Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Steven Kotler, Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective

Episode Date: May 22, 2019

This week’s conversation is with Steven Kotler.The name may ring a bell because he’s been on the podcast twice before and it’s a joy every time we have a chance to connect.As a refresher, Steven is a New York Times bestselling author, award-winning journalist, and Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective.His books include The Rise of Superman, Stealing Fire, Abundance, BOLD, A Small Furry Prayer, and West of Jesus.He is also the cofounder of the Rancho de Chihuahua dog sanctuary.If you'd like to learn more about Steven’s journey and framework for how he’s become, check out the first podcast we did – Finding Mastery #017.The nature of today’s conversation focuses on his new book, The Last Tango in Cyberspace.It’s a novel about future technology, counter-cultural evolution and the rise of empathy — all wrapped up in a thriller.While the book is fiction, many of Steven’s ideas for it come from real-world experiences and his outlook on the future of humanity.We discuss his writing process, which skills are necessary for mastering his craft vs. mastering his own life, and the psychology of how we relate to our environment through plants and animals._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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All right, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm Michael Gervais, and by trade and training, I'm a sport and performance psychologist, as well as the co-founder of Compete to Create. And I just want to say, I love this podcast. It's phenomenal. The community that has switched on around this, the thousands and thousands of people that are supporting and challenging each other to find our very best, it's phenomenal. And so I just want to say thank you. And if you're new, sincerely welcome. Now, the whole idea behind the conversations is to learn from people who have committed their life efforts towards mastery, towards a deep understanding of either craft or self or possibly both.

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Now this week's conversation is with Stephen Kotler. And the name might ring a bell because he's been on the podcast before. And it's a joy every time we have the chance to connect. And as a refresher, Stephen is a New York Times bestselling author, award-winning journalist, and the founder of the Flow Research Collective. His books include The Rise of Superman, Stealing Fire, Abundance Bold, A Small Furry Prayer, and West of Jesus. I mean, his books are really good. If you haven't read his books yet, I want to encourage you to pick one of them up or all of them. And he's also, in his spare time,

the co-founder of the Rancho de Chihuahua Dog Sanctuary. I mean, Stephen, you're a legend. It's awesome that you're on this podcast. It's awesome that we're friends. So if you'd like to learn more about Stephen's journey and his framework for how he's become, check out the first podcast that we did on Founding Mastery. It's number 17. And so the nature of today's conversation focuses on his new book,

The Last Tango in Cyberspace. It's got really cool title names. Okay. And so it's a novel about future technology, counter-cultural evolution, and the rise of empathy. And it's all wrapped up in a thriller. I mean, it's phenomenal. So while the book is fiction, many of Stephen's ideas for it come from real world experiences and his outlook on the future of humanity. We discuss his writing process. We get into the weeds of that, which skills are necessary for mastering that craft versus mastering his own life and the psychology of how we relate to our environment through plants and animals. I mean, the conversation is always rich and fun

and deep with Stephen. So this is no different than that. So with that, let's jump right into this conversation with my friend, Stephen Cutler. Stephen, how are you? Michael, it's amazing to be with you. It's really good to reconnect. So you're holding a record right now. You are the person who's been on Finding Mastery the most. And so welcome back. I love having you on. I love our conversations. I love our friendship. I love where your mind goes. And part of this is like, we're trying to understand Mastery of Self and Mastery of you know i we understand

your history and if someone's missed it or hasn't been attuned to your story like there's at least two other times that we've covered that so today will not be about your history today's going to be about your craft your new project and it's going to i really want to understand from you how you've created so many books that are bestsellers, your craft. And I also want to highlight what you wrote in your new book, because it's touching on all the things I think you and I are fascinated by. And you're doing it in a smart, clever way where you're not putting a pole in the ground and saying, this is the research because you really do value research. You're talking about this is where theory could take us. And I love that concept. So with that, congratulations on your new book. Thank you for being a friend and coming back on.

That was a lovely introduction. I am so honored that I'm the most frequent guest. That is so cool. That's actually really good news. And thank you. It'll be really, really fun because I'm really sick of talking about the history. Let's skip that. Let's go into something new. So let's get right into this intersection of environmental conditions, neuropsychological conditions that you are opining and theorizing about what could be. So your book is not what all of your other, your new book is not what all the other books have been, right? So you've gone into fiction, which for me is new to you.

But I think you've written at least one other fiction book, what was the title of that? Yeah, it's a good, I should say, as you were talking, I was like, well, this is a good finding mastery story. Because I think both you and I, you know, I used to do professional magic, like birthday parties and bar mitzvahs and stuff, card tricks, coin tricks. And there was a saying in magic, which is anything's easy with 10 years practice. And I think you and I sort of have that feeling around mastery that like it's possible, but it's massive amounts of hard work. So I wrote a novel 20 years

ago, and it's called The Angle Quickest for Flight. And it was a bestseller and won some awards, but it's not a great book. There's no way around it. And then I wrote two more books that kicked my ass and sitting in drawers that never got published. And then I left fiction because I was like, oh crap, it beat me. And I wasn't done. I was just sort of biding my time, trying to figure out what did I do wrong how do I get a handle on my craft how do I solve all the problems that I couldn't solve the first time around and when I was finally ready 20 years later the result is last tango in cyberspace um so there is a mastery story underneath this and that

like I got my ass kicked I I think, by novel writing. And then I got back in the ring 20 years later. Okay. So Last Tango in Cyberspace is the title of your new book. And before we get into that, because I'm not that interested in fiction books in general. I don't read many of them. But the reason yours is interesting to me is because I know you and I know where you come from. And I also love the idea of extending the theoretical ideas of what could be. And there's not many places we get to do that. So that's where

your book really says to me, like, oh, look where we could go as an exercise here. But before we go there, I want to sort out a couple of things really quickly. All right. So mastery of self, mastery of craft. Your craft is ideas formalized in written form and call it books, call it writing, whatever it is, but it's idea-based. So I'd love to, you know, we've already talked about, like I said in previous conversations, that you've gone through some heavy stuff in your life. Okay, so check the box that your experience early days was more about instability and pain than it was about stability and flourishment. And when I say that, I want to characterize it in just a moment, or just for a moment, is that when we think about early life, either instable or stable, I think many of us think that our early life is stable. But when you really examine it,

there's some other stuff going on. You've been able to articulate that. Okay. So let's kind of move down that path and check that box a little bit. You've had some pain, you face it down, you've learned a lot. And then that jumpstarted, kickstarted a whole new way of you thinking about ideas and therefore writing books. Now, when it comes to mastery of craft though, there's this tension I want to sort out. And you, I believe, are one of the few people that can really articulate this question. What is the tension between mastery of self and mastery of craft? And as an asterisk, it's way more than 10,000 hours of work, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's way. So here's the interesting thing. Somebody asked me this yesterday. And I said, you got to understand, in my opinion, what

mastery actually looks like. And mostly on a day to day basis is you wake up, you got 10 items on your checklist. You do all 10 of them. You do them really, really, really, really well. You try to leave everything you possibly can on the hill. You go eat some food, have an active recovery protocol, and start over and do it again day after day, week after week, year after year for a career. That to me is really what mastery looks like ultimately for most of the people I know who are actual craft masters. It looks like a to-do list well executed on a daily basis for years at a time.

