Joe Rogan Experience #873 — Steven Kotler Transcript

Transcript

0:00 Three, two, one. I've enjoyed a bunch of your shit online, man. moments of spontaneous you know just just like a blossoming of ideas where they come from like no! let's pare it down to essentials. And whenever life gets crazy for me, my first instinct is go You know, one of those dry sacks that you could just throw in the river. I lived in a place called Anti-Matter.

3:03 And it was small and tiny and you know crazy but it was a great you know i got to spend a couple years vacillate at all do you vary i do every now and again i'm like okay If you're ordering coffee from Starbucks, you have shitty taste in coffee anyway. it's like a it's a ridiculously expensive machine i think it might cost 50 or 60 thousand dollars

5:25 It'll come on in a second. top and you have like this hockey puck of grinds so like it'll brew it for the exact you know one it has different individual settings for that type of coffee. And, you know, soon there'll be homeless guys cleaning off the coffee for you. Yeah, it's a New York thing. Oh, out here? perched up on a bridge and put a bullet into his heart holy shit craziest part is he pulled off the

8:06 reoccurring phenomenon it's it's super super rare which is why the people with guns get so does but then it makes you wonder well they're not going to follow the rules maybe you should have guns just for them fuckers fair point you never know it's supposed to be enjoying the actual taste of sugary sweet things if you're manly no absolutely not But I started getting curious about,

11:05 Roblox. Every now and then. and this is what you do you are a writer and this is what you do and you sit down every day and do it. And this is what you do. You are a writer and this is what you do. And you sit down. It's an easy read for anybody who's interested in it. Because I don't want, all the way back up to beta. It's a very smart choice. The answer was yes, I'm going.

14:04 over all the different things that I just wrote. By the end of the day, I can shut it down because I feel like, okay, I've thought everything through. Being in the zone, optimal states of performance. This is why your sense of self sort of disappears in flow and why time passes strangely. HYPO means to slow down, to shut down. So it's a great reset if you've been doing something creative and you didn't get into flow and it was frustrating,

16:11 That that does that have to? Usually flow is what happens when you've automatized a whole bunch of skills, right? People go snowboarding for the first time and the first couple of hours where they don't know what they're doing, it's awful. It's called being in stroke or being in dead stroke. is to never recognize the state never acknowledge the state never go

19:15 because there's such an intense introspective aspect to training you're going to fuck up and you're going to be scared and you're going to be nervous But that only happens through intense training for so long that you have these pathways carved. He just does. Yeah. because there's not as many consequences. and then you get into this comfortable zone and then it starts to flow again and then you just

23:17 Sometimes you think it's good and it sucks. they came up with it in in like in their own personal head and sat down and with comedy you the wu-tang clan that doesn't make any sense right you know you would you go see rap you'd go to see Yeah. So we need new names. It's twofold. And the idea basically is that one of the easiest ways to trigger flow is what's called the challenge skills balance. So flow shows up best when the challenge of the task

26:53 hormones? It can be a feel-good hormone. It's essentially, right, it's the internal endogenous Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. can we help you what can you do tell the moron sitting next to you it's me hi chick sent me hi Thank you. what? in the 60s, he came up with So, for example, time is calculated all over the prefrontal cortex. And there's micro flow states when a couple of them show up.

30:09 experience it's one of those words or one of those terms rather flow state where there's a lot of woo I think it's A-K-I-L. She was the It's bullshit. kept going in europe There's 100 years of research. I just don't know how, first of all, how often that's been measured where you can say this. Let me just give you a counterpoint from my own life. I need you to rewrite it.

33:29 And it just kicks me into this. which is incredible and bizarre. from page one, I, has to do with evolution, things along those lines. And it wasn't even his. trigger like some sort of inspirational creativity inside of you and i've always wondered what that The first half of the book will be one playlist, and then it'll start to fail, and I can sort of feel like the juju's gone.

