Hala Taha: [00:00:00] 

Hala Taha: Hey, yap gang. One of the many things I hope listeners of this show have learned over the years is that aging doesn't mean slowing down, it means leveling up. The key is knowing how to train your brain and body to keep growing, adapting, and performing at your best no matter what your age.

Hala Taha: After all, we all wanna stay young and profiting in this YAB Classic episode from 2023. We're gonna revisit my interview with the peak performance expert, Steven Koler. Steven is the executive director of the Flow Research Collective, and he spent years figuring out how to sustain high performance deep into adulthood.

Hala Taha: In this conversation, he shared some of his findings about what really works, along with how deliberate play can supercharge your brain's performance and the surprising benefits of cross generational friendships. [00:01:00] So get ready to rethink everything you know about growing older. Without further ado, I give you Steven Kotler.

 

Hala Taha: So Stephen, I'm super looking forward to this conversation. My podcast is called Young and Profiting, but I actually have avid listeners of all ages 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.

Hala Taha: So I learned that you were really shocked by the story of Antonio Strava, 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 17 hundreds way before medical advancements. And so I'd love to understand why his story was so shocking to you.

Hala Taha: How did he dispel the typical, you know, thoughts around traditional aging and how did he inspire you to study peak performance Aging. 

Steven Kotler: So, you know, books have a lot of origin stories. There's like 11 [00:02:00] different things that come together. I've been working, researching, looking at the field of peak performance agent for a while in a totally unrelated project, right?

Steven Kotler: I was gonna write a mystery novel, and I wanted a cat burglar as a character who was gonna steal musical instruments, who made the rarest musical instruments and 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.

Steven Kotler: 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 believed, 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.

Steven Kotler: 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 nineties along with like expertise and wisdom and all the [00:03:00] like cognitive abilities.

Steven Kotler: 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. 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.

Steven Kotler: I've been looking at the cognitive stuff for a while, is very related to flow, um, how we age. Flow plays a big role there. So this is not new territory to me, the physical side, it's like, holy crap, could this possibly be true? And it is true, it's true across the boards. Every one of our physical skills are user or lose it skills.

Steven Kotler: And the research is really clear. We don't stop using these skills, both physical and mental. We can hang on to them, even advance them far, far later into life than am Beth all possible. 

Hala Taha: I love this. So you're saying the long slow rot theory basically means that our physical, mental skills decline over time.

Hala Taha: There's nothing that we can really do to stop the slide. That's what [00:04:00] 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 its 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.

Hala Taha: So talk to us more about use it or lose it skills, what they are, how we keep them, I guess, healthy. 

Steven Kotler: Yeah. So there's, there's a bunch of stuff on the cognitive side. Let's get back there in a second. On the physical side, there's five main categories that matter. And let me, since a lot of your listeners are younger, let me start here, which is peak performance Aging starts young.

Steven Kotler: Like the research is really clear. Like interventions in your eighties, 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 the stuff that you want to start working on, you actually wanna start working on in your twenties and your thirties.

Steven Kotler: And you know, this is, the [00:05:00] biohacking crowd is very aware of this, right? A lot of that crowd is twenties and thirties and they're doing a lot of the these things. Now I might argue that they're doing some of the wrong stuff 'cause they don't quite understand what peak performance aging is. But besides the point, a lot of this stuff starts young.

Steven Kotler: On the physical side, we want to train five skills that matter most. Strength, stamina, flexibility, agility, and balance. Those are the five skills that you want to train over time. And this is not new knowledge like the World Health Organization. Knows exactly how many minutes a week we should be training these things.

Steven Kotler: But peak performance aging is 150 to 300 minutes of hard aerobic training a week, moderate to vigorous aerobic training a week, two strength training days a week, and three, flexibility, balance, and agility days a week. Or you can find one skill. I chose park skiing in the, in the book that acs, all that, right?

Steven Kotler: If I, by in park skiing, I'm using strength, stamina, balance, agility, [00:06:00] 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 you start using the prime moves movers and not use the stabilizer muscles.

Steven Kotler: 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 S, you're gonna tear your hip flexor 'cause it stopped doing the work. Your're quad, if you're walking around your ambulatory, it's working, your hip flexor has started atrophy.

Steven Kotler: So there's ways you want to sort of think about training that's a little bit different if you've been away for a while. But those are the physical skills we need to train over time. On the cognitive side, it's a really long list and let me pause there, let you ask another question. Then we'll get to the stuff on the cognitive side 'cause we'll spend the next 20 minutes.

Steven Kotler: I'll spend the next 20 minutes talking. 

Hala Taha: Yeah, 100%. So on the physical side, why are action sports and what you call [00:07:00] dynamic activities so important to help us with these user lose it skills? Because I think a lot of people who are older we're used to going to the gym, taking group classes, whatever, but nobody's really thinking about action sports and you say that they're a great way to, to leverage these skills.