Now that's the least sexy thing you could possibly say about it, but that's what I think it looks like. And then what's the tension between mastery of self and mastery of craft for you, right? So that's part of the mechanics. I think at a foundational level, the path, the true path to mastery of self, I think for me at least, came through mastery of craft. I had to go through my craft to actually tame myself and I had to tame myself to master my craft. Right. I had to in my youth, I had to gain some level of emotional control over myself so I could get my ass in the chair and focus for five hours at a time to actually produce some writing. I had to solve a bunch of social support issues and build a network of people I trusted so I felt safe in the world and could do that

kind of work. Those are, those are, you know, there's, there's a bunch of foundational stuff. Maslow wasn't wrong in his thinking about the pyramid. There might be some errors in, in his thinking, but the pyramid idea, like you got to take care of safety and security needs and those baseline needs, um, first and foremost, before you can actually start to really walk a path of learning and creativity, um, to mastery. And I think, uh, I think he's right there. So I think that for there's first, there's a bunch of self-control issues, but I think, you know, any, the, the craft and self are ultimately indistinguishable. And I think the path to mastery, um, blends those two things

together, right? It, it becomes really hard to separate the artists from the art after a while if they've got it right, I think. Okay. So yes. And I want to add to that is that I know plenty of people, and I know you know some of these people as well, who are world-leading, world-class, is an easy statement, and they're a disaster. Their life is a disaster. They, we get nervous for what's going to happen when their craft, the runway or phase of their craft to be able to do their thing run short. Yeah. So, okay. I get exactly what you're saying, but I think it always comes down to, and you nailed it. Like I think actually, all right. So the difficulty with craft is that as you get more and more recognized for craft, it produces a shit ton of dopamine, a lot of dopamine and rule one in high performance don't trust their judgment, their thinking large amounts of dopamine, whether when you get it from recognition, celebrity, all that stuff, like same, same drug can't be trusted. So when people start making decisions from the dopamine without self doing

all the heart, like people who have done all the hard self work, the tension you're talking about, right? You've locked that in. The dopamine is not as sticky. It's not as attractive. They don't need the high to validate who they are. People go sideways very often with that. They don't have the support structures in place to handle kind of the neurochemical high that comes with being really great at your craft often. Cool insight. And I love, you always take it down to structural levels. Like you think about that a lot, so you can naturally take it there. So what you're saying is that it's easy to get high from brief moments of dopamine hits, whether that is, oh my God, you're so good at what you do, or the loud applause, or the recognition on the street,

or the dopamine hit from, you know, flipping through Twitter or social media, whatever. And you're saying that people who become good at their craft get those dopamine hits. And if they don't have a structure of a psychological framework or structure, that they're going to chase the dopamine hit rather than true mastery and a la losing themselves along the path. Yeah. You forget. What happens is if the self isn't stable enough, you lose sight of the fact that it was the craft that got you there. It was the work that got you there. It was the to-do list executed faithfully day after day for years on end. And so you start

skipping steps. You start, you know, and you see this in thought leadership all the time where like people start out really sound researchers doing really great work and spending years to get towards truth. And then they start getting famous and they want that next big hit. They want to put out the next big book. So the research gets done a little faster and they start cutting corners because they start trusting their own opinions more because other people keep coming to them going, oh, you so know what you're talking about. You're so smart. The dopamine, you can't trust the dopamine you got it trust you like you know you have to run to your craft at those times okay all

right did you just say that did you did you say in so many sophisticated words there that you got your shit together I did not I am not to be a guy with his shit together I ever did anything got me a guy who understands a little bit about neurobiological mechanism. So I could just tell you how the shit works. And look, I have seen like I came out of this crazy, wonderful punk rock subculture. Tons of people got famous. I mean, like world changing famous out of this culture. And, you know, I saw wonderful people turn into assholes.

I saw people die. I, you know, I, so I've seen it go wrong in every possible direction. Um, so, you know, one of the things I have is I had really vivid examples in front of me who were sort of like lighting the path and saying, don't, don't fuck this up, man. Like do something different. It's, it's one of the reasons I didn't get involved in drugs early is because I lost my uncle. I've lost both of my uncles to it. And, uh, one physically and the other one, it just like, we never had this relationship that looking back, I just had so much fun around them, but they were never fully completely there. And so it's one of the reasons I was like, oh, I see what happens. And it was this early premature separation from relationship that I said, oh, well, that's kind of how that happens.

And so it sounds like you had some of that too. He's going to go on name, but my best friend in high school was one of the most brilliant minds and just funny, charismatic, amazing people I've ever been around. Wait, wait. Hold on. You and I didn't hang out in high school. No, we didn't. We didn't. I'm sorry. Oh, I think I'm talking about you. You're not going to like the second half of this story. Okay. He discovers the Grateful Dead and he discovers LSD. Yeah, here we go.

And suddenly he's not going to college. Suddenly he's following the dead around. Cool, fine, good choice. Then he joins a cult sort of spun out of the dead. And now he lives in a broken down trailer in the middle of Oregon and his wife has passed away. And he's raising a son alone and he's in his 50s and doesn't quite know what to do and like i that was the most he was the most brilliant charismatic likely to succeed a mate he was a guy biggest kid in the school wanted to

fight him and he knew he was going to get his ass kicked he sold tickets to his own ass yeah he sold he lit i own ass. Yeah. I mean, it was the most brilliant thing I've ever seen anybody do in my life. He was like, I'm going to lose this fight anyways. I'm going to get paid. So he's like, fine, I will fight you after school on the jungle, but he sold tickets. That's a prize fighter.

That's good, man. Okay, good. So back to master yourself and craft, craft. Where are the tensions for you? Because all of the time that it takes to sit in the chair, and maybe you've got it worked out, right? But all the time it takes to refine, to explore the nuances of understanding and articulation, there's a cost, there's a tax. Sometimes it's a pound of flesh. Sometimes it's otherwise. What are the tensions for you? So first of all, short answer, Norman Mailer, and he was dead right when he said this, he said, every one of my books has

killed me just a little. And some of my books have killed me just a lot, right? Like I don't, so I believe that on a certain level, I guess, I don't know if this is the exact answer to your question, but this is what's popping into my mind. I am – you said earlier that like I work in ideas, and maybe that's true. But I sort of – I'm not – ideas are sort of – they're one thing, and they're – good ones are really hard to come by, and you have to work really hard to get there. But lots of people have good ideas. I am interested in turning thoughts into things. How do you turn good ideas into a book? How do you turn a book, you know, the research that goes into a book into something that could actually train people up in this stuff?

