Latest / The Action Catalyst / Growing Old, Staying Rad, with Steven Kotler (Neuroscience, Aging, Mindset, Change)

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Growing Old, Staying Rad, with Steven Kotler (Neuroscience, Aging, Mindset, Change) · The Action Catalyst

• 0:00
  Stephanie Maas: Okay, so I want to talk about your next book coming out. This new book is not because
• 0:04
  of your aging, even though it's a book on aging, per se. Two things, one, people absolutely have a
• 0:13
  fear of getting older. And secondly, they absolutely have a fear of dying. And I think
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  that's why in our society, there's this culture, I would even go to the point of saying, an obsession
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  with trying to stay young, mentally, physically, spiritually, or what all everything. Why do you
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  think we have such a fear? And how much of that do you think influenced or impacted? The idea of
• 0:40
  taking everything that you know, and putting it specifically towards this challenge.
• 0:45
  Steven Kotler: So back in the 90s, Ernest Becker won a Pulitzer Prize for a book called The Denial
• 0:51
  of Death. That was literally about how we are so death phobic right that like, most everything that
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  you can think of are cultures or societies or religions take pick all reactions against this
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  fear, it definitely seems to be very hardwired has a huge impact on our psychology. And if you're
• 1:09
  interested in training, things like peak performance, you have to sort of acknowledge it
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  and work with it, that's part of getting into biology to work for us rather than against us. You
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  can't pretend it's not there. So that's part of it. I, by the way, use a Tibetan death practice.
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  So every day when I hike my dogs, there's a standard Tibetan death practice, which is a three
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  line monitor, which is everything is impermanent, death comes without a warning, this body too, will
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  be a corpse someday, and I repeated myself for at least five to 10 minutes, every time I'm hiking my
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  dogs that's really positive. It's rare. But it's, you want it. So recognizing that change is
• 1:48
  foundational to life is part of what you do to maintain a healthy mindset towards aging. It's one
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  of the ways to train mindset is to notice, because the brain tends to trick us into believing that
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  stasis is, is that we think we're the same person that we were 10 years ago, 20. And we're not at
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  all, but it's this, this, this illusion of self and things like that. So the brain notices in
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  tries to protect the stability that we don't see. Right? So one noticing that everything has
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  changed. This actually, like lessens our fear of aging is one of the things that does that. So
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  that's it's really useful. And the other thing is, it's a really solid reminder, to sort of live
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  every day as if it was your last because it very much could be. And I think those are, those are
• 2:36
  important things. And I do them because I'm like everything else I've scared up, you know what I
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  mean? I've got the same fears as everybody else. So like, I'm just trying to work with it. But the
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  second half of your question, which is the real reason I wrote in our country, the old idea about
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  aging, is what I like to call the long, slow rock theory. And it's the dominant theory of aging that
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  most of us are familiar, it's the idea that most our mental skills, our physical skills, they
• 2:59
  decline over time. And there's nothing we can do to stop the slide. And I mean, then they stop dark
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  declining early in our 20s. And our 30s. In some cases, right. And this was the dominant theory of
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  aging. And it turns out, none of its true. Well, actually, that little bit of it's true. All the
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  skills we used to think decline over time. What we now know, and this is overwhelming is that they're
• 3:26
  all use it or lose it skills. So if you never stopped training, or study skills, you can hang on
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  to them, and even advance them far later in life than anybody thought possible. Now, I should also
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  say that like, of the skills, why am I in this work, where like, where it come from? Flow science
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  is deeply baked into adult development, peak performance, age and all this stuff. It's a big
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  part of it. And one thing to know is that flow is foundational for peak performance becomes even
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  more important for peak performance ageing, but like everything else, our ability to get into flow
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  diminishes over time, for a bunch of reasons, we can talk about why you have to counteract that
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  with training. And so that's kind of, you know, at the center of of what the book is. The other thing
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  that the book is, is it's really about applied flow science. So like, it's really easy to teach
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  people about the biology of illiteracy, but the data they application, how do you do it on a day
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  to day basis? Is it as I said, first of all, it's individual. And second of all, it changes on a day
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  to day basis in our country is a is a diary right through this like hard physical challenge that I
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  take on and the reason it's done that way is because it's a recipe book, in a sense, not
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  written that way. But like, if you know, it's Tuesday, I have to go to work. I'm don't feel
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  great. I didn't get a ton of sleep. And I'm feeling a little bit of anxiety. I also know I
• 4:54
  need to like I've got a presentation if I don't hit it out of the park. This whole project is
• 4:58
  going sideways. Be really good. right if I could drop into flow in this CLI challenge situation, so
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  how do you do that? What's the recipe for flow when you're starting there? And that's what this
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  book also allowed me to do is sort of break down on a day by day basis. You know, this is how you
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  go after the state this I use the triggers is how you sort of deal with wherever you are at the
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  time.
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  Stephanie Maas: Super fascinating. Okay. Do you plan to retire?
