Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
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.
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.
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Chapter 2: Can physical skills be retained with age?
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.
I chose park skiing in the book that accompanies all that, right? In park skiing, I'm using strength, stamina, balance, agility, flexibility. There's other stuff you want to do. There's ways. We have things called prime mover muscles, our big muscles, and then we have stabilizer muscles like your rotator cuffs or your hip flexors.
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Chapter 3: Why are dynamic activities crucial for aging well?
Over time, the body gets more efficient and it will start using the prime movers and not use the stabilizer muscles. So if you've been on the couch for a while and you come back to athletics, you're not going to hurt your quad. You're going to tear the stable out. You're going to tear your hip flexor because it stopped doing the work.
Your quad, if you're walking around, your ambulatory is working. Your hip flexor has started to atrophy. So there's ways you want to think about training that's a little bit different. if you've been away for a while. But those are the physical skills we need to train over time. On the cognitive side, it's a really long list.
And let me pause there, let you ask another question, then we'll get to the stuff on the cognitive side 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.
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Chapter 4: How can mindset influence aging and longevity?
Little known fact, your bones, like where you store all your minerals, all your nutrients are stored in your bones and they're released into... So everything that drives the brain, calcium, for example, which is in everything the brain does, it's stored in the bones. So as our bones become less dense over time, which happens... It impacts everything.
For women, really important after menopause, where does most of your estrogen come from? Your bones. So wildly fluctuating hormonal levels, which is a problem that most people have post-menopause, exacerbated by bone density. If you want to increase bone density, one of the best ways is hiking with a weight vest. There's lots of literature. There's lots of science on that.
There's also a bunch of other benefits, but it hits all of those categories if you're not interested in action sports. That said, there's a lot to recommend in action sports, especially a lot of our country is about a new way of approaching these difficult, challenging physical activities late in life that's much safer and much more well-suited to progression.
Yeah, because I have to say, like, I'm in my 30s and I used to ski and I don't even ski anymore because I'm like, I've got too much slip for it. I don't want to break a bone. I'm not into it. So I totally love that you're giving another option in terms of the weighted vest and hiking. So in your book, you actually took on park skiing.
And this is something that people used to believe that anybody over 35 like really couldn't learn. So talk to us about learning that activity at 53 years old and what you learned as an old dog learning new tricks.
So there's a couple of things you need to know to flesh this out a little bit. But you are right. Everything you said is totally true. Why did I think I could learn to park ski?
There's a whole bunch of new stuff in like flow science, my field and body cognition, a couple other whiz bang fields that I was like, you know, if these things are right, should be totally possible for older adults to be able to learn really, really difficult skills. I'll give you like one random example. We have a motor learning window.
Like Beverly says, don't become a gymnast or a ballet dancer after 25, right? Because that window's closed and you can't just, that's sort of true. There is like a lot of things in big performance aging. It's true, but, and here's the but, what really changes is not our ability to learn. It's how we learn. When we're kids, we play. When we're adults, we have shame. We have embarrassment.
We have time crunches. We have a whole bunch of other stuff. If you can shift back into that attitude of play, a lot of that motor learning window reopens. So that's just one example. A lot of the skills that we used to think declined over time. We now know their use it or lose it skill, including the skills we need to learn how to park ski. So that was sort of where it came from.
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Chapter 5: What role does forgiveness play in peak performance aging?
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Chapter 6: How does fluid vs. crystallized intelligence affect aging?
There's a tight link between who I am and what I do in the world, right? If you just, if you don't know who you are, you can't get match fit because there's no, if you don't know your strengths, your values, all that stuff. So that has to be by 30, by 40, we need to be, we have match fit. And then by 50, we need forgiveness. We got to forgive ourselves for like past embarrassments and past shames.
And we 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 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 love and kindness meditation and passion meditation.
It's an incredibly potent tool. It's amazing for a ton of different stuff. It's been studied extensively. for probably longer than any other meditation style. We understand all the neuroscience, but when it came to people who I got in fistfights with and worse for 10 years, it wasn't enough. I could like all the loving guidance meditation in the world.
Like I could forgive a lot of stuff and clean out a lot. I was left with like, it just like, wasn't going away. 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, you know, the story is sort of in the end of the book and I won't sort of ruin it. A 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, I've 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?
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