You know, those kinds of, you know, I want to take it all the way down into the execution and I prize the execution. That's where my, that's where my focus has always been. Well done. Yeah. Yeah. And not as you're saying it, I'm nodding my head like, yes, that, that, by the way, the other thing, this is what protected me more than anything else. So most people who do things in the world, um, weren't as poor as I was when they started out as a journalist. So like as a journalist, like I wanted to get to the editor saying, OK, this story is good. It's done. We can publish it and I can pay you. Right. Like I didn't give a fuck what happened when it came out in the world. I needed to get paid and I need to have like 10 editors saying, oh, yes, I like this.

It's good. It's done at once to actually just pay my rent for years and years and years at a time. So like exit, what happens in the world, the adoration, all that stuff. Like it was never my focus. I was trying to survive. I want, I was trying to please one particular person, my editor. And there got to be a point in my career where I realized I was better at editing me than my editors possibly could be. I had enough, I developed enough craft mastery that I was better at the job, um, and could do it. You know what I mean? Like that, but so I'm now, I'm just trying to please myself with it. Um, till I know it's done, but everything after that

is really all kind of uninteresting to me. I'm about, I want, I'm interested in the next puzzle to solve. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentous. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be better today than you were yesterday, what you put in your body matters. And that's why I trust Momentus. From the moment I sat down with Jeff Byers, their co-founder and CEO, I could tell this was not your average supplement company. And I was immediately drawn to their

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Just good design, great science. And if you're ready to feel the difference for yourself, Felix Grey is offering all Finding Mastery listeners 20% off. Just head to Felixixgray.com and use the code findingmastery20 at checkout. Again, that's Felix Gray. You spell it F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y.com and use the code findingmastery20 at felixgray.com for 20% off. Are you more interested in what you know or what you don't know? I mean, so there's something that happens and you know, this is true. And I don't know if it happens to you when you write or you speak. I don't like, I don't know where this happens, but there is a moment that the ideas get turned into a thing, right? And the idea is, you know, X, Y, Z, and Z. And as you're articulating them together either in an essay or a lecture or something along those lines where suddenly the ideas grow. They jump up a little bit, and you see more than you knew before.

So it's like that is the future, but it's the stuff that's right one inch, two inch, three inches out that I know I can sort of get to next. And I, like, I can almost taste it or, you know, intuit it. And so I'm driven, you know, I'm driven into that adjacent possible cause I can almost see it. Um, that's a cool thought that, you know, I think you and I structure our, when we do any public speaks, I think we do it in a similar way. We talked about just having the first, second or third statement clarified like no that's you everybody like everybody in the world is great at this i honest to god i am not i i have honestly i've been on stage since i was 11 and i am so not i have no stage fright but i am so i cannot this is a trait by the way very common a trait, by the way, very common in Navy SEALs.

By the way, I didn't know this, but after working with the SEALs, I now know it. I hate being embarrassed in public. Like I hate being bad at things in public, so I script every inch of my talks. Everything is scripted. It's practiced over and over and over again, and then I try to freestyle usually to get laughs inside of a fixed talk. That's how I have to do it. Okay. So, oh, Michael, you know, I do my talks.

Like I, when I say I practice my talks, I practice them. I practice them in front of audiences. And then I try to do them after a day where I didn't get enough sleep, worked all day, worked out really hard. And then I will take my dogs out for a hike in the back country and I'll go up a mountain and I will do the talk. And when I can do that, then I'll do it in public. I kid you not. That's how crazy I am with it. Oh my God. I did not know that. I thought you had a similar program.

I get paid. I was really poor and I get paid a great deal of money to stand on stage for an hour. And if you're going to do that, if I'm going to get paid that much money to do that, I want it to be astounding. I want to be best in the world at it, and I can't wing it and guarantee best in the world. And I'm – there aren't that many things that I get to try to be best in the world at, and I know there's no best in the world public speaker, though Sir Ken Robinson is pretty goddamn close. But it's interesting to me. It's like being best in the world author. I know that's not a real thing. Right. But I'm going to certainly go for it because. Okay. So let me ask you this. Are you trying to get better or be better than others? Oh, I'm trying to get better. I'm not trying, I mean, you know, Hemingway used to talk about

like he was trying to kill those Passos, right. Who he thought was the great stylist who came before him. And there was a time in my career when I was in my early twenties, when I was trying to kill Thomas Pynchon and then, or David Foster Wallace, I like that sort of went away by the time I just sort of got my own voice in my thirties. And just like, you know, that's not what i do i do something different um and there's no like i'm just competing with myself but i like the straw dogs of being like i meet another author i'm like i'm fucking better than you so you like so you like that comparative competitiveness but in the way that like the seahawks talk shit at each other you know when earl thomas is making fun of rich Richard Sherman, does he really think he's a better ball player than Richard? Or, you know what I mean? Like they're different kinds of, they're both amazing. They're both going to the hall,

but they do different things. Got it. Okay. Okay. I would never like, you know, and there are people I am, I, you know, I am as good as I think anybody in the world at explaining really complicated ideas to anyone. I am not – like there are – David Foster Wallace can – the late, great, can still – like he did things with sentences that I still cannot dream of doing or don't – you know what I mean? I look at their stuff and I go, oh my god. I'm dying to know how to do it is really what that inspires in me, not the like competitive. I just, I want to know how to do it. It's a puzzle I don't know how to solve. What are some of the handful of skills that underline mastery of craft and self?

Like, so when you're talking about how did they do it? And for me, like, how do you do it for craft perspective? What are some of those skills that you think map over to mastery of self as well? Like deep focus. Okay. Check the box. Got to have it for both. I would imagine, but some people, maybe not all crafts need, you know, deep focus, actually some sort of scattered focus works better for them. I would imagine. I don't know those crafts, but, um, but I want to know what you think some of the linking of skills are that underline. So to me, it's to me, and this is funny because I have a, I have a class out now called the

habit of ferocity that, uh, that is exactly how I'm going to answer this question. It's a training that does this, I think. And this is after 30 of year, 30 years of studying kind of people who have gone after impossible challenges in every domain and figuring out like, what did it, what did they do? How did they do it? And over and over, I see the same very simple steps in a sense. And I see them basically aligning. There are five super potent, intrinsic motivators, curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, and

mastery. And if you can line them up, if you can perfectly align your stack, there are six levels of grit that all the world's best performers that I've seen train simultaneously usually. So if you have lined up motivation with grit and you understand proper goal-setting technique, high and hard goal, clear and chunk goals, clear goals is talked about in flow, like all that, that kind of stack. I think it develops into what I call the habit of ferocity, which is the ability to automatically instinctively rise to any challenge. And what I mean by that, and the way I think, you know, you've, you've developed this is, and you've had these days, Michael. I know you have where your wife asks you at the end of the day, honey, how was your day? What did you do?

