Steven Kotler - Gnar Country: Growing Old, Staying Rad

Full transcript: Steven Kotler on London Real

2:31 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Stephen Kotler, the journalist, author, and entrepreneur. You are one of the world’s leading experts on human performance, and the author of 14 books, 11 of which are bestsellers, including The Art of Impossible, Bold, The Future is Faster Than You Think, and The Rise of Superman. You have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize on two separate occasions, your work has been translated into over 50 languages, and you have appeared in over 100 publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Wired, The Wall Street Journal, and Time.

3:11 Your latest book, Nar Country, Growing Old, Staying Rad, asserts there is no age limit for peak performance, and to the contrary, we gain entirely new levels of intelligence, creativity, empathy, and wisdom as we age. Stephen, welcome back to London Real. Brian, it’s great to be with you once again. Great to have you here. You were here four years ago in person, and I think we talked for two and a half hours.

3:36 We went deep into all of your IP on flow states and so much more, actually. And I’m so excited to have you back. I wish you were in person, but we’ll get you next time you’re here Let’s jump into this book because I’m 51 pushing 52 and if you check my Instagram I’m doing head spins these days because I picked up breakdancing a few years ago last year I almost had my first boxing match at the o2 arena here I actually called out some 24 year old punk youtuber who actually never took me up on the fight And I feel like I’m in some way living parts of this book Steven So maybe you can bring me up to speed. But as you said, we’re seeing guys like Tom Brady 45 at the top of their game Kelly Slater 51 years old top of his game as a surfer You’re 55 and doing park ski backflips and stuff on skis like what is going on with guys like you me Tom and Kelly and How do you explain this phenomenon or how can people younger start to look at their at their future older years as maybe a rebirth?

4:39 Those are great questions. There’s a number of different answers, so let’s just start big picture and work our way across for them. The place to start is most of us, even including myself, and like I’ve been studying this stuff for a couple of decades now, but I think before I got into the experiment that underpins in our country, even myself, we grew up and succumb to what I like to call the long slow route theory of aging. This is the dominant theory of aging from at least the last century. And it’s the idea that all of our mental skills, all of our physical skills, they decline over time, and there’s nothing we can do to stop this slide. And it turns out, we can talk about where that comes from. But it sort of gets its start in the beginning of the 1900s, around 1907. And by like 1990s, all we’ve done is managed to like prove it right in incredible detail, right?

5:36 We know about all the stuff that’s gonna fade away and all the reasons why. I mean, around 1995, some of this is that there were a bunch of longitudinal studying on aging that got started in the 70s. And some of it is just that we neuroscience, there was a revolution in the 90s because of brain imaging technology, but that combination started to poke. But for small and the larger, now like, bust size holes through the long slow route theory And the new idea, which is the first part of the answer, what are we seeing with yourself, with myself, with Tom Brady, with Kelly Slater, so many more folks.

6:13 I just saw a video of Derek Oh catching the biggest wave of his life at Sunset Beach at 64. And I just saw the video and, but we now know that all the skills we used to think decline over time. We now know their user illusion skills. And if we never stop training these skills, And this is mental and physical, we get to hang on to them, even advance them far later in life than anybody thought possible. And then UT is part two of that with your lead and thank you very much for the lovely intro.

6:43 But part of it, you said, hey, in our fifties, we get access to these cognitive super hours. We can talk more about this. It’s sort of our late forties, there are brain changes, there’s genetic stuff, but our brain becomes, if we do it right, a lot more potent and powerful in our fifties. So even the skills that we lost, we can start to perform as if we’ve retained an even greater percent. So I think we’re really seeing that with these folks on the cutting edge.

7:10 And the last part to it is longevity science, regenerative medicine, not stuff I really cover a lot in the book. It’s toward the end of the book that I poke at it, but all this stuff is advancing really radically fast. So like the moral of that story is most of us are gonna be old, whatever the hell that means, for a lot longer than our ancestors, for probably a lot longer than we suspected. And what we’re learning is, oh my God, we can take incredible advantage of that extra time, because peak performance aging, as you pointed out, it doesn’t actually fall off a cliff.

7:47 And there’s a lot we can do to perform at our best, very late in life. All right, so there’s someone out there right now who’s maybe our age, kind of, you know, early fifties, but there’s also people in their forties and even their 30s that are maybe hearing this for the first time. And I guess there’s a little doubt, there’s a little curiosity. What do you tell people right away when they first kind of hear this idea that can lead them to kind of pull the thread and go a little bit deeper?

8:13 You said this, use it or lose it. That’s kind of an interesting concept that- Yeah, so let me just give you some examples of what we learned, right? Facts tend to work pretty well for most people. Let me give you a handful of them. So, let’s start with physical body.

8:34 So, and this is, I like to say this is the hammer, meaning if you were talking to people even 10 years ago about kind of peak performance aging and holding onto these skills, they would always get in your face and be like, what about VO2 max? Cause that really drops off like lift. And VO2 max was something that physiologists love. people with it, that’s your upper respiratory capacity, right? When you’re boxing VO2 max, when you’re sprinting VO2 max, when you’re bump skiing or park skiing VO2 max.

9:05 And the old idea, which is sort of true, like a lot of these ideas, that VO2 max starts to decline in our 20s, it’s about 10% per decade kind of thing. And then we get to about 50 and it accelerates, gets to like 15%. And this is sort of the general thinking. And then something weird started happening in triathlons actually and in really long distance races. And they started to notice folks in their fifties and sixties and seventies were beating some of the younger athletes consistently.

9:36 And what the hell was going on? This is weird. So they decided they were going to go measure the VO two max of octogenarian triathletes. Now these are people that have been training really minimum since their fifties. So 30 years of training, but they found that 80 year olds, 85 year olds would have the B02 max of healthy 35 year olds and I believe I might have this wrong but the world record I believe it was 88 and the B02 max of a 25 year old. So that’s one example I’ll give you another one. Brain volume decreases over time, widely accepted, drinks one to two percent a year for a certain age. Oh my god what do we do and especially problematic is like the hippocampus which does long-term memory and the medial prefrontal cortex which is where your personality lives. So these are two areas of the trick, they were really alarming and we now know that rigorous exercise increases hipble cap volume. In fact, you can reverse the age-related decline in hipble cap volume without too much difficulty with sort of regular exercise. So there’s a body one, there’s a brain one, I can keep going with this stuff but the other thing you need to know because there’s some stuff that shrinks over time and we’re just now trying to figure out how to train it. So I’ll give you a really wild example.

11:04 We do a lot of work with Dr. Adam Gasoliz, a neuroscientist at UCSF University of California, San Francisco and he had the cover of nature about five or six years ago which is the most prestigious science publication in the world and he had the cover because he had invented a video game that was approved by the FDA as a medicine. First time any video game has been approved as a medicine and it’s designed to treat cognitive decline in older adults and specifically works on a couple of different things but the most good starter than one is task switching. Though older adults are worse at task switching than younger adults, one of the reasons that older adults are more vulnerable to cell phones and smartphones and distractions and things that are a little more addictive and it does more damage in older adults because of task switching.

11:51 Now, if you play his video game, I want to say it’s three times a week, 20 minutes a session for six weeks. I could be wrong, could be eight weeks, could have the time wrong, could be as long as that. Needless to say, it will reset the brain of a six-year-old back to a 20-year-old for task switching. So there’s certain stuff where it’s exercise certain stuff. We’re getting tools like these video games to train stuff That was really hard to get to and couldn’t figure out how to get to it any other way We’re figuring out how to train it. So those are full of examples what we can I literally can go on We could talk about pretty much anything Yeah, that’s a great start And you know you you do a bunch of myth busting You know in the book and and on some of the the pages that you put out with with the book And there’s a lot of these myths in there.

12:34 People think that depression and loneliness are byproducts of old age. You said that’s a myth. There’s nothing to stop our physical decline over time. You say that’s a myth. Aging is only a physical process.

12:44 You say that’s a myth. You know, doing any exercise will help you a little longer. You say, no, that’s a myth. You gotta do specific things. And then this whole use it or lose it concept.

12:54 So if you do these specific things mentally and physically, you can extend your capacity or even increase it. And it’s interesting what you said, because I did a triathlon. One of the other crazy things I did, Stephen, which made me read this book really carefully, is when I was 47, five years ago, one of my guests on my show named John Joseph challenged me to do my first Ironman race with 90 days of training, and I had to do it on a plant-based diet, because he had been vegan for 30 years.

13:21 Of course, I took the challenge, we made a documentary film about it, and then I did it. And I got a trainer, and it was a lot of work, but I did it, I didn’t pick up injuries, And I remember at the race they were announcing and there were 70 year olds there. And I was like, oh man, what’s going on here? First of all, there were a lot of older people there, which is interesting. I did it, which kind of surprised me too.

13:44 But you said something there. It was the people that had been actually using that every year up until the eighties that still had the skills, right? So you’ve got to use it or you will lose it. Yeah, and Brian, we touched on this we were chatting before we came on the air, one of the things that I like to say is that peak performance aging starts young. And what I don’t want to, I don’t want to mislead people. There’s a lot of studies that show even for like totally sedentary late 80s, you haven’t moved in 30 years, right? You haven’t moved since you’re 50. Steven interventions at that point, like even if we we get you from totally sedentary to you’re now walking up the stairs instead of taking the elevator, right? Those sorts of interventions, you can still make big differences in people’s lives really late in life. But for a couple of different reasons, there’s physical stuff that it’s better if you start younger. Most importantly is we have to introduce a term which is cognitive reserve.

