The Joe Rogan Experience - #873 - Steven Kotler

Episode Date: November 16, 2016

Steven Kotler is a bestselling author, journalist, entrepreneur, and co-founder and Director of Research Flow Genome Project.

Three, two, one. Pew! Hello, Steven. Hello, Joe. Welcome. Thank you. Thanks for coming, man. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

I've enjoyed a bunch of your shit online, man. You've got some really fucking cool articles and some great ideas. And we were talking about, the other day, a friend of mine, we were talking about creativity and the source of creativity and how to cultivate creativity. We were talking about creativity and the source of creativity and how to cultivate creativity. And I stumbled across something that you had on your website about creativity, about different methods or different ways to try to inspire your creativity or shock your system into creativity. I'm always really impressed with people who take things that I've always like, man, I wonder why or when my from and then i go oh check out this guy he actually kind of broke this shit down and tried to figure out what what the source of a lot of these ideas is or where where these these groovy

moments of spontaneous you know just just like a blossoming of ideas where they come from i'm a mechanistic guy i like to know how this shit works yeah i've seen that by talking to You know, just like a blossoming of ideas, where they come from. I'm a mechanistic guy. I like to know how this shit works. Yeah, I've seen that by talking to you just in the past 10 minutes. You've got like order. It's a show, but thank you. But you have like, you know, like when I was talking about you want cream in your coffee,

like no! Drink should have one thing. Scotch, neat. You know, coffee, black. You've got order. Or opinions. want cream in your coffee like no drink should have one thing scotch neat you know coffee black you've got you've got order or opinions yes but in your mind it's very rigid right it is i to me they're liberating structures to me i do everything like that i do six things in my life i've ever if it doesn't fall into those categories i don't do it it. I've, you know, I mostly just discovered years ago that the only stuff I failed at was the stuff when I was too overextended and I was quitting. I would give up halfway, but if I could stick to it, always led to success. So I was like, okay,

let's pare it down to essentials. And whenever life gets crazy for me, my first instinct is go small, get small. It's one of the hardest things I think about being married and running an animal sanctuary. My wife is, there's so many dependents on me now. When stuff gets difficult, I can no longer get small. Right. You can't minimalize and get down to a duffel bag. I have a friend of mine, Steve Maxwell. He literally lives out of like a dry sack.

You know, one of those dry sacks that you could just throw in the river. And that's like he has a duffel bag. That's his whole thing. He lives hotel to hotel, travels all over the world, teaching people strength and conditioning routines and wellness and health. That's all he does. He just does nothing. He has no items. He has like an iPad, and he's got a watch. When I was writing my first book, I was right out of college before I went to grad school.

I lived in a place called Anti-Matter. It was one of the largest performance and video galleries in the world. It was in San Francisco. Huge space, 20 people living there. But I lived above the tool room on a plank of wood the size of a Volkswagen microbus. You crawled over my bed to get to my desk. And my clothes were on one side and there were books on the other. That was it.

And it was small and tiny and you know crazy but it was a great you know i got to spend a couple years there and it's where i started writing my first novel and it was just wonderful owning nothing and being that free that seems like one of those things where it sounds like a really good idea if you don't have to do it forever like if someone said uh this is how i'm gonna live for a while you'd be like oh cool but if you said this is how i'm gonna live for the rest of my life you'd be like oh that poor fuck right you know it's weird right yeah it was a good thing to do when i was 18 19 20 whatever it was now yeah i you know come back and see my crib honey yeah that wouldn't work but like this idea that you have of like coffee black but do you do you

vacillate at all do you vary i do every now and again i'm like okay god damn it i gotta have from starbucks or something no i actually like i have an urge to punch people when they order that crap really why i just because it's yummy you ever have one they're delicious i believe you i do believe you i do know i'm being an asshole i get that right but no it just like i walk and i like, it takes them 17 minutes to order their coffee and 20 minutes to make their coffee. And I'm sitting there and I just want like a small cup of coffee black, please. Yeah, but let's be honest.

If you're ordering coffee from Starbucks, you have shitty taste in coffee anyway. Their coffee tastes terrible. True that. Yeah, you're going to get burnt coffee for the most part. The thing about Starbucks is it's convenient and consistent, but it's not good right what are you measuring against are you measuring against all the other coffee options or were you measuring about what was there before starbucks yeah well well you can get diner coffee which is even worse right one thing that starbucks does have is that weird machine what the fuck is that called it is a compressed clover yeah the clover yeah

it's like a it's a ridiculously expensive machine i think it might cost 50 or 60 thousand dollars it might be even more than that um and starbucks bought up the patent for them and the guys who invented it some serious geniuses just they were coffee dorks and they said okay let us find out what is the exact correct temperature for each individual bean program a brew cycle where you brew it for the exact correct time for each individual individual bean obviously it's subjective but they got it down to a science so inside starbucks is almost the anti-starbucks so you have your regular starbucks drip which is almost always burnt to a crisp and tastes bitter and And then they have this machine.

