YAPClassic: Steven Kotler, Secrets to Peak Performance in Your 30s, 40s, and Beyond

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What's up, a yap bam! You're never too old to learn something new. You've probably said that to yourself before. I know I personally have said it a lot. But is it actually possible to teach an old dog new tricks? How about a really old dog?

To answer that question and many others, we're going back to an interview I did in 2023, in episode 211, with the award-winning journalist and human performance expert, Steven Kotler. These days, Steven is a best-selling author and the executive director of the Flow Research Collective. But when he was a kid, Steven was a skinny, klutzie, and usually the last guy picked for any team.

At 53 years old, he decided to conquer his past shame and push his own aging body past preconceived limits. In this episode, Stephen shares how to navigate peak performance as we age and how to keep our user or lose its skills. He'll also dispel some myths around our aging brain and provide some tips for how we can stay at the top of our game as we enter our 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond. So stay right here and listen up. I give you Stephen Kotler.

So Steven, I'm super looking forward to this conversation. My podcast is called Young in Profiting, but I actually have avid listeners of all ages and their 40s and 50s and beyond. And so I know they'll greatly appreciate this conversation. And to kick it off, I figured we would start with how you got the inspiration to study peak performance. So I learned that you were really shocked by the story of Antonio Stradivaris.

And he's a famous violin maker and he had an amazing feat of creating two of his most famous violins when he was 92 years old. And this was in the 1700s, way before medical advancements. And so I'd love to understand why his story was so shocking to you. How did he dispel the typical, 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 performance agent for a while. And it's totally unrelated project, right? I was going to write a mystery novel. And I wanted a cat burglar as a character who's going to steal musical instruments.

who made the rarest musical instruments in history, I would stride a various. And then I found, figured out what you mentioned, which is he made two of the rarest, most expensive musical instruments in his 90s. And I went, well, wait a minute, everything I've been told about the physical abilities is like the older myth about aging, which most of us believe, and I 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 that decline over time, there's nothing we can do to stop the slide.

So included in those skill of 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 it's sort of pause me and I was like, well, wait a minute, if this is true, either stratovarius 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 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 on 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 are used to lose its 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 in life, the name is all 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 you lose its skills. We actually have control over them. We used to think that your physical abilities just decline, but there's a way we can actually keep those skills. So talk to us more about use it or lose its 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 since a lot of your listeners are younger, let me start here, which is peak performance aging starts young. Like the research is really clear, like interventions in your 80s, even beyond,

Matter like really matter you can you can really make changes right up to the end and they matter and they have actual big effects. But a lot of the stuff that you want to start working on you actually want to start working in your twenties and your thirties and you know this is the biohacking crowd is very aware of this right a lot of that crowd is twenties and thirties in the 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 week, two strength training days a week, and three flexibility balance in agility days a week. Or you can find one skill.

I chose park skiing in the book that accompanies all that, right? If I, in park skiing, I'm using strength, stamina, balance, agility, flexibility. There's other stuff you want to do. There's ways we have things called prime mover muscles, our big muscles, and then we have stabilizer muscles like your rotator cuff. So you have flexors. 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 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 flexor has started to atrophy. So there's ways you want to think about training that's a little bit different.

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, and then we'll get to the stuff on the cognitive side, because we'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 user to lose its skills? Because I think a lot of people who are older, we used to go into the gym, taking group classes, whatever, but nobody's really thinking about action sports. And you say that they're a great way to leverage these skills. Okay, we got to get to the full sentence anyway. So let's 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 to your 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 and pervious to cognitive decline. The more expertise, the more wisdom. And this is why one of the reasons people performance agents starts young, like literally the guy who did the core research on wisdom, Elkanon Goldberg, his core advice is that more wisdom and more expertise, the more we have cognitive reserve, the meaning, the more we can stave off Alzheimer's dementia.

color decline all the things that are going to happen to the brain over time is how we fight back and his point was wisdom among the many things encapsulated wisdom are all like the unconscious rules that govern how does systems work and his behavior work all the like all that stuff it's.

onboarded slowly over time. So you want to start training these things. You want to start learning, challenging creative and social activities. We learn a lot during. There also tend to drive us into flow. Social activities are really important as we age. The most important thing you can do for your brain is maintain social activity because it keeps the brain active in really important ways and really lowers stress levels. So a lot of stuff we're going to be talking about, there are nine known causes of aging.

They're all linked to inflammation. Inflammation is linked to stress. So anything you do that fights stress that lowers stress that gives you more emotional control is involved in peak performance aging. So social activities, lowers stress. They give us these pros, social others, people around who love me got my back. I can be a little less stressed. So there's a lot of that stuff. Dynamic deliberate play is the next bit dynamic. It's literally what we're talking about. It's just a fancy way of saying it. It's all five categories of functional fitness.

Stry, stamina, flexibility, balance, agility. Deliberate play, you've heard of deliberate practice, Anders Erickson's favorite expertise, repetition with incremental advancement is the fastest path for his expertise. And Anders wasn't wrong, but as he himself said, that's only true in certain very precise disciplines. And when faced with just general learning, deliberate play works better than deliberate practice. Deliber play is repetition with improvisation.

