THE ED MYLETT SHOW - Revolutionize Your Life w/ Steven Kotler

Episode Date: March 17, 2020

Finding The Flow State in uncertain times and a message of Hope as the Future is Now In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, anxiety, stress, and worrying about the future is heavy on our minds but I am here to remind you today that our future is BRIGHT! What can only be described as a blessing of timing .... I sat down with award-winning journalist, Steven Kotler, who is MONUMENTALLY predicting and influencing our FUTURE way of life. Steven is the Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective and is one of the world’s leading experts on high performance. As a 3x New York Times Bestselling Author and a 2x Pulitzer Prize Nominee, his writings explore the upper limits of societal possibility, revolutionize peak performance and reveal the answers to leading a more satisfying and meaningful life. In this interview, Steven shares the keys 🔑 to tapping Into the Ultimate Human Performance Zone called “FLOW STATE” This is a CRITICAL message especially today when emotions are running high. Steven is sharing his key tips to get control over your emotions and gives concrete, concise information on why our brains look for threats and how we can use our negativity bias to our advantage. Then we shift gears and talk about cutting edge medical technologies like “Crisper “ that promise to possibly cure disease right now We also dive into the transformation of artificial intelligence, flying cars, going to Mars, longevity, the decrease of genetic disease, and how the fundamental fabric of society changing for the better. The WORLD is evolving rapidly, and the next ten years are full of OPPORTUNITY you never saw coming! I hope this interview provides you hope, encouragement and the inspiration we all need to hear right now about what it means to be human. Listen/Watch this GROUNDBREAKING conversation right HERE!

This is the Edmire Show. Welcome back to Max out everybody. Today's show is why I did the show in the first place and it was about maxing out your life and I've been fascinated all my life with finding out the ultimate way that human beings can perform. And this man to my left, I consider to be an expert on that topic and many other topics.

And so if you started a program called Max Out, your ultimate guest would be the gentleman to my left. He's in all multiple time, New York Times bestselling author and all kinds of different categories. He is the executive director of the flow research collective and he's becoming a good friend of mine and I can't wait to talk about flow today with all of you with Stephen Kotler. So Stephen, thanks for being here. Pleasure. So good, man.

Any of you that have ever been in that zone in your life, you've had that moment where you just the right words came out of your mouth or when you're an athlete, you just performed at your peak state. We all just, we all know that moment we've touched on all of us in our lives, but you call that flow. Why would you describe with the process of flow is the state of flow? So flow is a technical term.

It's a scientific term. We can talk about where it comes from in a sec, but as you pointed out, right, lots of synonyms being in the zone, runners high, if you're a basketball player you call being unconscious, if you're a jazz musician, it's in the pocket, if you're a stand-up comic, it's the forever box, like everybody's got their lingo. Scientists define flow as an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best. And more specifically, so everybody knows what they have, we're talking about.

Right, it's those moments of rapt attention, and total absorb from you. It's so focused on the task and what you're doing. Everything else just disappears. Right. So you sense a self, self-consciousness will vanish completely. Timel dilate, which is a fancy way of saying, pass the strings later, sometimes it speeds up,

five hours go by, five seconds. Or if someone does a slow sound, you get that freeze frame effect, bermurian enemies, you get a car crash, andune, and you're using a car crash and throughout, all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go through the roof. So that's flow in a nutshell. How did you stumble upon this?

Because you've written on all these other topics. Was it, I heard this story about, I know you were following around all these sort of like ultimate athletes, these peak performance type crazy athletes. Is that when this all sort of came into your frame of being? It's a two-fold story. So a part A is when I was a journalist as you pointed out coming up in my 20s, actually, it's just happening. Surfing, skiing, rock, climbing, snowboarding, and the gravity games were starting, the

X-game was a media was starting to pay attention, and so if you could ride in ski, ride in rock climb, or ride in whatever, there was some work. And I couldn't do any of those things very well. But I really drawn to the sports and I really needed the work. So I lied to my editors and you know, claved. I was a lot better than I was. I was lucky enough to essentially spend a decade chasing professional athletes around mountainous across the oceans. And along the way, what, first of all, their level of performance.

This was started to rise to the roof, right? We, the growth in action sports in the 90s, nothing like this has ever happened before in the history of the world. We saw kind of more impossible feats fall and one, and so what the hell was going on? All the journalists who were covering this, it was a topic of conversation,

because it wasn't like, this was a rowdy bunch of of people you'd be out at night everybody's doing 12 shots at tequila smoking an ounce of weed taking acid letting a bus on fire and see if we could throw naked back flips over it on you know and excuse like it was not real things good and the next morning you'd go out into the mountains with the same people and they would literally do something that your friend that has never been done in the history of the world and people thought was never going to be done. And it was brain scrambling, right? It was totally brain scrambling.