It'll come on in a second. This machine, the Clover, and it's digitally programmed. They pour that stuff in there. You can only get it at Starbucks now. The water comes out. It's heated to the exact correct temperature. They stir it with a whisk, and then it works on a vacuum. And as it goes down and presses this thing it the grinds come up to the

top and you have like this hockey puck of grinds so like it'll brew it for the exact you know one minute 15 seconds that this program determines ethiopian coffee should be brewed for or if you have some sort of colombian or some you or whatever the coffee is, each one varies. Does it have a sensor? Does it know? Like it knows which bean you're throwing in? Yes. You program it. Like whatever coffee it is, whatever type of coffee,

it has different individual settings for that type of coffee. So then it brews it, and then when the six seconds is up, see, it lifts up like this, and that's the grinds, or grounds rather and then the coffee comes out and it is really good and the coffee comes out the perfect cough uh cup size and then the top thing when it comes up it's like this uh hockey puck of used up coffee grounds do we know why it's called a clover that's a weird name for a coffee machine it is weird i don't know maybe someone just really likes clovers and they invented it. But then you use a little squeegee, clean that sucker off, and that's a wrap.

And, you know, soon there'll be homeless guys cleaning off the coffee for you. You think so? It's a new market for the squeegee, I mean. Oh, the squeegee thing. Yeah. Nobody knows about that. L.A. doesn't have the squeegee people. Too many guns.

Yeah, it's a New York thing. I think after the Dire Wolf incident, when they're the first freeway killer, I think people got scared. Dire Wolf? That's what they called them. There was a Grateful Dead song called Dire Wolf, but it was one of the early freeway shooters.

Oh, out here? Out here. And I think that's sort of like, in LA, we don't want anybody coming near our cars because... Was there one freeway shooter or was there more than one? I think there were more than one. A friend of mine, I did a little story about him. He's a pro skier and he got he was driving to the sierra nevada mountains 20 years ago 25 years ago and somebody some sniper was

perched up on a bridge and put a bullet into his heart holy shit craziest part is he pulled off the highway found a fire station and like walked in and collapsed on a table and stuff, and shot in the heart and just dropped. Holy shit. Did they catch the guy? I don't think they ever caught him. What a crazy impulse to just decide you're going to make your life more exciting in this moment by taking another person's life. A very, very strange thing that happens every now and again i mean that's a

reoccurring phenomenon it's it's super super rare which is why the people with guns get so frustrated when someone does something like that because they say well the access to guns is not what causes this that someone has to be sick in the head in order to do this in the first place and you have millions and millions and millions of legal gun owners who wouldn't even consider doing something like this. But every now and then, someone gets on top of a rock and puts those crosshairs on a person just for whatever fucking reason. Some strange chemical imbalance, some strange combination of a fucked up childhood and a very depressing life and neurochemistry is all out of whack. very depressing life and neurochemistry is all out of whack and you gotta i mean i don't it's five percent or ten percent of the number i can't remember which one it is but it's psychotic just you know just happens yeah um so if you've got that portion of the population that you know is crazy and doesn't feel empathy makes you wonder if we should have guns or not well it definitely

does but then it makes you wonder well they're not going to follow the rules maybe you should have guns just for them fuckers fair point you never know it's there's it like many things in life there really is no ultimate answer there's too many variables going on there that is true that's why black coffee is not always the way to go sometimes throw a little cream in that thing man just mix it up a little stevia no i get it a little agave you know a jack and coke occasionally you know i understand just every now and then it's okay man we'll go out later we'll have pina coladas it'll be fine they'll be blended they'll be frothy you'll have an umbrella i don't mind umbrellas dude i'm comfortable with my own masculinity i will i will drink a cosmopolitan boat drinks oh boat drinks yeah there's something about those that are very unmanly you're not

supposed to be enjoying the actual taste of sugary sweet things if you're manly no absolutely not especially not they have alcohol you don't kick ass and drink strawberry daiquiris it's a contradiction in terms seems like you could do it if you were like the rock though yeah i mean who's gonna mike tyson wants to order a strawberry daiquiri i'm backing him up yeah it's like you get to a certain level of manliness you could just take it completely the other way absolutely start wearing clogs you just go off wear a kilt nobody gives a fuck so um this this article that you wrote about creativity um do you remember which one it was called which one were you looking at i do not know do you had a bunch of different things listed as various things that people you know do in order to enhance creativity. on how do I be more creative in the moment, right now I'm working on this project, whatever it is.