Steven Kotler: Okay, we gotta get to the full sentence anyway. So let's 

Hala Taha: go for it. Just tell me, 

Steven Kotler: throw it out there and then we'll break it apart and why it matters so much. 

Hala Taha: Okay. 

Steven Kotler: So if you wanna rock to you drop, if you really are interested in peak performance aging, you need to regularly engage in challenging creative and social activities.

Steven Kotler: 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. Lifelong learning matters for a bunch of different reasons, but short version, if we wanna preserve brain function, we need expertise and wisdom.

Steven Kotler: Expertise and wisdom are these very diverse neural nets in the brain. [00:08:00] Lots of real estate, lots of redundancy and impervious to cogniti decline. The more expertise, the more wisdom. And this is why one of the reasons people performance aging starts young. Like literally the guy who who did the core research on wisdom, Elon Goldberg, his core advice is the more wisdom and 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.

Steven Kotler: 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 does systems work, how does behavior work? All the like, all that stuff. It's onboarded slowly over time. So you wanna start training these things. You wanna be start learning, challenging, creative and social activities.

Steven Kotler: We learn a lot during. 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. 'cause it keeps the brain active [00:09:00] in really important ways and really lower stress levels. So a lot of stuff we're gonna be talking about, there are nine known causes of aging.

Steven Kotler: They're all linked to inflammation. Inflammation is linked to stress. So anything you do that fights stress, that lowers stress, that gives you more emotional control, is involved in peak performance. Aging. So. Social activities, lower stress. They give us these prosocial, oh, there's people around who love me, got my back.

Steven Kotler: 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. It's all five categories of functional fitness, strength, stamina, flexibility, balance, agility, deliberate play.

Steven Kotler: You've heard of deliberate practice, Anders Erickson's favorite expertise, repetition with incremental advancement is the fastest path for his 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 [00:10:00] than deliberate practice.

Steven Kotler: Deliberate play is repetition. With improvisation, you can do the same thing you did last time, but a little bit of flourish, little flower, a little something fun. It's playful, meaning there's no shame, there's no embarrassment. If you're bad, who cares? You're having fun. But that feeling of play produces more neurochemistry, more endorphins.

Steven Kotler: This one really boost the immune system lowers stress levels, but amplifies learning. So dynamic, deliberate play as 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.

Steven Kotler: They take place in novel outdoor environments, and they're challenging, creative and social. So it's one stop shopping. The last bit is most important bit. One. Outdoor environments in general, lower stress. We know this. This is well established in positive psychology. A 20 minute walk in the woods will outperform most SSRIs for treatment of depression.

Steven Kotler: I can talk about why if you care, but like we know [00:11:00] that good for you, lower stress. So in itself, being in nature is anti-inflammatory, so it's better for healthy aging. But if you wanna preserve brain function, how do you do that? You want to birth new neurons and turn those new neurons into neural nets.

Steven Kotler: 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, 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, they hippocampus.

Steven Kotler: Hippocampus does two things. It does long-term memory and it does location place. It's packed with place cells and grid cells. Why we evolved as hunter-gatherers when you were in the wild and something emotionally charged happened, you gotta remember where you were when it happened. That's survival. So where did I get attacked by that tiger?

Steven Kotler: 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 [00:12:00] 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 and outdoor environments.

Steven Kotler: So that's what you want to use it for. Action sports gives you that. Now, I also say in the book that like if action sports aren't your thing, you can duplicate a lot of this by simply hiking with a weight vest. And weight vests are really key, better than a lot of other things because they amplify bone density.

Steven Kotler: Little known fact. Your bones, like where you store all your minerals, all your nutrients are stored in your bones and they're released into. So everything that drives the brain. Calcium, for example, 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 for women.

Steven Kotler: Really important. After menopause, where does most of your estrogen come from? Your bones. So wildly fluctuating al levels, which [00:13:00] 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.

Steven Kotler: There's also a bunch of other benefits, but it hits all of those categories if you're not interested in action sports. That said, there's a lot to recommend in action sports, especially a lot of our country, is about a new way of approaching these difficult, challenging physical activities late in life that's much safer and much more well suited to progression.

Hala Taha: Yeah, because I, I have to say like I'm in my thirties and I used to ski and I, I don't even ski anymore because I'm like, I've got too much slip for it. I don't wanna break a bone. I'm not into it. So I totally love that you're giving another option in terms of the weighted vest and hiking. So in your book, you actually took on park skiing, and this is something that people used to believe that anybody over 35 like really couldn't learn.

Hala Taha: So talk to us about learning that activity at [00:14:00] 53 years old and what you learned as an old dog. Uh, learning new tricks. 

