Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Steven Kotler: How to Stay Sharp, Strong, and Healthy at Any Age | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Fri, 09 May 2025
Most people assume that aging means inevitable decline—but health and mindset can tell a different story. At 53, Steven Kotler set out to defy the so-called “long slow rot” of aging by learning how to park ski, a feat most experts believed was biologically impossible past 35. Along the way, he uncovered that many of our mental and physical abilities are “use-it-or-lose-it” skills—ones we can actively train to extend performance, youthfulness, and joy. In this episode, Steven shares the science behind peak performance aging, how mindset shapes longevity, and why dynamic challenges like action sports may be the secret to staying young and profiting. In this episode, Hala and Steven will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (01:22) The Inspiration Behind Studying Peak Performance (02:25) Debunking the Long Slow Rot Theory (04:16) Use It or Lose It: Physical Skills (06:54) The Importance of Dynamic Activities (16:57) Mindset and Aging (21:29) Overcoming Personal Traumas (27:59) Fluid vs. Crystallized Intelligence (32:43) Advancements in Regenerative Medicine (34:07) Learning and Cognitive Health (34:52) Three Types of Thinking for Better Aging (35:42) Business Opportunities in Hiring Older Adults (37:20) The Importance of Physical and Mental Activity (42:07) The Power of Authentic Learning (50:51) Insights from the Blue Zones (56:33) The Role of Flow in Aging and Performance Steven Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning journalist, and the Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective. He is one of the world’s leading experts on human performance. Steven is the author of 11 bestsellers (out of fourteen books), including The Art of Impossible and The Future is Faster Than You Think. His work has been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes, translated into over 50 languages, and has appeared in over 100 publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Wired, Atlantic Monthly, Wall Street Journal, TIME, and the Harvard Business Review. In his latest book, Gnar Country: Growing Old, Staying Rad, Steven tests his knowledge and theories on his own aging body in a quest to become an expert skier at age 53. Sponsored By: Indeed - Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/profiting Shopify - Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at youngandprofiting.co/shopify Microsoft Teams - Stop paying for tools. Get everything you need, for free at aka.ms/profiting Mercury - Streamline your banking and finances in one place. Learn more at mercury.com/profiting OpenPhone: Streamline and scale your customer communications with OpenPhone. Get 20% off your first 6 months at openphone.com/profiting Mercury - Streamline your banking and finances in one place. Learn more at mercury.com/profiting Airbnb - Find yourself a co-host at airbnb.com/host Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap Youtube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services - yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship podcast, Business, Business podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal development, Starting a business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side hustle, Startup, mental health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth mindset, Mental Health, Health, Psychology, Wellness, Biohacking, Motivation, Mindset, Manifestation, Productivity, Brain Health, Life Balance, Self Healing, Positivity, Happiness, Sleep, Diet
Chapter 1: What inspired Steven Kotler to study peak performance aging?
And so I'd love to understand why his story was so shocking to you. How did he dispel the typical, you know, thoughts around traditional aging? And how did he inspire you to study peak performance aging?
So, you know, books have a lot of origin stories. There's like 11 different things that come together. I've been working, researching, looking at the field of peak performance for a while in a totally unrelated project, right? I was going to write a mystery novel and I wanted a cat burglar as a character who was going to steal musical instruments.
Who made the rarest musical instruments in history? Oh, it's Stradivarius. And then I found, figured out what you mentioned, which is he made two of the rarest and most expensive musical instruments in his 90s. And I went, well, wait a minute.
Everything I've been told about physical abilities is like the older myth about aging, which most of us believe, and I believed at the time of this, is what you could call the long, slow rot theory. It's the idea that all of our mental skills and our physical skills, they decline over time. There's nothing we can do to stop the slide.
So included in those skills, physical skills would be fast twitch muscle response, fine motor performance, dexterity, all this stuff you would need to make a violin or a viola in your 90s, along with like expertise and wisdom and all that, like cognitive abilities and IQ. It sort of paused me and I was like, well, wait a minute.
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Chapter 2: How can 'use it or lose it' skills prevent aging decline?
