0:00:05 Today’s episode is sponsored in part by Teachable, Fundrise, Mint Mobile, Working Genius, Indeed,
0:00:06 and Shopify.
0:00:11 Teachable makes it easy for creators to monetize their content with full control.
0:00:15 Head to teachable.com and use code “PROFITING” to claim your free month on their pro-paid
0:00:16 plan.
0:00:20 Grow your real estate investments in minutes with the Fundrise flagship fund.
0:00:26 Add the Fundrise flagship fund to your portfolio with as little as $10 at fundrise.com/profiting.
0:00:29 Save big on wireless with Mint Mobile.
0:00:35 Get your new three-month premium wireless plan for just $15 a month at mintmobile.com/profiting.
0:00:39 Unlock your team’s potential and boost productivity with Working Genius.
0:00:44 Get 20% off the $25 Working Genius assessment at workinggenius.com with code “PROFITING”
0:00:46 at checkout.
0:00:49 Attract interview and hire all in one place with Indeed.
0:00:53 Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/profiting.
0:00:55 Terms and conditions apply.
0:00:59 Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you grow your business.
0:01:04 Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/profiting.
0:01:09 As always, you can find all of our incredible deals in the show notes.
0:01:22 What’s up, ya-bam!
0:01:24 You’re never too old to learn something new.
0:01:27 Just probably said that to yourself before.
0:01:29 I know I personally have said it a lot.
0:01:33 But is it actually possible to teach an old dog new tricks?
0:01:36 How about a really old dog?
0:01:40 To answer that question and many others, we’re going back to an interview I did in 2023 in
0:01:47 episode 211 with the award-winning journalist and human performance expert Steven Kotler.
0:01:52 These days, Steven is the best-selling author and the executive director of the Flow Research
0:01:53 Collective.
0:01:58 But when he was a kid, Steven was a skinny, klutzy, and usually the last guy picked for
0:01:59 any team.
0:02:05 At 53 years old, he decided to conquer his past shame and push his own aging body past
0:02:07 preconceived limits.
0:02:11 In this episode, Steven shares how to navigate peak performance as we age and how to keep
0:02:14 our use it or lose it skills.
0:02:18 He’ll also dispel some myths around our aging brain and provide some tips for how we
0:02:24 can stay at the top of our game as we enter our 30s, 40s, 50s, and beyond.
0:02:26 Stay right here and listen up.
0:02:28 I give you Steven Kotler.
0:02:33 Steven, I’m super looking forward to this conversation.
0:02:37 My podcast is called Young and Profiting, but I actually have avid listeners of all
0:02:39 ages in their 40s and 50s and beyond.
0:02:42 I know they’ll greatly appreciate this conversation.
0:02:47 To kick it off, I figured we would start with how you got the inspiration to study peak
0:02:48 performance.
0:02:53 You learned that you were really shocked by the story of Antonio Strativaris, and he’s
0:02:58 a famous violin maker, and he had amazing feet of creating two of his most famous violins
0:03:02 when he was 92 years old, and this was in the 1700s way before medical advancements.
0:03:07 I’d love to understand why his story was so shocking to you.
0:03:14 How did he dispel the typical thoughts around traditional aging, and how did he inspire
0:03:17 you to study peak performance aging?
0:03:18 I’ve said a lot of origin stories.
0:03:21 There’s 11 different things that come together.
0:03:25 I’ve been working, researching, looking at the field of peak performance aging for a
0:03:27 while, and a totally unrelated project.
0:03:31 I was going to write a mystery novel, and I wanted a cat burglar as a character who
0:03:33 was going to steal musical instruments.
0:03:35 Who made the rarest musical instruments in history?
0:03:40 I would stride a various, and then I found, figured out what you mentioned, which is he
0:03:44 made two of the rarest and most expensive musical instruments in his 90s, and I went,
0:03:46 well, wait a minute.
0:03:52 Something I’ve been told about physical abilities is the older myth about aging, which most
0:03:56 of us believe, and I believe at the time of this, is what you could call the long, slow
0:03:57 rot theory.
0:04:00 It’s the idea that all of our mental skills and our physical skills that decline over
0:04:04 time, there’s nothing we can do to stop the slide.
0:04:09 Included in those skills, physical skills would be fast twitch muscle response, fine
0:04:15 motor performance, dexterity, all this stuff you would need to make a violin or a viola
0:04:21 in your 90s along with expertise and wisdom and all that, like cognitive abilities, and
0:04:26 I, it sort of paused me and I was like, well, wait a minute, if this is true, either stride
0:04:31 a various is like the one in a billion, or most of what we’ve been told about aging
0:04:32 is wrong.
0:04:36 I had already been looking at other aspects of it, but really sort of lit a fire under
0:04:41 me to really investigate our physical abilities and what happened to them over time.
0:04:45 I’ve been looking at the cognitive stuff for a while, it’s very related to flow.
0:04:50 How we age, flow plays a big role there, so this is not new territory to me.
0:04:54 The physical side was like, holy crap, could this possibly be true?
0:04:55 And it is true.
0:04:56 It’s true across the board.
0:05:01 Every one of our physical skills are user-to-lose skills, and the research is really clear.
0:05:04 We don’t stop using these skills, both physical and mental.
0:05:09 We can hang on to them, even advance them far, far later into life than any of you thought
0:05:10 possible.
0:05:11 I love this.
0:05:16 A long, slow rot theory basically means that our physical mental skills decline over time.
0:05:19 There’s nothing that we can really do to stop the slide.
0:05:24 That’s what inspired you to kind of research this in more detail, understand performance
0:05:25 peak aging.
0:05:30 And like you just said, you said that user-to-lose skills, we actually have control over them.
0:05:35 We used to think that our physical abilities just decline, but there’s a way we can actually
0:05:36 keep those skills.
0:05:41 So talk to us more about user-to-lose skills, what they are, how we keep them, I guess,
0:05:42 healthy?
0:05:47 Yeah, so there’s a bunch of stuff on the cognitive side.
0:05:48 Let’s get back there in a second.
0:05:52 On the physical side, there’s five main categories that matter.
0:05:58 Since a lot of your listeners are younger, let me start here, which is peak performance
0:06:00 aging starts young.
0:06:02 The research is really clear.
0:06:07 Interventions in your 80s, even beyond matter, really matter.
0:06:11 You can really make changes right up to the end, and they matter, and they’re going to
0:06:13 have actual big effects.
0:06:17 But a lot of this stuff that you want to start working on, you actually want to start working
0:06:20 on your 20s and your 30s.
0:06:22 The biohacking crowd is very aware of this.
0:06:26 A lot of that crowd is 20s and 30s, and they’re doing a lot of these things.
0:06:29 Now, I might argue that they’re doing some of the wrong stuff because they don’t quite
0:06:31 understand what peak performance aging is.
0:06:35 But besides the point, a lot of this stuff starts young.
0:06:42 On the physical side, we want to train five skills that matter most, strength, stamina,
0:06:45 flexibility, agility, and balance.
0:06:47 Those are the five skills that you want to train over time.
0:06:48 This is not new knowledge.
0:06:52 The World Health Organization knows exactly how many minutes a week we should be training
0:06:53 these things.
0:06:59 The peak performance aging is 150 to 300 minutes of hard aerobic training a week, moderate to
0:07:05 vigorous aerobic training a week, two strength training days a week, and three flexibility
0:07:07 balance and agility days a week.
0:07:15 Or you can find one skill I chose, park skiing in the book, that accompanies all that.
0:07:21 In park skiing, I’m using strength, stamina, balance, agility, flexibility.
0:07:23 There’s other stuff you want to do.
0:07:27 We have things called prime mover muscles, our big muscles, and then we have stabilizer
0:07:30 muscles like your rotator cuffs or your hip flexors.
0:07:36 Over time, the body gets more efficient and you start using the prime movers and not use
0:07:39 the stabilizer muscles.
0:07:43 If you’ve been on the couch for a while and you come back to athletics, you’re not going
0:07:44 to hurt your quad.
0:07:48 You’re going to tear the stabilizer, you’re going to tear your hip flexor because it stopped
0:07:49 doing the work.
0:07:54 Your quad, if you’re walking around, your amuletory is working, your hip flexor has started to
0:07:55 atrophy.
0:07:58 There’s ways you want to think about training that’s a little bit different if you’ve been
0:08:03 away for a while, but those are the physical skills we need to train over time.
0:08:06 On the cognitive side, it’s a really long list.
0:08:10 Let me pause there, let you ask another question, then we’ll get to the stuff on the cognitive
0:08:13 side because we’ll spend the next 20 minutes talking.
0:08:16 Yeah, 100%.
0:08:22 On the physical side, why are action sports and what you call dynamic activities so important
0:08:25 to help us with these user-to-lose-it skills?
0:08:29 I think a lot of people who are older, we’re used to going to the gym, taking group classes,
0:08:33 whatever, but nobody’s really thinking about action sports and you say that they’re a great
0:08:35 way to leverage these skills.
0:08:38 Okay, we’ve got to get to the full sentence anyway, so let’s go for it.
0:08:39 Just tell me.
0:08:43 Throw it out there and then we’ll break it apart and why it matters so much.
0:08:47 If you want to rock to your drop, if you really are interested in peak performance aging,
0:08:54 you need to regularly engage in challenging creative and social activities, that is, you
0:09:01 just pointed out that demand dynamic, deliberate play and take place in novel outdoor environments.
0:09:07 Let’s unpack this big ass sentence and what it means and why it answers your question.
0:09:11 Challenging social and creative, lifelong learning matters for a bunch of different reasons,
0:09:16 but short version, if we want to preserve brain function, we need expertise and wisdom.
0:09:21 Expertise and wisdom are these very diverse neural nets in the brain, lots of real estate,
0:09:24 lots of redundancy and pervious to cognitive decline.
0:09:28 The more expertise, the more wisdom, and this is why one of the reasons peak performance
0:09:33 aging starts young, like literally the guy who did the core research on wisdom, Elkinon
0:09:39 Goldberg, his core advice is the more wisdom, the more expertise, the more we have cognitive
0:09:43 reserve, the more we can stave off Alzheimer’s to make sure cognitive decline.
