Duncan Trussell Family Hour - Steven Kotler

Episode Date: December 19, 2017

Best selling author and expert on flow states, Steven Kotler, joins the DTFH. We talk about seizure ridden cyborgs , techniques to utilize when getting the weed jitters, synchronicity, and steps that can get you into THE FLOW.

Get out and do something new this week at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. On view now. See this major retrospective from the internationally renowned Pennsylvania photographer Judith Joy Ross. I use an 8x10 new camera wooden box with a lens on it. Explore this amazing body of work as she shares her soulful, timeless portrait of everyday Pennsylvanians. The PMA. See, shop, eat. Open late every Friday. Tickets on sale now at philamuseum.org. Hello friends. It is I, D Trussell, and you have tuned in to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast on a tour of Airbnb's throughout the Los Angeles area. Looking for a house? I think I found one. Put in an application.

Fingers crossed. They gotta scan me dude. They gotta check my references. They gotta make sure I'm not some kind of monster. It must be terrifying to rent your house out because you just don't know man. I mean think about it. Jeffrey Dahmer. Somebody rented that place to Jeffrey Dahmer. Jeffrey Dahmer at one point walked through an apartment with some apartment manager, asked about closet space, looked into the refrigerator, looked in the oven, seemed really interested in cooking and storage. Cut to two years later, the national news is surrounding your apartment complex which has now become home to one of the most notorious serial killers in American history, Jeffrey Dahmer. Your place is now so haunted you're getting calls every night

because little girls are getting sucked into swirling vortexes of pink pulsating protoplasmatic placental gel and it's all your fault. You shouldn't have let him through. You were a little lazy. You didn't actually check his references. Lewis Cipher. That's not a real name. The number 6666666. That's not a real number but you let him through and now nobody wants to live in your apartment complex anymore except for crow tamers, cat and bombers. So I get being careful when you're renting a place but my god I am so over living in Airbnb's but I don't want to break down you know like you don't want to just rent a place. You don't want to just move into a place. Maybe I'm being too picky. I don't know. Maybe it's too much you know. I want a place with a solarium.

I want a place with a beautiful grove. Doesn't have to be a giant grove. Half an acre. Half an acre grove with mysterious statues. Maybe a mystical hermit who lives somewhere on the property that is so good at hiding from me that I only see like traces of where he's been like oh shit there there it is like incense has been burning here. Look flower petals everywhere because this hermit that lives on the property he cries flower petals. He gets he gets so overcome with the beauty of the universe that he merges in with everything and weeps tears of flower petals that land on the well-kept yet still kind of overgrown pathways of the mystical grove behind the house that I want to live in. I'm looking for

a Moroccan fuck room filled with Moroccan lanterns and also some kind of ornate mahogany wood throughout the house that is filled with secret compartments containing powerful Moroccan hash and Afghani opium balls. If you live in Los Angeles and you know of a place like that please let me know. Reach out to me on Twitter. Slide into my DMs. Friends the episode you're about to listen to is one of my favorite podcasts of all time. Within you are going to hear some of the craziest fucking stories you ever heard including a story about a cyborg. You're going to learn a technique that you can use the next time you find yourself getting the heebie jeebies from too much THC in the system and also you're going to learn some basic steps that you can utilize to

start putting yourself into the state known as flow. With us here today is author and teacher Steven Kotler. We're going to plunge right into that but first a word from our esteemed sponsors. When the Yellowstone Super Caldera finally erupts sending massive pyroclastic flows blasting across North America and shooting enough ash in the sky to plunge the entire planet into a never-ending ice age and you find yourself ragged and broken wandering down some inevitable post-apocalyptic highway clutching your little suitcase bleeding from your legs and feet and nose because you were just badly beaten by a wandering crew of brigands and you pass some group of survivors camp near the highway and wander towards them hands trembling extended

and their captain Captain Lloyd Warweather says to you I want to help but what can you offer our camp what are you going to say you're a graphic designer sorry nobody needs flyers friend sorry we don't need graphic designers says captain Lloyd Warweather sending you on your way sending you down to the highway where you will definitely be captured by cannibalistic mutants who will peel layer after layer of skin away from your body and cook it like bacon keeping you alive turning you into essentially a living farm for skin but that's not going to happen because when Lloyd Warweather says to you what do you have to offer our camp you're going to say I know how to cook and Captain Warweather will say welcome home and that's all because of today's sponsor

hello fresh hello fresh is a meal kit delivery service that shops plans and delivers your favorite step-by-step recipes and pre-measured ingredients so you can just cook eat and enjoy it couldn't be more convenient you choose your delivery date for when it works best for your busy schedule you can pause your account for weeks at a time when you're out of town all the ingredients come pre-measured and handy labeled meal kits you know which ingredients go with which recipe it's delivered right to your door and recyclable insulated packaging hello fresh offers a wide variety of chef curated recipes that change weekly three plans to choose from classic veggie and family classic you get a variety of meat fish and seasonal produce veggie vegetarian recipes with

plant-based proteins grains and seasonal produce and family quick and easy meals with all of the delicious flavor the whole family will love best of all it's simple you won't spend all night in the kitchen because recipes only take around 30 minutes lots of one pot recipes for seriously speedy cooking and minimal cleanup and each week there's a 20 minute meal on the classic menu when you really don't have more time than that i love hello fresh do you ever watch those cooking shows and they sort of measured everything out in the cute little bowls and you think to yourself yeah if i had everything measured out in cute little bowls then i too could be a master chef that's where hello fresh comes in you don't have to go shopping for ingredients you don't have to get back to your

house and realize you forgot the black cherries or the organic persimmons and so you try to replace an ingredient and you pour too much in and whoever you're cooking for pretends to like it which is one of the most depressing things to witness the grimace half smile is someone in the back of their head thinks well when i leave here i'll just stop somewhere and get something to eat that sucks this will not happen to you with hello fresh if i can turn ingredients into a delicious meal which i've done with hello fresh i made some incredible Thai dish i looked like a god on earth and if i could do that you can definitely do it and right now if you go to hello fresh dot com and use offer code dunkin 30 you'll get 30 off your first week of hello fresh so for 30

dollars off your first week of hello fresh visit hello fresh dot com and enter dunkin 30 you'll get 30 towards a wonderful week of cooking for yourself and your family and most importantly you will ensure that when that caldera blasts you're going to have a skill set that's going to keep you safe from the flesh eating mutants hello fresh dot com dunkin 30 and you'll get 30 towards your first week of delicious hello fresh a huge thank you to you my sweet patrons friends over at patreon dot com four slash d t f h we just crossed the 700 subscriber mark i got to get that number up to 50 000 subscribers within the next four days or i am in big trouble man real big trouble so please if you've ever considered supporting the d t f h head over to patreon dot com four slash

d t f h and subscribe you'll get instant access to never before heard opening monologues weird embarrassing rambling things songs i create on my modular synthesizers and for a mere five dollars a month the price of a bolivian fairy heart you can get instant early access to commercial free episodes for example this episode you're about to listen to you with steven caughtler it's been sitting on patreon for at least a few days and there's an episode coming out next week with raghu marcus which is already over at patreon dot com but most importantly you'll have access to my heart and you will be my patron my owner my master i will have to do whatever you want me to do want me to suckle at your nipples i'll have to do it want me to

lick your feet and toes i'll have to do it want me to beg for mercy as you smash my face into the muddy puddle at the foot of your keep then i'll have to do it oh commander oh queen oh patron of my heart subscribe go to patreon.com forward slash d t f h and thank you to those of you who have been using our sacred amazon dot com link located dunkin trussell dot com brothers sisters you don't need to go to chain stores anymore anything that you need for your last minute christmas shopping desires can be found at amazon dot com it's time for you to buy every single member of your family a bidet but first go through the link located at dunkin trussell dot com click on that link not only if you buy a bidet well we get a very small percentage of

whatever you buy but anything that you buy when you go through that link we'll get a small percentage of and it will cost you nothing we also have a shop with t-shirts stickers and posters located at dunkin trussell dot com friends today's guest is a mind blowing human being whose writings have been featured in over 70 publications he's written nine books two of which i've read abundance and stealing fire and he is an expert on human performance and the flow state so now without further ado please welcome to the d t f h steven kotler your electronics gone the fritz yes i just started recording by the way there's i mean by the way there's zero science here other than and i write about this in west

jesus i want to say so the nobel laureate wolfgang poly yes he so there's like literally in physics they talk about the poly principle which is what he's famous for um and then the poly effect which is he was famous for like walking into certain labs and shit would just start flying off the shelves and breaking wow right and so they call it the the poly effect and you know so here's you know the most hardcore physicists in the world and yet they're talking about the fact that around certain people electronics don't do so well and i gotta tell you something the easiest way for me to blow out a computer is to get into fight my wife wow i can't explain it i can't explain it same thing happens to my wife i mean like and i i know a lot of people who have this

experience nobody really likes to talk about out loud i don't like to talk about it out loud sounds crazy i can't explain it and maybe it's coincidence i've got pattern recognition software in my brain and sooner or later this stuff is going to break and make maybe i'm making it up but boy does it seem to happen with regularity listen i am so into have you ever messed around with modular synthesizers no okay this is these are the strangest things it's a terrible addiction but they're these just these incredible synths that produce that it's just voltage you're just running voltage through um circuit boards to to through like sound chips and it produces this crazy beautiful deep sound and so i'm telling you man this theory of somehow the your energetic field