You can do the same thing you did last time, but a little bit of flourish, a little flower, a little something fun. It's playful, meaning there's no shame, there's no embarrassment. If you're bad who cares, you're having fun, but that feeling of play produces more neural chemistry, more endorphins. This one really boost the immune system lowers stress levels, but amplifies learning. So dynamic, deliberate place is I'm using all the

physical skills that decline and i'm learning better than any other way novel outdoor environments the last bit why do we care and this is back action sports demand dynamic delivered play they take place in novel outdoor environments in the challenging creative and social so one stop shopping the last bit is most important that one.

Outdoor environments in general lowers stress. We know this is as well established in positive psychology. A 20-minute walk in the woods will outperform most SSRIs for treatment of depression. I can talk about why if you care, but like we know that good for you lowers stress. So in itself being in nature is anti-inflammatory. So it's better for healthy aging. But if you want to preserve brain function, how do you do that? You want to birth new neurons and turn those new neurons into neural nets.

That's the learning. So the adult brain, contrary to what we used to believe for a long time, it actually does continue to birth new neurons. And in fact, the adult brain will birth about 700 new neurons a day, even basically until you die. But where do those neurons show up? Is the key question they show up in a part of the brain numbers. They have a campus. The campus does two things. It does long-term memory and it is location.

place, packed with place cells and grid cells. Why? We evolved this hunter-gatherers. When you were in the wild and something emotionally charged happened, you got to remember where you were when it happened. That's survival. So where did I get attacked by that tiger? So I don't go back there. Where was that ripe fruit tree? So when it comes into season, I'm hungry, I can go there. This is survival. This is what the brain is designed to do.

Peak performance and peak performance aging is always getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. Our biology is designed to remember when we have novel experiences and outdoor environments. So that's what you want to use it for. Action Sports gives you that. Now, I also say in the book that like if Action Sports aren't your thing, you can duplicate a lot of this by simply hiking with a weight vest. And weight vests are really key better than a lot of other things because they amplify bone density.

Little known fact your bones like where you store all your minerals all your nutrients are stored in your bones in the released into everything that drives the brain calcium for example, which is every 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 hormone levels which 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 the 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 while 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 lip 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 bust and hiking. So in your book, you actually took on park skiing.

And this is something that people used to believe that anybody over 35 really couldn't learn. So talk to us about learning that activity at 53 years old and what you learned as an old dog learning new tricks.

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 the park ski? There's a whole bunch of new stuff in like flow science, my field and body cognition, a couple of other whiz bang feels that I was like, you know, if these things are right, should be totally possible for all their adults to be able to learn really, really difficult skills.

I'll give you one random example. We have a motor learning window. Like you, 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 struck a whole bunch of other stuff if you can shift back in that attitude of play a lot of that motor learning window reopens.

So that's just one example. A lot of the skills that we used to think declined over time. We now know they're used to losing skill, including the skills we need to learn how to park ski. So that was sort of where it came from. I was an expert skier. I just had never parked skid. I knew no tricks, right? I was a big mountain skier. I could go in a straight line very fast really well, but park skiing is like it's a few takes.

Doing tricks off jumps and on rails and walrides, very acrobatic, very dangerous. So it was a totally new adventure for me. There were a lot of reasons to take it up. There were a lot of advantages about knowing how to park ski later in life was actually what I was after. But it was just a great way to test all this science. And when we learned, and here's what's cool,

So, to measure progress, I made a list of 20 tracks. This is zero to intermediate. Intermediate matter, because once you get there, you take the random shit out of the equation. You can control your progress and not have these accidental falls or things that really can get you hurt early on. I figured if it took five years, cool, whatever. I didn't care. I served in a 63. If it took me 60, great, whatever, who cares?

I did it under a season. In fact, I've never learned anything so fast in my entire life. And the cool part was my ski partner, who's your age, and was a former professional athlete who got very injured, retired, had a family, had his job, came back. This sport, he used the same methodology and got farther than he's ever gotten before. We came back the following year. We took 17 older adults, ages 29 to 68. They were intermediate at best park skiers or skiers and snowboarders.

and we trained them up in four days on the mountain, and they got good. But then, because as you pointed out, action sports, not for everyone, so the key thing here is mindset. What am I talking about? Let me tell you what we did, and let me tell you what we did. We then stripped out the action sports. We used weight vest hiking instead, and we put 300 adults all ages, ages like 30

the 80s vibe, I think, through the same kind of training to see if we could explode their mindset towards aging and get them on what I call the NARS-style quest, which is a challenging social and creative activity that demands dynamic, deliberate plan takes place in not a lot of door environments. I don't care what it is. I wanted them to just start on a quest that would lead to something that way.

What i really want to do is explode the mind set of all long tools for shit i'm gonna get hurt i got i got things i want to hold on to it sets up it's really weird our biology is designed when work when we're young kids teenagers young adults.

The seeking system sort of drives our behavior. This is exploratory behavior, right? Like, I'm going to go out. I'm going to check out something new. I'm going to figure out who I am and what I do and how I want to live and how do I want to make all that stuff. This is about dopamine and norepinephrine. Those are very potent, feel good neurochemicals. They're very addictive.

