#873 - Steven Kotler

Joe Rogan (0:00)

Three, two, one.

Pew! Hello, Steven.

Steven Kotler (0:05)

Hello, Joe.

Joe Rogan (0:05)

Welcome.

Steven Kotler (0:06)

Thank you.

Joe Rogan (0:06)

Thanks for coming, man. I really appreciate it.

Steven Kotler (0:08)

Thanks for having me.

Joe Rogan (0:08)

I've enjoyed a bunch of your shit online, man. You've got some really fucking cool articles and some great ideas. And we were talking about, the other day, a friend of mine, we were talking about creativity and the source of creativity, how to cultivate creativity. And I stumbled across something that you had on your website about creativity, about different methods or different ways to try to inspire your creativity or shock your system into creativity.

I'm always really impressed with people who take things that I've always like, man, I wonder why or when my ideas come from. And then I go, oh, check out this guy. He actually kind of broke this shit down and tried to figure out what the source of a lot of these ideas is.

Or where are these groovy moments of spontaneous, just like a blossoming of ideas, where they come from?

Steven Kotler (1:04)

I'm a mechanistic guy. I like to know how this shit works.

Joe Rogan (1:08)

Yeah, I've seen that by talking to you just in the past ten minutes. You've got like, order.

Steven Kotler (1:14)

It's a show, but thank you.

Joe Rogan (1:17)

But you have like, when I was talking about you want cream in your coffee, I'd be like, no, drinks should have one thing, scotch, neat, you know, coffee, black. You've got order.

Steven Kotler (1:29)

Or opinions.

Joe Rogan (1:29)

Yes, but in your mind, it's very rigid, right?

Steven Kotler (1:34)

To me, they're liberating structures. To me, I do everything like that. I do six things in my life.

If it doesn't fall into those categories, I don't do it.

Mostly just I discovered years ago that the only stuff I failed at was the stuff when I was too overextended and I was quitting. I would give up halfway, but if I could stick to it, it always led to success. So I was like, okay, let's pare it down to essentials. And whenever life gets crazy for me, my first instinct is go small, get small. It's one of the hardest things I think about being married and running an animal sanctuary. My wife is, there's so many dependents on me now. When stuff gets difficult, I can no longer get small.

Joe Rogan (2:08)

Right. You can't minimalize and get down to a duffel bag. I have a friend of mine, Steve Maxwell, he literally lives out of like a dry sack, one of those dry sacks that you could just throw in the river. And that's like, he has a duffel bag. That's his whole thing. He lives hotel to hotel, travels all over the world, teaching people strength and conditioning routines and wellness and health. That's all he does. He just does nothing. He has no items. He has like an iPad and he's got a watch.

Steven Kotler (2:37)

When I was writing my first book, I was right out of college before I went to grad school.

I lived in a place called Antimatterist, one of the largest performance and video gallery, video galleries in the world. It was in San Francisco, and huge space, 20 people living there. But I lived above the tool room on a plank of wood the size of a Volkswagen microbus. You like crawled over my bed to get to my desk, and my clothes were on one side and there were books on the other. That was it. And it was small and tiny and crazy, but it was a great, I got to spend a couple years there and it's where I started writing my first novel and it was just wonderful owning nothing and being that free.

Joe Rogan (3:13)

That seems like one of those things where it sounds like a really good idea if you don't have to do it forever.

Like if someone said, this is how I'm going to live for a while, you'd be like, oh, cool. But if you said, this is how I'm going to live for the rest of my life, you'd be like, oh, that poor fuck.

Steven Kotler (3:25)

Right.

Joe Rogan (3:25)

I think that's very true.

Steven Kotler (3:27)

Yeah. So it was a good thing to do when I was 18, 19, 20, whatever it was.

Now, you know, come back and see my crib, honey.

Joe Rogan (3:36)

Yeah, that wouldn't work.

But like this idea that you have of like coffee, black, but do you vacillate at all? Do you vary?