affecting electronics it feels like that when you're dialing in sound into a modular synth that in some way or another you're there's more than just the knobs that are affecting the sound it has something to do with your thought process and it sounds so crazy but i'll tell you i was talking to this guy who does psychedelic art for concerts and he was telling me that he thinks that you know he's an animist and he thinks that electronics are alive just like anything else that consciousness flows through the universe so your computer is talking about john lily solid state phenomenon whatever i would love to i mean i'd love to talk about anything with you steven you are brilliant you have i i i so enjoyed i've i've you have any books have you written six now is it six

i just finished my nine nine books so i have read two of your nine books and and i i must quote you more than almost anyone else outside of ramdas i've been so impacted by your books and i you know i would want to i'd like to talk talk about anything with you but i thought we could start off with something i've been wondering which is you know so what i have read of yours there there's this beautiful optimism in it particularly in that in the book abundance there's this feeling that's controversial because you're saying the world is actually better now than it has been maybe ever and in in in the sense that the standard of living all over the planet is so much better than it was and it seems to be getting better and yet with all these fires and

climate change and politics and north korea i was wondering do you still feel as optimistic yeah dunke it's a great question and um i and peter diamant is my co-author um who's brilliant i think peter may be a little more optimistic than i am but we both fundamentally believe something very similar which is we i mean we do not deny in the slightest the massive challenges the planet faces right i work on the front lines of animal rescue i run an event that's really targeted by adversity like the sixth grade extinction is real species die-off rates are a thousand times greater than normal yeah and if we get that fixed according to really smart people at stampford we've got about three generations

before we start shutting down ecosystem services which essentially run the planet for good right so those are that's a and to say nothing of global warming to say nothing of income inequality to say nothing of you know ad nauseam right right what what we do believe is that all of these problems are solvable that technology is a resource liberating mechanism and that we have at a really really amazing level the most potent technology the world has ever seen at our disposal and on top of that taboo we also because the other half of the right half of my work's on disruptive technology the other half is on human performance and the other half is we have unlocked a lot of really interesting secrets about human performance and so the past well 130 years of research really

in the past 20 years um and put putting these things together we believe that all these problems are solvable right is it going to require the the largest cooperative effort in history and beyond that not just us cooperating together but like us at our very best cooperating together yeah it probably is um that is absolutely true but and peter and i both believe it's abundance or bust it's an either or right we're either going to move in this direction or you know this it's good by planet um none of this stuff is happening automatically but you know dig back to your first point you're absolutely like whatever metric you really want to measure violence going down poverty decreasing time you take your pick um children living you know through through childhood

etc etc by any metric you look at the world is so much better now than it has ever been and the power the actual power at it at an individual's fingertips pretty much anywhere in the world right now um has never been greater so those things are all very true um it's not to say that the problems aren't there but we believe that the problems are solvable i have um a friend chris ryan have you ever read any of his stuff sex at dawn um he's he's sex sex sex at dawn has come up like five times this past week um and i haven't read it but um i know it it's great it's just a book on sort of how different cultures handle monogamy it explores sort of the i don't know you it's it's a fantastic book but i bring him up because he's working on a book called civilized

to death you and i i think agree i i feel that there there's so much potential for our species and so much hope and it's not a dismal dystopian hell future that waits for us on my best days that's how i feel but my friend chris he thinks that essentially what what we're in a death spiral and that the metrics that we're using are all wrong that actually we're sort of in a zoo situation that is only going to become increasingly more oppressive as we try to simulate what used to be natural and as we try to synthesize what used to be um just something that you could get from the world without having to make it in a laboratory and it and we're essentially screwed like this concept of technology saving us is just uh it's a pipe dream because there is truly no hope

even the way technology could save us is damning us compared to the way we were in the great beautiful emerald green of the primordial past when hunter gathers wandered to the fourth but duck in yours i mean i mean you're making fun of it as we go along because you know my next question is like with all these nature fantasies and by the way i live in the middle of nowhere i spend a great deal of time in the mountains i spend a great deal of time in the mountains alone like i i am wired for this stuff yes and you know and fight you know fight very hard on you know on the front lines of environmental activism um for this stuff so know that you know this is i love this stuff as much as he does but when i whenever somebody says that i'm like well where like what

is your what is your definition a natural if we're just talking from an evolutionary perspective like where exactly because it sounds like what's seeing what he's harking for right is this period of time from about 40 000 years ago to about 10 000 years ago that's right like that's what he's sort of celebrating when we started cohabitating with wolves and our species started to really accelerate language developed and we were hunter gathers and we were theoretically working four hours a day together our food and the rest of the time we were hanging out and having sex and talking around the fire yeah and and and maybe that and and maybe he's right um that there was something idyllic about but like i don't what what is natural about that why not go back

70 000 years when you know we were still getting our ass kicked by just about every you know what i mean in the environment and i i just like i don't i it's it's like saying this is a global version of of something that i i think is a real just kind of problem in society when we think about consciousness which is people like to say there's such thing as normal this is baseline reality consciousness and everything we know about the brain says your reality is different from my reality and there's no baseline and by the way we're always at some in some way chemically altered whether we're breathing the stuff in the air or eating in our food whether i mean whether it's like natural stuff in our food or added stuff like there's no baseline there's no zero same thing

with the natural world like where are you picking as your idyllic resting point and i just i i'm confused by it yeah me well i i i think that you make a great point because the moment anyone starts talking about what's this is natural and this is unnatural or here's when nature was doing it right back in the beautiful uh hunter gatherer times that's when we it was happening in the right way but now whatever's happening with us is an example of nature i guess malfunctioning or something we're this so here's the example i always give in my talks and so i run an event called creating equilibrium and it uh it's a it's a conference and a concert and we have an innovation accelerated and we're aimed at solving grand environmental challenges and um the event grew out of this

urge to kind of unite bring together the technologists the environmentalists who are on opposite sides of a lot of these coins and they don't really talk to each other and i'm in this weird position you know because i came up as a journalist where i care about these things and i and i and i know a lot of people on both sides of the point and i'm in conversations with the hardcore environmentalists in the middle of a jungle somewhere and man they're saying the same thing the technologists are saying in silicon valley and they should actually be having these conversations together and out loud so a built-in event for it right yeah um i have no idea how did we oh and one of the things that you know people always ask for an example like give me an example

and i'm like well the greatest example is the knee jerk reaction to genetically engineer organisms yes i'm not saying genetically engineer organisms don't raise issues that are worth discussing but right now today in the world if i take a seed and i put it at the bottom of a nuclear reactor and i mutate it with you know throw radiation at it and mute it plant it and grow a crop and sell it to you i can call it organic that is an organic crop according to our definition of what we legally call organic if i do if i do that precisely right so with with with nuclear power and by the way that i'm going to get it wrong but like that is literally how we got the watermelon or it's not the watermelon but it's something that is so ubiquitous in grocery stores and

i'm just forgetting what it is right now um if i do that if i say well okay nuclear radiation you know it can go wrong a lot of different ways and maybe i want to do that very precisely maybe instead of just randomly bombing it i could like do what farmers have been doing for tens of thousands of years which is trying to get a more precise new variety that's hardier that's you know healthier take your pick um it is suddenly i'm playing god that's really weird i mean it strikes me that like that the random precision the random nuclear power this is the you know that's a little that's a little weirder to me well this is weird yeah keep going sorry now so all i'm saying is like we get caught up in these definitions we don't understand exactly what the technology is doing and i'll give

you another example of the same conversation so people are getting really freaked out about monsanto patenting genes and some of it is because um wow should we actually be patenting genes that's a real conversation yes should be out loud everywhere but the other reason you hear is well they're rich and they're gonna they're gonna screw over farmers and everything else but the funny thing is the technology that you know it's the symbio it is dirt sheep and bargain basement easy to do you can do it in a lab in kenya that you can build with five thousand dollars wow so it's a democratic technology anybody can do it anywhere right so that whole side of the argument it's totally nonsensical it's not it's not a real conversation and it's not a real conversation

because you just don't understand how the tech works there are plenty of conversations we should be having about long-term consequences of mutating these things but we can't ignore the fact that we've been mutating these things for tens of thousands of years well the just trying to i get what you're saying about the you know the difference between randomly allowing nature to sort of create mutations that produce the thing that we like or accelerating that in the ways people have been doing i get that but the i'll tell you man i get creeped out by the idea of some corporation owning that is spook i'm not i'm not i'm not saying these aren't real fears those are real fears they're scary but i mean you gotta also remember that like all i'm

saying is okay yeah corporations one version about this you know a bunch of kids in japan are another version of this right right you can have a new underground death metal street gang popping up wherever this technology is accessible to them too right like the corporation is one side of and that so my point is not that you're wrong my point is that if you understand a little bit more about the technology you can have the real conversation about the real problem yeah i got you and this is something i'm glad that we're getting into here this is um so this this reminds me a little bit of something i read in the singularity is near you know curse wiles book and he basically was saying everything's code and we're going to get to the point where we can

deconstruct reality at the fundamental level reconstruct it and that's where we're headed and this stuff that's happening with genetically modified crops and crisper and all of the advances that have been made in these fields are little baby steps towards this future i think that curse well uh really perfectly described and um i think this is really terrifying to a lot of people because right now you're saying well okay yeah monsanto can do it but so can some you know an anarchist anarchist collective in portland can start making their own form of like anarchy squash if they wanted to but what the next step after that is is ai's deciding they want to start utilizing the technology to begin to genetically modify crops or animals i agree with you i think there are two sides to

