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, how Freud kicked off 90 years of scientific tail-chasing, wisdom vs. expertise, and why guest host Stephanie Maas may just live forever.

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.

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.

Super fascinating. Okay. Do you plan to retire?

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.

I'm gonna live to 120 I think. Thank you.

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?

It is crazy. Super sincere. Thank you for your time today. This has been hopefully

kind of fun. Super insightful.

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.

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.

This, right there? It's my wife holding a dog.

Oh my god. Okay. I can't see anything. Please don't tell her...

You've really got to keep this in. Please keep this. And it's worse. The dogs dead!