Very, very, very addictive, right? Cocaine's the most widely addictive drug on earth. All it happens is it causes the brain to release some dopamine in blocks. It's reuptake, right? So dopamine is really addictive. When we get stuff that we want to hold onto, oh, I got the right job. I've got the right partner. I've got kids. I've got dogs. I've got a great apartment.

I like my bike. Whatever it is, we no longer want to be seeking. We want the stuff that is about conserving what we have, protecting what we have, bonding. So we get endorphins and anandamide and oxytocin. These are like the prosocial narrow chemicals that underpin.

strong family structures and things like that, strong company structures, and they're great. But we're trading our addictions. And what happens is it makes us very, very conservative. It shuts down the seeking system. We get the voice in our head that says, hey, don't do that. You're going to lose what you have. 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 pre-performance, itching, and there's a penalty for having a mindset of, oh, 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 people from its 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 to 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 NARS 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 of 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 the park skiing at 55 now, because I wrote even books a couple years old.

in terms of when I wrote it. Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors.

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I can feel your enthusiasm and sort of like your vigor for life. And so it's really positive that you're spreading this message in terms of how people can basically stay young at heart forever. And like you said, it's totally in your control. If you put yourselves in situations where you're activating your brain in certain ways, you're playing your

Dispelling any sort of internal beliefs that you have about your own abilities by actually going out and doing these physical things. In turn, it's helping improve your cognitive performance. Just amazing, really cool stuff. And nobody has talked about this on the podcast yet. So it's very exciting. So sticking on this point of mindset, I'd love to talk about this concept of dirty old shame. I know that you had to get over some internal traumas.

From my understanding, when you were growing up, you weren't always this sporty. You were sort of the last kid picked on the team at school. And you mentioned in your book that part of you kind of overcoming and taking on this challenge was you getting over these past traumas. So talk to us about that and how we need to do that as well.

So another reason people from its aging sort of starts young. First, we start with the good news. One of the reasons old dogs can learn new tricks that we haven't talked about yet is as we enter our 50s, it's really in our late 40s, there are a bunch of really profound changes in how the brain process information.

One, certain genes only turn on with experience. They only flip these switches later in life. Two, in our 50s, the two hemispheres of the brain, which essentially function in opposition to each other along the way. They start working together like never before. And finally, the brain starts to recruit underutilized resources in our 50s. So as a result, we gain access to whole new levels of intelligence.

creativity, empathy, and wisdom. And it's I go on and on and on about those benefits. There's a lot that comes with that. But these are not guaranteed.

Psychologists talk about moderators, the technical tournaments, and if-then condition. You get this only if you do this, right? And if you want the access to these cognitive superpowers in our 50s, and we'll come back to it, but from a profit perspective, we really want to talk about those superpowers in a second. Let me finish this point.

There are a number of gateways of adult development that you have to pass through. So by the age age 30, you sort of if you really just want to enjoy and kick ass beyond 30, you have to have solved the crisis of identity, which sort of shows up round age 12. And Erickson thought he used to disappear at 18. It doesn't, but it does. If you haven't solved it by 30, you have a problem. The reason is by 40, you need match fit. Match fit is an economics term means

There's a tight link between who I am and what I do in the world, right? If you just hope you don't know who you are, you can't get match fit because there's no, if you don't know your strengths, your values, all that stuff. So that has to be by 30, by 40, we need to be, we have a match fit and then by 50, we need forgiveness. We gotta forgive ourselves for like past embarrassments and past shames. And we gotta figure 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, you know, in the 70s and 80s and like, you got to understand, like, 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.

I knew, peak performance aging, you gotta put that shit down. You cannot thrive in your fifties, you don't get these superpowers, which is why old dogs can learn new tricks better than young dogs. That's why, one of the reasons I learned Parks King 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 could keep myself safer than 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, passion meditation. It's an incredibly potent tool. It's amazing for a ton of different stuff. It's been studied.

for probably longer than any other meditation style. 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. 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, chalky 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.

Love and kindness meditation, which is what everybody is not getting it done. And there's still anger, there's still resentment, 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, I won't sort of ruin it a spoiler alert, right? I'd be giving away.

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 a bunch of shame and embarrassment and stuff that I've carried since I was probably 10 or 12, definitely 12. That's amazing. Do you feel much lighter now and that you just can approach things differently? 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 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. What it gets is more meaningful and more in life satisfaction, overall well-being. And that's what this really impacted. Somehow, it made life more meaningful in those ways. I don't know.

Do I feel lighter perhaps? But it just sort of, it closed that loop. You know what I mean? Like, okay, done. Check. I don't have to worry about that anymore. And literally what it really does is when certain memories just like pop into my head, now they just last a half second. And I'm like, oh, yeah, there's that thing. And it goes away. Whereas before, no, I could start to think on it and dwell on it. And then I'd have a problem. Yeah. Have you ever heard of Arthur Brooks?

I think so. He's somebody that I think you should definitely look into. So I had Arthur Brooks on the podcast in 2021, sorry, 2022. And he was like one of my favorite interviews. And he wrote this book called Cracking the Code to Happiness. He's a Harvard professor, social scientist. And basically he talks about how your brain biologically is different before 40 and after 40. And he talks about fluid intelligence versus crystallized intelligence.

