Full episode · 1 h 6 m
No.1 Flow Expert: How to Enter Deep Lock-In Mode
Steven Kotler argues that flow is trainable—and that managing focus, challenge and play can improve performance and learning.
The Knowledge Project · Shane Parrish
- Steven Kotler is a bestselling author and executive director of the Flow Research Collective.
The best minutes
- 9:31A 4% challenge keeps you learning without snapping4 min
- 24:07Deliberate play can beat deliberate practice3 min
- 53:24Surfing gave Kotler moments of clarity during Lyme diseasePro pick 7 min
Also worth watching
- 16:05ADHD focus improves when people find autonomy in the task5 min
- 6:13Your primary flow activity can train focus for work3 min
- 31:23Frustration can be a sign that learning is working4 min
- 44:53The first two interview questions should show your preparation3 min
- 51:05Protect early hours for difficult creative work3 min
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Summary · 4 min read
Steven Kotler is a bestselling author and executive director of the Flow Research Collective, where he studies the science of peak performance. He says the collective’s flagship eight-week training has served 35,000 people and produced a 73% boost in flow.
Kotler describes flow as an evolution-shaped state of optimal performance that can be trained by managing focus, challenge and cognitive load. He recommends returning to a personally absorbing activity, reducing distractions and setting tasks just beyond current skill; he says deliberate play can outperform repetition in fields without tight rules. He also argues that curiosity can build toward passion and purpose, and that frustration can be part of learning. Kotler recounts how surfing during his Lyme disease recovery led him to investigate flow, while Parrish shares his own Lyme experience.
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- 0:39Flow can be trained
Kotler defines flow as an optimal state of consciousness marked by concentration, absorbed action, a diminished sense of self, time distortion, a sense of control and enjoyment. He says flow is rooted in biology and can be trained; the Flow Research Collective’s eight-week program saw a 73% boost in flow among 35,000 participants.
- 4:53Focus opens the flow channel
Kotler says flow follows focus, and that triggers such as novelty, risk and complexity draw attention into the present. He recommends resuming a primary flow activity, which he says can build focus and calm anxiety; he cites 2–4 hours a week as a useful amount. For tasks, he describes a back-of-the-envelope estimate of a 4% challenge increase over skill as a sweet spot between boredom and anxiety.
- 12:39Protect attention and autonomy
Kotler recommends shutting off distractions, limiting communication channels and building focus gradually; he says the brain is designed to focus in 90–110-minute cycles. While disclaiming expertise in ADHD, he calls it a potential flow advantage and says reframing a task around personal autonomy and purpose can help sustain attention.
- 22:39Flow is morally neutral
Kotler says flow can serve beneficial or harmful ends, but associates it with well-being, life satisfaction, meaning, empathy and environmental awareness. He also describes bored teenagers’ risky behavior as a possible attempt to find flow by raising the challenge in their lives.
- 24:07Play can accelerate learning
Kotler cites research by the U.S. Department of Defense finding that people learn 230% faster in flow. He says deliberate practice suits tightly bounded fields such as mathematics and violin, while deliberate play—repetition with improvisation—can work better in less structured fields because it produces more learning-related neurochemicals.
- 26:30Curiosity builds toward purpose
Kotler says curiosity is a foundational motivator and suggests listing 25 curiosities to find where several intersect; he calls that intersection a seed of passion. He says connecting passion to a cause greater than oneself can create purpose, which he associates with additional social neurochemistry.
- 28:06Spite can motivate but consume
Kotler says a small chip on the shoulder can motivate, but spite can become destructive; he points to Michael Jordan as an example of it consuming someone. He says he tries not to argue with critics and would rather put the effort into further research.
- 31:23Frustration can signal progress
Kotler says flow begins with a conscious struggle phase before performance becomes less conscious, and argues that frustration can signal working-memory overload rather than failure. He cites research linking frustration with a better chance of solving a problem later, and says the struggle can help prepare the brain for flow.
- 35:10Reading feeds pattern recognition
Kotler describes the brain as a prediction engine that seeks to reduce uncertainty. He recommends reading at least 25 pages a day to give pattern recognition new material, and says writers can help their brains connect ideas by identifying a piece’s start and ending.