Steven Kotler: So there's a couple things you need to know to flesh this out a little bit, but you are right. Everything you said is totally true. Why did I think I could learn to park ski? There's a whole bunch of new stuff in like flow science, my field and body cognition, a couple other whizzbang 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.

Steven Kotler: I'll give you like one random example. We have a motor learning window, like Beverly says, don't become a gymnast or a ballet dancer after 25. Right. 'cause it that window's closed and you can't just, that's sorta of true. There is like, like a lot of things would be performance aging. It's true, but, and here's the, but what really changes is not our ability to learn.

Steven Kotler: 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 [00:15:00] 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 or lose it skill, including the skills we need to learn how to park ski.

Steven Kotler: So that was sort of it, where it came from. I was an expert skier. I just had never park skied. I knew no tricks, right? I was a big mountain skier. 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.

Steven Kotler: So it was a, it was a totally not a new adventure for me. 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, and, and what we learned.

Steven Kotler: And here's what's cool. So I made to, to, to measure progress. I made a list of 20 tricks. This is zero to like intermediate, intermediate matter [00:16:00] because once you get there, you're sort of like, you take the random shit out of the equation. Like you can control your progress and not have these accidental falls or things that really can get you hurt early on.

Steven Kotler: I figured if it took five years, cool, whatever. Like I didn't care. I started when I was 53. If it took me to a 60, great. Whatever, who cares? I did it in under a season. In fact, I've never learned anything so fast in my entire life. And the cool part was my ski partner, who's your age? And was a former professional athlete who got very injured, retired, had a family, had his a job, came back this sport.

Steven Kotler: 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, 2 68. They were intermediate at best Park skiers or skiers and snowboarders. And we train them up in four days on the mountain and they got good. But then, because as you pointed out, action sports, not for everyone.

Steven Kotler: So the key thing here is [00:17:00] mindset. What am I talking about? Lemme tell you what we did and lemme tell you what what it was. But 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.

Steven Kotler: Deliberate playing takes place in novel outdoor environments. I don't care what it is. I wanted them to just start on a quest that would lead to something that way. What I really wanted to do was explode the mindset of old, oh, I'm too old for this shit. I'm gonna get hurt. I got, I got things I wanna hold onto.

Steven Kotler: It sets up. It's really weird. Our biology is designed when we're, when we're young 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'm gonna figure out who I [00:18:00] am and what I do, and how I wanna live, and how do I wanna make live all that stuff.

Steven Kotler: This is about dopamine and norepinephrine. Those are very potent, feel-good neurochemicals. They're very addictive. Very, very, very addictive, right? 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 free uptake, right? So dopamine is really addictive.

Steven Kotler: When we get stuff 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 like my bike. Whatever it is, 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.

Steven Kotler: These are like the pro-social neurochemicals that underpin strong family structures and things like that. Strong company structures, and they're great. But we're trading our addictions. And what happens is it makes us very, very conservative. It shuts down. Seeking system. We get the voice in our head that says, Hey, don't do that.

Steven Kotler: You're gonna lose [00:19:00] what you have. 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 big performance itching, and there's a penalty for having a mindset of old, and this is the point. There's a big health and longevity penalty.

Steven Kotler: 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 translate, and this is one of the most well-established facts in in peak performance aging. It will translate into additional seven and a half years of health and longevity.

Steven Kotler: That's huge. That's like quitting smoking huge. In fact, if you're morbidly obese and have a shitty mindset towards aging, change your mindset first. It actually have a bigger effect on your life and your health and your longevity than losing weight. So it's really, really important. It's where peak performance aging starts.

Steven Kotler: 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 [00:20:00] have to overcome it. One of the reasons the NAR style adventure is so useful for older adults is like, for me, it didn't matter what I wanted to believe about aging.

Steven Kotler: Once I got out of the mountain, I was learning how to do three sixties and nose better, three sixties and one eighties, and all the other stuff I learned, like it just blew up all my limiting beliefs about what was possible in the future. 'cause I have just onboarded the most difficult physical thing I've ever done in my life, and I did it at 53.

Steven Kotler: And I've done a lot of difficult physical things along the way. This was definitely the hardest and I did it, and I'm still park skiing at 55 now 'cause I wrote, you know, the book's a couple years old. Um, in terms of when I, when I wrote it. 

 

 

Hala Taha: 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. [00:21:00] And like you said, it's totally in your control.

Hala Taha: 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.

Hala Taha: 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. 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.

Hala Taha: 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. 

Steven Kotler: So, another reason, peak performance aging sort of starts young.

Steven Kotler: First we start with the good news. One of the reasons old dogs can learn new tricks that we haven't talked about yet [00:22:00] 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.