But I started getting curious about, well, what does it take to be super creative over the course of a career, over 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years? And I started to realize that there's a lot of kind of points in the life of a creative that nobody talks about. Places we get creatives end up getting derailed.

Roblox. I wanted to start taking a look at that. It may be my next book. Not sure. But something I've been poking at. Do you follow Stephen King at all? The writer? Yeah.

Every now and then. I like his book on writing. Yeah, that's what I was going to ask you about. I like his book on writing. Yeah, that's a really interesting one. Because a lot of those people that are super successful. He's probably one of the most prolific writers ever they have this sort of like just show up mentality like that you people have all these ideas of what needs to be in place in order for them to be creative and stephen king in a lot of ways is saying just fucking do it just sit down every day and do it

and this is what you do you are a writer and this is what you do and you sit down every day and do it. And this is what you do. You are a writer and this is what you do. And you sit down. You don't make excuses. And he went over all the different authors that had 19 kids and put out 50 books. And it's like, you just got to do it. And we have, have you read The War of Art? Yeah, I have. Pressfield's book, which is amazing in that regard too because he kind of breaks down. It's a very small book.

It's an easy read for anybody who's interested in it. too because he kind of breaks down it's a very small book it's an easy read for anybody who's interested in it but he breaks down all the different variables that come into play where you give yourself outs and excuses and he calls it resistance and beating that resistance and forcing yourself to show up and then the rewards come yeah for me it's wake up at 3 34 a.m and i like to be i like to be writing before my brain is even awake. I want to be writing within four minutes of getting out of bed.

Because I don't want, you know, when you sleep, your brainwaves drop down kind of to the alpha, theta borderline. Alpha is creative state. And if you wake all the way up, your brainwaves are going to jump

all the way back up to beta. So I don't want that to happen. I want to keep my brainwaves in that kind of creative phase. So I don't, you know, never check email first, never do any of that stuff. I want to immediately get out of bed, get to my office, have the coffee brewing, and then, you know, be writing instantly. That is a very, that's a very interesting choice. I like it.

It's a very smart choice. But goddamn, dude, 3.30 a.m.? I don't think it's, every writer, every writer, I don't want to say every writer. Most of the writers I know tend to find time to write when nobody else is awake. Either they do it late night or I just happen to do it early because it's an old habit. Everybody was young and hungry. I had editors in New York who would start – they were in their 20s too and they'd get in. They'd start calling me at 8.30 in the morning their time, which in California was 5.30 in the morning. The minute an editor called me and said, hey, I need you to do this, I was young. I was hungry. I was poor. I wanted to work.

The answer was yes, I'm going. So I wanted to be able to write my books before that. So I just started getting up earlier and earlier. It's probably the best way to do it because I do the opposite. I do it when my kids are asleep, my wife's asleep, when everybody's asleep. That's when I hit the bong and then go crazy. But oftentimes, I'll be five, six hours in and then it'll be five o'clock in the morning and then I stop and then I'm freaked out and I just lay in bed with my eyes open going

over all the different things that I just wrote. Well, that's the other reason. The good news is most of my writing is probably done at least by noon. I'll write from 4 to 8 a.m. Then I get some exercise. I'll come back. I'll do another session. I'll get some more exercise.

By the end of the day, I can shut it down because I feel like, okay, I've thought everything through. I've done everything I possibly can so I can actually get some sleep and start it again. I've heard a lot of people say that. They'll take a break and then they'll go for a long hike. They'll do something that's only mildly exerting. Again, back to creativity. So you know I do some work on flow states. Yeah.

Being in the zone, optimal states of performance. Definitely want to talk to you about that. I do some work on flow states, being in the zone, optimal states of performance. Definitely want to talk to you about that. And one of the things we know is there's something called exercise-induced transient hypofrontality. Ooh, I like that. Fancy term. Transient hypofrontality. So when we're in flow, one of the things that causes it, and this is why your sense of self sort of disappears in flow and why time passes strangely,

This is why your sense of self sort of disappears in flow and why time passes strangely. It's your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that's right back here that governs most of your higher cognitive functions, executive functions, sense of morality, sense of will, complex planning, long-term decision-making, blah, blah, blah. Turns off in flow. Shuts down. That portion of the brain shuts down. Transient, meaning temporary. Hypo. Hypo is the opposite of hyper.

HYPO means to slow down, to shut down. Frontality, prefrontal cortex, so transient hypofrontality. When you exercise, right, you've low-grade physical exercise. You're walking, going for a hike, 25 minutes, and you know this feeling. Your brain gets quiet, right? Everything starts to shut down. That's exercise-induced transient hypofrontality. So you can sort of walk yourself into a low-grade flow state.