14:52 So if you want to hold on to your cognitive skills, you want to stave off cognitive decline, you want to stave off Alzheimer’s and dementia, this was what started to happen back in the 90s. We started to get these long-term studies of aging. And they started to, in certain study groups, most famously the Sisterhood of Notre Dame, this was a very long-term aging study. And all the sisters not only had annual checkups and blood work and cognitive tests and all this stuff, but they donated their brains to science afterwards.

15:27 And they started to notice when they were autopsying the brains of sisters in their nineties and their hundreds of people who were incredibly active at full teaching schedules in the sisterhood and did all this stuff, they opened up their brains and they were filled with tangles and plaques. Alzheimer’s everywhere, everywhere, dementia. And yet none of these women exhibited science of cochlear decline. What the hell is going on became the next question. There are a number of answers to that question, but first and foremost is, if you wanna stave off cognitive decline, you want neurogenesis, the birth of new neurons, and you want synaptic plasticity, those new neurons to form new neural networks.

16:04 One thing to know about the brain, redundancy is built into everything. The brain never does the exact same thing twice in a row using the exact same neurons. It’s really rare, the brain likes to recruit other neurons and back things up. So it turns out cognitive reserve are these new neurons and these diffuse neural networks. And if you really want to stave off cognitive decline, you want them in the prefrontal cortex, part of your brain that’s right back here because it’s the part that’s most vulnerable to degradation.

16:32 Turns out that two things that are stored in the prefrontal cortex that are your best defense against cognitive decline are expertise and wisdom. And this is not 100% but think of it as Wisdom is like all the emotional learning that comes with an experience, right? And the emotional intelligence, whereas expertise is sort of like the factual learning that comes with an experience. That’s not perfect, but it’ll get us there. The expertise and wisdom form these really big diffuse networks all over the prefrontal cortex.

17:04 But if you want true expertise and true wisdom, all the scientists who have worked on this the most, everyone, if you read their books on the subject, you read their papers even, They all say the same thing, start young, start building up expertise and the wisdom in the 20s and the 30s make these networks as robust, as thick as possible. And you pointed out some of the physical stuff. You definitely want to start it in your 50s, but as you and I both know, it is a whole lot easier to start exercising younger and continue than it is to totally walk away from it because if you’ve walked away from it for 20 to 30 years, you can come back for sure but there’s, it’s a slower process, right?

17:45 You wanna do some stuff along the way to make sure you’re not gonna get hurt as you come back to your activity. And so it’s kind of no coincidence that when we’re talking about guys like Brady and Slater and even these octogenarian triathletes, almost by definition, they’ve been doing this every year, right? And maybe every day, and they’ve been doing it for a long time. So you can kind of learn even from these outliers that they’ve been doing this for a long time, brain activity, body activity.

18:16 And so the message here is, know this, start early. You said before we came on here that when people read this book, they get like an ease, they feel differently about their life because maybe you know the second half of your life can be amazing, right? And so is it also worth investing in your body and your brain earlier because there’s gonna be more to it later. Well, there’s gonna be more to it later and it’s really important. So for a bunch of different biological reasons, there’s something we could talk about as the mindset of old.

18:55 But let’s first start talking about the, so one of the things you said, one of the myths, aging is just a physical process. It’s not, it’s a mental process as much as a physical process. In fact, I’m sure at some point in this conversation, going to talk about like peak performance aging in a sentence, not summarize it for you. You’ll notice there’s really 10 terms of that sentence, feminine and psychological interventions. There’s very few physical interventions that mostly psychological interventions. And the classic example is mindset, positive mindset towards aging, which you just displayed. I think my best days are ahead of me. My second half of my life is filled with amazing possibility.

19:33 A bunch of reasons we could talk about it produces, and this is a very well-established fact, this isn’t just one study, this is a lot of studies, an extra seven and a half years of healthy longevity. That’s kind of incredible. That means if you’re morbidly obese and you have a shitty mindset towards aging, you want to live a longer, healthier life, it’s more important to switch your mindset than it is to lose weight. And that mindset of old counter to this, why does it set up? Where does it come from? And by the way, mindset of old is if you’ve got the voice in your head and saying you’re too old for this shit, that’s the mindset of old, right? And if you’re saying it to other people, you’re too old, like that’s the mindset of old. A couple things to really know about this.

20:19 The first is that it comes from a good place. When we’re kids, when we’re young, when we’re teenagers, we’re predominantly driven by the play system and the seeking system. We’re exploring the world. We’re figuring out who we are, how we live. Those systems are underpinned but some feel-good neurochemistry, dopamine, norepinephrine.

20:36 Now, those chemicals feel really good. You actually put them together, and that’s romantic love. That’s the combination of car, romantic love. So a lot of good feelings there. When we find the stuff that we want and have, like, oh, I’ve got the right partner.

20:50 Oh, I’ve got the right job. Oh, I like my car. Oh, I like my apartment, whatever it is. And it really happens with kids once we have children or even pets in our lives. The brain goes, oh no, it’s not about seeking new stuff.

21:04 Now it’s about holding on to what we protect, conserve, safe, secure. And the neuro, we switch addictions. We go from sort of like running on norepinephrine and dopamine to running on serotonin, oxytocin, and the endorphins a little bit, though endorphins show up with play as well on the front end. But it’s this switch in addictive neurochemistry and it just turns out that peak performance, aging demands, all of these systems, not just this second half of life systems that are really designed.

21:36 And what they’re really designed to do is make you not leave your partner because it takes two people to raise a baby to the point that they’re safe. Like that’s the biology, right? That’s what’s going on with the biology, it’s coming from a good place, but it comes with this mindset cost that over the years really came back to health and longevity and just to put an extra emphasis on it. So, Becca Levy, who’s at Yale, a brilliant researcher, and she’s done most of her career looking at language, aging, and stereotypes. And this is old research. But if you get your sort of negative stereotypes about aging, other people, meaning you ageism is the most common prejudice stereotype in the world. It’s the only socially acceptable one at this point, right? I walk outside, and I talk about any group of people negatively.

22:31 I’m canceled. I’m gone. But I can walk outside and be like, I got two holes in that shit. And nobody even blanks. And yet, huge impact on health and longevity. And just to give you one study, and the study ran for 38 years, so really long data, they found that those people who grow up around negative aging stereotypes or are subjected to them and believe them.

22:57 Once they hit 60, memory performance is 30% worse than those people who grew up without aging stereotypes or an old mindset. 30% of memory loss is about these negative ideas that we hold about our future. So really tight correlations, it goes a lot farther than this. We’re going to sort of stop there. So I don’t bury you under needless biology.

23:22 No, it’s super interesting. It’s almost, you know, like the reverse placebo effect. I mean, if you believe it, then you manifest it. And we hear all the time about, you know, manifesting things and bringing them into your life and people are dubious. But, you know, if there’s studies that are showing that and it all makes sense.

23:39 And again, you got to, you got to, you got to look at. Oh, I’m sorry. Please. Go ahead. No, I’m good. I mean, back to retirement age, I mean, 65 years that we’re taught to retire, like you said, when you’re born, you’re almost structuring this life out in your head subconsciously of when I’m going to be done. And then you almost convince yourself that’s doing that. Obviously, your grandparents have all been fed that loop as well, and they’re acting accordingly, act your age, and then I guess it becomes this damaging, self-fulfilling prophecy.

24:11 I’ll let you go. No, and you’re totally right. And all I wanted to say is, have you looked at the numbers on the placebo? That’s the thing. People say I was a placebo factor. No, no, no. 50% of any drug’s impact is the placebo or on the backside, the negative, the nocebo, right? So you’re talking about a tremendous 50% of what any Any substance we give you is going to do comes down to what you think or don’t think it’s going to do.

24:44 That’s every situation, right? That’s a very tight correlation. We tend to dismiss it with the placebo effect, but look at the data on the placebo effect. It’s kind of shocking. Yeah, it’s crazy.

24:54 I mean, 60 Minutes did something on this like 10 years ago, and yeah, it was numbers like that, 50%. I’m not saying who’s squashing it out there, but it’s not in the pharmaceutical company’s interest for you to really know that but you’re right that should be right in front of your face blatantly saying the way you feel about something can have more of effect on anything else in this world and so talk to me about this aging mindset and this concept of lifelong learning and then some of the steps and things that we should do if we want to be this person in our 50s and sixties and seventies. So, um, what I want to tell you, so this Harvard professor, Ellen Langer, I’m talking about the counterclockwise experiment for a second. So Ellen, her early work was on like priming and language. She got interested in, she was a grad student at Harvard. She played in like this poker game with all, all the, all of a sudden she was still in play poker, but she was the dealer and she screwed up and sort of dealt the wrong people each other’s cards and everybody’s playing poker with got furious they wanted their cards and she started wondering and when she inquired they felt that their cards were luckier even though nobody had any knew what their cards were like face down they’re like no no I want the ones that you were going to deal me those are luckier and she started wondering well and she started asking questions around language and primary she started asking questions of could aging be the result

26:29 Of sort of negative language for him and could it partially be the result of that Olivia or stuff on stereotypes that is studied under Ellen this is 20 years ahead we learn it is but this is Ellen designs this crazy experiment knows the counterclockwise experiment until I run our country experiment this was the weirdest experiment in peak performance aging I think mine was weirder, but she won up to that point. What she did is took a group of 16 older adults, late 70s, early 80s, all men drives them. They’re Harvard. They drive them a couple hours north into New Hampshire. They go to a monastery that’s been tricked out of 1981.

