388: Steven Kotler on Flow, Recovering From Lyme Disease, Psychedelics, & The Art of Impossible
The Ultimate Health Podcast
Jesse Chappus
4.5 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 19 January 2021
⏱️ 78 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Watch the full video interview on YouTube here: https://bit.ly/tuhpstevenkotler388
Steven Kotler (IG: @kotler.steven) is one of the world’s leading experts on peak performance. He’s an author, an award-winning journalist, and the founder and executive director of the Flow Research Collective.
Steven has written the national bestsellers The Future Is Faster Than You Think, The Rise of Superman, Stealing Fire, Abundance, and Bold.
His work has been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes, has been translated into more than forty languages, and has appeared in more than one hundred publications, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, WIRED, and TIME.
Today we’re discussing Steven’s new book, The Art of Impossible. The core message of his book - We are capable of so much more than we know.
In this episode, we discuss:
- The crossover between magic and neuroscience
- Facing fear is a lesson in peak performance
- Neuroscience and action sports were catching everybody’s attention in the 1990s
- Flow is optimal performance
- Flow states have triggers
- How the Flow Research Collective began
- Steven recalls the first time he was in flow
- The highlights of our life tend to be flow states
- Steven’s battle with Lyme disease
- Steven shares a near mystical experience he had while surfing
- Heightened creativity shows up in flow
- What is a collective flow state?
- Great collaboration is a shared state of consciousness
- The art of impossible starts with motivation
- Flow resets the nervous system
- Reboot your primary flow activity
- The basics of positive psychology
- If you want to perform at your best, you need social support
- Anxiety blocks peak performance
- The three best tools to calm yourself down
- People who practice gratitude are more prone to flow
- Steven’s thoughts on caffeine, supplements, and nootropics in relation to flow
- Building a biophysical based flow detector
- Flow is better than psychedelics for creativity
- Psychedelics outperform flow for spiritual experiences and trauma work
- Flow in animals
- Steven and his wife run a dog sanctuary
- The difference between intuition and insight
- The experience of writing fiction vs. nonfiction
- Book are the most condensed knowledge form available
- Steven's current health status
- When the impossible becomes possible
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Related links:
Steven Kotler - The Art of Impossible (book)
Follow Steven Kotler on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter
Steven Kotler - The Rise of Superman (book)
Steven Kotler - Abundance (book)
Steven Kotler - Tomorrowland (book)
Steven Kotler - A Small Furry Prayer (book)
Listen to Laird Hamilton previously on TUHP (episode #323)
Herb Benson – The Breakout Principle (books)
Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi (books)
Roland Griffiths - Johns Hopkins Center on Psychedelic and Consciousness Research
Charles Yu - How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (book)
Related episodes:
381: Dr. Dan Siegel – The Mind Is Broader Than The Brain
375: James Sebastiano – Chasing The Present
361: Dr. Alejandro Junger – Living In A Higher State Of Consciousness
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Coming up on the Ultimate Health Podcast. |
| 0:02.0 | Flow is such a profoundly altered state. |
| 0:05.0 | First of all, we tend to remember flow states. |
| 0:07.0 | So one of the easiest ways to, you know, keep people about flow is say, |
| 0:10.0 | well, think about the memories that are sort of seared into your brain |
| 0:12.0 | over the course of your life that are positive and as a general rule |
| 0:15.1 | This is the same reason that learning goes up and flow get a bunch of neurochemicals in the state that kind of make it feel so good and what they do is the more neurochemicals you get |
| 0:25.0 | that a chance the experience will move from short-term holding into long-term storage. |
| 0:28.9 | So flow is a big neurochemical dump, it's why it amplifies learning and memory so much the |
| 0:33.6 | highlights of our life tend to be flow states that's what we tend to remember. |
| 0:37.0 | Hello and welcome to the Ultimate Health Podcast episode 388. |
| 0:47.0 | I'm Jesse Chappas and I'm here to take your health to the next level. |
| 0:51.0 | Each week I'll bring you end up conversations with health and wellness |
| 0:53.7 | leaders from around the world. This week I'm chatting with Stephen Kotler. |
| 0:57.0 | He's one of the world's leading experts on peak performance. He's an author, an |
| 1:01.1 | award-winning journalist, and the founder and executive director of the Flow Research Collective. |
| 1:06.0 | Stephen has written the national best-sellers, The Future is Faster Than You Think, The Rise of Superman, |
| 1:11.6 | stealing Fire, Abundance, and Bold. |
| 1:15.0 | His work has been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes, |
| 1:18.0 | has been translated into more than 40 languages, |
| 1:20.0 | and has appeared in more than 100 publications, including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Wired in Time. |
| 1:29.0 | Today we're discussing Stephen's new book, The Art of Impossible, and the core message of this book, we are capable of so much more than we know. |
... |
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