Steven Kotler: We, they, they'll only flip these switches later in life. Two. In our fifties, the two hemispheres of the brain, which essentially function in opposition to each other. Along the way, we start working together like never before. And finally the brain starts to recruit underutilized resources in our fifties.

Steven Kotler: So as a result, we gain access to whole new levels of intelligence, creativity, empathy, and wisdom. And it's, 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 is the technical term. It's an if then condition.

Steven Kotler: You get this only if you do this right? And if you wanna the access to these cognitive superpowers in our fifties, and we'll come back to it. But from a profit perspective, we really want to talk about those superpowers in a second. [00:23:00] Let me finish this point. There are a number of gateways of adult development that you have to pass through.

Steven Kotler: So by the age, age 30. 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. And Erickson thought he used to disappear at 18. It doesn't, but it does. If you haven't solved it by 30, you have a problem. The reason is by 40, you have, you need match fit.

Steven Kotler: Match fit is an economics term, means there's a tight link between who I am and what I do in the world, right? If you just, if you don't know who you are, you can't get match fit because there's no, if you don't know your strengths, your values, all that stuff. So that's has to be by 30 by 40. We need to be, we have match fit and then by 50 we need forgiveness.

Steven Kotler: 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 [00:24:00] 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 seventies and eighties.

Steven Kotler: 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 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 gotta put that shit down.

Steven Kotler: 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. It's why I, one of the reasons I learned Parks King 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, I could keep myself safer than when I was making better decisions along the way.

Steven Kotler: 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. It's love and kindness meditation and passion meditation. It's an [00:25:00] incredibly potent tool. It's amazing for a ton of different stuff. It's been studied for probably longer than any other meditation style.

Steven Kotler: We understand all the neuroscience, but we. When it came to people who I got in fistfights with and worse for 10 years, it wasn't enough. I could like all the loving 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.

Steven Kotler: 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 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.

Steven Kotler: And I was like, well, I'm out of any other ideas. Loving kindness meditation, which is what everybody right is not getting it done. And there's still anger there. There's still resentment there. There's still, there's still stuff there. So [00:26:00] let me see if taking on this kind of go, putting myself on a physical mission could clear that out.

Steven Kotler: And it did. And. 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, that one, and I'm not going to, but it was one of the neater things that happened along the way is I got to put down like a bunch of sort of shame and embarrassment and like stuff that I, I've carried since I was probably 10 or 12.

Steven Kotler: Definitely 12. 

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

Steven Kotler: 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 gonna get easier.

Steven Kotler: 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. [00:27:00] It just doesn't, what it gets is more meaningful. And more and like life satisfaction and overall wellbeing.

Steven Kotler: 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, but what it, it just sort of, it closed that loop, you know what I mean? Like, yeah, okay, done. Check. I don't have to worry about that anymore. And, and literally what it really does is when certain memories just like pop into my head now, they just last a half second and I'm like, oh yeah, there's that thing, and it goes away.

Steven Kotler: Whereas before, no, I could start to think on it and dwell on it, and then I'd have a problem. 

Hala Taha: Yeah. Have you ever of Arthur Brooks. 

Steven Kotler: Think so. 

Hala Taha: He's somebody that I think you should definitely look into. So I had Arthur Brooks on the podcast in 2021, sorry, 2022, and he was like one of my favorite interviews.

Hala Taha: And he wrote this book called Cracking the Code to Happiness. He's a [00:28:00] 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.

Hala Taha: 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 is saying is that you have a biological talk clock ticking your ability to reason, think flexibly, learn new things, problem solve, be innovative, that starts to decline in your forties and fifties.

Hala Taha: And that doesn't mean that your brain starts to go bad. You just start to have crystallized intelligence or you accumulate knowledge back 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 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.

Hala Taha: So for example, the professional athlete becomes the coach, the [00:29:00] star litigator becomes a partner. The the singer becomes an a and r exec and you're basically teaching younger people your knowledge and taking on that second wave of your career. 

Steven Kotler: So he is right and he is wrong as far as I could tell. Where he's really right is passing along.

Steven Kotler: 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. I go out into public these days with any stereotype.

Steven Kotler: Somebody's gonna 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. All like, we geezer each other. Red left and it's crazy. Becca Le Yale's 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 [00:30:00] killing older adults with how we talk about them.

Steven Kotler: So that is really, really clear. Societies where there's no ageism, there's also cross generational friendships. So the old are passed along. Knowledge. This is a natural part of brain development. Now you have to put things into categories. He is not wrong. We do shift from fluid intelligence into crystallized intelligence.

Steven Kotler: 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. So that's not actually true.

Steven Kotler: There's certain things, the article I like best, Martin Seligman from Penn and Scott Berry Kaufman wrote a great article on creativity over time, where they talk about what goes away, creativity and what stays or comes on. And the list of like what comes on and stays is much longer than [00:31:00] what goes away.