27:06 Monastery looks like 1961. Everything. Magazines, books, all that stuff. And the groups get get divided in two, right? One group says, just reminisce about 1961. Just 20 years ago was 1961. Just talk about it. You know, what you do and the other group, pretend 20 years ago, and just use the language you use to talk about the cumulative crisis as a current event. Talk about like, that sort of stuff. On the back end, they measured everything cognitively and physically on the back end of five days of play acting to be 20 years younger hearing improved memory improved grip strength improved photos taken before and after they looked younger after vision improved on a smelling eye or joint flexibility dexterity IQ gait posture and arthritis decreases so much as my favorite status if fingers got longer and they got taller because they could stand up straight and stretch out their fingers um it’s sort of of the most stunning example of mindset and people so doubted it that the counterclockwise study has been rerun, I want to say four times, three times is TV shows and the fourth time with like all kinds of rigorous double blind, everything you could possibly do, you know, 2022 or 2019 standards versus 1975 standards. That’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about like the impact of mindset. So the next question you asked was, how do we translate?

28:38 What are we doing? What are we talking about? And I’m going to give you two suggestions from Ellen Langer, and then two suggestions that are built on the first round. Ellen will talk about first and foremost, and this is this shows up. This is her work, but it shows this is Buddhist philosophy going back 5000 years, a lot of places start with mindful noticing of current situations and what you want to pay attention to is the brain likes to operate under the illusion of permanence. Nothing changes but that’s obviously a lie.

29:11 The fact of life is everything is constantly changing on a moment by moment basis. Every time you breathe you’re changing your internal. You know what I mean? The cost in life is change and we tend to notice solidity. So first thing she says is notice change on a on my own basis and stop just being afraid of it. Just notice that change is the constant life. Second part, not surprising since then when we started this conversation, watch your language, right? Don’t. Ease it yourself. Don’t. You’re too old for this shit. Look carefully how you evaluate future possibilities and things like that. Those are the first two. The third one is, so, uh, is get, I think you want a, like a challenging quest for yourself.

29:59 Mine was, can I teach myself at a park speed? Yours was, can I learn how to dance hip hop or box, right? That kind of question. And the reason is this mind sensor are sticky, right? They’re like cognitive shortcuts, but their attitudes towards life and situations and whatever brain likes them because they save energy.

30:16 The cognitive shortcuts. And I find that, well, mindful noticing is useful and language is useful. What you really need to do is prove to yourself that your old mindset of old is bullshit. So create a quest where if you pull it off, whatever you used to believe about the possibility of the second half of your life, and no longer, right, when I started doing like 360, if your nose but a 360, it didn’t matter what I used to believe about the second half my life because it was gone. There was no way it could hold up in the face of this evidence.

30:48 And the fourth one, and this is not mine as well, but it’s really important is put down your damn smartphone. Stop using your smartphone as much. The reason is smartphones create a mobile mindset. It’s like, basically, it makes you feel safer and more secure and more comfortable than you actually are. And this tends to make us very isolated and narcissistic. And those are the mindsets that set up. So one of the best ways to improve your mindset is stop using your cell phone, watch what you’re paying attention to, watch how you’re talking, and then build a quest for yourself that will blow your old ideas up in some real way if you could actually pull it off and then figure out how to pull it off and you know Nar Country is all about those steps and how you can pull it off and how to approach that sort of stuff. But obviously you’ve been doing it for a while and you need to read Nar Country to get there. I didn’t know I was doing it but um so find a bodacious goal and then execute on it. You did it with Park Ski. I found myself tossed into these situations that looked interesting to me and I kind of went for them I’m also I got this show so when I do something like that I’m really held accountable to do it which so yeah Brian so I gotta stop you right there as you said something brilliant and I want to talk about this for a second so this was so I had this exact inside the very thing you said when I was at the

32:21 Front of my narcissist country cuz I used to be a journalist and if I was on assignment man you want me to go to it like a genocide and go behind the lines sure just give me the assignment right I will if you give me a mission I will complete the mission right right if you just say hey I’m trying to do this no no no so one like our country was a mission and you want and there’s all kinds of motivational advantages for making it that kind of mission and one of them is when you’re on a mission quitting is not really an option you’re on a mission you’re gonna complete the damn mission. And most of us are really wired this way. But we know there are certain situations where we’re like, I can’t fail, I’m on a mission, right?

33:08 I gotta protect my family, I gotta do whatever it is. And it’s that mindset, you have to, I gotta do it for the show. And I was like, oh crap, when I’m on an away game, home games, anything could happen. I might hurt my toenail and not wanna go do the thing. But if it’s a mission, I’ve got it on an airplane, I will do pretty much anything.

33:30 Isn’t that wild, right? The mindset shift. So that’s one of the reasons I say, like, make it a quest. It’s that very thing. I’m sorry I interrupted you, but I got really excited because I think there’s something really important motivation-wise there.

33:45 Yeah, that’s super important. And again, just so people know, they’re speaking to the Steven Kotler, you know, who kind of made famous and became famous talking about flow states. And that’s a very nuanced way of looking at how your brain behaves and all the different, very complicated aspects of getting into a flow state. And so when you start breaking down the nuances of what do this, I think it’s important that people pay attention because it’s not like be positive.

34:14 Like you need like a lot of these little things. When you start saying put the mobile phone over here and you’ve got some really interesting rules in here like train like a pro, find a good training partner, take choice off the table. I heard them when you were out park skiing, even using things like peripheral vision, so it wouldn’t scare you into doing something until you were ready to do the task. I mean, you’ve got all these little things that might seem inconsequential, but they’re quite important to get your brain in the right state to accomplish these tasks.

34:44 Maybe you could speak on some of the minutia of what gets you there. Yeah, so let me start with two high level concepts and then we’ll go into some of the minutia. The first high level concept is, and this is the thing that I talk about in Art at the Art of Being Possible, you wanna stack motivators, right? If you’re going on a sort of a hard, challenging mission style quest, athletes for fuel sources, right? Nobody would ever go into like a boss in mass eating just fat.

35:15 You want fat, protein, carbs, well hydrated, you’re stacking fuels, right? We do this, people from which do the same thing with motivation, right? They don’t just go into a situation saying, well, I’m curious. No, no, I’m curious. This is aligned to my passion.

35:31 It’s actually aligned to my purpose this way. I have autonomy in this situation because that’s a big motivator. It feeds my need for mastery, right? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So you wanna stack as many of these motivators as you possibly can or these little tools.

35:48 The second thing is the little things, they really, they start adding up and a 1% difference over time is a huge difference, especially if it starts to compound and there’s a bunch of stuff that I sort of stacked on top of each other as rules, as ways to go about this. All of them were lessons learned the hard way, right? This is just stuff that either has gone wrong consistently in my life for 20 years and I was looking for a solution or the Flow Research Collective were lucky enough to train tens of thousands of people every month.

36:30 So we’re data geeks. We measure everything and anything we can. So you’ve got huge data streams of what works, what doesn’t with tens of thousands of people. So, and the one I want, Of the things I want to talk to you, you mentioned, here’s the place I want to start because it’s the first place. So the idea of taking choice off the table. I created a series of rules. I knew I was going into dangerous, challenging situations. I know. Brain doesn’t make good decisions when it’s freaked out. We make bad decisions when we’re scared.

37:08 First of all, being fear limits creative problem solving, Right, the more scared we are, the fewer options we get until you get to the extreme version, fight or flight, right? All options are gone, you only got, there’s three, fight, you can fight, you can freeze, you can flee, and those are your options. But a little bit of nervousness, anxiety does the same thing. So just that alone tells you, oh shit, when I’m scared, I’m not going to make good decisions.

37:34 I knew I was going into a situation where I was probably going to be scared on a daily basis for minimum of a year maximum like I you know I when I started the quest I was like if it takes four or five years right so I knew I was gonna be really dealing with fear all the time and I knew I didn’t want to go to the hospital don’t make that don’t get injured right one of the things that is true among older adults is we take longer to heal than younger adults I think most people are more scared of injury than they need to be they haven’t had enough variance with it so they don’t realize how to work through it, how to train through it. They don’t realize what they’re capable of and how resilient they really are but that’s very hard to convince people of. You start to figure it out after you’ve broken a bunch of things and you keep coming back and you’re like oh wow I kind of got this I can do this it sucks but I’m not this isn’t gonna crush me but that’s alarmed by experience kind of way. So my goal is keep everybody as safe as possible. I think you know some of the old people take longer to heal than younger people that’s going to change over the next five years to stem cells to continue to do what they’ve been doing in the lab and that’s cool that’s interesting but we’re not entirely there yet. We’re good about if it’s ligaments, tendons or bones we can probably fix it but other stuff we can’t quite fix yet. But my point here is

38:55 I have rules governing my behavior in scary situations. I have rules for what I want to go and try this thing and I have rules for what I’m not going to go and try this thing. And we could talk about what those rules are, but the place I want to start with sort of all this is create a set of rules for yourself that governs your behavior in situations where not going to make the best decisions and you know you’re not going to make good decisions. And the way I thought about it and what really kicked me over into sort of agreeing to do this with simple realization from, so I have a ski partner. I’ve been skiing with Ryan. I’ve been skiing for about eight or nine years at this point. And historically, we’re similar athletes. He’s younger. He’s a better athlete than me. He was a former sponsored athlete. I was a guy who chased professional athletes around mountains. I wasn’t. So he’s a better athlete than I am. There’s certain things I’m better at on skis, many things he’s better at. But what I started to notice is that with a couple of exceptions, if he could do something, I can do it. We have similar ski styles, we have similar body types, we have similar terrain preferences. We have similar, our bodies like to do similar things in the air even and things like that. So I was like, you know, there are exceptions like he can do shit that I can’t do tricks wise and like never make decisions or do your ego is telling you to make decisions. That’s one time I always back off. So when

40:21 When I see Ryan do something that I know I can’t do, my ego’s like, well, try it. I know I want to try something mellow or right back off from that. But that was my go signal of Ryan can do it. I was going to do it. And the reason it was so easy for me to accept is I realized that if Ryan does something and I don’t do it, it haunts me.