And so this was like a big conversation that we had on the podcast and something that made us think a lot. I had a lot of feedback from my listeners. And I feel like what you say is pretty different from what he says. There are some similarities. But basically what he's saying is that you have a biological clock ticking, your ability to reason, think flexibly, learn new things, problem solve, be innovative. That starts to decline in your 40s and 50s.

And that doesn't mean that your brain starts to go bad you just start to have crystallized intelligence or you accumulate knowledge back skills and you can use that throughout your career as a way to teach other people and essentially what he's saying is like you've got to like be ready for the second half of your career and not miss that and be like trying to chase.

your younger self and your younger brain essentially. So for example, the professional athlete becomes the coach, the star litigator becomes a partner, the singer becomes an A&R exec, and you're basically teaching younger people your knowledge and taking on that second wave of your career. So he is right and he is wrong as far as I could tell.

where he's really right is passing along knowledge is absolutely key to being a performance agent. It's key to, in fact, the societies where people age the best. Two things are very true. One, they don't have negative stereotypes towards aging. So, ageism is the most common and social acceptance stereotype in the world. I go out in a public these days with any stereotype

Somebody's going to punch me in the mouth and cancel me, except for ageism. Ageism. You can people are like, oh, you're too old to do that shit. Like we geezer each other red enough and it's crazy. Becca Levy at Yale has done tons of work on ageism and the stereotype of aging. And it's incredibly detrimental. In fact, you could go as so far as literally we are killing older adults.

with how we talk about them. So that is really, really clear. Society is where there's no ageism. There's also cross-generational friendships. So the old are passed along knowledge. This is a natural part of brain development. Now, you have to put things into categories.

He is not wrong. We do shift from fluid intelligence into crystallized intelligence. That transition does happen, but, but, but, but, but, a bunch of the skills that we thought declined over time, like the fluid intelligence skills that we thought went away. No, it turns out that's, that's not true at all. We get actually new levels of intelligence and creativity in our fifties. So that's not actually true. There's certain things. The article I like best, Martin Seligman from

Penn and Scott Barry Kaufman wrote a great article on creativity over time where they talk about what goes away and creativity and what stays or comes on. And the list of what comes on and stays is much longer than what goes away. Now, there's stuff that does go away. So the question you've got to now ask, is it

permanent. Is this real or have we just not figured out how to train it? So let me give you an example. Adam Gazali is a friend of mine. He's on my board. We do a lot of research together. He's at UCSF and he had these neuroscientists in the cover of nature a bunch of years ago for a video game he designed. It's the very first video game to be approved by the FDA. It treats cognitive decline in older adults and what it

specifically focused is on is task switching. If you go back to fluid intelligence, one of the things that declines over time is task switching our ability to focus on this and then focus on this. And that's a real problem. He's got a video game that will take your brain if you're 60, you play it literally, I think it's three hours a week or three 20 minute sessions a week.

For six weeks is the standard doctor prescription for this video game, and it will reset your 60 year old brain back to 20. So there's a bunch of stuff like that, where it's user to lose it. We just have to figure out how do you train it up. The other side of it is, so let's talk about the other weird one of the things he said. One of the reasons we are brain performance declines over time is

White matter density decreases over time, and we lose certain neurochemicals. So what he's not telling you is, well, you can replace those neurochemicals. In fact, SSRIs, which actually suck for depression, turn out to be great for older adults. Low level SSRIs, because serotonin levels decline over time, and SSRIs can boost them. If you don't want to take a drug, type with a weight vest. Most of your serotonin is manufactured in your bones, and one of the reasons the brain has less is because you're making less.

In your bones and if you increase bone density, you get the serotonin back, you get a bunch of those neurochemicals back. The general thinking is sort of true, but a lot of those skills are used to lose it. And either we've already figured out how to fix them or this stuff is also progressing really, really, really quickly. That's the whole other side of this is regenerative medicine, longevity, science, all that stuff is moving at exponential rates.

So, for example, five years ago, we could not deal with most tendon bone and ligament problems. Today, there's very little you can do to tendons, bones, or ligaments that exome, stem cells, certain other things. Like we are good at that stuff now. It's advanced really far.

Now, if anybody's making you promises about stem cells that go like beyond bones like against the tendons, no, no, they're lying and they're exaggerating what the what's what's real right now. But up to that point, no, no, we've sort of got a dial. So technology's advancing and it's going to solve a lot of a lot of those issues. A lot of those issues are not

what we thought they were, and you can train a lot of that stuff. In unusual ways, we're just figuring out. And some of the early ways, like all the brain games, that they're worthless, totally worthless. They train nothing other than the ability to play that game. That's not how this works. But learning a foreign language, learning to play a musical instrument, learning a challenging dynamic activity, like all that stuff, no, no, that's the real medicine. And that really actually does work.