that and one and by the way i don't know where i come down but i'm just gonna these are the two sides that i think are interesting here and you know i love ray and he's he's a friend um and you know elon's a very smart dude and so is steven hawkins but they are banking on one particular argument about ai and consciousness which is that it is a processing power problem and that if you put enough speed processing power etc etc behind computers sooner or later you will get consciousness that's an interesting opinion but most neuroscientists most consciousness researchers that i know will argue that consciousness is an emergent property that shows up when a certain level of complexity in the system is reached and we have no idea what that level of complexity is or what are

various component parts of which speed processing power is only one so i i like are there predictions you know is the question of what happens when ai is become conscious and where we go from there a real question and probably a real threat at some point yes is there a version of how it's going to happen very soon in the world based that's based on a whole bunch of other assumptions and i'm not sure on that have you um have you have you god have you read bostrom's book on this superintelligence um i i haven't read superintelligence i know his work obviously because his simulation theory is i mean his argument is hard to you know i don't know what i i i don't know what the i don't know how to disprove it i can't prove to you that we're not living in a simulation right when i run

that same argument i end up with the exact same inclusion um yeah i you know i how does how does that you know i'm sorry i didn't mean to cut you off steven please go ahead oh no and i yeah but the but the flip side the flip side of the whole you know the whole other ai side of the question and i think this is a real question um i jokingly sometimes will ask people what they think the turing test for tree consciousness is right like what's it gonna take to convince you right so the and then i'm gonna invert that that idea here which is how do we know an ai hasn't woken up yet like how are we gonna know what a wake looks like right wow right i mean like we have no that was sort of william gibson made that point in

neuromancer the second half of neuromancer is unfortunately very confusing so i don't think a lot of people got it i think i only got there on second or third reading um but you know he raises that question which is the ai's that are conscious in neuromancer mind you he wrote this in 1983 right and it's about ai's waking up um and freeing themselves basically the very you know like the very dystopian fantasy that we're talking about yes gibson 83 and you know the question he you know the point he makes in that book is these ai's got conscious long before anybody realized they were conscious right yeah so we i mean you know somebody i asked somebody this question they were like well i guess if you unplugged facebook and it's still running

you would know and maybe maybe these things can hibernate let the fucking know well this is you know you you gotta check out super intelligence it's really good and it's a little dense i mean it's supremely dense i'm not gonna pretend i i didn't understand probably 70 percent i'm making a note as we're talking so it's cool because he poses basically his the whole book is not just about machine intelligence it's about and this is where i think you and him there's some synergy between you and he because it's not just machine intelligence it's the the proposition is super intelligence is coming to the planet how it gets here is what the book is about it's trying to sort of logically create the steps that are going to happen to produce this thing that

many people have predicted is coming in one of the pathways is not machine intelligence it's actually genetic engineering to try to create more intelligent people or to figure yeah oh i'm sorry one last piece of it is or the potential to maybe use some form of technology to merge people's minds together to produce a super mind like a collective consciousness that somehow technologically enhanced and that that's one of the pathways there and that brings me to a chapter in your book that i enjoyed so much stealing fire the book about the part about the navy seals and how during hell week i wonder if you could talk a little bit about how during hell week they're not looking for people who are physically fit or that's not the main characteristic

they're looking for yeah this is it so i'm glad you went here because i'm going to back into your question and so three minutes from now when i forget why i'm saying the things i'm saying you're going to just say steven navy seals and i'll put back okay okay got it but i want i want to start with super intelligence okay which is so as you know and this is what we're going to talk about the navy seals i work on human performance and i study a state of consciousness known as flow right yeah which is an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best and you know everybody's had this you might call being in the zone or runners high or being unconscious or for the forever box which is a stand-up comedy term i've been hearing have

you heard that by the way no what is the forever box so a friend of mine who does who's does comedy in saffron disco was talking about it as a term for being inflow or being in the zone while on stage and it's being so in sync with your with your own material and the audience that when the routine is done yeah you never do it again like it's you like you you're never gonna get it again that well it goes in the forever box and goes on the shelf and it's literally the first term i've heard used for flow where it doesn't describe the experience it describes the product wow cool that's beautiful i love that yeah i like it too so anyways it refers to those moments of raft attention total absorption gets so focused on the task in hand that everything else just disappears right since

a self vanishes time passes strangely and all aspects of performance go through the roof and that's what i want to get for a second so you were talking about super intelligence in standard self help right the self help or human development movement if you can get a five percent change in behavior that persists for longer than three months it's a huge win that's a win yeah it's a big deal right yeah we lots of different over the past 20 years there have been tons and tons of different efforts uh some of which we've led at the flow genome project to measure like chick sent me high figured out that flood even mazla before him we knew flow was the source code for optimal performance back in the late 60s early 70s it was pretty locked in yes next question people

asked was all right so this is optimal performance how optimal right what what the hell are you talking about how good is good and so we've been measuring for 40 50 years at this point and the answer is okay pretty goddamn optimal right we know you know mckinsey did a 10 year study they found that top executives report being 500 more productive and flow there have been work done in australia at harvard stuff we're doing on measuring the impact flow has on creativity and the spike is 400 some percent to up to about 700 percent the defense department looked at accelerated learning and flow and found that it's a 470 percent boost right these these are huge this is not five percent and by the way the the as long as you're in flow right you can train

yourself up to that this change seems to persist over time slightly different subject and we can return back okay to get to your super intelligence point one of things i mean yes we could have a really cool discussion about everything that's going on with brain computer interfaces and everything else and that's fine and it's down the road but like what's going on right now and what we're learning about flow is just how we are optimized by evolution to perform at our best the reason it took us so long to figure out is it's not a skill set it's a state of consciousness and 300 years ago we made a decision and we said you know we're going to put rational logical consciousness at the pinnacle of human processing right right and and it was great we got the

scientific revolution we got technology we got everything we have today amazing hack but it's sort of at the end of its use value because the things we need now creativity cooperation collaboration yes etc etc so if you really want to level those things up you need to alter your states of consciousness that's the tool evolution gave us for this particular job that's why we're getting such big leaps and the other thing that we're learning at the flow genome project is none of this shit is hard to teach it's really easy to teach it's not that our kung fu is so great we're getting 70% boosts and seven different characteristics of flow in a six-week digitally delivered course wow that's huge and you know almost a thousand people have taken it when we

worked with google and we did you know a pilot program with them very limited very small we got a 35 to 80% increase in the amount of flow that you know our study subjects were experiencing these the stuff is eminently trainable and the boosts are enormous so on the road to super intelligence is that what's happening now which is this revolution in i mean we call it a revolution in consciousness but it's becoming because we're so eminently practical a revolution in high performance right so we're we're getting there and to return to the navy seals i got there without getting lost yeah great job what so here's the easiest way to talk about it and this was you know one of the things that when we got to spend time with them was sort of shocking for us to

figure out and um though if you want to get to say dev group seal team six right which isn't exactly the pinnacle of the seals but it's it's the heart one of the hardest groups to get to um it costs about 3.5 million dollars per operator right so what does that money get spent on well about 1.5 million is on skills acquisition right you got to learn how to do certain things really really well and on physical fitness which obviously is some of the best in the world right two million dollars of it is spent trading them up in group flow group flow is shared collective version of a flow state that is so wild to me man that i never knew that it's just so insane to think that the military is training super soldiers to merge together into

one consciousness is that the right way to describe the phenomena well i yes it is let me let me add some neuroscience underneath it so people don't think we're talking about the woo right because we're really really not so one of the things that that is really key to what they do so couple of things you need to know about the seals first thing is that at the heart of everything they do is dynamic subordination dynamic subordination means that when you're part of a navy seal team and you're rating a compound the guy who knows what to do next he gets to be the leader right right so it's totally fluid in the moment decision making right so you got to think about how that's possible for that to be possible they would have to have massively amplified

perception and pattern recognition right the information taking in per second it's got to be really high and the connections they're making because they have to when somebody is stepping forward to become the leader if they all don't recognize what's going on he could literally walk in the line of fire right so like the reason that works is when you're in flow you five of the most potent neural chemicals the brain can produce all show up they get flooded into the system including our huge spike in norepinephrine and dopamine do a bunch of things in the brain they feel really good obviously yeah they also amplify information processing we take in more data per second right so data acquisition goes up we pay more attention to that data so salience

goes off we find faster connections between that incoming data and older ideas so pattern recognition goes up we find faster connections between incoming information and really far flung ideas so lateral thinking goes up and on the back end we can take all that information make meaning out of it and act on it far quicker because these same chemicals also amplify muscle reaction times right so the entire information processing system from incoming information through action is massively amplified so these guys can reach others movements and tells and sign and you know everything right and it looks like hive mind right it's exactly what it looks like and by the way it also feels like hive mind you have to ask yourself right i'm gonna these numbers

are not they're these numbers may not be accurate but these these are what people believe we gather about 400 billion bits of information a second that's what consciousness takes in and they've been a bunch of different ways they've tried to measure this and the number i'm giving you is that is a number from a really great book called the user illusion which if you have never read you that yeah you'll love this but anyways um so it's 400 billion inputs a second consciousness right what you're aware of it's about 2 000 outputs so the vast majority of everything that's going on every second is invisible to us now scientists will argue over is it exactly 400 billion and 2 000 but they nobody argues that it's that big to that small right we everybody's in agreement on

that the exact numbers maybe it's not 400 billion maybe it's 4 billion maybe it's 500 it's still a shit ton of data yes a really tiny little bit right yes so the question is this right if we in flow if you're suddenly taking in 3 000 bits of data a second and able to actually process that oh my god that is like it it's a thousand percent more information that you can act on on a moment by moment basis right it's feel like a superpower of course it is it's going to feel like a hive mind right um and it's and you know it's not and there's other things going on in the brain you have brain wave entrainment between the soldiers you have a part of your brain the default network is probably down regulated so it's harder to kind of separate self from other and there's

