About
Steven
Steven’s Resume
Steven Kotler is a New York Times-bestselling author, an award-winning journalist, a serial entrepreneur, and the founder and executive director of the Flow Research Collective. The author of fifteen books, including eleven bestsellers, Kotler's work has earned three Pulitzer Prize nominations, been translated into over 80 languages, and appeared in over 100 publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Wired, TIME, and the Harvard Business Review.
His bestseller, Stealing Fire, was named Best Business Book of the Year by both CNBC and Strategy + Business, and has been partially credited with sparking today’s psychedelic renaissance. His other books—The Art of Impossible, The Rise of Superman and Gnar Country—are considered foundational texts in the field of performance neuroscience.
Kotler is also the host of Flow Radio, a top-ten Apple iTunes science podcast that is regularly featured on “best-of” lists across the web. He lectures globally and has appeared on platforms such as Fareed Zakaria GPS, NPR, CNBC, Big Think, and The Joe Rogan Experience.
Recognized as a pioneer in the field of applied performance neuroscience, Kotler publishes peer-reviewed research on flow, altered states, intuition, creativity, and consciousness. He has been called “one of the world’s leading experts in ultimate human performance” by the New York Times. His training programs have reached individuals in 156 countries and over 28 industries, including U.S. Navy Seals, Olympic athletes, and executive teams at Google, Meta, Microsoft, Audi, and Accenture.
He is also known for radical self-experimentation, from once flying a MiG-17 into G-LOC while testing a theory about near-death experiences, to being dropped 150 feet into a circus net to explore flow and time perception. Somewhere in the process, he has broken upwards of 80 bones.
As an entrepreneur, Kotler has founded or helped launch 16 different companies. He was instrumental in the creation of several media and tech firsts, including Buzznet (one of the earliest online magazines), Bikini (the first punk lad-mag), Freeze (the first freeskiing magazine), EcoHearth (an early online environmental marketplace), and Transcape (the first biofeedback-based branching video game). In 2021, Forbes named the Flow Research Collective “one of the fastest-growing companies in America.”
Stuff at the bottom of Steven's resume
Steven flew a Russian MIG-17 fighter jet into G-LOC (gravity-induced loss of consciousness) to test a theory about the neuroscience of near-death experiences.
Steven makes a drawing every day (or most days). He doesn’t claim to be an artist. He just likes to draw for flow and fun. You can find examples on Instagram. @stevenkotler
Steven ran a strange experiment in peak performance aging—he taught himself how to park ski at age fifty-three. Then, Steven expanded the experiment, convincing eighteen adults (ages 29-68) to test his methods on the mountain. If you don’t know what park skiing is, or want to see a video of the experiment, both can be found here.
Steven has helped launch over sixteen companies. This includes two flow-based organizations, five national magazines, an environmental marketplace, an environment-focused events company, a publishing house, a video game company, two canine non-profits, a prestidigitation events company, one short-lived forest fire non-profit, and the now defunct Reporter’s Gym, which taught inner-city kids how to be sportswriters, and was cofounded in conjunction with the Los Angeles Lakers and Dave Eggar’s afterschool tutoring organization, 826 LA.
Steven covered music early in his career as a journalist. This is why his books contain references to bands, and his endnotes contain playlists. This is also why he teamed up with fashion designer and punk rocker, John Varvatos, to create A History of Punk: How The Kids Who No One Wanted Created The Future We’re All Living In. A Punk Rock Legacy. Stay tuned…
Steven has helped over a million people use flow to maximize performance.
Everything we thought we knew about aging is wrong
Everything we thought we knew about aging is wrong.
Before the 1970s, scientists thought of aging as a long, slow rot.
Everyone agreed: depression, loneliness, and cognitive decline were inevitable, and there was nothing we could do about these facts.
Not so fast...
.png)