Steven Kotler: Now. There's stuff that does go away. So the question you've gotta 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 G is a friend of mine, he's on my board. We do a lot of research together. He's at UCSF and he had, he's a neuroscientist, you know, the Cover of Nature a bunch of years ago for a video game he designed.

Steven Kotler: It's the very first video game to be approved by the FDA. It treats cognitive decline in older adults, and what it specifically focuses on is task switching. If you go back to fluid intelligence, one of the things that declines over time is task switching. Our ability to focus on this and then focus on this, and that's a real problem.

Steven Kotler: 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 [00:32:00] that where it's used or lose it.

Steven Kotler: We just had to figure out how do you train it up. The other side of it is, so let's talk about the other weird, one of the things he said. One of the reasons we, our brain performance declines over time is white matter density decreases over time and we lose certain neurochemicals. So what he's not telling you is, well, you can replace those neurochemicals.

Steven Kotler: 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 'cause you're making less in your bones.

Steven Kotler: 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 used or lose it. And either we've already figured out how to fix them or this stuff is also progressing really, really, really quickly.

Steven Kotler: That's [00:33:00] the, the whole other side of this is regenerative medicine, longevity science, all that stuff is moving at exponential. 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 at exosomes stem cells, certain other thing, like we are good at that stuff now.

Steven Kotler: 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've sort of gotta dial. So technology's advancing and it's gonna solve a lot of, a lot of those issues.

Steven Kotler: A lot of those issues are not what we thought they were. And you can train a lot of that, that stuff in unusual ways as we're just figuring out. And some of the early ways, like all the brain games, I. They're [00:34:00] worthless. They're totally worthless. They train nothing other than the ability to play that game.

Steven Kotler: That's not how this works. But learning a foreign language, learning to play a musical instrument, learning a challenging dynamic activity, like all that stuff, no, no, that's the real medicine and that really actually does work. 

Hala Taha: 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.

Hala Taha: 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.

Hala Taha: Plus, with modern medicine, like you said, there's a lot that we can do to slow it down, reverse it. So that's amazing. So let's dig deep on these three types of thinking. You alluded to them at a high level that we get better at as [00:35:00] we're 50 and beyond. So you say it's istic thinking, non-dualistic thinking and systematic thinking.

Steven Kotler: 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 trus and most things are gray. That's relativistic thinking and and probabilistic thinking. And then the last category, we learn to see the forest through the trees.

Steven Kotler: 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. There's a huge business opportunity here and nobody's paying attention to it. So that little backstory, when I wrote, uh, bold, which is a book about like entrepreneurship and people like Larry Page and Jeff Bezos and El Musk and, and how to really use exponential technology and some human [00:36:00] capability flow science stuff to really level up organizations.

Steven Kotler: I spent so much years talking to CEOs and a lot of the time and a lot of those discussions we would talk about hiring. Who are the ideal employees? How do you find them? What do you need for the 21st century? And over and over again, thousands of times I heard the same two things from CEOs. I need employees who are really intelligent and really creative and really innovative.

Steven Kotler: '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.

Steven Kotler: If I don't have psychological safety, I don't have great team performance. That team performance, you can't be a company. You can't do those things without empathy and wisdom. Most importantly, the mantra of 21st century business, and maybe we thank Jeff Bezos for this, but it's always been it's customer centric thinking.

Steven Kotler: And if you're not [00:37:00] empathetic or you're not wise, nobody's thinking like a customer. I. So it turns out a well-trained 50-year-old and a well-trained is key, right? There's a whole bunch we have, like you wanna, those gateways of adult development have turned about these, it should be a hiring checklist. And in your fifties, you want access to these superpowers.

Steven Kotler: 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.

Steven Kotler: 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 gray, uh, 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 that will block creativity.

Steven Kotler: It blocks [00:38:00] empathy and it blocks wisdom. So like you have to train back risk diversion of really flower in your fifties, sixties, and seventies. But if you get it right and you've got all that stuff, these are dream employees. This is a business revolution. We n and the very people that are getting forced out of companies, no, no, no, no.

Steven Kotler: 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 Leviton might have said it is the first person I heard say it this bluntly. But, uh, Daniel Leviton is a, a neuroscientist who wrote a, just wrote a book called Successful Aging, where if you want.

Steven Kotler: 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 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 'cause I ran a bunch of weird ass experiments along the way.

Steven Kotler: But he said flat out, he is like the best. See, the best advice I can give you on [00:39:00] retirement is don't retire. Don't ever retire. Hmm. If you're interested in peak performance, aging retirement is a bad idea. Reinvention maybe. Maybe. I don't wanna do the same thing I've been doing my whole life and I wanna do something new.