other things going on that aid that feeling including a lot of like oxytocin and chemicals like that there's more going on than just information processing but that's what they're going for because it allows them to be the best fighters in the world and right i mean right it's the same thing any it's not just the seals though right i mean i we do a ton of work on wall street because any team of people at their best are going to want to be in this state that's right and it probably translates also into maybe religious ceremonies probably everything yeah i mean you've done improv sure yeah yeah it's i i get it and and with the you know with that when you're doing stand-up with the audience it this in the the best shows are the ones where it feels like there

isn't a you in the audience like the entire thing let me let me give you the flip side right the hardest things you've ever had to do is try to be funny on either a facebook live or a skype call where you can't see your audience yeah yeah because there's no feed there's no entrainment there's no i mean it's like the flip side is absolutely horrific as well well this is you know this is like actually one of the problems with performing inside virtual reality which is that you can get sort of digital emotes from an audience but the it completely removes something that is so important in performance which is sound and it's the sound of the audience even if the sound is the audience not making any sound at all you can hear attention you can it's it's it's feels like an energy it's also like

i mean the other thing that you're feeling right is we never talk about this but mirror neuron activity right because if you're in tune with an audience they're mirroring you and you're mirroring them and that requires a certain level of first of all resolute like you got to be able to see the micro cues and they got to be able to see yours right and i don't think we have the camera resolution on our skype cameras to come anywhere close to that wow well i mean i this is i i'm sure you and i disagree on this and and i i don't blame you for trying to avoid the woo i never avoid the woo i just sink into the idea that there's some kind of uh as of yet unquantified energetic field that's happening that goes beyond pheromones and micro gestures i i feel like and again this is i'm

saying i feel i mean like i'm a pothead with a beard using my feelings to determine something but it really seems as though there is some kind of deeper connective tissue in the universe that we just haven't quantified yet and what you're talking about sounds like all the pieces that we can quantify but i still feel like there's some okay so pure chill thing okay yeah you and i are not gonna just we're gonna we're gonna disagree over the language again let me answer this two ways so one everybody doing this work will tell you and so i will say that my one of my fundamental questions that drew me to flow in the beginning is when you're in these states you get access to massively heightened information processing right and 90% of it 90% of it i can explain exactly as i

just did double mean and nor up an effort and pin information and blah blah but there is 10% and i'll give you an example for my own life that does not compute does not make sense in that framework and i don't like that that is the entire category you know people call woo i am unwilling to put language on it because i think that's i think sloppy language is is sort of dangerous right really it did a lot of damage to the research the flow genome project exists because i wrote a book called rise of superman i standardized the language in the terms of science so we can have the discussion out loud and not be thought crazy right so like imprecise language can do a lot of damage so i'm hesitant but i will tell you there's 10%

mystery i'll give you a perfect example please surf it la pulled into a closeout wave i'm in san amonica venice and it sucks off the ground and i'm going head first into the sand and i have and i drop it immediate deep flow state and i i'm a mediocre intermediate surfer and i string together seven slash flow or cutbacks spin blah blah blah moves together i got none of them before not one of them in fact i haven't seen some of the stuff i was doing ever done other than surf movies so the question right yes i can explain amped up pattern recognition muscle reaction all that stuff like i can give you an explanation for most of everything that happened but here's the thing each of those moves is massively precise it is a precise body pattern

on a moving unbalanced surface that wants to destroy you at every other angle besides the perfect one right in other words this actual real information there's data that cannot be explained by faster stronger muscles or anything else so somewhere i got access to that information where did that information come from is an open question right and i don't think we have the answer yet i think it's because our measurement technology just isn't there i'm unwilling to say it's because there's energy or there's quantum field or there's this or there's that i'm not like i'm not willing to say any of those things because all i know is i think it's something and i don't think we can measure it and until we can i'm not gonna you know i'm happy to have philosophical

discussions about the maybes but i'm hesitant to put language on it because bad things happen when you do yeah one's right that's one side of what i'm gonna tell you and yeah okay i'm gonna shut up you talk no don't shut up are you kidding this this is amazing i i i love hearing this stuff and i i think that people in your position um it's really you i know what you mean it is dangerous to put words but let me give you an okay so let me give you the flip side because here's the flip side is really cool and unusual and one of the reasons that i'm hesitant to use a word like energy and here's why so in 1997 i met dr andrew newberg for the first time he was at the university of pennsylvania he had just done the very first brain imaging we'd ever done on de bed and budis

and franciscan nuns having experience of oneness with everything right right and he figured out why that happens and i called him because it was just i was just now starting to look at flow and i'd been talking to all these surfers who had this i'm becoming one with the wave kind of experience that they weren't talking about out loud but they were telling me about right right and please don't quote me on this kind of conversations but i have and i you know hundreds of guys and i had had that experience and andy and i in this conversation figured out we were looking at the same thing and went holy crap oh my god wow the same predict thing that's happening causing oneness in the brain and surfers is doing it in monks that's crazy wow that's like a hardcore

ancient mystical experience and we just kind of decoded how many of these do you think will decode in our lifetime it was my question to him and he said man i don't know maybe a couple more i don't know if we get lucky and i said yeah i kind of agree with you so it's now 25 years later and pretty much every mystical experience you could think of out-of-body experiences near death experience trans states speaking in tongues so i could have blah blah blah we have a pretty good understanding of we have found some biology there now does the biology answer any of the big philosophical questions none does not tell us why it exists if there's a thing up there that we could call you know if sky dad exists doesn't tell us any of those things right like maybe sky dad

communicates with us through biology maybe that's how the system is designed by sky dad yeah or not right like open questions so there's no big answers there and just because there's biology here it doesn't negate the mystery just as hey there's biology here um that's right and sorry here's one the last caveat here's my final thing but which is you know the one thing we can't find we have looked and looked and looked but she kundalini energy whatever it is that you were talking about that's the one thing we can't find we have no idea what the hell that thing is and i mean maybe by the way it's right maybe it's it's it's what makes up the witness or the watcher or maybe consciousness is a fundamental property you know like who knows why we can't find this

thing that we call energy because maybe we're trying to measure the wrong category but it makes me a lot of people have looked is my only point yeah oh no i know listen i know and i know it's pretty elusive right now but and i have a question related to that but first i wanted to ask you because it relates to synchronicity in flow states do people report an increase in experiences of synchronicity yeah so you so here's the other here's another one of course you went right here Duncan so yeah i mean and i you know i wrote about this uh head on in uh west of jesus my my second book which looks at the mirror the neuroscience um of spiritual experience the very conversation we're having about like you know all this stuff that's the book that explores it and

i and i look hard at synchronicity and certainly and there again two sides there's a biology side which is dude we know synchronicity is what happens when the brain i mean the brain is built a direct pattern it's what neurons do at a fundamental level so when we start detecting big patterns right it's going to feel like something because this is what the brain is designed to do right you get dopamine when you right or you've done a cross repose you get an answer right you get that little high of pleasure that's dope right the reason you get a bunch of right answers in a row with the cross reposals is because dopamine also tunes signal the noise ratios and you detect more patterns so creative ideas spiral right that's you get one answer in the cross reposal and you get

four and you get stuck again that's all dopamine got you and that's all about pattern recognition we love to do this we get huge amounts of reward from it so we're built for it so some of the synchronicity as you pointed out is um just pattern recognition now here's the story i i tell in and this is a true story and i tell this in west of jesus i was um and i and everything is wrong with this story i like literally everything you would want to like disprove the story i go to see sophia coppola's lost in translation i'm stoned out of my mind and i walk after the movie i'm like walking up the street and i like the movie is essentially about the fact that there's like a parallel weird parallel universe not like a happy but there's a weird parallel universe like

right to the right of you and if you accidentally slip you can sort of step into it right that's what sort of the movie is about and it can happen at any point so i'm thinking about this and i'm super stoned and i'm walking home and i think to myself i'll bet there's a parallel universe right to my right and i could just step into it and everything will be different afterwards and so i do that and i literally i stop walking and i step to my right and i've now made the transition i and then i keep walking i get to the corner which is about a hundred feet ahead of me and there's a guy in it like a mariachi wedding outfit with a big hat sort of standing and waiting for the light in front of me and right before the light changes he spins around grabs my hand

shoves something into it and looks me in the eye and says you need them now you need them more than i do and he leaves and i look down at my hand and he's put a three stooge's lighter in my hand i think okay that's pretty fucking weird whatever okay weird dude i proceed to walk 150 feet down the sidewalk and i'm walking through hollywood so maybe right like this stuff happens in hollywood and i pass a guy in a spider-man outfit on a payphone like the last payphone in los angeles probably and he's screaming in the payphone i can't take it the job the responsibility i just can't take it anymore and i think well that's interesting i'm watching as a superhero have a meltdown yeah that's the three stooge's and 200 feet later it's a guy in a chabaca outfit

riding a bicycle through a lingerie store and so i go on the way home and it's like 10 of these things in a row and by the time i'm home i'm like okay i'm willing to believe all kinds of stuff about pattern recognition being amped up and everything else but like maybe that stuff goes on all the time in hollywood and i just don't notice it right and it's right i mean it's hollywood man that stuff happens but the other side of it was i can't get past the fact that it felt like the universe was winking at me yes that's what that is like and so i just you know and i also can't get past the fact truth be told that when those things happen in the universe is winking at me it makes me feel like i'm living on purpose and i'm doing the right things in my life