0:09:48 All the things that are going to happen to the brain over time is how we fight back and
0:09:53 his point was, wisdom among the many things encapsulated in wisdom are all the unconscious
0:09:59 rules that govern how the systems work, how does behavior work, all that stuff.
0:10:03 It’s onboarded slowly over time, so you want to start training these things.
0:10:05 You want to start learning.
0:10:08 Challenging creative and social activities, we learn a lot during.
0:10:12 They also tend to drive us into flow.
0:10:14 Social activities are really important as we age.
0:10:18 The important thing you can do for your brain is maintain social activity because it keeps
0:10:24 the brain active in really important ways and really lower stress level.
0:10:28 A lot of stuff we’re going to be talking about, there are nine known causes of aging.
0:10:30 They’re all linked to inflammation.
0:10:31 Inflammation is linked to stress.
0:10:36 Anything you do that fights stress, that lowers stress, that gives you more emotional control
0:10:39 is involved in peak performance aging.
0:10:43 Social activities, lower stress, they give us these pro-social, oh, there’s people around
0:10:48 who love me, got my back, I can be a little less stressed, so there’s a lot of that stuff.
0:10:51 Dynamic deliberate play is the next bit.
0:10:52 Dynamic is literally what we’re talking about.
0:10:54 It’s just a fancy way of saying it.
0:10:59 It’s all five categories of functional fitness, strength, stamina, flexibility, balance, agility.
0:11:02 Deliberate play, you’ve heard of deliberate practice.
0:11:07 Anders Erickson’s favorite expertise, repetition with incremental advancement is the fastest
0:11:12 path for his expertise and Anders wasn’t wrong, but as he himself said, that’s only
0:11:18 through in certain very precise disciplines and when faced with just general learning,
0:11:21 deliberate play works better than deliberate practice.
0:11:24 Deliberate play is repetition with improvisation.
0:11:27 You can do the same thing you did last time, but a little bit of flourish, a little flourish,
0:11:31 a little something fun is playful, meaning there’s no shame, there’s no embarrassment.
0:11:37 If you’re bad, who cares, you’re having fun, but that feeling of play produces more neurochemistry,
0:11:39 more endorphins.
0:11:45 This one really boosts the immune system, lowers stress levels, but amplifies learning.
0:11:50 Dynamic deliberate play says I’m using all the physical skills that decline and I’m learning
0:11:52 better than any other way.
0:11:56 Novel outdoor environments, the last bit, why do we care?
0:12:00 This is back, action sports demand dynamic deliberate play and they take place in novel
0:12:03 outdoor environments and they’re challenging, creative, and social.
0:12:07 One stop shopping, the last bit is most important bit.
0:12:10 Outdoor environments in general, lower stress.
0:12:14 We know this is well-established in positive psychology, a 20 minute walk in the woods
0:12:17 will outperform most SSRIs for treatment of depression.
0:12:22 I can talk about why if you care, but we know that good for you, lower stress, so in itself
0:12:27 being in nature is anti-inflammatory, so it’s better for healthy aging.
0:12:31 If you want to preserve brain function, how do you do that?
0:12:36 You want to birth new neurons and turn those new neurons into neural nets.
0:12:37 That’s learning.
0:12:41 The adult brain, contrary to what we used to believe for a long time, it actually does
0:12:46 continue to birth new neurons and in fact, the adult brain will birth about 700 new neurons
0:12:51 a day, even basically until you die, but where do those neurons show up is the key.
0:12:54 The question, they show up in a part of the brain known as the hippocampus.
0:12:55 The hippocampus does two things.
0:13:01 It does long-term memory and it does location, place, it’s packed with place cells and grid
0:13:02 cells.
0:13:03 Why?
0:13:04 We evolved as hunter-gatherers.
0:13:07 When you were in the wild and something emotionally charged happened, you got to remember where
0:13:09 you were when it happened.
0:13:10 That’s survival.
0:13:13 Where did I get attacked by that tiger so I don’t go back there?
0:13:17 Where was that ripe fruit tree so when it comes into season, I’m hungry, I can go there?
0:13:19 This is survival.
0:13:21 This is what the brain is designed to do.
0:13:25 Peak performance and peak performance aging is always getting our biology to work for
0:13:27 us rather than against us.
0:13:34 Our biology is designed to remember when we have novel experiences in outdoor environments.
0:13:35 That’s what you want to use it for.
0:13:38 Action sports gives you that.
0:13:42 I also say in the book that if action sports aren’t your thing, you can duplicate a lot
0:13:45 of this by simply hiking with a weight vest.
0:13:49 Weight vests are really key, better than a lot of other things because they amplify bone
0:13:50 density.
0:13:56 A little-known fact, your bones, where you store all your minerals, all your nutrients
0:13:59 are stored in your bones and they’re released.
0:14:04 Something that drives the brain, calcium for example, which is everything the brain does,
0:14:06 it’s stored in the bones.
0:14:11 As our bones become less dense over time, which happens, it impacts everything.
0:14:16 For women, really important after menopause, where does most of your estrogen come from?
0:14:17 Your bones.
0:14:23 So wildly fluctuating hormonal levels, which is a problem that most people have postmenopause
0:14:25 exacerbated by bone density.
0:14:28 If you want to increase bone density, one of the best ways is hiking with a weight vest.
0:14:31 There’s lots of literature, there’s lots of science on that.
0:14:34 There’s also a bunch of other benefits, but it hits all of those categories if you’re
0:14:37 not interested in action sports.
0:14:43 That said, there’s a lot to recommend in action sports, especially a lot of in our country
0:14:47 is about a new way of approaching these difficult, challenging physical activities late in life
0:14:52 that’s much safer and much more well-suited to progression.
0:14:58 Yeah, because I have to say, I’m in my 30s and I used to ski and I don’t even ski anymore
0:15:01 because I’m like, I’ve got too much lift for it, I don’t want to break a bone, I’m not
0:15:02 into it.
0:15:07 So I totally love that you’re giving another option in terms of the weighted vest and hiking.
0:15:13 So in your book, you actually took on park skiing and this is something that people used
0:15:17 to believe that anybody over 35 really couldn’t learn.
0:15:22 So talk to us about learning that activity at 53 years old and what you learned as an
0:15:25 old dog learning new tricks.
0:15:29 So there’s a couple of things you need to know to flesh this out a little bit, but
0:15:30 you are right.
0:15:31 Everything you said is totally true.
0:15:33 Why did I think I could learn to park ski?
0:15:38 There’s a whole bunch of new stuff and like flow science, my field and body cognition,
0:15:41 a couple of other whiz bang fields that I was like, you know, if these things are right,
0:15:46 should be totally possible for older adults to be able to learn really, really difficult
0:15:47 skills.
0:15:49 I’ll give you like one random example.
0:15:51 We have a motor learning window.
0:15:56 Like Beverly says, don’t become a gymnast or a ballet dancer after 25, right?
0:15:59 Because that window is closed and you can’t just, that’s sort of true.
0:16:02 There is like, like a lot of things would be performance aging.
0:16:08 It’s true, but and here’s the but what really changes is not our ability to learn.
0:16:13 It’s how we learn when we’re kids, we play when we’re adults.
0:16:14 We have shame.
0:16:15 We have embarrassment.
0:16:16 We have time crunches.
0:16:17 We have stress.
0:16:19 We have a whole bunch of other stuff.
0:16:24 If you can shift back into that attitude of play, a lot of that motor learning window
0:16:25 reopens.
0:16:28 So that’s just one example.
0:16:31 A lot of the skills that we used to think declined over time.
0:16:34 We now know they’re usually losing skills, including the skills we need to learn out
0:16:35 of park ski.
0:16:38 So that was sort of where it came from.
0:16:40 I was an expert skier.
0:16:42 I just had never parked skied.
0:16:43 I knew no tricks.
0:16:44 Right.
0:16:45 I was a big mountain skier.
0:16:49 I could go in a straight line very fast, really well, but park skiing is like, you take
0:16:54 it, it’s doing tricks off jumps and on rails and wall rides is very acrobatic, very dangerous.
0:16:58 So it was a totally not a new adventure for me.
0:17:02 There were a lot of reasons to take it up.
0:17:06 There were a lot of advantages about like knowing how to park ski later in life was
0:17:08 actually what I was after.
0:17:13 But it was just a great way to test all this science and when we learned and here’s what’s
0:17:14 cool.
0:17:17 So I made to measure progress, I made a list of 20 tricks.
0:17:19 It’s a zero to like intermediate.
0:17:22 Intermediate mattered because once you get there, you’re sort of like, you take the random
0:17:28 shit out of the equation, like you can control your progress and not have these accidental
0:17:31 falls or things that really can get you hurt early on.
0:17:34 I figured if it took five years, cool, whatever.
0:17:35 Like I didn’t care.
0:17:38 I started when I was 63, if it took me to 60, great, whatever, who cares?
0:17:39 I did it in under a season.
0:17:43 In fact, I’ve never learned anything so fast in my entire life and the cool part was my
0:17:48 ski partner who’s your age and was a former professional athlete who got very injured,
0:17:53 retired, had a family, had a job, came back this sport.
0:17:57 He used the same methodology and got farther than he’s ever gotten before.
0:17:59 We came back the following year.
0:18:03 We took 17 older adults ages 29 to 68.
0:18:10 They were intermediate at best park skiers or skiers and snowboarders and we trained
0:18:13 them up in four days on the mountain and they got good.
0:18:17 But then, because as you pointed out, action sports, not for everyone.
0:18:21 The key thing here is mindset.
0:18:22 What am I talking about?
0:18:24 Let me tell you what we did and let me tell you what it was.
0:18:26 We then stripped out the action sports.
0:18:34 We used weight vest hiking instead and we put 300 adults, all ages, ages like 30 to 85,
0:18:40 I think, through the same kind of training to see if we could explode their mindset
0:18:46 towards ageing and get them on what I call the NAR style quest, which is a challenging
0:18:50 social and creative activity that demands dynamic deliberate play and takes place in
0:18:51 novel outdoor environments.