So it's a great reset if you've been doing something creative and you didn't get into flow and it was frustrating, this is a way to sort of reset your brain and start over. And if you did get into flow and it was a really vibrant writing session, here's another way to chill it out and start over. Now, this area of the brain that quiets down because you're no longer second-guessing yourself you're no longer thinking about the you know, whether this is the right thing to do or

That that does that have to? Does that have do you have to be doing something that you've done many many times? We've carved these sort of paths of recognition Like say like if you were a guy who's really into running and you run all the time and like this is like once you start running is your body's like hey we run and this is what we do we already know how to do this and so then you can get into that sort of strange flow state is that what it is so there's a couple different answers to that and probably the truthful answer is we're not 100 certain but. But here's what we know.

Usually flow is what happens when you've automatized a whole bunch of skills, right? And they come together for the first time. Automatized means you've just passed them from your conscious mind to your subconscious. So you now know how to do them, right? You're no longer learning the skills. Usually what happens with flow is when you take like three or four of those automized skills and then bring them together for the first time and everything sort of levels up. So that's typically how it happens. But you see things with like action sports, right?

People go snowboarding for the first time and the first couple of hours where they don't know what they're doing, it's awful. They're falling all over the place. But by the end of the day, because snowboarding is a fairly easy sport to get down like the first time, you can actually start gliding down the mountain by the end of one day you'll see people get into flow that you know they'll have these really deep powerful flow states one of the reasons is because risk is a flow trigger risk spikes dopamine in the brain which drives focus which helps kick you into flow um one of the things that'll get you there and so that shows up with the snowboarding with the action sport so i think there are certain things that you can get into flow along the way earlier on. But as a general rule, it's skills that you've already automatized and you're really, really good at. Yeah, that's why I was asking because I've achieved those states with like playing pool.

It's called being in stroke or being in dead stroke. playing pool. It's called being in stroke or being in dead stroke. And when you get, when you play pool, especially if you play for hours and hours at a time, you get to this place and sometimes it doesn't last. Sometimes it only lasts for a few games at a time, but you get to this place where you can put that ball exactly where you want it to go. And you know exactly where the ball's going to reflect off that ball and bounce to the next rail and be in a perfect position on the next ball. And you get into this flow, this dead stroke stage. And when you're there, you're almost like a participant or almost like rather a passenger. You're almost sitting back and watching this play out. And the key to maintaining that state

is to never recognize the state never acknowledge the state never go holy shit i'm in dead punch right now because if you do that then you'll start thinking and you'll start you'll bring your prefrontal cortex back online and it'll kick you out of that state exactly so let me ask you a question did you we were talking earlier and you're talking about fighting and how you know everything focuses together in that moment did you find more flow as a fighter or as a comic? Well, let's explain to people what we're talking about. What we're talking about is that preparing for martial arts in general can be very psychedelic

because there's such an intense introspective aspect to training where you have to examine your skills so closely, and you have to be so acutely aware of your strengths and weaknesses and you cannot have any delusion about it because once the moment funnels down, all this pressure builds to this one event where you have to actually compete. That event is if you do not have all your ducks in a row, if you have not examined all aspects and prepared for all aspects of this competition, like 100% honest,

you're going to fuck up and you're going to be scared and you're going to be nervous and you're going to be nervous anyway, but you're going to really be nervous if you haven't done your work. So there's like a selflessness that gets sort of exposed when you're doing that. Not selflessness rather, but you step outside of yourself to examine yourself almost as if you're looking at yourself as a mathematical program rather than as a person. And then when you're fighting and if it's going well, which is not always happening, but if it is going well, sometimes things happen. Like sometimes you'll hit people and you had no idea how you did it. Sometimes things happen, like sometimes you'll hit people and you had no idea how you did it. Like you're so, it's so programmed in you that you have to figure out how to quiet everything down and just react.

But that only happens through intense training for so long that you have these pathways carved. Like you'll see it in a fight with like Floyd Mayweather is a great example. Someone will throw a punch at him and you will literally see his eyes open as the glove comes to his face. He moves just out of the way and he counters and he counters so quickly. There's no way he could have thought of it. He's not even thinking. It's just he's his patterns recognize. Oh, there's this and then that comes after this and there's not even a thought process behind it.

He just does. He just flows with it it's i mean when you can be when you have actual space to be creative inside that art right when it's not when you're just not reacting in a fight in whatever when you actually you know when when the when flow is peaking you really can make any decision you want to and it doesn't actually feel like you're making this decision feels like you're you're watching somebody else make that decision you're a passenger and the way i describe fighting i say fighting is extreme problem solving with dire physical consequences that's what it is yeah that's i mean that's why i like action sports as well it's the same it's the same thing yeah when you see someone doing like 15 flips with a BMX bike, ooh, if you don't land on your tires, you got a real problem there, fella.