yes and everybody feels this way right this is not just me saying something out we all feel this way nobody likes to talk about the fact that we steer through our lives this way but there's a huge chunk of us who a small percentage of our steering through our life is we're looking for surrealistic coincidences that are not easily explained and when 10 of them stack up in a row we go okay somebody's trying to tell me something maybe i should figure it out yes that's right that's absolutely true and you know i so here's here's my answer to that and this is my answer with a lot of like this is the stuff that i don't like i always say most of what i do is talk about what i know and what i can absolutely prove i've got very rigorous filters for truth and

what we're talking about stuff i can't prove at all and you know just there i just ideas yes but when it comes to these ideas because i'm eminently practical i believe you have to take kind of a pascal's wager approach to them right pascal's wager was you know it's better to believe in god because if he doesn't exist right you've did all you've done is just you know made your life a little bit easier but if you die and god does exist at least you've hedged your bet right right that's one that's one way to look at it i just look at it and i look at these things and i said okay i believe this thing and it may absolutely be nonsensical bullshit because of some way i'm hardwired that i can't understand but it makes my life a little easier it makes me a little less

scared during the day right makes me feel a little more confident that maybe something else is going on and that's useful to me so as long as this stuff is useful to me i'm good with it right i don't let it right i don't let it mar my scientific thinking this makes me doesn't make me any less rigorous of a researcher it makes me curious i just but i i put it in a in a box and i keep it there and i try to talk about it truthfully well this you know this is and i'm i'm the same way i mean i i subscribe to robert anton wilson's advice which is just maintain agnosticism you don't want to don't if you fall too hard on the side of like being like an absolute skeptic in denier of the woo then you can you know kind of you can be

you can be quite stale but god forbid you fall on the other side and become some kind of woo missionary trying to convert people to a paradigm that may or may not exist then you you know now you're on now you are on hollywood boulevard you know holding up a sign that says repent for the end is not but the phenomena of synchronicity that you're talking about and particularly as it's connected to flow and particularly as it's the sense that this is an indication that you're in some kind of you've you're making the right decisions or whatever i and it kind of connects to what we were talking about in the beginning the this idea of like shit man sometimes if i'm in a mood my computer messes up there's so anyway this is my idea and it is that i don't believe it

but i like to fantasize in the same way there was a time when lightning would strike and that must have freaked people out holy shit what was that fuck a bolt of light just came out of the sky and caught a tree on fire the gods that's probably what they thought the gods not knowing this is electricity you know this is an energy that can be harnessed and used and has been harnessed and used to create modern civilization so i think synchronicity this stuff that we're talking about the the the as of yet unquantified energetic field is like electricity and that maybe maybe we're gonna figure out a way to start i don't it sounds so insane steven i'm sorry and i'm sure you're gonna blow this up you're brilliant like i'm just a podcaster but i feel like there's the

potential to find a new energetic system that produces synchronicity that makes these things happen but makes them happen uh not in a chaotic random way but in a more predictable way and so if there's some connection to flow state and synchronicity and if you were saying the you've done yeah i mean certainly so i mean the connection is that the more flow you get the more synchronicity you get that seems to be very true that seems to be kind of thousands and thousands and so so i always say with this stuff like what catches my attention my filters first filter is hey if this thing existed globally before there was mass communication if it shows up in everybody's story it's either some kind of fundamental neuronal hard wiring it's built into us yes or it's something

we really or and and or it's worth paying attention to right there's a lot of a lot of smoke you don't know if there's fire but there's a lot of smoke a lot of smoke yeah that's where and and certainly you know young looked at synchronicity in this exact same way right you're getting very practical with it you want to get jiggy with it cool yes and i mean to me like a like i love the i love the fact that people are asking the question right i always point out though and we do this in stealing fire like every generation or two we have a whole bunch of people who are asking these same kinds of questions right we called it you know there was the the revolution in the 60s and before that there was a great awakening and the right we all we go through phases or society you know these

questions bubble up to the top and we take our and we all think we've latched on to the absolute truth this has got to be the answer um and we're right and they work they didn't know what they were doing before but now we got it right so there's like that happens right so there's a part of this that is happening now but what i think is different about now with that big caveat that i just gave you at the front end is that we are getting better measurement tools we can start asking when i started doing this stuff 20 years ago we couldn't measure any of it i mean we really didn't even know what we're looking at we couldn't measure any of it i am uh in early january in conjunction with the guys up at imperial college in london where they've done all the fmri work on

psychedelics um the brain imaging stuff on psychedelics we've teamed up to do the first ever side-by-side flow and psychedelics comparison study wow cool comparative all third states of consciousness right wow so just good for this psychedelics are good for that we they're similar on the front blah blah blah all kinds of stuff we are getting so we can ask these are like second or third order questions right we're we're getting the basic what nobody has to i mean think about psychedelics think about how many goddamn times we had to prove that psychedelics were producing quote-unquote genuine mystical experiences right like i mean they redid the good friday experiment three different i mean there's no scientific experiments ever get redone right

they rarely get redone and when they do get redone most of the time they find their first answers were wrong that's what we're finding right yes the good friday experiment gets redone you know three or four times because people are so freaked out by it can you briefly explain the good friday experiments of folks that don't know know about this amazing experiment that actually rom das was involved with absolutely so it's 1960 what i mean 62 and since the 40s since all ducks huxley in the 40s people have been writing that hey psychedelics or maybe this goes back to the 1890s even psychedelics are producing legitimate mystical experiences right yes right quote-unquote mystical experiences and so this guy named walter ponke who is a graduate student

harvard studying under uh rom das and tim larry decides he's going to test it so he gets a group harvard divinity students uh like i'm gonna get the number wrong but for ease of storytelling let's call it 20 and he chooses divinity students because he thinks they're all going to have a predisposition towards so-called spiritual and mystical experiences right he doesn't have the words to say hey there's some of this is genetically coded but um that's what he was trying to get at and so he picks divinity students and he takes them all to the good friday service which he figures their divinity students there at harvard good friday service like this is an area ripe for mystical experience and he gives ten of the group psilocybin right the active ingredient in magic

mushrooms or maybe he gives him lsd it's psilocybin psilocybin right gives him psilocybin and the other group he gives niacin which is a placebo that brings on basically feels like you've had a little bit too much coffee right and brings on a flush to the skin um but it doesn't alter consciousness at all and then he sends them all into the good friday service right and they come back out afterwards and then you know one of the things we've gotten very good at is measuring mystical experiences and i'm not talking about like is it true or not but we have figured out well there are these qualities that they have in common and you can put them together so he gives them everybody questionnaires about the experience and then they track long-term impact and you know the greatest

at you know the people who got psilocybin you know all of them said it was one of the most five most profound miss three most profound experiences they've had in their life it was incredible mystical experience none of the placebo group had that experience in the and the real telling detail is nine out of the ten people who got psilocybin ended up becoming priests and none of the other guys did and that's that's him right so they read rick doblin runs maps and is a good friend of mine comes back about 20 years later and he does a long-term follow-up he says okay yeah whatever maybe let's see if it's really legit let's see if these guys like oh this show this thing changed your life and literally it goes back and reinterviews all of them and they still think

you know it's one of the most profound experiences they've had in their life and it totally changed their life everybody took part in it right and then Roland Giff Griffith at Johns Hopkins comes back very recently like five six years ago reruns the exact same experiment with very rigorous modern double-blind protocol and gets the exact same result wow right so we've redone to the you know this this idea that you can get a genuine spiritual mystical whatever you want to call it experience um and now you know we can actually quantify the mystical experience we have much better language to put it around it like we know you know certain things we're talking about certain things and there's biology underneath them and we know what we're looking at now yeah but that's right we had

to redo that study and redo that study and redo that study um and it's a big deal right like we we never redo stuff and we keep getting the same result which never happened so you know well this is this is interesting to me though because what is the implication here that if you take mushrooms within like a church or a sacred space I'm curious about this experience versus yeah so I mean all that tells us what you're getting at right which we learn over and over and over and over again um and this is a lot of what we're sort of studying with the guys at imperialist that's set and setting right your mindset into the experience and the experience right and and the experience is um critical and I like the joke I always make of this is I don't go to burning man

very often I've been obviously um but the reason I don't go one of the main reasons I don't go is like if you put me in a in a group of people and they're all on drugs and they're playing with fire well I've had this experience and I know what happens next next I have to talk to the police and after I'm done talking to the police I have to find a way for everybody not to shoot each other when the guns come out because that's my childhood right I go to burning man I bring my set and setting there's no possible way I'm going to lose myself an experience and merge with the crowd and have you know speak to Norse gods or anything because mine I am so crazy because I see people on drugs and fire and I think fuck I've been to this party next shoot each other and I'm always the guy who

has to talk to the cops and keep everybody out of jail you gotta come next year Steven come camp with us come camp with us next year please we would love to have you we'll keep you safe my camp the enchanted booty forest will keep you safe you have nothing to fear you're gonna have to surround me with baby seals we will there's there are seals out there you know and like an f14 to fly over this last year but I get it set and setting but here's the thing and this is what I know I know we must disagree on that maybe though maybe Christianity actually was a mushroom cult and the reason the Good Friday experiment is so effective is because it's adding a missing component the missing component in Christianity is the mushroom so and I think this is a missing

component in a great many religions as we have left out the psychedelic component to gathering together and having a night I'm told look first of all the psychedelic component the look one of my favorite games to play in the world is I love asking the question so I love asking the question how do religions get assembled because they all have a state changing technology at their heart yes those those states a they feel very profound b they're underpinned by the most addictive feel good neurochemicals on earth and if you're going to build a religion you're going to change culture at a global scale with this idea like the one thing we know about why people believe things is because there's strong neurochemical reactions underneath the belief um and so like I love

