Who are the ideal employees? How do you find them? What do you need for the 21st century? And over and over again, thousands of times, I heard the same two things from CEOs. I need employees who are really intelligent and really creative and really innovative because the rate of change is really fast and I got to keep pace and stay ahead of it. Otherwise, I don't have a company. I don't have a business. I can't do any of that. The other thing I need is I need employees who are empathetic and wise because if I don't have psychological safety, nobody can do their job. If I don't have psychological safety, I don't have great team performance.

42:17That team performance, you can't be a company. You can't do those things without empathy and wisdom. Most importantly, the mantra of 21st century business, and maybe we thank Jeff Bezos for this, but it's always been, it's customer-centric thinking. And if you're not empathetic or you're not wise, nobody's thinking like a customer 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 50s, you want access to these superpowers.

42:51You 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. Risk aversion increases over time. It has a lot to do with like literally white banner volume in the brain. But we have to train back because the more risk averse you are, the more afraid you are, the more norepinephrine you're producing.

43:28That 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 most overall. And in fact, this is not my line. I think it's Daniel Levitin might have said it. It's the first person I heard say it this bluntly. But Daniel Levitin is a neuroscientist who wrote a, just wrote a book called successful aging, where if you want in my book, my book, sort of a fun adventure story, the sciences and the footnotes.

44:11And sort of at the end, if you really want every itch of the science, you can either take my peak performance aging training, or you can read successful aging. And like, he goes through all of it. We came to all the same conclusions though. I think I took my conclusions farther because I ran a bunch of weird ass experiments along the way, but he said flat out, he's like the best, The best advice I can give you on retirement is don't retire. Don't ever retire. If you're interested in peak performance aging, retirement is a bad idea. Reinvention? Maybe. Maybe I don't want to do the same thing I've been doing my whole life and I want to do something new.

44:45Great. Fantastic. Retirement. Death sentence. So I have a couple follow-ups to this. A lot of my listeners are young entrepreneurs, business owners. So if we're going to take your advice, give older people a chance when it comes to hiring, I mean, I know there's a big ageism issue, especially in the tech world. I used to work at Disney streaming services. Like you were old over 40, you know, and like people looked at you sideways, you know, and didn't trust you to do your job, essentially, if you were older than 40, 45. So I know there's ageism. So if you were to interview somebody in their 50s, what questions would you ask them to make sure that they've been training their brain?

45:22So I would ask one, how physically active you are. If you're not dealing with somebody who has been regularly exercising for a while and hitting all five dynamic categories, you don't want to go near them. The number one correlate with health and longevity over time is leg strength, believe it or not. I know. I was going to ask. That's one of my favorite facts. Yeah, it's wild. And we can talk about why and whatever. I don't think you can ask incoming employees, hey, what do you squat? Maybe you can, but it actually, like, if we're going to ask, put politicians in office in their eighties, those questions become really fricking relevant.

46:00Like that's the, those are things you really want to know. Are you engaging in challenging creative social activity? Like, are you, that's, those things become a checklist for folks over 50 identity match fit, self-forgiveness, forgiveness of others. You don't get access to the cognitive superpowers without those things. So those are the kinds of questions you want to poke at to make sure are being checked off. Those sorts of things. Are you engaging in challenging creative social activities that demand dynamic, deliberate play and take place in novel outdoor? Like that, those things, they become a checklist and they become, if you want to work here and you're over this age, you got to do this because we need you, but we need this version of you.

46:43And the most important thing is I look for older adults with much younger friends. I want to see those cross-generational friendships because older adults over 40, 50, one of the reasons they're not to be trusted is because they don't get the job because they're just too out of touch and things have changed. And there's a lot of stuff that changes and stays the same. And you sort of want the older adults around for that reason. but you also being old is not an excuse for not keeping up either. Like what I'm telling you is you've got access to more brain power. So like, it's really not an excuse as far as I'm concerned.

47:24So I think it's got to be mutual. And I think the benefits are going to be amazing if it can be mutual.

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52:08Now, cognitive function is weird. Some of it has to do with bone density. Again, we're back to the bones and the big bones in your legs. And if they're dense, they're not losing their minerals, their nutrients. They can feed the brain. The second part is that if you're not mobile, you don't have a social life. It's a lot harder to have a social life. If you don't have a social life, you are not going to age successfully. And in fact, if you don't have a social life, peak performance, you're just sort of locked out of peak performance because social support for a lot of different psychological safety reasons and just performance reasons, it's really important to have social support.