Steven Kotler: Great, fantastic. Retirement death sentence. 

Hala Taha: So I have a couple follow-ups to this. A lot of my listeners are young entrepreneurs, business owners. So 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.

Hala Taha: 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, 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?

Hala Taha: And, and 

Steven Kotler: so I would ask Juan how physically active you are. If you're not dealing with somebody who, who has been regularly exercising for, for a, a [00:40:00] while and hitting all five dynamic categories, you don't wanna go near them. The number one correlate with health and longevity over time is leg strength, believe it or not.

Hala Taha: I know. I was gonna ask, that's one of my favorite facts. 

Steven Kotler: Yeah, it's wild. We, we could talk about why and, and whatever. 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 eighties, those questions become really fricking relevant.

Steven Kotler: 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 for folks over 50, identity, match fit, self-forgiveness, forgiveness of others. You don't get access to the cognitive superpowers without those things.

Steven Kotler: So those are the kinds of questions you wanna poke at to make sure are being checked off. Those sorts of things. Are you engaging in challenging, creative social activities that demand dynamic, deliver, play, and take place in novel, [00:41:00] outdoor like that? Those things, not, they become a checklist and they become, if you wanna work here and you're over a.

Steven Kotler: Age, you gotta do this 'cause we need you, but we need this version of you. And the most important thing is I look for older adults with much younger friends. I want to see those cross generational friendships because older adults, over 40 50, 1 of the reasons they're not to be trusted is 'cause they don't get the job.

Steven Kotler: 'cause 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.

Steven Kotler: So like 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. 

[00:42:00] 

 

Hala Taha: 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. 

Steven Kotler: So it turns out that both preserving physical abilities and cognitive function, leg strength is the single largest factor. Now, the cognitive function is weird.

Steven Kotler: 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, you're not mobile, you don't have a social life, it's all a lot harder to have a social life.

Steven Kotler: If you don't have a social life, you are not gonna aid successfully. And in fact, if you don't have a social life peak performance, you're, you're just sort of locked outta peak performance 'cause you social support for a lot of different psychological safety reasons and just performance reasons. It's really [00:43:00] important to have social support and part of that, like you can get really great social support on the telephone, on Zoom.

Steven Kotler: We all learn 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, pet an animal for about five to eight minutes, also releases oxytocin and some of those other pro-social chemicals.

Steven Kotler: So like if you're stuck on, like if you, we need social support for performance. We definitely need for pre performance. Aging animals are our friends here. 

Hala Taha: 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.

Hala Taha: 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. [00:44:00] 

Steven Kotler: So let's back up one step into and talk about learning, like where you started.

Steven Kotler: 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 the autopsy of your brain and you've got tangles and plaques everywhere, and it just looks like your brain's mush and you're still, nobody would notice if you're alive.

Steven Kotler: This was, so some of the early research that happened, they started autopsy brains and being like, whoa, this person had advanced Alzheimer's. How the hell did they function so well up till age a hundred? What is it? Expertise in learning and or to expertise in wisdom, which are two different things, but important thing here is their big broad networks and they're in the prefrontal cortex.

Steven Kotler: The prefrontal cortex is where [00:45:00] it's most vulnerable to cognitive decline. It's the newest brain structure from an evolutionary perspective. 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.

Steven Kotler: And there's these diverse networks. Lots of redundancy. Lots of backups. So this goes down. You got seven other copies over here, don't worry about it. So that's where you have to start with lifelong learning, and you wanna do everything you can to maximize learning for that very reason. So what do we know about learning?

Steven Kotler: 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. 

Hala Taha: Mm-hmm. 

Steven Kotler: So their attention, you can't learn anything obviously without focus or attention, right?

Steven Kotler: Like paying attention is the gateway for learning. Attention is a coupled system. It's linked to autonomy. And [00:46:00] 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.

Steven Kotler: So it got a bad name early on 'cause 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.

Steven Kotler: Introverts need to learn in private extroverts, wanna learn in public. We're somewhere on the risk aversion scale. Like we have 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, and so, you know, one of the most important things for me is I'm an introvert.

Steven Kotler: I don't mind being baddest stuff, but I don't like being bad in [00:47:00] public. So we, and most terrain parks are actually under chairlifts and very, very visible. So I would turn, take these park tricks into the side country, in the back country, in the woods, and I learned them out of sight with my friends. And then I could go back, like, try to do it the other way was impossible for me.

Steven Kotler: 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.

Steven Kotler: Carl Rogers argued that it, it functions as a fundamental drive. A fundamental drive, meaning it's got as much power as our drive for sex or food or. Shelter. 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.

Steven Kotler: So you learn better on the back [00:48:00] 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? I in Art 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.