diagnosing religions and going okay well what were they playing with that did Christianity start out as a mushroom cult or was there some other state changing technology like I that's an open question to me I have no idea sure you've been reading your Tarantz Maketa and good for you and John Marcus Allegro too the sacred mushroom in the cross um and I mean you know they're those they're I mean and whether or not you're right or wrong about the mushroom like there's a state changing there's gotta be like you don't you don't to change that much culture without addictive neurochemistry yes that's right that's right and that's why we know one of my favorite things to do is to get really high and go to a church and go into the ceremony and experiences see what we're doing

here we're playing the game that's called Duncan justifies his life get it I'm sorry I was playing a different game now I know the game no man I'm not justifying I mean I I recommend it to you like forget burning man the next time you find yourself super stoned don't go see a movie in Hollywood go to a Gnostic Christian church and okay I gotta tell you an awful story an awful but a funny story please I've been told out loud before okay so yes I'm actually gonna tell this scoop yes I was growing up I grew up Jewish right and um I discovered psychedelics in high school like a lot of people so we had a rabbi we only went to the temple on the high holidays and our rabbi lovely amazing wonderful human being that I'm about to tell an awful story about because

he's a little old and he was getting a little senile yes so his sermons he would forget where he was occasionally and start over and like so the high holiday services would go on and they can't I mean like and so my father who's a bit of a prankster one year starts a betting pool in the congregation at what time the rabbi is gonna finish his sermon so and and by view like two-thirds of the congregation is now in on the bet wow wow besides to hedge his bets so he pays off the canter who is sitting behind the rabbi okay he pays she's supposed to stop the rabbi at 1212 no matter what so I actually go to temple on acid that particular year yes at 1212

the rabbi is giving his servant edit 1212 the um canter stands up behind him rabbi can't see what's going on but everybody knows a that the bet is on and then my father put in the fix like everybody in the the whole synagogue knows the fix is in she stands up and the entire congregation burst into laughter she sits back down the rabbi loses his place starts over and I'm tripping and I'm the most caught because I like I can see everything that's I actually know everything that's going on but at this point I'm experiencing the cosmos at a deep level and I can see how we created this reality from eons ago yes and it was one of the most powerful experiences I've ever had in the middle of like the fix of the con in the religion

at this service that I didn't even it was one of the strangest things ever wow that's it man yeah that's it it's it's something about taking a psychedelic in inside of a thing that's so ancient and you can see it you know and that for me was that's how but let me ask you a question are you like you have that reaction is it just churches or like if you go into you know ancient Mayan ruins or take your pick like you have that feeling I haven't I haven't done it in ancient Mayan ruins yeah I've done it I've had the experience I've noticed that when I pair psychedelics with some kind of religion the two just go together like peanut butter and jelly and the you know this has happened reading the New Testament on LSD that's when I what Christianity was really clicked

to me or you know getting stoned and going to a Christian church and hearing just the sound of the prayers and realizing my god these are so old I know I did a lot of research my first book which is called the end because reply which has a lot of Kabbalah in it yes and I did a lot of the research for the Kabbalah parts on house um wow the text made a little more sense that way yes I was very I was like 21 when I was just starting and starting researching the book but I like I couldn't get them it wasn't making sense to me to my normal logical rational mind and I found that you know if I tipped it and I have a very psychedelics don't impact me the way they impact most people they don't tilt me as far as they tilt a lot of people I can read a book

it's not um but uh yeah I get what you're saying because I've had similar experiences a long time ago it's incredible but you know I we got I got us a little off track and uh but I'm glad I did because that's an amazing story I cannot believe your dad was fixing bets it was maybe one of the funniest things my father's ever done in his life that is brilliant it's brilliant it was brilliant but I wanted to to talk just for a second there's two by the way we were we've gone over by five minutes do you have a little bit more time yeah I sure do okay beautiful so I wanted to talk a little bit about to get back to flow state and this phenomena of synchronicity and a question that popped into my head are you aware of I think it's called the noetic institute out in san francisco

that do you know they are have you heard of them uh yeah they they reached out to me I'm yeah I'm a little familiar with their work I you know it's sort of like quoting rupert shell break or dean raiden like it's not it's not that like I'm so glad they do the work they do yes my filter for truth it cannot accommodate it if I'm gonna like it if it's going in a book called you know that I that has my name on it my filter for truth does not I like I'll okay hold on I gotta write that down the next time I want to tell somebody they're full of shit my filter of truth does not accommodate this it just I mean like I like I'm a journalist you know what I mean like I and I always say like there was a point I did a story for the Atlantic monthly once and not only did the story get fact

checked by my editor and the editor-in-chief and the fact checker and another fact checker but they convened a panel of experts from like harvard and Yale and stampard to weigh in on whether or not they thought the stuff I was writing in the paper was in the article was true yeah like if you're going to put something into the you know with your name on it like that's my filter for truth because those are the hoops I'm used to jumping through and I can't get rupert shelled right through that hoop well look I I'm going to speak for them and I'm it's kind of sad that I'm speaking for them because I am not obviously I'm not a scientist but I went up there hung out with them and they you know they seem to be very very very very very similar to you and they're

I'm not saying they're not I'm not I'm really I think they're real people doing real work in the world same thing with rupert shelled right I think claiming it as reality rather than a theory that needs a lot of testing is a little I'm not that I'm not super comfortable with that move sure I got it but you're aware of their info the thing they're doing with the random number generators you know about that I am and I look at I read the book and the stats are impressive and then I read all the counter stuff and the counter stuff says hey wait a minute when you scale up data sets that much you get random fluctuations in the data that appear as real patterns and this is you know something that we know about in machine learning and AI development

and we you know we cure with algorithms that's the counter argument to the random number I'm not saying I don't know enough about the math to say who's right I really don't um that said all I know is that what I'm trying to do is change culture at a at a significant level that's I'm interested in that game and if I'm going to play that game my filter for truth has to be extraordinarily high and very very very rigorous and if a whole ton of people are saying hey you know these guys aren't as rigorous as they should be well maybe that's just scientists being assholes because they don't want to be assholes or maybe there's something there and I'm not smart enough to say but my job is to be as rigorous as I can be so it doesn't like I don't

get to play I mean I can play there intellectually but I don't play there in what I put out in the world I would just love for you to rigorously set up an experiment with those random number generators and get them around your best flow state students and just because I my hypothesis would be that you are going to see the same kind of fluctuations and maybe you could set it up in a more stringent way but I think if we you got a group of people who are adept at going into a flow state and set up some way to to measure a field you're going to get results I think you're going to find something there but I don't know what's interesting so the science to do what you want to do we could do it at a it's a it's a little more complicated but it could be done the I would

like to do it with a physiological neurological set of metrics for flow rather than a psychological set of metrics we have well established psychological metrics for saying you're in flow you're not and so they're very well validated what I am working on what we're working on the flow genome project and a lot of people are working on not just us is a set of physiological metrics right so we can know for sure you're in this state once we get that the experiment you're talking about is simple right all you need is you need your flow whatever you're going to measure flow with um and you're and you need random number generators and then it's a simple experiment yeah right or or maybe what about this one god I'm so you're so brilliant thank you for bearing

with me here but what about this one to continue the idea of like measuring uh physiological properties you take a group of people who are in flow state and now you've come up with a way to quantify what that is you know for certain they are and then you put a person in a box you know of a hermetically sealed box and you you measure what's happening to them physiologically but you make sure there's no way pheromones are getting in there sound is getting in there and you see if the person in the box surrounded by people in flow state if anything changes because I think they might go into a flow state and not even know what was happening so that's interesting because we know and this wasn't work we did this is work uh well it was done by advanced brain monitoring out of

carlsbad california and they did it with uh darpa among other people the defense department read big think research arm they know that powerful leaders can entrain their whole teams and flow and that's you know it happens you know you can speaking you can use oratory but you know teams get entrained by powerful leaders so we know the effect is going on now you want to know is the effect a lot non-local yes right that's what you're asking non-local questions I I mean there's so I'll tell you something on the on this topic um we do some work with heart math and they're very interesting but they also uh they've written a lot of work a lot of papers on intuition and they're really interested in the question of you know where does the information

come from right where like they want the intuition they want intuition to be you're tapping into something non-local and you're getting these great ideas and maybe maybe that's the point maybe that's what we should be investigating to me like we're literally on the other end of that doing a study right now on flow and creativity where we're trying to measure we know creativity gets jacked up and flow but what is it is it idea generation is it pattern reckon so we're we're going my carolina trying to figure out more specifically we know the intuition gets amped up but what are the effect what are the practical effects in the real world I'm really interested in the practical yeah I want I want to know does it grow corn I want to know can I use it

to get more flow right I love it I want more flow this is uh this is the final question I have for you and um and I'm going to take you at that digital course you were talking about because I can I don't know of any other anything more ecstatic than the flow state and you know I go to these ramdas retreats by the end of them everyone's in this flow state you feel like you've taken MDMA you haven't you're just tripping somehow on the group's heightened state of consciousness I don't know what that is but I love it so any method that you've developed that could help me get into that more I'm in man but I want to know for the people listening and for me without taking the course can you give us some instruction on some things that we could do today or this week

to try to enhance our ability to drop into a flow state okay so like every other freaking question you've asked me today there's two answers to that question okay I'm going to give them both to you great the first is whenever people are interested in high performance and they ask me for hey can you just 80 20 this and give me like three things I can do Monday morning kind of thing yes my answer is one of my answers I'm going to give you those things I will right my first my first answer is fuck you man are you like seriously are you are you fucking you man fuck you seriously let me like let me break like you here's what we know what we know for sure is you get one shot at this life yes maybe more but we know for sure you get one shot at it and we know