Yeah, I love what you're saying because I remember leaving that conversation with Arthur Brooks, although it was really enlightening and he said a lot of smart things. I felt depressed. I was like, oh, man, I got like, you know, less than 10 years to figure like to do all my innovative stuff. And it's good to know what you're saying that we are actually in control. Like, of course, you can be passive and the inevitable will happen with your cognitive decline. But if we're proactive and kind of fight that natural

tendency that's going to happen plus with modern medicine, like you said, there's a lot that we can do to slow it down, reverse it. So that's amazing. So let's dig deep on these three types of thinking, you alluded to them at a high level, that we get better at as we're 50 and beyond. So you say it's relativistic thinking, non-dualistic thinking, and systematic thinking. Yeah, so short version are ego quiets down in our perspective.

So, essentially, we learn to see things from multiple perspectives. We learn that there are very few black and white truths, and most things are gray. That's relativistic thinking and probabilistic thinking. Then, the last category, we learn to see the forest through the trees. We get good, better at systems thinking.

seeing the big picture. And because of these skills, this is where that extra intelligence, creativity, empathy and wisdom comes from and builds out of this intelligence. There's a huge business opportunity here and nobody's paying attention to it. So that little backstory, when I wrote a bold, which is a book about like honoring our shipment, people like Larry Page and Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and

And how to really use exponential technology and some human capability flow science stuff to really level up organizations. I spent so much years talking to CEOs. And a lot of the time and a lot of those discussions we would talk about hiring. Who are the ideal employees? How do you find them?

What do you need for the 21st century? And over and over again, thousands of times, I heard the same two things from CEOs. I need employees who are really intelligent and really creative and really innovative because the rate of change is really fast. And I got to keep pace and stay ahead of it. Otherwise, I don't have a company. I don't have a business. I can't do any of that.

Other thing I need is I need employees who are empathetic and wise because if I don't have psychological safety, nobody can do their job. If I don't have safety, I don't have great team performance, that team performance, you can't be a company. You can't do those things without empathy and wisdom. Most importantly,

The mantra of 21st century business and maybe we think japizos for this, but it's always been its customer center thinking. And if you're not apathetic or you're not wise, nobody's thinking like a customer at all. So it turns out a well-trained 50-year-old and well-trained is key, right? There's a whole bunch. We have like, you want those gateways of adult development turned about. These should be a hiring checklist.

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

Risk aversion increases over time and has a lot to do with like literally a white banner volume in the brain. But we have to train back because the more risk of risk of risk you are, the more afraid you are, the more norepinephrine you're producing that will block creativity. It blocks empathetic blocks wisdom. So like you have to train back risk diversion to really flower in your 50s, 60s and 70s. But if you get it right and you've got all that stuff,

These are dream employees. This is a business revolution we nap in the very people that are getting forced out of companies. No, no, no, no, that the very people we need in our companies, most overall. And in fact, this is not my line. I think it's Daniel Levitt, who might have said it is the first person I heard say it this bluntly, but Daniel Levitt is a neuroscientist who wrote a just wrote a book called successful aging, where if you want.

In my book, my book's sort of a fun adventure story, the sciences and the footnotes and sort of at the end, if you really want every itch of the science, you can either take my peak performance, aging training, or you can read successful aging. And like he goes through all of it, we came to all the same conclusions. Though I think I took my conclusions farther because I ran a bunch of weird ass experiments along the way. But he said flat out is like the best, the best advice I can give you on retirement is don't retire, don't ever retire.

If you're interested in peak performance aging, retirement is a bad idea. Reinvention? Maybe. Maybe I don't want to do the same thing I've been doing my whole life and I want to do something new. Great, fantastic retirement death sentence.

So I have a couple of follow ups to this. A lot of my listeners are young entrepreneurs, business owners. So if we're going to take your advice, give older people a chance when it comes to hiring. I mean, I know there's a big ageism issue, especially in the tech world that used to work at Disney streaming services. Like you were old over 40, you know, and like people looked at you sideways, you know.

I didn't trust you to do your job, essentially, if you were older than 40, 45. So I know there's ages. So if you were to interview somebody in their fifties, what questions would you ask them to make sure that they've been training their brain and. So I would ask one, how physically active you are.

If you're not dealing with somebody who has been regularly exercising for a while and hitting all five dynamic categories, you don't want to go near them. The number one correlate with health and longevity over time is leg strength, believe it or not.

I know I was going to ask that's one of my favorite facts. Yeah, it's wild. And we could talk about why and whatever. I don't think you can ask incoming, you know, employees, hey, what do you squat? Maybe you can. But it actually, like, if we're going to ask put politicians in office in their 80s, those questions become really freaking relevant. Like that's the, those are things you really want to know. Are you engaging in challenging creative social activity? Like, are you, that's those things we're going to checklist.

for folks over 50 identity match fit self forgiveness forgiveness of others. You don't get access to the cognitive superpowers without those things. So those are the kinds of questions you want to poke at to make sure are being checked off those sorts of things. Are you engaging in

challenging creative social activities that demand dynamic, deliberate play and take place in a novel outdoor like that. Those things, not they become a checklist and they become, if you want to work here and you're over this age, you got to do this because we need you, but we need this version of you. And the most important thing is I look for older adults with much younger friends.

I want to see those cross-generational friendships because older adults over 40, 50, one of the reasons they're not to be trusted is because they don't get the job because they're just two out of touch and things have changed. And there's a lot of stuff that changes and stays the same. And you sort of want the older adults around for that reason. But you also being old is not an excuse for not keeping up.

either. Like what I'm telling you is you've got access to more brain power. So like it's really not an excuse as far as I'm concerned. So I think it's got to be mutual. And I think the benefits are going to be amazing if it can be mutual.