36:50 And then I can get, I get into a state sometimes where I'm not even hearing the words. but most of that book was written Am I a bad person? that can enhance creativity is there like a proven thing that either enhance flow state But usually, not 100%, but usually, finding connections between them, lateral thinking, which is far-flung ideas. They're focusing chemicals.

39:48 Anandamide, which is a psychoactive inside of marijuana, amplifies lateral thinking, long-distance connections, right? If you go for, I'll do something, and I do this with my dogs the dog sanctuary i want to put going to add endorphins in by pushing yourself physically for like five to seven minutes. And then I turn around from the top of the cliff and

41:56 when he was talking about streak shooting It's an anomalous finding. You're getting five or six neurochemicals that tend to show up in your brain waves drop down to the alpha-theta borderline. it yet. So I don't quite know way to do it yet so i don't right now? That weird state where you're falling asleep and you think, oh, that looks like a gray elephant and then turns into a gray sweater and then it turns into a gray Camry, blah, blah, blah.

45:17 they could put it inside the fmri and then he visualized the difference between the brain of But we haven't put the whole puzzle together. Like really basic, basic, a lot of really basic, simple questions. We know if you're conscious. Where's that coming from? gratification super long term like we have religion right you we are willing to delay gratification super long-term. Like we have religion, right? We are willing to delay gratification until after I'm dead, right?

48:26 But everything else we've pretty much found. I'm drinking black coffee. I get like, like, go ahead, take me on a ride. I've really concentrated on the concept of everybody used to be a baby. I'm like, oh, that guy was a baby at one point in time. Have you heard about this? be careful of that right path over there because there's a fat guy in a purple

51:55 Right. They can think in the – for a while they thought animals lived in a perpetual present, right? It was probably if it's ended up with us because we work with the worst of the worst of the worst. Now, this work that's been done on prairie dogs, has it been done on any other animals? But that's incredible. Yeah, they name themselves. You know? I mean, you know, I mean, there's such, that's one of the weirdest things about people is

54:36 You definitely see some dialects and some, some variables. You know, they put it in the Bible. here just waiting to happen that i can't get to Fucking A, man. Oh, yeah. Now, when he's talking about techno physio, he's only talking about using technology in terms of the health benefits of it, medicine, or is he talking about our interfacing with technology?

58:06 it's like a punchline. Yeah, holy shit. notions of things you could and could not say and he those. And one of the ways he did it is by going to jail. But what he was doing was he was interfacing with a society and a culture that was infantile. if you're gay, it's illegal. I mean, people have inadvertently stolen that bit, He's like, I thought it was like too obvious.

1:00:21 Like if you listen to like, let's get small, like it still holds. see everything i saw coming up so i you know i showed her everything including all the like bill knows best it becomes a comedy like it's sort of kind of a comedy when it came out and then it Like whatever else you want to say about the Mansons, They sound like absolute morons all the time.

1:03:11 psychological states and what that was by the 80s it got a little firmer and around the 90s is when it kind of normalized and suddenly like guys could talk about having emotions for the first time just a sign of the times because the world was hard and you're coming off of the depression What was Russia like, Grandma? She was a depression baby. i'm jordan peterson coming on in a couple weeks to talk about this. He's a professor at the University of Toronto. And in Toronto, Canada has different laws.

1:05:52 I mean, right now, it's just theoretical. It hasn't been, you know, no one's... I see. Because transgender people want to be either, if it's a man, they want to be a woman. You know, you look a little like a foxkin. Yeah, go do something. 37 new ones. crazy they mean it's almost like Rome before the fall right we're all just I'm not very good at it,

1:09:19 You just break too many things without it. So the angle was off. And I was really fascinated with it. It wasn't folding, right? He's like, that's over. reason I started, I mean, like I went, I was like, maybe I needed more flexibility. Maybe that was the key. But I remember the first time I went into the yoga class and, you know, you sort of like, I don't know how often she goes, but she's there almost every time I'm there. That lady busts her ass every class. And she walks out of there smiling and happy. And I'm like,

