Steven Kotler: The Psychology of Aging Well and Why Your Best Years May Still Be Ahead of You | Health and Wellness | YAPClassic

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or at youngimprofeting.com/deals. Yep, bam. We've been sold this story that aging means decline. A slower brain, a weaker body, fewer big wins. But what if your later years could actually be your peak?

Today, we're thrown it back to my conversation with human performance, expert and best-selling author, Steven Kotler. He's the executive director of the Flow Research Collective, and at 53 years old, he decided to learn Park's skiing, one of the most intense, high-risk sports out there,

to prove that peak performance doesn't come with an expiration date. And this yap-classic episode Steven breaks down the science of training your brain and body for longevity, and while your 40s, 50s, and beyond can unlock more creativity, resilience, and wisdom than ever before. For my young improveders who are getting a little older, this one is for you.

I give you Steven Kotler. Steven, welcome back to Young Improveding Podcast. It is so good to be with you again. I am super happy. Young improveders, Steven Kotler, has been on yaps three times,

and I still feel like I could have ten more conversations with him, given his breath of work. And to kick it off, I figured we would start with how you got the inspiration to study peak performance. You learned that you were really shocked by the story of Antonio Stratovaris.

And he's a famous violin maker, and he had amazing feet of creating two

of his most famous violins when he was 92 years old. And this was in the 1700s, way before medical advancements. And so I'd love to understand why his story was so shocking to you.

“How did he dispel the typical thoughts around traditional aging?”

And how did he inspire you to study peak performance aging? So I had been working, I've been working researching, looking at the field of the people performance aging for a while. And it totally unrelated project, right? I was going to write a mystery novel.

And I wanted a character, one of the cat burglar's, a character who's going to steal musical instruments, who made the rarest musical instruments in history. Oh, it's Stratovaris. And then I found figured out what you mentioned,

which is he made two of the rarest, most expensive musical instruments in his 90s, and I went, well, wait a minute. Everything I've been told about the physical abilities is like the older myth about aging, which most of us believe, and I believe at the time of this, is what you could call the long slow rock theory.

It's the idea that all of our mental skills and our physical skills that decline over time, there's nothing we can do to stop the slide. So included in those physical skills would be fast-witch muscle response, fine motor performance, dexterity. All this stuff you would need to make a violin or a viola in your 90s,

along with expertise and wisdom and all the cognitive abilities. And it's sort of positive, and I was like, well, wait a minute.

If this is true, either Stratovaris is like the one and a billion,

or most of us have been told about aging is wrong.

It really sort of lit a fire under me to really investigate our physical abilities. And what happened to them over time? I've been looking at the cognitive stuff for a while. It's very related to flow, how we age, flow plays a big role there. So this is not new territory to me.

But the physical side was like, holy crap. Could this possibly be true? And it is true. It's true across the board. Every one of our physical skills are using or losing skills.

And the research is really clear. We don't stop using these skills both physical and mental. We can hang on to them. You've been advanced them far, far later to life than any of these all possible. Hmm.

So I love this.

So you're saying the long, slow, rot theory basically means that our physical mental skills

decline over time. There's nothing that we can really do to stop the slide.

“That's what inspired you to kind of research this in more detail.”

Understand performance peak aging. And like you just said, you said that use it or lose its skills. We actually have control over them. We used to think that your physical abilities just decline. But there's a way we can actually keep those skills.

So talk to us more about user loses skills. What they are, how we keep them, I guess, healthy. 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 of matter. And let me since a lot of your listeners are younger. We start here, which is peak performance aging starts young.

Like the research is really clear.

Like interventions in your 80s even beyond matter. Like really matter. You can really make changes right up to the end and they matter. And they're going to have actual big effects. But a lot of the stuff that you want to start working on.

You actually want to start working on your 20s and your 30s.

“And you know, this is the biohacking crowd is very aware of this, right?”

A lot of that crowd is 20s and 30s. And they're doing a lot of these things. Now, I might argue that they're doing some of the wrong stuff. Because they don't quite understand what peak performance aging is. But besides the point, a lot of this stuff starts young.

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 specifically, we have like the world health order.

This is not new knowledge.

Like the world health organization knows exactly how many minutes a week. We should be training these things. You want to 150 to three on this of a peak performance aging. Not healthy and successful aging is a little less. But peak performance aging is 150 to 300 minutes of harder rubble training week.

Moderate to vigorous rubble training week. Two strength training days a week. And three flexibility balance in agility days a week. Or you can find one skill, eye chose park skiing in the book. Then a company is all that.

Right. If I, in park skiing, I'm using strength, stamina, balance, agility, flexibility. There's other stuff you want to do. There's ways. We have things called prime mover muscles.

Our big muscles. And then we have stabilizer muscles. Like your rotator cuff, your hip flexors. Over time, the body gets more efficient. And it will you start using the prime moveers and not use the stabilizer muscles.

So if you've been on the couch for a while and you come back to athletics, you're not going to hurt your quad. You're going to tear the stable out. You're going to tear your hip flexor because it's stopped doing the work. You're walking around your amulatory is working.

Your hip flexor has started to attribute. 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 physical side, why are action sports and what you call dynamic activities so important

to help us with these user-illusive skills? Because I think a lot of people who are older, we used to go into the gym, taking group classes, whatever. But nobody's really thinking about action sports. And you say that they're a great way to leverage these skills.

Okay, we got to get to the full sentence anyway. So let's look. Look out there and then we'll break it apart and why it matters so much. So if you want to rock to you drop. If you really are interested in people from staging,

“you need to regularly engage in challenging, creative and social activities”

that is you just pointed out that demand dynamic, deliberate play and take place in novel outdoor environments. Now let's unpack what this big asset is and 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 want to preserve brain function, we need expertise in wisdom. Expertise in wisdom is the very diverse neural nets in the brain. Lots of real estate, lots of redundancy and pervious to cognitive decline.

And this is why one of the reasons people perform in staging starts young.

“I believe that the guy who did the core research on wisdom,”

Elkinon Goldberg, his core advice is, the more wisdom, the more expertise, the more we have cognitive reserve, the more we can stay off Alzheimer's, dementia, cognitive decline. All the things that are going to happen to the brain over time, this is how we fight back, and his point was,

wisdom among the many things encapsulated in wisdom, are all like the unconscious rules that govern how the systems work. There's behavior work, all that stuff. It's onboarded slowly over time, so you want to start training these things.

