Growing Old, Staying Rad, with Steven Kotler – Episode 432 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

Steven Kotler, New York Times bestselling author, award-winning journalist, and the Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective, returns in Part 2 of this interview, tackling weighty topics like the denial of death, embracing change as foundational to aging, the illusion of self, the “long slow rot” theory, how aging is a “use it or lose it” game, why Freud kicked off 90 years of scientific tail-chasing, wisdom vs. expertise, and why guest host Stephanie Maas may just live forever.



About Steven:

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. He is the author of 11 bestsellers (out of fourteen books), including The Art of Impossible, The Future is Faster Than You Think, Stealing Fire, The Rise of Superman, Bold and Abundance. 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.

A lifelong environmentalist and animal rights advocate, Steven is the cofounder of Planet Home, a conference/concert/innovation accelerator focused on solving critical environmental challenges, the cofounder of The Forest + Fire Collective, a network of individuals, organizations and institutions dedicated to ending catastrophic wildfire and restoring forest health to the American West. Alongside his wife, author Joy Nicholson, he is also the co-founder of Rancho de Chihuahua, a hospice care and special needs dog sanctuary.

Learn more at StevenKotler.com.



The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Stephanie Maas:
Okay, so I want to talk about your next book coming out. This new book is not because of your aging, even though it’s a book on aging, per se. Two things, one, people absolutely have a fear of getting older. And secondly, they absolutely have a fear of dying. And I think that’s why in our society, there’s this culture, I would even go to the point of saying, an obsession with trying to stay young, mentally, physically, spiritually, or what all everything. Why do you think we have such a fear? And how much of that do you think influenced or impacted? The idea of taking everything that you know, and putting it specifically towards this challenge.

Steven Kotler:
So back in the 90s, Ernest Becker won a Pulitzer Prize for a book called The Denial of Death. That was literally about how we are so death phobic right that like, most everything that you can think of are cultures or societies or religions take pick all reactions against this fear, it definitely seems to be very hardwired has a huge impact on our psychology. And if you’re interested in training, things like peak performance, you have to sort of acknowledge it and work with it, that’s part of getting into biology to work for us rather than against us. You can’t pretend it’s not there. So that’s part of it. I, by the way, use a Tibetan death practice. So every day when I hike my dogs, there’s a standard Tibetan death practice, which is a three line monitor, which is everything is impermanent, death comes without a warning, this body too, will be a corpse someday, and I repeated myself for at least five to 10 minutes, every time I’m hiking my dogs that’s really positive. It’s rare. But it’s, you want it. So recognizing that change is foundational to life is part of what you do to maintain a healthy mindset towards aging. It’s one of the ways to train mindset is to notice, because the brain tends to trick us into believing that stasis is, is that we think we’re the same person that we were 10 years ago, 20. And we’re not at all, but it’s this, this, this illusion of self and things like that. So the brain notices in tries to protect the stability that we don’t see. Right? So one noticing that everything has changed. This actually, like lessens our fear of aging is one of the things that does that. So that’s it’s really useful. And the other thing is, it’s a really solid reminder, to sort of live every day as if it was your last because it very much could be. And I think those are, those are important things. And I do them because I’m like everything else I’ve scared up, you know what I mean? I’ve got the same fears as everybody else. So like, I’m just trying to work with it. But the second half of your question, which is the real reason I wrote in our country, the old idea about aging, is what I like to call the long, slow rock theory. And it’s the dominant theory of aging that most of us are familiar, it’s the idea that most our mental skills, our physical skills, they decline over time. And there’s nothing we can do to stop the slide. And I mean, then they stop dark declining early in our 20s. And our 30s. In some cases, right. And this was the dominant theory of aging. And it turns out, none of its true. Well, actually, that little bit of it’s true. All the skills we used to think decline over time. What we now know, and this is overwhelming is that they’re all use it or lose it skills. So if you never stopped training, or study skills, you can hang on to them, and even advance them far later in life than anybody thought possible. Now, I should also say that like, of the skills, why am I in this work, where like, where it come from? Flow science is deeply baked into adult development, peak performance, age and all this stuff. It’s a big part of it. And one thing to know is that flow is foundational for peak performance becomes even more important for peak performance ageing, but like everything else, our ability to get into flow diminishes over time, for a bunch of reasons, we can talk about why you have to counteract that with training. And so that’s kind of, you know, at the center of of what the book is. The other thing that the book is, is it’s really about applied flow science. So like, it’s really easy to teach people about the biology of illiteracy, but the data they application, how do you do it on a day to day basis? Is it as I said, first of all, it’s individual. And second of all, it changes on a day to day basis in our country is a is a diary right through this like hard physical challenge that I take on and the reason it’s done that way is because it’s a recipe book, in a sense, not written that way. But like, if you know, it’s Tuesday, I have to go to work. I’m don’t feel great. I didn’t get a ton of sleep. And I’m feeling a little bit of anxiety. I also know I need to like I’ve got a presentation if I don’t hit it out of the park. This whole project is going sideways. Be really good. right if I could drop into flow in this CLI challenge situation, so how do you do that? What’s the recipe for flow when you’re starting there? And that’s what this book also allowed me to do is sort of break down on a day by day basis. You know, this is how you go after the state this I use the triggers is how you sort of deal with wherever you are at the time.