52:44And part of that, you can get really great social support on the telephone, on Zoom. And 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 for whatever reason you're like stuck with the phone and Zoom, make sure you pet a dog for at least eight minutes a day, a dog or a cat. Petting an animal for about five to eight minutes also releases oxytocin and some of those other pro-social chemicals. So like if you're stuck on, like if you, we need social support for performance, we definitely need for peak performance aging.

53:15Animals are our friends here. Yeah. I love that. I feel like you're giving us so much great tips in terms of how we can age gracefully and be impactful at an older age and still innovative and creative. So this is such a meaningful episode to me because honestly, we don't talk about this enough on the podcast. So we do need to learn as we're older. Obviously, it's possible. You learned how to park ski at 53. So let's talk about how we can learn and embrace authentic learning. So let's back up one step and talk about learning, like where you started. I just want to start where you started, which is, so if you want to stave off Alzheimer's, dementia, cognitive decline, right?

53:57Fluid intelligence, what matters? Lifelong learning. Why is that? Expertise and wisdom are the two most important things we can do to develop what's known as cognitive reserve. So if you have a high cognitive reserve, you could even have advanced Alzheimer's. I mean, you die, they autopsy your brain. You've got tangles and plaques everywhere. And it just looks like your brain's mush and you're still, nobody would notice if you were alive. This was 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?

54:30What is it? expertise in learning and or to expertise in wisdom, which are two different things. But important thing here is they're big, broad networks and they're in the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is where it's most vulnerable to cognitive decline. It's the newest brain structure from an evolutionary perspective, and it's the most vulnerable. You don't suffer cognitive decline like deep in your brainstem. 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.

55:04So this goes down, you got seven other copies over here, don't worry about it. So that's where you have to start with lifelong learning. And you want to do everything you can to maximize learning for that very reason. So what do we know about learning? One of the best ways to maximize learning is authentic learning. This is a big movement in education right now. And it's based on a whole bunch of different stuff. But let me just talk about one thing. So their 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.

55:40It'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 by choice. Authentic learning means we learn based basically exactly on who we are. So it got a bad name early on because people started talking about learning styles. Are you a visual learner or an auditory learner? And that's absolute nonsense. Like that's actually not true. No, we're all those things. It depends on what we're learning and how we're wired and it changes over time. And that's not actually, but what is true is everybody shows up somewhere on the introversion, extroversion scale.

56:17Introverts need to learn in private. Extroverts want to learn in public. We're somewhere on the risk aversion scale. Like we all have, I'm this fearful and you can only be pushed so far. And like, so those authentic learning is about like those kinds of questions, the questions that really matter. And so, you know, one of the most important things for me is I'm an introvert. I don't mind 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 and the back country and the woods and I'd learn them out of sight with my friends.

56:57And then I could go back, like trying to do it the other way was impossible for me. I don't work that way. And you can keep, there's a lot more to authentic learning, but the big point here is also taking on these kind of NAR style challenges late in life, like learning how to park ski or whatever. Phenomenal for peak performance aging, but you need a lot of motivation. And it turns out we have like we are driven towards authenticity. Carl Rogers argued that it functions as a fundamental drive. A fundamental drive meaning it's got as much power as a drive for sex or food or shelter. You have a drive to be yourself, your authentic self.

57:35And 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 challenge can be challenging you want all the help you can get right in art impossible i talk about one of the things peak performers are really good at is they never meet a challenge around a single fuel source we know this food wise right like you want carbs protein and fats before you're going into workout same thing with motivation you want authenticity you want autonomy you want passion purpose, all these big intrinsic motivators, curiosity, you want to stack them on top of each other because it maximizes our motivation.

58:23I love that. So to wrap up this part of the interview, I'd love for you to just sort of summarize what skills generally do you think older people are better at than younger people? And older people, I guess, who have trained their brain properly, let's say. Well, anything that requires seeing things from other people's perspectives and multi-perspectival thinking, you're just better at. It's harder to do when you're younger because of how the ego functions and how the brain functions. You're just better at it when you're older. You can meditate a lot to sort of lower cognitive bias and do those things, but it's going to start to happen naturally when you're older.

58:59So to me, the big one, the cool one is the systems thinking part because one of the commonalities among all the biggest brains I've ever met. All the real, the people who really can affect change in the world, they're all systems thinkers. And it's really hard to train people how to be systems thinkers. It's a tough skill to bring on. Certain careers force you to learn it in different ways. Writing, especially if you write books, 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.