40:45 It sticks with me. It’ll bug me. And it’ll bug me up until I do the thing, right? up until I try the thing, I’m going to be bugged by it.” And I realized that one moment of fear trying the thing versus like six to eight months of getting in my head and feeling like, wow, you didn’t do this thing that you know you should have done. How you got to do it and making it bigger than it is and all that stuff.

41:08 And I was just realized I was like, I would rather be a little uncomfortable in the moment and have to live the voice with my head is going to do to me for like until I solve this problem. That was the trade-off for me because it’s not like When you geezer yourself, right when you’re like, yeah, you took both of this shit or don’t try that You know that sort of stuff that has an impact too. That’s like that’s what ages us prematurely in a sense so there’s consequences on either side and You want to learn in my experience you want to learn how to play safely in in dangerous terrain, not just walk away entirely, unless, you know, there’s certain situations where I’m just like, no, that’s no longer, I don’t have to go to a war zone anymore.

41:54 Been there, done that, seem like, don’t need to do that ever again, right? Not a threat that some, some things are like that, right? Where there’s no, but with the NAR style quest, with these quests that we’ve been talking about, I think you want to look for something that’s tied to unfinished business. I don’t know if any of the stuff you do works that way, but for me skiing for a bunch of stuff, I had unfinished business, right? When I set out on this quest, there was stuff that I had left to do and it was about, can I accelerate my way through that?

42:27 And I think that’s another, you know, important motivator to sort of stack in. That’s one of the other things. I’ll stop there, we can go in any direction. Yeah, some really powerful stuff. giving me flashbacks to to my boxing match that was actually scheduled and funny enough never happened last year but you mentioned the autonomy so it was my choice I had unfinished business because I had trained in martial arts for 10 years and never had a fight and when this came up I laughed out loud at first when one of my former guests said Brian why don’t you have your first boxing match at the O2 Arena in London just the biggest arena in in the country and but we did all these things you’re talking about I mean we we knew There would be various layers of fear.

43:07 I did various layers of motivation, as in my two young boys are gonna watch this fight one day and they’re gonna see Papa get knocked out. I got haters that wanna see me get knocked out. I got a brain I need to protect. I got lots of different reasons to train. The nutrition, we knew that on the day, everything would go out the window, so we kept the plan super simple, knowing that once I walk in that ring with people screaming, I’m gonna forget 95% of the game plan.

43:32 So keeping it simple, safe in training, But then there was one point where my coach, David Hayes, a professional boxer here, he said, Brian, you’re making it too safe. He said, I need to throw you in with a young kid and you need to spar. And my coach was like, we’re six weeks out, it’s too dangerous. And David was like, no, it’s dangerous if you don’t do that because then you’re just BSing yourself and you need to go in there and do this and we’re gonna pretend like there’s one day, it’s the fight day, it’s Sunday, you’re never gonna meet him, I’m gonna come in just like the ring announcer and we’re gonna simulate this fight and it’s gonna bug you all day, You’re not going to be able to eat or think about it.”

44:06 And he was right. And we ran that scenario to get me comfortable with it. So it’s interesting, but this was a mission and I really wanted to do it. And it got me focused, super focused and just took me to another level. And so I guess people need to find that mission is what they need to do, right?

44:25 Yeah, and they also, so inverse, okay, also let’s talk a little about some of the stuff did for park skiing and why because I mean a mission but how you approach it especially if it’s a difficult physical test you an emotional test really matters. So we got to talk a little bit about flow for a second for this to make sense. Flow if you if you didn’t happen to see but my last episode with Brian don’t know what it is it’s any of those moments of wrapped attention, total absorption is so focused on the task at hand, so focused on what you’re doing that everything else just starts to melt away.

45:09 Depends on self, self-consciousness diminishes, gets quiet, time passes strangely, usually just so tucked into what you’re doing that like five hours go by, it feels like five minutes. And throughout all aspects of performance, mental and physical go through the roof, which is why flow is an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best. Flow states have triggers. You want more flow, you want to perform all your best, these triggers are your toolkit. The most famous one is the challenge skills balance. The flow follows focus and only shows up when all our attention is right here, right now. Turns out we pay the most attention to the task we have when the challenge slightly exceeds our skill set. You want to stretch but not snap. If I were to put that a number on and this is not science, this is a metaphor, it’s about four or five percent difference right when the challenge about 5% harder than your skill set um that maximizes focus except this is what we discovered so one other thing you should know flow science runs straight through the middle of peak performance aging. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi the godfather of flow psychology he’s written six books on uh adult development flows role in adult development and all that stuff so there’s a there’s a lot of this is right smack in the middle of my field as well. And what I realized is that in older adults, because of allostatic load, which is the impact of stress over time on

46:35 Our physiology and our psychology, um, it’s going to shrink that challenge to go sweet spot, offensively, unconsciously, we don’t even know it, right? We sort of feel like we want to push 5% because that’s what we’ve done most of our life to get in and so we’ll even overstretch. And so the The fundamental rule was go slow, go too fast, my model is one inch at a time. Start with a movement, I could do 100% of the time, zero fear and no conscious interference and then improvise on top of it, a tiny little bit and improvisation.

47:10 This is not deliberate practice, repetition with incremental advancement. That’s useful for learning certain kinds of skills but as a general rule deliberate play, repetition without repetition, repetition with improvisation tends to be as far as more spectacular learning results and everything else, a lot less self-consciousness and a bunch of stuff tied into deliberate play. So you sort of want to do what you did safely, they slowly, playfully. And that was really key. In fact, when I ran my original ski parks skiing experiment, trying to learn how to park ski at 55, you know, it worked incredibly well, worked really well for my ski partner. Then we ran it as an open experiment with 20 older adults ages, 29 to 68, right? And got the same result with them. And the funniest This thing about it is when you have a mindset of old and you actually start making progress in these difficult physical tasks, that progress is delicious.

48:17 It’s like the most amazing, I mean mastery is one of our favorite feelings anyways, but when you’re gaining mastery, the second half of your life when you had this mindset old really didn’t think it was possible, it’s freaking delicious. So what happened with these, we’d get these older adults in and we had them for four days on the snow. We weren’t really trying to teach them tricks. We were trying to teach them how to move their body in new ways so they can creatively interpret the mountain.

48:44 And that would drive them into flow. And flow took care of a lot of the learning because learning is usually amplified in the zone. So that was sort of general methodology. But what would happen is they would make so much progress like on morning of day one, I remember our first day on the hill, I went into it. First of all, I went into it suspicious.

49:01 I was like, I turned my, put my, uh, bare my apartment. I was like, dude, there’s no, this isn’t going to work. Don’t have your hopes up. Like it worked for us. It was great.

49:09 It’s a crazy experiment. It was really neat. There’s something there, but this is not going to work just. And just know that I don’t think this is going to work. Don’t have your expectations through the roof.

49:19 Cause I really don’t think we’re, it’s going to happen. Four hours later, I was like, turned to the same guy. I was like, Holy shit. They got so far, so fast. We got to hold them back.

49:31 Otherwise they’re gonna put themselves in the hospital right now. And that was after a day. It was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen and that has been consistently our experience with this. So this go really slow is part of it. Don’t get so addicted to the progress that you forget that that challenge goes sweet spot is to 1%, even if the progress is delicious and it’s gonna tell you to take on slightly greater challenges, you’ll get there.

49:56 Just, you don’t have to get there today. You might be able to get there tomorrow or the next day, you can go faster, but you can get hurt. And unless you want that experience, right? And usually for most people, that’s total derailment of their plans. They don’t know how to come back from those kinds of things.

50:15 So just avoid it in the first place if you can. Yeah, so now I’m having flashbacks to my break dancing, which I picked up about four or five years ago. I had been doing some movement with Edo Portal and I was on the ground doing one of his lizard walks and I had flashbacks to my youth. When I didn’t breakdance, I was the nerdy kid, but there were kids around me doing it. So I started training and I’m telling you, Steven, you just hit the nail on the head.

50:38 When I can pull off a new move in breakdancing, there’s probably not much else as delicious as that. And it’s silly because you could stack up all these delicious things in front of me, and yet that is almost even better. I’ll give you an example. Yeah, it’s the challenge, please give me an example. And so I got, so I managed, first of all getting a breakdancing teacher is kind of hard because it’s kind of a little bit of a, you know, it’s kind of a little bit of an in crowd doing this thing.

51:07 They don’t always want to teach a 50 year old, you know, podcaster that, but I found a great guy who’s really good and one day it’s like, I think you can do a 1990, which in breakdancing means you spin a 360 degrees on one hand with your palm kind of spinning around on the floor. It’s a move that looks crazy. And you see these kids do it at 20 and you’re like, wow. And I was just like, a 90? Like, I never thought I would ever think about doing a 90.

51:34 It’s like, I think you’re closer than you think. Let’s work on it. And you know, about four weeks later, I pulled one off and it was probably the coolest thing I’d done all month. And I was just like, I can’t believe I’m doing this at 51. And yeah, so I know exactly this feeling you’re giving people, Steven, because it’s better than what we’re told would make us happy.

