Know Thyself - E58 - Steven Kotler: Achieve Peak Performance, Find FLOW & Do The Impossible

Episode Date: August 8, 2023

Steven Kotler reveals the secrets to achieving peak performance and discovering the transformative power of flow. He shares his insights behind what flowstate is, whether it's the same as a meditative state, and how we can train ourselves to experience it regularly. He discusses procrastination, dopamine addiction, and why clarifying our passion and purpose in life is essential for achieving our dreams. Steven describes the 4 stages of flow, and how we can engineer our environment to provide the ideal space to experience it. He also dives into the mystical side of flow, and explores the mystery behind what it actually is. ___________ Timecodes: 0:00 Intro  2:15 Is Flowstate a Spiritual Experience? 8:10 Defining Flowstate 9:34 Using Your Procrastination for Optimal Performance 13:57 Why Breaking Dopamine Addiction is Essential, and How to Do It 17:52 Clarifying your Passion and Purpose to Motivate You 22:21 Combining Passion & Purpose and Stacking Motivation 26:03 The One Mistake Everyone Makes on Purpose 32:09 How to Turning Work Into Play 41:56 Learning New Things: Conscious Competency 53:46 Micro vs Macro Flow: Flow in Our Daily Life 1:00:25 4 Stages to Achieve Flowstate 1:01:55 Setting Up Your Environment for Flow 1:09:29 Manicuring Your Internal Space for Flow 1:19:26 Group Flow: Maximizing Creativity with Others 1:25:12 The Mystical Side of Flow 1:36:40 Conclusion ___________ Steven Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning journalist, and the Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective. He is one of the world’s leading experts on human performance. He is the author of 11 bestsellers (out of fourteen books), including The Art of Impossible, The Future is Faster Than You Think, Stealing Fire, The Rise of Superman, Bold and Abundance. His work has been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes, translated into over 50 languages, and has appeared in over 100 publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Wired, Atlantic Monthly, Wall Street Journal, TIME, and the Harvard Business Review.  A lifelong environmentalist and animal rights advocate, Steven is the cofounder of Planet Home, a conference/concert/innovation accelerator focused on solving critical environmental challenges, the cofounder of The Forest + Fire Collective, a network of individuals, organizations and institutions dedicated to ending catastrophic wildfire and restoring forest health to the American West. Alongside his wife, author Joy Nicholson, he is also the co-founder of Rancho de Chihuahua, a hospice care and special needs dog sanctuary. Website: https://www.stevenkotler.com Books: https://www.stevenkotler.com/books Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stevenkotler/ ___________ Know Thyself Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ Website: https://www.knowthyself.one Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ4wglCWTJeWQC0exBalgKg Listen to all episodes on Audio:  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4FSiemtvZrWesGtO2MqTZ4?si=d389c8dee8fa4026 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/know-thyself/id1633725927 André Duqum Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/ Meraki Media https://merakimedia.com https://www.instagram.com/merakimedia/

I have spent my career with people who have done the extraordinary. They all started out ordinary. To perform it your best, what are the basics? Flow states are not binaries. You're not in the zone or out of the zone. It's actually a four-state cycle. It's an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best. Flow is so joyous, so addictive, so pleasurable, so much of our best feeling on earth,

that once an activity starts producing flow, we automatically go back to that. Let's talk about the simplest things people can do if they want more flow in their life. What do you make of when you turn that macro flow dial up to 11 and those states of consciousness become so rapturous that mystical things start happening? Flow can explain synchronicity. It can't explain serendipity. It allows you to sort of get closer and closer and closer to these really interesting mysteries. There's nothing special about the people who do really special things. we're all capable of so much more than we know.

Hello, beautiful beings. Welcome back to the Know They Self podcast for every single week. We get the honor and privilege to sit down with a brilliant mind, beautiful soul to sit down and see what we can learn more about ourselves in the world around us at deeper and deeper levels. My guest today is a New York Times bestselling author, author of many incredible books such as Stealing Fire, The Art of Impossible, The Rise of Superman, and New Book NAR country.

He is an award-winning journalist, and he is the founder and executive director at the Flow Research Collective. And he is an individual that is a world-class leading expert at the human high-performance state of consciousness known as Flow. Stephen Kotler, thank you for coming on the show, my friend. Thanks for having me. It's good to be here. People tune into this podcast because they're trying to become the best, most self-realized,

actualized version of themselves. And there's this Taoist maxim that I actually came across recently that I absolutely love. And it says that the master does nothing, yet leaves nothing. done. And what I take from that is that there is a place within ourselves. There's a state of consciousness that we can't have access to where the sense of being a doer ceases to exist. What I feel like is flow and what you share so much about. And so I would love for you to share how the possibility of reaching the state of consciousness within ourselves where the feeling and the sensation of being a doer can kind of stop, but yet you are extremely effective in the world and

and what you do in your physical activity. And so do you feel like that is an accurate description of what flow would be? I'm going to give you an uneasy answer. Yes and no. Sure. So let's start with the no and then work our way to the yes. But it's an interesting question. You're asking a good question.

So, and this is, you actually jumped to an argument that's sort of been at the heart of flow research for a while, which is neurobiologically, if you look in the brain, flow activates a number of networks cognitive control network which is what allows you to focus really intensely and cut out the world which is one of the things that happens in flow right you stay very focused on the task at hand the other network that's active is the goal directed network so the goal directed network is only active when we're active so the interesting question about the doer doing nothing is he talking about flow and what's interesting about this is and i spent I started when I came into flow, my early work was on what you call the neurobiology of spiritual

experiences or mystical experiences. And I was looking at flow. So I've spent a lot of years scouring like the world for, okay, what was flow called in this culture? What was flow called in this culture? What is it called in this, right? That sort of thing. And we know, for example, flow isn't in enlightenment. It may be closest, if you're going to use a term from Eastern philosophy to what the Japanese is described in the Zen tradition is Satori, a brief awakening, because it's a state and not a stage. And enlightenment is a stage, right? So there's this argument of, is flow always a goal directed action-based state versus like meditated trans states, which are much quieter, right? And this has been a longstanding argument.

The European side of the argument loves to say, no, you can have non-goal-directed. flow. So that's where their position is on the American side. We tend to say, no, no, no, it's always goal-directed flow. I don't know where I come down yet. I'm not actually sure. I just know that this debate has been going on for 25 years. It's probably going to still go on. That said, the similarity between sort of deep meditative states and flow states are neurobiologically also very, very similar, right? So the things that are producing that stillness inside. So, for example, why does that happen in flow? One of the reasons it happens is because your emotions are almost completely turned off in flow. Martin Seligman, sort of one of the godfathers of positive psychology

in his book, Authentic Happiness, points out that flow, you need emotions to modify behavior, right? That's what emotions do. They tell us to act this way or act that way. And think like that, which is one of the reasons people say don't hang on to your emotions, especially in the spiritual traditions, right? Because they're literally meant to be lightning quick behavioral signals that are over and gone in a second. They're not meant to linger. But all of that gets turned off in flow, because if one of the things that happens in flow, right, is every decision, every action leads seamlessly perfectly to the next, right? And if you don't have to course correct behavior, if everything's already perfect in what you're doing, you don't have any need for

emotions. So the entire Olympic system, the amygdala, all that portion of the brain gets what they would call down regulated, turn down. It's really quiet, right? That's where the stillness comes from. You can get the same thing in meditative states and the deactivation of the peripheral cortex that you get in flow. You can also get in certain meditative states. So there's a lot of overlap. And the one question is this goal directed, this action question that you're asking. And as of yet, not solved. That was sort of a really long way of saying, I don't know. Well, you pick, there's a lot of things that you touch on that I want to pick up on. I think that when people have experienced or taste what flow is like, there's this lack of a sense of self.

Totally. And so I think it can kind of feel analogous or very similar to where people have these spiritual experiences and they feel their inherent interconnectedness. There's a sensation of the world, but there is not this me that is so rigid that is the pre-cebra of it. Yeah, and that's, I mean, one of the reasons I feel it's so important to train people in flow. People come to the Fleur Research Collective because they want more productivity, better performance, those sorts of things.

And that's great. But what I get in the bargain is increased empathy and expanded what we call ecological awareness, right? But it basically moves sort of, most people are like human, they're self-first and they're very human-centric, right? Um, flow expands that boundary. You first, you empathize with other people and then it goes beyond the border of species and it'll go into animals and plants and ecosystems and extends outward. Psychedelics will do the same thing. This is sort of well known.

Um, sometimes some of the meditative, uh, states can do it, but not like psychedelics are known for it. Flow is really known for it. Um, that sort of like the self disappearing and then the expanded consciousness, um, that especially transverses like the border of species. sees that's a you know it sounds like a very spiritual kind of experience right it's got all all the hallmarks there and it's certainly um one of the things that shows that these experiences are one of things that show up in the spiritual traditions and all of most of the wisdom traditions talk about

you know this sort of thing um so again long way of saying maybe but we're i you know i i tend to I tend to agree with you on that. What is your description of what flow state is for? What's the definition? Scientifically, the definition is useless, but I'll start there. It's an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best. More specifically, flow refers to any of those moments of rapt attention and total absorption gets so focused on and what you're doing on the task at hand. Everything else just starts to disappear.

Action awareness are going to merge. Your sense of self, as we talked about, self-consciousness disappears completely. lately voice in your head gets really quiet, the inner critic, time will pass strangely. Usually it'll speed up. You get so sucked into what you're doing that, you know, two hours go by and one feels like two minutes. Sometimes it can slow down. If you've been in a car crash into that freeze frame or factor, seen the Matrix bullet time, that'll happen as well in flow sometimes. And throughout all aspects of performance, mental and physical tend to go through the roof. So that's flow in a nutshell. That place where we feel like we feel our best and we perform our best. Who doesn't want that, right?

