Why Your Brain Can’t Keep Up Anymore | Steven Kotler

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-05

[00:00:02]What happens when we're in a world where text uh technology is getting exponentially stronger, which it is, um but maybe our, you know, human nervous system hasn't evolved to sort of meet this moment? Am I sort of getting that right? Like is this big question what you were hoping to answer a bit in this book? I think there's two and you definitely got the you nailed the first one. What what we were looking at when I was looking at and you you said it exactly right is um we are living at a speed and a and a scale that the human brain didn't evolve to process at all. And the quick way to think about it is we evolved in a local linear world, right? So everything we dealt with linear change was really slow. So your great-great-grandmother's life was the same as your great-great-granddaughter's life. And local meaning most of what we dealt with was within a day's walk.

[00:00:53]Today it's global and exponential. So if it happens on the other side of the world, we get it seconds later. Our computers get it milliseconds later. And exponential meaning the rate of change is split-screen, right? Forget about the difference between the generations. Now it's week to week. Sometimes it's day to day.

[00:01:09]You know what's particularly interesting about that framework setup and I want to hear the second piece because you know, my mother started to have dementia maybe 15 years ago. We started to see it.

[00:01:20]And it was right about the time maybe a little longer, but she really has struggled with tech and struggled with things that when her brain was a little bit more adapt, a little bit more malleable, I think a a typical person might be able to integrate it. And she certainly had a a way of doing things. She was a cognitive psych professor at Denver University.

[00:01:41]But I really saw that as her brain was less able to make these changes, the acceleration around her seemed to double, triple. I mean, and often times her conversations with us were about like I I I can't keep up. You all are doing things at a rate. And I I thought to myself that salient because I I think this tech has left a generation of people behind. But also I know that Juliet and I sometimes feel lost. And we have young kids who are like, you know, keep up. This is how we're doing it.

[00:02:12]This is how we're thinking about AI. And um am I right in thinking I mean just that this sort of rate of acceleration has changed as you said exponentially. And more importantly, how should we think about this software going forward because it's it's one thing to say, here's a problem. It's another thing to say, here's what you can actually do to leverage or think about this problem. So uh let's start with the rate cuz that's that was one of the questions who we had going in. Uh and I wanted to try to find a way to quantify it and We Are As Gods, right?

[00:02:48]And the way we did it is we looked at major social, cultural, technological trends. And this is everything from like the arrival of the smartphone to uh various technologies like that to remote work or same-sex marriage, like things that totally shook up culture. Um and we took about 30 different factors and built an algorithm and sort of ran the numbers. And big grain of salt here, right? Like this is not an exact science uh what we're doing at all. But I just sort of wanted to like get a stab at it cuz I wanted to kind of put my put my head around it. Sometimes in in flow research there's been a couple times people took a stab at things and just put a number on it cuz it was close and it turned out to be incredibly useful.

[00:03:35]And I thought that might be the case here. And what we found is that the world today, and this is a very conservative number cuz I was trying to be as conservative as possible cuz I knew it was sort of a fake calculation, was 286% faster than it was in 2012.

[00:03:51]So Peter and I wrote our first book together, Abundance, in 2012.

[00:03:56]And the core idea, right? And this is the upgrade in We Are As Gods, was, "Hey, 2012 there's these 10 technologies that are all advancing on exponential growth curves." An exponential growth curve means quite simply it just doubles in power on a regular basis. And the classic example was Moore's law, right?

[00:04:12]The number of transistors on a computer chip doubled every 18 months. So every 18 months your computers got twice as fast, the cost stayed the same.

[00:04:20]And we said cuz of these 10 technologies that are advancing on exponential growth curves, we think we're going to soon be able to solve grand global challenges, poverty, energy scarcity, etc. And we jumped in 2025 and said, "Okay, well, here we are. We are literally in the world of abundance." And most people, by the way, don't even they don't quite understand what we mean by that. So if you like look at some basic numbers, extreme poverty declined. 200 million people exited extreme poverty over the past decade. Um a billion people gained access to electricity. 2 billion people gained access to clean drinking water. 5 billion gained access to smartphones and communication technology, right? All this stuff actually has So we went from a world of, "Hey, abundance is coming" to, "Oh it's here." And with a vengeance cuz what you're talking about is we got an abundance of uh computer technology and now we have it came with an abundance of AI and smartness that's leading to an abundance of technological unemployment that we're all scared of right now. We got an abundance of cheap food. It led to an abundance of obesity on one end.

[00:05:30]And another end, it's there's this giant distribution problem. We throw away enough food in a year to feed the world three times over, right? So we've got an abund- we've got abundance of waste.

[00:05:41]We've got an abundance of obesity. These are both things that come off abundance, right? Your second question was how do our brains deal with both the good and the bad cuz we're not evolved for this speed and this scale.

[00:05:54]And there's a whole bunch of sort of ways to think about it. I want to go back to what you said about your mom and dementia and the things she faced, the I can't keep up, technology's coming at me at all times cuz people lose sight of um sort of very basic common sense in the face of so much uncertainty and newness.

[00:06:15]And common sense is one, you don't have to learn everything.

[00:06:22]You have to learn specific things. And if it's the rate of change is moving really fast, you're actually a little better off being a later adopter than an earlier adopter because think about all those poor souls who got way into NFTs or got way into the metaverse, right?

[00:06:39]Like this happens a lot. So there's a lot to be said for being a slow adopter today, especially because as you pointed out, the real battle we're fighting today is over attention and cognitive load. That's the battle we're fighting.

[00:06:55]That's the issue.

[00:06:56]>> feels like it.