59:43Mostly we specialize, especially in the modern world. We specialize, we specialize, we specialize. And one of the things that I want to point out here is, and anybody who's ever worked in entrepreneurship, innovation, like, you know, all the big innovations are in the cracks between disciplines. It's very hard to innovate inside that same funnel that everybody's been in for 50 years, but you move adjacent to where that funnel touches something. And suddenly there's a revolution waiting to happen. And that's how you build companies and world changing companies and everything else. You can't see that shit.

1:00:14If you're not a systems thinker, it's completely invisible to you. So the thing that I think is the most exciting over is that. Yeah, that was really inspiring to me. I'm actually writing a book with Penguin Random House coming out in 2025. And that little bit of information was really inspiring. I'm going to include it in my book and credit you. Okay, so Steven, I want to wrap up this interview talking about your research about the blue zones, these long-lived communities around the world. You alluded to some of it, but I'd love for you to sort of dive deeper on what you found in terms of why these people live longer, happier.

1:00:51Let me back this story up a little bit to tell you a story that's not in the book. Yeah. That is where this actually starts. So people may know this or not know this for almost the past two decades. My wife and I run a hospice care dog sanctuary. So for two decades, we've done hospice work with dogs. We have a healing methodology that's based on, it's very low tech. It's flows. It's like lifestyle interventions in a sense. Some flow science, some evolutionary psychology, nothing really fancy. Our dogs all get checked out by vets when they come to us. Before they come to us, they come from shelters.

1:01:26But we, I mean, we specialize in the worst of the worst. So if you are a geriatric chihuahua with an abusive past, three legs, one eye, cancer, heart disease, mange, and flatulence, you're our guy. 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 a provider, very good death. And we'd bring the dogs in and mind you, We've over 700 dogs passed through our facility and over 5 ,000 are our program. So big sample size. And on average, our dogs wouldn't live another month or six weeks.

1:02:07They would live another three, four, five years. Oh, wow. You translate into that human numbers. That's right. You get seven years for every year. So like the top end of that, you're getting an extra like 28 years, 30. Like what the fuck is going on? Pardon my language. So I started to ask questions like, what's going on? Why is this working? What are we doing? And will it work in humans? Like, would any of this stuff work in humans, right? And it turns out almost everything I were doing with the dogs exists in these so-called blue zones, which is what led me to the blue zones in the first place.

1:02:43So Dan Buehler is a National Geographic reporter in the early 2000s, noticed that there were places on the planet where people lived on average 12 years longer than everybody else. And they're all over the place. And he wanted to know, 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. There's some stuff that has been turned into supplements and it's dietary. And those questions are open. There's no argument on sort of the lifestyle stuff with the blue zones. And the commonalities are really like move around a lot, regular exercise, right?

1:03:20De-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 matter so much. This is built into blue zones. There's also this respect for the elders and these cross-generational friendships, they're built into Blue Zones. There's some evolution. I mean, they eat healthy, they eat less than most people and they eat very, very healthy diets, but like there's no one diet across the boards that like works for everybody.

1:03:57But 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 and very like, for example, they get It's social belonging and connection. They really emphasize it. In the blue zones, some of them, people spend six hours a day hanging out with friends or family. So a lot of it. With our dogs, we had enforced petting time. So when you have a lot of dogs, like at various times, we've had 40, 50 dogs. It's hard to individual petting time. You have to like, oh, I got to hang out with this dog. But we would do it because we wanted these neurochemicals underneath that.

1:04:34Same thing with flow. We'd find ways to put our dogs into flow. So flow is really important to peak performance aging for a lot of different reasons, but the state, 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. T-cells fight diseases and natural killer cells fight tumors and sick cells and other of the diseases of aging. So when we get into flow, it lowers inflammation, which is tied to all the causes of aging. It peruses T cells, natural killer cells, a lot of benefits, and it boosts the immune system.

1:05:09So 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 are blue zones, you see a lot of action sport and outdoor athletes too. Colorado, Pitkin County, Colorado, and Eagle County, Colorado, and Loma Linda, California are the four places in America where people, these are the blue zones.

1:05:47Summit, Pitkin, and Eagle, this is Colorado. That's Vail, Aspen, Beaver Creek, all of the big ski areas, a lot of outdoor stuff. And in Loma Linda, that's a Seventh-day Adventist population. And they're very social, very flowy. good dietary stuff, a lot of belonging, a lot of, so like it's the same stuff. Um, and a lot of outdoor activities, surfing and, and, and cause 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.

1:06:23And then number two, like what are some examples of creative social activities as an adult? Well, one, it is completely erroneous, though myself and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi are totally at fault for this. Like we are to blame. But the idea that flow only shows up in athletes and artists is not true. We focused a lot on athletes and we focused a lot on artists. So people think it's only athletes and artists. But the most common flow state on earth is reading or interpersonal flow. Interpersonal flow is like the group flow. you and your best friend get into a great conversation and a whole hour goes by and you don't notice it's gone.