• 5:24
  Steven Kotler: No, no, no. i So, Daniel Levitin is a neuroscientist and McGill. At the same time I
• 5:30
  was I was reading in our country wrote a book called successful agent, where he basically I ran
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  a bunch of studies and did a whole bunch of other stuff that we read the same, like 5000 papers
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  there on the the papers that basically show because the loss law theory, the fact that all our
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  skills decline, it really starts with Freud in 1907, Freud makes a comment, and it's like off to
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  the races and between 1907 like 1995, all we do is prove Freud, right. We just get so nitpicky about
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  what declines and when it declines, and by like 9095, the general we're just screwed. I mean,
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  like, we're just a really bleak story. And then this data start showing up and by now it's, that
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  whole idea has exploded, but it didn't, it was sort of one at a time, a little, little bit in a
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  row that we started to figure out, oh, wait a minute. It's it's not that these things decline
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  over time. They're all trainable. How do we train various things has been a puzzle that people have
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  tried to figure out because some of it is less than obvious. What I think is telling and
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  interesting. And where I think I want to go with this is, if you think about one, if you think
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  about aging, most people think that's a problem for later, not now. And what the research shows is
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  that peak performance aging starts young. So the stuff you want to do in your 20s, your 30s, your
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  40s, your 50s 60, right, like every decade, there's really boxes to check that are really
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  important. And the second thing is most of what we hear, right let's say you don't believe the long
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  so we're out there and you think there are possibilities what you're tapped into his like
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  longevity science, regenerative medicine, biohacking. All those things are, they may be
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  real, they may be fake, but they're very much cutting edge. And it's going to be 2025 years
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  before we actually know. So Regeneron medicine logs, every science is a second generation
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  basically it all the all this stuff that started in the around 2000s First generation, there's like
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  10% of that's left that we were like, oh, yeah, those were good ideas, the other 90% Throw it out.
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  So the other side of this is the big levers what like mindset, there's the psychological
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  interventions, in a sense, that really matter. And so on the other side of the lungs, they're out
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  there is the stuff most of the stuff that people are doing is the wrong stuff. They're reaching for
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  these like bio hacks, because they they think those are tools and yet we've got 50 years of
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  science that say, oh, no, maintaining robust social connections really matters far more
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  exercise. The number one correlate for health and longevity is strong legs, believe it or not for
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  preserving cognitive function, physical function, everything thigh muscle mass, inversely correlates
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  with mortality.
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  Stephanie Maas: I'm gonna live to 120 I think. Thank you.
• 8:21
  Steven Kotler: I'm going to leave you with one wild fact. So how do you stave off cognitive
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  decline, Alzheimer's and dementia? We know lifelong learning. Why is that? It's expertise and
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  wisdom. This is one of the reasons slow matters so much over time is flow, as we know automatically
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  expands wisdom. So why does that matter? What is thicket of the difference between expertise is
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  about like, facts and strategies and tactics and systems, right? That's expertise. Wisdom is
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  emotional intelligence writ large. It's some other things, but that's sort of what it is. And there's
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  separate categories in the brain. But what's cool is that most cognitive decline dementia,
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  Alzheimer's is in the prefrontal cortex, which is a part of the brain behind your forehead. From an
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  evolutionary perspective, it's the most recent party branches most vulnerable to disruption,
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  expertise and wisdom form these wildly diffused and redundant key here's redundant networks across
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  the prefrontal cortex. And so the brain never learns one way to do anything, whether it's an
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  emotional problem, wisdom or physical problem, expertise, it wants like 11 different ways to do
• 9:22
  the thing, right. And so redundancy is baked into everything the brain does. And so what happens is
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  expertise and wisdom and the wisdom we get and slow on top of the expertise we get in flow. They
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  not only better give us better performance, they make us wiser over time that wisdom is actually
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  neuro protective against cognitive decline. Why? Because what could we wisdom be if we can't pass
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  it along to our grandchildren? So when you get wiser, you live longer, because evolution wants
• 9:51
  you to be able to pass it along. In fact, the craziest statin people for obese Aging has offered
• 9:56
  this which is grandparents who hang out with their grandkids, and pass along knowledge when their
• 10:03
  grandkids get to childbearing years, they will be more fecund. It's one of the reasons we started to
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  realize it was one of the things about humans that we violate the standard. Most species they
• 10:14
  reproduce and they die. Humans don't. So why is that? Why, right? Why and why do we live multiple
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  generations and this reason, so the more contact between grandparents and grandchildren, the more
• 10:27
  likely to have that you're gonna end up with what many grandchildren? It's crazy, right?
• 10:32
  Stephanie Maas: It is crazy. Super sincere. Thank you for your time today. This has been hopefully
• 10:38
  kind of fun. Super insightful.
• 10:42
  Steven Kotler: Thank you. If they're interested in more Steven kotler.com is me flow research
• 10:47
  collective get more flow.com and Gnar country.com is the website for the book.
• 10:53
  Stephanie Maas: Awesome. Thank you so much. Okay, I got a question. On your shelf back there. Is
• 10:58
  that a picture or a book? My eyesight is terrible, but it looks like a guy's got boxing gloves on.
• 11:03
  Steven Kotler: This, right there? It's my wife holding a dog.
• 11:07
  Stephanie Maas: Oh my god. Okay. I can't see anything. Please don't tell her...
• 11:16
  Steven Kotler: You've really got to keep this in. Please keep this. And it's worse. The dogs dead!
• 11:22
  Stephanie, friend of animals!