I broke a tremendous amount of bones. If you're not a professional athlete and you chase them around, you're going to, so at a certain point I realized I was going to kill myself and I had to take this question, how do you do the impossible until a lot of other domains? That sort of started. And then when I was 30 years old, I got Lyme disease. And I spent three years in bed. And by the end of it, I lost everything.

I lost the job. I spent a decade trying to get, what did Dean say, the success tax? I was paying my success tax. I'm getting my ass kicked. And after about three years of it, and I was like, I couldn't work. I was functional about 10% of the time. I was a massive amounts of pain. couldn't think, couldn't read,

because my short-term memory had disappeared. My long-term memory has gone. I was hallucinating sometimes. It was bad. And I was going to, I decided I was going to kill myself, because the doctors, they pulled me up meds. There was nothing any we could do for me. And all I was going to be was a burden to my friends

and my family from that point on. And I was like, well, that's not anyway to live. And so I did. I had sleeping pills, I had bourbon. I had a plan. It was when it wasn't if and a friend of mine showed up in my house and demanded me to go surfing. Dragged me to the SONLA, dragged me to the Pacific.

I couldn't walk across the room. It was a joke. But they carried me out there. They put me on a giant surfboard. And 30 seconds later, a wave came. And muscle memory took of took over. I spun the board, peddled a couple of times, jumped up and went to a dimension, I didn't even know exist.

It was the deepest flow stood at it I've ever experienced. I didn't even know you could go that far. Wow. So a full out of body experience, a whole bunch of other weird things happened. Did you know this was flow at the time? I didn't know. I knew I was having, like, what I thought

was a mystical spirit. I was floating above my body. I was not in pain, physical pain for the first time in three years. I felt great. I felt clear-headed. I felt like I had panoramic vision. These are all, by the way, we understand the neurobiology

where all this stuff comes from now. But so I had this crazy experience. I felt great and went home and like I was done. Like they put me into bed for two weeks and they'd bring me food and like on the 15th day when I could walk again, I caught a ride with more of my neighbors and went back to the beach and did it again. And over the course of about six to eight months

because it was the only time I had felt alive at all in three years. Right, my life had been miserable and this was the one. And I was like, well, if I can't do anything else at least I can do this. So I went back, we did it again and over the one and I was like, well, if I can't do anything else, at least I can do this. So I went back, we did it again and over the course about six months, eight months, I went from 10% functional to about 80% functional.

I, like, the Lyme disease went away and I was like, well, the fuck is going on? Like surfing is not a known cure for chronic problems. Right. Right, and I'm a science guy. So I lit out on a giant quest to figure out like what the hell's going wrong with me and I learned a couple of things very very not quickly as a relative term, but within a couple of years. I had learned that

One I figured out why I got better so when you move into flow there is a Essentially it resets your nervous system. So it calms you way down, right? Stress hormones are flushed out of your system. There's a global release of nitroxide. It pushes all the stress hormones out of your system, and then you get a bunch of feel good, positive uplifting neurochemistry on the back end. So two things, Lyme disease, any autoimmune condition, this is a nervous system going haywire.

So just by calming your nervous system back to zero, I could level set it again. I could find normal. Cause oftentimes with an autoimmune condition, your body doesn't even know where normal is. Like it's a homestatic organism that doesn't know how to find homeostasis. Okay. So, lime allowed me to do that.

All these same neurochemicals that turns out, this is not my work, this herbence, this work, Harvard massively boosts the immune system. So that was what was happening physically. But what I quickly figured out is I was like, holy shit, the same thing that's taking me from seriously subpar back to normal is taking these normal math rates all the way up to super.

Taking guys who they thought you can't ride away more than 25 feet and then now there's guys right in 150 feet. Yeah, that's the example I love to get exactly. Like if so, when we say action sports exploded in the 90s, and more impossible is what's happening than ever. We're surfing is a great example, right? It's a thousand year old sport.

Progress is really slow. 4 AD to 1996, the biggest wave. That name is surfed to 25 feet. And there's physics papers written about how you can be in Kant's surf a wave over 25 feet. And here we are a couple decades later. And surfers are paddling into waves that are over 60 feet, and they're telling you the waves that are over 100, right?