Yeah. There's something super intense to it. Now, in fighting, add on that it's not just the air and the ground, but another person who's just like you, just as trained as you, and is trying to do to you what you're trying to do to them. and is trying to do to you what you're trying to do to them. So you're solving this puzzle that's a live human being with all these pre-programmed variables that they have. So your question was like, where do you experience the flow state more, fighting or comedy? I think probably comedy, it's easier

because there's not as many consequences. And you also, you develop a routine where like you'll, the way I do it, and a lot of guys do it the same way you put together a special and then you film it and then you abandon it and then you start from scratch so like that's i just did one and it just aired um october 21st so now i'm in this like new material acquisition mode which takes uh takes a while so there's very little flow going on while i'm on stage it's a lot of it's calculation and thinking and remembering all the new stuff but then after a few months of that then you get to this point well i know that bit and then there's this bit

and then you get into this comfortable zone and then it starts to flow again and then you just got to figure out okay this is we got like an hour and 20 minutes of this here. Let's simmer this down to 60 badass minutes and wrap it up. And then I start all over again. It's usually like a two-year cycle. Two-year process? Yeah, two-year cycle. Do you know when you're developing a good bit? Sometimes.

Sometimes you think it's good and it sucks. Sometimes you think it sucks and it turns out to be your best one. And sometimes you're on stage and then in the moment, a new idea pops in your head that makes it way better than it was before. And it's one of the only art forms, I think, where you have to do it in front of a crowd to develop it. You could write the dopest song ever by yourself. There's a lot of people that have written some amazing songs and there was no one in the room. And they wrote it and they programmed the music and they go hey check this out there's a song i wrote and you're like holy shit this is incredible they didn't need anybody for that

they came up with it in in like in their own personal head and sat down and with comedy you kind of have to have an audience you have the idea you write things out but it doesn't really come fully together doesn't it doesn't cure unless the audience is there does that make sense yeah it totally makes sense different kind of jokes for different audiences as well i'm sure sort of yeah but you can't those people change you can't worry about them you know you're you gotta do things that you think are funny because the problem with comedy also is that there's only one genre but there's not there's many many genres of comedy like you know comedy is just comedy but who the fuck goes to see just live music you know and you go to see live music it's johnny cash followed by

the wu-tang clan that doesn't make any sense right you know you would you go see rap you'd go to see country you'd go to see rock you would likely go to see the kind of music that you're really into whereas comedy is just one universal generic term for a bunch of different you would go see stephen wright followed by dave chappelle i would they're radically different i would yeah sure yeah but some people like only squeaky clean like brian regan type comedy and if they went to see doug stanhope they would leave in disgust. You know? Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah. It's interesting. Yeah, well, it's weird because there is, I mean, there's a bunch of different ways to do it, but it only has one name. You know, where it's like, you know, you say, well, what kind of music do you do? Just, you know.

So we need new names. I mean, this is a naming problem. No, I don't know. It's fine. You were the one who started it, man. Yeah, naming problem. No, it's fine You were the one who started it man, yeah, I know to back you up. I'm just thinking about it too much It's overthinking, you know Overthinking I think is a that's you've talked about that many times with flow state That the second guessing and that part of your mind that doubts is really the enemy of that state

It's twofold. One, you're activating your prefrontal cortex, right? The part of your brain that's doing that overthinking. And whenever you get stressed, obviously your brain starts releasing cortisol, norepinephrine, your stress hormones, right? So flow exists. Flow exists. They call it the flow channel.

And the idea basically is that one of the easiest ways to trigger flow is what's called the challenge skills balance. So flow shows up best when the challenge of the task at hand slightly exceeds your skill set. So you want to stretch, but not snap. And there's nothing fancier. Flow follows focus. So everything that triggers flow is a way of driving attention to the present moment. So if i was to put this emotionally i would say flow exists sort of not on but near the midpoint between boredom hey there's not enough stimulation here i'm not paying any attention and anxiety whoa way too much stimulation i'm overburdened that anxiety norepinephrine and cortisol you get up in your head you're producing norepinephrine and cortisol you're knocking yourself out of that sweet spot. And why does norepinephrine knock you out of it? Isn't that like one of those feel-good