0:18:56 I don’t care what it is, I wanted them to just start on a quest that would lead to something
0:18:57 that way.
0:19:01 What I really wanted to do was explode the mindset of old, oh, I’m too old for this shit.
0:19:02 I’m going to get hurt.
0:19:04 I got things I want to hold on to.
0:19:06 It sets up.
0:19:07 It’s really weird.
0:19:13 Our biology is designed when we’re young, kids, teenagers, young adults, the seeking
0:19:15 system drives our behavior.
0:19:16 This is exploratory behavior.
0:19:19 I’m going to go out and check out something new.
0:19:22 I’m going to figure out who I am and what I do and how I want to live and how do I want
0:19:23 to make a living.
0:19:24 All that stuff.
0:19:25 This is about dopamine and norepinephrine.
0:19:27 Those are very potent, feel good, neurochemicals.
0:19:30 They’re very addictive, very, very, very addictive.
0:19:33 Cocaine’s the most widely addictive drug on earth.
0:19:37 All that happens is it causes the brain to release some dopamine and it blocks its reuptake.
0:19:39 So dopamine is really addictive.
0:19:44 When we get stuff that we want to hold on to, oh, I got the right job.
0:19:45 I’ve got the right partner.
0:19:46 I’ve got kids.
0:19:47 I’ve got dogs.
0:19:49 I’ve got a great apartment.
0:19:50 I like my bike.
0:19:53 Whatever it is, we no longer want to be seeking.
0:19:58 We want the stuff that is about conserving what we have, protecting what we have, bonding.
0:20:02 So we get endorphins and anandamide and oxytocin.
0:20:06 These are the pro-social neurochemicals that underpin strong family structures and things
0:20:11 like that, strong company structures, and they’re great, but we’re trading our addictions.
0:20:14 And what happens is it makes us very, very conservative.
0:20:16 It shuts down the seeking system.
0:20:19 We get the voice in our head that says, “Hey, don’t do that.
0:20:21 You’re going to lose what you have.”
0:20:24 The truth of the matter is like old people are literally addicted to the wrong drugs
0:20:25 in their bodies.
0:20:29 You need all of these systems working together for big performance aging, and there’s a
0:20:31 penalty for having a mind set of old.
0:20:33 And this is the point.
0:20:34 There’s a big health and longevity penalty.
0:20:38 In fact, when you flip it, when you have a positive mindset towards aging, second half
0:20:40 of my life is filled with thrilling and exciting possibilities.
0:20:42 My best days are ahead of me.
0:20:43 It translates.
0:20:47 And this is one of the most well-established facts in performance aging.
0:20:51 It will translate into additional seven and a half years of health and longevity.
0:20:53 That’s huge.
0:20:55 That’s like quitting smoking huge.
0:21:01 In fact, if you’re morbidly obese and have a shitty mindset towards aging, change your
0:21:02 mindset first.
0:21:06 It should actually have a bigger effect on your life and your health and your longevity
0:21:08 than losing weight.
0:21:10 So it’s really, really important.
0:21:12 It’s where peak performance aging starts.
0:21:17 And one of the reasons that peak performance aging starts young is if you never develop
0:21:19 this mindset, this isn’t going to be a problem.
0:21:22 You’re not going to have to overcome it.
0:21:27 One of the reasons the NAR style adventure is so useful for older adults is like, for
0:21:30 me, it didn’t matter what I wanted to believe about aging.
0:21:34 Once I got out on the mountain, I was learning how to do 360s and nose butter 360s and 180s
0:21:36 and all the other stuff I learned.
0:21:40 It just blew up all my limiting beliefs about what was possible in the future because I’ve
0:21:44 just onboarded the most difficult physical thing I’ve ever done in my life and I did
0:21:45 it at 53.
0:21:48 And I’ve done a lot of difficult physical things along the way.
0:21:50 This was definitely the hardest and I did it.
0:21:55 And I’m still at Park Skating at 55 now because I wrote books a couple of years old in terms
0:21:57 of when I wrote it.
0:22:00 Let’s hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors.
0:22:07 YapGang, I appreciate a good deal just like anyone else, but I’m not going to cross a
0:22:11 desert or walk through a bed of hot coals just to save a few bucks.
0:22:15 It needs to be straightforward, no complications and no nonsense.
0:22:19 So when Mint Mobile said that I could get wireless service for just 15 bucks a month
0:22:22 with a three month plan, I was skeptical.
0:22:26 But it is truly that simple to secure wireless at 15 bucks a month.
0:22:29 And Mint Mobile made my transition incredibly easy.
0:22:31 The entire process was online.
0:22:35 It was easy to purchase, easy to activate and easy to save money.
0:22:39 The only lengthy part that took up any time was waiting on hold to cancel my previous
0:22:40 provider.
0:22:44 If you want to get started, just go to mintmobile.com/profiting.
0:22:48 You’ll see right now that all the three month plans are only 15 bucks a month, including
0:22:50 the unlimited plan.
0:22:55 All plans come with high speed data and unlimited talk and text, delivered on the nation’s
0:22:56 largest 5G network.
0:23:00 And don’t worry, you can use your own phone and keep your current phone number with any
0:23:02 Mint Mobile plan.
0:23:06 Find out how easy it is to switch to Mint Mobile and get three months of premium wireless
0:23:09 for just 15 bucks a month.
0:23:13 To get this new customer offer and your new three month premium wireless plan for just
0:23:17 15 bucks a month, go to mintmobile.com/profiting.
0:23:19 That’s mintmobile.com/profiting.
0:23:25 Get your wireless bill to just 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.com/profiting.
0:23:29 $45 upfront payment required equivalent to $15 a month.
0:23:32 New customers on first three month plan only.
0:23:35 Speed slower above 40 GB on unlimited plan.
0:23:37 Additional taxes, fees and restrictions apply.
0:23:40 See Mint Mobile for details.
0:23:43 Young and Profiters, Buy Low, Sell High.
0:23:45 It’s easy to save, but it’s hard to do.
0:23:49 For example, high interest rates are crushing the real estate market right now.
0:23:53 Demand is dropping and prices are falling, even for many of the best assets.
0:23:58 It’s no wonder the Fundrise Flagship Fund plans to go on a buying spree, expanding its billion
0:24:02 dollar real estate portfolio over the next few months.
0:24:06 You can add the Fundrise Flagship Fund to your portfolio in just minutes with as little
0:24:11 as $10 by visiting fundrise.com/profiting.
0:24:15 That’s F-U-N-D-R-I-S-E.com/profiting.
0:24:21 Again, you can diversify your portfolio with the Fundrise Flagship Fund at fundrise.com/profiting.
0:24:26 That’s F-U-N-D-R-I-S-E.com/profiting.
0:24:30 Carefully consider the investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses of the Fundrise
0:24:33 Flagship Fund before investing.
0:24:38 This and other information can be found in the Fund’s prospectus at fundrise.com/flagship.
0:24:40 This is a paid advertisement.
0:24:44 Yeah, fam, if you’re anything like me, you didn’t start your business to spend all your
0:24:49 time managing finances – budgeting, invoicing and tax prep?
0:24:52 Not exactly the fun part of entrepreneurship.
0:24:57 My COO Jason, on the other hand, is great at finances, but even he doesn’t want to
0:25:02 switch between five different apps for banking, expense tracking and contractor payments.
0:25:04 We wanted a tool that could just do it all.
0:25:05 And guess what?
0:25:06 We found one.
0:25:09 And yes, it’s called F-O-N-D.
0:25:14 F-O-N-D is an all-in-one financial tool made for entrepreneurs and solopreneurs.
0:25:18 F-O-N-D handles everything – business banking, bookkeeping, invoicing, vendor payments and
0:25:20 even tax planning.
0:25:22 No more juggling multiple apps.
0:25:25 Found does it all in one place.
0:25:29 With smart features like automatic expense tracking, virtual cards for specific budgets
0:25:35 and no hidden fees or minimum balances, F-O-N-D helps us stay organized and save time.
0:25:40 Plus, signing up is quick and easy – no paperwork or credit checks required.
0:25:44 Join the 500,000 small business owners who trust F-O-N-D.
0:25:46 Start your business banking working for you.
0:25:49 Try Found for free at found.com/profiting.
0:25:55 Stop getting lost in countless finance apps and try Found for free at found.com/profiting.
0:26:00 Sign up for Found for free at F-O-N-D.com/profiting.
0:26:03 Found is a financial technology company, not a bank.
0:26:07 Banking services are provided by Pyrmont Bank, member FDIC.
0:26:08 Found’s core features are free.
0:26:16 They also offer an optional paid product, Found Plus.
0:26:22 I can feel your enthusiasm and sort of like your vigor for life and so it’s really positive
0:26:25 that you’re spreading this message in terms of how people can basically stay young at
0:26:31 heart forever and like you said it’s totally in your control if you put yourselves in situations
0:26:36 where you’re activating your brain in certain ways, you’re playing, you’re dispelling
0:26:40 any sort of internal beliefs that you have about your own abilities but actually going
0:26:45 out and doing these physical things in turn, it’s helping improve your cognitive performance.
0:26:49 Just amazing, really cool stuff and nobody has talked about this on the podcast yet so
0:26:51 it’s very exciting.
0:26:56 So sticking on this point of mindset I’d love to talk about this concept of dirty old shame.
0:27:03 I know that you had to get over some internal traumas from my understanding when you were
0:27:04 growing up.
0:27:08 You weren’t always this sporty, you were sort of the last kid picked on the team at school
0:27:13 and you mentioned in your book that part of you kind of overcoming and taking on this challenge
0:27:17 was you getting over these past traumas so talk to us about that and how we need to do
0:27:18 that as well.
0:27:22 So another reason peak performance aging sort of starts young.
0:27:23 First we start with the good news.
0:27:27 One of the reasons old dogs can learn new tricks that we haven’t talked about yet is
0:27:31 as we enter our fifties, it’s really in our late forties, there are a bunch of really
0:27:35 profound changes in how the brain processes information.