You want to start learning. Challenging creative and social activities, we learn a lot during. But there are 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,

because it keeps the brain active in really important ways, and really lowers stress level. So a lot of stuff we're going to be talking about, there are nine known causes of aging. They're all linked inflammation,

inflammation is linked to stress. Anything you do that fight 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 pros social.

“Oh, there's people around who love me, got my back,”

I can be a little less stressed, so there's a lot of that stuff. It's never at play as the next bit dynamic. It's literally what we're talking about. It's just a fancy way of saying,

"You did all five categories of functional fitness." It's down in a flexibility balance agility. Deliberate play. You've heard of deliberate practice, Anders Erickson's favorite expertise,

repetition with incremental advancement. It's the fastest path for his expertise, and Anders was a grown. But as he himself said, that's only true in certain, very precise disciplines.

And when faced with just general learning, deliberate play works better than deliberate practice. Deliberate play is repetition with improvisation. You can do the same thing you did last time, but a little bit of flourish,

little flower, little something fun. It's playful, meaning there's no shame, there's no embarrassment. If you're bad who cares, you're having fun. But that feeling of play produces more,

neurochemistry, more endorphins. This one really boost immune system lowers stress levels, but it amplifies learning. So dynamic, deliberate play, since I'm using all the physical skills that decline,

and I'm learning better than any other way. Nav allowed door environments, the last bit, why do we care? And this is back action sports, demand dynamic, deliberate play,

and they take place in novel out door environments, and they're challenging, creative, and social sorts.

One stop shopping in the last bit is most important,

but one outdoor environments in general lower stress. As well as established and positive psychology, a 20 minute walk in the woods, will perform most SSRI's, the treatment of depression.

I can talk about why if you care, but like we know that, good for you lowers stress, so in itself, being a nature, is anti-inflammatory, so it's better for healthy aging.

“But if you want to preserve brain function,”

you want, how do you do that? You want to birth new neurons, and turn those new neurons into neural nets. That's the 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 the adult brain will birth about 700 new neurons a day, even basically into you die. But where do those neurons show up?

Is the key question? They show up in a part of the brain rooms? They have a campus. If a campus does two things, it does long-term memory,

and it does location. Place, packed with place cells, and great cells. Why? All this hunter-gratherers.

When you were in the wild, and something emotionally charged happened, you better remember where you were when it happened, that's survival. So where did I get attacked by that tiger?

So I don't go back there. Where was that right fruit tree? So when it comes to disease, and I'm hungry, I can go there.

This is survival. This is what the brain is designed to do. Peak performance, and peak performance aging,

is always getting our biology to work for us,

rather than against us. Our biology is designed to remember how we have novel experiences, and outdoor environments. So that's what you want to use it for.

Action sports gives you that. Now, we, I also say in the book that like if action sports aren't your thing, you can duplicate a lot of this, but simply hiking with a weight vest

through natural environments. It's a really great, and weight vest is a really key better than a lot of other things, because they amplify bone density.

So a lot, in fact, your bones, it's like where you store all your minerals, all your nutrients, right? Our stored in your bones and the released, so everything that drives the brain,

calcium, for example,

it's stored in the bones.

“So as our bones become less dense over time,”

which happens, it impacts everything, for women, really important, after menopause,

where does most of your estrogen come from, your bones? So, while the flexion hormone levels, which from that most people have postmenopause, exacerbated by bone density.

If you want to increase bone density, one of the best ways is hiking with a weight vest. There's lots of literature, there's lots of science on that. There's also a bunch of other benefits, but it hits all of those categories,

if you're not interested in action sports. That said, there's a lot to recommend in action sports, especially, a lot of in our country is about

a new way of approaching these difficult challenging physical activities, laid in life that's much safer, and much, much more well suited to progression. Yeah, because I have to say, like, I'm in my 30s,

and I use to ski, and I don't even ski anymore, because I'm like, I've got too much to live for, I don't want to break a bone,

I'm not into it, and so I totally love that you're giving another option in terms of the weighted vest and hiking. So, in your book, you actually took on park skiing,

and this is something that people used to believe that anybody over 35 really couldn't learn. So, talk to us about learning that activity at 53 years old,

and what you learned as an old dog learning new tricks.

“There's a couple things you need to know”

to flesh this out a little bit, but you are right. Everything you said is totally true. Why did I think I could learn to park ski? There's a whole bunch of new stuff

and like flow science, my field and by a cognition, a couple other wisdom fields like you know, if these things are right,

it should be totally possible for older adults to be able to learn really, really difficult skills. I'll give you like one random example. We have a motor learning window, like every says don't become a gymnast

or ballet dancer after 25, right? 'Cause that window is closed and you can't just, that's sort of true. There's 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. 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 strut, we have a whole bunch of other stuff. If you can shift back in 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 used to losing skills.

We need to learn how to park ski, and so that was sort of it where it came from. And it was, I was an expert skier.

I just had never park skier.

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 a, you take it's doing tricks off jumps, and on rails and wall rides, it's very acrobatic,

it's very dangerous. So it was a totally not a new adventure for me. There were a lot of reasons to take it up. There were a lot of advantages about like,

knowing how to park ski later in life. It was actually that what I was after. But it was just a great way to test all this science. And when we learned, and here's what's cool.

So I made it to measure progress. I made a list of 20 tricks. This is zero to like intermediate. 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 heard early on. I figured if it took five years.

Cool. Whatever. Like I didn't care. I started to see if I took me to a 60, 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, and he was a former professional athlete. He got very injured, retired. Had a family, had his job came back to this sport.

He used the same methodology and got farther than he's ever gotten before. We came back the following year. We took 17 older adults, ages 29 to 68.

They were intermediate at best. Park skiers or skiers and snowboarders. We trained them up in four days on the mountain. And they got good. But then, because as you pointed out,

action sports is not for everyone. So the key thing here is mindset. What am I talking about? Let me tell you what we did. We then stripped out the action sports.