Steven Kotler: We know this food wise, right? Like you want carbs, protein, and fats before you're going into workout. Same thing with motivation. You want authenticity, you want autonomy, you want passion, purpose, all these big intrinsic motivators, curiosity, you wanna stack them on top of each other. 'cause it maximizes our motivation.

Hala Taha: I love that. So to wrap up this part of the interview, I'd love for you to just sort of summarize what skills generally do you think older people are better at than younger people and older people, I guess, who have trained their brain properly, let's say? 

Steven Kotler: Well, anything that requires seeing things from other people's perspectives and multiperspectival thinking you're just [00:49:00] better at.

Steven Kotler: 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 and and do those things, but it's gonna start to happen naturally when you're older. So to me, the big one, the cool one is the systems thinking part.

Steven Kotler: 'cause like one of the commonalities among all the biggest brains I've ever met, all the real, that people really can affect change in the world. They're all systems thinkers. And it's really hard to train people how to be systems thinkers. It's a tough skill to bring on, you know, certain careers force you to learn it in different ways.

Steven Kotler: Writing, especially if you write books 'cause 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. [00:50:00] I. Mostly we specialize, especially in the modern world.

Steven Kotler: We specialize with. Specialize with specialize. And 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. It's very hard to innovate inside that same funnel that everybody's been in for 50 years.

Steven Kotler: 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, 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. So the thing that I think is, is the most exciting over is that.

Hala Taha: 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 Steven, I wanna wrap up this interview talking about your research in the, about the blue zones, these long lived communities around the [00:51:00] world.

Hala Taha: 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. 

Steven Kotler: Let me back this story up a little bit to tell you a story that's not in the book. 

Hala Taha: Yeah. 

Steven Kotler: That is where this actually starts, so people may know this or not know this.

Steven Kotler: For almost the past two decades, my wife and I were on a hospice care dog sanctuary. So for two decades we've done hospice work with dogs. We have a healing methodology that's based on, it's very low tech. It's flows, it's, it's, it's like lifestyle interventions in a sense. Some flow science, some evolutionary psychology.

Steven Kotler: 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, uh, we specialize in the worst of the worst. So if you are a geriatric chihuahua with an abusive pass, three legs, one eye cancer, heart disease, mange and flatulence, you're our guy.

Steven Kotler: That's who we work with. And the vets would be [00:52:00] like, we, they'd get these dogs. Dogs would be like, don't get attached. This dog is gonna live a month, month and a half at most. This is about a provider, 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 program.

Steven Kotler: So big sample size. And on average, our dogs wouldn't live another month or six weeks. They would live another 3, 4, 5 years. 

Hala Taha: Oh wow. 

Steven Kotler: You translate into that human numbers. That's right. You get seven years for over year. So like the top end of that, you're getting an extra like 28 years, 30. Like what the fuck is going on?

Steven Kotler: Pardon my language. 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.

Steven Kotler: So [00:53:00] Dan Bueller is a National Geographic reporter in the early two thousands noticed that there were places on the planet where people lived on average a 12 years longer than everybody else. They're all over the place. And he wanted to know, well, what are the commonalities? And he did a whole bunch of research.

Steven Kotler: 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 in this dietary. Those are the open, and those que, those questions are open. There's no argument on sort of the lifestyle stuff with the blue zones.

Steven Kotler: And the commonalities are really like move around a lot. Regular exercise, right? 

Hala Taha: Mm-hmm. 

Steven Kotler: 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.

Steven Kotler: This is why challenging social activities matter so much. This is built into blue zones. There's also this respect for the elders and [00:54:00] 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 very, very healthy diets.

Steven Kotler: But like there's no one diet across the boards that like works for everybody. 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 a. For example, they get social belonging and connection.

Steven Kotler: They really emphasize that you, in the blue zones, some of them people will spend six hours a day hanging out with friends or family. So a lot of it with our dogs, we had enforced petting time. So when you have a lot of dogs, like we, at various times, 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.

Steven Kotler: 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. Flow is really important to peak performance. Aging for a lot of different reasons, [00:55:00] but the state is 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.

Steven Kotler: So T cells fight. Diseases and natural killer cells fight tumors and sick cells and other the diseases of aging. So when we get into flow, it lowers inflammation which is tied to all the causes of aging. It per produces T cells killer, natural killer cells, a lot of benefits and it boosts the immune system.

Steven Kotler: 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.

Steven Kotler: 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 uh, action sport and outdoor athletes too. Colorado, Pitkin County, Colorado, and Eagle County, Colorado. Loma Linda, [00:56:00] California are the four places in America with the, where people, these are the Blue Zones Summit, Pitkin and Eagle.

Steven Kotler: This is Colorado, that's Veil, Aspen, beaver Creek, all the big ski areas. A lot of outdoor, 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.