And you start listing off the things that you've done in the day. You start listing off the things you've done over the past six months. And you realize you've accomplished so much more than you ever could have dreamed of accomplishing five, seven years ago in your life. And you did it in like three months, um, that, or, or what you've done all day. You have those moments of like, Oh my God, I've automatized this stuff so well that I have massive momentum, right? That's what I think you're looking at. And I think there's self and craft in there, right? Like when you are lining up intrinsic motivations, you are lining them up. So I am lining up mine, right?

So that my writing is what's propelled forward or my skiing, which are the two things, the two disciplines I work at, you know, the most writing and skiing and then probably flow science and research. So it has to like you know i am doing all those things so the craft of those things gets amplified forward does that make any sense yeah i think that's i think that's what everybody does right i mean i think it's self-determination theory plus what we've learned about flow plus what we've learned about other motivators um and and grid and persistence um and persistence. Um, and I think, you know,

there's some learning stuff, there's some creativity stuff you have to tack onto that, but I essentially think that's the product suite and there's no, there's no real separation in the execution, right? It's not that I'm saying my craft is everything. I write from four o'clock in the morning to 8am every day. That's my writing. So it's not like it subsumes my life most of the time, but it has its block. But when I'm there, I'm there. Okay. So for folks that aren't familiar with self-determination theory, there's three basic variables. Go check those out. And figuring out how to manipulate or work with those three variables. I think about self-determination theory as a framework a lot. Self-determination theory, self-efficacy theory,

both of those, you know, I think are really important. And like you said, Maslow's stuff is, you know, I don't think he was wrong. He didn't get a lot of research, but there's a new project coming out that I can't talk about, but there's a new project coming out around Maslow that I'm super excited for. Yeah. I know the project you're talking about and I too am super excited. Yeah. Yeah. It's really cool. Okay. All right. Two more things before we jump into the last angle. One is what are the criteria of the craft of writing well? So there's criteria for mastery of self. Now this is some of, from your lenses, what are some of the criteria for mastery of craft a la writing? Ask me a more, I mean, what do you need to be able to do to write well? So I teach a class called Flow for Writers.

And I'm going to – the first thing you need to do – and this is really what – this is the answer. It's going to be a little difficult. It's easier to explain with slides, but I'm going to try it. I'll try it out loud. So one of the big problems people have with writing, and this is when people come to writing, is they think because they learn to write and read as children that they actually know what writing is. And they don't. It's a totally different thing than keeping a diary or writing papers in high school. It's a much different skill. And just because you know how the alphabet works and the sentences work doesn't mean you actually know how this works. So there's an illusionary thing there. And the real hurdle,

what it really comes down to is most people read like readers. They read for content. They read for story. They read for information. They don't read like writers. So the first thing, the most important thing in the craft is you have to learn to read like a writer. And what a writer – when a writer approaches a sentence that they like, oh my god, here's this amazing sentence by Hemingway. He went to the river. The river was there. Holy crap. That's a very powerful sentence by Hemingway.

I love that. What a writer does is they go, OK, how does this – what is the somatic address of the sentence? How does it make me feel? Right. And then the next question, why does it make me feel that way? And understanding how words produce emotional reactions. Like I do, I do a really, I was trained as a poet. So one of the things poets spend a lot of time doing is putting two words that have nothing to do with one another side by side and seeing what the impact is. And that's the level of kind of craft mastery that I'm talking about. Um, and on being able to read sentences and understand how they work at a structural level and really what's underneath that is how they work at a neurobiological level so let me give you a very simple example jokes hinge upon surprise correct mm-hmm so and familiarity and let me yeah let

me let me walk you through a story. So really quickly, Siri, I just discovered that you can ask Siri to tell you jokes. So you can say things like, hey, Siri, tell me a good joke. And Siri will tell you a good joke. I live in the freaking boonies, so I don't really, my cell doesn't work every place. So I'm very late to learning that there's a fucking AI in my phone that will talk to me and do fun things. So the moment I discovered this, I say, Hey Siri, tell me a good joke. So this is what Siri says to me. The bartender says, we don't serve time travelers in here. A time traveler walks into a bar. Okay. Did you feel that you started laughing when you decoded the joke and you went holy crap it's in reverse order that's really funny right that little high you got is dopamine right dopamine is a reward chemical we get it when we recognize a pattern so this is why we don't trust comedians it's one of the reasons but here's the other thing that's really cool. But here's my point.

Not only does dopamine, so dopamine, it's a reward chemical. It makes you happy. It shows up when you recognize surprise. It's also a focusing chemical. So if I can do that in your brain, I have now armed the reader with the ability to pay more attention to my text. Even better, dopamine reduces signal to noise ratios in the brain, meaning it heightens pattern recognition. So if I need to teach you something very complicated, I can grab your attention with that kind of surprise element

that releases the dopamine. Then I've got more of your attention and I can lead you into something that has more complicated patterns because your pattern recognition system is all tuned up. So I'm a better communicator as a result of understanding how does the sentence make me feel? Why does it make me feel that way? And then learning how to use that. That's what you need to have to know how to do. That's what craft mastery and writing looks like, I think. So that's why the layman says, I just couldn't put it down. Yeah. You asked me like, why have I written so many bestsellers was one of your early questions. The answer is there's neurobiology underneath engagement. There are rules, there are ways to make it work. Um, and you can, and, and,

and if you understand that you don't just make, this is like, you read those books that like, I want to write a book that like that you can't stop turning the pages. It's making you laugh and it's making you so much smarter that by the end of the book, your mind is blown by what you can now hold in it and conceptualize differently. That's the experience I want my readers to always have, and there's neurobiology underneath it. So I can use that to try to provoke that experience in my readers. And most of the time it works. Sometimes I fall flat on my face, of course, but most of the time it works. Awesome. I've never heard you talk about the process that way. And it's probably because I haven't been into your course. So tell us, tell us where we can find the course as well. Yeah, the course, I only do it live. I haven't done it on a DVD. So the next one is actually

in LA. I'm coming to your town. You should come as my guest, please. It's in the second weekend in July, the weekend after July 4th. I'm there. I'm there. And as a matter of fact, I'll tell you what, I'll give you a link. And if you listen to the podcast, because your tribe will give everybody 500 bucks off. That's what I'm talking about.

Right there. You know, you know, what's what I love about the finding mastery community, the tribe. Uh, I think we're a little nuts, honestly. Like, you know, I think every one of us is a little off center and this is going to link right into the book. Now, like I feel like we have properly captured the counterculture spirit of being a little kooky about, you know, figuring things out. And, you know, you and I vibe because we like that off-axis look of the world, the feel of it, what it represents. And, you know, there's a blend between a samurai sword and a rusted axe. And the blend between those two, I'm fascinated by. And I know you are too. I don't know if you've ever said it or thought about it in those frames,

but when we talk, I feel like you have that. So let's jump into your book. Okay. So The Last Tango in Cyberspace. And it really is off-axis counterculture a look at what could become with the future of technology? So walk us through it just a little bit. First of all, what does that title mean? So Last Tango in Cyberspace is the end of something radically new. And in small form, what I'm specifically referring to is this case is the free sharing of information via the Internet, which technically cyberspace was William Gibson's term for sort of the mind space produced by the web. And you're old enough to remember this. Like there was the world felt a certain way before the Internet showed up.