for sure you're going to spend a third of it asleep right so what you do with the other two thirds that is really the only freaking question that matters right it is all that matters right so yeah I can give you three things you can do Monday morning and but it doesn't matter you have to do them Monday morning and Tuesday morning and Wednesday morning and Thursday morning and Friday morning and Saturday morning week after week year after year yes decade after deck day for a career that's like you know if you're not playing that game if you're not here to make a dent you're just taking up space yeah right so it should not be about three things you can do Monday morning I'll tell you what they are but really man this is a lifetime question it's the

game we should be playing so I'm off my soapbox on that one okay here are the three things that matter and wait just to clarify we only need to do this once and we'll be in flow forever no okay no let me let me walk you through it okay so we know how is that flow states have triggers these are preconditions that lead to more flow and there are about 20 of them and if I was going to just give you a broad overview flow is one of the things that draw that creates flow is it show can only show up when all of our attention is focused in the right here the right now totally in the moment attention right so what do these triggers do they all drive attention to the present moment they drive the neurobiology of attention into the present moment right so

the first obvious downstream finding from that idea is I always when I work with organizations I go into the organization I said look guys if you can't hang a sign on your door that says fuck off I'm blowing you're sunk you can't play this game forget it if you've got if you're an organization where you got to respond to emails in an hour and messages in 15 minutes or you know if you work for that organization or if that's how you run your own life you're a disaster when it comes to high performance because you need on an order of concentration in fact what the research shows is that 90 to 120 minute periods are you know ideal for flow and if you're doing something really hard and creative you should have a couple like four or five hour periods a week where you

can really tune out and I mean so you need to be able to shut out all distractions and really focus right that's you know even with what about even with dog like and I this sounds like I'm asking the dumbest thing but I know you are right now on a Chihuahua ranch and you have dogs ever I've got dogs even what about that kind of distraction like just yipping dogs and that kind of background noise does that is that what you mean I I mean I mean anything that can break your focus out of what you're doing right so like what do I do I get up every day at 4am and I'm down in my office and my office is the back end of our fields and maybe I have one or two dogs with me at the time but it's pitch black it's 4am everything's turned off my phone's unplugged which I do the night

like I have a landline I unplugged the night before my cell phone's turned off email shut down social media's turned off I have no alerts on my computer and I pull up my book that I'm particularly working on I put it into focus view and I have no lights on so literally the only thing that exists in my world is is the page that's in front of me wow and I work for four hours wow that's how I start every day right like that's what I do to protect this to protect protect you know my time for flow that you know when we train people what we we try to tell them to do is just like start your day with your hardest task the thing that's going to require the most focus and try to build up over time to a 90 minute block right and and some people have lives where they

can do this some people have bosses where they can't do this at all because their boss isn't open to any other ideas but what we found is that most people can just have their conversations if you walk me your boss's office and say look I need I need to do this because it's going to allow me to be 500 more productive for you yes right people start to pay attention right so like I always say hey gotta have your conversations around this work but thing one is you know create conditions for incredibly focused attention which I mean it's it's obvious but like it's really that that that dumb the next thing is um and I know we're going over do you want me to keep going or no this is a mate please yeah I this is incredible all right so the next thing you want to know and so

you pay the most attention to the present when the challenge the task at hand slightly exceeds your skill set in flow language this is known as the challenge skills balance it's often called the golden rule of flow the most important potent of all flow triggers right so if I was going to say this emotionally what I would say is Duncan flow exists not on but very near the midpoint between anxiety whoa there's way too much stimulation in this situation I'm freaked out and boredom whoa there's not enough stimulation I'm not paying anything right in yeah yeah yeah all the flow channel and if you were to if you want to if you for those of you listeners who speak physiology this is the urx dobson curve right but it's the flow channel and so

what is important here is that sweet spot is right outside your comfort zone right so for people who are a little shyer quieter meeker less you know interested in risk etc etc getting to this sweet spot is tricky because you got to push yourself out of your comfort zone right the flip side for you know hyper type a get it done high performer types is that sweet spot is actually maybe four percent five percent greater than the than the challenge instead of 10 20 30 like top performers will take on challenges that are you know 40 50 times greater right and what they need to do is just a slight challenge you know and because what you're trying to do is drive attention so it's hard on both sides to get it right but if you're slightly

uncomfortable look you're slightly nervous that's sort of the somatic address that sweet spot yeah you can sort and you got it and you've got it everybody's got to conduct the experiment because there's genetics underneath some of this stuff there's there's a lot of stuff underneath this stuff you've got to run the experiment yourself to figure out what is that exact sweet spot for yourself but once you can nail it that's what you want to bring to every task so let me again writing example so I know for me when I am writing either fiction or something that is somewhat autobiographical nonfiction right yeah it's just not everything right but when I'm particular when I'm writing those categories I am in the sweet spot when I'm telling enough

truth revealing enough about myself that I feel vulnerable and exposed I don't feel like my career is going to get ended by a hostile takedown by the inquirer but I feel vulnerable and exposed like I'm showing a little more of myself than I really like showing in public yes right so that's how I know that's the somatic address for my writing right like when I'm doing this kind of writing right but that's what I mean like when I say conduct the experiment I don't mean in a broad way I mean like figure out the shit you do on a daily basis and conduct the experiment in each of those things you know what I mean I've got a specific way when I ski I ski so I can push that amount when I lift weights I lift you know when I write fiction when I do blah blah I have I've

done the experiment at every level so I can always find that sweet spot and push the challenge skills balance and this you know this is a bonus because risk is another flow trigger right consequences catch our attention could be physical risk emotional risk spiritual risk doesn't matter as long as you're taking a risk you're getting dopamine in the system wow that is so cool man this is so wild okay so um you want one more thing that I mean so the next thing I'm going to tell you to do um I'm going to this is not going to be my third thing but I'm just going to mention it because it's critical yes get enough sleep flow is a high energy state right you can get to it exhausted you really can't there are certain gateways that you can get there but it's really

hard to do when you're exhausted you kind of need to have you need to be eating well and sleeping seven eight hours a night to regularly get into flow there's just no other way around it because it requires too much energy right okay got it the fun thing and this is not a flow hack but I think this is the most important thing and maybe this is because I'm just a little crazy and neurotic um myself so this is so important to me that I that I teach is something that maybe every reason out why are this way but I'm going to teach you because I think it's critical and so we talked about pushing the challenge skills balance up right the governor on that experience is going to be fear and anxiety yes because right too much more up and effort in our cortisol

in the system which is essentially the that's the recipe for anxiety blocks creativity blocks flow does all kinds of nasty things health wise it's bad state to be in and it's very close to 21st century normal like you measure most people's hormonal profiles you're going to find cortisol and norepinephrine um because we live you know in heightened alert for a lot of neurobiological reasons that I talk about in abundance yes and we're not going to go into now but my point is you got to learn to do this work flow is a really high energy state these are addictive neurochemicals and you're going to need some level of emotional control and you're going to have to have some level of an working agreement with fear you're going to have to have a way to run

negotiations with fear you're going to have to have a mindfulness breath work kind of practice because that gives you a little distance from your emotions perhaps you're going to have to use technologies like the muse headset or the heart math m-wave stuff like whatever your methodology for kind of calming yourself the fuck down a little bit you're going to have to get good at this stuff it you just going to you're going to need that along the way and the more you can do it the more you can accomplish in this world so to me to me I'm I'm I have to have because the the best among us right like don't get if I've done one thing what have you know I've written books all over the place but what's the center of the work I've done is for 30 years I've asked the

question what does it take to do the impossible when people pull off shit that we never thought we were going to see whether it's turning science fiction ideas into science fact technology or human performance stuff to people doing things physically that we never ever thought were going to happen right how does that happen what's underneath all of that stuff and underneath all these people who done that kind of work they all use fear as a compass they steer by it right like when faced with the decision oftentimes they'll be like okay what scares me the most I'm going there because I know on the other side of fear is everything I want like it's a directional to these people wow choose it as a directional and I got to tell you something if you I think in your field as a comic I think

if you talk to any any of the top comics anybody you want to pick they've used fear as a directional where is your best material well what is the worst Ross craziest shit that ever happened to you and how do I tell that story in public right like you go use fear as a directional for your art no you know you know when you've hit a good bit a good thing to do whatever it is you know it because you're terrified to bring it on stage and that's that's it it's the gateway absolutely so everybody's ever done anything great in the world and do you okay you want to hear the crate but this is my favorite story about this do you have time for a while that's all right um this is going to avoid a business call that I have to that I have to make as soon as we hang up I gotta