- 39:37Books offer high information returns
Kotler says reading books, especially textbooks, is central to improving how he thinks. He compares five minutes spent reading an article with about six hours of work behind it, and a six-to-seven-hour read of Rise of Superman with 15 years of his research. He also advises interviewers to prepare, show domain knowledge and ask follow-up questions.
- 47:19Feedback and privacy sharpen learning
Kotler says visible consequences can expose thinking errors, citing Josh Waitzkin’s chess losses and martial-arts setbacks. He and Parrish discuss meditation and tolerating mistakes; Kotler says he prefers learning away from an audience. He calls early morning non-time, when few people interrupt him, valuable for writing.
- 53:24Kotler connects flow with Lyme recovery
Kotler recounts being severely ill with Lyme disease and experiencing flow while surfing; he says he went from about 10% to about 80% functionality over six months, then took six more years to feel normal. He describes a possible link between flow’s effects on stress and the nervous system and autoimmune symptoms, while calling a broader claim that flow causes most spontaneous healing an overstatement. Parrish also recounts his Lyme diagnosis.
- 1:04:01Success means following curiosity
Kotler says he is happiest skiing or riding and defines success as a way of living rather than a destination. He values doing authentic, useful work and continuing to follow his curiosity; he also says flow lets him discover and push the edges of his abilities.
Published Oct 27, 2026.
Transcript · 54 min read
The Knowledge Project, hosted by Shane Parrish, with Steven Kotler.
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
You don't really know what you're capable of because you can only find out inside of flow. I'm curious how you would define flow. Flow is a scientific definition, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is the one who came up with that definition. But it's technically defined as an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best. It refers to any of those moments of rapt attention and total absorption where you get so focused on what you're doing, So focused on the task at hand, that everything else just starts to fade away and disappear. All aspects of performance, mental, physical, and emotional, will skyrocket.
What does a flow state feel like? So this is actually the original work that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi did on flow. He went around the world asking people about the times in their life when they felt their best and they performed their best. And he discovered that flow has six core characteristics. So there's complete concentration on the task at hand. There's a merger of action awareness. a diminishment of our sense of self, time distortion. We don't feel peak performance on the inside. We feel a sense of control. So a sense of I can control things I can't normally control. That's what it feels like, right? You look at Michael Jordan in a flow state, you see the windmill dunk, and that's what it looks like. But on the inside, it's, wow, that basket looks as big as a Hulu, but I can't miss. It's a feeling I can control.
Finally, the last thing is flow states are autotelic is the technical term that text me high used, it just means euphoric and delicious. Autotelic means an end in itself. So it basically means flow feels so good, we'll go very far out of our way to get more of the experience. If I were to put it, psychologists hate when I do this, but it's the most addictive state on earth, period, right? But those are the six characteristics. So if you're trying to figure out, am I in flow, my team in flow, those are the six characteristics you're looking for. So many people feel like they're not reaching their potential, like they're capable of doing more, but they don't quite understand that. Is flow that key?
Read the whole transcript
Flow is how evolution created optimal performance in the human body. We've known for a while that the origin story of flow was probably runner's high. And there's a couple other evolutionary stories to go along with it. But there's also some proof, and now there's a little bit more kind of neurobiology to back this up, that flocking behavior and mobbing behavior, which are actually related behaviors in nature are early versions of flow states but it's very old and it's so it's it's not just in humans some all social mammals get into flow and some insects some birds so this is how we evolved to perform at our best so if you were seeing any human being performing at their best chances are flow is involved another term that's worth defining is peak performance because it has connotations. People think soldiers or athletes or, and people for all, as far as I can tell, this is, this is my definition. It's nothing more or less than getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. Go deeper on that. There's nothing sort of beyond our biology. There's no secret, secret to performance. There's just our biology.
Neurobiology is mechanism shaped by evolution. It's the same in all of us. What motivates you is going to be different than what motivates me. But in both me and you, that motivation is going to show up as dopamine. So what we're actually after here is the dopamine. That's the actual energy and focus and drive. And all the words and the terms we can put around it don't matter as much as getting the dopamine, which is actually what matters. And so I sort of figured if we could get to the level of mechanism, this stuff would get very trainable. And that has been our experience. So at the Flow Research Collective, our flagship training for a lot of years was zero to dangerous.