51:58 It’s better than the million dollars. It’s better than the new relationship. It’s better than the burning the lottery. There’s something really special about it. Yeah, why is that?

52:08 Why is it so special? Well, first of all, I have to tell you. So, rate dancing is actually on my list. Oh, yeah. So, I started with park skiing, on my list is I want to reboot my drawing skills. I haven’t agreed and I haven’t really drawn much in 25 years but I’ve been drawing again daily and I’m really interested by the way in how much better I can get just drawing 15 minutes a day right just that’s all I’m asking myself to do.

52:42 I just want to see what that’s going to look like in like four or five months breakdances on my list, learning about musical instrument is also on my list. But I think it’s twofold. So I’ve always said that if you’re training wrist tolerances, it’s really good to start physically because we’re embodied creatures and there’s something about physical challenge that works differently in the brain. It just does. And as a result, you know what I mean?

53:17 So here’s a funny story. And it’s in our country. To tell the story of the day I was skiing the day Art of Impossible hit, I want to say it was 12 or 13 bestseller lists. I swept the list. I’ve never done that before. It was also the same day that I skied the gnarliest line I’ve ever skied in my entire life. I skied pencil shoot for the first time that day. But the day was done. I didn’t know it was best out of this. We were in the parking lot when like all that, like you didn’t go reception on the mountain and like my bones and they got reception and like, congratulations texts. We were always going up and just like slotted with these texts. And we’re trying to figure out what’s going on.

54:01 And once we figured it out, my ski partner looked at me, he was like, I just got to ask. You just had every best seller list in the world. And you see Pencils shoot. And I was like, yeah, Pencils shoot feels better. Like, I can’t tell you why. But skiing that shoot feels better.

54:17 Like, I know this other one is way more important in my career, to my life, to my future, the future, my company, and my wife, and, you know, my family, like, all it doesn’t matter. This one feels better. Some of it is I think we privilege it and some of it is also, you know, the idea that we can’t and all you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, which is totally erroneous and just completely untrue. And it’s actually been true since it first got said in 1907.

54:46 But we believe it. And if you’ve lived with this mindset of old way, you’re telling us that there’s just stuff I can’t do, I can’t do, I can’t do, I can’t do. And then start doing it, right? What I like about it is it’s um, and you ask why it’s so delicious. And I think one of the so I don’t know if you’ve looked into the research on the neuroscience of mindset, like growth mindset versus fixed. One of the things that happens if you have a growth mindset towards the second half of your life versus a fixed mindset towards the second half of your life. One of the main differences is in something known as an error related positivity. So when we make an error, but 50 to 100 milliseconds after making error, the brain notices and you get what’s known as an error related negativity. Negativity means it’s a negative deflection of the brain wave. And then if you have a growth mindset, you’ll go, oh, but I can learn from that. And once you make that decision, you get an error related positivity. People who have fixed mindsets or people who have fixed mindsets towards aging, don’t get that error-related positivity.

55:57 A couple of problems there. The error-related negativity earns off dopamine production in the body, so it feels terrible, right? You’re like, oh crap, I made a mistake, I can’t do this, right? But if you made a mistake and you believe you can learn from me, you’re like, oh cool, I made a mistake, but I don’t have to do that again, right? Then it turns dopamine back up in most people, and I think with older adults, and I can’t prove this to you yet, but I got a line of research moving this direction. I think you get a bigger dopamine boost with erulated positivity over a certain period of time and especially around things that we didn’t think were possible. So I think that is part of it.

56:39 The other thing is hope is an incredibly addictive emotion, really powerful. It’s very understudied. We’ve looked at faith a lot more than hope. In fact, hope is really, really understudied, but it’s an amazingly powerful motivator, right? And so I think that’s sort of what you get.

57:02 Because the other thing is this, here’s the cool thing, and you know this, it was called a 1990 or a 1900? A 1990. Your hand spin? A 1990, I think it was first done in the 1990s. So yeah, it’s called the 1990.

57:15 Okay, so, but here’s the thing that I want to point out. Once you learn that in 1990, your brain went, oh shit, I can do this, what else can I do? And you start asking those kinds of questions, those kinds of questions get really interesting, right? And those are the ones that lead us, I think, really towards exactly where we want to go. And those are also, and I want to say this, I talk a lot in the book or a bit about authenticity.

57:44 And there’s a bunch of different reasons, but it’s a very important motivator. So you want to design a very authentic quest, right? Really true to yourself. Authenticity gives us a lot of motivation. We actually have authentic play styles.

57:57 So that’s really what you’re aiming for is your authentic play style as the sort of the person that comes out on this quest. But both authenticity and autonomy tend to be coupled to attention. So you can’t maximize performance if you can’t maximize attention. You can’t maximize attention If you don’t, you’re not the person driving the bus and it’s going in a direction that is really truly you. So some of this stuff is like, those are the little details that we talked about earlier, right?

58:25 And I just wanted to sort of hit on those because you don’t, you want to be 100% on message with yourself for those reasons. Because you want to be able to maximize attention. You want to be, you just, you don’t want the limitations that come with it. Um, um, when you sort of blow up that, whatever the limiting thing was for you, it was the 1990, I think for me with park skiing, it was a 180. It was literally just like landing backwards and skiing away. I could not imagine, never landed backwards in my entire life. I could not imagine for the life of me that there was any way I was going to learn how to land backwards of that first learning sideways and upside down, but it was going to be a disaster and I knew it.

59:14 The funniest thing is I had just thrown my very first nose butter 360, which was a trick I knew I could do because it was one inch past something I already could do. I sort of knew that. I just did my first one and then I watched my ski partner throw a 180 like 50 feet later and I went, Oh fuck, I got to do this thing, pardon my language, I got to do this thing and uh, but I just found this other semi impossible thing and so I tried it and it was tiny, right?

59:43 But I landed, I landed backwards and this, this is funny. I landed backwards and I was right in front of the chairlift and the lifty was a young woman. She’s probably in her twenties and you can’t see how old anybody is, a ski helmet, goggles and face man. But I just landed a 180 in front of her, literally in front of her. And when I got on the lift neck, she flirted with me. And nobody in their 20s has flirted, like, you know who I was, how old I was, or anything else like that. It was just like this tiny little reward for throwing this cool trick in front of her. And it was not only I had done this thing that was impossible, but I got attention for it, right? And my ski my ride was laughing when it happened. I was like, yeah, until she figures out that I married at 50 or 30 years older than her, but that was very sweet. And it was so unbelievably motivating because it was this impossibility. And once I got past it, then you had to ask the next question, which is, oh, shit, if this is possible, what else is possible? And now I’m going to wrap it all up.

1:00:47 And once you start asking what else is possible, those things can align with our authenticity their autonomy very tightly right maybe that first one is a limiting thing we gotta get one for basket you can really start to pick and choose based on authentic stuff and i think you ask why is this so delicious why is it motivated so much i’m not a hundred percent everything i’ve just said is is deadly i give you like eighty five to ninety percent accuracy in there and i can’t tell you where i’m off because I don’t think we know, but I’ve been looking at it and thinking about it and trying to figure out how do we study this, because I’ve been asking some of the questions. Yeah, some really important points. I mean, first of all, we are embodied beings, and so not to look at the physical right in front of us as one of our main teaching tools, expression tools, learning tools, enjoyment tools is silly.

1:01:42 You know, when I looked at the documentary films we made over the past six years, Stephen, we made six, and so many of them have a physical component. And this show is not necessarily a sports show and I’m not a former actor. You wear a suit and you sit in the chair. Yeah, exactly. But I’m drawn to people that push their bodies and then I ended up pushing my body in a lot of these ways because yeah, like you said, it’s this direct feedback loop and it gives us so many things that other goals maybe don’t immediately show us.

1:02:16 And I’m sure they can that as well. But that’s one thing that’s interesting. The other thing you said is authenticity and autonomy. Very important parts of the recipe. And again, I’d really like how you quickly went through flow and I encourage more people to look in your work on FlowState and maybe watch our previous episode on our website as well because it’s important to understand all the different things that are going on here.

1:02:37 It’s much more complicated than it might just look on the surface. That woman saw you do that, you know, 180, but also what went into getting you there were many, many, many different things that got you to even attempt it and then feel great about it, and then wanna do the next thing. And a lot of that had to do with the fact that that was an authentic expression of you. You wanted to be there, right? That was your choice.

1:02:58 You were pushing yourself. Someone wasn’t forcing you to do it, and then you are now taking it to a new direction. And I feel all those things in the practices I’m lucky to do. And so it’s getting me to these crazy new states. And yeah, I do think what’s next, what’s next.

1:03:12 And I’m sure part of me thinks, well, then what’s next in other aspects of my life, you know, as well. Two physical things I wanted to hit on, because I noticed them in the book. One you said is that leg strength seemed to be a really important factor on longevity and important maybe isn’t correlated to longevity or determining longevity. The other thing you said also is you’re training with a weighted vest and specifically how you do hikes with that. And I just, those were two things that were in my mind that I wanted to talk about before we maybe get into some of the mental aspects of this.

1:03:48 Okay, so let’s start with sort of strong legs and move to the weight vest. So this is wild and we’ll talk about why, but in the elderly, in older adults, leg strength is the single most important factor for longevity. In fact, thigh muscle mass inversely correlates with mortality and the question is why, right? Well, like why is that? And there appear to be three answers.

1:04:22 One is sort of the most obvious, which is most people by now have heard that social connection matters. It matters for psychological health. And this is jobbly important as we age. Maintaining robust social ties is similar to mindset in its impact on health and longevity is about seven and a half years of extra health and longevity. and when you lose your legs, lose your mobility.