We used weight best hiking instead. And we put 300 adults, all ages, ages like 30 to 85, I think,

through of 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,

social and creative activity

that demands dynamic,

“deliberate plan takes place in not a lot more environments.”

I don't care what it is. I wanted them to just start on a quest that would lead to something that way. But what I really wanted to do was explode the mindset of all,

along two wolves, which says shit, I'm going to get hurt. I got things I want to hold on to. It sets up.

It's really weird. Our biology is designed when we're young. Teenagers, kids, teenagers, young adults.

The seeking system sort of drives our behavior. This is exploratory behavior, right? Like, I'm going to go out and check out something new.

I'm going to figure out who I am and what I do and how I want to live and how to own like a little. That's stuff. This is about dopamine and NARP an effort.

Those are very potent, feel good NARP chemicals. They're very addictive. Very, very, very addictive, right? The most widely addictive drug on our earth.

All that happens is it causes the brain to release some dopamine in blocks. It's re-uptake, right? So dopamine is really addictive. When we get stuff that we have that we

want to hold on to, 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 start trading our addictive, our the cat neurochemicals we want.

We no longer want to be seeking. We want the stuff that is about conserving what we have, protecting what we have, bonding.

So we get endorphins, and an anamide in oxytocin. These are like the pro-social NARP chemicals that underpin strong family structures and things like that. Strong company structures.

And they're great. But we're trading our addictions. And what happens is it makes us very, very conservative. It shuts down the seeking system.

We get the voice in our head that says, hey, don't do that. You're going to lose what you have. It's an addictive addiction. And the two of them matter is like old people

and literally addicted to the wrong drugs. And their bodies, you need all of these systems working together for big performance aging. And there's a penalty for having a mindset of old.

And this is the point. That very mindset that you describe, having like being scared about the second half of your life. Oh, it's not as exciting. That mindset of old.

There's a big health and longevity penalty. In fact, when you flip it, when you have a positive mindset towards aging.

“Second half of my life is filled with thrilling and exciting possibilities.”

My best days are ahead of me. It translates, and this is one of the most well-established facts in big performance aging. It will translate into additional seven and a half years of health and longevity.

That's huge. That's like quitting smoking huge. Right? In fact, if you're morbidly obese, and have a shitty mindset towards aging,

change your mindset first and actually have a bigger effect on your life and your health and your longevity. Then losing weight. So, it's really, really important. It's where people performance aging starts.

And one of the reasons that people performance aging

starts young is if you never develop this mindset.

This isn't going to be a problem. Like, you're not going to have to overcome it. Right? One of the reasons the nars style adventures, so useful for older adults,

is, like, for me, didn't matter what I wanted to believe about aging. Once I got out of the mountain, I was learning how to do 360s and knows about 360s. And 180s and all the other stuff I learned.

Like, it just blew up all my limiting beliefs about what was possible in the future because I have just onboarded the most difficult physical thing I've ever done in my life and I did it at 53. And I've done a lot of difficult physical things along the way. This was definitely the hardest and I did it.

You know, and I'm still still partying at 55 now, because I wrote, you can book a couple of years old in terms of when I wrote it. I mean, that's amazing. I have to say it's very inspiring.

And I can feel your enthusiasm from the camera and sort of like your vigor for life. And so it's really positive that you're spreading this message in terms of how people can basically stay young at heart forever. And like you said, it's totally in your control

if you put yourselves in situations where you're activating your brain and certain ways that you're playing, you know, dispelling any sort of internal beliefs that you have about your own abilities,

but actually going out and doing these physical things in turn, it's helping improve your cognitive performance.

It just amazing, really cool stuff.

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I'd love to talk about this concept of dirty old shame. I know that you had to get over some internal traumas from my understanding when you were growing up.

You weren't always this sporty,

you were sort of the last kid picked on the team at school and you mentioned in your book that part of you kind of overcoming and taking on this challenge was you getting over these past traumas so talk to us about that and how we need to do that as well.

This is another, another reason people perform in staging sort of starts young for a free start with a good news. One of the reasons old dogs can learn new tricks that we haven't talked about yet

is as we enter our 50s. It's really not late 40s. There are a bunch of really profound changes in how the brain processes information. One certain genes only turn on with experience.

They only flip the switches later in life. Two, you know, 50s, the two hemisphere is the brain,

which is essentially functioning an opposition to each other along the way. They start working together like never before. And finally, the brain starts to underutilize resources in our 50s. So as a result,

we gain access to whole new levels of intelligence, creativity, empathy, and wisdom. And it's, I'd go on and on and on about those benefits.

There's a lot that comes with that, but these are not guaranteed. So psychologists talk about moderators, the technical term, it's an if-then condition.

You get this only if you do this, right? And if you want to, the access to these cognitive superpowers in our 50s, and we'll come back to it, but from a profit perspective,

we really want to talk about those superpowers in a second. But let me finish this point. There are a number of gateways of adult development that you have to pass through. So by the age, age 30,

you sort if you really just want to enjoy and kick ass beyond 30, you have to have solved the crisis of identity,

If you haven't solved it by 30,

you have a problem. The reason is, like 40, you need match fit. Match fit is an economics term,

“means there's a tight length between who I am,”

and what I do in the world. If you just hope 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 has to be by 30, but 40 we need to be, we have a match fit, and then by 50,

we need forgiveness. We've got to forgive ourselves for like past embarrassment and past shame. And we've got to forgive those who have done this harm. And as you pointed out,

I spent most of my childhood losing fights to jocks. I was a punk rocker. The jocks didn't like us. I didn't like them. And this was back in the 70s and 80s.

And like, you got to understand like, cars of football players who 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 you know, boom, it was not a great situation.

So I had a lot of anger. And I knew, peak performance aging, you got to put that shit down. You cannot thrive in your 50s.

You don't get these superpowers, which is wild dogs can learn new tricks better than young dogs. It's why I, when there is I learned park skiing so fast, is I have more intelligence.

I've got more creativity. I've got this stuff I need. And they've got even more wisdom, which means I could keep myself safer. Then I don't know if it's making better decisions along the way.

That stuff is great, but I don't get it. If I can't forgive those who have done me wrong. So this is standard best way to do that. And there's tons of research,

love and kindness meditation and passion meditation. It's an incredibly potent tool.