And this was happening in every air of action sports. So that's what I was seeing, and I realized it was the same mechanism. And then as I took this question of, hey, what does it take to do the impossible? Out of action sports and to other demands, which I did. Business, technology, science, art, culture, take your pick, and broke books about what I found, the mechanism is the same, because it's biology. Stay on this though. What is going on in a flow state? We're going to kind of go into flow and what it looks like now.

What is going on from a neurochemistry, neurobiology perspective? You started to touch on that. So let me back up half a second and see when you talk about what's going on in the brain. There's usually, you want to talk about four things. You want to talk about neurochemistry and neuroelectricity, which are the two ways the brain talks to itself into the body. And then you want to talk about neurolenatomy and networks, which is where in the brain, something is happening, because things rarely happen in one place.

You have a network. So that's what you want to talk about. In flow, we see changes everywhere. The two big things, the first is, we see what's known as transient hypofrontality. Okay, what that means is transient temporary hypohypyo. It's the opposite of hyper. It means to slow down, to shut down,

to deactivate and frontality. It's your prefrontal cortex. It's part of your brain that's right back here. Really powerful part of your brain. Executive function, your sense of morality, your sense of willpower, logical decision-making, long-term planning, all this stuff is housed in the prefrontal cortex. In flow, the brain performs an efficiency exchange. It says, oh, you need extra energy for attention, focus.

So I can keep your focus leaves or focus focused on the target, task at hand. Let's shut down things that we don't need. So you just watch the prefrontal cortex, mostly the sides turn off. This is, by the way. Contrary to everything you've ever heard. Yeah, what I always say is this contra, exactly. Like, 100 years of high performance theory

is a 10% brain width. We only use 10% of brain. So big performance must be the whole brain and overdrive. This turns it upside down. Yeah, totally wrong. So this is, by the way, this is why self disappears. This is why time passes so strangely.

So time is a calculation that's performed all of your prefrontal cortex. There's a bunch of different structures working together. And when parts of it wink out, we lose the ability to separate paths from present from future. So we're plunged into that deep now, right? So that's what happens. There's something happens to your sense of self, self-self-consciousness that you're

inner critic that nagging defeat is voice. That's also housed in your prefrontal cortex. So in flow, like not only, I mean, when you say sense of self goes away, the obvious example that everybody's experienced is, okay, I'm going to back up and tell you one other thing before I, so there's micro flow, low grade flow, state and macro flow. What happened to me when I was skiing or surfing, that was macro flow, right? Feels like a mystical experience, all kinds of crazy stuff. Micro flow is, you sit down and write a quick email, right?

You look up an hour later, you've written essay and it's not that your sense of self disappears, but maybe I had to piss and you didn't notice the whole hour and something like, you're back and you bought, everybody's had that experience, so that's micro-flow, that's the other end of the spectrum. I've heard you talk about this, but I just want to get away from the science for a second,

it's just like everyday life. Do you pay attention to your emotions? Like I find that for me, when I've performed at the highest levels for me, whether I've gone into the flow state every time, I'm not sure I'll figure that out with you as we talk, but I don't always believe every emotion that I have. Whereas I think most people just believe their emotion.

In other words, what they're feeling must be true because they feel it. Emotions are two things here. One, they're just signals. They're signals meant to alter behavior and they're meant to be experienced and let go. Right? They're not supposed to hold on to that. They're just a signaling mechanism. Braintakes and a whole bunch of information, and it's got to summarize it really quickly to trigger action.

What's the fastest way to summarize a bunch of negative information? Fear. That's a summary. It's a summary of information, right? It's a signal that does that. So, in peak performance, especially, I always say, your emotions don't mean what you think they mean, yes. Right, at all. And so first of all, everybody who's ever succeeded learns early on that fear, most people avoid fear, they don't like it.

Successful people steer by fear. They go right at things that scare them. And one of the reasons, and this is automatic, like we all will naturally move in the direction of peak performance, will biologically hardwired for it. So a lot of when we talk about peak performance of the flow research collective, what we really mean is getting your biology to work for you rather than against you. Is there a basic strategy you would give them on these 22 triggers that they could begin to find in the field? Yeah, so I like to, at the end of my day, or first thing in the morning, depending on how I'm feeling, I like to start my day with like a five minute gratitude practice, right? Everybody has a different one.