1:06:59That's interpersonal flow happens all the time. So one of the reasons you want to engage in challenging creative and social activities, they all trigger flow. So singing 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 on and on and on i mean there's a ton of flow at work in fact flow is much more common at work than it is during leisure for a bunch of different reasons but you know the the list sort of goes on and on and on if we want to enjoy the second half of our lives we want to enjoy our lives in general but if we really want to thrive during our second half of our lives you can't do it without flow flow is actually the engine of adult development it's how we grow up We grow up by getting into flow states, coming out the other side is more complex, more skillful, more adaptive, more empathetic, wiser.

1:07:55And we move forward. So it plays a big role in adult development and successful in peak performance aging. Yeah. So just for all my young and profiters, I'm going to do a sort of Stephen Kotler marathon when this episode comes out. And I'm going to replay all of our older episodes about flow, about all the different things that I've talked to with Stephen over the past. So it will be a great educational value for all of you guys. So Steven, I end the show with a couple of questions that I ask all my guests and then we do some fun things at the end of the year. The first one is, what is one actionable thing that our young and profitors can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?

1:08:32You 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 is playing guitar. or whatever that thing that most likely drops you into flow. Flow massively amplifies, among other things, motivation, productivity, and creativity. And here's the cool thing. Even though a flow state lasts about 90 minutes, sometimes they can stretch out for longer. The heightened productivity and creativity will outlast the flow state by a day, maybe two.

1:09:04Flow also resets the nervous system. It calms you down, flushes stress hormones out of your system. So emotional regulation, emotional management, fear blocks performance on every level. Flow resets the nervous system. So, and the thing is, it's most people, and especially all the people listening to this podcast are going to be like you, you got to your thirties and you stop skiing. You put down childish things, skis go away. The surfboard goes away. The skateboard goes away. You stop samba dancing and salsa dancing and all that stuff. And the research shows that's a disaster. It's a disaster.

1:09:39In fact, we work with tons of people all over the world and burnout is a real big issue. The first thing we do to treat burnout is have them double down on the primary flow activity. Research shows that if you want peak performance, you need to have like about three to four hours a week on your primary flow activity just to keep your nervous system where it needs to be. Yeah. I'd love for you to tell everybody about the Flow Research Collective and all the trainings you guys have available. Flow Research Collective is my organization. We're a research and training organization on the research side.

1:10:09We studied the neurobiology of peak human performance, what's going on in the brain and the body when we're performing at our best. We did this work with scientists all over the world at Stanford and Imperial College London and UCSC and UCLA and UC Davis and UCSF and a whole bunch of other acronyms. And we take the science and we use it to train people. We train people in 130 countries and we train everybody from like professional athletes and members of the special forces to soccer moms and insurance brokers and teachers and folks in the Air Force. And we work with a lot of companies in between.

1:10:43So I think now we're training Facebook or Meta, Accenture, Bain Capital, Audi, San Francisco Police Department, the Air Force, Wisewatch People, and our trainings are for everybody. And if you're interested, if you go to getmoreflow.com, cheesiest URL in the world, but nobody was remembering any of the others. So I've given in and it's now getmoreflow.com despite the fact that I'm embarrassed to say it out loud, but you can go there and sign up for a free hour long coaching call with somebody 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?

1:11:17Nobody 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 have to do with the topic of the episode. It's up to you. What is your secret to profiting in life?

1:11:47It's just hard work. 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 three times. Clearly my job is to make my editor's job easier. My job editor has to really comb through my articles and it takes months. He hates me. I'm not a good employee. So I started editing my stories 12 times. I just figured out what everybody else would do and I'd triple it or quadruple it.

1:12:23I did that for years. So, I mean, it wasn't much of a secret. I just figured I wasn't as smart, as well-connected, as handsome and all the other things as everybody else. But I just figured out how to outwork them. A lot of it is about smart hard work, not just hard work. Smart hard, 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. And the difficulties with just hard work is the only tool you reach for. But really, like, there's no secret. I just put my butt in the chair and I did the work. I love that answer. Thank you for sharing that.

1:12:56Where can everybody learn about you? Where can they get Gnar Country? And how can they find more about you, Stephen? Gnar Country, you can go to GnarCountry.com or Amazon or wherever books are sold. StephenCottler.com gets you to me. FlowResearchCollective.com gets you to the Flow Research Collective. GetMoreFlow.com gets you to our trainings. 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.