It's amazing for a ton of different stuff.

It's been studied for probably longer than any other meditation style. And we, we understand all the neuroscience. But when it came to people who I got in fist fights with and worse for 10 years,

it wasn't enough. I could, like all the love and kindness meditation in the world. Like I could forgive a lot of stuff and clean out of it. I was left with like,

it just wasn't going away. So I decided one of the reasons I took on incredibly difficult physical chalky challenge is, okay,

I'm going to go, like this is my problem. Let's go walk a mile in there, mock a sense, right?

Let's take this on. And it turns out it worked. By the way, I didn't think it was going to work. I just knew I needed to do this to thrive.

And I was like, well, I'm out of any other ideas. Loving kindness meditation, which is what everybody is not getting it done.

And there's still anger there. There's still resentment there. There's still stuff there. So let me see if taking on, you know,

this kind of go putting myself on a physical mission. Could clear that out. And it did. And the story is sort of in the end of the book. And I won't sort of ruin it.

It's spoiler alert, right? I'd be giving way sort of that. That one and I'm not going to, but that was, it was,

it was one of the meter things that happened along the ways. I got to put down like a bunch of sort of shame and embarrassment. And like stuff that I, you know, I've carried this.

That was probably 10 or 12, definitely 12. That's amazing. Do you feel like much lighter now? And that you just can approach things differently?

Like how did that impact you getting over that trauma like that? After so many years of having the same issue? I don't know. It, it, I always say,

this is, one of the myths that a lot of people have about

“their life is that people think it's going to get easier.”

Like you think, oh, I'm going to get older. I'm going to get better at this. I'm going to be able to sort of like,

oh, oh, I know exactly what I like. And I can manicure my life. And it just doesn't get easier.

It just doesn't. What it gets is more meaningful. It, and more, and like life satisfaction overall well being.

And that's what this really impact and 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, it just sort of, it closed that loop.

You know what I mean? Yeah. Okay, done check. I don't have to like,

I don't have to worry about that anymore. And literally, what it really does is, when certain memories just like pop into my head,

now they just last a half second.

I'm like, oh, there's that thing, and it goes away. Whereas before,

no, I could start to think on it and dwell on it, and then I'd have a problem. So I want to talk about our brain biology. Have you ever heard of Arthur Brooks?

Okay,

“he's somebody that I think you should definitely look into.”

So I had Arthur Brooks on the podcast in 2021.

2022. And he was like, one of my favorite interviews, and he wrote this book called Crack in the Code to Happiness.

He's a Harvard professor, social scientist.

“And basically he talks about how your brain biologically is different”

before 40 and after 40. And he talks about fluid intelligence versus crystallized intelligence. And so this was like a big conversation that we had on the podcast, and something that made us think a lot. I had a lot of feedback from my listeners.

And I feel like what you say is pretty different from what he says. There are some similarities,

but basically what he's saying is that you have a biological

clock ticking your ability to reason, think flexibly, learn new things, problem solved, be innovative.

That starts to decline in your 40s and 50s. And that doesn't mean that your brain starts to go bad. You just start to have crystallized intelligence, or you accumulate knowledge, 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 got to be ready for the second half of your career, and not miss that, and be like trying to chase your younger self,

and your younger brain essentially. So for example, the professional athlete becomes the coach, the star litigator becomes a partner. The singer becomes an air in our exec.

And you're basically teaching younger people your knowledge, and taking on that second wave of your career. So I know that was a handful, but I just wanted you to do it on your screen. So he is right,

he is right, and he is wrong. As far as I could tell,

where he's really right is passing along knowledge,

“is absolutely key to key to performance aging.”

It's key to, like, so in fact, the side is 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 so it's accepted to stereotype in the world. It's the only stereotype in the world. I go out and public these days with any stereotype. Somebody's going to punch me in the mouth and cancel me.

Except for ages. Ages. I mean, you can, people are like, oh, you're too old to do that shit.

And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that.

And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that.

And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that.

And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that.

And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that.

And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that.

And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that.

And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that.

And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that.

And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that.

And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that.

And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that.

And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that. And we're going to do that.

And we're going to do that. Adam Gazali is a friend of mine. He's on my board. We do a lot of research together. He's at UCSF.

And he had the Ezenero scientists in the cover of Nature a bunch of years ago for a video game he designed.

It's the very first video game to be approved by the FDA.

It treats cognitive decline and older adults. And what it's specifically focused is on is task switching. So 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.

He's got a video game that will take your brain if you're 60. You play it literally.

“I think it's three hours a week or three 20 minute sessions a week.”

For six weeks is the standard doctor prescription for this video game. And it will reset your 60 year old brain back to 20. So there's a bunch of stuff like that where it's used. 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 are brain performance declines over time is white matter density decreases over time and we lose certain neural chemicals. So what he's not telling you is we can replace those neural chemicals. In fact, SSRIs which actually suck for depression turn out to be great for older adults.

And SSRIs can boost them if you don't want to take a drug. Take with a weight vest. Most of your serotonin is manufactured in your bones. And one of the reasons the brain has less is because you're making less in your bones. And if you increase bone density, you get the serotonin back.

You get a bunch of those neural chemicals back. So he's not wrong and what he's presenting. He's wrong. Like some of this stuff has changed since that the general thinking is sort of true. But a lot of those skills are used to lose it.

And either we've already figured out and fixed them. Or this stuff is also progressing really, really, really quickly. That's the other side of this is regenerative medicine, longevity science. All that stuff is moving at exponential rates. So you know, for example, five years ago, we could not deal with most tendon bone and ligament problems.

Like we are good at that stuff now. It's advanced really far. Now, if any of you is making you promises about stem cells that go like be on bones ligaments and tendons. No, no, they're lying and they're exaggerating. What's real right now?

But up to that point, no, no, we've sort of got it dialed.

“So technology is advancing and it's going to solve a lot of those issues, right?”

A lot of those issues are not what we thought they were in the wicked and you can train a lot of that stuff in unusual ways. Just figuring out. And some of the early ways, like all the brain games, those that they're worthless, totally worthless. They train nothing other than the ability to play that game. That's not how this works.