I like to list 10 things I'm grateful for and just try to feel that gratitude a little bit, right? It's not, this is just about, this is by the way about gratitude to the amygdala. That's what you're doing. So the amygdala takes in, we take in according to Malford Zimmerman, the idea of the research that we're credited to do, 11 million bits of information a second. Consciousness is about 2,000 outputs. So most of everything that's going on in the process either processed subconsciously or it's just tossed out.

Right? 11 million bits is way too much for the brand to deal with. It's got a sift, it's got a sort. Where does it go first? It goes to the amygdala. What does the amygdala look like for? Threat, stanger, and opportunity. Is there anything new here? Can I sleep with it?

Can I eat it? Do I have to run away from it? Right? That's what the amygdala is doing. And it's biased because it's survival, as it's take, towards negative information. So we have, psychologists talk about the negativity bias. What it means is your brain will take in six to nine bits of negative information for every positive bit

that gets through. This is a real problem for creativity, because creativity is what happens when we take novel information that's coming in and can combine it in a new way. And if you can't get, if there's too much fear in the way, right? So why did I say earlier, you got to do gratitude, mindfulness, or exercise every day because otherwise you're taking in too much negative information and not getting enough other stuff. The brain really does two things.

It takes in negative information and it takes in stuff that will help you serve your goals. Right? So if it's not grabbing shit that's scaring you, it's grabbing stuff that is helping you get what you want. That's the trade-off. So you're not doing gratitude because there's something wishy, washy, spiritual, whatever. You're doing gratitude because it's going to help you get more stuff. And gratitude works because the brain, this is why affirmations don't work.

And gratitude does. Brain's got a phenomenal built-in bullshit detector. So if you're working at Walmart and you look in the mirror every morning and go, I am a millionaire, I am a millionaire, your brain goes, fuck you man, no you're not, you work at Walmart. Right? And that's totally demotivating. It's crushing you.

Thank you. Right? gratitude. I am really grateful that my legs work today and I can still talk. Right? Well, that's true. Right? And so if I chalk off 10 of those that I'm really grateful out every day, my brain goes,

oh, maybe it's not so scary here. Let's start grabbing stuff that we cannot use to get to our goals rather than stuff we're scared of. That's why you do gratitude. Mountedfulness is basically the same. Reason works a little different. Mechanism's a little different, but same thing. One of the points that you made about cars leads me to your new book.

And so the book is the future is faster than you think. How converging technologies are transforming business industries and lives. And so why? I think culturally we could enter a flow state as a culture. In other words, I'm watching how fast the world is changing, how much performance and lifestyle and access to information and all these changes have happened in such a short window

of time, even just look back 10 or 15 years. It's a difference in how we live our lives now. And if you can think forward, I've heard you and Peter talk about, if you can even think forward 30 years, which is about as far forward as he says he can see. But in terms of all these things that are coming, I want to talk about that because I just want people to get a picture. Like you don't have a choice. What you've said is you've got to decide in your life whether or not you're just going

to embrace the science of being a peak performer or not. And if you don't, you're probably heading towards not neutral, you're probably heading towards depression, frustration, anxiety, fear, these negative things. The other part of it is you better get on board because culture is changing so quickly,

the way we live is changing so quickly. So to me, flow state, embracing that, getting great at it, getting in it more often, and your latest book go right together. Yeah, they do, and I'm gonna do three things to make all this make sense. One, you pointed out that I cover a broad range, seems like I cover a broad range.

And I'm other than the fact that I am a huge animal advocate and have done a lot of work on animals in the environment, that's the odd man out, right? And that's just personal. I love animals. I love the environment. I like plants, animals, and ecosystems. They're the ultimate underdog and I like fighting for the underdog. I love that.

So there's all that. But everything else, I study the impossible. When does the impossible become possible? That's what I study. And when you see the impossible become possible, you tend to see two things. One of which we've talked about, which is flow. That shows up all the time. The other thing you see is when the impossible becomes possible, you basically, I always say you find you're seeing people extend human capability and that usually means flow. Sometimes it means other

things. Like during the Renaissance, it meant the printing press. It never really had access to information for the first time, right? But often it's flow or flows in that mix. The other side is people leveraging disruptive technology. That's the other half of this equation, right? The impossible becomes possible. Even like you look at the skiers that I was running around with in the 90s, Shane Maconkey, who's the most famous of all of them,

one of his giant contributions is the invented new skis that were much wider. So we have big platforms to land on. So suddenly the human body could jump off 100 foot cliffs because the platform got bigger and it was better made at the same time that they started harnessing flow in ways that they've ever done. So convergent. So convergent.