We've 35,000 people went through it. So after eight-week training, people would see a 73% boost in flow. I would like to tell you that's because. our kung fu is that good. It's because this stuff is really trainable. And if you start with the neurobiology, which is the same in all of us, it's trainable because it's built into all of us. So maybe you spend a few beats and teach me how to get into flow. Two things to know. First, flow states have triggers, preconditions that lead to more flow. There are 26 to 28 that have been discovered. There's probably way more. That's just what we know so far. And the first thing to know is the simplest, flow follows focus. Only shows up on all our retention in the right here, right now on the task at hand. So that's what all the triggers do. They drive focus into the present moment. If you peel back the hood, they do this in a number of different ways. They can push norepinephrine into our system. They can push dopamine into our system. They can push both together into our system. Or they can lower cognitive load. Cognitive load is all the crap you're trying to think about at any one time. And if I lower cognitive load, your brain instantly repurposes that energy for paying attention. This is why people will tell
you to clean your desk first before you try to focus on writing or something like that. What you're actually doing is lowering cognitive load because now it's more organized and things are in spots and the brain will automatically, it's an efficiency engineer, always wants sort of extra energy for the task at hand. And so that's what happens. You clean your desk and you get more energy because cognitive load has gone down, you can focus better. So that's what all the triggers do. I always, there's three triggers I start people with, but I also start, I always
“the research shows that like two to four hours a week is about what it takes on your primary flow activity.”
“when the challenge of that task slightly exceeds our skill set. So you want to stretch, but not snap.”
moment. The most obvious flow trigger is complete concentration. What do I mean by complete concentration? For me, it's writing. So I'll give you a writing example. And I'm going to go writing. First thing I want to do is get rid of all the distractions. So my smartphone gets turned off Because, you know, they modeled it after jackpots, the single most, you know, addictive and distracting technology in the world.
And so that gets shut down, notifications, email. When I used to start this work 20 years ago, average executive I dealt with had like three ways you can interrupt them. There was cell phone, call them, you could email them, you could message them, you knock on their door, right? The average executive I work with these days has like 17 to 18 different incoming channels, WhatsApp and messages and Slack and Notion. And it's it's insane. But do you know how many people shit on me? Like my phone is perpetually in focus. If you're not my kids, it doesn't get through. That's it. Just my kids. And so, like, people are like, you're always in focus.
I feel like I'm interrupting you. And I'm like, well, you can text. I'm just not going to get your text until I choose. And yeah, well, that's the other thing I tell people, train people. So limit communication channels. Keep one channel open for emergency. So like your boss or your wife or whatever, one channel for emergency. Get rid of the others. Batch communications. So communications in the morning, the end of the day. The next question is how long should you focus? And here's a really good biological answer because we actually have an answer here. So everybody knows they go through a sleep cycle when they sleep, and it's roughly 90 to 110 minutes long, which is the REM cycle.
You have an awake and alert cycle. It's the exact same length. It's 90 to 110 minutes long. Your brain is biologically designed to focus for 90-minute slots. So I always tell people when we're training them in flow and we're training them how to focus, you know, start by starting. You know, start by like walling yourself off. And if you can only focus for 10 minutes at a time, start there. If it's 15 minutes, start there. It doesn't matter. Start by starting. But when you start to get better at this, you will find that your brain will naturally move. Like you'll, people will be training up and training up and I can, oh, I got 20 minutes, 25 minutes. And suddenly they're like, oh my God, I was 90 minutes. What happened?
And I'm like, what happens to your biology? Like you're built to do that. So if you start getting your biology to work for you in this way, you're going to move in that direction naturally. So complete concentration is one of the first flow triggers. You know, you have your primary flow activity. I always say, you know, manicure the space for complete concentration and then use the challenge skills balance to figure out how to tune the task. So I'll give you a writing example. I write every day. I'm sure you do too. When I'm starting a book, for me, I like to write about 500 words a day. And so that's right in that 4% sweet spot for me. Because that's so mutable, you have to also tune in on a daily basis for what's your energy level, right?