1:04:53 And if you can’t walk, can’t move around, you have much less kind of a social life. There’s impact physically and there’s also impact mentally, right? You wanna use the brain as much as you possibly can over time. And other people challenge us in ways that we don’t always challenge ourselves, right? So there’s some of that.

1:05:13 Some of that is that one of the most common killers, If you aren’t going to die for cancer or heart disease and more and more of those things are curable, chances are you’re going to fall down and you’re going to break a hip. And it’s not the hip break that’s so problem. It’s the secondary infections that what happens is you break something as you’re healing, your body is putting all this energy into healing the hair. Now suddenly you get pneumonia or COVID, right?

1:05:39 That tends to be a very popular killer of older adults. Um, they did a huge study, uh, with 300 twins in, uh, all over the age of 55 at King’s college in London. And, uh, out of every health and lifestyle, the fact that they imagined leg strength was the single most important correlate. So a couple of other things about leg strength, and this will tie into the weight vest. One of the other reasons that leg strength is so important, especially the man became cognitive health is the cutting edge of physiology, neurophysiology right now is bones and bone health. And what we are learning more and more and more is that bones store all the nutrients and minerals for the body. And when they break down bones, that’s one of the few things that penetrates the blood-brain barrier. Our bones store everything or much of everything that we need to run our brains, including calcium, which is involved in almost every, every time the brain does anything, there’s calcium involved and that comes from our bones.

1:06:45 So preserving bone density is really important. So there’s a bunch of different ways to do it. You have to lift a lot of weight. You have to pressure the bone very heavily to do this. And one way you can do it is training with a weight vest.

1:07:03 But so let me, beside bone density, Let me also back up and tell you one other thing about preserved physical function and the user loses skills we started out talking about. So, if we want to rock, do we drop? You need to kind of rock. And we actually know exactly how much and how often, like the World Health Organization has peak performance aging recommendations, right? You need, you got to train strength, stamina, agility, balance, and flexibility.

1:07:34 You got to do it on a regular basis. You’ll hear me use the term dynamic play or dynamic deliberate play. Dynamic is shorthand for all five categories of functional fitness. That’s all I’m saying. I’m saying it uses strength, stamina, agility, balance, and dexterity, and you want those things at once.

1:07:52 When the brain encounters dynamic movements, it tends to amplify neurogenesis. So exercise gives us new neurons. Dynamic exercise gives us way more new neurons. much better. That’s one of those little tips. But so with a weight vest, you can hit if you stretch before and after, you’re hitting all five categories of functional fitness and your improvement bone density. So in the book, I say, look, a lot of the sports we’re told are bad for us as we get old, older action sports, for example, are actually really good for us.

1:08:32 And one of the reasons is they’re dynamic. They train up a bit just to put it in regular sports. So there’s all kinds of studies done at the Mayo Clinic and they wanted to know what are the best exercises for alpha longevity. And so they’ve rated that over I think it was 25 years. And they know if you join a gym, you’re going to get about a year more kind of longevity.

1:08:55 If you take up running, it’s like 3.1 years. If you play badminton or tennis, it’s seven to nine years. And a lot of it is badminton is going to be social personal. So there’s social activities playing with other people. And to their dynamic activities, you need all these categories of a functional fitness.

1:09:21 So weight vests are a way if you’re not able to play tennis or ski yet and you need to train yourself up, it’s a really great place to start and because it hits so many things at once. I said earlier, you know, peak performance aging, there’s a lot to do and you want to train for all days like a professional athlete, but part of what I mean is not just train hard. You’ve got to train smart. Professional athletes train smart because there’s too much to do otherwise.

1:09:54 So you want dynamic activities because if you didn’t, here’s the normal WHO, people’s performance aging guidelines on physical activity. You need 150 to 300 minutes of aerobic training a week. That’s moderate to vigorous. So you’ve now done five hours basically of aerobic training that’s moderate to vigorous. need two strength training days a week and three balance agility and flexibility days.

1:10:21 Now if you’re really training that stuff that’s about an hour and a half to two hours five days a week. Not everybody’s got that kind of time. I sure don’t have that kind of time. Do I need activities that are going to train multiple things at once because I can’t train two hours a day or not every day. And the other thing that I loved about the weight vest, and this is sort of the most important thing, is it fit into my schedule, right?

1:10:52 Find stuff that fits into your schedule. I have to have dogs. My wife and I are in a dog sanctuary and I have to hike my dogs in the mountains every day. It’s the job. It’s part of what I do.

1:11:03 So putting on a weight vest doesn’t, other than the two minute stakes to put it on and take it off, there’s no extra time. I’m doing what I normally have to do and I’m just making it harder, right? So that’s how I like to think about it because we’re all busy and you don’t wanna skimp on this stuff because you really wanna thrive for the rest of your life. However many days are ahead of you, do you want these kind of smart work options? Yeah, definitely.

1:11:33 The workout you want is the one you actually get done more than anything. Tell me about this, the benefits of an older workforce. This is an interesting point in the book because again, I think we always used to think that when you get old, you have to retire because you don’t get it. You can’t teach the old dog new tricks. The technology confuses you.

1:11:52 We don’t want grandpa working at our tech startup, right? Whether they say it or not, that’s what they’re thinking. But what you’re saying, I think, especially if people adopt a lot of these concepts, is that this older workforce could be the thing we really need. Yeah, so there are some caveats here that we should come back to in a second, but you mentioned at the start of the program, older adults, as we go into our 50s, there’s changes in other brain processes and information.

1:12:24 If we get it right, we can talk about what that getting it means in a second. As you said, we get access to whole new levels of intelligence, and this is stuff it’s hard to come by earlier. So you get things like multi perspectival thinking, the ability to see multiple points of view, you, you sort of lose black and white thinking that tends to go away, you start to realize it’s more nuanced, all great big picture, thinking systems thinking really start to come online. Um, we also get new levels of creativity. And this includes divergent thinking right outside the box farflung creativity, the hardest one teach, and we get new levels of empathy and wisdom. My point is, so both, you know, in my work on technology bold and abundance and the future president you think and my work and peak even performance I spent a lot of time talking to CEOs. One of the conversations that is very frequent is training, hiring. How do we train employees? How do we hire? Like usually it’s around flow stuff. But I’m always asking the Dio’s, tell me about your dream employees, 21st century, what’s the dream employee? And the answers I hear to the traits I hear most frequently decided is, oh, this is a camera company without this is one, I need really intelligent, really creative, really innovative employees, because the rate of change in the world is spectacularly fast.

1:13:52 And if I can’t keep pace, if I can’t stay ahead of it, I’m out of business. The second thing is, I need wise and empathetic employees. Why? Three reasons. The first is we all know you can’t own a business without psychological safety.

1:14:07 This is something like we’ve all learned over the past five to ten years, foundationally you need psychological safety and that’s really difficult without empathetic wise employees. You also, everybody’s business, I mean I’m a writer and that’s got to be one of the solo careers you can possibly have and I will say at least 60% of everything I do is still done as a team, right? Maybe even more than so team performance. Team performance is all about collaboration, cooperation, which is all about empathy and wisdom. And finally, Jeff Bezos, you know, clearly claimed the mantra for 21st century business is customer-centric thinking. And I don’t think that’s changed. But if you’re not empathetic or wah, nobody’s thinking like your customers. So my point is holy crap people in their 50s who are properly trained and continuing to properly train, this is a dream workforce, this is a business revolution waiting to happen and I’m not the only one who’s noticed this, right? A lot of people have sort of been, because the peak performance, what we’re now calling peak performance aging, Five or six or seven years ago was like 11 different fields, healthy aging, successful aging, geriatric psychiatry, body disemission, flow science, I keep going on and on and on.

1:15:28 It’s coalescing this new thing that we’re calling peak performance aging, but there’s a bunch of people in it and we’ve all seen the same data, we’ve all run our own experiments and you know, across the board, there’s things you’ll hear like don’t retire. Retirement’s terrible, right? I don’t think people across the board in big performance aging tend to say, but everybody else who’s looked at the same thing and just came to the same religion, holy crap, there’s a business revolution waiting for us.

1:15:54 Now, it doesn’t mean you want to hire every older adult. There’s a couple of caveats. So one, you need to look for people who have passed through the successful gateways of adult development, which are, you need to know who you are, solve the crisis by identity. You need to have a match fit, like a tight fit between who you are, your identity, and what you do in the world, right? It’s got to align with your values, your purpose, and then around the age of 50, we got to forgive those who have done us wrong.

1:16:23 We can do those things, those are the mob gateways of development, and then in our 50s, three things matter. To unlock all these new thinking styles, these new super hours, we actually have to engage in creative activity. It’s the pattern recognition underneath creative activity that starts to train, that starts take advantage of these brain changes. So the brain is going to change anyways. Can you take advantage of it? You need creative thinking to sort of really unlock it. And then once you start to unlock it, two things matter. One, you’ve got to train against physical fragility because what good is all this new brain? Right. So the five aspects of functional fitness start to matter there. And two, and this is something that you said in your lead in, don’t hire grandpa, doesn’t get technology can’t get and it’s because of risk aversion. Older people are more risk-averse than younger people. Some of it has to do with brain shrinking. As our brain shrinks, processing speed gets impacted and the brain goes, oh shit, you’re a little slow, you’re one step behind, so let’s be a little cautious. We talked about how exercise improves simple chemical law, even things like that, so you can fight against it, but there’s There’s a pause there and if you’re more risk adverse and you’re more fearful, there’s the data stream consequences that will block creativity, it actually blocks a bunch of these new levels

1:17:43 Of intelligent. Fear blocks empathy, you get selfish, you don’t get empathetic when we’re scared and fear blocks learning. So wisdom doesn’t accumulate because we won’t learn, it’ll block learning. there’s a big risk aversion penalty. You actively have to be training against risk. And we talked a lot about physical challenges may be slightly better for that. I’m not saying there aren’t a lot of other kinds of risks, emotional, social, intellectual, right? That sort of stuff that are worth training and getting good at, but the physical side is there too. So a well-trained over 50 year old is that these are your dream workers. Now do we screen workers that way?