That's what you see. So what's happening now is we're seeing convergence. We're seeing artificial intelligence smash into robotic smash into 3D printing smash into biotechnology smash into material science. The effects are insane and so Ray Kurzweil head of engineering at Google so does their AI stuff. Smart is probably the smartest guy in the world on this topic has worked the math and he believes we're gonna essentially experience about a 100 years of technological change over the next 10 years.

So think back to 1920. Think the math. Think everything that's happened in that period and put it into the next 10 years, that's what's coming. Does everyone hear that? Did you get that? Okay, that's huge. And you got to understand, like, for entrepreneurs,

for people who want to get out in front of it, oh my God, we're going to create more wealth in the next decade than we have over the past 100 years. There's more Google-sized opportunities, sort of like waiting right now than ever before. So tremendous opportunity, if you're an established organization, a traditional business, something that's been built for safety and security,

oh, you're screwed. You're right. Get nimble, get agile, because you've got a problem other than that. So here's where all this ties together. We have a problem dealing with this amount of change, which is our brains are local and linear. We evolved in an environment where local everything's

a days walk away. Linear, rate of change is really slow. Great granddad's life, great grandson's life, rough with the same, not much changes. Today, global and exponential, right? Happens in China, we hear about a second later, exponential meaning like the difference between last week and next week could be enormous. So the brain doesn't work at that speed or at that scale. Fund fundamental problem. And there's a third problem which we'll get to in half a second. Flow is the only time we can process information at speed and at scale. Even better. So, there's part of your brain right here, the medial prefrontal cortex. It does a bunch of different things, long-term memory, retrieval, blah, blah, it's really creative self-expression. And it's a very

selfish part of your brain. So if you think about yourself, it will get really active. If you think about your wife, it'll get a little less active, it'll stay active. If you think about me, you don't know me as well as your wife, it'll shut down a little bit more. Think about a total stranger, it's turned off. If I ask you to think about who you're going to be in 10 years and who you're going to become, you would think this part of the brain gets active. It doesn't. It teats. The brain treats the person we're going to become as a total stranger.

This is why we have a hard time staying on diets. This is why people have a hard time lifting weights, right? Oh my God, it's going to hurt today. Right? The benefit's not going to show up for two years, right? Or why do I want to get that prostate exam right? It's going to be the person who's going to benefit most from that stuff is not the person who you are today.

Literally the brain treats it like a stranger. Flow is the only time you can think about who you're going to become in the future and this party of brain stays active. So it gives us an enormous advantage. One of the things that happens in flow, the technical term for it is the watch tower effect. It basically feels like you're high above your life. I have insights. I can see farther, right?

And it really comes because our sense of self is shut down. And we can think of the future in this part of the brain stays active, it's a couple of those things working together. But it means that if you're going to plan for your future, if you're going to try to steer your company into the future, like you want to do this, the thinking at least in flow, for sure, if you can, because it's the best, we can think for the future, like you want to do this, the thinking at least in flow, for sure, if you can, because it's the best, we can think for the future,

and we can think fearlessly about the future, which is a big deal. All of this is converging. The fearlessness part, being in flow, being able to process information this quickly, and you guys, one of the things all of you want to bring us listeners, it's a large part of the audience here too,

or you're working, it comes can change. I've heard you say this and I believe this. There's not going to be a single industry the next 10 years, it's the same. Yeah, we get, so in the book, we go through the 11 largest industries on earth. And we track what's converging into these industries and what are the changes that we see already?

Like, there's nothing that the book is out. I mean, it's outrageous. I'm like flat out. It's outrageous. It's outrageous. Everybody has the same, like, everybody has the same, oh my god, my brain's gonna melt. And by the way, it's not like, I had to stop writing the book. I wrote a sci-fi novel in the middle

because I couldn't, I was starting to like, how do these things converge and what is that? I want to know what was it gonna be like to live in that world? So I literally created a universe five years in the future and put a character in it and wrote a novel so I could write this book with Peter because I could hold the individual stuff in my line but once you started putting it together I was like oh this is really hard to track and even think about What it means to be human is going to change I think that's probably true.

I do. Well, for certainly CRISPR stuff in China, we've got to at least touch on this. Because the vast majority of people, I, CRISPR is here now. So this isn't like, you know, eight years from now. CRISPR technology exists. They last year. They used CRISPR and they edited sickle cell anemia.

Right. I mean, sickle cell anemia. Right. Out of the, I mean, sickle cell anemia, right? Right. It's 30,000, there are 50,000 heritable diseases. Right. 32,000 of them are single mutations, which is what CRISPR is designed to change. Right. So 32,000 genetic diseases could go away this decade.