And we have a $4 trillion altered states economy where a lot of people are seeking that state, that feeling within unconsciously, right? Through drugs, through caffeine, through porn, through video games, through many things that we can kind of alleviate that sense of self and kind of feel more easeful within ourself that allow that optimal state of consciousness to exist. And so I would love for you just to share your. thoughts on how we can so often unconsciously go for things that allow us to get to that state of

consciousness, but then how we can consciously trigger flow instead of just unconsciously seeking unconsciousness in negative ways? Yeah. Well, that just don't have as much negative repercussions, right? One of the things that's interesting about flow, and I've made this argument, other people may disagree. There's, there's, again, debate here. I think humans, maybe all animal because a lot of animals can get into flow. All social mammals can get into flow and maybe all mammals. But definitely with humans, we seem to move in the direction of optimal performance, almost as if the system wants to perform that way. I'll give you a simple example. I got to tell you a little about flow states have triggers, right? If you want more flow in your life, these triggers are

your toolkit. The most famous one is known as the challenge skills balance. It's the idea, Yeah, flow follows focus. So that's what all the triggers do. They drive our attention to the present moment. The challenge skills balance, it's often called the golden rule of flow, to the most famous of the triggers. And it's a simple idea. We pay the most attention to the task at hand

when the challenge of the task slightly exceeds our skill set. So you want to stretch but not snap. If I were to explain that emotionally, I would say there's a midpoint between boredom and anxiety that they talk about is the flow channel. Bortem, there's not enough stimulation here. I'm not really paying attention. Anxiety.

Whoa, way too much. I can't stop paying attention. In between this is a flow channel. If you speak physiology at all, it's what's known as the irks-dopsin curve. But all this is sort of besides the point. I want to talk about procrastination. So we are told culturally, procrastination is a bad thing. Don't do this. And there's probably some common sense there. But what's interesting about procrastination is it's also a system moving towards optimal performance. So think about the challenge, skills, balance, boredom and anxiety, right? And in-between is this flow-cham. So procrastination takes one or two forms.

Either the thing that you're putting off doing bores you. It's not interesting enough. So you can't, right? What's actually having this brain is saying, hey, you can't focus on this thing. You'll never drop into flow and be your best. So put it off until the time stress builds up to the point that you're in that challenge skills sweet spot, right? And if it's overwhelming, if you're on the other side of the coin, you get the same

thing. And so what I always tell people is if you feel that, to procrastinate first figure out are you procrastinating because the thing bores you or because the thing stresses you out if it bores you i'll give you an example for my own life so i came up as a journalist and i was poor and had to write hundreds of articles all the time and most of them i loved i'm a very curious person and you know i can pretty much find something in any subject that i'm interested in but every now and again an article would come up though it was just like i'm doing this for the money that's all that's happening here um and i would procrastinate it right and i would procrastinate it

Right? Like I put it off and it's a bad idea. You don't want to put off like an article that's due for an editor that's writing you a paycheck to the night before. What if my dog gets sick? What if, you know, something happens? So it's a lousy idea. But I had the same, like I was putting things off. So I started doing, making the challenge harder for myself. I would say, okay, write this article for Wired Magazine in the style of Charles Dickens or something like that. Something really absurd. We're like, yeah, I was curious about how Dickens wrote his sentences, but trying to like sneak a Charles Dickens. style article passed by Wired magazine editor. That's like, you know, the kind of challenge view. You're like, it's goofy. But it was just enough to like, oh, this is kind of goofy. Like I'm writing an article about data caves in this style of like Charles Dickens. And that's just weird enough that it raised the challenge level. And I was no longer bored by it.

And I could get it done. When the task is too hard and too big and too anxious, you just want to chunk it down. So what's in front of you is much more manageable. all this is a long way of saying, we do that naturally, right? We procrastinate naturally, and we think it's a bad thing. It's got this cultural bad rap, but if you look it from the perspective of peak performance, my argument is, no, no, it's your system saying, hey, you're capable of much better performance, and let's try to create the situation that will produce that.

Part one. The second answer to your question is about how we relate to dopamine. So all of the substances and activities you just mentioned, whether we're talking about sex addiction or gambling addiction or shopping addiction or drug addiction or alcoholic addiction or internet porn or take your pick, it's all about that like dopamine treadmill. Give me more dopamine.

Give me more dopamine. We have T-shirts, the collective that say never trust the dopamine, right? And for this very reason. and it's flow you get a little bit of dopamine, but you get four other reward chemicals that are just as potent, dust is pletrival. So there's a lot more going on than just dopamine. That dopamine loop, I don't know if there's any easy way to do it.

You just, to me, and this, I think, is probably, you know, this sort of what I'm about to say is probably found in all the wisdom tradition. They have different ways of doing this, but you literally just have to sort of break that easy attachment to fast dopamine, which is a, I think at some point in everybody's life, you're gonna have to do that.

You don't have to do anything. But if you want overall life satisfaction, if you want well-being, if you want peace, you're going to have to break the addiction to easy dopamine. which is not to say flow, I mean, flow is a very addictive state, way more addictive than dopamine, right? If like, do you want to talk on your cell phone? Do you want to go surfing? Most people end up going surfing. Why? Because surfing will drop you into flow and the cell phone just give you dopamine, right? Like when you put the reward side by side, people tend to move towards flow over the easy, fast dopamine hit.

But I think you have to break that, just the stickiness of dopamine. dopamine and it's just practice right it's like everything else i'll give you a weird example that happened to me so they're just now talking about dysfunctional daydreaming people who have usually happens in childhood people with really rough childhoods tend to escape into daydreams and um it becomes dysfunctional because when you come back from the daydream reality is nowhere near as good as your your daydream right you're trying to escape reality so what happens is you end up living in those daydreams and that was definitely my childhood and I got to a point somewhere between middle school and high school I don't exactly know when I happened when I started to realize I was like oh wow

this is actually interfering with not only does it feel bad when I come to reality because reality in comparison of my daydream is you know negative but it uh it was too sticky it was getting in the way of like I wasn't even paying attention to class I wasn't even there kind of thing and I started I was like oh this is a habit and daydream I mean, produced a little bit of dope me. It feels good, right? And so I learned sort of early on how, like I had to just sort of wrestle my brain back from yourself early on. But it took a while to break that link. And it's, you know, it's like any addiction. It's go back and forth a little bit with it and finally you break free. I don't know if that's the answer you were looking for.

I think it's really interesting because a lot of people definitely struggle procrastination I have earlier on for sure. And there's, I think, whether it's from stress or boredom like you spoke to, those are powerful indicators and inquiries people can have to gain awareness as to why am I putting off what I'm putting off right now. And I feel like the more that we clarify a passion, a purpose in our life that allows us to generally go after something that we're excited for in life, then we're not constantly facing this uphill battle of doing things that we're not really excited to do in the first place. So how important do you feel like it is to clarify your passion and purpose if you want to be able to sink more into flow in your life.

So that's a great question and the answer is super important. So the art of impossible follows the order of our biology. It's a peak performance blueprint, but our biology was designed evolutionarily when I'm talking about it to work in a specific order. So if you're interested in peak performance, if you're interested in flow, I always talk about the importance of stacking internal or intrinsic motivators, right? There's a difference between extracent motivators and internal motivators. Extrinsic motivators, money, sex, fame, should in the world that will work hard to get. Internal motivators, there's a lot of them, but there's five major ones. Curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, and mastery. And they're literally, biologically, one is designed to

be built into the other. And the way I sort of break this down for people is curiosity is the simplest motivator in the world. And by the way, when we talk about a motivator, right, one easy way to think about it is one of the biggest things that motivators give us is focus for free. So the brain's an energy hog, right? It uses 25% of our energy and that's at rest, right? So anytime you're trying to do something like pay attention to something that's a lot more energy. And anything that gives you focus for free, that's what motivation is great for, right? So think about curiosity. curious about a subject, you're not working really hard to pay attention to it, right? It happens automatically. So curiosity is the most basic of the intrinsic motivators. It is designed to be built

into passion. What that literally means is passion gets really mystified in today's world and ascribed a lot of things that maybe it's not. And it's interesting because philosophically, by the way, most people, we talk about passion is a really good thing from like Plato, until Nietzsche, right? And whether you're talking about the Western philosophical tradition or religious and spiritual traditions, passion's a bad thing, right?

Yume says, oh, wait, we've got this, excuse me, Kant says we have this like moral passion, right, what he calls the categorical imperative. He's one of the only philosophers sort of along the way who had some use for passion. But most philosophers were like, no, no, this is bad. This gets us away from kind of rational intellectual thought, which is what we should prize. So it's interesting. It's only been in the past

50, 67 years that we've started to go, oh, no, passion is really important. It's really a good thing, right, which I just find fascinating. But curiosity, when you can find the intersection of multiple curiosities, right? Not one curiosity, sometimes that's enough for people to build it into passion, but as a general rule, there's just not enough energy there, right? And it won't hold your attention over the long haul. But if you can, I always start, people make a list at 25 things you're curious about and then look for where they intersect with one another and play at those intersections for a while.

This is the other thing that people get wrong with passion. A lot of people are looking for it and purpose is they want it really fast. Passion purpose are not designed. That's how you get two years into like your passion project to go, oh, wow, it was just a phase. This isn't really who I am or what I want to be doing. that's really demotivating. That's an awful place to be. So I always tell people, build passion slowly, right?