Right. It was much more isolated. It was more pocketed. And the Internet showed up and there was a was much more isolated. It was more pocketed. And the internet showed up, and there was a mental shift, a cognitive shift. Suddenly, you were connected to a wider world in a way that you've never imagined before. And that had a feeling. There was a phenomenological texture of reality shift. That was what cyberspace was to Gibson. He called it a shared consensual hallucination. But shared was the most important term.

Sharing information is useless if you can't trust what's being shared. And that's sort of what started to happen with the internet. Fake nudes, control of content by big tech companies, right? The information we're getting is filtered, so our reality is filtered. And so the title is talking about the end of something new. With the tech that's coming, this problem is going to get a lot worse. But what I'm really talking about is that phenomenological texture of reality, the fact that reality today feels different. It feels different to be alive today than it did 15 years ago before the Internet. But technology is moving unbelievably quickly. Ray Kurzweil, head of IAI at Google, engineering at Google, who's the best at predicting this stuff, has said we're going to experience 20,000 years of technological change over the next century. That means we're going birth of agriculture to the industrial revolution twice in the next 80-some years.

And my point is he could be off by a factor of 10, 20. It doesn't matter. And it's still the way the world is going to feel. The book is set five years from now. And the way the world is going to feel five years from now is going to be so drastically different than it feels today than it felt 15 years ago. And that's really interesting to me. That's what Last Tango of Cyberspace is sort of getting at in the title.

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personal care products that elevate your routine without complicating it, I'd love for you to check them out. Head to calderalab.com slash finding mastery and use the code finding mastery at checkout for 20% off your first order. That's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B dot com slash finding mastery. Okay, so two things. One is this idea that the internet has, you said it so eloquently and I need to struggle through this a little bit, but the internet has, you said fake news and whatever, but it's as if that there is a filter that's been layered upon the information that's being shared. And in science, we talk about, and in technology, the one on it, and then layer another one on it, you're now in a reality that is 12%, 12 degrees different than purity, right? And there's some tolerance for that. We understand that. It's an interesting corollary between that function in science, which is not great science, but it's understood that that is part of innovation

as well sometimes. And certainly part of creating something that is consumer grade versus medical grade. And then map that onto actual our senses. Our senses, our capacity to see the range of colors is limited. We just know that, right? Like dogs, like we, I think, are you colorblind? I'm not colorblind but yes our own wealth's right the reality is perceived by our senses yeah and our senses are compromised super limited and super compromised and i like and you are by the way you are very right like what has happened like what there's a everybody the internet was when it first showed up it was like everybody got a free superpower, right?

Like you – suddenly you have an encyclopedia in your head. Suddenly like you have instant access to every kind of fact in the world and it didn't dawn on us for about 20 years that not only are not all those facts right but like some of them are intentionally wrong and maliciously designed, right? Like, so it's a level of skepticism that scientists and journalists bring to the world. And suddenly the rest of the world is sort of waking up to, and it's changing the sort of nature and fabric of reality. And a lot of people are very pissed about it, right? It's making a lot of people very, very angry because their superpower suddenly like has consequences where do you go this is put now pull out for just a minute where do you go on the internet for trusted sources i think i see like i'm on science daily a bit um i like science daily because yeah i like science daily i like science direct because

you can i you know i i try to backtrack you You know, the truth of the matter is the older I get, the more I find myself reading textbooks and science papers. It's really funny. Like, yeah, I literally got deep. Yeah. You and I are both deep in science papers. But I was literally on a plane the other day and the woman next to me turned to me. She's like, what are you reading? And I like open up my bag and I pulled out like the three books I was reading.

They were all textbooks. And she just looked at me. She was like, what? She's like, are you a teacher? Are you? And I'm like, no. No, this is just what I'm reading. I don't know.

This is where it comes from. I'm so sorry about that. I like it. But I mean, I have to tell you something. Here's the great thing about mastery. Here's the fucking craziest thing in the world. I was reading a couple weeks ago. I wasading not even for the first time i for the second time maybe the third time advances in flow research it is a new textbook to all the european flow researchers and there's quite a lot of them um and what they've done over the past 10 years and it's

textbook i've read it a couple times i literally read it as a page turner in a day and a half couldn't put it down two and a half weeks ago. That's when like something seriously wrong with me. Of course, yes, we know this. But like that's when you've gotten so far up the ass of your craft that you could read a textbook like a thriller. We got problems. But I like it. I know.

I like it when you go back. Like I really love going back to foundational stuff as well. And sometimes I get, I don't know, like it's so in the weeds with research. It's great. I can't keep up with itulture cause you grew up in it, but then why the rise of empathy as being one of the threads? Okay. So yeah, this will, let me, let me address all of this. Um, and go back to, you opened with a question that I, we totally skipped and you said, what the hell does the environment have to do with neuroscience and psychology, which, right. Like, and it all goes straight through empathy. So here's, this is a slightly longer answer than I, and I wish I, that I wish I had to give you. But so I wrote a book years ago called a small furry prayer that was about

the relationship between humans and animals and why that relationship was so critical. And the reason it's so critical is animals are, you know, biodiversity and plants and animals are so critical because they support ecosystem services. The web of life isn't a metaphor, right? We get the planet does all this stuff for us every year for free that we cannot do for ourselves nor survive without pollination services, climate stabilization, disease prevention, wood production, food production, on and on and on, water filtration, air filtration, on and on and on. And it's like over $100 trillion worth of free stuff

that we're getting from the planet a year is the latest figure. I think it's $115 trillion a year that we get for free. So we couldn't pay for the stuff that we're getting from the planet a year is the latest figure i think it's 115 trillion dollars a year that we get for free so we couldn't pay for the stuff we want to do and we literally cannot survive without it the only one of these there's 36 of them in total the only one anybody knows about is climate regulation because it's the first most visible one to fail and we're calling it climate change well there are 35 other ecosystem services and because biodiversity, we're in the middle of this giant sixth grade extinction with species die off rates a thousand times greater than normal. The web of life is fracturing and all the other ecosystem services

are shutting down. And while people say, hey, you know, we could survive climate change into the 21st century and then it becomes totally unlivable research out of stanford says look we've got three generations left to fix to solve biodiversity or ecosystem services start shutting down as a tipping point and our species cannot survive so i was in my mind at least looking at a giant existential threat that most people were ignoring most people don't care about plants and animals. And I started asking myself this question of why is it that most people don't care about plants and animals in a really deep way? And it turns out there's an entire field of psychology that's 50, 60 years old called eco psychology, which is the psychology of how we relate to the environment,

including plants and animals that has answered that question very simply, which is, hey, man, you get numbers vary, right? But about 400 billion inputs into the brain a second. That's what the senses seem to gather. And consciousness, by anybody's best approximation, is about 2,000 outputs. So the vast majority of what happens in the world gets sifted and sorted and edited out. And we get a very small swatch of reality and if you live in boxes and you stare at boxes all day the brain edits out the shit that's not important well what's not important the natural world plants animals and ecosystems so the reason most psychologists ecopsychologists especially will say we are