But learning a foreign language, learning to play musical instruments, learning a challenging dynamic activity, like all that stuff. No, no, that's the real medicine and that really actually does work. Yeah, I mean, I love what you're saying because I remember leaving that conversation with Arthur Brooks, although it was really enlightening and he said a lot of smart things. I've built a press. I was like, oh man, I got like, you know, less than 10 years to do all my innovative stuff and it's good to know what you're saying that we are actually in control.

Like, of course, you can be passive and the inevitable will happen with your cognitive decline. But if we're proactive and kind of fight that natural tendency that's going to happen, plus with modern medicine, like you said, there's a lot that we can do to slow it down, reverse it. So that's amazing. Yep, in business communication is part of the client experience. Think about it.

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Indeed.com/podcast terms and conditions apply. Need to hire. This is a job for indeed sponsored jobs. So let's dig deep on these three types of thinking. You alluded to them at a high level that we get better at as we're 50 and beyond.

So you say it's relativistic thinking, non-dualistic thinking, and systematic thinking. Yeah. So short version are ego quiet down in our perspective. So essentially we learn to see things from multiple perspectives. We learn that there are very few black and white truths and most things are gray.

That's relativistic thinking and probabilistic thinking. Then the last category, we learn to see the forest through the trees. We get good, better at systems thinking and seeing the big picture. And because of these skills, this is where that extra intelligence creativity, empathy and wisdom comes from, it builds out of this intelligence.

Let's talk about for a second because the name of the podcast and so many people care here because we are.

There's a huge business opportunity here and nobody's paying attention to it. So that little backstory. When I wrote a bold, which is a book about like honoring our ship and people like Larry Payton, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and how to really use exponential technology and some even capability, flow science stuff to really level up organizations.

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, which was I need employees who are really diligent and really creative and really innovative because the rate of change is really fast and I got to keep pace and stay ahead of it. Otherwise, I don't have a company. I don't have a business.

I can't do any of that. The other thing I need is I need employees who are empathetic and wise because if I don't have psychological safety, nobody can do their job. If I don't have psychological safety, I don't have great team performance. That team performance, you can't be a company.

You can't do those things with that empathy and wisdom. Most importantly, the mantra of 21st century, this is the maybe we thank Jeff Bezos for this,

but it's always been its customer center thinking, right?

And if you're not empathetic or you're not wise, nobody's thinking like a customer, right?

“At all, so it turns out a well-trained 50-year-old and well-trained is key, right?”

There's a whole bunch. You want those gateways of adult development, I've turned about. This should be a hiring checklist. And in your 50s, you want access to these superpowers. You need to engage in creative activities.

That sort of unlocks these new thinking styles. That's another reason why challenging creative and social activities matter. And you need to fight off risk of origin and train down physical fragility. Because if your body is rotting, what good is all this new mental skills you can't use it? And risk of origin, which increases over time.

This is why challenging activities matter so much. Risk of origin increases over time. It has a lot to do with like literally white man or volume in the brain. We have to train that because the more risk of origin, the more afraid you are, the more NOR app and effort you're producing.

It blocks apathy and it blocks wisdom.

“So like you have to train backwards to where there's no really flower in your 50s, 60s and 70s.”

But if you get it right and you've got all that stuff, these are dream and place. This is a business revolution. We have in the very people that are getting forced out of companies. No, no, no, no. They're the very people we need in our companies.

Most overall, and in fact, you know, this is not my line. I think it's Daniel Levitt and might have said it.

It's the first person I heard say it.

This bluntly, but Daniel Levitt is a neuroscientist who wrote a book called Successful Aging. Where if you want, in my book sort of a flat advantage, just draw the sciences and the footnotes and sort of at the end. If you really want every inch of the science, you can either take my peak performance, 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 far because I ran a bunch of weird ass experiments along. But he said flat out is like the best advice I can give you on retirement is don't retire. Don't ever retire if you want. If you're interested in peak performance aging retirement is a bad idea.

If you want reinvention maybe, right, maybe I don't want to do the same thing I've been doing my whole life. And I want to do something new, great, fantastic, retirement, death sentence. Yeah, so I have a couple of followups to this. A lot of my listeners are young entrepreneurs, business owners. So if we're going to take your advice, give older people a chance when it comes to hiring.

I mean, I know there's a big ageism issue, especially in the tech world that you sort of work at decision streaming services like you were old over 40, you know, and like people looked at you sideways, you know, and didn't trust you to do your job. Essentially, if you were older than 40, 45. So if you were to interview somebody in their 50s, what questions would you ask them to

make sure that they've been training their brain and and I would ask one. I'll physically act if you are, right? If you're, if you're not dealing with somebody who has been regularly exercising for a while and hitting all five dynamic categories, you don't want to go near them. The number one correlate with health and longevity over time is leg strength.

Believe it or not. I know I was going to ask that. It's wild. It's wild. Yeah, it's wild.

And we could talk about why and whatever. And I like, I don't think you can ask incoming, you know, employees, hey, what do you squat? Maybe you can. But it actually like, if we're going to ask put politicians in office in their 80s,

those questions become really freaking relevant. Like, that's the, those are things you really want to know. Are you engaging in challenging creative social activity? Like, are you, those things we're going to check list, right? For, for folks over 50 identity match fit self forgiveness forgiveness of others.

You don't get access to the career cognitive superpowers without those things. So those are the kinds of questions you want to poke at to make sure, you know, are being checked off, right? So those those sorts of things. Are you engaging in, you know, challenging creative social activities at demand,

dynamic delivery plan take place and novel act or like that. Those things, not they become a checklist and they become,

“if you want to work here and you're over this age, you got to do this.”

Because we need you, but we need this version of you.

And the most important thing is of.

I look for older adults with much younger friends. I want to see those cross generational friendships. Because older adults over 40, 50. One of the reasons they're not to be trusted is because they don't get the job, because they're just too out of touch, right?

And things have changed. And you know, there's, there's a lot of stuff that changes in stays the same, right? And, and you sort of want the older adults around for that reason, and also, you know, being old is not an excuse for not keeping up, right? Yeah.