If I didn't get any sleep last night because my plane was delayed and it was three o'clock in the morning when we landed and I woke up, you know, and it was starting a book, I wouldn't ask myself to write 500 words. That would be too hard.
“autonomy and attention are coupled systems in the brain.”
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Ready to find your next million customers? Go to applovin.com slash Shane and launch your first campaign today. I built an AI version of myself with Hey, Jen. What you're about to see in here is my digital avatar. I asked it why some professionals build an audience while most stay invisible. And here's what it said. Hey, Shane, the professionals breaking out right now aren't the most talented ones. They're the most visible ones. That's their edge. They show up on video constantly, and nobody else can keep the pace. Record yourself once, and I close that gap, so you become the face people trust.
That's HeyGen. Record yourself for 15 seconds and get an avatar that keeps you posting without filming. So you don't need to become a full-time content creator. 30 million people already use it, from financial advisors and real estate agents to 85% of the portion 100. Your first three videos are free at HeyGen.com slash TKP. That's H-E-Y-G-E-N dot com slash TKP. Is flow always good? So that's an interesting question. One of the things that's worth pointing out is flow is morally neutral. It's a tool. So soldiers get into flow. So depending on which side of battle you're on, right? Chick Set Me High pointed out years ago, was absolutely right that most so-called juvenile delinquency, graffiti art, vandalism, fighting, that sort of stuff. It's actually bored teenagers who are naturally, your body will naturally see flow and they're actually tuning the challenge skills balance with through delinquency. They're upping the challenge level in their lives and trying to get into flow rather than this isn't about like misbehaving. It's actually, this is flow-based behavior. So flow is just, it's neutral, can be used for good or bad, and can have good and bad effects, right? Depending.
What do we know for sure? We know it underpins happiness, well-being, overall life satisfaction, meaning and purpose, and increases longevity. I mean, we can talk about what cognitive benefits, but these are just like kind of well-being benefits. Those are beneficial. It expands empathy, which I always think is a good thing. It increases environmental awareness, which is our ability to see, perceive, and care about the natural world. I always think that's a good thing. What's one specific thing everybody listening to this podcast can change today that will increase
“If you're outside of a bounded discipline, which is pretty much almost everything else other than like a musical instrument, a couple other things, deliberate play outperforms deliberate practice significantly.”
If you're trying to amplify human motivation, the way I always explain it, people, usually I talk about this, people will come to me and they're like, how do you find a purpose? How do I get a purpose, right? And I said, well, biologically, you follow the biology. The way the biology works is curiosity is the foundational motivator. It's a little bit of dopamine. It's a great motivator, but it's just a little bit of dopamine. If you are trying to build towards passion, right, which is this bigger individual motivator, you just want the intersection of multiple curiosities.
So this is one of the things when people are trying to find their purpose, one of the things I do is I say, list 25 things you're curious about and find where they intersect. This used to be a hard thing for people. Like they would have a hard time doing this and it would take people a really long time. The great thing is we all have LLMs. And they're great at this. Like you can literally use an LLM to do this. But if you can figure out where like one, three or four of your curiosities intersect and start playing there, that's passion. That's a seed kernel of passion because now you've got a lot of different dopamine coming in.
When you attach that passion to a cause greater than yourself, that's purpose. The reason we care about purpose from a motivational standpoint is better drugs, right? Passion is dopamine and norepinephrine. It's really powerful, but purpose is dopamine, norepinephrine, and then all the pro-social neurochemistry that you get when other people are there. So you get serotonin, and you get endorphins, and you get oxytocin. It's better drugs, right? It's more feel-good drugs. It also seems like there's two fundamental power sources for motivation, if you will, which is, one, I have a chip on my shoulder.