1:18:30 No and I’ll give you a radically different example where you know in the middle of an election cycle in America and a lot of the candidates are over 70 and there’s a lot of talk about oh we should test their brain power and all that stuff and maybe what I really think is you should look at their life and start asking questions about the quality of their social relationships, life-long learning, wisdom, expertise, the five categories of functional fitness now up in their training them. Like those are the questions that are way more important to me than a cognitive test because I’m just, I’m getting worried about these cognitive tests and how you’re assessing certain things. Could you probably come up with the right one?

1:19:13 Yes. Do I trust people to do it? No, I don’t. But there are signs that you can look for and you’re like, okay, this is gonna be a vibrant, over 50-year-old, is my dream employee? And we want that for sure.

1:19:28 That’s fascinating stuff, Steven. So not all 77-year-olds are created equal. And it sounds like to find that right, 50-plus-year-old worker, it sounds like it’ll be a small percentage of them. But if you find that one, they could be more valuable than any other worker or a super valuable person? Yeah, I mean, it’s an interesting question, Brian, because like, are they gonna find it now?

1:19:54 This information is out, you know what I mean? So like, are you gonna find it today? I don’t know, but within a couple of, you know, my books come out, Daniel Leviton, neuroscientist at McGill, just wrote a really phenomenal book called Successful Aging. He talks about most of the cognitive stuff that we’ve been talking about. We looked at a lot of the same papers.

1:20:13 If you want the 800 page textbook version, successful aging, if you want the adventure story I’ve read in our country. But the conclusions are roughly the same, right? So like the news is the traditional long story theory is going away and we also know that retirement is deadly, right? The first thing anybody will tell you about peak performance aging, successful aging is don’t retire. Right.

1:20:38 Really don’t retire. It’s a bad idea, right? It’s a bad idea. Now, maybe you have a good job that you no longer want to work, you know what I mean. Stop doing that job, but find something that is rich and emotionally fulfilling and keeps you busy and fills your time and uses your brain and your body, otherwise you’re just sort of got to go down a cliff.

1:20:58 Yeah. Look, in addition with the physical stuff, what you just said about fear is fascinating. I had to re-examine my own relationship with fear about five years ago, six years ago when I had a guy come on my show that ended up kind of mentoring me for many years and really pushed me when it came to my own risk taking and I wasn’t really taking the same, well I wasn’t really taking the risks I needed to to grow as an entrepreneur, to grow in a lot of other ways and so now I kind of engineer risk into my life and now I try to do things that I know have a chance of failure because I know without doing that I have a chance of stagnating or dying and that’s true always about business but it’s interesting you say that.

1:21:40 My friend, Laird Hamilton, the big wave surfer, who’s a good friend, he is maintained. And I just think it’s the right way to think about it, is try to do just one thing every day that scares you, actually scares you. And I, you know, I mean, let’s not kid ourselves, sometimes that’s having a conversation with my wife, right? Sometimes it’s that, right? And sometimes it’s other stuff, But I think it’s really, really important.

1:22:15 Part of it is this. So here’s a weird tidbit. Though by training up risk tolerances, you’re keeping yourself open to experiences. Though openness to experience is really important for successful aging, healthy aging, pre-performance aging. But here’s the weirdest part.

1:22:32 They were looking at like the big five psychological characteristics of which openness to experience is one. And then one, see, are they related to health and longevity? They’re all related to health in one way or another, but only openness to experience is related to longevity. And you can see this when there is a massive decline in openness to experience or big decline in openness to experience, people are usually dead within a year. It’s literally that tight.

1:22:59 Openness to experience massively declines. Start the clock is what the data tells us. So risk aversion, right? Training now, risk aversion is also training up openness to experience. And, you know, that seems to have some serious benefits too in keeping us alive and healthy.

1:23:18 Super important. You know, interesting you say about these older people. I think it was like eight years ago, Stephen, when I had the author Jared Diamond on my show. I don’t know if you know him, but he wrote the book Guns, Germs, and Steel. Back then, I didn’t have all the fancy cameras and I wasn’t wearing a suit.

1:23:34 I was in my old studio with my webcams on the thing. And he was, I think, 77 at the time, right? And he rolls up, first of all, I can’t even believe he’s coming over to my studio. I was like, oh my God, because I had read his book and he was in town and there weren’t a lot of podcasts back then. And he rolled up and what really shocked me was he told me his age and he didn’t act like that at all.

1:23:58 I mean, he was 77 and he was like, I’m like, what’s next for you? And he’s like, I got a book next year. I got a book in two years. I got a book in three years. And I was like, Jesus, this guy’s, he’s gonna be putting the pedal to the metal through his 80s.

1:24:12 And one of the first times I noticed that, and funny, now that I look at all of your data here, it’s like, well, here’s a guy who’s out there teaching, innovating, putting his ideas, they have to be tested, he’s out there researching, so he’s probably doing all of these things that are keeping him cognitively present. And then I have a bunch of recent guests, like Robert Kiyosaki, author reached out, poured ad 77, crushing it. Jim Rickard, same thing. He’s in Antarctica right now, climbing glaciers.

1:24:42 And again, he’s on my show, he’s flying to Japan. Dan Pena, he’s up at his castle, yelling at kids all week long, all 77, 78 years old, arguably at the top of their game, arguably still going up. And just really interesting to note, you know? And like you said, cognitive test or an age test, would not do them justice of who they really are as people. You know, interesting.

1:25:11 So it’s similar, a little related, but it just happened the other day, it really stayed with me. I was skiing.

1:25:23 So if you read in our country, there’s some really big lines I would ski in that book. I went back and like re-skied all the biggest lines in our country that I had skied I did it like, you know, multiple times just to make sure like the dead stay dead. But it was maybe the rowdiest ski I’ve ever had and I’m 55 years old and my ski partner was with me and he’s 35 years older than 20 years younger than me. But he made it because somebody said something to us on a chairlift about like, you know, oh yeah, if I was only my 18-year-old self, I would ski that kind of line, like the geezer dust, right? And Ryan, my ski partner, looked at the guy, he just sort of leans forward and looks at him and goes, what are you freaking talking about?

1:26:13 I would crush my 18-year-old self. In fact, I’ve skied him massively today and I was thinking like, oh my God, like forget about it. This was the best ski day of my entire life and I’m 55, right? Like period, I could not, I don’t think I could have died. I couldn’t have done it at 15, 40 like definitely not at 18 like was not nearly together and um um That’s the uh, that’s the thing that’s really interesting and you said No, no, I thought they were like they’re at their peak form. It’s 77 right? It’s 78 Um, I don’t know what that you know, I can’t even imagine I think okay, that’s 23 years from now. Oh cool. Okay. I want that um but one of the things that makes it seem a little more feasible, possible, doable, real is, holy crap, I’m doing things professionally and personally at 55 that I, I mean, I’ll take my present self over myself at any other point in my life, in my career, for all the skills, pretty much.

1:27:19 Yeah, you know one fine. I think you might want my you might want my 21 year old 22 year old So you’re in a drinking contest the only thing I can think of like, you know You might want my younger self if you if you want us if you want to drink a drink me Okay, but other than that, yeah, your younger self is also the only one stupid enough to take on that challenge, too You know one thing that I observed openly when I accepted that boxing match last year and this you’ll find this interesting Stephen is that my 41 year old self would have never accepted it because I would have been too scared. I wasn’t mentally developed to understand that it was a risk I could take and I could live with the outcome of that risk and I could handle pushing myself into that situation because of my age and what I had been through. So I was now mature enough to be able to put myself in the situation that I knew would make me grow in so many ways and I literally couldn’t do that 10 years earlier even though I was technically stronger and fitter and all these other things going for me but I didn’t have the perspective of knowing this was the thing I needed to do to advance myself to feel good about it to do the checklist I don’t know maybe maybe even maybe somehow this was the thing I needed to do to get me even in peak performance right because I’m on a mission so that was really interesting to me to see that about myself that that

1:28:45 That I had actually done something I couldn’t have done. The younger guy would have ran away from that, would have ignored it, would have found an excuse not to even engage with that challenge. That’s what the younger guy would have done. So the only story that should have been in our country that didn’t make it is a story that involved my friend Rebecca Rush. Rebecca is, she’s known famously as the Queen of Pain.

1:29:10 She’s the most celebrated female endurance athlete in history, um, seven time world mountain bike champion. She’s got like world championships and things we didn’t even just like quarantining and things like, he’s insane. And she just at, I want to say 55 could be 54, could be 53. I could get her age wrong this year completed the, uh, the hand powered Iditarod, so there’s the Iditarod, the Alaskan sled race. Um, there’s a human powered version, no sled dogs.

1:29:39 You go on winter bicycles. And she won this year, through third, it’s her third year doing it. She won. And all the journalists that her age was the story. Rebecca Rush wins, despite being 54. Like that’s the story, everybody. And she called me after retirement. She’s like, I got geezer everywhere. I went there, right? The story is, oh, my God, she does it in spite of rage. And she’s like, Stephen, I got to tell you, I but it died doing this in my 40s. The reason I lived is because I’m 55 and I have this much emotional regulation, I have this much self-control and I know all these things about myself in dangerous situations, how I’m going to react. It’s like I would have died 10 years ago.