If this is true, either Stradivarius is like the one in a billion or most of what we've been told about aging is wrong. I had already been looking at other aspects of it, but it really sort of lit a fire under me to really investigate our physical abilities and what happened to them over time. I've been looking at the cognitive stuff for a while.
It's very related to flow, how we age, flow plays a big role there. So this is not new territory to me. The physical side was like, holy crap, could this possibly be true? And it is true. It's true across the board. Every one of our physical skills our use it or lose it skills. And the research is really clear. We don't stop using these skills, both physical and mental.
We can hang on to them, even advance them far, far later into life than anybody thought possible.
I love this. So you're saying the long, slow rot theory basically means that our physical mental skills decline over time. There's nothing that we can really do to stop the slide. That's what inspired you to kind of research this in more detail, understand performance peak aging. And like you just said, you said that use it or lose it skills. we actually have control over them.
We used to think that our physical abilities just decline, but there's a way we can actually keep those skills. So talk to us more about use it or lose it skills, what they are, how we keep them, I guess, healthy.
Yeah. So there's a bunch of stuff on the cognitive side. Let's get back there in a second. On the physical side, there's five main categories that matter. And let me, since a lot of your listeners are younger, let me start here, which is peak performance aging starts young. The research is really clear. Interventions in your 80s, even beyond Matter, like really matter.
You can you can really make changes right up to the end and they matter and they're going to have actual big effects. But a lot of the stuff that you want to start working on, you actually want to start working on your 20s and your 30s. And, you know, this is the biohacking crowd is very aware of this. Right. A lot of that crowd is 20s and 30s and they're doing a lot of these things.
Now, I might argue that they're doing some of the wrong stuff because they don't quite understand what peak performance aging is. But besides the point, a lot of this stuff starts young. On the physical side, we want to train five skills that matter most. Strength, stamina, flexibility, agility, and balance. Those are the five skills that you want to train over time. And this is not new knowledge.
Like the World Health Organization knows exactly how many minutes a week we should be training these things. But peak performance aging, It's 150 to 300 minutes of hard aerobic training a week, moderate to vigorous aerobic training a week, two strength training days a week, and three flexibility, balance, and agility days a week. Or you can find one skill.
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Chapter 3: Why are dynamic activities essential for healthy aging?
And let me pause there, let you ask another question, then we'll get to the stuff on the cognitive side because we'll spend the next 20 minutes, I'll spend the next 20 minutes talking.
Yeah, 100%. So on the physical side, why are action sports and what you call dynamic activities so important to help us with these use or lose it skills? Because I think a lot of people who are older, we're used to going to the gym, taking group classes, whatever, but nobody's really thinking about action sports. And you say that they're a great way to leverage these skills.
Okay, we got to get to the full sentence anyway.
So let's go for it. Just tell me.
Throw it out there and then we'll break it apart and why it matters so much.
Okay.
So if you want to rock till you drop, if you really are interested in peak performance aging, you need to regularly engage in challenging creative and social activities. That is, you've just pointed out that demand dynamic, deliberate play and take place in novel outdoor environments. Now let's unpack what this big ass sentence and what it means and why it answers your question.
So challenging social and creative, lifelong learning matters for a bunch of different reasons, but short version, if we want to preserve brain function, we need expertise and wisdom.
expertise and wisdom are these very diverse neural nets in the brain lots of real estate lots of redundancy impervious to cognitive decline the more expertise the more wisdom and this is why one of the reasons performance aging starts young like literally the guy who who did the core research on wisdom elkanon goldberg his core advice is the more wisdom the more expertise the more we have cognitive reserve the meaning the more we can stave off alzheimer's dementia
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Chapter 4: What role does mindset play in aging and performance?
It shuts down the seeking system. We get the voice in our head that says, hey, don't do that. You're going to lose what you have. The truth of the matter is like old people are literally addicted to the wrong drugs in their bodies. You need all of these systems working together for peak performance aging. And there's a penalty for having a mindset of old. And this is the point.
There's a big health and longevity penalty. In fact, when you flip it, when you have a positive mindset towards aging, second half of my life is filled with thrilling and exciting possibilities. My best days are ahead of me. It translates, and this is one of the most well-established facts in peak performance aging. It will translate into additional seven and a half years of health and longevity.