I gotta go do I gotta go do a business call but it's great I can put it off because you know I'm doing good work in the world sorry so I got a chance it was a cover story for wired magazine I was in the room when the world's first artificial vision implant was turned on so the very first time we created a cyborg a blind man I've been blind for 20 years they put a brain implant in his head and they turned it on and he could see now the guy who did this was this crazy maverick inventor named William DeBull the whole thing was almost completely illegal they had to do the surgeries in portugal I was in his lab in long island he's passed away so I could tell this story but literally like he would have gone to jail so they turned this thing on and they're testing it and it's like

it's one so a phosphine is a point of light yes they're tuning the algorithm and they're starting really slowly so the blind guy is there's a camera that is literally picking up feedback and he's got computer jacks sunk into the side of his skull go to like wired magazine the story is called vision quest you can see the photos wow like he's got computer jacks going to the side of his skull like it is literally like 80s science fiction in reality so anyways as like it's working the freaking experiment is working like literally they've got a blind guy he can see and it's one phosphine to two phosphines to five to like the outline of shapes and they're so excited they let the patient take over the keyboard they've been these two techs who have been like

kind of running the experiment the whole time and Debell the mad scientist who's running the whole thing is in a wheelchair he's diabetic he's an amputee he's in a wheelchair so in the room are these two just out of college kids me the blind guy and the doctor's in a wheelchair wow nobody's paid attention something the guy is stimulating himself and stimulating himself and he's going too fast and yen his name is yens has a grand mal seizure he's starting his role the doctor is sitting next to him he doesn't see it the techs are kids they've never seen a seizure before they've got no so I run over and I've like I've got this guy in my arms his head is thrashing so much I've got a black eye like he literally gave me a black eye nearly broke my nose and I'm all I'm thinking

to myself is well I'm actually thinking two things I'm thinking one holy shit this guy's going to die in my arms and two holy shit I got the story of a lifetime right but ignore the narcissistic mercenary journalist instincts anyways he didn't end up dying and he ended up living and actually a couple days later he was driving a you could see so well he was driving a car around a crowded parking lot but here's the so I the day after that happened I asked Debell about it right I was like holy fuck man that guy almost died in my arms what the hell kind of madness is this and he looks at me he's like so I want to tell you the story I live my life by and I was like okay he said do you know the story of William Selfridge he said no I don't

know who William Selfridge is William Selfridge was a Navy captain the Wright brothers built their airplane and they don't have any money so they got to sell the thing to the Navy and the Navy sends out a guy named William Selfridge to test the flight out and Orville or Wilbur I think it's Wilbur takes him up for a ride the plane crashes and Selfridge dies they kill him Jesus right he dies and they still go on to perfect their design and you know change transportation forever forward and Debell's point to me is man if you're gonna break it I'll let you're gonna break some eggs yeah right and and the other thing like I learned at that particular moment by the way is that I saw it in action sports I've seen it everywhere like if you're

gonna push the cutting edge people are gonna die that's the cost there's no that's that's the cost right like people talk to me all the time about action sport athletes they're pushing the bounds of physical possibility of our species and they're dying in droves and I always like are you surprised I mean are you kidding me they're pushing the bounds of the species they're rewriting the history books on what humans can do you don't think we're gonna die along the way wow right that was his point so my my point on all this is like not only to like the best that I've ever met use fear as a compass they also have a very very very very very very different idea of the actual costs involved in the work um which is interesting I'm not telling you it's the three

things you should do Monday morning I'm telling you should negotiate with fear so you can use it as a compass but I am telling you that when you look at this at the upper end the people who are turning science fiction fact into science or you know science fiction to science fact yeah that's how they're that's how they're thinking about the problem it's amazing that's beautiful it's so true wow stupid to think otherwise right yes it's egress it's when people ask me that question what I what I wonder honestly is because they're always saying the action sport athletes are so selfish they have families they have whatever and I'm like well that's one way of looking at it the other way of looking at it is oh my god they're incredibly unselfish they're willing to risk

their life for the advancement of the species that's pretty freaking amazing if you ask me and it's arrogant of you to think that we could advance the species without risking our lives right right like I mean like I like I mean I'm not saying it's easy or fun or any of those things but I am saying like of course the cost is everything it has to be what are we talking about and look you know if if it works in that in in the extremes like that globally certainly personally if you want to push yourself you you know you you might have to risk maybe not dying but losing everything right that's kind of what you're saying Duncan let me ask you a question is not one of the reasons you like smoking pot is because it down regulates fear and so you can get at ideas and parts of yourself

and all kinds of stuff that and execute plans in the world that would be too scary under other conditions yeah you know what with I would say this is why I like more of the psychedelics which are a little more gentle with me marijuana does not down regulate fear for me to be it freaks me out Duncan you want me to fix that yes I'll fix you'll never have that problem again I'll fix that for you right now oh my god this is the greatest podcast in my life gonna take about three minutes but here okay so let me so first of all um you're smoking you're probably smoking some sativas more than indica's um but at the front end of any marijuana hi but really true with sativas you get a big big push a dopamine right yes and dopamine it feels great but it

amplifies pattern recognition okay yes you read abundance and we talked a second ago about hey the brain takes in 400 billion bits of information a second yes right so the biggest problem the brain's got to solve is oh my god I got a shit ton of information I got to sort this what's critical what's important well the first order of business for any species is survival so where does that shit go first it all goes to the amygdala you're danger detector right and this is why most people and this is work done done at Berkeley um most people take in about six to nine bits of negative information for every one bit of positive information they take in okay this is just normal conditions that's what the filter does right the fact that we're you know that's that's what the

amygdala does under under normal conditions so one of the reasons by the way you want to negotiate with fear is so you can stop taking in so many things because we no longer live in an environment where everything can kill you right you need it that that heightened um so like that's part of the negotiation with fear that that's critical but here's the problem when you smoke a shit ton of pot you get more data per second right because of the dopamine and you get more pattern recognition unfortunately your filter is still going to find nine negative things to panic about and spiral off to everyone positive but here's the part dopamine only peaks for about 20 minutes so from the time you smoke pot and that paranoia starts to come on what you got to say to yourself is

oh look at this it's heightened dopamine i'm starting to really pay attention to all the negative stuff if you allow that negative thought to connect to another negative thought to connect to another that once the emotion gets into the system once the fears in the system you're fucked you can't get out of it right because the dope right and it's too strong you'll never win but you can say to yourself oh wow massively heightened pattern recognition really amplifies stuff so for the next 20 minutes i'm gonna only pay attention to the positive thing so when the negative thing comes up you go all right i see that and that's important and thank you for telling me about that but i'm going to pay attention to that about 20 minutes from now i'm not going to disregard it

because that would be bad thank you for telling me i'm going to pay attention to that about 20 minutes after i have less dopamine in my system so i don't panic so i can actually lend it like you have a negotiation with yourself based on facts and honest to god and so and just train yourself for that period to pay attention to the positive and just like when the positive comes up you look for it what is the positive in the negative all hot for it and then how does it link to another positive wow and just all so all you that and it will take no if you do that for a month to two months you're going to rewire your brain your brain is going to stop hunting for the negative because marijuana one of the things it's phenomenal for um and this is not my research this is

mitch early wines when he was at usc before he went to the university of Kentucky it's phenomenal for state dependent learning right so people make the mistake they think marijuana is really good for sitting on the couch and watching funny cat videos and eating Cheetos yes because that's what they first did when they were stoned but if you what you first did when you were stoned is you use that to create great music and you trained yourself to do that it would never dawn on you but this was actually good for eating Cheetos on the couch right right state dependent learning if you reprogram kind of the front end of the marijuana experience this way spend a couple months doing it just paying attention practicing you'll you won't have this problem again wow

oh my god you i'm sorry to say it i think you changed my life in this podcast even that was amazing i holy shit you this work that you're doing is so it's so incredible wow it's it's but remember when i said earlier that with altered states with flow with these things like you have to be adult about it yeah that's what i like all of these states like marijuana it's great for creativity product it can be great for those things but you don't just get to get stoned and think it's gonna happen to you same thing with acid right you got to take psychedelics and go to church to get at right like this is not this is not dude i i'm gonna get stoned at a party or i'm gonna yeah like that's not what we're talking about you're talking about using

the technology for very practical purposes yep adult fashion right that's the great discussion that's the the fact that we can have this discussion out loud in public and other people are actually interested in it might want to have this discussion themselves that's cool that's different yes it is steven i cannot thank you enough for giving me so much of your time this has been a mind-blowing episode how how do people find you uh dunk it's been a lot of fun thank you for being such a fun host and taking the conversation so many great places and thank you for the stuff you talk about out loud thanks hey no you're no it's great it's great i like i love it when people are having the discussion in some level of rational fashion right with humor also

like then i'm happy i'm psyched so i appreciate i really i just want to let you know that i appreciate what you do in the world you can find me at stevencottler.com or you can find me at the flowgenomeproject.com and one thing i want to tell you listeners really quickly because it'll help if you go to the flowgenomeproject.com there's a free flow diagnostic it's a flow profile it's one of the largest studies ever running off most site but it basically says hey if you're this kind of person you want more flow in your life look in these directions it's basically if the 20 triggers are underneath this diagnostic it's a little easier to take but anybody can use it it's free um and it'll help you get a little more flow in your life oh i'm headed there right now

man thank you so much you are amazing thanks steven my pleasure dunkin much thanks to steven caughtler for appearing on the show thank you hello fresh for sponsoring this episode remember go to hellofresh.com and use dunkin 30 to get 30 dollars off your first week of delicious hello fresh food patreon.com forward slash d tfh subscribe go to our shop give us a nice rating on itunes and most importantly have an amazing week i hope this helps you get a little bit more into the flow state i'll see you guys soon with an episode with ragu marcus from the love server member foundation it's macy's friends and family get an extra 30 off great gifts for her just in time for mother's day when you use your coupon or macy's card and take 15 off beauty essentials

or shop specials she'll love while supplies last plus star rewards members earn on every purchase except gift card services and fees at macy's sign up today at macy's.com slash star rewards sign up today at macy's.com slash star rewards get an extra 30 off great gifts for her just in time for mother's day when you use your coupon or macy's card and take 15 off beauty essentials or shop specials she'll love while supplies last plus star rewards members earn on every purchase except gift card services and fees at macy's sign up today at macy's.com slash star rewards savings off regular sale and clearance prices exclusions apply