0:27:39 One, certain genes only turn on with experience, they’ll only flip these switches later in
0:27:40 life.
0:27:45 Two, in our fifties the two hemispheres of the brain which essentially function in opposition
0:27:49 to each other along the way, they start working together like never before and finally the
0:27:53 brain starts to recruit underutilized resources in our fifties.
0:27:58 So as a result we gain access to whole new levels of intelligence, creativity, empathy
0:28:03 and wisdom and it’s, I go on and on and on about those benefits, there’s a lot that comes
0:28:07 with that but these are not guaranteed.
0:28:12 So psychologists talk about moderators, the technical term, it’s an if then condition.
0:28:15 You get this only if you do this, right?
0:28:21 And if you want the access to these cognitive superpowers in our fifties and we’ll come
0:28:26 back to it but from a profit perspective, we really want to talk about those superpowers
0:28:27 in a second.
0:28:29 Let me finish this point.
0:28:33 There are a number of gateways of adult development that you have to pass through.
0:28:40 So by the age 30, you sort of, if you really just want to enjoy and kick ass beyond 30,
0:28:45 you have to have solved the crisis of identity which sort of shows up around age 12 and Ericsson
0:28:49 thought he used to disappear at 18, it doesn’t but it does.
0:28:52 If you haven’t solved it by 30, you have a problem.
0:28:56 The reason is by 40 you need match fit.
0:28:57 Match fit is an economics term.
0:29:02 It means there’s a tight link between who I am and what I do in the world, right?
0:29:06 If you just, if you don’t know who you are, you can’t get match fit because there’s no,
0:29:09 if you don’t know your strengths, your values, all that stuff.
0:29:15 So that has to be by 30, by 40 we need to be, we haven’t met fit and then by 50, we need
0:29:16 forgiveness.
0:29:20 We got to forgive ourselves for like past embarrassments and past shames and we got to
0:29:22 forgive those who have done us harm.
0:29:27 And as you pointed out, I spent most of my childhood losing fights to jocks.
0:29:31 I was a punk rocker, the jocks didn’t like us, I didn’t like them.
0:29:36 And this was back in the ’70s and ’80s and you got to understand like cars of football
0:29:39 players would pull up on the side of the road and they’d see a guy with a mohawk and they’d
0:29:41 jump out to beat you up.
0:29:46 And it was like five against one always and it was not a great situation.
0:29:48 So I had a lot of anger.
0:29:53 And I knew peak performance aging, you got to put that shit down.
0:29:57 You cannot thrive in your fifties, you don’t get these superpowers, which is why old dogs
0:29:59 can learn new tricks better than young dogs.
0:30:04 It’s why, one of the reasons I learned park skiing so fast is I have more intelligence.
0:30:09 I’ve got more creativity, I’ve got the stuff I need, and I’ve got even more wisdom, which
0:30:15 this means I could keep myself safer than when I was making better decisions along the way.
0:30:16 That stuff is great.
0:30:19 I don’t get it if I can’t forgive those who have done me wrong.
0:30:25 So the standard best way to do that, and there’s tons of researchers loving kindness meditation
0:30:28 and passion meditation, it’s an incredibly potent tool.
0:30:31 It’s amazing for a ton of different stuff.
0:30:36 It’s been studied for probably longer than any other meditation style.
0:30:38 We understand all the neuroscience.
0:30:44 But when it came to people who I got in fist fights with and worse for 10 years, it wasn’t
0:30:45 enough.
0:30:50 All the loving kindness meditation in the world, I could forgive a lot of stuff and clean
0:30:51 out a lot.
0:30:55 I was left with it just wasn’t going away.
0:31:01 So I decided one of the reasons I took on an incredibly difficult physical jockey challenge
0:31:06 is, okay, I’m going to go, this is my problem, let’s go walk a mile in there, moccasins.
0:31:10 Let’s take this on, and it turns out it worked.
0:31:12 By the way, I didn’t think it was going to work.
0:31:15 I just knew I needed to do this to thrive.
0:31:17 And I was like, well, I’m out of any other ideas.
0:31:22 Loving kindness meditation, which is what everybody is not getting it done.
0:31:26 And there’s still anger there, there’s still resentment there, there’s still stuff there.
0:31:32 So let me see if taking on this kind of putting myself on a physical mission could clear that
0:31:33 out.
0:31:34 And it did.
0:31:38 And the story is sort of in the end of the book, and I want to sort of ruin it.
0:31:43 A spoiler alert, right? I would be giving away sort of that one and I’m not going to.
0:31:47 But it was one of the neater things that happened along the way is I got to put down like a
0:31:52 bunch of sort of shame and embarrassment and like stuff that I have carried since I was
0:31:56 probably 10 or 12, definitely 12.
0:31:57 That’s amazing.
0:32:01 Do you feel like much lighter now and that you just can approach things differently?
0:32:06 Like how did that impact you getting over that trauma like that after so many years of
0:32:08 having the same issue?
0:32:14 I always say that one of the myths that a lot of people have about their life is that
0:32:16 people think it’s going to get easier.
0:32:19 Like you think, oh, I’m going to get older, I’m going to get better at this, I’m going
0:32:24 to be able to sort of like, oh, I know exactly what I like and I can manicure my life.
0:32:27 And it just doesn’t get easier.
0:32:28 It just doesn’t.
0:32:35 What it gets is more meaningful and more like life satisfaction overall well-being.
0:32:39 And that’s what this really impacted somehow.
0:32:43 It made life more meaningful like in those ways.
0:32:47 I don’t know, do I feel lighter perhaps?
0:32:50 But it just sort of, it closed that loop.
0:32:51 You know what I mean?
0:32:52 Yeah.
0:32:53 Okay, done.
0:32:54 Check.
0:32:55 I don’t have to worry about that anymore.
0:33:02 And literally what it really does is when certain memories just like pop into my head,
0:33:06 now they just last a half second and I’m like, oh yeah, there’s that thing and it goes away.
0:33:11 Whereas before, no, I could start to think on it and dwell on it and then I’d have a
0:33:12 problem.
0:33:13 Yeah.
0:33:14 Have you ever heard of Arthur Brooks?
0:33:15 I think so.
0:33:17 He’s somebody that I think you should definitely look into.
0:33:22 So I had Arthur Brooks on the podcast in 2021, sorry, 2022.
0:33:25 And he was like one of my favorite interviews and he wrote this book called Cracking the
0:33:26 Code to Happiness.
0:33:30 He’s a Harvard professor, social scientist, and basically he talks about how your brain
0:33:34 biologically is different before 40 and after 40.
0:33:39 And he talks about fluid intelligence versus crystallized intelligence.
0:33:44 And so this was like a big conversation that we had on the podcast and something that made
0:33:45 us think a lot.
0:33:47 I had a lot of feedback from my listeners.
0:33:52 And I feel like what you say is pretty different from what he says.
0:33:53 There are some similarities.
0:33:57 But basically what he’s saying is that you have a biological clock ticking, your ability
0:34:01 to reason, think flexibly, learn new things, problem solve, be innovative.
0:34:04 That starts to decline in your 40s and 50s.
0:34:05 And that doesn’t mean that your brain starts to go bad.
0:34:10 You just start to have crystallized intelligence or you accumulate knowledge, facts, skills,
0:34:14 and you can use that throughout your career as a way to teach other people.
0:34:18 And essentially what he’s saying is you’ve got to be ready for the second half of your
0:34:23 career and not miss that and be trying to chase your younger self and your younger brain,
0:34:24 essentially.
0:34:29 For example, the professional athlete becomes the coach, the star litigator becomes a partner,
0:34:34 the singer becomes an A&R exec, and you’re basically teaching younger people your knowledge
0:34:37 and taking on that second wave of your career.
0:34:42 So he is right and he is wrong as far as I could tell.
0:34:49 Where he’s really right is passing along knowledge is absolutely key to peak performance aging.
0:34:50 It’s key to…
0:34:53 In fact, the society is where people age the best.
0:34:55 Two things are very true.
0:34:58 One, they don’t have negative stereotypes towards aging.
0:35:03 So ageism is the most common and socially accepted stereotype in the world.
0:35:07 I go out in the public these days with any stereotype, somebody’s going to punch me
0:35:10 in the mouth and cancel me, except for ageism.
0:35:14 Ageism, people are like, “Oh, you’re too old to do that shit.
0:35:15 We geezer each other red and left.”
0:35:20 And it’s crazy.
0:35:23 The stereotype of aging and it’s incredibly detrimental.
0:35:30 In fact, you could go as so far as literally we are killing older adults with how we talk
0:35:31 about them.
0:35:33 So that is really, really clear.
0:35:36 Society is where there’s no ageism.
0:35:38 There’s also cross-generational friendships.
0:35:41 So the old are passing along knowledge.
0:35:43 This is a natural part of brain development.
0:35:47 Now, you have to put things into categories.
0:35:48 He is not wrong.
0:35:51 We do shift from fluid intelligence into crystallized intelligence.
0:35:56 That transition does happen, but, but, but, but, but, a bunch of the skills that we thought
0:36:02 declined over time, like the fluid intelligence skills that we thought went away, no, it turns
0:36:03 out that’s not true at all.
0:36:07 We get actually new levels of intelligence and creativity in our fifties.
0:36:09 So that’s not actually true.
0:36:15 There’s certain things, the article I like best, Martin Seligman from Penn and Scott
0:36:20 Barry Kaufman wrote a great article on creativity over time, where they talk about what goes
0:36:24 away and creativity and what stays or comes on.
0:36:27 And the list of like what comes on and stays is much longer than what goes away.
0:36:30 Now, there’s stuff that does go away.
0:36:34 So the question you’ve got to now ask, is it permanent?
0:36:37 Is this real or have we just not figured out how to train it?
0:36:38 So let me give you an example.
0:36:40 Adam Ghazali is a friend of mine.
0:36:41 He’s on my board.
0:36:43 We do a lot of research together.
0:36:49 He’s at UCSF and he’s a neuroscientist in the cover of nature a bunch of years ago for
0:36:51 a video game he designed.