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So it turns out that both preserving physical abilities and cognitive function, leg strength is the single largest factor. Now the cognitive function is weird. Some of it has to do with bone density. Again, we're back to the bones and the big bones in your legs. And if they're danced, they're not losing their minerals, their nutrients, they can feed the brain. The second part is that if you're not mobile, you don't have a social life.

It's a lot harder to have a social life. If you don't have a social life, you are not going to aid successfully. And in fact, if you don't have a social life, people performance, you're just sort of lock out of peak performance because you social support for a lot of different psychological safety reasons and just performance reasons. It's really important to have social support. And part of that, like you can get really great social support on the telephone on Zoom. We all learned that during COVID, but there is something to be said for in person, oxytocin, right? I always tell people if you

for whatever reason you're like stuck with the phone and soon make sure you pet a dog for at least eight minutes a day. A dog or a cat petting an animal for about five eight minutes also releases oxytocin some of those other prosocial chemicals. So like if you're stuck on zip like if you we need social support for performance we definitely need for people performance aging. Animals are friends here.

Yeah, I love that. I feel like you're giving us so much great tips in terms of how we can age gracefully and be impactful at an older age and still innovative and creative. So this is such a meaningful episode to me because honestly, we don't talk about this enough on the podcast. So we do need to learn as we're older. Obviously, it's possible you learned how to park ski at 53. So let's talk about how we can learn and embrace authentic learning.

So let's back up one step into, and talk about learning, like where you started. I just want to start where you started, which is, so if you want to stave off Alzheimer's dementia, cognitive decline, flu intelligence, what matters? Like long learning, why is that? Expertise and wisdom are the two most important things we can do to develop what's known as cognitive reserve.

So if you have a high cognitive reserve, you could even have advanced Alzheimer's. When you die, they are top of your brain. You've got tangles and plaques everywhere. And it just looks like your brain's mush and you still nobody would notice if you were alive. This was so some of the early research that happened. They started autopsying brains and being like, whoa, this person had advanced Alzheimer's. How the hell did they function so well up till age 100? What is it?

Expertise and learning and or to expertise in wisdom, actually, which are two different things, but important thing here is they're big broad networks and they're in the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is where most vulnerable cognitive decline. It's the newest brain structure from an evolutionary perspective and it's the most vulnerable. You don't suffer cognitive decline like deep in your brain stem.

It's impervious, but the prefrontal cortex is where it shows up, expertise and wisdom live in the prefrontal cortex and there's these diverse networks, lots of redundancy, lots of backup. So this goes down. You got seven other copies over here. Don't worry about it. So that's where you have to start with lifelong learning and.

You want to do everything you can to maximize learning for that very reason. So what do we know about learning? One of the best ways to maximize learning is authentic learning. This is a big movement in education right now, but, and it's based on a whole bunch of different stuff. But let me just talk about one thing. So there are attention. You can't learn anything obviously without focus or attention, right? Like paying attention is the gateway for learning.

Attention is a coupled system, it's linked to autonomy, and autonomy means we like driving the bus. We like being in charge of our own lives, right? We can't pay maximum attention to something if it's not sort of by choice. Authentic learning means we learn based basically exactly on who we are.

So it got a bad name early on because people start talking about learning styles. Are you a visual learner and auditory learner and that's absolute nonsense. Like that's actually not true. No, we're all those things. It depends on what we're learning and how we're wired and it changes over time and that's not actually, but what is true is everybody shows up somewhere on the introversion to extroversion scale. Introverts need to learn in private extroverts want to learn in public.

We're somewhere on the risk aversion scale. Like we all have, I'm this fearful. And you can only be pushed so far. And like, so those authentic learning is about like those kinds of questions, the questions that really matter. And so, you know, one of the most important things for me is I'm an introvert. I don't mind being bad at stuff, but I don't like being bad in public.

So we, and most terrain parks are actually under chair lifts and very, very visible. So I would take these park tricks into the side country, in the backcountry in the woods, and I'd learn them out of sight with my friends. 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 NARS style challenges late in life, like learning how to park skier, whatever.

Phenomenal for peak performance agent but you need a lot of motivation and it turns out we have like we are driven towards authenticity car Rogers argue that it functions as a fundamental drive.

A fundamental drive, meaning it's got as much power as our drive for sex or food or shelter. You have a drive to be yourself, your authentic self. And if you get it right, get a huge boost in motivation, which is crucial for all this stuff. So you learn better on the back end and you're more motivated to learn on the front end. And being that there's a lot to do in people for messaging and it's challenging.

You want all the help you can get, right? I in an art impossible. I talk about one of the things peak performers are really good at is they never.

me to challenge on 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, math, 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-perspective thinking, you're just better at. It's harder to do when you're younger because of how the ego functions and how the brain functions. You're just better at it when you're older.

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 I like one of the commonalities among all the biggest brains I've ever met, all the real

the people 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 it you know certain careers force you to learn it in different ways writing especially if you write books because you have to hold four hundred pages in your head and move it around and be able to do stuff like that.