hormones? It can be a feel-good hormone. It's essentially, right, it's the internal endogenous version of speed, right? The external substance the same chemical basically um little bit wakes you up drives focus too much you're jittery and freaking out okay that makes sense and there's got to be a spectrum as well yeah the flow state right so a bunch of different ones but uh chick sent me hi me hi chick sent me hi who's sort of the godfather of flow psychology was how do you say his name me hi chick Csikszentmihalyi. That's his whole name? That's how you, yeah, he's Hungarian.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. And by the way, funny story about how I, so I was on NPR after my second book, which was the first time I wrote about him. And I slaughtered his name. I mean, just slaughtered it, destroyed it. And the phone rings. It was live. I think it was in Cleveland. I think that's where i was and the caller comes gets on it's like how

can we help you what can you do tell the moron sitting next to you it's me hi chick sent me hi chick sent me hi and he did like four times around i was like okay i've been schooled i got it how rude though never gonna screw that up again moron i was kind of a moron. Oh, were you really? Or was that guy just looking to get some fucking brownie points because he knew the name? Okay, so that, too. Yeah. I think that guy's an asshole. Tell the moron.

Thank you. Thank you, Joe. Oh, you're a moron because you don't know the craziest fucking name that anybody has ever put on a kid. It's true. That's not a poor kid in school. Me high, chick sent me high. The whole class is like,

what? Where did we, how did we even get to him? Flow state, spectrum. Oh, spectrum. So, chick sent me high

in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Discovered a bunch of things about flow that are kind of fundamental. First thing he discovered is that there's,

he came up with 10 characteristics that define the state. I think he actually sort of mashed up three triggers with seven characteristics. But these are things like uninterrupted concentration, your sense of self-vanishing, time passing strangely. And the reason, by the way, this happens, why does self vanish? Why does time pass so strangely in flow? Self and time are both calculations performed in the prefrontal cortex.

So, for example, time is calculated all over the prefrontal cortex. This is David Eagleman's work from Stanford. He used to be at Baylor. And when parts of the brain start to wink out, when parts of the prefrontal cortex start to shut down, as you move into flow, your brain can no longer perform the calculations. So you can no longer separate past from present and future, and you're plunged into a deep now or an eternal present. So that's some of where that comes from is the deactivation of the prefrontal cortex. But anyways, he figured out there were these seven characteristics of flow.

And there's micro flow states when a couple of them show up. So like you're at work and you're talking to a – you bump into a colleague in the hallway and you fall into a conversation, it sucks you in and an hour goes by and you don't notice, that's microflow. Macroflow, when all the conditions show up at once, for the first 70 years we were looking at the experience, people thought we were looking at a full-blown mystical experience. They didn't know what it was because everything can happen. You can have out-of-body experiences. You can have really strange, you know know phenomenas of consciousness show up so macro microflow to macroflow and it's a spectrum

experience it's one of those words or one of those terms rather flow state where there's a lot of woo woo attached to that sort of state like a lot of people almost want to call bullshit automatically like oh you're in a flow state there's there Well, there's reasons for that. And I mean, so the Flow Genome Project, which is my organization, our whole goal when I started with my partner, Jamie Wheel, was to grab flow back from the new age and put it on a hard science footing. And sort of what happened, there were a number of things that happened. But who do I kill, which is actually a woman's name. Another person with a crazy name. Yeah. H-U-D-A.

I think it's A-K-I-L. She was the world's leading endorphin expert. She's at the University of Michigan and she was president of the American Society for Neuroscience. And back in, I want to say 99 or 2000, Gina Collado, who's a science writer for the New York Times, asked Huda Akil about endorphins, which everybody had thought were one of the reasons, one of the things that causes flow. And they were having a really hard time measuring endorphins in the brain. So Huda Akil told the New York Times, this is a total fantasy of the pop culture.

It's bullshit. It doesn't exist. She was totally wrong. But it wasn't until 2007, 2008 that our technology got good enough to actually visualize the endorphins in the brain. But at that moment, flow research in America

kept going in europe and other places but in america basically it went to a dead stop nobody else was going to fund it and i think the new age came in and went oh flow such a great term we're gonna and that's what happened so a lot of a lot of what i tried to do at the flow genome project and what we've tried to do is just put it back on a hard science footing because there's 150 years of science behind flow. Flow science dates back almost to the 1870s to almost the beginning of like cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology. The research goes all the way back. William James was looking at this stuff at Harvard in the turn of the century.

There's 100 years of research. I mean, it's ultimate human performance, optimal performance. Of course, we want to study it. You know, it's funny because skeptical people will rally against it in a weird way. Like I had a conversation with Sam Harris about it, where he was saying that when you look at it statistically, when people are in the zone, they are not more accurate in basketball than they are outside of it, that it's an anomaly and then it's an illusion. It's an illusion of the state of mind where you're achieving this. And I was like, I don't know what you're talking about, man.