Stephanie Maas:
Super fascinating. Okay. Do you plan to retire?

Steven Kotler:
No, no, no. i So, Daniel Levitin is a neuroscientist and McGill. At the same time I was I was reading in our country wrote a book called successful agent, where he basically I ran a bunch of studies and did a whole bunch of other stuff that we read the same, like 5000 papers there on the the papers that basically show because the loss law theory, the fact that all our skills decline, it really starts with Freud in 1907, Freud makes a comment, and it’s like off to the races and between 1907 like 1995, all we do is prove Freud, right. We just get so nitpicky about what declines and when it declines, and by like 9095, the general we’re just screwed. I mean, like, we’re just a really bleak story. And then this data start showing up and by now it’s, that whole idea has exploded, but it didn’t, it was sort of one at a time, a little, little bit in a row that we started to figure out, oh, wait a minute. It’s it’s not that these things decline over time. They’re all trainable. How do we train various things has been a puzzle that people have tried to figure out because some of it is less than obvious. What I think is telling and interesting. And where I think I want to go with this is, if you think about one, if you think about aging, most people think that’s a problem for later, not now. And what the research shows is that peak performance aging starts young. So the stuff you want to do in your 20s, your 30s, your 40s, your 50s 60, right, like every decade, there’s really boxes to check that are really important. And the second thing is most of what we hear, right let’s say you don’t believe the long so we’re out there and you think there are possibilities what you’re tapped into his like longevity science, regenerative medicine, biohacking. All those things are, they may be real, they may be fake, but they’re very much cutting edge. And it’s going to be 2025 years before we actually know. So Regeneron medicine logs, every science is a second generation basically it all the all this stuff that started in the around 2000s First generation, there’s like 10% of that’s left that we were like, oh, yeah, those were good ideas, the other 90% Throw it out. So the other side of this is the big levers what like mindset, there’s the psychological interventions, in a sense, that really matter. And so on the other side of the lungs, they’re out there is the stuff most of the stuff that people are doing is the wrong stuff. They’re reaching for these like bio hacks, because they they think those are tools and yet we’ve got 50 years of science that say, oh, no, maintaining robust social connections really matters far more exercise. The number one correlate for health and longevity is strong legs, believe it or not for preserving cognitive function, physical function, everything thigh muscle mass, inversely correlates with mortality.

Stephanie Maas:
I’m gonna live to 120 I think. Thank you.

Steven Kotler:
I’m going to leave you with one wild fact. So how do you stave off cognitive decline, Alzheimer’s and dementia? We know lifelong learning. Why is that? It’s expertise and wisdom. This is one of the reasons slow matters so much over time is flow, as we know automatically expands wisdom. So why does that matter? What is thicket of the difference between expertise is about like, facts and strategies and tactics and systems, right? That’s expertise. Wisdom is emotional intelligence writ large. It’s some other things, but that’s sort of what it is. And there’s separate categories in the brain. But what’s cool is that most cognitive decline dementia, Alzheimer’s is in the prefrontal cortex, which is a part of the brain behind your forehead. From an evolutionary perspective, it’s the most recent party branches most vulnerable to disruption, expertise and wisdom form these wildly diffused and redundant key here’s redundant networks across the prefrontal cortex. And so the brain never learns one way to do anything, whether it’s an emotional problem, wisdom or physical problem, expertise, it wants like 11 different ways to do the thing, right. And so redundancy is baked into everything the brain does. And so what happens is expertise and wisdom and the wisdom we get and slow on top of the expertise we get in flow. They not only better give us better performance, they make us wiser over time that wisdom is actually neuro protective against cognitive decline. Why? Because what could we wisdom be if we can’t pass it along to our grandchildren? So when you get wiser, you live longer, because evolution wants you to be able to pass it along. In fact, the craziest statin people for obese Aging has offered this which is grandparents who hang out with their grandkids, and pass along knowledge when their grandkids get to childbearing years, they will be more fecund. It’s one of the reasons we started to realize it was one of the things about humans that we violate the standard. Most species they reproduce and they die. Humans don’t. So why is that? Why, right? Why and why do we live multiple generations and this reason, so the more contact between grandparents and grandchildren, the more likely to have that you’re gonna end up with what many grandchildren? It’s crazy, right?

Stephanie Maas:
It is crazy. Super sincere. Thank you for your time today. This has been hopefully kind of fun. Super insightful.

Steven Kotler:
Thank you. If they’re interested in more Steven kotler.com is me flow research collective get more flow.com and Gnar country.com is the website for the book.

Stephanie Maas:
Awesome. Thank you so much. Okay, I got a question. On your shelf back there. Is that a picture or a book? My eyesight is terrible, but it looks like a guy’s got boxing gloves on.

Steven Kotler:
This, right there? It’s my wife holding a dog.

Stephanie Maas:
Oh my god. Okay. I can’t see anything. Please don’t tell her…

Steven Kotler:
You’ve really got to keep this in. Please keep this. And it’s worse. The dogs dead! Stephanie, friend of animals!