You have to be able to hold the big picture, it's sort of built into the job and it's trained up over time, but it's not trained up in a lot of jobs. 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, but you move adjacent to where that funnel touches something, and suddenly there's a revolution waiting to happen. And that's how you build companies and world-changing companies and everything else. You can't see that shit if you're not a systems thinker. It's completely invisible to you. So the thing that I think is the most exciting over is that.

Yeah, that was really inspiring to me. I'm actually writing a book with Penguin Random House coming out in 2025. And that little bit of information was really inspiring. I'm going to include it in my book and credit you. Okay, so Steven, I want to wrap up this interview talking about your research in about the blue zones, these long lived communities around the world. You alluded to some of it, but I'd love for you to sort of dive deeper on what you found in terms of why these people live longer, happier.

Let me back this story up a little bit to tell you a story that's not in the book. Yeah. That is where this actually starts. So people may know this or not know this for almost the past two decades. My wife and I were on a hospice care dog sanctuary. So for two decades, we've done hospice work with dogs. We have a healing methodology that's based on, it's very low tech. It's like lifestyle interventions in a sense.

Flow science and evolutionary psychology. Nothing really fancy. Our dogs all get checked out by vets when they come to us before they come to us. They come from shelters, but we, I mean, are we specialized in the worst of the worst? So if you are a geriatric chihuahua with an abusive past, three legs, one eye, cancer, heart disease, mange and flatulence, you're our guy.

That's who we work with. And the vets would be like, we did get these dogs, dogs would be like, don't get attached. This dog is going to live a month, month and a half at most. This is about a provider of very good death. And we bring the dogs in. And mind you, we've over 700 dogs have passed through our facility and over 5,000 are our programs. So big sample size. And on average, our dogs wouldn't live another month or six weeks. They would live another three, four, five years.

Wow. You translate into that human numbers. That's right. You get seven years for every year. So like the top end of that, you're getting an extra like 28 years, 30, like what the fuck is going on? Pardon my language. So I started to ask questions like,

What's going on? Why is this working? What are we doing? And will it work in humans? Like, would any of the stuff work in humans, right? And it turns out almost everything I were doing with the dogs exists in these so-called blue zones, which is what led me to the blue zones in the first place. So Dan Bueller is a National Geographic reporter in the early 2000s. Notice that there were places on the planet where people lived, on average, a 12 years longer than everybody else.

And they're all over the place. And he wanted to know, well, what are the commonalities? And he did a whole bunch of research. The research is a little controversial. The controversy is not on the lifestyle stuff. It's on the, there's some stuff that has been turned into supplements and this diet to Ariane. Those are the open and those questions are open. There's no argument on sort of the lifestyle stuff with the blue zones. And the commonalities are really like move around a lot.

regular exercise, right? Distress regularly. So have rituals, meditation, exercise, gratitude practices, breathing work, whatever it is, walking in nature, I don't like have rituals to destress regularly, a ton of stuff on social belonging and connection. This is why challenging social activities matter so much.

This is built into blue zones. There's also this respect for the elders and these cross-generational friendships. They're built into blue zones. There's some evolution. They eat healthy. They eat less than most people, and they eat very, very healthy diets. But there's no one diet across the boards that works for everybody. But those are the commonalities, and they live with passion, purpose, and regular access to flow.

These were all things that we were providing for our dogs and very like, for example, they get social belonging and connection. They really emphasize that you're in the blue zones. Some of them people spend six hours a day hanging out with friends or family. So a lot of it with our dogs, we had enforced petting time. So when you have a lot of dogs, like,

We had various times and we've had 40-50 dogs. It's hard to individual petting time. You have to like, oh, I got to hang out with this dog, but we would do it because we wanted these neurochemicals underneath that same thing with flow. We'd find ways to put our dogs into flow. Flow is really important to peak performance aging for a lot of different reasons, but the state is still really positive, powerful emotional state.

And some of the emotions that show up in flow, stimulate the production of T-cells and natural killer cells. T-cells fight diseases and natural killer cells fight tumors and six cells and other the diseases of aging. So when we get into flow, it lowers inflammation, which is tied to all the causes of aging. It produces T-cells killer, natural killer cells, a lot of benefits and it boosts the immune system. So this is the stuff we were doing in our dogs. This is stuff that's going on in the blue zone. This is the stuff we now

widely know correlates to healthy longevity. This isn't really peak performance aging. It's sort of successful aging, healthy aging, right? At this point, it's like it should be common sense for everybody really is really what it should be. But one of the things that's interesting is you also see a high, a lot of the places where there are blue zones, you see a lot of action sport and outdoor athletes do.

Colorado, Pitkin County, Colorado, and Eagle County, Colorado, and Loma Linda, California are the four places in America where people, these are the blue zones. Summit, Pitkin and Eagle, this is Colorado, that's Vale, Aspen, Beaver, Creek, all the big ski areas, a lot of outdoor stuff. And in Loma Linda, that's a seventh day advantage population.

And they're very social, very flowy, good dietary stuff, a lot of belonging, a lot of so like it's the same stuff. I'm am a lot of outdoor activities surfing and because it's California on the ocean, right? They take advantage of that stuff too.