I just don't know how, first of all, how often that's been measured where you can say this. Because he was like really adamant about it. But Sam's like a super hyper skeptic, you know? Sam's talking specifically about streak shooting, right? That's what they're looking at. Yes. And which is a funny, and he's right. His dad is absolutely correct.

Let me just give you a counterpoint from my own life. Okay. So I have a book, my third book called A Small Furry Prayer, which is about the relationship between humans and animals and sort of on the work that I do with dogs and my wife does with dogs. And I wrote the first half of the – it's about a 300-page book. I wrote the first half of the – I wrote the whole thing, turned it in, and my agent called me up, or my editor called me up, and she said, look, the first 110 pages are pretty good. You've got to redo it. But everything from that point on sucks.

I need you to rewrite it. And she was totally right. So I sat down to rewrite it, and I sort of polished the first 110 pages and got stuck, couldn't write, couldn't write. Months go by. I'm closing in my deadline. I go downhill mountain biking for the very first time in my life.

And it just kicks me into this. If you know how to ride a bike, you can get downhill mountain biking pretty quickly. And it just kicked me into an amazingly deep flow state. I went home and I started writing. And I didn't stop for about two weeks straight. I went to sleep and things like that. But it was a nonstop flow state. Finished the book, wrote 160 pages in like two weeks,

which is incredible and bizarre. And talk about feeling like a passenger earlier. I have no idea who wrote the second half of that book. No idea, just flowed out of me, pardon the pun. But when I turned it in, my editor came back to me and they had the first 110 pages, the part I had written outside of flow. There were still lots of errors and can change this and fix this and this

from page one, 10 to the end of the book, not one change. She was happy with everything I'd written. Book was a bestseller. It was nominated for a Pulitzer prize. So obviously I did something right along the way. Second half happened totally in flow.

I, you know, that's the counter to Sam's argument. What was the subject of the second? Well, that's interesting. But what was the subject of the second half? The whole book is about the relationship between humans and animals and about, you know, animal welfare and running a dog sanctuary and where empathy and altruism comes from and what it

has to do with evolution, things along those lines. The second half had a lot to do with sort of a little bit to do with animals and spirituality and why we have this. What is that, you know, non-woo? What do we mean by like the spiritual relationship to nature? If you strip out the woo, what's underneath that? Now, when you were on the bike, do you remember the thought? Do you remember what it was, what the catalyst was? The catalyst was Bob Dylan's Going to Acapulco, his song.

And it wasn't even his. It was, I don't remember the movie where they did all the Bob Dylan songs over again a couple years ago. And it was somebody's version of that. And something about the first couple lines to that song, it got the tone right. It was like there was something really kind of bittersweet and raw in that song that I needed in my book, and that's what it was. Somehow I came home with the song, with that lyric in my head, and I just started writing, and that's what it was. Wow. By the way, you happened to pick the one thing where I could have given you the cause. Any other book, I'm probably going to whiff on that question, but that's the one thing where i could have given you the cause any other book i'm probably gonna whiff on that question but that's the one i remember is it it is weird how certain songs will

trigger like some sort of inspirational creativity inside of you and i've always wondered what that is i i learned this from hunter thompson and i've done it many times myself where i'll take a song and i'll put it on replay replay and the same song like I flew from um from San Francisco to New York once and the entire flight actually LA was LA New York the entire flight I listened to Ozzy Osbourne crazy train the entire flight while I was writing just I just kept playing over and over and over again I do with a fixed playlist I usually pick about seven to ten songs per book. And it's usually two different playlists.

The first half of the book will be one playlist, and then it'll start to fail, and I can sort of feel like the juju's gone. And I'll have to find a whole bunch of new music. Oh, the juju, the woo-woo. The woo-woo juju. The magic. Yeah, there's something about songs, too, where sometimes I'm listening to music when I'm writing and I'm like, I'm listening to this music too much. I can't pay attention to what I'm doing. And I got to shut it off.

And then I can get, I get into a state sometimes where I'm not even hearing the words. Like the music is almost just like a fuel or something or like some sort of a motivating factor that I'm not really totally taking in. Like I'm aware of it, but I'm not addressing it. I'm not really focusing on the lyrics. I'm just sort of like riding the head nod, and the beat is kind of driving me in some sort of a weird way. Also, my latest book, Stealing Fire, the one that's out in February, most of the writing that I had a partner, so he did something,

but most of that book was written to Amanda Palmer's cover of Nick Cave's The Ship Song over and over and over again. How obscure. I know. That's a weird one. I don't know who Amanda Palmer is. I don't know who Nick Cave is either.