Build purpose slowly. But passion is built out of multiple curiosities intersecting. Once you have passion, it's a great motivator, as you know, right? Think about romantic love. Think about when you're falling in love, that passion you feel. You can't just stop focusing on the person you're in love with it. It happens automatically get tremendous amounts of focus for free. The problem of passion over time is so if you go into passion,

in psychology, they divide passion between harmonious passion and obsessive passion. Obsessive passion goes in a negative direction. Harmonious passion goes in a positive direction. It's difficult to separate the two, right? And I've seen what they would call harmonious passion. I'm writing a book. It's going great. And suddenly I get stuck and I get, you know, really obsessive.

And it can be kind of a dark spiral for a while, right? So I just say passion in general is a great motivator, but it's a little too selfish for the long haul, right? Which is where purpose comes into play. Now, I'm going to give you a bunch of geeky science to why passion and purpose are important. I talked about motivators. Passion is essentially about producing feel good neurochemistry, noraphenaphyran and dopamine. That's what you get from passion is those two chemicals. Purpose is interesting.

Those are, by the way, very individual motivators. there once you attach purpose to your passion, you couple your passion to something outside yourself that you'd like to see fixed in the world, right? Something bigger than yourself that will help the planet, help other people, that sort of thing, that's purpose. You get the pro-social neural chemistry, right?

Because you've extended it beyond yourself, so you get dopamine and norepidaphrine, which are really powerful motivators. And just like, if you're not familiar in neurochemistry, when I say dopamine and nor epitaphne, you put those things together, that's the cocktail called romantic love. So we were talking about it a second ago.

We've all fallen love that amazing feeling. That's nor epinephrine and dopamine. That's what produces that. With purpose, you start to add in serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins. These are the pro-social chemicals. So endorphins are opiates, right? They're internal opiates, but that's a mother and a child

or a father in a child, right? That's that parental bond we get with our offspring, really strong, really tight. We know about oxytocin. And everybody knows about serotonin is like the calming chemical. this point so you start getting those pro social chemicals what does that mean it means way more motivation way more focus for free that's why purpose is such a useful thing from a peak performance perspective

we can circle back and talk about meeting a life stuff with purpose and all that stuff if you want but once you have purpose what does the system want next once autonomy the freedom to pursue that purpose right it's worthless to have a purpose if you can't actually go after it and once you have that freedom once you have autonomy you want mastery the skills to pursue to pursue that purpose pursue that purpose well. We talk about the big five motivators and I talk a lot about stacking motivations and this is where peak performance, I always say it starts there and one of the reasons is flow follows focus and when all five of your intrinsic motivators are tightly stacked like that drives a lot of focus. It also turns out that all five of the things that I just mentioned

are flow triggers, all of them. Mastery is another way of saying the challenge skills balance because flow fall is focused. We pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge is slightly harder than our skill set. So you're always stretching a little outside your comfort zone. Getting a little better, getting a little better,

getting a little better. That's the path to mastery. Passion produces dopamine, which drives focus, purpose, dopamine and a bunch of these other things. Autonomy is interesting. So flow follows focus. And it turns out autonomy is really tightly coupled in the brain to focus.

We as humans, we like to drive our bus. We like to drive the bus. And we pay more attention to where the bus is going and we're the ones driving. Everybody sort of knows this, right? When it's your thing, you care a whole lot more. You pay a whole lot more attention.

So autonomy, there's a bunch of stuff that's positive about freedom, but it's really about focus from a flow peak performance perspective. But you're getting curiosity is the same thing. You're getting all five of these sort of flow triggers in a stack and as a sort of precondition. If you want more flow in your life,

not a bad place to start, right? The triggers are your toolkit and this is a really, this is also where your biology wants to start from sort of an evolutionary perspective. I love that. There is so much there in that kind of lighter and how it stacks. I think it's going to be super helpful for people. And it rings true to me that. Let me say, let me add one other thing just because this is the mistake everybody makes on passion and purpose. And it's, I just find it really helpful to know. Sorry to cut you off. though. So when I say passion to you or to most people, right, you get an image of like, if you're my age, you see Michael Jordan going in for like a windmill dog. If you're younger,

maybe you're Steph Curry shooting a three or LeBron with a windmill dunk. Either way, that's what our image of passion is or yo-yo mom playing the cello. And that is passion, but it's mature adult passion at the end. That's what it looks like at the end. That's where You're going, right? What people forget is, what does it look like on the front end? What does it look like when you're just starting out, right? We hear everybody saying, I want passion, I want purpose. And what I hear coming out of their mouth is what I really want is a lightning bolt from the sky, right?

That'll just, just something I'm going to, oh, this is my passion, this is my purpose, I've discovered it. One, doesn't work that way. Passion and purpose are earned a little bit of interest at a time. You have to build them up in yourself. one, two, passionate the front end, it's a little kid in a driveway shooting hoops trying to get that basketball to fall. It's not Michael Jordan, LeBron, James, at the end of the arc. Sure, that's where you're going.

But you're actually looking for it. So when you think about that bolt of lightning that you want to strike you, let's say it does strike you. What's it going to feel like on the front end? It's going to feel like a little kid with a curiosity, right? Can I get better at this? Can I get better? that's what it feels like on the front end.

So people get it wrong. They don't have enough patience with themselves. And you really need that. But they get it wrong because they're expecting this big, weighty, kind of heavy, mystical, thick thing that feels spiritual. Oh, my God, I know what my passion is. I know what my purpose is. It's not what it's like on the front end at all. Not for a friend.

I've never talked about passion and purpose with. tens of thousands of people at this point, I've never heard one story where it's, you know, all-consuming, it shows up fully formed on the front. It just doesn't work that way. That's not really how our biology works. Now, let me give you the caveat, because we do have love at first fight, right? Maybe we don't have love at first sight, but I've certainly met a bunch of people who have, you know, had that experience. I've probably had it once or twice over the course of my life as well. That's instant passion. So, It seems like romantically maybe that's possible a little bit, even though we all know, like, anybody who's been in a relationship, but I don't care how passionate you are at the front end. You're still going to have to earn that passion over time and work at it, right? So it may come with that crazy feeling. I mean, it's still going to require a massive amount of effort. This is the other thing that people get wrong about passion is they think it means easy, right?

Oh, I've got my passion, I've got my purpose. It's no, these are burdens. Purpose especially. So my purpose, one of my, has always been to make the world a better place for animals, right? This is my wife and I run a dog sanctuary. I've been involved in environmental and animal rights issues for 30 years at this point. That's a purpose. Do you know what that is like in the real world?

Have I gotten anywhere, right? Have I done anything? For my, I mean, I've worked, see, so I'll give me an example. We run hospice care dog sanctuary. In 20 years, about 800 animals have been through our facility. So we've taken care of 800 animals. It's amazing. They kill, they meaning the U.S. government euthanizes 10 to 20 million dogs a year in America.

Mostly, 50% of those animals for the crime of getting older, right? People, dogs get old, they lose control of their bladders and the balls and they get dumped into shelters. And for most animals, it's a death sentence. You know, there are very few facilities like ours that do this work. But if you think about it, we, for 20 years, my wife and I, I can count on my hands. Maybe I now need my toes to the number of times we've been out to dinner in 20 years. We've taken one trip together away from the dogs and so forth. So there's been some sacrifice to do this.

The truth of the matter is, I've worked on this for 20 years. And there's a bunch of other environmental initiatives. This is the most successful one. They kill, let's say it's 10 million dogs a year. We didn't even dent Tuesday. I didn't even dent Tuesday, right? Forget about, right? That's purpose is about never reaching your goal, right?

If you've got a real purpose, I want to do this in the world. I mean, you're never fulfilled. You never get there. It's an endless heartbreaking treadmill. So everybody talks about how. I want passion, I want purpose. Are you sure? Are you sure?

Because purpose is heavy. And it's a burden as much as a blessing. So I hear this from people. And what I really think every time somebody says, oh, I want passion and purpose is no, I want to get late on a Friday night. That's what I hear. That's what I hear you saying to me.

I want to do something that's going to make me look good for whoever it is that I'm attracted to. That's what I'm hearing. Because when you actually see what passion and purpose looks like up close when it's real, it's heavy. It weighs a lot. It's not what people think it is. I'm not dissuading anybody. It makes certain things a lot easier. It makes a lot of things a lot harder. Yeah, it's the burden you're willing to pay for what you feel like needs to come through you and what needs to be done. Exactly. And you're happy to make those sacrifices because the alternative is even more painful, right, not doing that.

The alternative is more painful. I don't know if you're happy, but you're not bitter. They don't make you, right? You don't. you don't resent the sacrifice. They're not always pleasing, but you don't have to resent it afterwards, right? So I love what you opened up so many boxes that we could spend hours and hours diving into, but I really love that invitation you gave of just allowing people to explore what those inner curiosities are as kind of the inklings on the path to realizing their purpose and becoming more self-actualized. I was talking to a friend recently who is like kind of stepping into this next stage of his life, and he feels like he has all these amazing connections. He has a sense. passion for raising the evolution of consciousness on the planet. And he loves production and media.

And when I look at my own life and I look at the overlap of my curiosities that have come into this and to the show, my, you know, my passion, my curiosities for videography, for filmmaking, for sharing media as medicine and, you know, reaching out and being able to share conversations that can raise consciousness on the planet. My deep curiosities and passions for having these kind of conversations and the format of like all these things overlap right and they stick they kind of stack on top of each other like you're speaking to to finding that harmonious passion that can as you continue to go on that path and develops into mastery one day in your life and I think that's so beautiful you've shared a quote of yours is that if we are hunting the highest version of ourselves then we need

to turn work into play and not the other way around and so I'd love for you to share how our purpose can and if we want to become the best version of ourselves and impact and be the most effective version of ourselves, then we need to find that place where it's like that most ease and where it can actually feel like play because we're only going to get masterful at something if we really love to do it in the first place. Yeah, that's for sure. So let's start with the geeky neuroscience for one second because there's, so this is one the things that people don't understand about learning quick shorthand for what so flow massively

amplifies learning and memory right it's one of the things that happens in flows the Department of defense did a study of soldiers and flow and they found they learned 240 to 500 percent faster than normal so flow is known to massively shorten the path to mastery um normally when we learn what happens is the brain pretty you get a little bit in norapinephrine noropinephrine is like i'm awake I'm alert. I'm a little excited. I'm a little curious, right? That's what's going on on the inside. Maybe if there's a goal tied into what you're learning, what you're doing, you'll get a little dopamine. So two neurochemicals boost learning. Great. Super useful. When we play, you get noropenephrine, dopamine, and endorphins, right? Really big hit of endorphins is a general rule. So one,

massively amplifies learning, shortens the path to mastery. to be. It's not quite flow. Flows a bigger neurochemical dump, but it's much better than regular learning. So one, if you're walking a path to mastery and you want to get there quickly, plays a faster road. Also, because when we're playing, so this is really important as a writer. I'm a writer. I'm a creative. And there's a time I want to be self-conscious and critical of my work, right? But that's not when I'm actually getting the words down on the text. That's what editing is for, right? When I'm getting the words on the text, I don't want shame, self-consciousness, embarrassment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That's all the stuff we tend to get

from learning. Oh, I'm trying to get this. I'm trying to get this. And I'm not getting any better, right? And we beat ourselves up inside. And if you're wired like me, I really beat myself up inside for for not learning. I'm really hard on myself on the inside. So play has been a lifesaver for me because it takes all that crap out of the way for when I need it out of the way. So I always, with my writing, you know, I, even if I go in and like, I write every day, right? It's a work thing. I show up at 4 o'clock in the morning and no matter what else is going on, I'm going to write at least till 8 a.m. And that's going to happen every day unless I'm on the road when I read. But like, you know, it's essentially 300 days a year. And it has been for,

40 years or something like that. That's a discipline. That's a work effort. But 10 minutes in, I'm playing, right? It starts out. It's the same thing. I got to get my butt in the chair. I got to get into it.

But the minute I'm going and the minute I start getting to noodle with language, I'm playing. And one of the reasons that quote is so important, you've got to turn work into play, right? To get to wherever you want to go is because the road is long. The road is just really, really, really. really long and one of the things that peak performers know and this is this is in our country the new book i really talk a lot about this um this is something a lot of people sort of get wrong um probably for really good reasons grit for peak performers is a last resort most people grit is the first tool they something gets hard oh i fuck you i gotta just tough this out overcome it by more for us

right right and that's fine except it's a recipe for burnout Right? You app that's only going to, so peak performers will reach for every other motivation possible before going for grit. So we just talked about the big five intrinsic motivators, right? I, that's, that's the first place I turn. So if the task is really grueling, sure, I can just get gritty or I can stop and go, what about this is really curious to me? Where's my curiosity in here? What's really cool in here that I'm super interested in? How does this task tie in with my passion and my purpose? I can reframe it that way or challenge skills balance is something I love to do.

Rather than grit to get gritty, can I detune the challenge level a little bit, right? Chunk it down so what's in front of me is smaller or more playful kind of thing and start there and then build back up. So grit is the tool you, I mean, we're all going to need it, right? And I always say that like in any given day, first of all, grit's also a, it's limited, right? It's tied to willpower on a daily basis. And willpower drains over the course of the day. So you have a lot of it in the morning, high energy. And it fades as we get towards the end of the day, which is why like you can quit smoking or stay on your diet all day long.

And then you get to like eight o'clock at night. And suddenly you're powering through ice cream, right? Because willpower has used it up. And, you know, and you have none left sort of at the end of the day. So grit's a limited resource, first of all, and we all know if you're getting after it in any real way, there's going to be shit that happens every day that you're going to have to be gritty about no matter what, right? Just because file under shit happens category. So if stuff's going to happen and you're going to have to be gritty anyways, if that's the only tool like why are so many people burned out, it's because this is the tool they keep reaching for. And there's a lot of other tools in that kit that you want to go to first.

So the alternative to like really just if you desire sustainability and the longevity of being able to for years and years and years, wake up at four and go to eight of just writing in the morning or whatever that version is for somebody where they're really committed and devoted to something, you got to figure out how to, you get to figure out the play. I always tell people, like, don't think I'm getting out of bed because I'm tough. or like it's none of that stuff. I'm getting out of bed because I'm dying to know where the sentences are going to take me.

I'm dying to know what the words are going to do today. It's still fascinated to me. That little bit of magic that comes through in the writing where you're like, you know, I know this word, I know this word, I know this word,

and suddenly you're like, oh wow, I didn't know that about myself. And you see like, you learn a little thing about yourself or you learn a little thing about the universe or your relationship. You know what I mean? That kind of stuff.

That's play for me. on top of it. And I also, I bake play what I call play for me. Challenges very, I like challenges. So every one of my book projects, pick a book, there's the ideas I want to communicate, which is, you know, why most people write a book. There's a bunch of ideas they want to communicate. That's usually the tiniest part of my motivation. It's usually there's some kind of writing challenge, right? Stealing fire. Stealing fire, the writing challenge was factual density. So that's a very factually dense book. It on average has two to three facts per sentence, which is an incredible amount of fact density. You didn't notice, but I spent months and months and months and months and months pouring over, for example,

Stephen Pinker, who's a scientist at Harvard, he's written a lot of books. He writes really fun books, fun sentences, but very information dense. And I knew we had so much information to cover in Stealing Fire that if I didn't do that, it was going to be like a 2,000-page book that nobody was going to read. So I was like, okay, I got to figure this out. That to me is play, right? It's a challenge. It's hard. I don't know how to do it, but it's play. And once I got it down, I got any tool in my belt that I can use going forward. And that's really exciting to me, too. So those kinds of challenges. And they're like six or seven of those built into every one of my books that, you know, nobody sees. They're just for me. But they're just for me. But they're

how I turn work into play. This is great. I can tell that we're in flowing conversation now because it's actually where I was going to take you next. And it's actually a good sign for this podcast and something I want to maybe pin and bring up later about flow and group dynamics. But if we're always chasing flow, it doesn't necessarily make space for the part of ourselves that when we learn anything new, we're going to face those inevitable, hard, challenging moments when we're, you know, when we're learning something new. And so I think I've shared in this podcast before. And I love kind of those four stages of learning. I'm sure you're

familiar with where you start and you're unconsciously incompetent. You just don't know what you don't know in regards to tying your shoelace, learning how to ski. You just don't even know the thing exists, right? And then you have conscious incompetency where you know you don't know. And then you have a conscious competency where it takes a lot of energy and effort to do the thing. You have to think a lot about it. You have to learn how to do the two loops and the pull for tying your shoelaces or whatever it is, pizza and French fries, whatever skiing. And then we get to that place of unconscious competency where it just becomes second nature and that's super in flow, right? Right.

What I want to focus on is that area of conscious competency where you're learning the thing. And that often feels like a lot of resistance. It's challenging to learn something new. Learn to scale on the piano. It takes a lot of effort. We all desire that state of flow where we're just masterful and we're doing the thing. But inevitably to get there, you have to focus and get to that point where it's a little bit more clunky.

And so how do you relate to that? because a lot of, I think, people, when they speak about flow, it's this ideal state of just, you know, so much ease. But if we're going to learn anything new, which is part of the process of becoming self-actualized, it's going to consist of a lot of those consciously competent moments. So, because there's like 17 answers. Yeah. Let me start with the first thing that pops in my mind because you asked a flow specific question. So if you read my books, you know this.

Flow states are not binaries. You're not in the zone or out of the zone, right? It's actually a four-stage cycle. And you have to move through all four stages of the flow cycle before you can pop back into flow, right? So there's no such thing as a permanent flow state, which is why, one, we know power flow is not enlightenment. But, like, I always tell people in the early days of my career, it stopped happening. But people would come up to me about once a month. It was usually a guy.

The eye is really, really big. Oh, dude, you got to study me. I'm in flow all the time. And it used to happen a lot, and I never knew what to say to people. And finally, I just settled on the truth, which is, you know, we have a word for that. We call that schizophrenia, right? Mania sometimes, but like that's what that is. There's no such thing as a permanent flow state.

And some of the stages of the flow cycle are really unflowy. And flow starts with a struggle phase. Why? Because you have to learn things consciously before you can perform them unconsciously. And it's always struggle. So there's always a struggle phase on the front end of a flow state. One way or another, in fact, even in miniature, so we just worked on, spent the past three years working on big paper that came out a couple

months ago and what happens in the brain in the first few seconds of flow as we transition into the flow. And one of the things that is becoming more and more clear is you may need to trigger the fight response for a second. Like we've heard about fight or flight, the fight response at the front end of a flow state. A lot of people cure flow and are like, oh, it's going to like, I want a flowy mountain bike ride, right? Going out for a flowy mountain bike ride is the easiest way to go to the hospital, right?

You'll get bounced off your bike. Why? Because mountain biking is a violent, aggressive sport. And you have to go out and attack the mountain. And it's through that attacking that you'll actually get into flow. You can't go out seeking flow in that way because you're not bringing enough to the fight. You literally, you need the fight response because it tells the brain to put all your focus right here, right now. That's really what it's doing, right?

You want the testosterone underneath it, right? You don't want to fight anything. You just want the testosterone for focus. So even in miniature, there's going to be struggle, right? It's built in. That's the first thing I want to say. So if you think that a lifespan and flow is a life without struggle, disavow yourself of that notion, right? It's literally baked in to the state.

The other side of it is most of the time. This is possibly not true with learning some action sports or some combat sports where there are penalties for failure. Like physical pain can be a penalty for failure. Getting punch in the face. Right, getting punch in the face. And even this isn't entirely true. Struggle is awful.

learning is awful mostly because of how we're talking to ourselves, right? I've been teaching myself how to draw. I have a degree in art from way back in, but I haven't touched drawing in 30 years. And I just came back to it seven months ago. And all I'm doing is making a drawing a day, basically.

And usually it's just like, today I'll draw shoulders, today I'll draw trees, to Dale and then once a week I'll try to make art and I'm certainly not good enough to me I'm not making art yet right I'm doing but like I let seven months of doing this 250 drawings let's say there might be three that I might actually show to people maybe maybe just maybe and only if I really love you I posted a couple on a social media why what because I want to like I don't like learning anything in public.

It really bothers me. I don't like being bad in public. I don't mind being bad, but I don't like being bad in public. But I want to get over that because it blocks learning. So I'm forcing myself to put some of these drawings out on social media along the way just because it helps me break down that. But as a general rule, the experience has been remarkably flowy. And one of the reasons is I have zero expectation.

I have no, I don't think I'll ever do anything professionally. with those drawings. I have no plans for an art show or a graphic novel or any of that stuff. This is really just for me, but I don't judge it, right? In fact, if it's good, I'm more surprised than if it's bad. If it's bad, I'm still learning, right? Usually what is a win for me is it's bad,

but I can see what I did wrong, so I don't have to make that mistake again, right? And that's how I'm looking at it, and I'm calling that a win. If you're going at it that way, the learning process can be incredibly flowy. Now, I'm not dropping into deep, what we would call macroflow, deep macroscopic flow states. But I am getting into microflow, the kind of low-grade version of the state, almost every time I draw.

And it's literally just the, I'm showing up, I'm putting the work, and I'm not judging at all. Now, that's unusual for me. It took me a long time to figure out how to not judge myself, right? I'm harsh on myself. And I like that about myself. I think one of the reasons I'm successful is because I'm a ruthless task master on myself. But it's gotten to a point where it can stand my way and some of it's negative. So I'm trying, especially with drawing, to kind of remove that and posting things in public is taking that a little farther and making it a little more uncomfortable, but it's working.

So my point is you can. microflow is very available, right? Along the way, when it starts getting blocked for a lot of people is the shame, the self-consciousness, or for me, I say this a lot with skiing. Self-expectation has ruined more ski days than anything else in the world, right? And the worst, flow is the worst for this. So this is really funny, but we talk about flow is the most pleasurable state on Earth, and it is. But I get into a great flow state to go skiing and say, like I, you know, I learned a bunch of new tricks in the terrain park in flow.

The next time I come back, I expect to be able to perform at that level right again. And that's usually not how it works. What happens with flow, especially with athletics, but usually in general, when you can do a deep flow state, it's your body showing you, okay, this is what might be possible at the unconscious level, but you're still going to have to learn how to do all these things consciously along the way before you can get back here. So I feel like sometimes flow states give you a preview of what's possible without flow. And I always say, for example, with skiing, my favorite day, though it's a miserable day physically, my favorite days are the days that I do everything I did previously in flow, out of flow, right? Because it's proof that I've actually mastered these skills.

It's usually, they say you, in sports, they say you can win a championship without flow if it's a one game chance. You can't win a seven-gate series without flow. It's not that that'll never happen. But if it's a single one game of a Super Bowl, for example, you can probably pull that off without flow, but you'll never want to do it again because it's so miserable. So you can perform at your best without the sport without flow, but it's rare.

I love those days, even though they are miserable. It's because it's become a part of you. It's become a part of you. And now you can execute it when you're tired, when you're not. Like, that's what I'm really excited because then I'm like, oh, I got this. And I can trust that the skill is. built in. That's exciting. I think

I love that analogy, your story of drawing and how you share that because there's that quote that what we do in the dark shines in the light. We're constantly being fed people's highlight reels of their unconscious competency of what they're doing that's like that's taken them

a long time. Oftentimes they get to that point and we don't see the dark times. We don't see them consciously practicing. By the way, I should tell you, my best friend started doing it. he was teaching himself guitar and he started doing it and i was like oh wow that's really brave yeah i don't know if i could do that you know what i mean so i watched somebody else do it first i was

like okay that's a really good idea and i'm really a fan of it because for the same reason you pointed out like it bugs me on social media where you get like the best lives and and nothing else um and i also think um i'm not a fan of social media i tend to think social media broke the world but but so immediate feedback is a flow trigger and what flow follows focus when feedback is immediate we don't have to wonder how we perform we know right so when we're in sports are so flowy is you either serve the tennis ball into the net or you got it into the court right in or out you know immediate that's immediate feedback the internet social media can be really great for a little bit of immediate feedback i don't think it's useful for any other i mean there's some good ways to do business

on social media that I think are probably useful. But for creativity and immediate feedback, I think it's a great tool for that and really, really useful. But I watched a friend of mine do it, and I was like, oh, my God, if he was willing to be, like, really bad. Because, like, a bad drawing is one thing. Listen to somebody learning how to play guitar is kind of brutal, right?

Like, it's maybe a little worse. And he was so brave with it. And I was watching it. I was like, oh, wow, I've got the same, like, I got the same shame and embarrassment, and I only like to be great in public, too. Right. So let me go right at this. Let me try this, too.

So thank you for giving you credit for it, but I stole it from somebody who's not mine. No, it's good. It's important for those reminders in a world where everyone's just showing the best version of themselves. Before we move on, can you just give those definitions of micro-versed macro flow and actually define what those four stages are just to clarify that as well? flow is a spectrum it's not a singular experience um it's a spectrum of experiences i always say it's like emotions anger you're a little irked you're homicidally murderous right it's the same emotion anger flow shows up on a spectrum micro flow to macro flow so let me back up a little bit flow has

how do you know if you're in flow or out of flow how do you know if your friends in flow state of six core, we call them phenomenal logical characteristics, meaning this is how the experience makes you feel, right? Complete concentration on the task at hand, a merger of action awareness. I mentioned some of these earlier, the vanishing of self, time dilation. We don't feel peak performance. That's not our internal experience. That's I was, I could be looking at you in flow, right? And I see you performing your best. Inside, it feels like a sense of control. I can control things. I can't normally control. My words are doing amazing things at 4 a.m. on a Tuesday. And that doesn't normally happen, right? Like, wow, I got all this control of my sentence, or I keep shooting baskets,

and the hoop is as big as a loo-lupa and I can't miss, right? And finally, the experience is autotelic, meaning an end in itself, meaning it's so pleasurable. Autotelic is a Greek term for an end in itself. And it tries to describe the fact that flow is so joyous, so addictive, so pleasurable, so much of our best feeling on earth, that once an activity starts producing flow, we automatically go back to that activity. We're just obsessed with it. It doesn't take effort to go do it. We just want to keep doing it, right? That's autotelic. So when we measure micro to macro flow, microflow is those six conditions showed up, but they're like one or two. They're turned on the volume knob. It's like one or two. So you go to work. You sit down to write an email to your boss and you get so, it's supposed

to take two minutes. You get so sucked into what you have to say that like 45 minutes goes by. you've written an essay instead of a paragraph and maybe so the entire voice in your head self-conscious just didn't totally fade away but bodily awareness did and when you sort of wake back up you realize you have to run to the bathroom right this happens to all of us all the time this is like a daily experience so microflow is actually really common in fact chick sent me hi the godfather of flow psychology me hi chick sent me hi uh in a study day i want to say back into the 80s 1980s so 40 years ago at this point found that people spend about 5% of their work life in 5 to 10% of their work life in microflow,

often without even noticing it. So microflow is really common. It's the low-grade version of it. The other side, macroflow, when all those things are turned up to 11. And until the 1950s, macroflow wasn't a thing. We talked about that as a spiritual experience, religious experiences or spiritual experiences or mystical experiences.

And it was Abraham Masla was studying, commonalities among successful people. And he found that all the successful people who were studying all use flow to alter their consciousness and perform at their best, but everybody in this particular study group was an atheist. So it was the first time somebody went, oh, this isn't just reserved for religious people or spiritual people. This is available for everybody.

That was actually where Chick-Sent-Mehai came from. So Maslow figured out pre-Maslo, it's a spiritual experience. Maslow's like, oh, no, super successful. people have this. Chick-Sept-Me-high comes along a decade later and says, what about everybody else? What about like the common man and woman? What do they feel when they experience optimal performance? And that was his quest. That was what he started out trying to figure out is, is it the same? Is it different? It's obviously the same. But so macroflow is really powerful. And some of the weirder out-of-body experiences, cosmic unity, that feeling of oneness with everything, are common experiences in macroflow. We understand the neurobiology behind them. By the way,

since you have a slightly more spiritual audience, let me just say this out loud. Just because there's science at the heart of something does not say anything about the greater why question, right? I learned this years ago from my mentor, Andrew Newberg, who started out, you know, doing research on Franciscan nuns and Tibetan Buddhists who felt cosmic unity, one with everything, and he wanted to know where it came from. And this was really early work for me in Flow. But he taught me, one, my field, in general, in all states, in general, the field of studying that has tremendous advancement between when scientists sit down with spiritual folks and have conversations

and try to figure out what the hell, where the commonality is and what's going on, that's where most of the progress has come from in the past 30 years. And a lot of the fields that you're interested in the conversations we're having, it was these conversations and I always just want to tell people I am an agnostic I have no idea and um one way or the other and I like the mystery I like not knowing I'm really comfortable with that I like the uncertainty a lot of people don't one way or another just because I'm talking about biology it doesn't answer any of the why questions just talking about how yeah um I had to say that sorry you know it's good um macroflow microflow microflow macroflow the mystical experience microflow

One of the things that's really important for anybody interested in peak performance, one of the things that you learn how to do is macroflow is really common. How do you turn up the volume on a macro flow state to get it to, or a microflow state to get it to a macro flow state? That's one of the things that we've started to learn how to do. The second thing you asked about is, I said, flow is a four-stage cycle. on the front end is this struggle phase. It's a loading phase. And this is really good because you broke down the consciousness, the associated process, unconscious learning.

Struggle is about using your conscious mind to really think hard about it. And it's usually a loading phase where you're loading then overloading the brain with information. That is followed by what's called a release phase. You literally have to take your mind off the problem. So what you want to do is pass the problem over from the conscious mind to the subconscious mind to solve it, right? And you can only do that by taking your mind out of the problem. So that's what happens in the release phase. And usually there's usually activities that are really good for that.

Low-grade physical activity that doesn't exhaust you, but like a long walk is a really famous way for people to go through a release phase, gardening, building model, airplanes actually and model dinosaur like building models there's research that shows this is a phenomenal release activity drawing is a good at good activity there um tv doesn't work tv will actually block the next stage is flow and it'll end up blocking flow because how it affects your brainwaves but you get the idea third stage is flow itself and flow is a high energy state takes a lot of energy produced on the back end of a flow state there's a recovery phase and the recovery phase is important for a couple of reasons. One, you have to, if you got into flow, you need that recovery phase if you actually want to learn what you learned in flow, right? We need deep delta wave

sleep to pass things into long-term memory. So really important on the back end of a flow stage. You could get this massively amplified learning. So you've taken it all in, but it's not locked yet. It's not locked into long-term storage. And if you don't sleep seven, eight hours the night after a really powerful flow state, you just sort of wasted that flow state. You might have had fun, but it hasn't helped performance in the long run and hasn't helped learning in the long run, that sort of thing. So that's the four stages of the flow cycle, and that's the spectrum of flow. What I would like to touch on next is some kind of like practical, useful things. I mean, we touch on many, but in regards to individuals that want to set up their environment to help it be conducive to flow,

I would love for you, what are some common triggers, things that are extremely helpful for things to alter within their environment, within their workspace, within their home that can allow them to go through those four stages more easily? Flow follows focus. It can only show up when I'll have our attention to the right here right now. I said that's what all the flow triggers do. The first and most important flow trigger is complete concentration. Right. So when it comes to, let's talk about individual flow, not group flow, the shared collective version. Let's just stay with individual flow for a second.

This means, first of all, you have to practice distraction management. Like before you move into your workspace, you got to manic. Turn off your email. Turn off your smartphone, messages, notifications, to have conversations with your, you know, if you're working from home, talk to you. your partner, talk to your spouse, talk to your kids, talk to your roommates. If you're in an office, talk to your boss, talk to your coworkers, right? I always tell people that the distractions are terrible for flow. In fact, there was, there was worked on, the guy that Timothy Lister, and I can't remember whose partner was, they were Peoplesoft old school coders from the back from the 90s and the

thousands did a lot of work on flow. They were working on flow and they found that if coders get knocked out of flow. It'll take them a minimum 15 minutes to get back in if they can even get back in at all. So those distractions are really costly. They're going to block, keep you out of flow. And even if you do get into flow, they can knock you back out on this big cost there. So one, you want to just remove all the distractions. This also tells us one thing across the boards, open office plans are a disaster. They're just a disaster. Because even in group flow, the shared collective version of flow, the first thing you need to do is you want to wall the group off from the rest of the world. So you don't need individual concentration.

You need group concentration. And so that's distraction management is one of the best places to start there. I have found not always the case, novelty is a flow tracker. And I like a space that if I got a view of beautiful nature, it's really useful. It may not be everybody, but you get a lot of novelty in this. I can look up and, you know, catch little bits of, oh, wow, a hawk just flew through that. That novelty, a little bit of dopamine, tiny little, which is driving focus. So useful.

So that's one thing. I often think about. It's beyond that is interesting because it doesn't seem like there's a formula that works across the boards for everybody. People are very, very, very individual. So I think it's more about how you manicure your internal state. But there are so let's talk about the simplest things people can do if they want more flow in their life from a practical standpoint. It's remarkably obvious, but it's very true. So we all have what we call a primary flow activity,

which is essentially, it's that thing you've done since you were a little kid that most of the time just drops you into flow, right? We can say it really technically that this is the thing that has the flow triggers that you are most susceptible for, blah, blah, blah. But it's really whatever you've done your whole life that is most likely to drop you into flow. For me, it's skiing. My wife, it's, you know, hiking our dogs to the back country. You're my best friend is playing the guitar as we talked about a second ago.

I don't know. Some people are dancing samba. Some people's playing with their kids. Some people, you know, the list goes on. But what was essentially a focusing skill? So one of the things that we know is the more flow you get, the more flow you get. So I go skiing on Saturday, ski all day, get into a flow state. It means I'm going to have an easier time getting into flow on Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday.

Flow gets more flow. Flow we get some more flow. It's a focusing skill. It's like mindfulness, right? The more you meditate, the better you get at meditation. Because you're learning how to focus. Right, yeah, exactly. So the same thing is happening with flow.

So that's A. B, two other things that are really critical here. When we drop into flow, we experience massively heightened happiness, well-being, and creativity. Creativity in some studies spikes 400 to 700% above baseline. Nobody's really tried to measure the actual impact on happiness. well-being other than to say that we know the happiest people on earth are the people with the most flow in their lives. The people who score off the charts for overall life satisfaction well-being are the people with the most low in their lives. So intimately tied with that stuff. But the heightened

creativity and the heightened productivity and that heightened happiness will outlast a flow state by a day maybe two. So that's cool too. Also, as we move into flow, it tends to reset our nervous system. So flow will push all the stress hormones out of our system. So just from a general performance, standpoint, right? You're resetting your nervous system. Anxiety is blocks flow, but it blocks learning. It blocks all kinds of performance. So there's a lot of benefits psychologically, emotionally, and performance-wise from doubling down on your primary flow activity. And this is the very thing. As we get older, what do we do? We set down childish things, right? The surfboard goes away. The skateboard goes away. No, no, I've got responsibilities now. I've got a, and it's literally the worst thing we can possibly

do. In fact, burnout, which is so prevalent today over and over and over again, we know that if you're burned out, the single best thing you can do to restore yourself to, you know, normal is doubled down on your primary flow activity. What the research shows is like, you don't need a ton of time. Three to four hours a week is often enough to do the job. And you can usually, if you want, you can split that up into a couple of sessions, but it's literally like one afternoon a week, you should probably devote to something that's really flowy for yourself for this reason. That's not a way of manicuring your space and your environment, but it's a way of manicuring your life to maximize flow. That's important. I mean, it's a combination

of the things we don't do and the things we do do, right? So the things we don't do, putting technology the phone in a different room when we're trying to write a book, right, or like the things that we just eliminate those distractions like you spoke to, and then the things that we can do internally, manicuring, but then also externally in our environment, whether it's, you know, whatever it is for people, essential oils or a view or like things that can really help you just kind of sink into what, into presence. Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. That's exactly right. And it's, it is very just individual, of course. Yeah. And we know this. We know, like, culture does play a role in shaping how we get into flow. And it's not overarching and the neurobiology kind of works across the words, but there's some culture. And it's here that that shows up, right?

Yeah. So you gave that one. Is there any other quick practical ones outside of just doing some other things that bring you into flow? But quick practical things, is there anything else that has really worked for you before it happened to the next thing? All the flow triggers are super effective. So let me give you just another practical tip for me. I have to read a lot of neuroscience textbooks. As you can imagine, they're fascinating.

They're thrillers, really, just page-tribes. And so, and naturally, like, I want to read and flow because learning is significantly amplified and pattern recognition is significantly amplified. So when I have to read about, I save them up until I have like two or three textbooks to read. And I will go, I usually get a hotel room with a view for the same novelty reason. Like I find a hotel room somewhere, get a balcony, and I'll sit on that balcony. me and purposefully read there for novelty, right? Nolty is a flow trigger. This is, you know, if that's not available to me,

I'll drive across town and go to a coffee shop I've never been in, right? Just that little bit of extra novelty is going to amplify focus and help you drive you towards flow. And so that's another just like really simple, easy sort of practical tip. I always say that if you're interested in more flow in your life, the place you have to sort of start is what I like to talk about is the positive psychology basics. So positive psychology spent about 30 years sort of trying to figure out what do we need to do to get into flow. And they weren't talking about flow itself, like creating the flow state. They were just like, to perform it your best, what are the basics? And there's sort of four things that have come out of that that are really important.

One, you need regular sleep, seven, eight hours of sleep at night. Flow is a very high energy state. Sure, you can get into flow. You know, you can get lucky, stay up all night and drop into flow. It'll happen, certainly, but it's not reliable, repeatable, sustainable over a long haul. It's a bad peak performance strategy. So it's general seven, eight hours of sleep a night for all of us if you want to maximize flow.

Hydration, nutrition, right? There's no secret. There's no one. And there's definitely no flow diet at all. But hydration and nutrition, right? It's a high energy state. This is kind of a no-brainer. The one that's tricky here.

This is, I'm talking about ways to produce physical energy, right? Like to get into a flow state. Social support. And people hear about social support as a like a psychological safety thing and a mental health concern, which it is. But what's really interesting is that whenever we face a situation, right, could be an opportunity. right or a challenge I want to rise towards or it could be a threat that I want to run away from and we have to evaluate it and this happens all day long to all of us so when we've in that situation the brain when it evaluates one of the things that's asked is do you have people around you who love

you who have your back because if you got folks around who love you who got your back and you have a support system co-workers who you know that sort of thing well if you fuck up and fail they can pick you up again and you're much more willing to take the chance and then that this thing the situation is an opportunity and you won't get a huge stress response a huge stress response takes a tremendous amount of energy it burns a ton of energy so it will end up blocking flow instead you'll get a much more sympathetic response and obviously if you don't have that social support network and you and you keep getting these huge stress responses you're not going to have the energy left for flow. So it's and you don't you don't need tons of friends, tons of family. You need a couple of

relationships that you sort of regularly check in with. I'm an extreme introvert. I don't need a whole lot of contact. People are really extroverted might need more, but you got to sort of figure out what you want and you want to get on a daily basis. The other three things, the other things you want to think about is anxiety blocks flow, right? We talked about that challenge skills balance, right? And obviously too much anxiety is just going to push you out of that. sweet spot and because you know you got to like push on your skills anyways right so there's going to be a little anxiety in this anyways you're going to have a little bit of norapinephrine in your system anyways so people who are really good at flow and really good at dropping in a flow before you even get to

what you can do to get into flow will make sure they're manicuring their nervous system right and there's three the three best ways there are a couple others but the three best ways sort of manis to calm yourself down, daily gratitude practice, daily mindfulness practice or regular exercise, right? And gratitude practice takes five minutes. Mindfulness for stress reduction, right? It's 11 minutes. Exercise for stress reduction. You want to exercise until it gets quiet upstairs and your lungs open up, which is a signal that the brain has released nitrogen oxide. Same thing happens in flow. It pushes stress hormones out of your system. I tell people, normal conditions do want a day. Right. And if you press for time, do a gratitude list. It also has the extra bonus. We did some work with Glenn Foxes at USC. He's one of the world's leading gratitude experts. He studies that he's a neuroscientist. We found that a regular gratitude practice also makes you flow prone. So you want to increase the amount of flow in your life. Gratitude is one easy way to get there. But if there's a lot going on, due to a day, right? At the flow research collective during COVID, we asked,

our employees, the folks working with us to do three a day. We're a peak performance organization. We want our people performing at their best. Everybody's freaked out during COVID and super stressed. And they were turning to us for help. So I couldn't have freaked out people, right? So I was like, all right, you want to work here? Gradually practice, mindfulness, regular exercise every day, no matter what. Otherwise, you can't do this job right now. So those are all sort of the basics, right? And that's where I start. And then you want to start playing with the flow triggers, right?

And I always tell people, start with distraction management, right? Start. Also, complete concentration. One of the things people always want to know is, well, how long should I focus for, right, if I can? And I always say you want to start by starting, right? You want to sort of wall off your focus flow time from the world. But if in the beginning, you can only get 10 minutes, 20 minutes, we'll start there, right? Right. Flow massively amplifies productivity, so you're going to get time back, right? You end up getting time back for this. But what you really would like to be able to do is 90 to 120 minutes. The reason is the brain has a built-in focus slot for 90 to 120 minutes long. How do we know this? We also have a dreaming slot, a sleep cycle. It's 90 to 20 minutes long. We have a sleep cycle. We have a waking cycle. It's exact opposite. We all know about the sleep side. We're less aware of the waking.

side, but the brain is designed to focus for like 90, 10 minutes at a time. It can do it really, really well. So what happens is as you start working towards that, you'll find it gets easier, right? Because you're actually just taking advantage of your natural biology that way. So I was talking about when you start with complete concentration,

that's where I start, distraction management, see if you can get 90, not in 20 minutes. The next thing that is really, helpful here is task focus, not ego focus. So one of the things that happens in flow, neurobiologically, is our prefrontal cortex deactivates. Your ego lives in your prefrontal cortex. So if I'm writing and I'm thinking about like how my audience is going to feel about my words, right? Are they going to like them? Are they going to not? That's an extrinsic motivator. That's an outside thing and it fires up my prefrontal cortex and gets my ego involved, right? You want to stay

task focus, not ego focused. And finally, the last thing I mentioned this earlier, autonomy and attention, they're coupled systems. So if you don't have full autonomy on the task, you want to do what I talked about earlier. You want to reframe that task a little bit. So, okay, this, I got to write, you know, 500 words about data caves, right? Not super excited. and I'm not going to write like Charles Dickens this time.

So I don't want to write the story. I'm not motivated. And maybe 90% of that story is bullshit, but there's like this 10% thing where, oh, if I write about data caves, I'm going to have to learn about holographic displays, for example. I'm kind of into holographic displays. So, okay, now I've reframed it.

Yeah, I've got to do all this other work, but this is the thing that I really care about. I've got a little passionate curiosity. Now I've got a little more. autonomy. So this is how you essentially, you know, it's not an environmental space because that's sort of individual, but these things are true across the boards for all of us. So this is sort of how you manicure the mental space for flow. Very thorough. Thank you for diving to all of that. I think it's extremely also helpful for me. I'm in the middle of building on a course right now and it

feels like I'm waking up and at the bottom of the hill of this mountain constantly. And so being able to chunk it up into different tasks, you know, utilize these triggers and novel kind of moments to be able to just get into the flow of it, right, and into the process of it and not be so identified with the result of what it's going to be, but allow that to unfold naturally. The last thing that I want to dive into today is, as I mentioned earlier, I'm so fascinated in how group flow unfolds and how when you bring, and I sometimes do these mastermind dinners, I bring together eight people who just like a Jeffersonian-style-type dinner, or on a specific topic of life.

And I always find that there's just another level of intelligence that opens up when the group of individuals come kind of sink and flow in conversation that isn't available maybe just as an individual. There's a new energy that becomes available. And so I'm just curious your thoughts on what becomes possible when multiple consciousnesses come together into flow. Do you want the long technical geeky science answer or do you want the short answer? Give us the punchline and then we're

work our way through it maybe a little bit. So this is what group flow is so great for. It maximizes choice and creativity. So an individual in flow has what I like to talk about is 360 degree creativity, meaning you're performing at your best. So any direction you go in, right, you're going to be great at. but a group together where everybody has 360 degree, that what you can produce together is so much more powerful than one you can produce alone.

This is, by the way, the reason group flow is everybody's favorite experience on earth is this very thing we're talking about. If there's the most freedom, we literally have the most freedom inside a group flow because you've got everybody performing at your best. So obviously a team is more powerful than an individual. and a team performing at the breast where everybody is in flow, you can go on a ton of directions and get a ton of stuff done. So that's sort of the medium answer in between. We can talk about why it happens neurobiologically and all that stuff and where it comes from.

It's truly rare and wonderful, and it's certainly massively amplifies learning. And there's certain like learning to park skis. We talk about this a lot where like anything physically dangerous where like or difficult where this could be pain involved. It is so much easier to learn in group flow than under any other circumstances, even if you get to flow solo. So spend a lot of time trying to like in athletic endeavor. It's trying to like preconditions for group flow are really, really, really important. And they change too because interpersonal flow, me and you talking.

right, we got great conversation. We got so sucked in. I don't know how much time has passed. You don't know how much time has passed. That's low-grade micro-growth, right? Microflow, but it's low-grade micro-grove flow, which is what we've been experiencing here today. Delicious and wonderful.

Turn up that crank to macro flow, and it's, you know, it's sort of mind-blowing in the sort of what people can actually accomplish. It's so exciting once you start to feel that. and I just feel like there's the there's that old saying of like two horses pulling a carriage is not twice as fast three times as fast there's this exponential component I don't even know if that's true but there's this I'm trying to do the math and I'm like is this true I don't think I know about horses and carriages and pulling but but when you bring multiple individuals together there is that exponential feel right certainly whatever it is whether it's a sport dynamic which is very common in people understanding this

but then also just in conversation and looking to uncover solutions to pressing challenges and problems. Well, it's also, I mean, it's at the heart of music. Yeah, right? I mean, more than any, like, if you're looking for like the singular pinnacle of group low, improv comedy is great,

but music is really jazz is, of course, the classic example of this with improv jazz. But I could, you know, anytime you have a band comes together and the music starts to soar that. That's group flow in action. And it's interesting, right, because that's at the point that the music starts

to be able to talk about things that the music's not talking about. That's what's interesting to me about is this is that exponential effect that I always say with flow and group flow, the biology that the science can answer. There's 90% of the stuff we understand, but there's 10% of the things.

things that start to happen in flow and in a group flow, that's still a little bit of a mystery, right, where the science sort of runs a ground. And I love that mystery. I don't necessarily have to reach for metaphysical solutions exactly to solve it. But I just, I, but what's always just stayed with me is that that's really where interesting meanings start showing up. And that's what's weird is the meaning gets amplified, right? You were talking about it in your dinner party or suddenly the conversation got a lot farther than anybody expected it to go. What happens? Somebody turned up the meaning tap, right?

That's a little weird, right? I can talk about heightened pattern recognition and blah, blah, blah, and the brain for a real long time, but am I going to be able to explain how the meaning tap gets turned up and group flow in the way that it does? Not so much. You know what I mean? I run out of explanation at a certain point, but it's a real phenomenon. phenomenon that's, you know, super fun and boy, can you get farther faster.

It's so powerful. It's exciting. And as I kind of feel into the vision of like the future of the human potential, I'm also very fascinated with like these cities, right? The Sanskrit term for cities are they kind of these like, they're described as like spiritual superpowers that become available. Oh, the cities. Yeah. I thought it was like London, no, no, no, no, no, the cities. By the way, there's spiritual supervirals and there are distractions on the path. Yeah, absolutely. They're not the good thing. They're the bad thing.

For sure. Yeah. But it's an interesting marker of possibility when you hear about these individuals that tap to this place within themselves that create these miraculous moments or what people would see as superhuman. I'm just curious in closing here because I know we go off for hours and hours and hours. What do you make of when you turn that macroflow dial up to 11? and those states of consciousness

becomes so rapturous that mystical things start happening. I'm curious what... How I think about it? Yeah. So what I learned sort of early on in my career, I don't know where...

I think Dr. Newburgh, Andy Newberg, was the first person to have this conversation. But this is how he approached it. And you have... So back in the 90s, the people who sort of laid the fact foundation for what you're doing now and things like that. You have to understand,

it was not, like you were risking your career talking about these kinds of things. Dr. Newberg got forced essentially out of the University of Pennsylvania for his research on spiritual topics, right? Like, this was really taboo. So people really, and even writing about it in West of Jesus, which was my first book on this stuff, I was like, if this goes wrong, I'm like a new age laughing stock whose career is over, right? And I knew it. And I was really, I was scared, right? And people hear that now and they're like, really?

And I'm like, you was a very different time. And it was really easy to flush a career that way with these kinds of discussions. But what I was taught was, one, if something shows up globally before the era of mass communication, right? Before, especially before we have international travel of any kind, trade routes, any sort of, like, yes, the Polynesians did manage to, you know, sail in enormous, enormous distances with Starlight and could navigate most of the whole Pacific. So there was a lot of travel was possible, but it was very, very slow. But I always said if it shows up in multiple cultures, right, before we've got telephones. telegraphs and all that stuff. There's a lot of smoke there.

Is it fire? Don't know. But there's enough smoke that you want to take a closer look. This is what happened when we looked at cosmic unity. Oneness with everything. One is with everything was like this thing, you go back to the 80s, walk into a shrinks office and say, God, I was, you know, I was writing the other day. I got to this state of consciousness and I merged with the words and I became one with the universe.

You were going to a nut house. They were locking you up. Like that's what was happening, right? And Nuber came along and said, hey, wait a minute. This shows up. We've got Franciscan nuns. We've got Tibetan Buddhists. We got like, we got a look at this.

There's some biology here. So what I've learned is that if it shows up cross-culturally before mass communication, there's probably some kind of biology. Again, biology is just a how. It's not a why. It doesn't tell us anything about the why. But the how shows up. And so that's one, that's the first thing I think about.

So when I look at these phenomenon and that has been, now there are certain things. So, for example, going back to the cities, one of the cities is levitation. There's zero proof that that's real. I mean, like people have gone, looked, really tried to figure it out. Nobody's come back and said no. Right. There's a bunch of other cities where you're like, oh, no, that's like, you know, two people thinking the same thoughts at the same time.

That happens a lot in group flow, right? Where you get, and it's not quite levitation, and I can sort of talk about pattern recognition and queuing and everything else, but I don't think it gets to the answer, right? Like I don't, like I always say flow can explain synchronicity. It can't explain serendipity. And we know that when you start getting into flow record, Regularly, synchronous things start happening in your life and serendipitous things start happening in your life.

And we can explain the first half of it, but the second half, you're like, I don't know what this is, right? I have made an argument. There were a bunch of us, John Hagel, Salimus, Smell, a couple other people who, for a while we were trying to figure out what is luck. How do you codify luck? Can you put science around luck? And I've spent a really long time thinking that what we actually mean by luck, though this just moves the needle a little bit, it doesn't answer the question, is frequent access to flow,

regular flow states, because lucky things start to happen. Now, I can explain a lot of it by sort of turning up pattern recognition and your ability to recognize more opportunity in the world and its impact on your mood and you're less judgmental. So you're letting more stuff in, you're noticing more opportunities and I can use that to explain 60% 70% right like it makes sense but you run into that wall of like what the hell is this serendipity synchrony and you we don't have answers maybe it's absolutely nothing I'm going to argue that there's probably some biology there that we haven't yet discovered um I don't quite know what it is but um to me these are the reasons this is like maybe flow has been like a lifelong passion and purpose that's like different

from animals and that it doesn't it hasn't broken me in any in any way shape or form but um i mean i guess it's broken my head open a couple of times where like i've gotten so frustrated at trying to be able to solve certain puzzles but eventually i get them um but this is one of the reasons i like sort of the you know i a friend michael who was talking about who plays guitar he likes to say, one of the great things about guitar is I'll never run out of guitar. You never run out of drawing. I'll also, I don't think ever run out of flow questions, right? So this is one of the reasons I love this topic so much is because it allows you to sort of get closer and closer and closer to these really interesting mysteries. And they, so I'll give you a really simple example

as a way to maybe wrap this up. But I think, so if you're very spiritually, minded, this conversation and flow, it sort of forces you to make a choice, right? You have to either come down and say, okay, God's in the biology, or you have to say God's in what remains after the biological explanation, right? So it's one or the other, and you've got to sort of pick, and what's interesting is on the God is in the what remains category, right, which is where I think a lot of people, spiritual people, are much more comfortable, right? They're uncomfortable with the idea that biology and spirituality might be the same thing, right? One might be a mechanism for the other, whatever any of these words mean.

But like, and they want the spirituality to live in the remainder. But that remainder is getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller, right? Back before we started doing our work in the early 1990s, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, cosmic unity, trance states, meditative states, all this stuff. was the mystery. We had no idea. Now, all of that is, I don't want to say colonized territory, because there's still a bunch of, you know, there's still a bunch of mystery left, but it's shrinking, and it's shrinking, and it's shrinking. And I just find this fascinating. I don't come down one way or another. Right. I just find the whole thing really interesting. And, you know, I never run out of

flow for that reason. I'm also very much in the camp of being comfortable with just, I don't know, saying that and being okay with it and being at ease with that mystery. And, you know, I've met certain individuals a couple times in my life where it's very clear they have these spiritual gifts, you know, and, you know, the biology doesn't fully account for the story of consciousness and its various manifestations of what becomes possible within certain people's conscious experience. And so I'm just so fascinated as we start to discover more and more of the possibilities of consciousness and what happens with certain individuals that have, that are tapped into ways that I just can't physically explain.

Maybe it'll all be explainable one day as that margin continues to shrink as it has been. I'm hoping. I'm hoping that we can one day explain. I mean, if I don't get all the answers, I'm hoping that you get them when you die. Even if just for like a minute, right, I would certainly like, I'd like the answers. I'm certainly, certainly, certainly super curious about it. One of things, you know, I've spent my career studying those moments. in time when impossible it comes possible right that's what i that's what i've done and you know i i say in the

art of possible there's always a secret right there's always a tool a technique a thing gone on doesn't mean there's a trick right um but it there there are tools and techniques and you know all that stuff but um it has led to because it's you know the people are doing a lot of this work like if they weren't before they got into it, they end up as friends of mine. So I've got a collection of friends who have all done the impossible. And they're all ordinary, average, normal, like you, like me, like everybody else, folks. And that's one of the things that I find. Like, there's nothing special about the people who do really special things, right?

They've found a way to work. They found a way to tap into flow. They've done some stuff. but that's what's so interesting to me and you know we talk about now the uncertainty but like that's what the impossible is right like whether we're talking about physical performance or intellectual performance or that sort of stuff so over and over and again i've like sort of gone right up against that that mystery and been like okay this was you know absolute nonsense two weeks ago and now this is a reality in this world And that to me is as much about like a spiritual transformation for the planet as anything else.

I tend to think that way. I'm really nervous around terms like spirituality and mysticism and these things because the definitions get very, they're very individual and they get very murky. And so I'm hesitant for years, I wouldn't even have the conversation out loud with you. But now I'm trying to have the conversation out loud a little bit more. But it's because the terms are so unclear. But certainly there's something magical going on there. Well, this conversation has been magical. Stephen, thank you so much for all the different avenues we've been diving into today.

For people that want to explore some of these topics more, I have like four of your books here. Stealing Fire is great. The Rise of Superman, the Art of Impossible, all of these. A new book in our country, which is available now. We'll link everything down in the description below. Any closing thoughts, things that you want to share where people can be pointed towards before we wrap up? Yeah, I'm at Stephen Kotler on social media. Stephen Collar.com is my website, flowresearchcollective.com. Flow website, if you're interested in training with us at all, get more flow.com is where you go for that. And as far as kind of a parting thought, let me go back to,

let me just kind of reemphasize sort of what I just said a second ago, which is, you know, I have spent my career with people who have done the extraordinary, they all started out ordinary. They are all started out just like me and you. So that's the thing that, you know, I always want to close with because it, you know, we're all capable of so much more than we know, right? That's the moral of this story. Across the boards, we're all capable of so much more than we know.

And that I think is the best part I thought I can have because it's usually helpful. Yeah. I think all of your content and your devotion to writing so much and sharing in the way you do help people realize how the extraordinary is possible for the ordinary person and how we can actually find that in our life. So thank you for all the work that you're doing. I really appreciate it. Thank you for noticing. Beautiful. Well, everybody that's been tuning into this episode of the Know They Self podcast, thank you for coming on this journey with us. If you thought, if you found something, heard something while watching this on YouTube or listening on audio,

that was particularly impactful for you. Let us know in the comments section below. We'd love to hear that stuff. You can share clips that we post on social media everywhere you can find Steven will be linked down in the description below. Until next time, be welcome.