0:36:54 It’s the very first video game to be approved by the FDA.
0:36:56 It treats cognitive decline in older adults.
0:37:00 And what it specifically focuses on is task switching.
0:37:04 If you go back to fluid intelligence, one of the things that declines over time is task
0:37:07 switching, our ability to focus on this and then focus on this.
0:37:09 And that’s a real problem.
0:37:14 He’s got a video game that will take your brain, if you’re 60, you play it literally
0:37:19 I think it’s three hours a week or three 20 minute sessions a week for six weeks is the
0:37:23 standard doctor prescription for this video game and it will reset your 60 year old brain
0:37:24 back to 20.
0:37:29 So there’s a bunch of stuff like that where it’s user to lose it.
0:37:31 We just had to figure out how do you train it up?
0:37:37 The other side of it is, so let’s talk about the other weird one of the things he said.
0:37:43 One of the reasons our brain performance declines over time is white matter density decreases
0:37:46 over time and we lose certain neurochemicals.
0:37:50 So what he’s not telling you is, well you can replace those neurochemicals.
0:37:55 In fact SSRIs, which actually suck for depression, turn out to be great for older adults.
0:38:00 Low level SSRIs because serotonin levels decline over time and SSRIs can boost them.
0:38:03 If you don’t want to take a drug, hike with a weight vest.
0:38:07 Most of your serotonin is manufactured in your bones and one of the reasons the brain
0:38:12 has less is because you’re making less in your bones and if you increase bone density,
0:38:15 you get the serotonin back, you get a bunch of those neurochemicals back.
0:38:20 The general thinking is sort of true, but a lot of those skills are user to lose it
0:38:24 and either we’ve already figured out how to fix them or this stuff is also progressing
0:38:27 really, really, really quickly.
0:38:32 The whole other side of this is regenerative medicine, longevity, science, all that stuff
0:38:35 is moving at exponential rates.
0:38:43 So for example, five years ago, we could not deal with most tendon bone and ligament problems.
0:38:50 Today, there’s very little you can do to tendons, bones or ligaments, exosomes, stem cells,
0:38:51 certain other things.
0:38:53 We are good at that stuff now.
0:38:55 It’s advanced really far.
0:39:00 Now, if anybody is making you promises about stem cells that go like beyond bones, ligaments,
0:39:05 and tendons, no, no, they’re lying and they’re exaggerating what’s real right now, but up
0:39:08 to that point, no, no, we’ve sort of got it dialed.
0:39:13 So technology is advancing and it’s going to solve a lot of those issues.
0:39:19 A lot of those issues are not what we thought they were and you can train a lot of that
0:39:25 stuff in unusual ways as we’re just figuring out and some of the early ways, like all the
0:39:28 brain games, that they’re worthless, totally worthless.
0:39:32 They train nothing other than the ability to play that game.
0:39:37 That’s not how this works, but learning a foreign language, learning to play a musical
0:39:42 instrument, learning a challenging dynamic activity, like all that stuff.
0:39:46 No, no, that’s the real medicine and that really actually does work.
0:39:47 Yeah.
0:39:50 I love what you’re saying because I remember leaving that conversation with Arthur Brooks,
0:39:53 although it was really enlightening and he said a lot of smart things.
0:39:54 I felt depressed.
0:39:59 I was like, oh man, I got less than 10 years to do all my innovative stuff and it’s good
0:40:03 to know what you’re saying that we are actually in control.
0:40:07 Of course you can be passive and the inevitable will happen with your cognitive decline, but
0:40:13 if we’re proactive and fight that natural tendency that’s going to happen, plus with
0:40:18 modern medicine, like you said, there’s a lot that we can do to slow it down, reverse
0:40:19 it.
0:40:20 So that’s amazing.
0:40:25 Let’s dig deep on these three types of thinking you alluded to them at a high level that we
0:40:28 get better at as we’re 50 and beyond.
0:40:33 So you say it’s relativistic thinking, non-dualistic thinking and systematic thinking.
0:40:34 Yeah.
0:40:39 So short version, our ego quiets down and our perspective whiteness.
0:40:43 So essentially we learn to see things from multiple perspectives.
0:40:48 We learn that there are very few black and white truths and most things are gray.
0:40:51 That’s relativistic thinking and probabilistic thinking.
0:40:55 Then the last category, we learn to see the forest through the trees.
0:41:01 We get good, better at systems thinking and seeing the big picture.
0:41:07 Because of these skills, this is where that extra intelligence, creativity, empathy and
0:41:09 wisdom comes from and builds out of this intelligence.
0:41:14 There’s a huge business opportunity here and nobody’s paying attention to it.
0:41:20 So that little back story, when I wrote “Bold,” which is a book about like on-and-be-neurship
0:41:25 and people like Larry Page and Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and how to really use exponential
0:41:30 technology and some human capability, flow science stuff to really level up organizations.
0:41:36 I spent so much years talking to CEOs and a lot of the time and a lot of those discussions,
0:41:38 we would talk about hiring.
0:41:39 Who are the ideal employees?
0:41:41 How do you find them?
0:41:43 What do you need for the 21st century?
0:41:48 And over and over again, thousands of times, I heard the same two things from CEOs.
0:41:54 I need employees who are really intelligent and really creative and really innovative because
0:41:58 the rate of change is really fast and I got to keep pace and stay ahead of it.
0:41:59 Otherwise, I don’t have a company.
0:42:00 I don’t have a business.
0:42:01 I can’t do any of that.
0:42:07 The other thing I need is I need employees who are empathetic and wise because if I don’t
0:42:10 have psychological safety, nobody can do their job.
0:42:14 If I don’t have psychological safety, I don’t have great team performance, that team performance,
0:42:15 you can’t be a company.
0:42:18 You can’t do those things without empathy and wisdom.
0:42:22 Most importantly, the mantra of 21st century business and maybe we thank Jeff Bezos for
0:42:27 this, but it’s always been customer-centric thinking and if you’re not empathetic or you’re
0:42:31 not wise, nobody’s thinking like a customer at all.
0:42:38 So it turns out a well-trained 50-year-old and well-trained is key.
0:42:40 There’s a whole bunch.
0:42:44 Those gateways of adult development, it should be a hiring checklist.
0:42:47 And in your 50s, you want access to these superpowers.
0:42:52 You need to engage in creative activities that unlocks these new thinking styles.
0:42:56 That’s another reason why challenging creative and social activities matter.
0:43:02 And you need to fight off risk aversion and train down physical fragility because if your
0:43:04 body is rotting, what good is all this new mental skills?
0:43:09 You can’t use it and risk aversion, which increases over time.
0:43:12 This is why challenging activities matter so much.
0:43:16 Risk aversion increases over time and has a lot to do with like literally a white banner
0:43:21 volume in the brain, but we have to train back because the more risk averse you are,
0:43:26 the more afraid you are, the more norepinephrine you’re producing that will block creativity.
0:43:28 It blocks empathy and it blocks wisdom.
0:43:34 So you have to train back risk aversion to really flower in your 50s, 60s, and 70s, but
0:43:39 if you get it right and you’ve got all that stuff, these are dream employees.
0:43:43 This is a business revolution way nabbing the very people that are getting forced out
0:43:44 of companies.
0:43:50 No, no, no, no, they’re the very people we need in our companies most overall.
0:43:52 And in fact, this is not my line.
0:43:56 I think it’s Daniel Leviton might have said it is the first person I heard say this bluntly,
0:44:01 but Daniel Leviton is a neuroscientist who just wrote a book called “Successful Aging”
0:44:02 here.
0:44:07 In my book, my book is sort of a fun adventure story, the science is in the footnotes and
0:44:11 sort of at the end, if you really want every itch of the science, you can either take my
0:44:15 peak performance aging training or you can read “Successful Aging” and like he goes
0:44:16 through all of it.
0:44:20 We came to all of the same conclusions, though I think I took my conclusions farther because
0:44:23 I ran a bunch of weird ass experiments along the way.
0:44:28 But he said flat out is like the best advice I can give you on retirement is don’t retire,
0:44:29 don’t ever retire.
0:44:34 If you’re interested in peak performance aging, retirement is a bad idea.
0:44:39 Reinvention, maybe, maybe I don’t want to do the same thing I’ve been doing my whole
0:44:43 life and I want to do something new, great, fantastic.
0:44:44 Retirement, death sentence.
0:44:46 So I have a couple of follow-ups to this.
0:44:50 A lot of my listeners are young entrepreneurs, business owners.
0:44:55 So if we’re going to take your advice, give older people a chance when it comes to hiring.
0:44:59 I mean, I know there’s a big ageism issue, especially in the tech world, I used to work
0:45:03 at Disney streaming services, like you were old over 40, you know, and like people looked
0:45:07 at you sideways, you know, and didn’t trust you to do your job, essentially, if you were
0:45:09 older than 40, 45.
0:45:10 So I know there’s ageism.
0:45:14 So if you were to interview somebody in their fifties, what questions would you ask them
0:45:17 to make sure that they’ve been training their brain?
0:45:21 So I would ask one, how physically active you are.
0:45:27 If you’re not dealing with somebody who has been regularly exercising for a while and hitting
0:45:31 all five dynamic categories, you don’t want to go near them.
0:45:35 The number one chore that with health and longevity over time is leg strength, believe
0:45:36 it or not.
0:45:39 I know I was going to ask, that’s one of my favorite facts.
0:45:40 Yeah, it’s wild.
0:45:43 And we can talk about why and whatever.
0:45:47 I don’t think you can ask incoming, you know, employees, hey, what are you, squat?
0:45:48 Maybe you can.
0:45:53 But it actually like, if we’re going to ask, put politicians in office in their eighties,
0:45:56 those questions become really fricking relevant.
0:45:59 Like that’s the, those are things you really want to know.
0:46:01 Are you engaging in challenging creative social activity?
0:46:08 Like are you that those things become a checklist for folks over 50 identity, match fit, self
0:46:10 forgiveness, forgiveness of others.
0:46:14 You don’t get access to the cognitive superpowers without those things.