That's huge. That's like quitting smoking huge. In fact, if you're morbidly obese and have a shitty mindset towards aging, change your mindset first. It actually have a bigger effect on your life and your health and your longevity than losing weight. So it's really, really important. It's where peak performance aging starts. And one of the reasons that peak performance aging starts young is
If you never develop this mindset, this isn't going to be a problem. Like you're not going to have to overcome it. One of the reasons the NAR style adventure is so useful for older adults is like for me, it didn't matter what I wanted to believe about aging. Once I got out on the mountain, I was learning how to do 360s and nose butter 360s and 180s and all the other stuff I learned.
Like it just blew up all my limiting beliefs about what was possible in the future because I have just onboarded the most difficult physical thing I've ever done in my life. And I did it at 53. And I've done a lot of difficult physical things along the way. This was definitely the hardest and I did it.
And I'm still park skiing at 55 now because I wrote books a couple of years old in terms of when I wrote it.
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Chapter 5: How can older adults learn new, complex skills?
And we've got to forgive those who have done us harm. And as you pointed out, I spent most of my childhood losing fights to jocks. I was a punk rocker. The jocks didn't like us. I didn't like them. And this was back in the 70s and 80s. And you've got to understand, cars of football players would pull up on the side of the road, and they'd see a guy with a mohawk, and they'd jump out to beat you up.
And it was like five against one always. And it was not a great situation. So I had a lot of anger. And I knew peak performance aging, you got to put that shit down. You cannot thrive in your 50s. You don't get these superpowers, which is why old dogs can learn new tricks better than young dogs. It's why one of the reasons I learned park skiing so fast is I have more intelligence.
I've got more creativity. I've got the stuff I need. And they've got even more wisdom, which means I can keep myself safer than when I was making better decisions along the way. That stuff is great, but I don't get it if I can't forgive those who have done me wrong. So the standard best way to do that, and there's tons of research, is loving kindness meditation, compassion meditation.
It's an incredibly potent tool. It's amazing for a ton of different stuff. It's been studied extensively. for probably longer than any other meditation style. We understand all the neuroscience. But when it came to people who I got in fist fights with, And worse, for 10 years, it wasn't enough. I could like all the loving guidance, meditation of the world.
Like I could forgive a lot of stuff and clean out a lot. I was left with like, it just like wasn't going away. So I decided one of the reasons I took on an incredibly difficult physical jockey challenge is, okay, I'm going to go like, this is my problem. Let's go walk a mile in their moccasins, right? Let's take this on. And it turns out it worked. By the way, I didn't think it was going to work.
I just knew I needed to do this to thrive. And I was like, well, I'm out of any other ideas. Loving kindness meditation, which is what everybody is not getting it done. And there's still anger there. There's still resentment there. There's still stuff there. So let me see if taking on this kind of putting myself on a physical mission could clear that out. And it did. And
The story is sort of in the end of the book and I won't sort of ruin it. Spoiler alert, right? I'd be giving away sort of that one and I'm not going to. But it was one of the neater things that happened along the way is I got to put down like a bunch of sort of shame and embarrassment and like stuff that I have carried since I was probably 10 or 12, definitely 12.
That's amazing. Do you feel like much lighter now and that you just can approach things differently? Like how did that impact you getting over that trauma like that after so many years of having the same issue?
I always say that one of the myths that I think a lot of people have about their life is that people think it's going to get easier. Like you think, oh, I'm going to get older. I'm going to get better at this. I'm going to be able to sort of like, oh, I know exactly what I like and I can manicure my life. And it just doesn't get easier. It just doesn't.
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Chapter 6: What are the benefits of overcoming personal traumas?
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Chapter 7: What is the difference between fluid and crystallized intelligence?
And then I could go back like trying to do it the other way was impossible for me. I don't. work that way and you can keep there's a lot more to authentic learning but the big point here is also taking on these kind of NAR style challenges late in life like learning how to park ski or whatever phenomenal for peak performance aging but you need a lot of motivation and it turns out we have like
We are driven towards authenticity. Carl Rogers argued that it functions as a fundamental drive. A fundamental drive meaning it's got as much power as a drive for sex or food or shelter. You have a drive to be yourself, your authentic self. And if you get it right, you get a huge boost in motivation, which is crucial for all this stuff.