1:12:52 The people who are happiest, the people who have score off the charts for overall life satisfaction and well-being are the people with the most flow in their lives. the time, whether it's archery or martial arts or yoga or something difficult things for whatever success or it propagates um the the concept of uh continuing to improve i know what you're talking

1:14:54 at it for sure 100 and that exists with uh it's a big one with martial artists it's a big one with certainly in the top two or three best fighters of all time. There's this famous fight that he had with Forrest Griffin for the, He's not there. like he saw everything coming in slow motion. And then he went right back to the spot, and he goes, I mean, it was just, he had achieved this weird state

1:17:22 like training thinking that like one day He got knocked out, like joking around, putting his hands down. upside down wrist went down um but for a year and a half after it whenever i was above exposed rock so the injury. I could be in better shape than I was before the injury, whatever. It's going to take How do you deal with being the nail? For some fighters, they have to recognize that because of the amount of damage that they've taken,

1:20:29 even though you've been getting knocked out regularly and training because your chin's gone Your internal organs get smashed by kicks and punches on a regular basis. that's all the tbi stuff right like that's why there's concussion protocols yeah you gotta wait Things started, like it was, my brain just was like. something like there were like three cracks and i was like wait a minute there were not three cracks

1:22:43 And sometimes it's going to work out and sometimes it's not. And it's also, it's a difference between someone who's been lucky and understands that they've been lucky Was it a lucky shot that you got hit with? Yeah. It's very heavy. That seeing someone who will never be the same again. That's heavy. Yeah. Yeah, yes. like, once you start ringing that bell, you know, you, you got to do everything you can to heal that

1:24:55 Yeah, and it's common. research came from i yeah i i pulled myself out of it through surfing in these crazy altered states of the sentence that i read but it's like watching yourself go mad i don't know if any i don't i've And it's half a page of diseases. West Coast disease. It's still it came from. So they live in a place where it's really common, and the doctor was is where it came from so they live in a place

1:28:00 I'd seen him. And I was like, hey, man, blah, blah, blah. This is what's going on. So like I've been having protected sex my whole life. Right. No, he tested, he tested. Let's just say I won the lawsuit. Oh. By the time you before he said this? No. He tested. I mean, they wouldn't test me for anything. are they to run a bunch of big expensive tests so he looks at anybody on an hmo he's like aids

1:30:17 And they just started sort of treating people for it over the last few decades, right? And they scratch themselves and develop these like open sores from itching. He thinks that there's And finally, I'm like, oh, crap. Wow. That must be insane. But you knew how to walk. You knew how to talk. You knew how to say there's something wrong. You had full access to the language.

1:33:04 produces this thing where you start seeing these fibers coming out of your body. kind of avoid it. Oh. You know, I had a guy on who is a super controversial character. and amyl nitrate, and that in the gay community, there's so much partying that they're destroying They don't test them for HIV. oh yeah, you have AIDS. running around there saying that and everybody avoids him, a lot of people are going to get

1:36:59 going to compromise your immune system you drink every night it compromises your immune system any drug abuse is not good so if that drug abuse is going on and it's coinciding with an infectious disease bed for three i mean i'll tell you yeah i was in bed for about three years they had to pull me off And in the middle of this, it was when I was still living in Los Angeles, a friend of mine showed up at my door and said, we're going surfing.

1:38:32 She's going to drown me. And they literally sort of had to walk me to the car right take you know by the shoulders because i was around my vision i felt like i could see out of the back of my head which was like 60 feet away. altered state of consciousness experience. science writer so like i don't have quasi mystical experiences and i sure as hell don't have them

1:41:11 what happened to me health-wise um and this is her benson did some of the work on the neurobiology It gets rid of all the stress hormone, all that stuff. healing actually have a flow state at their heart and it's this particular process that's doing it yeah i'm sure you um have concentrated on probiotics and the effect probiotics have a chemical imbalance and it makes you paranoid and anxious

1:44:37 we see a unique thing, but what we are is some weird- to poke at those questions but it's super interesting to me if they think it affects stuff all the time. I drink kombucha daily. Every day I drink that stuff. I eat a lot of yogurt may be no science here but i stopped once i started taking probiotics regularly i stopped It's incredible to think of yourself as some sort of a weird ecosystem.