Either. Like what I'm telling you is you've got access to more brain power. So like, you know, it's, it's, it's really not an excuse as far as I'm concerned. So I think it's got to be mutual.

“And I think the benefits are going to be amazing if it can be mutual.”

Yeah. I want to get into you authentic learning and how older people can learn new skills,

but let's go on the tangent of why we should never skip leg day.

It turns out that both from preserving physical abilities and cognitive function, leg strength is the single largest factor in our cognitive function is weird. Some of it has to do with bone density again. We're back to the bones. And, um, legs, big bones in your legs.

And if they're danced, they're not losing their minerals, they're 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 our luck harder to have a social life. If you don't have a social life, um, you're not going to eat successfully. Um, and in fact, if you don't have a social life, people form, you're, you're just sort of luck out of peak performance because you, social support for a lot of different psychological safety reasons and just performance reasons.

“It's, it's really important to have social support and part of that.”

Like, you can get really great social support on the telephone on Zoom. We all learn that during COVID, but there is something to be said for in person. Oxytocin, right?

I always tell people if you, if you, if you, for whatever reason, you're like stuck with the phone and,

and, um, zoom, make sure you pet a dog for at least 8 minutes a day. A dog or cat, heading an animal for about 5-8 minutes, also releases. Oxytocin is some of those other post social chemicals. So, like, if you're stuck on, like, if you, we need social support for performance. We definitely need for people performance aging, right?

Animals are friends here. Yeah. So, I love that. I feel like you're giving us so much great tips in terms of how we can age gracefully and, you know, be impactful at an older age and still innovative and creative.

So, this is such a meaningful episode to me because, honestly, we don't talk about this enough on the podcast. So, we do need to learn as we're older. Obviously, it's possible. You learned how to park ski at 53. So, let's talk about how we can learn and embrace authentic learning.

So, let's back up one step and talk about learning, like, where you started. I just want to start where you started, which is.

“So, if you want to stay off Alzheimer's dementia, cognitive decline, right?”

Fluentaligence, what matters? Like, long 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 can even have advanced Alzheimer's men as you die. They ought to opposite your brain and you've got tangles and plaques everywhere. And it just looks like your brain's mush and you're still, though we would notice if you were alive. This was so, some of the early research that happened. They started autopsy and brains and being like, "Whoa, this person had advanced Alzheimer's.

How the hell did they function so well until age 100? Right? What is it? Expertise and learning? And, or to expertise in wisdom?

Excellent. Which are two different things. But important thing here is that big broad networks and they're in the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is where it's most vulnerable to cognitive recline. It's the newest brain structure for an evolutionary perspective and it's the most vulnerable.

You don't suffer cognitive recline like deep in your brain stem. Right? It's impervious. But the prefrontal cortex is where it shows up. Expertise and wisdom live in the prefrontal cortex and there's these diverse networks.

Lots of redundancy, lots of backup. So, this goes down. You got seven other copies over here. Don't worry about it.

“So, that's where you have to start with life-long learning.”

And you want to do everything you can to maximize learning for that very reason. So, what do we know about learning? One of the best ways to maximize learning is authentic learning. This is a big movement in education right now. But it's based on a whole bunch of different stuff.

But let me just talk about one thing. Attention. You can't learn anything obviously without focus or attention. Like paying attention is the gateway for learning. Attention is a coupled system.

It's linked to autonomy. And autonomy means we like driving the bus. We like being in charge of all the lives. We can't pay maximum attention to something if it's not sort of by choice. Authentic learning means we learn based basically exactly at who we are.

So, it got a bad name or the on because people start talking about learning styles. Are you a visual learner or an audience? Yeah. And that's absolute nonsense. Like that's actually not true.

No, we're all those things. It depends on what we're learning. Right? And how we're wired in it changes over time and that's not actually. But what is true is everybody shows up somewhere on the intro version of extroversion scale.

Right? Like we have all have on this fearful. Right? And you can only be pushed so far. And like, so those authentic learning is about like those kinds of questions.

The questions that really matter.

And so, you know, one of the most important things for me is I'm an introvert.

I don't mind being bad at stuff. But I don't like being bad in public. So, we, and most true. I don't like being bad in public. I don't mind being bad at stuff, but I don't like being bad in public.

So, we and most terrain parks are actually under chair lifts and very, very visible. So, I would target these park tricks into the side country, in the back country, in the woods, and I'd learn them out of sight with my friends. And then I could go back and try to do it with the other way. It was impossible for me.

I don't, don't work that way. And you can keep, there's a lot more to authentic learning, but the big point here is also.

Um, like learning how to park skier whatever it's phenomenal for peak performance, aging, but you need a lot of motivation. And it turns out we have, like, we are driven towards authenticity. Car Rogers argued that it functions as a fundamental drive. And a fundamental drive, meaning it's got as much power as a drive for sex or food or, you know, shelter.

Um, you have a drive to be yourself, you're authentic self.

And if you get it right, you get a huge boost in motivation, which is crucial for all this stuff.

So you learn better on the back end and you're more motivated to learn on the front end. And being that there's a lot to do in people for messaging. And it's challenging, it can be challenging. You want all the help you can get, right? And in the art of muscle I talk about, one of the things peak performance are really good at,

is they never meet a challenge on a single field source. We know this food wise, right?

“Like you want carbs, protein and fats before you're going into workout, right?”

Mm-hmm. So in the good motivation, you want authenticity, you want autonomy, you want passion, purpose. Matt, all these big intrinsic motivators curiosity.

You want to stack them on top of each other because it maximizes our motivation.

Mm, I love that. So to wrap up this part of the interview, I'd love for you to just sort of summarize what skills generally do you think older people are better at than younger people? And older people, I guess, who have trained their brain properly. Well, Annie, anything that requires seeing things from other people's perspectives and multi-perspective thinking,

you're just better at. It's harder to do when you're younger because of how the ego functions and how the brain functions. You're just better at it when you're older. Um, a lot of people, you can, you can meditate a lot to sort of lower cognitive bias and do, and do those things. But it's going to start to happen naturally when you're older.

So that's, that's really important.

I, um, to me, the big one, the cool one is the system's thinking part.