Right. I mean, that's, right, that's all radically different morals. And is everybody getting that? So I think a vast majority of people don't know what even CRISPR is. And they think it's a future thing, but it's here now, guys. We are currently, not only just a disease eradication,

that changes what it means to be a human being. How long you're gonna live? How healthy you're gonna live? What your life experience is going to be like. And having said that, I have a sister who's got diabetic retinopathy, right? Which is one of the original places this stuff started to really work.

Guys, we're remaking the retina. Like blind people are seeing. Like this is remarkable stuff that's happening right now. It's a myth. So I was in the room as a wire reporter, the very first time the first artificial vision implant was ever turned on., the very first time, the first artificial vision implant was ever turned on. So the very first time, there was a blind guy

who was made to see again. No, I think it was in the room. I was actually, it was seen. It's a funny story. So I'm in this lab as a professor at William DeBel were in New York, the patient, his name is Yams. And this is, so this is 2000. And he's literally got what we would use to call

stereogax in the side of his head. So he's literally got wires jacked into the side of his head. He's got an implant that's been being brought in from line for 20 years and it's literally they're counting down to when they hit the button, 10, 9 and I'm like, and I realize I'm sitting across from him and I'm a reporter. Our job is not to be history, right? Like our job is to report on history. You don't want to be the history. And so what do I do? I push back and try to get out of the way.

He's blind. He's been tracking like motion through sound for 20 years. So what happens? Three, two, one. I try to get out of the way. And I always say there's a moral here, which is you can never get out of the way of the future. It's coming for you whether or not you like it. I thought that was amazing. I was literally like trying to duck. So give them, you guys,

I just want to get a little bit of picture of this. So if you're tying together where we were in the beginning to where we are now, this is such a great time to be alive It's such a remarkable time and and frankly the the the concept of how long you're going to have had Dr. Davidson Claire on oh yeah, great great. We talked a little about crisper more off camera than on but Just give them a flavor just for fun So we open the book of flying cars which are like everybody's crazy sci-fi technology. And it turns out that they're here, like there are a hundred different car companies,

or there are a hundred different companies making flying cars. Every car company is in Toyota, put 400 million, 396 million into Joe B. A. B. H. in Flying Car Company three weeks ago. Bell helicopter, the big, right, they just changed their name to Bell because they dropped because no more helicopters flying cars. And they're the ultimate conversion technology. Flying cars happen because AI hit robotics, hit material science, hit 3D printing, etc. And, wow, that's totally revolutionary.

Crazy flying cars. But it's not just flying cars. It's also autonomous cars. Every major car company has an autonomous car. Like, WAMO is rolling out on the streets, Google's autonomous car company this decade, or this year simultaneously, Hyperloop, high speed trains, L.A. to Las Vegas in 25 minutes, right? There are 25 different Hyperloop projects in the world today. Then, Elon Musk, the boring company, we're going to drill tunnels under

cities and this is already happening all over the place and put cars on high-speed conveyor belts. And Elon's crazy idea, the rockets that he's using right now to put satellites in space that he wants to take people to Mars within the 2030s, he has promised that before 2030 you can use them for terrestrial travel. So New York to Shanghai in 39 minutes. The point is, so the point is not just it's one, it's all of these over the next 10 years and you have to, like this does, like think about simple things, car insurance. Well, if the cars are all autonomous, you don't need cars. In fact, WAMO, when you sit in one of their autonomous cars, you're automatically in shirt.

It happens automatically that the risk profile has shifted. There's a whole category of insurance go away. But simple stuff. If Las Vegas to Los Angeles is 25 minutes, how big is the local dating pool? You got it. How big is the size of the local school district? You live in LA, you don't like the schools your kids are going to. Suddenly they can go to school in Vegas. It's an hour away or 20 minutes away. All fundamental things, the way we like to talk about it is when you have solitary

exponentials, AI, whatever, they tend to disrupt products, services, and a little bit they make markets wobble. So like the classic example is Netflix, right? Streaming video, it's one accelerating technology and they put BlackBushtradah business, right? So this is product service and a little bit of the market with converging exponentials. You get the scale increases massively, you get products, services, markets, institutions,

and all the structures that support them. So, right, suddenly the local dating pool, the local school, like really foundational thing. What's it do to the real estate market? Oh, the real estate market is insane, right? Right. And the consequence, so you want to someplace smart, right?