Yeah, so I'd love to get a couple examples here. First of all, what are examples of getting into flow aside from sports as an adult? That's number one. And then number two, what are some examples of creative social activities as an adult?

Well, one, it is completely erroneous, though myself and Mihaji except me, I are totally at fault for this, like we are to blame. But the idea that flow only shows up in athletes and artists is not true. We focused a lot on athletes and we focused a lot on artists. So people think it's only athletes and artists, but

The most common flow state on earth is reading or interpersonal flow. Interpersonal flow is like the group flow. You and your best friend get into a great conversation and a whole hour goes by and you don't notice it's gone. That's interpersonal flow happens all the time. So one of the reasons you want to engage in challenging creative and social activities, they all trigger flow. So singing and acquire very, very flowy group flow. Lots of research on that gardening, very flowy long walks in nature. Nature likes very, very flowy.

coding architecture, drawing, drumming, dancing, on and on and on. I mean, there's a ton of flow at work. In fact, flow is much more common at work than it is during leisure for a bunch of different reasons, but the lists are

goes on and on and on. If we want to enjoy the second half, let's go ahead and enjoy our lives in general, but if we really want to thrive during our second half of our lives, you can't do it without flow. Flow is actually the engine of adult development. It's how we grow up. We grow up by getting into flow states, coming out the other side is more complex, more skillful, more adaptive, more empathetic, wiser, and we move forward. So it plays a big role in adult development and successful in people performance aging.

Yeah. So just for all my young and profitors, I'm going to do a sort of Steven Kotler marathon when this episode comes out and I'm going to replay all of our older episodes about flow, about all the different things that I've talked to with Steven over the past. So it will be a great educational value for all of you guys.

So Steven, I end the show with a couple of questions that I ask all my guests and then we do some fun things at the end of the year. The first one is, what is one actionable thing that our young and profitors can do today to become more profitable tomorrow? You can double down on your primary flow activity, which is whatever the thing you've done most of your life that just drops you into flow. For me, it's skiing, right? For my wife, it's long walks with dogs. For my best friend is playing guitar. Whatever that thing that most likely drops you into flow.

Flow massively amplifies, among other things, motivation, productivity, and creativity. And here's the cool thing, even though a flow state, that's about 90 minutes, sometimes I could stretch out for longer. The heightened productivity and creativity will help us 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 matter fear blocks performance on every level flow reset the nervous system so and the thing is it's most people especially all the people listening to this podcast are gonna be like you you got to your thirties and stop skiing put down child thing.

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 to 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 floor activity. Research shows that if you want peak performance, you need to have like about three to four hours a week on your primary floor activity. Just to keep your nervous system where it needs to be.

Yeah, I'd love for you to tell everybody about the Flow Research Collective and all the trainings you guys have available. Flow Research Collective is my organization, we're a research and training organization. On the research side, we study the neurobiology of peak human performance. So 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 USC, SF and a whole bunch of other acronyms. And we take the science and we use it to train people and we train

We train people 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 which I think now we're training Facebook or meta, a censure, Bain Capital, Audi, Jefferson Police Department, the Air Force.

Why so much people and trading so for everybody and if you're interested, if you go to get more flow dot com, cheesiest URL in the world, but nobody was remembering any of the others. So I've given in and it's now get more flow dot com, despite the fact that I'm embarrassed to say it out loud, but you can go there and sign up for a free hour long 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're, they try to sell you anything. They just, it's just an informational conversation. So it's really mellow and most people get a lot out of it and it's free. Get more flow.com.

Amazing. I'll stick that link in the show notes to make it super easy for you guys. Okay. Last question of the episode and this is where you can feel free to add something that we didn't get to talk about or just something that's on the top of your mind. Doesn't you have to do with the topic of the episode? It's up to you. What is your secret to profiting in life?

It's just hard work. I'll give you an example. I came off as a journalist and I figured out very early on that most journalists hated rewriting. They'd write their story, they'd edit it, they'd turn it in, the editor would make changes and they'd rewrite it once and turn it back in.

I found that out. I was like, okay, you guys are doing it three times. Clearly my job is taking my editor's job easier. Like my job editor has to like really comb through my articles and takes months. He hates me. That's not, you know, I'm not a good employee. So I started editing my stories 12 times. I just figure out what everybody else would do. And I triple it or quadruple it.

For really i did that for years so i mean it wasn't much of a secret i just figured i wasn't as smart as well connected as has seven all the other things is everybody else but i just figured out how to work. A lot of it is about smart hard work not just hard work smart hard there's better ways to do i talk a lot about that in our country. About the advantage of smart hard work and smart hard play. The difficulties with just hard work is the only tool you reach for but really like.

There's no secret. I just put my butt in the chair and I did the work. I love that answer. Thank you for sharing that. Where can everybody learn about you? Where can they get in our country? And how can they find more about you, Stephen? In our country, you can go to narcontory.com or Amazon or wherever books are sold. StephenCotler.com gets you to me. Flowresearchcollective.com gets you to the Flow Research Collective. Get more Flow.com gets you to our trainings. I think that's it.

Amazing. Always such a great conversation with you, Steven. Thank you so much for your time. My pleasure is great hanging out with you again.