Because I like, you know, one of the commonalities among all the biggest brains I've ever met. All the real, the, the people really can affect change in the world. Um, they're all system stankers. And it's really hard to train to people how to be system stankers. It's a tough skill to bring on.

You know, certain careers force you to learn it in different ways writing, especially if you write books,

“because you have to hold 400 pages in your head and move it around and be able to do stuff like that.”

You have to be able to hold the big picture. It's sort of built into the job and it's trained up over time. But it's not trained up in a lot of jobs, um, mostly we specialize, right? Especially in the modern world, we specialize with specialized with specialized. One of the things that I want to point out here is, and anybody who's ever worked in entrepreneurship,

like, you know, all the big innovations are in the cracks between disciplines, right? They're not in the specialized as very hard to innovate inside that same funnel that everybody's been in for 50 years. But you move adjacent to where that funnel touches something, right? And suddenly there's a revolution waiting to happen. And that's how you build companies and world change companies, everything else.

You can't see that shit if you're not a system stanker. It's completely invisible to you. And that so the thing that I think this is the most exciting overview is that. Yeah, that was really inspiring to me.

“I'm actually writing a book with Penguin Random House coming out in 2025.”

And that little bit of information was really inspiring. I'm going to include it in my book and credit you. Okay, so Stephen, I want to wrap up this interview talking about your research about the blue zones. These long-lived communities around the world. You alluded to some of it, but I'd love for you to sort of dive deeper on what you found in terms of why these people...

Yeah, I got it. So let me back to story up a little bit to tell you a story that's not in the book. Yeah, that is where this actually starts. Here. People may know this or not know this for almost the best two decades.

My wife and I run a hospice care dog sanctuary. So for two decades, we've done hospice work with dogs. We have a healing methodology that's based on it's very low-tech. It's like lifestyle interventions in the sense. Some flow science, revolutionization, psychology, nothing really fancy.

Our dogs all get checked out by vats when they come to us before they come to us. They come from shelters, but we specialize in the worst of all. So if you are a geriatric chihuahua within abusive paths, three legs, one eye,

That's who we work with.

And the vats would be like, "We did get these dogs." So I wouldn't be like, "Don't get attached."

This dog is going to live a month, month and a half at most. You know, this is about to provide a very good death. And we bring the dogs in, and mind you, we've over 700 dogs passed through our facility and over 5,000 of our programs, 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. And you translate into that human numbers. That's right, you get 7 years for every year. So like the top end of that, you're getting an extra like 28 years. 30, like what the fuck is going on, part of my language.

“And so I started to ask questions like, "What's going on?”

Why is this working? What are we doing?" And will it work in humans? Like would any of the stuff work in humans, right? And it turns out almost everything I've been doing with the dogs

exists in these so-called blues zones, which is one lead me to the blues zones in the first place.

So Dan Bueller is a National Geographic reporter in the early 2000s notice that there were places on the planet where people lived on average a 12 years longer than everybody else. And they're all over the place and he wanted to know, "What are the commonalities?" And he did a whole bunch of research. The research is a little controversial.

The controversy is not on the lifestyle stuff. It's on the, this stuff that has been turned into supplements and is dietary. And those are the open, and those questions are open. There's no argument on sort of the lifestyle stuff with the blues zones. And the colonalities are really like move around a lot.

Regular exercise, right? D stress regularly. So have rituals, meditation, exercise, gratitude practices, breathing work, whatever it is, walking in nature. I don't like have rituals to destress regularly.

A ton of stuff on sociable longing and connection. This is why challenging social activities matter so much. This is built into blues zones. There's also respect for the elders and these cross-generational friendships. They're built into blues zones.

There's some evolution. They eat healthy. They less than most people, and they vary very, very healthy diets. Like there's no one diet across the board that works for everybody. And those are sort of the commonalities and they live with passion,

purpose, and regular access to flow. And these were all things that we were providing for our dogs in very, like, for example, they get social belonging and connection. They really emphasize that you're in the blues zones. Some of them people spend six hours a day hanging out with friends or family.

So a lot of it with our dogs. We had enforced petting time. So we didn't have a lot of dogs. Like, you know, we had various times. We've had 40, 50 dogs.

It's hard to individual petting time.

“You have to like, oh, I got to hang out with this dog,”

but we would do it because we wanted these neurochemicals underneath that. 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.

But the state is still really positive, powerful emotional state.

And some of the emotions that show up in flow, stimulates the production of T-cells and natural killer cells. So T-cells fight disease is a natural killer cells fight tumors. Six 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 peruses T-cells killer natural killer cells. A lot of benefits and it boosts the immune system. So this was the stuff we were doing in our dogs. This is stuff that's going on in the blues zone.

This is stuff we now widely know correlates to healthy, long cavity. This isn't really peak performance aging.

“It's sort of successful aging healthy aging, right?”

At this point, it's like, it should be common sense for everybody. Really is really what it should be. But one of the things that's interesting is you also see a high. A lot of the places where there are blues zones. You see a lot of actions born now to our athletes too.

Some in Colorado, Pitkin County, Colorado. You go county, Colorado. And Loma Linda, California, are the four places in America with people. These are the blues zones. Some in Pitkin and you go, this is Colorado that's veil.

Aspen, Beaver Creek. All of the big scary is a lot of adore stuff. And in Loma Linda, that's a seven day banis population. And they're very, very social, very flowy. Very good dietary stuff, a lot of belonging, a lot of.

So like it's it's the same stuff. I'm am a lot of outdoor activities surfing. And because it's California on the ocean right there. And they take advantage of that stuff too.

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 the number two, like, what are some examples of creative social activities as an adult? The most common flows to it on earth is reading or interpersonal flow. Interpersonal flow is like the group flow. You and your best friend get into a great conversation in a whole hour goes blind.

You don't notice it's gone. That's interpersonal flow happens all the time. So one of the reasons you want to get in challenging creative and social activities. They all trigger flow. So singing and acquire very, very flowy group flow.

Lots of research on that gardening, very flowy long walks in nature. You know, nature likes very, very flowy coding, architecture, drawing, drumming, dancing. You know, on and on and on. I mean, there's a ton of flow at work. In fact, flow is much more common at work than it is during leisure for a bunch of different reasons.