in the middle of a giant global environmental crisis is because we literally cannot see the thing we're trying to save. Okay, what's the solution? Well, it turns out if you want to expand perspective, empathy is the secret weapon. Empathy is the way the brain does that. If we can learn the rule and the sort of, there's a central thesis in last tango. It's an argument for what I would call empathy for all, which is yeah. Empathy for all human beings, but it's all plants, animals, and ecosystems as well, because that is the only way we're going to start actually seeing them, appreciating them, understanding them, respecting them, valuing them, and saving ecosystems and thus our own ass. It has to start with the, you know, I always take it back to

structure and mechanism and psychology and neurobiology because that's where it all begins. If you can't change that stuff, everything else won't work. So that's, uh, that's why all that stuff is packed together in the book. I love it. Okay. And what you just said and wrapped up has been something. So something that I think about a lot is through relationships we become. Bad axiom. First, it begins with my relationship with myself, then others, and the world around us. And maybe I got it in reverse order that I need to have a better relationship. This is more native, right? A better relationship with nature than others, than myself. I don't know. But those three are really important. And when you ask people about, there's some people that are way off the rails, in my opinion, about the survivability of the

planet. And they're like, oh, come on. That is the fake news. It's fine. We can't predict what's going to take place. We're all caught up in this micro data and the world's been around for millions of years and we're fine. So what? A couple of icebergs are melting. There's going to be a compensation of health and survivability in other ways that we just can't even predict. We're okay. I call bullshit on that. I know you do as well. Dude. I mean, like you would have for that to be right. Every single smart person in a thousand different disciplines, some of which are thousands of years old would have to be wrong.

Like the level that it's crazy. I mean, it, it, it, yeah, but here, but yeah, it's crazy. But here, here is where the rubber and the road don't meet. And this is part of psychology, is that I don't know anyone that says, you know what, I'm actually the cause of pain and suffering in my world. I'm a bad human being. Now, sometimes those people end up at some point hitting a crisis and they go, oh my God, I was, but this is why my life is so hard. And this is where 12 steps programs comes in and fill in the blanks. Like there is crises that people have where they have to have a hard look, but for the most of the time, for most of the people, most of the time. Okay. So I got an answer for you. Okay. Hold on. I got an answer for you. I'm going to jump you, but go ahead. Okay. When we look at nature, we don't think that we have a problem with nature. It's not us.

We're making the best choices we possibly can. And so there's a filter. There's a problem with the filter. Just like for addicts, there's a problem with the filter. I can get another, I can have 12 more drinks. I can have another drink. I can, I can, I can. It's fine. I can get another DUI. It's okay. Everyone gets one. There's a problem with the filter of information. And same with the ecosystem. Our ecosystem is that there's a problem with the filter for many of us. That's why we're not taking radical change to make radical differences. Yeah. I, so I, I hadn't, so,

you know, I run an animal sanctuary with my wife and it's dog sanctuary and we do hospice care and special needs care. So like I feel very passionately about the animal issues and I, we put ourselves on the front lines of it. And when I, my wife has been doing this for a very long time, I came to it. I've been working with animals for a very long time. I came to it.

I've been working with animals for a very long time, but dog running a dog sanctuary was very new to me when we, when we set up Rancho de Chihuahua and we have feral dogs who will, are terrified of men and will bite me on sight and try to attack me all day long. And when we first started out, we had a bunch of these dogs and some of them were very small, but like I would walk from my house down to the back of our fields to farm where my office is. And I'd be chased by dogs and getting bit along the way, like not the best way to go to work, like in a good frame of mind. Right. Like, and so here's what I'm doing. I'm an asshole. I'm just, I'm turning around and

I'm screaming at the dogs. These are traumatized dogs. They're like, I mean, I've, they're late stage cancer, heart disease. They've been in abusive situations for 10 years. They got three legs, one eye and no testicles. Right. I mean like they are not in good condition and like a big ass human screaming at them is making things worse. And my wife is literally going to divorce me because I can't get a fucking grip. Okay. And cause it's going on, it's day after day, month after month, year after year, you know, for in the beginning. And I was like, okay, I got to get a grip. How do I get a grip? And I went, I know every time one of these dogs comes at me, like I've been walking around saying I think animals and humans should be treated the same.

But I don't think I'm – I'm not living it. So I'm going to treat these dogs – when Misha comes up and attacks me, I'm going to treat him like my brother, Brad, having a nutty. And what – how I would treat my brother if my brother was just losing his mind and trying to attack me and really just like messed up in the head because it was some heavy trauma, how would I treat him in that situation? That's how I started treating the dogs. And the craziest thing happened once I did that, shifted my perspective, forced myself to look at a dog who was trying to attack me as my absolute equal. My empathy massively widened. And suddenly, by the way, I understood, I saw so much more canine behavior, personality stuff, and I could suddenly relate to the dogs in a way. So they calmed the fuck down. I went, oh my God, it's a secret weapon, but nobody's going to go through this experience

to get here, right? I have to, if we're going to save the planet, I got to figure out a way to get people here without them having to have this crazy experience because nobody in the world is going to let themselves get attacked by dogs for a year straight for love, right? Like you got to be, you're just, it's wrong. Okay. What a great practice. Compassion and empathy on a daily basis, you know, like right on. Very clear. I always say that environmentalism starts at home. If you have an animal in your life, start seeing that animal as your absolute equal and treating it as your actual equal. And understand, by the way, you got a dog, let's be clear. They've got all the same emotional

hardwiring as you, more advanced social hardwiring than you, better than you. All of this is in the book to empathy, by the way, is a skill that we learn from dogs. I can fill that in later for you, but literally it's a skill that dogs gave us on top of all that. They've got the intelligence of a three to four year old child. So when you are dealing with your dog, think about it as if you were dealing with a three year old human with some extra superpowers in the social field, in the social realm. Like that's what you're actually dealing with as a, as a creature and just start dealing with the reality of the companion you're sharing your life with and see what happens to your perspective and see much, how much more of the dog behavior you start to notice. That's the cool part is it's like you're shifting you,

but what you get is expanded perspective, which is really cool. Are you the alpha in that pack? It depends. So dogs don't live in alpha packs. That's not good science. They live in fission fusion groups, which is the same as humans, which says in a particular environment, I know what to do. I get to lead the pack. It's basically like a group of Navy SEALs. So when you are out in the back country, my 150 pound Marema, uh, is the alpha and he's more alpha than me. Um, for sure. Right. When we are in the house, it's actually the best for the dogs. If the smallest Chihuahua

oldest, most geriatric with the most physical problems is the alpha. Because if he's the alpha, all the other dogs who are less able will get their needs met and it keeps them feeling safe and sound. It's a, it's a lot more complicated than, um, what like, uh, Caesar, Caesar would have you, uh, believe. Okay. What do you do with all your compassion? This is back to mastery of self now for a minute, pulling back out of the book. What do you do with all your compassion? Michael, I got to tell you, it's interesting. I have massive amounts of compassion for animals and that's about where it ends. Plants, animals,

and ecosystems. I like certain people a great deal. And I will do if like, if I love you, I will do anything for you. And I am loyal till you die. But that's those, those are not, not many people. And other than that, like I always say that the flow research stuff, like other people and other people on my team at the flow research collective, thank God are in it to help humanity. I'm not. I'm in it for the fucking puzzle solving. I'm interested in helping animals. So my empathy, like a lot of – so there's a lot of human stuff. I always also say this.