So, suddenly you can live flying cars, by the way, to 150 miles an hour, and they can, they can do three hours of continuous flight. So imagine how far you can live, and this has enormous environmental consequences. The best thing we can do for the environment is leave nature alone, and suddenly we can live in, right, you were just in Cordelani, you were talking about how much you like Idaho,

and one of the reasons we like Idaho so much is because there aren't many people there, right? That's about to change with flying cars. Or we're going to have to legislate around it and think about this stuff and get out ahead in front of it. That's just one. That's just transportation. Every other industry is just as crazy.

We're going to look at our lifetime back. Most people used to live within 30 miles of where they worked. We're going to look back at the time and go, how bizarre what a small world it once was. Where you want to go to dinner at night. We're gonna look back at the time and go how bizarre what a small world it once was and how much it Where you want to go to dinner at night and by the way, let's let's talk about your new industry You're now in the podcasting business, right and we were just talking you like to make your things an hour 45 minutes to an hour long because the average commute. Yeah, it's 45 minutes to an hour, right? so and

You're more popular on audio than video, because people are listening to you. So in flying cars or in autonomous cars, you can have a, it's a theater. It's a moving theater, right? If you want, you can have a desk to work at, you can have blah, blah, blah. So suddenly, people, podcasters who have been relying on audio, right?

It may go to video because the autonomous cars, like the cars where people are driving to work, the community hasn't changed, but they don't long after driving. Now they can watch it, even like, I'll tell you something crazy. Nobody likes it when I talk about this out loud, but everybody on the inside of the autonomous car industry is talking about it. Autonomous cars are going to revive the sex industry

in ways we haven't even, like, it's a brothel on wheels, right? Imagine what happens with Tinder, like Tinder for autonomous, wanna share a car home, right? I mean, like, people are dying, like, they don't like it when you talk about it out loud, but like, that's what I mean when you talk about, like, the fundamental fabric of society is gonna change. All that stuff is gonna shift in wild, weird ways. And one of the reasons we wrote the book is most people are scared about the future that fears based on a lack of knowledge.

So go out, read about what's coming and figure out how you can take advantage of in your industry. Get their book. I'm serious. I endorse books when someone's on my show if I've read them. Like, why would you not want to know this information. Why would you not want to know this information?

Why would you not want to know what's coming? Why would you not want to begin to think this way? And when you can converge these two things, everybody, when you have the convergence of this flow state and the convergence of what's coming, and people say, wow, that sounds pie this guy. Many of the things we've described here now, most of my very wealthy friends,

when we're talking about different things that were being pitched on investment-wise. I mean, I'll be honest with you, flying cars and autonomous cars are constantly coming up all the time. Right now, like significant investments from very smart people. Yeah, and I mean, Tony, Peters and business, what are they doing? Long Jevvy and STEM cells, right?

Like our friends are, like, Peters got four different long Jevvy companies. Right, right. Like, I don't know how many Tony has been, but like- A bunch. Right, a bunch. Like, they got a lot of money, they want to live forever. Okay, cool. Like, right, right? Right, like, I don't know how many Tony has been, but like, right, they got a lot of money, they want to live forever. Okay, cool, out like, thank you. Let's go one more Eric,

because I haven't not talked about this with you at all, and I'm just curious, because we're talking about travel, and there's all kinds of, there's quantum computers, and all these other things we could be talking about. And if you think that this is pie in the sky stuff, if I'd have told you 10 years ago, even 10 years ago, that you would just say, uh, you know, I want to jug a milk and it's at your house the next day. You just

say it out loud into the air and the milk shows up at your freaking house, right? Like, you thought I was absolutely crazy. You might have sun and I were touring this college and they were showing us how amazing their library was. Their library library and I'm like, these still exist. Like you used to have to get in your card, drive somewhere, give them your card, they'd, with ink on a deal, write it on there, check you a book out, like, think of it. Dude, do you remember learning,

we're roughly the same as you were learning the card catalog? Yeah, that was the thing you had to learn. Here's how we use the card catalog and I was like, right? It's stupid things you take for granted. You just have a Thomas guide, that wasn't long ago. I just looked at a pretty vintage card, not that vintage. Was there a Thomas guide?

Yeah, I got a car. So when we're talking about these things guys, you have to, you must. It's a necessity that you'd be in a think this way. I'm just curious, because I haven't asked you this. What do you think it means for space travel? Do you have any insights? Oh yeah. So we, at the end of the book, I know. That's why you're going. The book is really, I, it's focused on the next 10 years. What's going to happen next 10 years? But we pull back in the last chapter for the 100-year view.

