Steven Kotler
speaker
1,080 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 12 Jun
Steven Kotler’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
It is so good to be with you again.
So I had been working, I'd been working, researching, looking at the field of peak performance for a while in a totally unrelated project, right?
I was going to write a mystery novel and I wanted a character, I wanted a cat burglar as a character who was going to steal musical instruments, who made the rarest musical instruments in history.
I would stradivarius.
And then I found, figured out what you mentioned, which is
He made two of the rarest and most expensive musical instruments in his 90s.
And I went, well, wait a minute.
Everything I've been told about physical abilities is like the older myth about aging, which most of us believe, and I believed at the time of this, is what you could call the long, slow rot theory.
It's the idea that all of our mental skills and our physical skills, they decline over time.
There's nothing we can do to stop the slide.
So included in those physical skills would be fast twitch muscle response, fine motor performance, dexterity, all this stuff you would need to make a violin or a viola in your 90s, along with like expertise and wisdom and all that, like cognitive abilities.
And it sort of paused me and I was like, well, wait a minute.
If this is true, either Stradivarius is like the one in a billion,
or most of what we've been told about aging is wrong.
And that was, I had already been looking at other aspects of it, but it really sort of lit a fire under me to really investigate our physical abilities and what happened to them over time.
I've been looking at the cognitive stuff for a while.
It's very related to flow.
How we age plays a big role there.
So this is not new territory to me.
But the physical side was like, holy crap, could this possibly be true?
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