Steven Kotler: They, and they take advantage of that stuff too. 

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

Steven Kotler: Well, one. It is completely erroneous though myself and Miha Chick miha are totally at fault for this.

Steven Kotler: Like we are to blame. But the idea that flow only shows up in athletes and artists is [00:57:00] 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.

Steven Kotler: You and your best friend get into a great conversation and a whole hour goes by and you don't notice it's gone. That'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.

Steven Kotler: Group flow, lots of research on that. Gardening, very flowy. Long walks in nature. You know, nature hike's. 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.

Steven Kotler: But I, you know, the, the list sort of goes on and on and on. If we want to enjoy the second half of our, if we wanna enjoy our lives in general, but if we really want to thrive during our second half of our lives, you can't do it [00:58:00] without flow. Flow is actually the engine of adult development. It's how we grow up.

Steven Kotler: We grow up by getting into flow states coming out. The other side is more complex, more skillful, more adaptive, more empathetic, wiser, and we move forward like so. It plays a big role in adult development and successful in peak performance Aging. 

Hala Taha: So just for all my young Anders, I'm gonna do a sort of Steven Koler marathon when this episode comes out.

Hala Taha: And I'm gonna replay all of our older episodes about flow, about all the different things that I've talked to with, uh, Steven over the past. So it'll 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.

Hala Taha: The first one is, what is one actionable thing that our young and profits can do today to become more profitable? Tomorrow 

Steven Kotler: you can double down on your primary flow activity, which is whatever the thing you've done most to your life, that just drops you into flow. For me, it's skiing right for my wife.

Steven Kotler: It's long walks with the dogs. My best friend is playing [00:59:00] guitar. Whatever that thing that most likely drops you into flow. Flow massively amplifies among other things, motivation, productivity, and creativity. And here's the cool thing. Even though a flow state lasts about 90 minutes, sometimes they can stretch out for longer.

Steven Kotler: 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 emotional regulation, emotional management, fear blocks, performance on every level. Flow resets the nervous system.

Steven Kotler: So, 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 thirties and you stopped 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.

Steven Kotler: And the research shows. That's a disaster. It's a disaster. In fact, we work with tons of people all over the world and burnout is a real [01:00:00] 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 and your primary flow activity, um, just to keep your nervous system where it needs to be.

Hala Taha: Yeah. I'd love for you to tell everybody about the Flow Research Collective and all the trainings you guys have available. 

Steven Kotler: Flow Research Collective is my organization. We're a research and training organization on the research side study the neurobiology of PQ and performance. So what's going on in the brain and the body when we're performing at our best.

Steven Kotler: We did this work with scientists all over the world at Stanford and Imperial College, London and UCSC and UCLA and uc, Davis and U-S-C-S-F and a whole bunch of other acronyms. And we take the science and, and we use it to train people. And we train, we train people in 130 countries and, uh, we train everybody from like professional athletes and, and members of the special forces to soccer moms and insurance brokers and teachers and folks in the Air Force.

Steven Kotler: And we work with a lot of companies in between. So we [01:01:00] we're, now we're training Facebook or Meta Accenture, Bain Capital, Audi, San Francisco Police Department, the Air Force wide SWAT of people. And our trainings are for everybody. And if you're interested, if you go to get more flow.com, cheesiest, URL in the world, but nobody was remembering any of the others.

Steven Kotler: So I've given in and it's now get more flow.com, despite the fact that I'm embarrassed to say it out loud. You can go there and sign up for a free, uh, 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?

Steven Kotler: 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 maow and most people get a lot out of it and it's free. Get more flow.com. 

Hala Taha: Amazing. I'll stick that link in the show notes to make it super easy for you guys.

Hala Taha: 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 he have, have to do with the topic of the episode? It's up [01:02:00] to you. What is your secret to profiting in life? 

Steven Kotler: It's just hard work.

Steven Kotler: 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.

Steven Kotler: Clearly, my job is to make my editor's job easier. Like my job editor has to like really comb through my articles and takes months. He hates me. That's not, you know, 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 for really, I did that for years.

Steven Kotler: 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. 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.

Steven Kotler: About [01:03:00] 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. 

Hala Taha: I love that answer. Thank you for sharing that. Where can everybody learn about you?

Hala Taha: Where can they get in our country and how can they find more about you, Steven, 

Steven Kotler: in our country? You can go to nar country.com or Amazon or wherever books are sold. Steven kotler.com gets you to me. Flow research collective.com gets you to the Flow Research collective. Get more flow.com gets you to our trainings.

Steven Kotler: I think that's it. 

Hala Taha: Amazing. Always. Such a great conversation with you. Steven. Thank you so much for your time. 

Steven Kotler: My pleasure. It's great hanging out with you again.

Hala Taha: