Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 476 - Achieve Peak Performance & Enter Flow State w/ Steven Kotler

Episode Date: February 1, 2021

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 nine bestsellers (out of thirteen books), including his latest release, The Art of Impossible. Steven is also the cohost of Flow Research Collective Radio, a top ten iTunes science podcast. Steven's newest book "The Art of Impossible": https://amzn.to/3aqFZx0 Others to consider: Stealing Fire: https://amzn.to/2MKLzSn The Rise of Superman: https://amzn.to/39Bx6Ba Subscribe to the NEW Power Project Newsletter! ➢ https://bit.ly/2JvmXMb Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Special perks for our listeners below! ➢LMNT Electrolytes: http://bit.ly/3bxyMND ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $99 ➢Sling Shot: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/ Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Mark Bell's Power Project podcast. This episode of the podcast is brought to you by Element Electrolytes. You know, the cool thing is that Mark told me about Element last year. He told me how he was using it before workouts, and he does a lot of workouts fasted too, so he suggested it to me. And in the past, because I do a lot of lifting, a lot of performance stuff outside the gym, I thought towards the end of a workout when I'd cramp, it's kind of normal. Maybe I wasn't adequately hydrated, I didn't have adequate nutrition, so I'd just drink workout when I'd cramp, it's kind of normal. Maybe I didn't wasn't adequately hydrated.

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thing about element is that they have a lot of great flavors my personal favorite is raspberry and you can just put a packet in water drink it do your workout it's easy it's simple it's it's just, it works. Okay. So make sure that you're not just drinking a lot of water to get yourself hydrated. You're getting enough electrolytes in your system before you train. It will make a massive difference to your performance. Yes. You guys got to take your workouts to the next level by picking up some element electrolytes right now, head over to drink lmnt.com slash powerproject. Make sure you guys check out the bundles because when you buy three, you essentially get one free.

What up Power Project crew? This is Josh Setledge, aka SettleGate, giving you a brief description on our next guest on Mark Bell's Power Project, Steven Kotler. 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 and is the author of 13 books, 9 of those books being bestsellers. His books include his latest release, The Art of Impossible, which dropped this past January, as well as The Future is Faster Than You Think, Stealing Fire, The Rise of Superman, and Bold in Abundance. His work has been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes, has been

translated into over 40 different languages, and has appeared in over 100 publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Wired, Atlantic Monthly, Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, and the Harvard Business Review. Steven is also the co-host of his podcast, The Flow Research Collective Radio, which is a top 10 iTunes science podcast. And along with his wife and author, Joy Nicholson, he is the co-founder of the Rancho de Chihuahua Dog Sanctuary. A fun side note is that Steven also once flew an MIG-17 Russian fighter jet,

but that's a different story. Hopefully one we'll be able to hear on this episode of Mark Bell's Power Project. That's going to be it for Stephen Kotler. Shout out to our boy Josh Settlegate for reading that amazing intro. It's been kind of a long time coming. It's something I thought of a while back because he was giving us such great information and researching our guests so well

that I was like, man, that would be awesome if we just had him on the show. And I just kind of forgot to ask him every day for the last year or so. So it's good to finally have him on there. Yeah, I'm pretty stoked because I've just been kind of sensing that he would be a bigger part of the podcast. For those that don't know, he's the one that does all the research, you know, behind the, on the guests.

And, you know, when we pull up some crazy story from back in the day, you know, they get fired up like, oh, how did you guys know that? Like, wow, you really did your homework. It's like we did by having josh take care of it for us um and then late cheated yeah we cheated a little bit uh but you know having him um just a part of the show is really cool and watching his growth and i've been you know trying to push him towards learning a little bit more about the podcast and you know you guys know josh like any second he can learn something new he's all for it so uh like i said it's just really cool to see that uh you know he's he's grown so much just in a short amount of time and i think everyone's gonna really appreciate the uh having

a little bit of extra daily discipline on the podcast uh you guys need to check out his instagram which i don't know what it is but i'll put it down below and you guys can check out what daily discipline is all about and then he also has a podcast, the day you put discipline manifesto and, uh, he's fired up every fucking day. He is, he is fired up every day. Our guest today is going to show people also, you know, how to get fired up and get into these like flow States, uh, where you're just, uh, massively productive and really cool. I think he talks about, you know, kind of like being a Superman, you know, type character, which is really cool, but he kind of seems like he has almost like a Forrest Gump type of story where it's like,

he wrote all these books. He's at like, you know, Harvard business. He's like, you know, on New York times bestseller, he's just like doing all this stuff. And then there's that nugget in there about him flying a Russian fighter jet. That's not something that you just go and do, you know, you, you need to have, uh, quite a bit of expertise to even, um, you know, to even be like up to do something like that. So that'd be interesting thing to ask him about his, what happened there, you know, that.

And also he's just like straight up a voracious writer. Like he has so many books. And then I think I, I heard this from another podcast, but he's been nominated for two Pulitzer prizes, which is absolutely insane. Like it's crazy. It's not normal.

It doesn't make any sense. i think he's uh he's written a ton of books but there was like five or six that were new york times bestsellers or something like that it's like that's wild yeah you know go ahead andrew no i was just gonna say that that flow state i mean that's what nine bestselling books are. Jeez. Yeah. Cause five, five would have been underachieving goodness. Um, but no, that, that flow state, you know, like I, I think I only learned about this term, you know, a handful of years ago. And that's when I really dove deep into a nootropics and stuff. So I'm interested to hear if he has anything, um, related to like certain supplements that might be able to help get you there.

I personally always feel that taking MindBullet at least opens the door for me. You know, it just puts me in a better mood and helps, you know, helps me just want to work a little bit harder, a little bit longer. And then before I know it, like four hours pass and I'm like, I think I was just in the flow state for a hot minute there because I didn't even pay attention to like the time. And it just it flows right or goes right past. And it's just the eyes is all super interesting to me because flow state is something that, you know, can help you perform better like in sports or whatever. But it can also help you perform better in speaking, writing, you know, whatever it may be. It's like, dude, how the heck do we get into this damn state? Yeah. Mark, have you ever been like, whether it's be as an athlete, whether it be in one of your speaking gigs where you're like

speaking to a big crowd, um, or whatever, have you ever found that like afterwards you're like, holy shit, what did I just do? Like you did something that you can't really explain that it just everything just happened i definitely never had it uh happen with um anything athletic i can't remember i can't recall um i definitely had it where i felt like i was on fire you know doing like a seminar or something like that. I definitely had it, uh, uh, happened before just with being, uh, creative and just, um, just sitting down and having a good day of work and just, um, you know, listening to music or listening to another podcast and just like, even just going on a walk or journaling or something like that. Um, so I I'm interested to hear kind of what his definition is. Cause I wonder if it's just kind of a heightened state or if it's very specific, if it's if it's different than just having a heightened state.

Yeah, like personally, and there's so many things I'd like to ask him about from the athletic context. But there have been times that I've been able to, like, get that feeling. I remember certain times when i see poop so uh i'll be right back you guys keep it keep it flowing okay you as well you as well let me you know let's let's let mark go take his poop i think you can pause this right because i want to hear his response to this yeah yeah yeah so let's pause and wait for him to come back. And he's back. Jesus. How was that one, Mark? Oh, I was just like, you know what? I don't know what the likelihood would be if I, you know, to go through the podcast in a professional way without shouting myself.

It's like a true professional. like a true professional i don't think people realize the difficulty of like pre coming and doing a podcast in the morning especially when you have a healthy metabolism because you always have to poop right before the podcast and if you don't manage you're going to be holding it throughout the whole episode yeah it's kind of like the question of whether you you know poop before you train or not you know you're like, but at least you're training, you kind of just push it back, you know, just train a little bit later. Yeah. Speaking of, so we, we did a poll on the YouTube channel. Oh God.

Sit or stand when, when wiping. And the last time I checked, um, it was 70% sit 30% stand. Um, it had, I forgot it had like almost 400 votes though so yeah that the people have spoken and if you missed out next time make sure you check our youtube channel especially the polls so that way you can make your voice be heard i love that 30 of the people are standing up you know for what they believe in yeah but but you know like in history when you look at history here we go like just look look at like the 60s with you know what was happening with with you know civil rights there was a minority of people that were like hey this is this is wrong this is what you got to do

and they showed them that it was right just like us standards you know we are currently in the minority but we are the correct minority and history will show that we're doing so you're saying at some point in our rearview mirror will be all these people that are sitting down on the toilet exactly exactly what's that what's that in the rearview mirror it's like i saw those people sitting down like look at those savages neanderthals yeah that's have either one of you guys ever been in a flow state were you guys talking about that when i was pooping yeah um i like no like i've noticed that and i'm i want to ask him about that if it's easier to reach that type of state with an athletic context because as i got better and better with jujitsu um like it's like every single time i train and i like my thing is just like not thinking so within like when i did power lifting my thing was like i don't

think before i do the lift i visualize the lift and i just go do it i try not to think about anything empty out go ahead but the jujitsu I feel that even more like when I'm rolling with people and I'm not thinking, and I'm just letting my body move because of all the training that that's, that's culminated. I can just do things. I can just like, there are things that I'll do that I haven't done before yesterday or two days ago. There was a few things that I did in my roles that I don't really, I don't even know how I did it. But when I watched the video, I was like, Oh, that's pretty fucking cool. How did that happen? How did that happen? And it's because like, I, I just able to empty out when I do that. And like, I'm curious if like, you can take that and then apply that type of thing to

other aspects of life. Cause I know what that feels like. I definitely know what that feels like. And it, it's, it's addictive. It really is. I remember, uh, I think I was in junior high basketball team, had a couple of friends and I don't, I don't, this was just like my first, like I went looking back thinking like, I wonder if that meant I was in flow state, but we were shooting free throws and I literally could not miss no matter what the hell i did i could not miss it i seriously made like 50 in a row and i just got tired like it wasn't yeah i'm like what the hell it started i think we were just playing like i remember playing 21 like you know everybody against everybody just first of 21 so i made the first shot and then i made the rest all in one go and i'm just gonna see how far i can keep going and i remember i did it again so i you know i got

somewhere around 50 uh as that's you know the height of my like athletic career right but um as far as like nowadays um editing photos for sure um I would just throw on some music and, you know, I would blink and like over, you know, 1500 images would be edited, you know, uh, sorted and like exported. Like, I know, like, it's like, like even just loading that many images would take forever, but it's like, it would be, it would get done. And I would, you know, be like, that was, that was fun. Like, what else can I do now? Um, so that, that's kind of how I feel about that sort of thing right now. Like, I can't remember a time recently where I'm like, like, oh, I definitely hit flow state, but you know, like I said, taking mind bullet, I'll start editing a podcast or start editing, you know, these power bites that we've been putting out or, uh, writing out some captions and stuff. And I just, I,

a lot of it is just because I really enjoy it. So there's that. Um, but other than that, I can't really point to anything like super concrete and, you know, my, my free throws is like, whatever, you know, that's just, that was just kind of silly, but that's the first thing I thought of. And I remember thinking back then, like once I learned what flow state was, I'm like, Hmm, I wonder if that's what that was. Yeah. I'm interested, uh, to hear, you know, about some of the, some of the books that he's written. Um, cause it seems like he's kind of touching upon the same topic. Um, and then how, how do you, how do you write so successfully,

you know, on a similar topic, like that's gotta be really difficult and challenging. I also kind of wonder too, if his Superman book has anything to do with Friedrich Nietzsche, because he often talked about a Superman. He talked about, you know, he kind of thought a lot of people had this kind of inner super human capabilities. And it'd be interesting to kind of learn, like, does everyone have like a beyond? Does everyone have like an over, like, does everyone have an Uber or extra inside of them? You know, I kind of believe that they do, but there's some people who are like, no, it's not like that. But I think that everyone, I guess it'd probably be fairly agreeable that everybody could do a little bit better. I think we can all kind of agree on that, whether you're super successful or whether you're not.

I think we can all agree that there's so many areas as a human, too, and there's so much complexity to human behavior. There's so many areas to improve upon that you could always be doing a little bit better yeah absolutely that's um in terms of all his books though i don't know if you saw there's this latest book that he has called the art of impossible and in all of his books there's always this they're all he always seems to bring up the flow state somehow but in this one um he it's like a culmination of a lot of his books, there's always this, he always seems to bring up the flow state somehow. But in this one, it's like a culmination of a lot of his other books. And the big ideas from those books put into this one big book. It's really, really, really well done.

I got it on Audible yesterday. And it's a really good book. And a lot of the explanations are really solid. He makes things simple to understand. And he has a lot of really cool real world examples of like people and things of how they actually do achieve that. So it's it's it's it's kind of interesting that he's the guy. At least I think he's the guy who's been doing like research and trying to dig into this for like the past few years. think he's the guy who's been doing like research and trying to dig into this for like the past few years. I haven't heard of anyone else who's been trying to really dig into what this is, um, other

than him. And it's like, you would think that there would be other people who would, who would really be digging into this as much. But when you type in float state on Google or on YouTube, it's always Steven Kotler that pops up. It's always him. Some of the things we spoke about before on this podcast is like, you know, you're trying to, you know, learn a skill and you're trying to get better at it. And then you're eventually trying to be great. And, you know, where that pulls, you know, can pull negatively on other aspects of your life. And with some of the research that Stephen Kotler does, you're going to see like, you know, we'll bring up some questions of like morality, like, should you go for some of these things, you know,

because you can develop a flow state and you can probably crush it in some areas. But, you know, is that always the bet in your best interest? Because what if you're kind of pulling against some other things that you want to improve upon as well? So getting tunnel vision, I kind of wonder if that could set you off track for something else that you're trying to achieve. That's actually a good point. Yeah. Because, you know, you talk about this a lot, like how much are you willing to sacrifice? Like, is it worth it in the end type of a thing? So that is, man, yeah, that's heavy stuff right there.

What do we got for us for lifting? You know? Should have something. Getting to the gym. I know they have some stuff with like athletics and he's talked about like climbing and things like that. He's talked a little bit about running. I think running and swimming, it's hard to cut any time off those all-time world records and stuff, but it's a little easier to kind of see, but to visualize something and just to be stronger, bring out this flow state and just be stronger out of nowhere, that would be amazing if we could figure that out.

No, but I think that's really a thing. Like, I mean, you could probably think back on some like really crazy power lifting or strongman feats that just kind of like when you, when you hear Eddie Hall talk about his 1100 pound pull, right. And how even before that, he, he didn't really touch anything close or that close to 1100 i believe um but then when he was there it's like he's like he just visualized something he just went for it and he was all in the zone that's probably kind of what that was and there's probably other really crazy feats of strength that you know people can't really explain um that like that's because they were in like,

it's, it's pretty much just being in the zone. It's what athletes call being in the zone. Just like, you know, when you, when you see the, the tiger doc,

and I'm curious if he actually watched that too, like all those times that tiger seemed to do like the impossible, the absolute impossible. And a lot of those masters tournaments, he was in the zone or he was in, he was in a flow with what he did because he had so much skill so yeah there's oh my goodness he's fine okay he's i'm gonna go create this little guy because he yeah i'm gonna go create him be right back all right have fun yeah we've we started watching the uh the tiger that, you know, it's not so in the middle of it all, I remember how dominant he was. Um,

and I didn't forget that, but it's just really cool going back and seeing exactly how just, I mean, it was him and then, you know, what is like a 10 stroke lead at the masters, you know, these big wins and then everybody else. And I remember hearing about a hefty, uh, Phil Mickelson or whatever. And that shit was hilarious, but it looks like Steven's ready to go.

Get him in here. Here we go. Oh, cool. Alrighty. Good morning, gentlemen. Morning. Great to have you on the show today. It's good to be with you guys.

Man, there's a lot to dive into right here. And I guess first off, we're going to be talking a lot about a flow state, which after writing 13 books, maybe you would think that you would get tired of it, but it seems like you're still fired up and excited about it. Can you explain to people what a flow state is just so we get that out of the way? For sure. It's technically scientifically defined as an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best. That's obviously not very helpful. It refers more specifically to those moments of rapt attention and total absorption. You get so focused on the task at hand, so focused on what you're doing, that everything else just seems to disappear.

Action awareness is going to start to merge. Your sense of self, self-consciousness is going to get really quiet. Time is going to dilate, which is a fancy way of saying it passes strangely. Sometimes it'll slow down. You're going to freeze frame of fact, right? I mean, it's been a car crash and more frequently it speeds up and five hours go by in like five minutes and throughout all aspects of performance, both mental and physical tend to go through the roof.

You mentioned a car crash. What are some other natural ways that some of this might be induced without even really thinking about it? What are some examples of somebody that might have experienced something similar to what you're talking about without really ever even trying? So it's actually a really great question because a couple of things, flow is universal. So it shows up in anyone, anywhere, provides certain initial conditions are met and flow is a spectrum of experiences. So it's not a singular experience it's this spectrum

so you can have micro flow which is really familiar to people we spend five percent of our work lives in micro flow often without noticing it micro flows when you sit down to write that quickie email and you get sucked in right and an hour goes by and you look up and you've written an essay and you didn't notice time passing and maybe your sense of self didn't totally disappear but bodily awareness was gone and when you sort of like pop into consciousness you're like oh crap i gotta pee right and you run to the bathroom that's micro flow macro flow the other end of the spectrum is sort of the full-blown quasi-mystical experience where time slows down and all that stuff um flow shows up all over the place

meaning all of our athletic competitions from you know action adventure sports through traditional sports shows up in work shows up in uh very common in code in software coding in video gaming uh music art theater etc etc it really shows up pretty much everywhere. In fact, when Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who's often called the godfather of flow psychology, was a psychologist then at the University of Chicago, did his first giant initial study on flow. The reason we know it was universal is he went around the world

talking to everybody he could talk to about these experiences. And he talked to everybody. He talked to expert neurosurgeons and stock traders and dancers and rock climbers and then he talked to detroit assembly line workers and chicago meat packers and elderly korean women and japanese teenage motorcycle gang members and navajo sheep herders and on and on he literally talked to everybody about so you can get into flow in pretty much any activity if you can get into flow while working on an assembly line in detroit you can get into flow in pretty much any activity. If you can get into flow while working on an assembly line in Detroit, you can get into flow anywhere as far as I can tell. There was an awesome movie a couple years back called Limitless.

A bunch of us watched it and a bunch of us were like, how do we get into this state of mind? And so a lot of us turned to nootropics and trying different things like that. Later, probably learned a lot about Adderall and that sort of thing. Is there any supplements or anything like that that can help someone better get into the flow state? It is an open question. This is not the work I do at the Flow Research Collective. First of all, we study kind of the neurobiology of flow and we work on predominantly psychological, physiological interventions. We don't tend to get involved in technologies or substances, predominantly because we work on peak performance. And our work has to be able to work every time, no matter what,

in any conditions. And we don't want to rely on outside stuff. That said, in my book, Stealing Fire, we looked at a lot of these questions more closely. I would say at a neurotropic level, the experience is pretty much every experience is neurotropics these days, which is most of them don't work. You get placebo effects. Adderall, those things, they spike norepinephrine. They actually block flow. So you get like a fake kind of flow focus feeling, but it doesn't tend to bring the heightened performance, the heightened creativity, the heightened cognition, all the other stuff that tends to come with flow doesn't because it's predominantly the neurochemical norepinephrine.

So the bigger point is, the easier way to explain this is when you look under the hood of flow, what's going on in the brain and the body, you see five different predominant reward neurochemicals being cocktailed and you see profound changes in neuroanatomical function on top of a bunch of other stuff. There are no real nootropics. There's nothing out there that can really do much more than provoke one neurochemical at a time. And so you'll see this in the technology space. Somebody will have a whiz-bang EEG device and they'll say, oh, this produces flow. It drops you right into flow. And they're lying because yes, flow has a brainwave signature, right? It takes place at the alpha theta borderline, but all this other stuff is going on. And just being able

to produce one bit of a much more complicated brain reaction isn't the thing, right? And that's been the same problem with neurotropics. Plus, individual biology plays such a huge role in kind of which neurotropics you're going to respond to, et cetera, et cetera. I don't think that's a promising avenue in the near term. I think there's a lot of other ways we can... Flow has gone from elusive to reliable and repeatable using psychological interventions and um based on kind of neurobiological mechanism and that's where we are and we're solid with that we're good with making this reliable and repeatable any that

made any sense yeah absolutely it did and i was curious about one thing from in your book, I think it was The Rise of Superman. You had this phrase, transient hyperfrontality. And when you mentioned that, it kind of like the explanation kind of seemed like turning your brain off. Right. Or turning thinking up is for for like for me, whenever I do anything athletic or when I do things like jujitsu, I, I like, I feel like when I don't think and when I don't think about the next moves, I just let my body do what it's been trained to do. I, I get super creative and I'm able to do things I've never done before. And that's by turning things off. Right. Is that, is that one of the ways that people are able to achieve that by just like just doing and not thinking. so what you're talking at flow

is transient hyperfrontality the activation of the prefrontal cortex right and when that happens as you're right a lot of automatic processing a lot of bottom-up stuff takes over right it's it's predominantly an efficiency exchange the brain wants more energy for focus in the present moment and it's got a fixed energy budget so it shuts down non-critical structures and repurposes that extra energy for attention in the present moment and the and the task at hand right that's sort of what's happening and you're experiencing in the gym specifically that's what's known as exercised induced transient hypofrontality it's the front edge of a flow state it's not there's other things

going on and now once you started talking about the second half of your statement which is i can do all the standard stuff and then i can improv on top of it right now that's flow now you're seeing other because that that improv on top of it for that to be taking place you need uh brainwaves involved that that brainwaves have to sort of be on the alpha theta borderline for you to be able to come up with a lot of those creative ideas that quickly. And you also need increases in, for example, dopamine and norepinephrine, two of the neurochemicals that show up in flow. They do a lot of different things in the brain. One of the things they do is they tune signal-to-noise ratios, which is a fancy way of saying they

amplify pattern recognition. so you're fighting jujitsu and you you know you're in some kind of hold you can't see a goddamn thing and suddenly you see a little bit of light under your opponent's body and your brain goes oh wait if i leg sweep from here and roll blah blah right all that creativity on top of that that's pattern recognition your brain is going oh that little crack of light underneath the hip is an opening and I can slide my foot in and blah, blah, blah. Right. That sort of thing. If I was a better, if I spoke better jujitsu, this would have been a better example. Steven, how in the world do you study this? It seems elusive. It seems like it's not easy to even find examples of it sometimes. So how you how did you come to uh studying this

so um for i want i want to say that at this point it's a huge field right it's not elusive there are just i mean if you just the european association of flow researchers you're just going into europe forgets what there's over 100 150 people involved now there are a bunch of sort of dedicated labs including my own um I don't think it's, you know, we're not cancer research yet, but we're not as obscure as we were. I came in through two pathways, but the more interesting one is I started, I was a reporter, a journalist in the early 1990s. And I was, you know, reporting is this cool game where you get to exploit your curiosities, right? Like anything you're super into, you can sort of get paid to learn about.

And that's, you know, that's amazing. And I was super interested in neurobiology, how humans work. And neuroscience had just sort of advanced to the point, like in the late 90s, we started to really understand emotions. And we started being able to like behavioral neuroscience, what was actually driving people was starting to line up and that was very firm and crisp because psychology as most people know you get into it the kid's going to provide all the answers and what you quickly discover is that it's mostly metaphor and that the neurobiology is the mechanism and um so i wanted to understand the neurobiology was also was also interested in action sports, surfing, skiing, rock climbing, snowboarding, and whatever. The 90s in action sports was called the great era of impossible.

We're more so-called impossible feats, things that had never been done and were believed to be never going to be done. We're not just being done. They bring iterating on over and over and over again. This is what I wrote about Rise of Superman. And it caught my attention, one, because, you know, impossible things were going on. And it was like seeing a magic show up close and in person with mortal consequences all the time.

And that was amazing. But the more interesting thing is, and I knew this from reading neuroscience and psychology and working in those fields, the group of people I was hanging out with and who were sort of reinventing the limits of human possibility, these action sport athletes in the 90s, this is like deep subculture. Punk rock, irreverent, rowdy.

Most of the people I knew came from broken homes. They had very little education. They didn't have a lot of money. There was a lot of like drugs, drinking, high-risk behavior in these communities. Normally, you put all those things together in a group of people and you get jail and death and things like that. You don't get reinventing what's possible for the human species. And so I was fascinated by this question of what was going on. And in these athletes over and over and over, they kept talking about the same state of consciousness that, you know, when they're

performing at the best, they're in this altered state and people would call it the zone or runners higher. They had all kinds of names for it. And depending on the action sport, there was different names in different sports, but it was everywhere. And I started taking this question of what does it take to accomplish the impossible on action sports and into other domains. I took it into business and the science technology. And, you know, for like 25 years, my beat as a journalist was with magazines like Wired and New York Times and Discover. And I would track those moments that sci-fi ideas became science fact technology, right? So when bionics first started showing up or when the world's first

artificial vision implant was turned on, the first blind man could see again, first private spaceship, all that stuff. And in getting to know the inventors behind it, you heard the same stories. vision implant was turned on. The first blind man could see again, first private spaceship, all that stuff. And in getting to know the inventors behind it, you heard the same stories. You heard stories about flow. When I'm doing my best work, I'm in this altered state of consciousness. The ideas are just kind of flying around. And it's very similar to the description Nesima gave a second ago, right? I mean, they're all, the descriptions are really the same, no matter what people are doing. That was was what caught my really caught my attention and got me into the puzzle and i got lucky in that i came in all the other work had been going on in psychology i just came into the neuroscience because i was geeked on that and i was knew that i knew neuroscientists i was writing about that

and i got lucky one of the first people i called had done some of the very first brain imaging work on deep altered states of consciousness. It was Dr. Andrew Newberg at the University of Pennsylvania, and he was working on meditating monks and why do they'm one with the wave or skiers, I'm one with the mountain. It's also sort of everywhere. And we start, I called when I was like, hey, could the same thing that's allowing Buddhists to become one with the universe and Franciscan nuns become one with Jesus's love? Could that be what's causing surfers to become one with the oceans? And after a bunch of work, we sort of figured it out. Yes. And, you know, tracked it back to flow states. And that's where I came in. And slowly from basically that point forward, the neuroscience has been accumulating. In fact, you mentioned transient hyperfrontality a second ago. That was a, that came out of drug addiction. They noticed in the nineties that people who had really bad coke addictions or speed addictions had decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex because that's right where impulse control lives and so it was this bad thing and then when this guy named rnd trick proposed it as this possibility for flow everybody leaped

on him no you can't flow flow is this good thing and drug addiction is bad and no it turns out it's the same kind of mechanism slightly different places in the prefrontal cortex are being deactivated but impulse control by the way is also turned way down in flow we've what the flow users have collected flat out tell people don't go shopping in a flow state right like that's it's a bad idea you'll buy everything in sight pattern recognition is all jacked up and you know everything just looks good to you i find it interesting um we see this in power lifting as well um where some of these men and women are able to tap into like some people are just really well trained they train really well and they end up getting the results it's like quite obvious you know they lift 600 they lift 650, 700. There's a natural progression, but we sometimes see these athletes

that can tap into, um, they're, they're not lifting like 20 more pounds than the, than the best guy. They're sometimes lifting like a hundred pounds more than the next guy. And they're so, uh, unbelievably explosive. And we're kind of, we're looking at each other like this guy's from another planet. Like what are the, what are the are maybe some of these people able to tap into? So this is not our research. It's research. I'm going to forget the name of the scientist's name. He's at the University of Pennsylvania.

He was looking at physical strength. He was looking specifically at this question. And as you probably know, you're there's a governor on most of your behavior that says you don't want to hurt yourself. Right. So in any physical exertion situation, most people are only able to give 60, 65 percent of total rate of total strength. You can train yourself up, as you know, to about 85 percent. And that's where most people tend to tap out. But there's an extra 15% on reserves. We override these in flow states for mechanisms I'll talk about. And during like adrenaline experiences where the woman lifts the car off the baby, right? That's one of the things that's happening.

Flow does it. There may be a mechanism for increasing strength that we are not completely aware of. Right now, the current thinking is, and there does appear to be a boost of testosterone right at the front end of a flow state that does seem to be fairly consistent, but you get both dandamide and endorphins, right? Really powerful painkillers. And so a lot of that extra force is massive amounts of painkillers. And people don't realize this, you know, endorphins are opiates, right? So they're Oxycontcontin or heroin or whatever about 20 different endorphins in the brain but the most common one it's a hundred times more potent than medical morphine so you're talking about really powerful

painkillers really right powerful drugs and normally got it worth pointing out like if i were to give you that much morphine heroin oxycontin whatever you're not lifting shit right like it's not it's just you don't you can't tap into that it'd be a disaster trying to go to the gym uh on on those substances um flow allows you to get the kind of the pleasure and the pain relief without kind of the loss of everything else that normally comes along with those those substances yeah you mentioned um that that little boost in testosterone right at the beginning of flow state. Has your research shown that like maybe a male with higher or lower

testosterone has a easier or more difficult time getting into flow? Yeah. So tricky, interesting question. And I should caveat on the testosterone. Our work is showing, and this is in conjunction with Dr. Andrew Uberman at Stanford a little bit, that you may need to trigger the fight response to get into flow. And if that is the case, you will get testosterone with it. So that's what we're looking at. You also get surges in cortisol and things like that, right at the front end of a flow state. Are there male-female differences? We've been looking at that question. There appear to be some slight male-female differences, which could signal differences in testosterone levels. Certainly, so here's the best way I think

about it when we talk about individual differences or personality differences, even there are flow states have triggers. The reason we know flow is reliable and repeatable now is because we know that flow states have preconditions that lead to flow. And there are 22 of them. They're all known. Um, uh, and they all, they will all basically work by driving attention into the present moment because flow follows focus and that's what all the triggers do they do it different ways neurobiologically but the point is that not everybody is susceptible to the same triggers risk is a flow trigger because it produces a massive surge of dopamine in the body now we know

people have all kinds of different receptivity in their D2 dopamine receptors, right? Which got, if they're really active, you have sensation seekers, or that can also be the product of low dopamine production that requires, right? You to do more extreme things to get more dopamine. So there's a lot of individual differences all the way down to the receptor level that say which triggers you're going to work with. level that say which triggers you're going to work with we haven't seen anything that says this type of person will get into flow more we have like the closest we've come is certain we've

linked you know there are known high gratitude for example we did a study with glenn fox at usc who's kind of one of the better researchers on the neuroscience of gratitude and we found that people with uh regular gratitude practices tend to have higher flow lifestyles there's things like that and their chick sent me high godfather for the psychology uh talked about some of a lot of his early papers i think it's in it's in flow um it's definitely in flow in the foundations of positive psychology one of his textbooks where he talks about the autotelic personality high flow personality type and certain traits that are associated with that. And of course, those traits are going to be underpinned by things like testosterone levels and hormonal production.

Things like that are going to sit underneath that. So there is like the answer is probably yes, but we have no idea what it is yet. And ultimately, I don't think it's going to matter meaning evolution shaped flow for all humans right it's for us to perform at our best it wouldn't make sense if there was a privileged group there'd be privileged ways in that would make sense depending on personality types but um i couldn't i don, I don't see it working that way from an evolutionary perspective. Of course, that's really hard research to do. The evolution of flow is, you know, one of the least researched of the topics,

but that's just, you know, I'm a little outside my lane here. So I'm a little sort of talking out of my butt, but I'm trying. No, I'm really curious about this because I can imagine that there are some people that are listening, whether it's a college student or somebody who's in a job currently. And let's say that they just don't really enjoy what they do, but it pays the bills. It does well. And they're just doing it right.

I'm assuming that one of the precursors to being able to achieve peak performance or flow is actual enjoyment and interest, pure interest in what you're doing? Or can someone achieve that even if they don't really like what they're doing? So that is a phenomenal question. There's a complicated, there's a complicated series of answers. So the answer is through reframing, if you can align, let's say you have a job you hate. We know you'll get more flow if the thing you're doing is aligned with curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, and mastery, the big five intrinsic motivators, right? But let's say your job, you know, just it doesn't have any of those things. If you can reframe the job, one portion of what you're doing is an opportunity for mastery. So the whole thing sucks.

But here's this thing that I want to take into this thing that I really want to do in later life. And I'm going to look right. I'm going to use this, even if it's nothing more than this job, of course, with the opportunity to be patient or think right kind of attribute development, that sort of stuff. That kind of reframing can start to recruit more intrinsic motivators. And as a general rule, once you start recruiting more intrinsic motivators, other opportunities inside the job itself, things you used to hate and now start to see in a new way are going to start showing up. That's one thing. The second thing is certainly flow works better if all your intrinsic motivators and all those motivators, curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, mastery, they're all flow triggers.

They all drive focus into the present moment. A lot of it do it by driving neurochemicals like dopamine and norepinephrine, which are focus enhancers into our system and things like that. So if you want to be a peak performer over time, because it's hard, the work is hard, right? In general. So you want all the fuel sources you could get. That's sort of like saying, you know, can I be a peak performer if I don't eat breakfast and get enough sleep at night, right? Like it's a sort of a nonsensical question. There are conditions under which, yes, of course you can, right? If you have to, but over time, no. And here's the more interesting point on that one. Easier when you're younger. There seems to be in adult development for happiness and fulfillment

and contentment later on in life, there appear to be, and this is not my work, this is work that comes out of the Harvard Adult Development Project um a couple of thresholds for things you sort of have to like if you don't check these things off you're sort of screwed for overall life satisfaction afterwards and there's two big ones one is that roughly by 40 you got to figure out how to get paid for what you love or at least what you like right other? Otherwise, it gets really hard. And interestingly, by 50, you got to forgive those who have done you wrong. If you don't, it limits empathy and creativity and enjoyment afterwards.

And why those things exist are peculiar in much of the same way that like, we don't quite know why emotional set points gets it up early in life, but there seem to be these developmental things with emotions a different time frame for reasons nobody can figure out that i know of yet um but so when it comes to doing work that isn't totally aligned with everything you do right um now it's also worth pointing out by the way that there's something called the primary flow activity.

This is that thing that you've done most of your life that just drops you into the zone. For me, it's skiing. For some people, you know, it's jujitsu or walking their dogs or riding horses or painting or boxing or dancing, hip-hop, whatever it is. It's known as your primary flow activity. And it's often not a great idea to work in your primary flow activity right i remember i once tried to teach a flow and skiing workshop i love skiing and when i got out there there were other people like in my ski day i was like fuck are you talking to me for i want to be skiing i don't want to be talking to you i was so resentful it was awful it's like the river guide who loves river

rafting and so they become a guide and then they realize that their job is simply like taking care of tourists. And, oh, the bathroom is over there. Let me cook you dinner. And, you know, that's the job. And it's the thing you love sort of gets crushed by that. You see that a lot, not as quite as much in martial arts. But I've seen a bunch of friends who have sort of opened studios or dojos along the way. And they're like, oh, my my god this is a management task and i gotta run software and accounting programs and what the hell right um so that you know you see that sometimes along the way when you try to work in your primary flow activity because you tend to resent all the other things

that go that get in between you and it's often better to work in what's known as a secondary flow activity for me that's writing right 70 of the time i start writing i'm going to drop into at least like a micro flow state 90 of the time i go skiing i'm going to drop into flow that's how i think about it what's up guys this episode of mark bell's power project is brought to you by piedmontese beef here we go talking about beef again dude you know i'm on a high carb low fat diet. There's no way I can have amazing ribeyes Uh new york strips and all that good stuff. There's just way too much fat in it Why are you gonna just like sit there and tease me with all this stuff? You know the cool thing about like piedmontese is that it kind of falls in line with uh, you guys you guys know about mark's

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At checkout, enter promo code POWERPROJECT for 25% off your order. And if your order is $99 or more, you get free two-day shipping. It's interesting when you have your mind preoccupied on something else, how it can trigger some of this flow state that you're talking about. Because for me personally, it's always felt best if I'm not thinking about business to come up with great ideas for business, you know, if my mind is somewhere else, even just something as simple as listening to old music, um, watching an old movie, that's like my favorite movie. I'll watch it. And then I'll be like, Oh man, I got this crazy idea for this new, whatever the heck it might be.

So a lot of it is, especially the music, but but same thing with movies so i talked a second ago about dopamine norepinephrine uh heightening pattern recognition right so the ability to link ideas together um there's also a dope insight trigger for flow so when you link ideas together right you're watching an old movie you see something familiar and it links to another thought in your head, right? And your brain, and especially if it's a movie you've seen a lot, your brain, which is always trying to predict what's going to happen next, you already know what's going to happen next. So there's got a little space on the side so it can look for those kind of more remote connections. And we also know, this is why favorite pieces of music and old movies tend to do this. So if you look in creativity,

one of the things about creativity is anxiety blocks creativity. And one of the great secrets to creativity is a good mood promotes it. And the reason is anxiety is predominantly norepinephrine cortisol, but the more norepinephrine in your system, the more logical and linear brain wants to be right. If you're in a big problem, crisis situation, you don't want choice paralysis, a million options. You want fight, freeze, or flee, right?

That sort of thing. And we all know this, that in the, like, if, you know, as you learn this the hard way in any of the, in the martial arts, right? Like what Mike Tyson meant, when everybody's got a plan, do you get punched in the mouth, right? Like, you know, that in a crisis situation, your brain stops being able to kind of tap dance and suddenly just, you know, reacts. That happens. It's not just extreme anxiety. It's all levels of anxiety. So it's because the anterior cingulate cortex, which is part of the

brain that can find far flung connections between ideas, the more norepinephrine in that circuit, the less far-flung connections it will find. So a good mood, it will go, oh, everything's cool in the world. I can look for far-flung connections from this idea that may help you find new resources or innovate or whatever. It's not a crisis situation. We have time. We have the luxury of time to solve this problem and when you watch an old movie one you don't have to predict what's happening next because you know and two it puts you in a good mood gets a little dopamine flowing um and as a result you're starting to know this pattern same things music music is all about

pattern recognition right one of the reasons music is so, our brain wants to predict what's going to happen next. And because music follows predictable patterns, we often can. We get little hits of dopamine every time we connect those patterns. That's why music can try to drop us in the flow that way. Do you have any pre-writing rituals that may or may not help you get into that flow state? I just know I love writing and sometimes I will blink and then time will pass by and I'll have, you know, a couple of pages down. Um, but I know listeners who are writers are kind of like, Hey, this guy has, you know, 12 books.

Yeah. So I, I, we actually, I do a whole course called flow for writers as a whole. We have a whole digital course that I put together on this cause I really like training writers, but I, so there's a lot of rituals. Um, I'll talk about the most important ones um as they pertain to writing but these are all flow triggers that apply to everybody it's not just writing so this is obvious but flow follows focus so the most important flow trigger is complete concentration and that means and what that actually means is I start my day with about a four hour block of uninterrupted concentration. But the research shows in the beginning, 90 minutes is great. You want to sort of start your day or start your work session

with 90 minutes uninterrupted space for complete concentration, 90 minutes, just in the way that we sleep for 90 minute cycles. Well, there's a waking focus cycle that lasts about 90 minutes or REM sleep is 90 minutes and waking focus is 90 minutes. So it's a built-in biological block. We're sort of built to pay attention for that long. I always like to start my day with that and start my day with my writing because it's my hardest task. We know that willpower is highest first thing in the morning, right? It usually, willpower tends to decline over time for a variety of reasons. Roy Baumeister's work on some of this, other people have added to it since then. I also always, always, always start my writing day by editing what I wrote the day before. So I writing a flow. One of the things that triggers flow are clear goals. So that's a daily to do list. So I always write start of a

book. I'll write 500 words a day in the middle of book at seven 50 towards the end. It's a thousand words as I get to know where I'm going. And I start by editing what I wrote the day before. And the reason is editing is predominantly about pattern recognition. As we know from the conversation, pattern recognition, when you notice, oh, this sentence gets so much better if I change this word out for this word and there's more rhythm here if I connect this right, that's pattern recognition.

So you're getting little bits of dopamine, little bits of, and what it is doing is it's driving concentration, driving you closer to flow. So by the time I get to the threaded blank page, I'm already a little bit in flow. My focus is at least up and I've got a little bit of that stuff in my system. And now when I face the blank page, I'm not exactly neurobiologically starting from zero. So those things are really important. But I also, one of the most important things for writers is your brain has a right. It does build, it does pattern recognition automatically, but it can't do it if it doesn't have starts and endings. So always know where

you're starting from and always know where you're going. Your brain will automatically be able to fill in the middle, but a lot of writers block is is I don't know where I'm starting from and I don't know where I'm going. So when I say I have clear goals, I'm going to write 500 words today. Right. And I always know where I'm starting from and where I'm ending because it tends to prevent writer's block. Yeah. And that 90 minutes that you spoke of, what's what are you trying to achieve there? And is it like a meditation thing or are you just literally. No, I mean, those 90 minutes for uninterrupted concentration i'm writing that's when i'm writing yeah that's my writing time but it's nine you want foe to maximize flow

it doesn't really if you're giving yourself 15 minutes to drop it usually takes about 15 minutes to drop into into flow kind of thing even if you're really good at your craft kind of thing, and if not longer. So you want that long block to give yourself time to shift into the state. I'm also wondering what kind of people have you run into that have gotten into flow states? They're masterful at it. They're amazing at it. And it's before they even ever met you, you mentioned like rock climbing and you mentioned some of these guys being kind of, uh, grungy and just, no, there is no way to achieve expert performance in pretty much any discipline without flow because flow is how, how we get to expertise and it's what underpins expertise.

Um, it is particularly, it was particularly common in action sports in the 1990s. Why I saw that giant revolution is for a variety of different reasons. They had started to sort of build communities of innovation around flow triggers. Now we will do this automatically and consciously. So in my new book, The Art of Impossible, I talk about how peak performance is nothing more than getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. And the whole book covers a bunch of motivation skills, a bunch of learning skills, a bunch of creativity skills, and a bunch of flow skills, because that's the full biological toolkit for peak performance.

Every peak performer is going to gravitate towards these skills because this is how we do it, right? What we've learned now is that there's an order to the process and there's a sequence. There's a way to get it to work much better for us. But you see all this stuff anywhere you see kind of expert performance. You have to. It's how expertise gets done. One thing I'm kind of wondering on that is um these rock climbers they sound like unconventional it didn't sound like they're like necessarily and maybe they were

professional rock climbers but the way that you kind of painted the picture it sounds like they were doing drugs and rock climbers and surfers and ski i mean i was predominantly the big group that i think i was living in squaw valley so it it was, you know, skiers, snowboarders in the winter, and we were all rock climbers in the summer or surfers, right? And so it wasn't limited to one sport, though. I will say Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, when he started doing a lot of this early research, he was looking at rock climbers. He himself is a mountaineer and a little bit of a rock climber. So he, that was one of the groups of people he was looking at early on.

My curiosity is in like, some of these people don't seem to care about much else, except for this. They have a singular focus. You kind of mentioned, painted a picture. Like sometimes from what I've seen is like, sometimes a guy can't figure out how to scrape change together to get to a certain spot because they don't have money for gas. But when they get there, they kick everybody's ass. You know, you kind of see this unconventional. Is that allotting for the freedom in their brain? Like you mentioned earlier for them to be creative and for them to draw upon flow, maybe easier. It's it's, I mean, that's a complicated question.

Cause that, you know, all kinds of individuality stuff there. You also, you know, when you see that kind of OCD kind of devotion and right there, there could be other mental challenges going on around. Like there's a whole bunch of stuff that could produce that particular thing. But with the rock climbers, I mean, certainly a lot of it. of stuff that could produce that particular thing. But with the rock climbers, I mean, certainly a lot of it, you also got to remember, like, I mean, this was as when I was coming up as a journalist, right. When I wasn't being a journalist, I was certainly driving around in different rock climbing areas or surf breaks or whatever, and living out of the back of my car. This was being in my twenties, I think for a lot of people. Right. So, you know, one is the question

that, right. Cause if you see the guy who's 2025, right? Cause if you see the guy who's 2025, it's one thing you see in somebody who's 50 55, that's a different thing, right? And that you're looking at different things. Some of that has to do with flow. It's interesting. Here's what's weird about this. We know that flow transfers because flow is essentially a focusing skill. So like one of the first things we do when we're training people to get more flow in their life, they want more flow at work, for example, right.

At the office is double down on your primary flow activity. So the reason is if you go skiing on Monday or, you know, play jujitsu on Monday and drop into flow, you go to work on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Well, the more flow you get, the more flow you get. work on tuesday wednesday thursday and friday well the more flow you get the more flow you get it's a focusing skill and like any other skill you train it you get better at it over time and there's additional boosts to doing that in that as we move into flow there's a global release of nitric oxide it's a gas that's signaling molecule flushes stress hormones out of

our system so you sort of reset the nervous system it really calms you down and anxiety blocks peak performance so that's great longer term and flow is a massive heightening in creative problem solving uh 400 to 700 depending on whose studies you're looking at uh Teresa probably at Harvard read out that that creativity will outlast the flow state by a day maybe two and you see the same thing happening to mood and emotion and flow, right? Flow is incredibly euphoric and the euphoria outlasts the flow state. So just going, going, you know, surfing on Monday getting into flow that those benefits tend to carry later into the week, which would lead you to believe, right?

These people who are show up at the, at, at the studio and kick everybody's ass are great, that it would carry into daily life. And we don't see that. And there are other things like, for example, we know that flow over time will increase empathy and environmental awareness, your perception. But that doesn't mean like surfers surfing is packed with flow triggers but this doesn't mean surfing automatically seems to turn you into like this

empathetic buddha type because that clearly doesn't happen right and so that i my point is there's still you know big gaping holes in the research that we can drive a bus through in terms of these kinds of questions. You know, one thing that I was really wondering as you were talking about this is because you mentioned in your book, The Art of Impossible, that it's the biology of flow, right? And I don't know if like, do you put a difference between the biology and the psychology of things? Because when a lot of people think about this, they about changing their mindset changing the way they think about things but you're so talking about the physical mechanisms to be able to achieve i'm talking about the neurobiological mechanisms we access them through psychology but the point so when we were trying to train people we go back to the 90s and the 80s and 90s there's a great book called flow and sport

written by susan jackson mehi chicks at mehi and uh great susan's a great flow researcher and she was a uh really high level olympic coach worked with a lot of different people and tried to use the psychology of flow to train people in the flow and the results were really mixed like people just weren't good at it because like how the hell are you gonna like, we have to worry about the, like the merger of action awareness. And they didn't know what they were doing. Once we figure out, Hey, wait a minute, flow triggers do one of three things. They create dopamine, they create norepinephrine or they lower cognitive load. Now we're like, oh, okay. What do we have to, we have to find things that create norepinephrine, create dopamine and lower cognitive load. These will drive flow. And suddenly it became much more reliable and repeatable. That's what I mean by it.

We just got down to the level of mechanism. I'll give you another example because you used it. So when most people use the term mindset, they mean attitude towards life. When psychologists use the term mindset, They actually mean attitude towards learning, right? Growth mindset versus fixed mindset. And when you actually look under the hood of what the hell is, is like Carol Dweck talking about, she's saying, look, if you have a growth mindset, when you're faced with a challenge, your brain will get active and rise to the challenge. We have a fixed mindset.

When faced with a challenge, your brain won't do work. And it's that mechanism that you're right you're not interested in attitudes or growth or fixed you're interested in i want to fucking learn so how do we know how do we make the brain learn right so that's what i mean by going to that level it's less about if the problem is training from the psychology, these words are metaphorical. It's like trying, you know, we there's a lot of really interesting research that comes out of like the crossovers between people in the sciences and people in spiritual communities. But for it to happen, we always have to teach the folks in the spiritual communities the language of science, because the way a Tibetan Buddhist is going to describe one practice versus a franciscan nun versus a jew versus a muslim and they're all doing the same kind of meditative practice in the right there but the language is totally different but if you go under the hood you're like oh wow same parts of the brain are being active and inactive when all these people are

praying and meditating similar technology in a sense does that make sense makes total sense good how do you have an opportunity to drive a uh to uh fly i should say yeah what went on there so uh i gotta give you a little bit of backstory as i said when i started this conversation with you my early mentor was looking at the kind of the neuroscience of quasi mystical experience oneness with everything right another really common mystical experience with you my early mentor was looking at the kind of the neuroscience of quasi-mystical experience oneness with everything right another really common mystical experience that happened in flow is out-of-body experiences and some of the earliest research into out-of-body and near-death experiences believe it or not were done by the air force the mig fighters or the stealth fighters

show up pilots start flying them into g-lock right gravity induced loss of consciousness because they can bank turns right and all the blood rushes out of your head people are crashing these billion dollar planes so this guy james winner he gets hired to solve the problem and he spins over a thousand pilots into g-lock in a centrifuge in texas and discovers that when the vast majority of them start right before they start to lose consciousness, they're having out of body experiences. And if they keep spinning them, they progress into near death experiences. And so this is sort of a known thing in the research, in the literature. And I know this. All right. We're going to park this by the side. Then I'm going to tell you a different story.

All right, we're going to park this by the side, and then I'm going to tell you a different story. I was a journalist, and I had friends who were publicists. And a friend of mine was a publicist for Stolichnaya. Cold War ends. The Soviet Union falls. Everybody's freaking bankrupt over there. And the Russian government decides they're going to make money by selling selling off their old mig fighter jets and they sell stoli a bunch of mig 17 fighter jets and stoli decides to take them up tour of america and fly them all around and they show up in california my friend calls me up and he's like hey dude you want to

go for a ride in a mig hell who doesn't right of course i want to go for a ride in a mig so i i drive out to livermore where that where they are and it's a mig trainer so there's a right there's a the front seat is for actually the passenger where they're learning to fly the plane and the pilot sits behind them but it's a standard mig but just with an extra seat in there and i'm like they strap me in and the pilot crew walks over and he's like starts teaching me about the like here's the this is how the rudder works and these are how the pedals work and and i'm looking and he's like starts teaching me about the like here's the this is how the rudder works and these are how the pedals work and and i'm looking and i'm like dude you know i can't fly a plane i've never flown a plane before and he's like no no this is just a precaution just in

case whatever and um he's russian of course and uh we get a hundred feet off the deck and he's like, okay, you have this stick. And I'm like, what do you mean? I have this stick. He's like, you have this stick. You cannot crash us. I do not think. And I'm like, okay. And then like, I start flying this thing and I'm like, well, what can I do? He's like, you can do anything. And I'm like, I can't crash this thing for real. Cause I've read all this stuff about out-of-body and near-death experiences if i fly into g-lock so i want to fly the plane into g-lock i want to see if this is true i want to see if i'm going to have an out-of-body or near-death experience and he's like well okay so i start barrel rolling and that doesn't work and then i start looping the plane looping a mig is how i flew myself into g-lock totally knocked myself out

completely flipped the big, knocked myself out. One of the things I don't tell you about G-force is that it makes you sick as a dog afterwards. It messes you up. I was like, flew symptoms down to the count for like a month afterwards. I got like halfway home from the airfield. I was like, I don't feel so good. It was bad. But yeah, I flew a mig-17

and i flew into g lock and i did a test of neuroscience theory and yes i did actually experience like i passed down a long dark tunnel into the light right as my consciousness went away so that part actually uh turns out to be true too you know actually i'm not on mute so one thing i was curious about is because you continue to mention that flow follows focus. That's like, that's like the thing flow follows focus. But along with that, you've also mentioned many a time that you need to be able to be in the present moment, right? And when I'm assuming when you mentioned being in the present moment, that means you're not thinking of other things other than the task at hand. Nowadays, people find it very

difficult to focus on being in the present moment. They're doing something, they're doing work, they're working out, they're doing a task, but their mind is in all of these other places and they can't figure out how to focus. So are there any practices for being able to achieve that, being able to actually focus on what you're doing at that point. If you're an individual that can't, you find it impossible to do that. So there's a number of answers here. One we talked about earlier. So what's the big deal about intrinsic motivation? Why do we care? Curiosity, autonomy, passion, purpose, right?

We hear these things and what is motivation? The big deal about intrinsic motivation is we get focused for free. That's what it is. When you're curious about something, you automatically pay attention to it. When you're passionate about something, you pay even more attention to it. If it's tied to your purpose, right, et cetera, et cetera. So when you try to kind of line up the thing you're doing with all of your intrinsic motivators, kind of line up the thing you're doing with all of your intrinsic motivators, you're pointing them all in the same direction to solve that problem, right? Is the first answer. The second answer is we use a bunch of different, we train people in mindfulness along the way. We do it for emotional regulation to keep people's nervous systems in check because too much anxiety will

block flow. But it also trains up focus. We also train people in distraction management, right? When I say have a period of uninterrupted concentration, 90 minutes, start your day kind of thing. I also mean I end my day and I train people with distraction management. So I know I'm going to come in first thing in the morning and start writing. So I turn off the internet. I shut down email. I turn off messages. I block my notifications, all of it ahead of time. So I manicure the space. Right. Because I'm just like everybody else and things go blinky blinky. It's going to distract me as well. So I prepare the space ahead of time kind of thing.

There's other things to go on, but we're not multitaskers, right? The evidence is over. I mean, yes, you can become better at multitasking, right? But you're still terrible at it, right? I mean, okay, you're slightly better at something that we're terrible at, and you're never going to be great at it. That's a lost cause, right? The brain is a serial processor. It wants to do one task at a time. And so does the nervous system, right? We really don't love kind of that much scattered focus. In fact, one of the reasons clear goals, setting a daily to-do list works as a flow trigger is because all the shit we have to do at any one time weighs on our cognitive load.

So when you make a clear goal to-do list, you are exporting something out of memory into the world and it lowers cognitive load. It frees up more energy that you can repurpose for focusing attention. that you can repurpose for focus and attention. So I'm not saying, you know, yeah, I guess I am saying it's a stupid way to live, right? Like train yourself out of multitasking. Like if you're interested in long-term peak performance, solve that problem, right?

Do stuff that lines up with your intrinsic motivators, create practice distraction management. And the other thing, practice mindfulness and respiration practices. And the other thing is don't expect it to happen. You're never, if you can't focus for 90 minutes, that's not a reason to not do this. Start with 10 minutes, right? If you can manage it for 10 minutes today and 11 minutes tomorrow, right? This is a long game. Peak performance is an infinite game. It's played over the course of a lifetime. It's not something you win, right?

There's no, how are you going to win peak performance? It's a lifestyle. It's a way of approaching everything that you do. What have you seen in some of your research with exercise? Has there been, you know, like walking or running or? Yeah. So, okay. Has there been, you know, like walking or running or?

Yeah. So, okay. So what's foundationally important for flow? So one of flow's most important triggers is what's known as the challenge skills balance. 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 this. If I were to say this emotionally, I would say that the challenge of the task sits not on a pretty clear, clear, close to the midpoint between boredom, not enough stimulation here. I'm not paying any attention and anxiety. Whoa, way too much right in between is what is known as the flow channel or if you speak

physiology this is the erks dobson curve right it's this it's the same thing um but the point of that is it's a it's a thin line right like between your challenge and skills and the more anxiety in your system, the more challenging things are going to be in general to you. And it's very easily get overwhelmed and get knocked out of flow. So positive psychology has sort of identified a bunch of great strategies for going after fear and anxiety. And they're either a daily gratitude practice, a daily mindfulness practice or exercise, right? And the way I look at it is five minutes of gratitude practice, a daily mindfulness practice, or exercise, right? And the way I look at it is five minutes of gratitude practice will kind of, will lower anxiety. And we can talk about

the neurobiology of why, if you're interested in lower anxiety using mindfulness and meditation, it's about 11 to 20 minutes of focused meditation a day, or you want to exercise, where this is where we started the conversation, into exercise-induced transient hyperfrontality, when it gets quiet upstairs. And by the way, when you get that nitric oxide releases, you probably know your lungs open up, right? So you feel that expansive breath feeling also as well. That's the signal that you've calmed down your nervous system. So what I tell people is under normal conditions, do one of those a day, right? It could be gratitude.

It could be respiration. It could be mindful or it could be exercise, but one a day under crisis conditions, we're dealing with COVID, right? Where people are more stressed out, a little more hypervigilant, double down, do two a day is really, you know, foundationally important.

So for nervous system regulation alone, super, super important. Also, we know that one of Flo's triggers is what's known as deep embodiment. Basically, when we engage multiple senses in one activity, it pulls focus into that activity, right? So physical activity engages multiple senses. So this could be low-grade physical activity, building model airplanes, going for walks in nature or gardening, that kind of stuff. Or it could be more rigorous exercise. Once you get into a lot of the athletics, because they involve so many other flow triggers and often athletic progression stays in that challenge skills sweet spot,

you tend to get a lot of flow inside athletic activities, especially as you move up in expertise and can start to automatize some of your behaviors, right? You know, one thing I was also curious about when you were mentioning that was um there was gosh what was it i'm losing it here all right let's see if we get it back i was gonna ask actually uh let's see where to go okay in regards to just your work specifically where does somebody start yeah if you so if you're

like the art of impossible is the new book is the first time I've turned this into a how to right this is the work we've been doing at the flow research collective for a while right we're a research and training organization and on the training side we work with everybody from kind of the u.s special forces and professional athletes to ceos of fortune 100 companies to like insurance brokers from iowa and soccer moms from indiana um so it's a huge spectrum it's about

a thousand people a month we're training so we have good data sets on this we're very good at it and um all that the how-to side of it is in the argument possible. It's the first time I've written an actual peak performance primer. It's a blueprint that anybody can use to level up their game. That's what it was designed for. If you're interested in, you know, flow and action sports and what happened in this great era of impossible, that's in my book, The Rise of Superman. if you're more interested in these questions of other altered states of consciousness that's stealing fire and then there's a shit ton of other books but we'll stop there and it can't go go ahead oh one thing uh i

uh i just want to uh give your listeners is if you uh want more flow in your life and you just want a place to start, if you go to www.flowblocker.com, it's, so there are six main blockers of flow that people fall prey to. And most people tend that there's a major one that tends to stand between them and more flow. We just built a diagnostic and it's free. Anybody can take it. It's out there at flowblocker.com as well. that you can take it it's out there um at flowblocker.com as well so wait one final thing because i just want to come off something before i said it you asked a question about flow and exercise and things like that where this shit is getting really cool and where we don't have answers is um for example i'm a huge weightlifting, right? I would much rather train aerobically by actually going out and skiing or mountain biking or whatever. Like you'll never catch me on the Stairmaster. You always catch me going up the mountain with my dogs. But I love lifting weights. And I think lifting weights is a really good precursor for flow because of how it tends to deactivate the prefrontal cortex, et cetera, et cetera. And just in the way that we're starting to see that aerobic exercise is good for certain kinds of cognition and strength training is good for certain kinds of cognition. We may find that

different kinds of training leads to better, worse, or different kinds of flow in that sort of stuff. This is really sort of at the edge of where our knowledge is right now. But I think that's, I think that's sort of coming. And I think we'll have, like, if you ask me again, if you have me back in three or four years and ask me the question again, I'll probably have a much more interesting, cool answer for you guys. Yeah. When you mentioned the title of your book, the question came back to me because, you know, you mentioned that anxiety is a blocker for flow.

And obviously the art of impossible or the impossible is this massive goal that you think is impossible and makes you anxious. Makes you anxious, man. Exactly. So, um, yeah, no, let me, let me talk about what I mean by that. So the book is really about lessons learned from people who have gone after capital I impossible, that which has never been done for sure. It is meant to be applied by anybody who's interested in what I would call small I impossible. Small I impossible is that which you think is impossible for you. And right. This could be for me. I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, blue collar steel mill town in the 70s. I wanted to be a writer. Right. It was like I woke up one day. I didn't know any writers. I didn't know how you became a writer. It was like I looked at my parents. I was like, mom, dad, when I grow up, I wanted to be a writer, right? It was like, I woke up one day, I didn't know any writers. I didn't know how you became a writer. It was like, I looked at my parents and I was like,

mom, dad, when I grow up, I want to be an elf, right? I mean, for, I had no idea how you did this. That's a cap. That's a small lie impossible because there's no clear path between where I am and where I want to go. And statistically not great odds of success, but there's a lot of small lie impossibles in our lives, rising out of poverty, overcoming trauma, getting paid for what you love, becoming world-class at anything. It could be stamp collecting, right? Any of that, those are all small I impossibles. There are a lot of those. I always say that I think most of this, the first small I impossible most of us tackle is like back when you're 10, 11, 12 years old and you want that first kiss or first boyfriend, girlfriend, right? Like, I 10, 11, 12 years old and you want that first kiss or first

boyfriend, girlfriend, right? Like, I mean, you remember being that young and you were like, how are you going to solve that particular problem? Was a small lie impossible. But I'd also like to point out since there's no difference by there's just getting your biology to work for you rather than against you. If you want to be a little more productive at work on Monday, right, or a little more fulfilled in your life on Tuesday, or you are interested in going after small I impossible, or you are interested in going after capital I impossible, the toolkit is the same.

That's what's broken down in the art of impossible. My point in calling it the art of impossible is in 30 years of studying this stuff, there's one overwhelming conclusion, which is all of us are hardwired for extraordinary. We're built to go after big challenges. We're actually built to rise to our full potential, our full capabilities. Abraham Maslow, the psychologist, this is not a new idea. He put it this way. He said, whatever a person can be, they must be.

We're designed, and we know this, right? Like the agony of not living up to our full potential is hard for anybody to live with. We feel that tension inside ourselves. That's a persistent form of cognitive load. One of the reasons why passion, purpose, and all these things are also flow triggers is because when we're not, they're not aligned and they're not all pointing in the same direction. We're not living according to our values and our passions and our purposes. It weighs on us, right? And it, and it weighs on our brain and it exerts cognitive load on a moment by moment basis, which is why when you start lining those things up,

you feel like the energy just levels just go up. What are you working on at the moment? Is there something that really excites you or you're working on a new book or read or new research? Yeah. So I've been, I, I'm starting to research a book on, my next book is going to be on intuition and that's very exciting because I think it's the last uncharted wilderness of human performance. And I'm really curious about that.

But we have been working on, we meaning me and some of the neuroscientists at the Flow Research Collective, are working on a paper on the neural dynamics of flow to the network level. And we're really focused on flow state onset. So earlier we started this conversation. I said, hey, there might be the fight response at the front end of a flow state. That's work that comes out of this paper and more. So we've been working on this for about a year. We're getting closer and closer to getting ready to publish it,

but hopefully it'll be out this year. I'm really excited about that work. Great having you on the show today. Outstanding information and where can people look up more stuff on you? You, uh, you could find, uh, the art impossible.com is all about the book. Steven Kotler.com. If you're interested in the work we do at the flow research collective and training with us, it's flow research, collective.com flow blocker.com. We'll get you that diagnostic. And I think that's all I got.

Awesome. Congratulations. Thank you gentlemen. Looks like we lost Mark. Congratulations. Oh, thank you gentlemen. Looks like we lost Mark. He was just congratulating you and yeah, just sincerely thank you for all the information today. We really appreciate it. Um, so yeah,

thank you so much, man. You have a good, thanks for the good, thoughtful questions. I appreciate it. Likewise. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Have a great day. Be well guys. You as well. You just cut off right there, Mark. Am I back? Yeah, you're back. No, we're all good.

Man, that was sick. It said that I was unstable is what it said on my screen. It's like, how do they know? Yeah. They're going to say, hey, is this my psychiatrist? What's going on here? That was dope, man. I'm going to check out that book.

Yeah, we got to figure out that flow. That flow flow yeah uh eminem was really good with that that guy could flow for days you know like honestly you bring up a good point when you when you like hear eminem's freestyles and stuff like that guy had to have been tapping into something you know what i mean because it was just unreal like a lot of rappers probably like freestyle rappers that just have stuff come off the dome that you're just like what the hell they're they're getting in something right there we just we didn't have like enough time to challenge him on it but um i would have liked to ask him more about multitasking because you know you're always doing more than one thing you know like you're like even being on this podcast, we're communicating with him at the same time,

we're thinking about questions at the same time. I'm like writing down some questions and yes, somebody could say, Hey, look, man, if you were just in the present moment and you were just like solely focused on him, you would, it would be a better interview or something. But I think that there's some small stuff that we can do. Like you can listen to music and walk, you know, like I think there's, you can listen to music and stretch. Somebody can maybe make an argument and say, Hey, look, we have all this science that shows this other stuff. But he even mentioned himself that sometimes when you go to do something,

how it frees up some space and frees up your mind to think about other things because you're not so singularly focused on that one thing. So I understand his point. You know, I'm not like this, like, you know, sitting here texting people while I'm trying to communicate with you guys that I totally understand. And I would agree with that 100%. Yeah. I like what he said about you want to stretch a little bit.

You don't want to snap. So I think what you're explaining is like, yeah, we're stretching a little bit. You don't want to snap. So I think what you're explaining is like, yeah, we're stretching a little bit by listening, writing down some questions and then, you know, taking notes. But you're right. If I'm trying to do some math equations over here, one of the two are going to fall. And I believe that was part of the one of the book I read a year or two ago. And was just explaining how like the um like the percentage drop off when you're trying to multitask like they've been able to compute it and calculate that you know if you do focus on more than one thing at once but i don't see any problem with

what you're explaining which is just like music and walking yeah small yeah small tasks i think the larger things would you you would be making a mistake. Yeah, I wouldn't call that multitasking. Like having some instrumental music on while you're getting some work done, that can only amplify what you're doing because it just helps you get in the zone of that. But if you have multiple tabs on your computer and you're getting notifications and having to answer people's questions while you're trying to get something done, that never works well for me. Right.

Yeah. I think one interesting thing that he really mentioned that I don't know, I never really thought about was like, he, he said that you have this, there's a primary flow thing that you do, and then maybe there's a secondary flow activity. And he said that he saw, um, less success at individuals that like worked or like had to do work in their primary flow activity. And I can of i can kind of see that you know what i mean because like like i really really really enjoy jujitsu but i know that it would just be stressful if one day i wanted to try to own a dojo and all of that like things that comes into all

of that like i feel like that would just kind of dampen the jujitsu experience for me rather than me just being able to go in and train with people, you know? Yeah. Yeah. There was somebody that said, uh, it, it all depends on your interest levels. Yeah. Who was that? That was Mark Bell. And what, that's exactly what he was explaining. You know, even if it's a job that you hate or that you dislike, um, as long as you have something that you can hang your hat on, like, I'm going to do this, you know, for eight hours because it's going to allow me the time and, or allow me the money to go buy podcast equipment in the next couple of months. So that's what I'm going to be focusing on. And then you can dive into that flow state to, you know, crush that day job. Um, I know Aubrey Marcus called it like smiling through the suck,

like kind of give yourself an, uh, a reason to, uh, to be pumped about what you do every day. Like you mentioned the reframing. Correct. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, reframing. And when you mentioned having anxiety over impossible here, he like auto-corrected himself and was like, that's the anxiety that you would have. That was great. You know, I think, you know, words like I can't. And,

um, I mean, we say them all the time. I can't do, I can't do that. Or how many times have you said, ah, I tried it. And when you say you tried it, you are signaling to other people that you feel that you gave it a pretty good shot and that you're done with it. It's, it's a closed statement. And same thing with, I can't, I can't, it's like, yeah, you're, you're saying that you just don't think you possess the ability to do it. And that's that, you know, kind of stretch, but don't snap type of type of mentality is great. Because if you do tell people to do stuff that is really, really simple and really super easy, they're not really excited about it. Usually there's some people that will say, really simple and really super easy, they're not really excited about it.

Usually there's some people that will say, oh yeah, I'll go on a couple of 10 minute walks a day or whatever. But if the 10 minute walk never progresses into anything else, or your, your weight training never progresses into anything else, you're always using the same weights. You're not really ever challenging yourself. It's going to be hard to grow. I like what he said too, about in psychology, about mindset. That was really, that was really helpful. You know, learning that mindset in psychology terms means to, you know, have a, have a growth mindset, you know, towards learning. You know, it's, it's about, it's about learning and mindset, uh, in, in general, when we use the word mindset, we're like, oh, that guy's got a crappy mindset. He's not, um,

he's not excited about life or he's negative. Uh, but being positive and being open to learning is, is, uh, almost a better way to look at it more direct. I think. You know, I think it'd be great if we could somehow manage to find Carol Dweck, that woman who wrote that book on mindset that everybody always refers to because in his, in Steven's book, it was the, the rise of Superman or whatever. He mentioned like the growth mindset and he mentioned it during this interview too, but the growth mindset versus the fixed mindset for being able to achieve that, like you need to have a growth mindset. You can't go on something and say, Oh, I can't do that. Or that's too hard. Or I can't learn that you have to believe that it's something that you can learn and do as a precursor to being able to achieve that.

And like a lot of that mindset is, you know, having great parents that, that tell you that you can do like whatever you try to learn that learn that give you that encouragement or as an adult changing your fixed mindset into a growth mindset, having to actively fight against your fixed mindset. That's a big component. I think a big component to the age thing that he was talking about saying, like, you know, having your kind of where you're making your money and how you're making your money kind of set by the time you're 40. I think that was, that was, I've never really heard anyone talk about that before, but that makes a lot of sense because when you're five or when you're 10, you know, you're not like questioning life. You're not like, why are we here? You know, as you get older, you are searching for purpose.

You are kind of wondering, you're like, yeah, why are we here? And if, I don't know, if your life is just good and feels healthy, even when you do ask that question, you won't necessarily feel bad about it because you're like, well, I don't really know why we're here, but like things are going pretty good. I feel pretty good every day. You know, I got a lot of nice things to look forward to each and every day, rather than you know, you're sitting there kind of wondering why we're here and you're like, why do I exist? Cause I'm, I didn't pass on my genes. I didn't I, I don't have a good income. I every day is a struggle, you know, like what's the point in being here? And so I can see his point on that, on how you can get, um, how that, those are things that like, yeah, you,

you do need to have those things, um, set up and kind of aligned before, before you get to those ages. Yeah. And I never heard anybody give a specific like age number on that as well as you know at 50 kind of um forgiving everyone that did you wrong that that's that's interesting never never heard of that before thinking about that it's like i get it but i wonder like what's the deeper reason as to why like i mean you should you should try to do that already but why like why by 50 must that be something you do to be able to, I guess, maybe what's he mentioning move forward emotionally or something like. He mentioned kind of like living the most, I guess, kind of optimal life type of deal, you know?

I would imagine just that resentment of people probably just sits with you all the time. And then it kind of goes back to that anxiety deal and goes back to consume. It consumes your mind. You know, the negativity consumes your mind. It halts you. It it it really slows you down, you know, and it's not motivating. And it's going to be a block, as he was mentioning, towards that flow state.

And we don't we don't want any of that, you know. So the heck are you doing in bodega bay mark you were just here five minutes ago or so yeah you know the uh we got a power outage and they're like we don't know when we're going to get to your area so oh my god i was like all right let's get out of here. So my son wanted to go to Tahoe, but they just got dumped on with a crazy amount of snow. And I was like, dude, like, you know, I don't even I don't know if we have power there either. And it's just tough to get up there. You know, they close down a lot of roads and it's just it's it's mayhem. So it's Jake's birthday. so it's uh jake's birthday it's jake's birthday today actually so oh wow yeah um he is 17 oh my gosh yeah he's 17

yet uh well two days ago uh hamish my uh nephew he turned eight. And so we've got some birthdays going on over here. But yeah, I'm in Bodega Bay where we got some, we have some power, sun's out. I'm going to go outside and go for a big ass walk. Yeah. Bodega always has great weather, but like, it seems like whenever it's really crappy over here, it's perfect over there. It can get really stormy out here too, and can lose power here and there, but usually it's because it's common for there to be storms here. It usually gets fixed fairly quickly.

Yeah. Cause I don't want people without power for too long, I guess. Yeah. You know, real quick though, I would suggest that everybody, whether you listen to the audio format or you buy it,

grab that book, the art of impossible because uh i was telling andrew i just grabbed it on audible yesterday and i was listening to it it's it's really good it's and it's it's it's also kind of you know you can tell how good of a writer he is because once you start listening to it like you start to get a pump and then you start to like feel all like this is i could do anything like like he's a really good exactly you get fired up man so um it's a really good book yeah do you think that's a book that you probably want like the physical form so you can highlight it or is like the audio version gonna be just as good yeah no i was mentioning to you how i think like he he takes a lot of the

stuff that he mentioned other books and he culminates it into this one along with putting a lot of actionable stuff into this book. Um, I think it's a book that would be good to have physically too, but Hey, just, just whatever way you guys want to grab it, just grab it. That's all I'm saying. Boom. All right, Andrew, take us all out of here buddy i will thank you everybody for checking out today's episode please share it with somebody if you found it uh you know as interesting as we did i know i have a bunch of people that i'm going to send this to actually um so please make sure you do that uh hit like subscribe do all that good stuff here on youtube and if you're on itunes go ahead and drop us a rating and a review that helps us out a ton. Please make sure you're following the podcast at Mark Bell's power project on

Instagram at MB power project on Twitter. Make sure you hit that link for the subscribing or for subscribing to the newsletter. I got some really cool stuff from Encima that he just sent me that you guys are going to get hit with early in February. So don't miss out on that. Cause if you guys missed out on this previous newsletter, it was really some just amazing stuff and you missed out on it, man. So out on that because if you guys missed out on this previous newsletter it was really some just amazing stuff and you missed out on it man so get on that my Instagram is

at I am Andrew Z as well as Twitter and Seema where you at thanks daddy I'm Seema Inyang on Instagram and YouTube and Seema Inyang on Twitter Mark got me again I'm at Mark Smelly Bell strength is never weakness weakness never strength catch you guys later bye