I'm moving away from something. And then the other is I'm moving towards something. It's an interesting way of thinking about it. So I, one of the more famous things that I wrote, it was a newsletter actually, but I love small letter S spite as a motivator. This is Tom Brady, right? Like with a chip on his shoulder. There's a fortune cookie that's. tape tar refrigerator that like my wife found and it says you get great satisfaction out of proving other people wrong and almost everything i've done like i've done because somebody i thought was doing it wrong and it pissed me off and so i want to i want to i want to fix it so i love that as a motivator um when is a chip on your shoulder healthy and when is it unhealthy so michael jordan is the example of unhealthy because greatest basketball player of all time of all time and i was born in chicago i grew up a bulls fan it was like watching jordan play was amazing but watching what that chip became after he was out of basketball like do you watch interviews with michael jordan and think oh here's a really happy dude i'm thinking he's starting to get a little bit there now, but as a general rule, that level of spite as a motivator ends up eating
you alive. So I think like it's really, really useful, but you sort of got to know when to put it down. That's why I say small s spite. One of the things that I never do is read criticisms of my work, take it personally and care what my critics say or argue with my critics. But I know lots of thinkers, lots of really brilliant men and women who somebody said they were wrong. They will like go toe to toe. I'll give you this happened fairly recently. And it was just we put out a very I have a new science article out right now in Frontiers of Neuroscience called The Body Doesn't Keep the Score. And it is a direct rebuttal against Vanderpoel, who I think is totally wrong. And I think that book is very problematic. Some of my co-writers, because people are freaking out and there's a lot of like podcasters are trying to people are trying to argue with us and i had to call i was like we're not going to play that game like at some point if you know the right person comes to us and says hey will you have the conversation yes we'll do that but our job is not to like defend our territory against commerce we took our stand we made our stay it's a very well-written article you can argue this you don't have to argue with
us, but we don't have to rebut all the, like, that's not the job. The job is to do the research and, you know, our job is to prove it more, right? Like people got mad. Great. Let's, let's go do another study and prove it more. Right. And like, that's our job. Our job isn't, isn't all the rebuttals and you don't have to sort of do that. Or, you know, I see those writers and it's amazing because I like, I see really smart people who are amazing contributors to this world. And I can't tell you how much time they're, they're, you know, like flushing down a toilet because they want to
“frustration is a sign that you're moving in the right direction”
I want to come back to something, maybe double click on pattern recognition and anticipation, the relationship between those two things.
The brain fundamentally is a prediction engine, right? What the brain is doing at every moment of every day is it's trying to predict what is about to happen, right? And what it wants to do is lower uncertainty, wants to minimize uncertainty, and it wants to know exactly how much energy, right? because we evolved in an environment where calories are really hard to come by. So it never wants to waste energy. So it's what's about to happen and how much energy do I need to meet the challenge? That's what the brain is always trying to do. So when I think about when you say anticipation, I'm really just thinking about what we mean by like a prediction engine brain that's always sort of trying to lower uncertainty. And I also think like if you're trying to understand in human behavior, you always have to start there. We use pattern recognition as a flow trigger. So it's another one of flows triggers and it's really, really, really important. And I'll give you a couple of like sort of really common examples. So one of the things I will always have people I'm working with do is read a minimum of 25 pages a day, usually in a book. I like, I think books are the best but because you have to stock the pattern recognition system with ammunition right
if you're not feeding the pattern recognition system new information it doesn't have the raw materials to make connections. So one of the ways to start getting more flow in your life is if you start taking in more information. And I like reading books because they're just the densest form of information available on the planet and you have the best opportunity for stocking the pattern recognition system that way. But that's one of the things I think of when talking about pattern recognition. Again, on the other side, this is something that I train a lot. I will train different thinking styles, lateral thinking, right? Outside the box thinking, how do you make sort of connections between sort of unrelated things? How does that work? And the brain will, you know, sort of automatically do that. I always say with, we were talking earlier about writing and sort of one of the most common causes of writer's block is not knowing your starts and your endings. If you know where you're starting, you know where you're ending the brain is a built it's a pattern recognition system right the brain does pattern recognition at like this is what neurons do it at most basic level right everything everything we do is built out of pattern recognition if you know your starts and your
endings you have a pattern recognition system for the brain it will connect them this is how we do narrative this is how we do cause and effect this is how the brain does everything so with writing people are you if they're stuck it's usually because they don't know where they're starting and where they're going, because eventually the brain will automatically fill in the middle for you because it's built to do that. Let me tell you about the best new product that I've used in the past five years. It's the Matic Vacuum. This thing vacuums, it mops, Matic does everything. Other robots bump into things, but the Matic sees things. It actually avoids the problems. And the Matic automatically adjusts between my carpeted surfaces and my hardwood floors. It's also super easy to schedule. I have it run every night while I'm in bed, and every morning I wake up to clean floors.