Two things to know about the 100-year view. So Ray Kurzweil also worked the numbers on what happens over 100 years. So it's 10 years where it's 100 years with a change over the next 10 years. Deep breath before the end of the century. According to Kurzweil, who's barely wrong about anything. Like he's just not wrong. He's made so many predictions. He's batting like 86%. I mean, from the fall of the Soviet Union to the arrival, like, I mean, just he doesn't seem to miss with this stuff because it follows just, there's math underneath it essentially. He says over the next 100 years before the end of the century, we're going to experience

20,000 years of technological change. So that's birth of agriculture to the Industrial Revolution twice in the next 80 years. So let's say he's off by 50%. Right, let's say he's spectacularly wrong, right? And it's only 10,000 years that you are kidding. So one of the things that's going to happen, and we look at this in the book, is this is the century that we stop being a single planetary species. We become a multi-planetary species. And this, you know, being partnered with Peter for almost 20 years at this point, you know,

this is his big passion, so I've got to see it up close a lot. And I've watched this, you know, go from Peter's crazy idea that he shared with the handful of other people into a billion dollar industry growing towards a trillion dollar industry. So it's really, right? It's massively matured. But, and it's really funny, because what we write about in the book

is like, if you think about the space race, you know, I say that to most people, they think USSR versus USA, right? That's the like, what got us into space? It was, well, there's competition between two superpowers. What's gonna unlock the space frontier? This century competition between two superpowers,

only those powers are Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, right? There arguing Bezos got blue origin, Musk has got SpaceX and they both, and they've got different viewpoints. Bezos wants to go to the moon and build space floating space colonies. Musk wants to go to Mars, right? And that is what is unlocking the space frontier. And I mean, by the way, just so people can wrap their heads around this, this isn't actually

in the book, but there is a company I'm going to blank the name of it. Peter's been talking about it for weeks now. They figured out how to 3D print in a couple of weeks, a rocket, a rocket, a rocket. And this is amazing because it used to be like, you know, rockets are billion dollar toys. And like if you screw something up in design, right? Like you have to, you build in, you're like,

oh damn, I wish the fin was five degrees off or like what you what you're screwed. Now we can build, we can iterate and rock it in two weeks. I think this is gonna happen. And this is already, like this is here right now. Really cool, really interesting. So yeah, this is, and it's probably gonna happen over the next 20 years.

Just amazing. Just the fact that you just used a term called single planet species. Like, we're gonna be a multiple planet species, right? Like, guys, it's just, it's coming. You're fascinating. Today was fascinating. It exceeded my expectations.

Like, I'm so glad that we did this. And I am, I guarantee you, we're having you back. We are having you back. People are gonna want you back. We've, you back. People are going to want you back. We've touched 1%, literally 1% of which in, really, any of his flow content, or in their latest book on future. So how do they find you? Where do you want them to go find you?

First of all, free tool for anybody. If you go to, so the flow stuff, flowresearchcollective.com. But if you go flowresearchcollective.com forward slash flow blocker, it is a diagnostic we built that says, hey, let's analyze your life, figure out what is the thing that is the biggest stumbling block between you and getting into flow. So that's a free diagnostic for anybody who wants that that's out there. And I'm Stephen Kotler.com. So, and if you really psyched out future, the book, more than anything else, you can go to futurefasterbook.com. Because no matter what I do, I can't convince my co-writer that we shouldn't build individual

websites for our books. Because I do only floating like orphan websites for books like a 14 books, and I've got a little website, and I got 10 them all. Like, no, it's a bad idea. I think it's been working out pretty well for you. Dude, thank you so much for today. I enjoyed this today so much. Everybody, I know you enjoyed today's show.

I know you learned a ton. I know you're inspired. Hey, listen, if you follow me on Instagram, you know this. I want to engage with you more deeply because I want to know who you want sitting next to me and what kind of content you want me creating. And so every day on Instagram, I run the max out two minute drill.

When I make a post, you got two minutes. Make a comment. So turn your notifications on. If you missed the first two minutes, just make a comment every day on every post. At the end of the week, we add up anyone who posted on every comment, comment on every post. We pick a winner from there as well. Or if you reply to people's comments on there, you increase your chances of winning as

well. We pick winners every week. They ride on my plane with me. They go to events. They get coached by me or my guests. They get max out gear. It's really cool stuff just to reward you for engaging with me so I can learn more about you. So participate in a max out two minute drill.

God bless you. Max out everybody. This is the end of my show.