But like, you know, the list sort of goes on and on and on and on.

And flow is really if we want to enjoy the second half of it.

We want to enjoy our lives in general. But if we really want to thrive during our second half of our lives. You can't do it without flow.

“Flow is actually the engine of adult development.”

It's one of the, it's how we grow up. We grow up by getting into flow's dates coming out the other side is working. Flex more skillful, more adaptive, more empathetic. Wiser. And so I mean, and we move forward like so it plays a big role in adult development.

And successful in performance aging. So Steven, I and the show with a couple of questions that I ask, Oh, my guests and then we do some fun things at the end of the year. The first one is what is one actionable thing that our young Profiters can do today to become more profitable tomorrow.

You can double down on your primary flow activity, which is whatever the thing you've done most to your life that just drops into the flow for me is skiing, right? For my wife, it's long walks with dogs. For my best friend is playing guitar.

Whatever that thing that most likely drops into flow. Flow massively amplifies among other things. Motivation, productivity and creativity. And here's the cool thing. Even though a flow state, that's about nine minutes.

Sometimes I can stretch out for longer. The Biden's productivity and creativity will have that's the flow state. By a day, maybe two. The law also resets the nervous system. It calms you down, flesh and stress hormones are to use this system.

So emotional regulation, emotional management, fear blocks, performance on every level flow resets the nervous system. So really, and the thing is, it's most people. And especially all the people listening to this podcast are going to be like you. You got to your 30s and you stop skiing.

You put down childish things, right? Skies go away. Third floor goes away. The skateboard goes away. You stop somebody dancing and salsa dancing and all that stuff.

And the research shows that's a disaster to disaster. In fact, when we work with tons of people all over the world and burnout is a real big issue.

The first thing we do to treat burnout is have them double down

in the primary floor activity.

“Research shows that if you want to be a performance,”

you need to have like about three to four hours a week and your primary floor activity. Just to keep your nervous system where it needs to be. Yeah, I'd love for you to tell everybody about the flow research collective and all the trainings you guys have available.

Flow research collective is my organization. More research and training organization on the research side. We started the neurobiology of peak human performance. So what's going on in the brain in the body? When we were performing at our best, we did this work with the scientists all over the world

at Stanford and Pure College London. And you see us see in UCLA and you see Davis and U.S. see at staff in a whole bunch of other acronyms. And we take the science and we use it to train people. We train people on 130 countries.

And we train everybody from like professional athletes and members of the special forces to, you know, soccer moms and insurance brokers and, you know, teachers and folks in the Air Force. And we work with a lot of companies in between. So with which I think now we're training Facebook or meta.

A sensor, bank capital, Audi. It's ever so pleased to our men. The Air Force, you know, why so much people. And a training is there for everybody. And if you're interested, if you go to get more flow.com,

she sees URL in the world, but nobody was remembering any of the others. 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. But you can go there and sign up for a free hour-long coach. With somebody on my staff.

So you're all about the trainings. You'll learn everything. Is it right for you? Is it wrong for you? No one on my staff gets every, I'll fire somebody

if they try to sell you anything. It's just an informational conversation. So it's really malar and most people get a lot out of it. And it's free get more flow.com. Amazing.

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

And this is where you can feel free to add something that we didn't get to talk about. Or just something that's on the top of your mind. Doesn't have to do with the topic of the episode. It's up to you.

“What is your secret to profiting in life?”

It's just the, I mean, it's just hard work.

You know what I mean, I like, I just always go out of my way to figure out what, like,

like, give you an example. I came off as a journalist. And I figured out very early on that most journalist hated rewriting. They'd write their story. They'd edit it.

They'd turn it in. The editor would make changes in the rewriting. Once in turn it back. Yeah. I found that out.

I was like, okay, you guys are doing it three times. Clearly my job is to make my editors job easier. Like, like, my job editor has to, like, really come to my articles and takes months. He hates me. That's not, I'm not being, you know, I'm not a good employee.

So I started editing my stories 12 times. I just figured out, figure out what everybody else would do. And I tripled it or quadriple it for a really, I did that for years. So, I mean, it wasn't much of a secret. I just figured out 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 work them. I mean, I, I, a lot of it is about smart hard work. And that just hard work smart hard. There's, there's better ways to do it.

I talk a lot about that in our country. About the advantages of smart hard work and smart hard play. Um, uh, and the difficulties was just hard work.

“Because the only tool you reach for, but really, like, there's no secret.”

I just put my butt in the chair and I did the work. I love that answer. Thank you for sharing that. Where can everybody learn about you? Where can they get in our country?

And, uh, how can they find more about you, Steven? Our country, you can go to our country.com or Amazon or wherever books are sold. Steven Caller.com gets you to me. Flooryserscollective.com gets you to the flow research collective. Get more flow dot com gets you to our trainings.

And I think that's it. Amazing.

Always such a great conversation with you, Steven.

Thank you so much for your time. My pleasure. It's great hanging out with you again. Hey, FM. We're about to launch something that might be my favorite thing we've ever done on the podcast.

A brand new series called How We Profit. Now, I've been doing young and profiting podcasts for eight years. And my listeners are successful. We are real entrepreneurs with real businesses. And a lot of you guys are crushing it behind the scenes.

You may not be super famous. You may not be a billionaire yet, but you've got a business that you've learned how to scale. And we want to hear from you. One of the best ways to learn as an entrepreneur is from your peers. And I found it super helpful to be in these peer entrepreneurship groups and learn from other entrepreneurs who are at my level.

But just in a different industry.

“So that's what I want to bring to this podcast.”

I want this to be our own peer group. But on the podcast.

And so I'm going to be interviewing people who are making anywhere from 500,000 to $10 million a year.

They're not super famous. They're not the typical billionaires that are on my show. These are real entrepreneurs who are crushing it behind the scenes and we're going to uncover what they do to sell. How they get their customers with their profit margin looks like, how they market and so much more. It just sounds like you and you want to be featured on young and profiting podcasts for our how we profit series.

Just head to you, young and profiting.com/apply. And share your story. Let me know why you think you should be featured on the show. Again, that's young and profiting.com/apply. And who knows, maybe you'll be our next guest on Young in profiting podcasts.

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