Messes happen, and when they do, Matic rolls into action. Go to maticrobots.com today and put Matic to work for you. Ever hit 3 p.m. and feel like your brain just quit? For a lot of people, that's not caffeine or sleep. It's electrolytes, and water alone won't fix it. That's why I drink Element, every day after lunch zero sugar no dodgy ingredients just a real dose of sodium potassium and magnesium i know you're all thinking electrolytes are for athletes but you don't have to be an athlete to benefit from it and it tastes great stay sharp in the afternoon and grab a free eight count sample pack with any purchase at drinkelement.com tkp that's drink l m n t dot dot com slash TKP. Can you teach people to think better? If you want to think better, you have to start by reading more. You want to think better, read more. First thing, people ask me how I got my career, how I did anything, and I will flat out tell you I outread the motherfuckers. I realized very early on I wasn't the brightest guy. I wasn't the best at all that stuff. But I was willing to read three or four or five times the amount as anybody else was willing to read. So I think, one, if you want to teach somebody to think better, you've got to
teach them how to read more. When I say read, I actually mean books. I spend most of my time these days reading textbooks because I think it's the ultimate edge. I love them because literally you have the best people in the world summarizing and putting all their most important stuff into it and nobody else reads them i always talk about this in terms of the roi on reading and so for For example, if you read a blog of mine or a short article you write, it's going to take you. five to eight minutes, about a thousand words, right? It's going to take you five to eight minutes to read it. What do you actually get for those thousand words?
Well, if I'm writing a blog article, I'm going to, it's two writing sessions, really. I'm going to write it one day. I may do one phone call, one interview. I'll call a friend, hey, you know, you're an expert. What do you think? This is the idea, you know? And then I'm going to polish it the next day. So you give me five minutes and you get roughly six hours and maybe one phone call. So two brains on the problem and about six hours for five minutes. That's not bad ROI. But if you read a book, say take Rise of Superman, my books on average are about 70,000, 72,000 words. So they take mostly about six to seven hours reading them.
This is just normal reading speed, right? So, okay, cool. You've given me six to seven hours. What's your return on investment? Well, for Rise of Superman, it took me 15 years worth of research to write that book. There were thousands of conversations. And, you know, so literally you're giving me six or seven hours, but you're getting 15 years of my life and hundreds of other people beating on those ideas. That's amazing ROI. Two ideas that dovetail into this that I want to hear you maybe respond to. One is I have a concept called the learning loop. Okay. And it's you have an experience. You take that experience.
You compress it. So you reflect on it. So you have an experience. You reflect on it. you create a compression, and then you act on that compression. And when we communicate with other people, we're often communicating the compression. And I feel in a lot of cases, it's the illusion of knowledge. It's like me going home. I pull out a cookbook. I can make that recipe, but if something goes wrong, I have no idea what went wrong, why it went wrong. But the chef who's had the experience reflected on that experience and then given me the recipe, which is in fact the compression, they know exactly what went wrong. There's too much salt, your oven's not the right temperature, you didn't start enough. They like instantly know all of that stuff. And a lot of what we consume is the compressions, other people's compressions.