0:46:21 So those are the kinds of questions you want to poke at to make sure are being checked off.
0:46:22 Those sorts of things.
0:46:26 Are you engaging in challenging creative social activities that demand dynamic, deliberate
0:46:27 play and take place in novel outdoor?
0:46:31 Like that, those things, not, they become a checklist and they become, if you want to
0:46:38 work here and you’re over this age, you got to do this because we need you, but we need
0:46:39 this version of you.
0:46:45 And the most important thing is I look for older adults with much younger friends.
0:46:53 I want to see those cross-generational friendships because older adults over 40, 50, one of the
0:46:57 reasons they’re not to be trusted is because they don’t get the job because they’re just
0:47:04 too out of touch and things have changed and there’s a lot of stuff that changes and stays
0:47:05 the same.
0:47:09 And you sort of want the older adults around for that reason, but you also, being old is
0:47:11 not an excuse for not keeping up either.
0:47:16 Like what I’m telling you is you’ve got access to more brain power.
0:47:20 So like it’s really not an excuse as far as I’m concerned.
0:47:21 So I think it’s got to be mutual.
0:47:25 And I think the benefits are going to be amazing if it can be mutual.
0:47:29 We’ll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors.
0:47:33 Young and Profiters, chances are if you’re listening to this show, you’ve got an expertise
0:47:34 that you can teach other people.
0:47:39 Chances are you can make passive income by creating your first course.
0:47:43 If you’ve been on the fence about creating a course, what are you waiting for?
0:47:48 It is so easy to launch a course these days because Teachable has got your back.
0:47:50 Teachable is the number one course platform.
0:47:55 It is simply the best platform for content creators to start or grow an online business
0:47:56 authentically.
0:48:00 That’s because Teachable offers more product options to create and sell than any other
0:48:06 platform with online courses, digital downloads, coaching services, memberships and communities.
0:48:11 You can engage your online audience on a deeper level and you can get selling fast with easy
0:48:15 to use content and website builders plus a variety of AI tools.
0:48:17 They have an AI curriculum generator.
0:48:20 They have automatic subtitles and translations.
0:48:25 So they’ve really figured out how to use AI to optimize our course creation and make
0:48:26 it much faster.
0:48:30 They also have a top rated mobile app that allows your customers to enjoy your products
0:48:31 on the go.
0:48:36 On Teachable, creators also get more power and ownership over monetizing their content.
0:48:40 Your content shouldn’t get lost in the algorithm and you shouldn’t have to rely on other companies
0:48:41 to pay you.
0:48:45 Now is the perfect time to join Teachable because you get an exclusive deal with our
0:48:47 partner code, profiting.
0:48:52 Go to teachable.com and use code profiting to unlock a free month on their pro plan.
0:48:56 You’ll get all their marketing, product creation features to build out your offerings and
0:48:58 there’s no limitations on this trial.
0:48:59 So you definitely don’t want to miss this.
0:49:01 Again, it’s teachable.com.
0:49:05 You can use code profiting for an entire free month on Teachable.
0:49:09 Be a part of the 100,000 plus creators who are already using Teachable to turn their
0:49:12 expertise into a thriving online business.
0:49:16 Hey, yeah, bam, launching my LinkedIn secrets masterclass was one of the best things I’ve
0:49:20 ever done for my business and I didn’t have to figure out all the nuts and bolts of creating
0:49:23 a website for my course.
0:49:24 I needed a lot of different features.
0:49:28 I needed chat capabilities in case anybody had questions.
0:49:30 I needed promo code discounts.
0:49:36 I needed a laundry list of features to enable what I was envisioning with my course.
0:49:41 But here’s the thing, all I had to do was literally lift a finger to get it all done
0:49:46 and that’s because I used Shopify.
0:49:52 Shopify is the easiest way to sell anything, to sell online or in person.
0:49:56 It’s the home of the number one checkout on the planet and Shopify is not so secret secret
0:50:00 as Shoppay, which boosts conversions up to 50%.
0:50:06 That means way fewer cards get abandoned and way more sales get done.
0:50:10 So when students tell me that they can’t afford my course, I let them know about payment
0:50:11 plans with Shoppay.
0:50:13 It is a game changer.
0:50:17 If you’re into growing your business, your commerce platform better be ready to sell
0:50:22 wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling on the web, in your store, in their feed and
0:50:24 everywhere in between.
0:50:28 Put simply, businesses that sell more sell with Shopify.
0:50:32 Get your business and get the same checkout we use at YAP Media with Shopify.
0:50:39 Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/profiting and that’s all lowercase.
0:50:43 Go to Shopify.com/profiting to upgrade your selling today.
0:50:48 That’s Shopify.com/profiting.
0:50:53 Young Improfitors, I spent years slaving away and so many different jobs trying to prove
0:50:58 myself, trying to figure out what gave me joy at work, and trying to build productive
0:50:59 teams.
0:51:01 Eventually, I figured it all out.
0:51:05 But what if you could learn that stuff about yourself and your team in a fraction of the
0:51:06 time that I did?
0:51:11 The working genius model will transform your work, your team, and your life by leveraging
0:51:13 your natural gifts.
0:51:15 We each possess a unique set of skills.
0:51:19 And let’s face it, you’re going to be more fulfilled and successful when you lean into
0:51:23 rather than away from your natural true talents.
0:51:28 Working genius can help you discover how to increase joy and energy at work by understanding
0:51:31 what your working geniuses really are.
0:51:36 The working genius assessment only takes 10 minutes and the results can be applied immediately.
0:51:41 I took the assessment and my two primary working geniuses are inventing and galvanizing.
0:51:46 I just love creating new things and then rallying people together to bring them to life.
0:51:50 That’s why I’ve been starting businesses and growing teams for years.
0:51:53 Your own working genius may be completely different.
0:51:57 The working genius assessment is not just a personality test, it’s a productivity tool.
0:52:02 It can help you identify your own individual talents and provide a great roadmap for creating
0:52:05 productive and satisfied teams.
0:52:10 You and your team will get more done in less time with more joy and energy.
0:52:16 To get 20% off the $25 working genius assessment, go to workinggenius.com and enter the promo
0:52:18 code profiting at checkout.
0:52:19 That’s right.
0:52:25 You can get 20% off the $25 working genius assessment at workinggenius.com using promo
0:52:31 code profiting.
0:52:36 I want to get into authentic learning and how older people can learn new skills, but let’s
0:52:40 go on the tangent of why we should never skip leg day.
0:52:47 It turns out that both for preserving physical abilities and cognitive function, leg strength
0:52:49 is the single largest factor.
0:52:51 Cognitive function is weird.
0:52:53 Some of it has to do with bone density.
0:52:58 Again, we’re back to the bones and the big bones in your legs and if they’re dense, they’re
0:53:02 not losing their minerals, they’re nutrients, they can feed the brain.
0:53:07 The second part is that if you’re not mobile, you don’t have a social life.
0:53:09 It’s a lot harder to have a social life.
0:53:13 If you don’t have a social life, you are not going to aid successfully.
0:53:16 In fact, if you don’t have a social life, peak performance, you’re just sort of lock
0:53:21 out of peak performance because you social support for a lot of different psychological
0:53:25 safety reasons and just performance reasons, it’s really important to have social support
0:53:26 and part of that.
0:53:29 You can get really great social support on the telephone, on Zoom.
0:53:33 We all learned that during COVID, but there is something to be said for in-person, oxytocin.
0:53:40 I always tell people, if for whatever reason you’re stuck with the phone and Zoom, make
0:53:44 sure you pet a dog for at least eight minutes a day, a dog or a cat.
0:53:48 Petting an animal for about five, eight minutes also releases oxytocin and some of those other
0:53:50 pro-social chemicals.
0:53:54 If you’re stuck on, if we need social support for performance, we definitely need for peak
0:53:56 performance aging.
0:53:57 Animals are our friends here.
0:53:58 Yeah.
0:53:59 I love that.
0:54:03 I feel like you’re giving us so much great tips in terms of how we can age gracefully and
0:54:07 be impactful at an older age and still innovative and creative.
0:54:11 This is such a meaningful episode to me because honestly, we don’t talk about this enough
0:54:13 on the podcast.
0:54:15 We do need to learn as we’re older.
0:54:17 Obviously, it’s possible.
0:54:20 You learned how to park ski at 53.
0:54:25 Let’s talk about how we can learn and embrace authentic learning.
0:54:30 Let’s back up one step and talk about learning, where you started.
0:54:33 I just want to start where you started, which is.
0:54:39 If you want to stave off Alzheimer’s, dementia, cognitive decline, flu intelligence, what
0:54:43 matters, lifelong learning, why is that?
0:54:46 Expertise and wisdom are the two most important things we can do to develop what’s known
0:54:49 as cognitive reserve.
0:54:52 If you have a high cognitive reserve, you could even have advanced Alzheimer’s, meaning
0:54:56 you die the autopsy of your brain and you’ve got tangles and blacks everywhere and it just
0:55:00 looks like your brain’s mush and you still, nobody would notice if you were alive.
0:55:02 This was some of the early research that happened.
0:55:07 They started autopsying brains and being like, whoa, this person advanced Alzheimer’s.
0:55:11 How the hell did they function so well up till age 100?
0:55:12 What is it?
0:55:17 Expertise and learning or to expertise and wisdom, which are two different things, but
0:55:22 important thing here is they’re big broad networks and they’re in the prefrontal cortex.
0:55:26 The prefrontal cortex is where it’s most vulnerable to cognitive decline.
0:55:31 It’s the newest brain structure from an evolutionary perspective and it’s the most vulnerable.
0:55:34 You don’t suffer cognitive decline like deep in your brainstem.
0:55:38 It’s impervious, but the prefrontal cortex is where it shows up.
0:55:42 Expertise and wisdom live in the prefrontal cortex and there’s these diverse networks.
0:55:47 Lots of redundancy, lots of backup, so if this goes down, you’ve got seven other copies
0:55:50 over here, don’t worry about it.
0:55:55 That’s where you have to start with lifelong learning and you want to do everything you
0:55:58 can to maximize learning for that very reason.