1:47:17 to stay alive you haven't had time to contemplate on your gut biome you know this is all like really antibiotics fuck you up so much and they mimic when your microbiome gets that scurry it mimics really early my friend tate caught it i was super lucky we were at the airport and i was wearing And you're eating cheeseburgers and fries and you don't ever get probiotics in your system and your gut biome suffers and you you know you go on

1:50:16 finally was like okay i gotta like just go out of network and find an infectious disease doctor i and said, and go, yeah not a lot so they put you on yeah i blame the insurance companies much more than the doctors on No, I don't think so. your brain or in that direction but i'm i met a woman beautiful beautiful beautiful probably it did this to her a while same kind of thing

1:52:40 And I worked with Mark Gordon then. sort of recovering after like the surfing was what i was doing and it would knock me on my ass for a if you end up with a lot of flow while surfing or fighting or whatever. It will start bleeding into your other work because it's just a focusing skill, right? But it took a while until I was strong enough. And once you know how to surf,

1:55:03 being on that water, and it's moving in its own thing. There's millions of them. There are very few things on this planet that and he sends me videos of like him with a gopro looking down what is this here there he is yeah Like, what? Holy shit. Is this Andy? Hesitation. Oh, I would imagine. your social risk yeah your brain can't tell the difference between social fear and physical fear.

1:59:00 Yeah. When they went looking for non-sports examples of really high flow environments, Montessori education is very high on the list. ceos in silicon valley who are montessori educated hmm wow that's a my friend went, he took his son to Montessori, but he was like, why is my kid, like, who's six, in school with a bunch of, like, 14-year-olds? They're all in the same class. He's like, they have different age kids all hang out together.

2:01:07 Yeah. I have lived a crazy life. with me other magicians he knew and I was making a ton of cash for discussing was all the various flow triggers and we're talking about unsafe sex so maybe that's heard you heard a magic story and there's all these different factors and all these different forms of stimulation that can sort of trigger this optimal state, this optimal state of consciousness.

2:04:05 do yeah what can the average person do to sort of i feel like most things require a step most things require like a little a dipping your toe into the water as it were to sort of get get for example people you know mckinsey did a 10-year study and they found that top executives That's an interesting point. There's so much motivation. altered states of consciousness um to massively drive performance and across all different kinds of voltage states.

2:06:58 It's the video switcher. All the different various altered states of consciousness? they were all the same thing, right? They weren't split apart over the course of the past 100 years. It's an energy hog, right? It sort of kicks things over to the subconscious, but the end result is the same. You get this sense I tend to think of all these states as sort of like big data for the mind. It's access to much

2:11:10 you know, obviously there's levels of physical skills and, you know, tactical skills that you They weren't involved in the same movement. It's absolutely the same thing. They're seeking We focus on – we looked at all that stuff. which has a long history in yoga, They're just, Yeah. I don't know. breath for sure and in jujitsu that's really important because there's many times where you're

2:14:41 So one of the, you know, with when working with action sport athletes or people – I guess you could do it with fighters as well. That's really interesting. And it allows you to carry through with this very difficult thing in this very intense So I'll figure it out. So let's talk about, let's look at trauma for example. Okay. And they've done a lot of this.

2:17:42 scientists with meditation and it takes about 12 weeks with meditation. It just takes you with it. When I talk about effortlessness, right? And now I hope we're going to start to see some headway being moved into other psychedelic drugs, Baboons, as we talked about, were iboga. and I can't remember what their drug of choice is, I watched an otter kill a monkey the other day online.