So in the podcast space, one of the reasons I wanted to do long form is to get away from the compression, at least as reasonably as we can get away from the compressions, get into the experiences and show the thinking, show the reflection, and then people can come up with their own compressions that they take away from the episode in an effort to make it more useful. I'm curious, A, how you would respond to that, B, how I can make the podcast format better for people to take away information they can actually use. One, I think it's a medium is the message kind of thing. So I think you will get with this kind of thing, better stories better the human side i like there's a lot of advantages because those things even get compressed in books for a lot of reasons so i think the podcast is really there's certain kinds of things that are that are very that is very effective for when it comes to like teaching knowledge though i still think there's something about reading oh definitely it's just better i also always tell people that like you can't read the same books as other people right if you read the same books as other people you think the same thoughts as other people and so whenever the whole
world's running around talking about a book like i'm i'm usually usually suspicious of that book but i'm usually curious about what the author read to produce the book right that's really interesting to me i like i like backtracking that way in terms of sources how to make the podcast better from an information perspective information density perspective is interesting to me it's also about your willing to a willingness one's willingness to always sort of ask the extra question as a bit on both sides of the microphone right i started out as a journalist um there's an urge to sort of get through your questions and get through the interview and sort Absolutely.
do that part of the job. But like every there's always the next question, right? There's that follow. And so that like the restraint to like, oh, I'm not going to get through my checklist. I'm going to take the time to ask the next question and the follow up and the follow up,
“First question I ask always displays personal knowledge.”
history and you speak my language you're one of us i could talk to you right it's a big deal i want to switch gears just a little bit uh josh witzkin says he hunts for his own thinking errors is that like the meta skill why is he so effective at learning i love josh um i think he's a genius about about this stuff i don't know if this is an answer i'm gonna fumble around for a little while But I will tell you that the areas where Josh learned how to learn, first as a chess player and then as a martial artist, especially in Tai Chi, which is a sort of a slower, more meditative stuff, when you make errors in thinking, in chess you're going to lose, and in Tai Chi, he's going to get thrown out of the ring because he was doing competitive, the martial version of Tai Chi, and you get pushed out of the ring.
That's how you lose in that version. And so his thinking errors were very visible to like the errors of thinking have consequences that are that were right in his face. And I think. Something like that, even like me learning to think as a journalist, right, when I got something wrong, I would get fired or I wouldn't get hired again. You know what I mean? So I think. To develop the meta skills, one, like I think the consequences sort of help a little bit. to help you think about thinking um i also think i'm a long time meditator josh is a long time meditator and when you start getting that separation between emotion and feeling right because emotions surface first and they're automatic and feelings come second and they feel automatic and they feel like but you know like if you can get into the gap between feeling emotion and feeling you start to figure out oh wait a minute that feeling is a frame it's not exactly trustworthy. It's different. There's two things going on here. And the minute that feeling shows up, it locks me into a meaning. And so when you start doing that work and you start noticing there's like there's a difference there, I think all these things are very helpful sort of on the
way to metacognition. I want to tie that back to Josh for a second. So it seems like there's a couple of things. I'm going to say how I'm hearing what you're saying and maybe you can respond to this. So it sounds like a lot of the conditions Josh was using were the same conditions we need for intuition. So rapid feedback, a lot of iterations and a relatively unchanging environment. You know, you're confined in what's happening. And then I heard, but you didn't say, or maybe I inferred from my past knowledge of Josh that he was okay being uncomfortable, Which means he was okay looking like a fool and being a beginner, and he didn't have an image or something he had to maintain, and he was okay making mistakes and then getting the feedback from those mistakes.
That's interesting. I wasn't thinking about that. That is obviously true. I think anybody who's good at learning doesn't. I don't like being bad in public, so I try very hard. Like, even with, you know, when I ski, I try to get as far away from the chairlift. Like, I will, you know, I want to iterate in the woods out of sight. I think Josh was a little bit, like, when Josh was transitioning from Tai Chi and martial arts, Gracie Jiu-Jitsu at that point, and moving into surfing and pedalboarding, which is, you know, where he is right now, he left New York and went down to Costa Rica, right, where he doesn't really know anybody he got.
And some of it was access to waves and I got that, but I think some of that, it was also like, let me get away from everybody I know so I could like be really bad and it doesn't matter.
“Nobody owns 4 a.m. to 7 a.m. is non-time. It doesn't belong to anybody.”
“And it felt it was amazing because the best part about it is like my head was clear. I could surf. The pain was gone.”
Ellen Langer hadn't done her work at Harvard yet and all the stuff that sort of like smoothed that over hadn't happened yet. How long did it take you to feel normal again? I was sick for three years. The surfing to like 80% functionality, which is what got me to, was about a year.