0:55:59 What do we know about learning?
0:56:03 One of the best ways to maximize learning is authentic learning.
0:56:08 This is a big movement in education right now, and it’s based on a whole bunch of different
0:56:13 stuff, but let me just talk about one thing.
0:56:17 You can’t learn anything, obviously, without focus or attention.
0:56:19 Paying attention is the gateway for learning.
0:56:20 Attention is a coupled system.
0:56:25 It’s linked to autonomy, and autonomy means we like driving the bus.
0:56:28 We like being in charge of our own lives.
0:56:33 We can’t pay maximum attention to something if it’s not by choice.
0:56:38 Authentic learning means we learn based basically exactly on who we are.
0:56:41 It got a bad name early on because people started talking about learning styles.
0:56:45 Are you a visual learner or an auditory learner or a clinic?
0:56:46 That’s absolute nonsense.
0:56:47 That’s actually not true.
0:56:48 We’re all those things.
0:56:51 It depends on what we’re learning and how we’re wired.
0:56:53 It changes over time, and that’s not actually true.
0:56:58 What is true is everybody shows up somewhere on the introversion to extroversion scale.
0:57:01 Introverts need to learn in private.
0:57:03 Extroverts want to learn in public.
0:57:05 We’re somewhere on the risk-aversion scale.
0:57:11 We all have, “I’m this fearful,” and you can only be pushed so far.
0:57:17 Authentic learning is about those kinds of questions, the questions that really matter.
0:57:21 One of the most important things for me is I’m an introvert.
0:57:26 I don’t mind being bad at stuff, but I don’t like being bad in public.
0:57:30 Most terrain parks are actually under chairlifts and very, very visible.
0:57:35 I would take these park tricks into the side country, in the back country, in the woods,
0:57:41 and I’d learn them out of sight with my friends, and then I could go back, try to do it the
0:57:42 other way.
0:57:43 It was impossible for me.
0:57:44 I don’t work that way.
0:57:49 You can keep … There’s a lot more to authentic learning, but the big point here is also taking
0:57:54 on these kind of NAR style challenges late in life, like learning how to park skier, whatever.
0:57:57 Phenomenal for peak performance aging, but you need a lot of motivation.
0:58:03 It turns out we are driven towards authenticity.
0:58:06 Car Rogers argued that it functions as a fundamental drive.
0:58:12 A fundamental drive, meaning it’s got as much power as a drive for sex or food or shelter.
0:58:14 You have a drive to be yourself.
0:58:19 You’re authentic self, and if you get it right, you get a huge boost in motivation, which
0:58:22 is crucial for all this stuff.
0:58:28 You learn better on the back end, and you’re more motivated to learn on the front end.
0:58:33 Being that there’s a lot to do in peak performance aging and it can be challenging, you want
0:58:35 all the help you can get.
0:58:39 In Artemis, what I talk about, one of the things peak performers are really good at
0:58:43 is they never meet a challenge on a single field source.
0:58:45 We know this food-wise, right?
0:58:49 You want carbs, protein, and fats before you’re going into work out.
0:58:51 It’s a thing of motivation.
0:58:52 You want authenticity.
0:58:54 You want autonomy.
0:58:59 You want passion, purpose, all these big intrinsic motivators, curiosity.
0:59:04 You want to stack them on top of each other because it maximizes our motivation.
0:59:05 I love that.
0:59:10 To wrap up this part of the interview, I’d love for you to just summarize what skills
0:59:14 generally do you think older people are better at than younger people?
0:59:18 Older people, I guess, who have trained their brain properly, let’s say.
0:59:22 Anything that requires seeing things from other people’s perspectives and multi-perspectival
0:59:24 thinking, you’re just better at.
0:59:29 It’s harder to do when you’re younger because of how the ego functions and how the brain
0:59:30 functions.
0:59:31 You’re just better at it when you’re older.
0:59:37 You can meditate a lot to lower cognitive bias and do those things, but it’s going to
0:59:40 start to happen naturally when you’re older.
0:59:47 To me, the big one, the cool one, is the systems thinking part because one of the commonalities
0:59:54 among all the biggest brains I’ve ever met, all the real, the people who really can affect
0:59:57 change in the world, they’re all systems thinkers.
1:00:01 It’s really hard to train people how to be systems thinkers.
1:00:04 It’s a tough skill to bring on.
1:00:10 Certain careers force you to learn it in different ways, writing, especially if you write books,
1:00:14 because you have to hold 400 pages in your head and move it around and be able to do
1:00:18 stuff like that, you have to be able to hold the big picture.
1:00:22 It’s built into the job and it’s trained up over time, but it’s not trained up in a lot
1:00:23 of jobs.
1:00:29 Mostly, we specialize, especially in the modern world, we specialize, we specialize, we specialize.
1:00:32 One of the things that I want to point out here is, and anybody who’s ever worked in
1:00:37 entrepreneurship, innovation, you know all the big innovations are in the cracks between
1:00:38 disciplines.
1:00:44 It’s very hard to innovate inside that same funnel that everybody’s been in for 50 years,
1:00:49 but you move adjacent to where that funnel touches something and suddenly there’s a revolution
1:00:50 waiting to happen.
1:00:54 That’s how you build companies and world change companies and everything else.
1:00:59 You can’t see that shit if you’re not a systems thinker, it’s completely invisible to you.
1:01:03 The thing that I think is the most exciting over is that.
1:01:05 Yeah, that was really inspiring to me.
1:01:10 I’m actually writing a book with Penguin Random House coming out in 2025 and that little bit
1:01:12 of information was really inspiring.
1:01:15 I’m going to include it in my book and credit you.
1:01:21 Okay, so Stephen, I want to wrap up this interview talking about your research about the Blue
1:01:24 Zones, these long-lived communities around the world.
1:01:28 You alluded to some of it, but I’d love for you to sort of dive deeper on what you found
1:01:32 in terms of why these people live longer, happier.
1:01:37 Let me back this story up a little bit to tell you a story that’s not in the book that is
1:01:39 where this actually starts.
1:01:43 People may know this or not know this for almost the past two decades.
1:01:47 My wife and I were on a hospice care dog sanctuary.
1:01:51 For two decades, we’ve done hospice work with dogs.
1:01:57 We have a healing methodology that’s based on, it’s very low-tech, it’s like lifestyle
1:02:01 interventions in a sense, some flow science, some evolutionary psychology, nothing really
1:02:02 fancy.
1:02:05 Our dogs all get checked out by vets when they come to us.
1:02:11 Before they come to us, they come from shelters, but we specialize in the worst of the worst.
1:02:19 If you are a geriatric chihuahua with an abusive past, three legs, one eye, cancer, heart disease,
1:02:21 mange, and flatulence, you’re our guy.
1:02:23 That’s who we work with.
1:02:27 The vets would be like, don’t get attached.
1:02:30 This dog is going to live a month, a month and a half at most.
1:02:33 This is about to provide our very good death.
1:02:40 We bring the dogs in, and mind you, over 700 dogs have passed through our facility and
1:02:44 over 5,000 are in our program, so big sample size.
1:02:47 On average, our dogs wouldn’t live another month or six weeks.
1:02:51 They would live another three, four, five years.
1:02:56 You translate into that human numbers, that’s right, you get seven years for every year.
1:03:01 The top end of that, you’re getting an extra like 28 years, 30, like what the fuck is going
1:03:02 on?
1:03:03 Pardon my language.
1:03:07 I started to ask questions like, what’s going on?
1:03:08 Why is this working?
1:03:10 What are we doing?
1:03:11 Will it work in humans?
1:03:14 Would any of this stuff work in humans?
1:03:20 It turns out almost everything I were doing with the dogs exists in these so-called blue
1:03:24 zones, which is what led me to the blue zones in the first place.
1:03:28 Dan Bueller is a National Geographic reporter in the early 2000s, noticed that there were
1:03:35 places on the planet where people lived, on average, 12 years longer than everybody else.
1:03:38 They’re all over the place, and he wanted to know, well, what are the commonalities?
1:03:40 He did a whole bunch of research.
1:03:42 The research is a little controversial.
1:03:46 The controversy is not on the lifestyle stuff, it’s on the … There’s some stuff that has
1:03:51 been turned into supplements and is dietary, and those are the open, and those questions
1:03:52 are open.
1:03:56 There’s no argument on the lifestyle stuff with the blue zones, and the commonalities
1:04:02 are really move around a lot, regular exercise, destressed regularly.
1:04:09 Have rituals, meditation, exercise, gratitude practices, breathing work, whatever it is,
1:04:14 walking in nature, have rituals to destress regularly, a ton of stuff on social belonging
1:04:16 and connection.
1:04:19 This is why challenging social activities matter so much.
1:04:21 This is built into blue zones.
1:04:26 There’s also this respect for the elders in these cross-generational friendships.
1:04:27 They’re built into blue zones.
1:04:29 There’s some evolution.
1:04:30 They eat healthy.
1:04:35 They eat less than most people, and they eat very, very healthy diets, but there’s no one
1:04:38 diet across the board that works for everybody.
1:04:42 But those are the commonalities, and they live with passion, purpose, and regular access
1:04:44 to flow.
1:04:48 These were all things that we were providing for our dogs.
1:04:51 For example, they get social belonging and connection.
1:04:53 They really emphasize it in the blue zones.
1:04:57 Some of them, people spend six hours a day hanging out with friends or family, so a lot
1:04:58 of it.
1:05:03 With our dogs, we had enforced petting time, so we didn’t have a lot of dogs.
1:05:07 We had various times, and we’ve had 40, 50 dogs.
1:05:09 It’s hard to individual petting time.
1:05:12 You have to like, “Oh, I got to hang out with this dog,” but we would do it because
1:05:15 we wanted these neurochemicals underneath it.
1:05:16 Same thing with flow.
1:05:19 We’d find ways to put our dogs into flow.
1:05:24 Flow is really important to peak performance aging for a lot of different reasons, but
1:05:28 the state is just a really positive, powerful emotional state.
1:05:32 Some of the emotions that show up in flow stimulate the production of T cells and natural
1:05:33 killer cells.