1:30:26 They are like, not only are they wrong on their assumption, right? Like that you’re doing this in spite of your age, the only reason I can do this is because of my age. it’s the exact same sentiment I just heard from you. And I think the same thing is, I mean, how did I ski those big ass lines? It, I managed to say like, what was the victory? The victory was, I came out the other side of my pulse and got spiked, right? That was the victory is like, it’s not just I can ski this thing. It’s, I can ski this thing and my pulse is literally not going not going to move that’s that’s the and that’s the cool thing and I could have done that when I was younger at all um I know I know a new term now getting geezerd I like that so that’s the comments I got on Instagram when I post my head spin videos on breakdancing they’re always like age is just a number I get all that which is all good now I know what it is but that’s interesting I guess you’re on the right path if you’re getting geezerd on a regular basis, right?

1:31:29 Yeah, if you’re going to use it on a regular basis, duh. I know we’re running out of time, so I have to tell this story because it was one of the things that started the beginning of my park ski adventure and it’s what, it’s sort of like, it stuck with me, it was really why. So, I noticed when I was skiing, I lived in New Mexico, right? Last time we were together, I was living in New Mexico and I would ski in three places. I would ski at the Santa Fe ski area, house, And then every spring I would come out to Tahoe and ski at Palisades, Tahoe, Squaw Valley.

1:32:02 And Santa Fe Ski Area, Santa Fe is a retirement community. And so most of the people there, most people at ski areas are over 50, right? Unless you’re on a weekend, most of the people are over 50. But Santa Fe’s got this retirement vow. And a lot of people who go there think of themselves as retiring.

1:32:24 And I’d be on the chairlift and I said, you can’t tell how old anybody is, really. But, you know, I’d be on a chairlift with folks who I knew were like 10 or 20 years younger than me. And I’d ask him questions like, hey, did you check out the shoot over there or the cliff over there? And I’d invariably get, I’m too old for that shit. Because it was a retirement community and there was their mindset.

1:32:47 Then I’d go to Taos. Same age skiers, Taos is an outdoor athlete community. They’re not action sport athletes, their outdoor athletes. So in Taos, who’s at the upper part of the mountain people have to hike to get to the gnarliest terrains. And I would go to Taos and you like guys who were 20 30 years young older than me would hike me into the ground.

1:33:08 Right. And these are the same people who retired and didn’t want to do any of that stuff, essentially, but they’re they can have this outdoor athlete mindset. So they’re like, they can hike me. I mean, I remember skiing one day with like guys in their 70s. And I’m so we’ve done so many laps I couldn’t no longer see, I must fall off an 80 foot cliff because I’m so tired I can’t see, and they’re still skiing fine. And then I come to Palisades Tahoe where people are action sport athletes. And so you can say, if you go to Tahoe and you can say, hey, you want to hike the peak, everybody says yes. But if you say, hey, do you want to go to the drain park? Oh, no, I’m too old for that shit. Okay. But you just hiked me into the ground, right? Okay, what’s going on? Then you go to Tahoe and people are action sport athletes. So you say things like say I’m an AIDS group and you want to go to the train park and everybody goes to the train park and it’s the only thing different is how what category people put themselves into it’s so stunningly shocking to me um a simple some of this stuff is but we don’t we all talk about over reframing and things like that we all know stereotypes are bad and those sorts of things but we don’t stop to think about our own thinking and sound our head is functioning these other Other things that we know are true are true.

1:34:20 Oh shit, the placebo effect is gonna have an impact in my head, the stereotypes are gonna have an impact in all this stuff, it starts to get really important. What’s next for you, Steven? And is this like the funnest project you’ve worked on in like five or 10 years? This has been a delightful project. It has been, this is one of the longer things I’ve worked on.

1:34:43 So it’s been a tremendous amount of work which is totally gratifying and I love longer projects. It’s been really fun that way. Next for me, we’ve got a whole slate of research around peak performance aging and the same. I may, but that’s really where my focus is. I think somewhere down the line, I think four or five years, the next big book is gonna be on intuition, but right now I’m working on the neurobiology intuition when we’re writing research papers.

1:35:10 After I get a couple of those out and really put into the stuff we’ve discovered is really the stuff, then I’ll start writing about it. So for now it’s a lot of peak performance aging experiments, which is fun. Which is great. I mean, look, I follow your work I’ve had you on before, but I haven’t really heard of peak performance aging. A lot of this stuff was really new to me.

1:35:32 Steven though I’m living parts of it, I still had never heard it articulated in detail, you know, Kotler style. So yeah, I hope you run with this for a little bit longer because the world needs it and it needs it bad. And as I’ve been having a lot of discussions about longevity lately, and it’s one thing to live longer, but what the hell is the point if you’re not? Yeah, if it’s not high quality, who cares, right? Yeah, as a matter of fact, it might be worse.

1:35:59 It’s like a longer prison sentence at that point. Well, and I also think, you know, so Peter Diamandis, obviously I’ve written three books with him, he’s a good friend of mine, he’s very invested in longevity technologies, and Peter’s running around saying, I’m gonna live to be 150. And I got to tell you something, that’s a long-ass time. One, like I’m not sure, like I’m really curious what happens next. So I don’t even know in general if I want that one.

1:36:29 But two, if that’s possible, quality of life becomes like the thing, right? The thing, you got to like, it is definitely, I mean, we, because we’ve all witnessed it. And I think as maybe as a last thought, talking about the mindset of old, we witnessed the generation that has benefited from longevity science but not healthspan science, right? Lifespan extended, healthspan did not. That’s what, you know, my father and mother are both in their 80s, right?

1:37:03 That was not possible 10, 15 years ago but they both got like 11 different things wrong with them and they’re having a great time and they have a lot of quality of life but they had to work really hard at it. And I think all of us, we’ve got this boomer. And the boomer generation, they’re older. And we’ve extended their lives. Have we massively improved the quality of their lives? And the answer is not yet. And the reason is quality of life. This is like a positive psychology idea. In science, it’s five years old. The idea that we should apply it to older people is really fricking new, right? Like, you got to understand the idea that like, older people could benefit from this stuff.

1:37:48 Like in the 70s, we didn’t think it was possible, but don’t even waste your time. In fact, there’s this crazy thing. Harry Truman sends out a memo in the 50s when we’re going to establish social security for the first time. And the memo is sets up things that are cutting edge that we’ve learned about old people, we’re not going to get everybody on the same day before we have this meeting. The first one, first thing that we now know to be true about all people. They’re just like regular people, they have all the same emotions, and all the same desires. Like, this is news in the fifties. This is news, like, shocking news, old people have emotions, just like you and me. Um, it’s stuff like that, where you’re like, Oh, now I’m starting to see why like, nobody’s having these conversations, because this stuff is really new positive psychology in general is about 20 years old and applying it to the second half of our lives. This is really sort of radically new. In fact, it wasn’t until 1997 that anybody actually realizes even a correlation between something really similar like optimism levels and when you’re going to die. We can well I don’t know you know this but if you are in your 20s and you write down a if you write a paragraph, this is a little bit about my history, this is what I’m looking forward to in the future, this is what I’m not looking forward to.

1:39:09 We can literally analyze it for linguistic density and optimism levels and predict with pre-stunning accuracy what decade you’re gonna die. It’s that like, it’s really tight at this point but it’s also very new. Anyways, thank you so much for having back. I appreciate it. It’s fantastic perspective.

1:39:29 I actually just had Dr. David Sinclair on and we were talking about lifespan and living longer. And it’s funny because I look at my parents and other people and I feel like they’ve got the extra lifespan, but it’s almost like they weren’t taught how to deal with it or what to do to prepare for that, you know? And they’re like, oh, now I’m here. And it’s like, I hope that the work you’re doing is gonna teach us how we can use that extra time, you know, and use it in a way.

1:39:58 And like you said, 150, I mean, that is kinda crazy, you know, and everything you’re talking about now, how does it apply from the years 100 to 150, probably in a very other strange nuance way, maybe there’s different protocols. Yeah, totally. Open questions, right? And even the stuff like David Sinclair, right? His interventions, health-wise, these are stuff that we know are working in like the 80s and 90s.

1:40:26 Are they gonna be the same ones that are gonna be working in like 100 and 20s? Those are really radically open questions because we just don’t know. Yeah, yeah. Well, to be continued, the book is Nara Country, Growing Old, Staying Rad, and you had all sorts of cool things going on with that. You got great videos, you got a website for that, you got programs, I think you’re introducing around it.

1:40:47 What’s the best way for people to get the book and learn more about this? You can get the book anywhere. Books are sold at Amazon, Barnes & Noble.com. Personally, you can support a local independent bookstore go in and do that, do that. And narcountry.com, G-N-A-R country.com, will get you both the book’s website. That’s where the peak performance aging experiment videos, everything we’ve done, we videotaped, there’s cool stuff there. If you’re interested more in the flow stuff, that’s flowresearchcollective.com. StevenCobbler.com gets you everything, me.

1:41:23 Love it. Steven, come back to London so we can do this in person next time. I appreciate you. Great concepts. You got me thinking a lot about myself and talking about myself today. So thank you, sir. Appreciate what you do. Keep doing it.

1:41:36 Thank you, sir. Have a great day. I appreciate you. All right. Fantastic. Thanks, everybody. We’ll see you next time on London Real. Take care. Bye.