2:20:40 I had no idea. he's at ucla and if you really want to read the core text on this it's a book called intoxication and it covers kind of everything but at this point change the channel. want that you would think that what they would want is to be constantly hey look at that we're for a lot of these animals that are dealing with the tooth, fang, and claw existence

2:23:12 Yeah, so here's the thing I don't understand. That would make sense. rich plants and we do you know that's what monoamine oxidase does that's why mao inhibitors Hyperspace lexicon. You find that a lot in Arrowhead and the hyperspace lexicon places like that. The exact story happened to a friend of mine. I mean, it seems to me like something that you can only really handle in small doses occasionally. You go in, you get your brains blown out, and you come back,

2:26:37 I mean, is there any benefit in, you know? He's so important. Big surprise, right? I mean, everybody's blending all this stuff together. That's interesting. Through the breath-holding work. enough dmt in an orange to send you to jail for the rest of your life is it really it's everywhere It's so filled with folly. And so many people that have had these problems with pills,

2:31:50 we write about the work of robin carter harris who is uh the first person to use fmri to do Because nobody trusts those damn hippies in their research. much well not and here's one thing i think also to concentrate on not just substances but also Different – and we're going to get more of that. state you were in this is we're at the front edge of that right but more and more this is really

2:35:31 we've got technology that's coming that's advanced brain monitoring is they were working with archers for example marksman um but they neurofeedback means i i don't know how system – I can't remember exactly how our system works. So you just – you don't know what you're aiming for. Yes. experiences, your emotions, your nerves. I mean, you might slip a little bit and have a little

2:38:45 So their ultimate goal is to be able to play your dreams Well, you can now go to jail Yeah, what do you do? Maybe there's some sort of a biochemical roadblock in the mind, and they can figure out how to of disingenuous take on it. It's just, it's very the spectrum, the autism and Asperger's, um, empathy is an issue, right? Um, and it, you know, So you're

2:42:05 People posted stuff online. Yeah, because if some established neuroscientist You know, I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley where there's, you know. It's an interesting question because one of the questions that this raises is, will it start to splinter the species? Like ants don't have that, at least as far as we know. Mm-mm. Yeah, they can't find the female.

2:45:04 Nuts. That looks like. Yeah. Nuts. You're an ant hater. It's awesome, right? them in your kitchen and you just brush them off your pants like if you kill an ant on your pants It would. There's a biomass line where animals become, like, super significant and important to us. Because, you know, a lot of spiders will kill you. you freaking out jamie has got arachnophobia look at him he's covering his mouth through

2:47:58 Uh-uh. No, I got it. But they're looking at it for an erectile dysfunction drug And it apparently does it to all the muscles in your body. muscles up yeah it does that nitric oxide has some sort of an effect on muscles and it's also Yeah. funny story i did some work uh with a woman named patricia right she's a macarthur genius award They're harmless, though.

2:50:50 And kind of fill the container with it. on the plane did she get arrested no i don't think she got arrested did they get mad at her It's spiders on the plane. Yeah, what is that thing? Oh, my God. The John Carpenter? Yes. It's like the thing. Or the thing from thing. The face hugger. The thing, right? The John Carpenter? The thing is the one about insects.

2:52:37 Probably some 1950s movie. You're right about that. Okay. The same issue that has been with opiates, like opiates have a real benefit for people because you've got massively heightened Everything looks great on you. feel that open sourcing the research and open sourcing the exploration is the best way to kind of keep it free and science to understand what was all going on with, there's a whole bunch of kind of moral issues that

2:56:21 If you're in self-help and I can get a 5% improvement over And we're just starting to kind of tap it into this function. You know, and I'm sure Where can people get a hold of you? It says if you're this kind of person, you're likely to find flow in these directions. It's essentially their knowledge workers. It's called Stealing Fire. Really, really appreciate it. I really enjoyed this conversation.