So you learn better on the back end and you're more motivated to learn on the front end. And being that there's a lot to do in peak performance aging and it can be challenging, you want all the help you can get, right? In Art Impossible, I talk about One of the things peak performers are really good at is they never meet a challenge around a single fuel source. We know this food-wise, right?
Like you want carbs, protein, and fats before you're going into workout. Same thing with motivation. You want authenticity. You want autonomy. You want passion, purpose. All these big intrinsic motivators, curiosity, you want to stack them on top of each other because it maximizes our motivation.
I love that. So to wrap up this part of the interview, I'd love for you to just sort of summarize what skills generally do you think older people are better at than younger people? And older people, I guess, who have trained their brain properly, let's say.
Well, anything that requires seeing things from other people's perspectives and multi-perspectival thinking, you're just better at. It's harder to do when you're younger because of how the ego functions and how the it when you're older. You can meditate a lot to sort of lower cognitive bias and do those things, but it's going to start to happen naturally when you're older.
So to me, the big one, the cool one is the systems thinking part because like one of the commonalities among all the biggest brains I've ever met, all the real, the people who really can affect change in the world, they're all systems thinkers. And it's really hard to train people how to be systems thinkers. It's a tough skill to bring on. Certain careers force you to learn it in different ways.
Writing, especially if you write books, because you have to hold 400 pages in your head and move it around and be able to do stuff like that. have to be able to hold the big picture. It's sort of built into the job and it's trained up over time, but it's not trained up in a lot of jobs. Mostly we specialize, especially in the modern world. We specialize, we specialize, we specialize.
And one of the things that I want to point out here is And anybody who's ever worked in entrepreneurship, innovation, like, you know, all the big innovations are in the cracks between disciplines. It's very hard to innovate inside that same funnel that everybody's been in for 50 years.
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Chapter 8: Can cognitive decline in older adults be reversed?
And here's the cool thing. Even though a flow state lasts about 90 minutes, sometimes it can stretch out for longer. The heightened productivity and creativity will outlast the flow state by a day, maybe two. Flow also resets the nervous system. It calms you down, flushes stress hormones out of your system. So emotional regulation, emotional management, fear blocks, performance on every level.
Flow resets the nervous system. And the thing is, it's most people, and especially all the people listening to this podcast, are going to be like you. You got to your 30s and you stopped skiing. You put down childish things. The skis go away, the surfboard goes away, the skateboard goes away. You stop samba dancing and salsa dancing and all that stuff. And the research shows that's a disaster.
It's a disaster. In fact, we work with tons of people all over the world and burnout is a real big issue. The first thing we do to treat burnout is have them double down on the primary flow activity. Research shows that if you want peak performance, you need to have like about three to four hours a week on your primary flow activity just to keep your nervous system where it needs to be.
Yeah, I'd love for you to tell everybody about the Flow Research Collective and all the trainings you guys have available.
Flow Research Collective is my organization. We're a research and training organization. On the research side, we study the neurobiology of peak human performance, what's going on in the brain and the body when we're performing at our best.
We did this work with scientists all over the world at Stanford and Imperial College London and UCSC and UCLA and UC Davis and USCSF and a whole bunch of other academics. And we take the science and we use it to train people.
We train people in 130 countries and we train everybody from like professional athletes and members of the special forces to soccer moms and insurance brokers and teachers and folks in the Air Force. And we work with a lot of companies in between. So I think now we're training Facebook or Meta, Accenture, Bain Capital, Audi, San Francisco Police Department, the Air Force.
wise watch people and our trainings are for everybody and if you're interested if you go to getmoreflow.com cheesiest url in the world but nobody was remembering any of the others so i've given in and it's now getmoreflow.com despite the fact that i'm embarrassed to say it out loud but you can go there and sign up for a free uh hour-long coaching call with somebody on my staff.
So you'll hear all about the trainings. You'll learn everything. Is it right for you? Is it wrong for you? Nobody on my staff gets every, I'll fire somebody if they try to sell you anything. It's just an informational conversation. So it's really mellow and most people get a lot out of it and it's free, getmoreflow.com.
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