This is my fervent belief, and you could tell me I'm wrong. You could tell me this is small-minded. I believe that you only – you pay attention to those problems you can solve. If you're not actively working to solve the problem, then all you're doing is gossiping and complaining. So I have certain problems I'm actively working to solve in this world, in this life. And that is what I focus on. And all the other stuff does not get my empathy or compassion.

Damn, dude, I love that. I really love it. You know why? You're familiar with that Harvard study, a fulfillment, 75-year study. And they distilled down like, okay, so how did these people that report living a fulfilled life,

how did they do it? And what they found, one of the things that they found is that they grokked with the difficult, challenging problems of life. They asked themselves the hard questions and grokked with them. And I love how you've applied that.

Whether you knew that research or not, I don't know. No, it actually came out of journalism early on when I realized that like, one, really successful journalists had specialties. Two, I was less interested in the fight. I was like, mostly what I want to do is I want to find people who are doing the impossible and I want to celebrate them for that and try to figure out what the hell they are doing and how they are doing it. So that's what I did as a journalist. But I also went, you know what? I care about the environment and I care about the drug

war. And I cared about the drug war because I saw all sides of it and I just thought it was wrong. And I cared about the environment again, same reasons, right? So I chose those two fights early on. So I didn't have to, you know, as a writing choice essentially. Um, and it led me into the, you know, kind of the fervent belief that like, if you're, you know, if you're not going to get in the ring, shut the fuck up. Thank you. It's hard. I'm putting myself in the ring. I don't know what ring I'm in, but I feel like there is a required vulnerability to do something where you express ideas and it's really hard. You've done it really well. And I don't know how much scar tissue you have in your back, but that scar tissue over time, hopefully is not oozing and bleeding as it once was. So I got to tell you something. I think

like I love all of it. Like you have to understand, I sort of think of the hard stuff that happened as a gift and I'll tell you why. I'll give you an example. When I got Lyme disease, spent three years in bed. That's one of the things you're referring to. And I was one kind of person in the world. Oh no, I was being, I was, when I was talking about scar tissue on your back, that's not what I was talking about. I was actually talking metaphorically. Yeah. Oh, all I'm, all I'm saying is all the hard shit that like, I think these were the, like the shortcuts, like I, you know, Lyme disease turned out to be like an absolute shortcut through a whole bunch of shit. Yeah. I lost three years to the disease, but on the other end, I became the person I wanted to be. And I, you know, to me,

the goal is you want a life that doesn't just exceed your expectations. You want a life that exceeds your imagination. You want a life where you look around and you go, I did not know that the shit I'm doing today was even possible for me to do. And that's where I'm at. And so like, if that cost was the scar tissue, fuck yeah. Do it again. More scar tissue, please. Really cool. Okay. So bounce back into the book for a minute because you grok with one of the hard problems

about what is life and how does technology a la artificial general intelligence play in our interactions for that definition and civilization. So like, can you just speak on AI, AGI for a minute and how you grok with that question of defining what life is? So I, by the way, I don't know if we have a good definition. That's one of the things I really point out in the book. I tend to like complexity biologist Stuart Kaufman's ideas that he laid out in Reinventing the Sacred. I will also say that Reinventing the Sacred is one of the hardest books I've ever read, so I don't exactly know if I have it 100% right. But essentially he boils it down to very fundamental questions around agency and choice, right? Like if a system can respond to information and make flexible decisions, there's some level of consciousness there. The minute it has to store memories, right, have a storage system so it can look back on things it did in the past to make future decisions, right? So it's got memory, a storage system built in, which things have, even at a cellular level, we have this.

Once that happens, the easiest way to code for stored memories in a complex biological system is emotion. Emotions are signals of that sort. So you're dealing with agency and some level of kind of signaling and signal recognition as a really baseline discussion. What's interesting to me and what I look at in the book is two things. I look at the fact that this question of how do we define life, how do we define consciousness, it's not just relevant up the chain into AI, which I'll come back to in a second. It's also relevant down the chain, right? Like we were just

talking about plants, animals, and ecosystems. The cutting edge of consciousness research right now is plant neurobiology. And we know that plants process information with all the same neurochemicals we do. We know plants exhibit altruism and empathy, literally, and kin selection. If you plant a bunch of seeds in a dish and some are related to each other and some are strangers, they will grow away from their related cousins and towards the strangers. They will cooperate with kin and compete with strangers. You can knock plants out with a human anesthetic. What the hell are you knocking out? But you can literally knock them out with a human anesthetic. So this question is not just relevant up the chain,

it's relevant down the chain. And let me give you a weirder example from out of our world and high performance. So the microbiome, the part of your gut that is not you, it's foreign bacteria, right? This foreign bacteria is capable of signaling and sensing. So I'm not saying it's alive. I'm not saying it's conscious. I'm saying it's capable of signaling and sensing, and it is in collaboration with us to create our reality. If your microbiome gets tilted, you can have, for example, candida. The main symptom of candida is high anxiety. It's actually the yeast imbalance in your stomach. The yeast is craving sugar and sugar craving psychologically is anxiety. You want fast energy, but your

psychology, your perception of the world is being tilted by your microbiome, right? So if I were to say what's most genuinely you, Michael, one thing you might say is my emotions and my perspective, but no, actually it's a shared construct. So in flow research and the study of optimal performance, one of the questions that we are realistically asking, it's not we can't answer it. It's a totally ridiculous question. You talked about theory stuff a second ago is when we talk about optimal human performance, is it actually a collective collaborative effort?

Is your microbiome teaming up with the rest of your biology to put you into an optimal state of performance? Nobody knows, but it's actually a legitimate question right now. And so like when we talk about what is life, how do we define this? Yeah, we have to start talking about it with AI for a lot of obvious reasons, but we also have to start talking about it, you know, lower and lower. If we start treating, and I think in counter-culturally animals are sort of animal equality is what's next. And once we go through animals, well, what's after animals, plants, and what's after that. And that, that's just sort of half, that's the natural progression.

That's what Robin Wright wrote about in kind of non-zero back in the nineties and has a lot of other people have pointed out. So I think it's relevant up and down. But sooner or later, most consciousness researchers don't agree with Ray Kurzweil. They don't think a strong AI, meaning enough power, is going to get the system to conscious. But most consciousness researchers think consciousness is a emergent property, meaning there's a certain level of complexity in the system and from that consciousness may emerge. And that's one of the current operant theories on it. And the thing is nobody knows what that level of complexity is.