And then it took six more years till I was sort of back till normal. I lost like 30 or 40 pounds. I was 170 pounds when I started and I was 129 pounds when I finished with Lyme disease. I still can't get my weight above 160 like this. Like I can't get, I can't. get back. I lost about an inch of height, too. And I was done. I was shorter. And I was lighter. I thought I had a bad case of Lyme, but that takes... What happened to you? I just woke up one morning and started drinking coffee. And the left side of my face was completely paralyzed. Paralyzed. And that was the start. And I had no idea. So I called my mom and I was like, Can you come watch the kids? I got to go to the hospital. And I show up at my doctor's office and they're like, oh my God, we think you're having a heart attack. So they brought me in, saw the doctor. She's like, yeah, I think you're having a heart attack. And I'm like, well, rationally speaking, that doesn't make a ton of sense, right? Like healthy, no family history.
Out of all the things, like what else could it be? And she's like, you need to go to Emerge like right now. And I show up at Emerge. They're like, yeah, you're not having a heart attack. And then, you know, six hours later, because this is Canada, I see a doctor and they give me all these tests. And I was like, oh, you know, I was talking to some neurologists while I was waiting. And he's like, oh, you were playing Dr. Google over here. And I was like, well, they said that, you know, in a healthy, you know, male at my age, test for these four things. And that will probably cover 80% of what would cause it. And he's like, here's some Pregnizone, go home. If your family doctor thinks you need it, she can order the test. And over the next two weeks, I started to gradually lose almost all functionality. I couldn't stand still at one point. If I stood still for more than three seconds, the back of my knees felt like somebody had stabbed them.
I'd be lying on the floor crying. And then after that, I had locked jaw. I couldn't open my mouth. And so my whole body was just shutting down. But luckily, a friend saved me. I told her about it. She's like, this feels like Lyme. She wrote me a prescription for doxycycline. And within three days, I just started feeling improvement. And she gave me the requisition to get tested for Lyme. And I got tested for it. It turns out I tested positive. My family doctor called me the day after I got my test results, because it takes seven days in Ontario to get a Lyme test result, which is insane in and of itself, given what it does to your body and how destructive it is and how prevalent it is.
And so she calls me and she's like, I finally agreed to give you a requisition, you know, because you're just arguing with me. If you go, if you open up West of Jesus, which is the book I wrote where I tell the sort of the story we just walked through, I don't really write about much about the Lyme. It just sort of kicks off the book and it's there a little bit. And but there's a paragraph where I list all the diseases they thought I had before they would test me for Lyme. Interesting. It's literally a paragraph. Such a simple test. Refused. There's first the disease and then there's the medical establishment and what it's like to deal with a long-term illness and the medical establishment.
You have to advocate for yourself. And it's, I don't know, it was eye-opening for me in so many ways. But luckily, we're both fully recovered and healthy today. So we always end these interviews sort of with a similar question or theme. But I have two questions for you. When are you most happy? When I'm skiing or when I'm riding. And what is success for you? It's always been the same thing, right? It's like I get to, like, put words together in a straight line for a living. It's the most mad. Like, I can't believe people pay me for it. And now I get to, like, put words together in a straight line, often based on the, like, science experiments that me and my friends get to run.
Are you kidding? Like, are you crazy? I would have done all this shit for free. In fact, I was doing it for free for a very long time. Right. So I think of it that way. I'm also I flat out tell you it's one of the reasons I get along so well with the action sport athletes is I am ferociously competitive. I don't take it very seriously. But if you came to me, I will flat out tell you I want to be the greatest writer in the history of the universe. I know that's not a specific title, but I still want that title. Right. Like I'm that ferociously competitive. The coolest thing about flow. Right. And performance is that it's emergent. You don't really know what you're capable of because you can only find out inside a flow and you get into a flow state and you push your skills to their to their edge. And then, you know, you get into another and you push it, push it and push it.
And so when I think of what success is, it's always I don't like it's not a destination. It's a way of living. And to me, the way of living is one. I'm doing things that are like core to me and dearly authentic and where I can be very effective and useful. I get to keep following my curiosity out and it doesn't stop. That's how I think about it. You