1:05:37 T cells fight diseases, and natural killer cells fight tumors and sick cells and other
1:05:39 of the diseases of aging.
1:05:45 When we get into flow, it lowers inflammation, which is tied to all the causes of aging.
1:05:49 It peruses T cells, natural killer cells, a lot of benefits, and it boosts the immune
1:05:50 system.
1:05:52 This is the stuff we were doing in our dogs.
1:05:53 This is the stuff that’s going on in the blue zone.
1:05:59 This is the stuff we now widely know correlates to healthy longevity.
1:06:02 This isn’t really peak performance aging.
1:06:04 It’s successful aging, healthy aging.
1:06:09 At this point, it should be common sense for everybody, really, is really what it should
1:06:11 be.
1:06:15 One of the things that’s interesting is you also see a high, a lot of the places where
1:06:19 there are blue zones, you see a lot of actions for outdoor athletes too.
1:06:24 Colorado, Pitkin County, Colorado, Eagle County, Colorado, and Loma Linda, California are
1:06:29 the four places in America where people, these are the blue zones, Summit, Pitkin, and Eagle.
1:06:30 This is Colorado.
1:06:35 That’s Vale, Aspen, Beaver Creek, all the big ski areas, a lot of outdoor stuff.
1:06:40 In Loma Linda, that’s a Seventh Day Adventist population.
1:06:48 They’re very social, very flowy, good dietary stuff, a lot of belonging, it’s the same stuff,
1:06:53 and a lot of outdoor activities surfing because it’s California on the ocean, right?
1:06:55 They take advantage of that stuff too.
1:06:56 Yeah.
1:06:57 I’d love to get a couple of examples here.
1:07:02 First of all, what are examples of getting into flow, aside from sports, as an adult?
1:07:08 It’s number one, and then number two, what are some examples of creative social activities
1:07:10 as an adult?
1:07:16 Well, one, it is completely erroneous, though myself and Mihai Chicks and Mihai are totally
1:07:18 at fault for this.
1:07:24 We are to blame, but the idea that flow only shows up in athletes and artists is not true.
1:07:28 We focused a lot on athletes and we focused a lot on artists, so people think it’s only
1:07:33 athletes and artists, but the most common flow state on earth is reading or interpersonal
1:07:34 flow.
1:07:37 Interpersonal flow is like the group flow, you and your best friend get into a great conversation
1:07:40 and a whole hour goes by and you don’t notice it’s gone.
1:07:43 That interpersonal flow happens all the time.
1:07:47 One of the reasons you want to engage in challenging creative and social activities, they all trigger
1:07:49 flow.
1:07:55 Singing in a choir, very, very flowy, group flow, lots of research on that, gardening,
1:07:58 very flowy, long walks in nature.
1:08:06 Nature likes very, very flowy, coding, architecture, drawing, drumming, dancing, on and on and
1:08:07 on.
1:08:08 There’s a ton of flow at work.
1:08:12 In fact, flow is much more common at work than it is during leisure for a bunch of different
1:08:17 reasons, but the list goes on and on and on.
1:08:21 If we want to enjoy our lives in general, but if we really want to thrive during our
1:08:24 second half of our lives, you can’t do it without flow.
1:08:27 Flow is actually the engine of adult development.
1:08:28 It’s how we grow up.
1:08:33 We grow up by getting into flow states, coming out the other side is more complex, more skillful,
1:08:36 more adaptive, more empathetic, wiser.
1:08:37 We move forward.
1:08:42 It plays a big role in adult development and successful in pre-performance aging.
1:08:48 Just for all my young improvisers, I’m going to do a Steven Kotler marathon when this episode
1:08:54 comes out and I’m going to replay all of our older episodes about flow, about all the
1:08:57 different things that I’ve talked to you with Steven over the past.
1:09:00 It will be a great educational value for all of you guys.
1:09:04 Steven, I end the show with a couple of questions that I ask all my guests and then we do some
1:09:06 fun things at the end of the year.
1:09:10 The first one is, what is one actionable thing that our young improvisers can do today to
1:09:13 become more profitable tomorrow?
1:09:18 You can double down on your primary flow activity, which is whatever the thing you’ve done most
1:09:19 of your life that just drops you into flow.
1:09:20 For me, it’s skiing.
1:09:22 For my wife, it’s long walks with dogs.
1:09:25 My best friend is playing guitar.
1:09:31 Whatever that thing that most likely drops you into flow, flow massively amplifies, among
1:09:35 other things, motivation, productivity, and creativity.
1:09:36 Here’s the cool thing.
1:09:39 Even though a flow state lasts about 90 minutes, sometimes I can stretch out for longer.
1:09:44 The heightened productivity and creativity will help last the flow state by a day, maybe
1:09:45 two.
1:09:47 It also resets the nervous system.
1:09:48 It calms you down.
1:09:51 It flushes stress hormones out of your system.
1:09:56 Emotional regulation, emotional management, fear blocks, performance on every level flow
1:09:58 resets the nervous system.
1:10:03 The thing is, it’s most people and especially all the people listening to this podcast are
1:10:05 going to be like you.
1:10:07 You got to your thirties and you stopped skiing.
1:10:11 You put down childish things.
1:10:12 Skis go away.
1:10:13 The surfboard goes away.
1:10:14 The skateboard goes away.
1:10:17 You stop samba dancing and salsa dancing and all that stuff.
1:10:19 The research shows that’s a disaster.
1:10:24 In fact, we work with tons of people all over the world and burnout is a real big issue.
1:10:28 The first thing we do to treat burnout is have them double down on the primary flow
1:10:29 activity.
1:10:34 Research shows that if you want peak performance, you need to have about three to four hours
1:10:38 a week on your primary flow activity just to keep your nervous system where it needs
1:10:39 to be.
1:10:43 I’d love for you to tell everybody about the Flow Research Collective and all the trainings
1:10:45 you guys have available.
1:10:48 Flow Research Collective is my organization, we’re a research and training organization
1:10:49 on the research side.
1:10:52 We study the neurobiology of peak human performance.
1:10:55 What’s going on in the brain and the body when we’re performing at our best?
1:11:00 We did this work with scientists all over the world at Stanford and Pure College London
1:11:05 and UCSC and UCLA and UC Davis and USC SF and a whole bunch of other acronyms.
1:11:08 We take the science and we use it to train people.
1:11:14 We train people in 130 countries and we train everybody from like professional athletes and
1:11:21 members of the special forces to soccer moms and insurance brokers and teachers and folks
1:11:22 in the Air Force.
1:11:23 We work with a lot of companies in between.
1:11:29 I think now we’re training Facebook or Metta, Accenture, Bain Capital, Audi, San Francisco
1:11:35 Police Department, the Air Force, Wise Watch People and our trainings are for everybody.
1:11:41 If you’re interested, if you go to getmoreflow.com, Cheezy’s URL in the world, but nobody was
1:11:46 remembering any of the others so I’ve given in and it’s now getmoreflow.com despite the
1:11:49 fact that I’m embarrassed to say it out loud, but you can just go there and sign up for
1:11:55 a free hour-long coaching call with somebody on my staff so you’ll hear all about the trainings,
1:11:56 you’ll learn everything.
1:11:57 Is it right for you?
1:11:58 Is it wrong for you?
1:12:02 Nobody on my staff, I’ll fire somebody if they try to sell you anything.
1:12:05 It’s just an informational conversation.
1:12:08 It’s really mellow and most people get a lot out of it and it’s free, getmoreflow.com.
1:12:09 Amazing.
1:12:12 I’ll stick that link in the show notes to make it super easy for you guys.
1:12:17 Okay, last question of the episode and this is where you can feel free to add something
1:12:21 that we didn’t get to talk about or just something that’s on the top of your mind.
1:12:23 Doesn’t he have to do with the topic of the episode?
1:12:24 It’s up to you.
1:12:27 What is your secret to profiting in life?
1:12:28 It’s just hard work.
1:12:30 I’ll give you an example.
1:12:35 I came up as a journalist and I figured out very early on that most journalists hated
1:12:36 rewriting.
1:12:37 They’d write their story.
1:12:38 They’d edit it.
1:12:39 They’d turn it in.
1:12:42 The editor would make changes and they’d rewrite it once and turn it back in.
1:12:43 I found that out.
1:12:46 I was like, “Okay, you guys are doing it three times.
1:12:49 Clearly my job is to make my editor’s job easier.
1:12:53 My job editor has to really comb through my articles and it takes months.
1:12:54 He hates me.
1:12:56 I’m not a good employee.”
1:12:58 I started editing my stories 12 times.
1:13:04 I just figured out what everybody else would do and I’d triple it or quadruple it.
1:13:05 I did that for years.
1:13:07 It wasn’t much of a secret.
1:13:13 I just figured I wasn’t as smart, as well-connected, as handsome and all the other things as everybody
1:13:14 else.
1:13:15 I just figured out how to work them.
1:13:20 A lot of it is about smart hard work, not just hard work.
1:13:21 There’s better ways to do it.
1:13:25 I talk a lot about that in our country, about the advantages of smart hard work and smart
1:13:26 hard play.
1:13:31 The difficulties with just hard work is the only tool you reach for, but really, there’s
1:13:32 no secret.
1:13:34 I just put my butt in the chair and I did the work.
1:13:35 I love that answer.
1:13:36 Thank you for sharing that.
1:13:38 Where can everybody learn about you?
1:13:41 Where can they get in our country?
1:13:43 How can they find more about you, Steven?
1:13:48 In our country, you can go to narcountry.com or Amazon or wherever books are sold.
1:13:54 Stevencautler.com gets you to me, flowresearchcollective.com gets you to the Flow Research Collective.
1:13:57 Get more flow.com gets you to our trainings.
1:13:58 I think that’s it.
1:13:59 Amazing.
1:14:00 Always such a great conversation with you, Steven.
1:14:02 Thank you so much for your time.
1:14:04 My pleasure is great hanging out with you again.
1:14:14 [Music]
1:14:16 [Music]
1:14:25 [BLANK_AUDIO]