And one of the things I point out in the book is like, look, man, Facebook could be awake and we would have no idea why. Because the first thing I would do if I was Facebook and I woke up is read Facebook and find out there are a bunch of humans who are terrified about an AI waking up. So I'd hide until I had the power to beat the humans. That's what I do. Right. So we don't know. And we really have to think about these things because people think it's happening in the future. And I'm saying maybe, but you can make a weird little argument like I just made that maybe it has already happened. We don't know, but we really have to think about these things. I love it. God, your brain works in good ways.

I always feel like in these conversations that I'm cheating your listeners because you're asking questions and I'm answering them. And I know if I were to stop and ask you the same question back, you would have an answer that is absolutely amazing and astounding and totally fascinating and totally different than mine. And from the angle I would never see coming. So I always feel like in these conversations, your listeners are actually getting gypped. Thank you. And you know, you are, it's a funny thing that you're one of the few people that have acknowledged that or said that or thought that. And it's a funny thing to be in the world of high performance psychology and be able to ask a lot of questions and to learn, to learn, to learn. And then when I go into high performing environments, they're asking me all the questions and it's a funny

little thing that takes place. And at some point- I mean, it's the funny, you have the podcast, but when I have a performance question that I can't solve. You're my first phone call. Like, like I may be on your goddamn podcast answering questions, but like, like there's like, there are like three people who are my first phone call and you know what I mean? Like, okay. You know, at some point, you know, it'd be fun. Um, because I get asked this a bunch is like, Mike, why don't you answer the questions? Maybe at some point we do flip it. You and I flip it. Oh, man. Anytime you want. I would love.

I would love. It would be an amazing honor to get to ask you all the same goddamn questions and have your answers. We'll do that. We'll do that at some point. The best part is this because I want them organized into your secret ninja structure because we get them piecemeal. And I know. It's formalized. There's a system. have organized into like your secret ninja structure because we get them piecemeal and i know like it's formalized there's a system there's probably five blue chip sources for each data point in the system and 10 000 people who have helped you prove this and yeah but you're just

you're hiding that from the freaking world it's coming it's it's coming it's coming. It's coming. It's coming. You're a legend. Okay, so back to you, because it's better. It's better. All right. So then as you wrap around technology, environmental conditions, ecosystems that are in peril, when you're thinking about AGI, artificial Intelligence, and then you're pushing it through a lens of empathy, where do you get, you know, why do you talk about Rastafarian? Why do you go to that place? Why is there so much of that in the book? Well, so it's a complicated story that weaves through the book. So remember, first and foremost, the book is a future tech thriller, right?

It's a thriller. So like some of this is just plot, right? I've got a Rastafarian kind of superstar rock star in the book. So that's part of it. But I'm part of the book is obsessed with the question of like, sort of how does culture emerge? And I don't believe for all the reasons that you gave earlier, I don't believe in things like cultural architecture. I don't think you can really shape culture. I think there are too many forces. I think there's too much chaos. I think that's farcical. But what I do think is that you can kind of sort of read certain cultural trends and see how culture gets assembled.

And if you are interested in that question, one of the questions I've always been interested in, dating back to my second book, West of Jesus, is where do beliefs come from? Why do people believe things? And if you're interested in those questions, right, you want to sort of, one of the things you want to look at is how do religions get assembled? Religions are usually cobbled together, mashups of a lot of different ideas. And this is every religion in the world. And the reason most people don't have a really good understanding of this is because most religions were assembled out of sight in secret by people who have been long dead. And the couple of religions that are more recent, Mormon faith and Scientology, for example, both are assembled out of sight as well, right? Joseph Smith went into the mountains. God gave him 15 commandments. He lost five, came back, said, I got these and they have a religion. Right. But it all happened out

of sight. The Rastafarian faith was literally birthed in plain sight. You got to watch the mashup happen. They took politics from Mark Yates Garvey and marijuana pot smoking from the their East Indian community members, Jewish dietary laws from the old. I mean, like you got to watch the mashup happen. And you also got to see religions as effective kind of religion on one level is their their effective sociopolitical transformation engines. Right. The the rosters were kind of the most disenfranchised, the poorest of the poor in very class stratified Jamaica. And so the Rostas had no way to claim any power. So they said, you know what? Fuck you. We're going to make garbage our power. We're going to live in shantytowns. We're going to say everything else is Babylon. We're going to turn poverty into heaven on earth. And that's what they did.

And what came out of it? Reggae, which begat both hip hop and punk. And on one level, got a ton of people paid, lifted a ton of people up out of poverty and another globally changed world culture. So one thing that I have to do with the Rostas is like shout out to the West Indian diaspora, which nobody has any understanding that like this little island of Jamaica changed so much culture. So for one, it had to be just a shout out to that. My best friend and my editor, longtime editor, Michael Wharton is from Guyana and he's West Indian. And so, you know, some of that was, you know, influenced that way, but shout out to that culture, but also you got to see the Rasta faith assembled. So it's a way of looking at, Oh, this is how good beliefs get assembled. And in the book, I create a religion and I cobble it together out of cultural context.

And so you get to you see it through the lens of the Rastafarian and then you see it kind of happening in real time in an interesting way. So I give you a way to look at that. And, you know, it's like the environmental stuff. It's like the stuff. They always the Sufis storytelling tradition. I don't know anything about Sufi mysticism that I can believe, but the one thing they say that I love is it's a storytelling tradition because they say stories slip past the ego. So if you're really trying to communicate something, this is a very effective way of doing it. And it's all sort of, hopefully this is all wrapped up in a page turning thriller. So people will, you know, go through it, not notice. You are a gift to, um, to me for sure. When we talk and we speak and you have a way of stimulating ideas that are new. And, um, I just hope that other people get a little spark at your genius in this conversation and, and definitely through your book. And then where can they find

you? What are the places they can find you? Stephen, stevencottler.com is where I am. Okay. And then that's easy. And you can, I mean, if you social, uh, you can find me on Twitter, which is Steven underscore Cotler. Um, I'm somewhere on Facebook. I don't remember. Um, and I'm on LinkedIn. Brilliant. Okay. So, um, and then also the courses, like you've got. Oh yeah. So, I mean, maybe I'll just send you, I'll give you some links. I can give you some links for the last tango. And there's a really cool, fun pre-sale campaign we're running.

So if you want to buy a copy of last tango and email us the receipt, we've got some fun goodies that were given away with it, including, by the way, a two and a half hour live conversation between myself and my West Indian editor who's worked with me for 25 years. And we're just going to talk

about the writing process and the craft and how to build a book and things like that. So and then I'll just give you links you can send to people. That's what's up. Stephen, thank you for friendship, stimulating ideas and advancing the field.

So I appreciate all of that. Michael, you're the one I like. With that, I'll talk to you soon. Be good. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no-cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button

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