Am I a bad person? How does that work? I don't think you're a bad person. Who's Amanda Palmer? Should I know who that is? Yeah, she married to Neil Gaiman, the writer. I know who that is yeah she uh married to neil gaiman the writer i know who that guy is i've seen him on twitter amanda's on twitter too um she's just a singer-songwriter are there any psychoactive substances or you know anything that people do

that can enhance creativity is there like a proven thing that either enhance flow state or enhance creativity so there's a couple thing that either enhance flow state or enhance creativity so there's a couple different ways to answer this question um for sure um so neurobiologically we know for example so let's first of all creative is a really freaking fuzzy word so let's let's put some meat around it yeah for starters there are lots of different styles of creativity types of creativity etc etc is a really freaking fuzzy word. So let's put some meat around it for starters. There are lots of different styles of creativity, types of creativity, et cetera, et cetera.

But usually, not 100%, but usually, what you're talking about is the brain taking in more information or different information per second and then finding connections between this new incoming information and older ideas, right? So you've got information acquisition on the front end, and you've got pattern recognition, which is closely related ideas,

finding connections between them, lateral thinking, which is far-flung ideas. And then on the back end, usually you have to – creativity involves making it public, right? You've got to – there's some courage and some bravery on the back end. We've got to take it out into the world so to me when we talk about creativity that's the process so if you want to talk about amplifying creativity well you have a bunch of different places you can intercept in the chain right so when we have norepinephrine and dopamine in our system so internally we get norepinephrine and dopamine.

They're focusing chemicals. Dopamine shows up whenever we link patterns together also. So, you've done a crossword puzzle. You get an answer. That little rush of pleasure, that's dopamine. Norepinephrine and dopamine, not only do you take in more information per second when they're in your system, they also amplify pattern recognition. They lower signal-to-noise ratios is what they do. So we notice more patterns.

Anandamide, which is a psychoactive inside of marijuana, amplifies lateral thinking, long-distance connections, right? And then there's a bunch of different chemicals that will show up and help you take risks. All these chemicals can be produced internally or exogously. Like I always say, I guess there are more states you can now do this in, but a really cheap flow hack is, and it won't work over time, but if you go for a 20-minute, 25-minute run, low-grade run, you're inducing exercise-induced transient hypofrontality. We talked about that. Followed by a cup of coffee. Followed by a joint, and you're going to essentially mimic the majority of the neurochemistry that shows up in a flow state. So it's an artificial flow state. So you can do it that way. You can do it with a regular, you know, go for a run and, you know, do it that way. I can do the same thing.

If you go for, I'll do something, and I do this with my dogs the dog sanctuary i want to put them in flow because all these same neurochemicals boost your immune system and reset your nervous system a little bit so we work with very very sick animals and so flow is really beneficial really help extend pet lifespan we've discovered we do this thing where we'll hike for like half an hour or so again to get to the point where low-grade exercise induced hand-turning hypofrontality, and then we will sprint up a cliff or up a hill, something like a five to seven-minute sprint, just long enough to get the endorphins going, right? So you get that pain relief. You sort of know you've gotten there when you've gotten the pain relief. So the hike will get you sort of into the low-grade flow state, and then you're

going to add endorphins in by pushing yourself physically for like five to seven minutes. And then I turn around from the top of the cliff and I run back down the cliff face, which is a big risk and gets a bunch of dopamine into your system. And usually by the time I hit the bottom of that cliff, I'm in a flow state. So like if I'm trying to solve a puzzle, a writing puzzle, and I can't solve it, I call it a flow hike. I will go out and do this exact format. And usually by the time I'm hiking home with the dogs, the answers are starting to come. Whoa. Now, I think we'd be remiss if we didn't go back to what Sam was talking about

when he was talking about streak shooting and comparing streak shooting to flow state, which I think is kind of very different, right? Because streak shooting has some pretty definitive results if you if you it's very repeatable right you're you're doing the same thing over and over again you're shooting a ball into a net and it's not an easy thing to do and statistically when someone's in a flow state they're not more successful or what they think is a flow state or in the zone so that's that's the thing that I was going to point out. And I've seen that same data, and I have a hard time believing it. It doesn't actually make a whole lot of sense to me.

It's an anomalous finding. It's interesting for that reason. But we know people go on streaks, right? I just want to – like when I talk about flow, right? Everybody's got – I mean, it's defined as an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best. There's more words we can lay under it. But what I'm talking about specifically is specific changes in brain function. You're getting prefrontal cortexes turning down.

You're getting five or six neurochemicals that tend to show up in your brain waves drop down to the alpha-theta borderline. So when somebody tells me they're in the zone, we don't have a biophysical-based flow detector yet. We're working on one. Adam Ghazali at UCSF is working a biophysical-based flow detector yet. We're working on one. Adam Ghazali at UCSF is working on one, but it doesn't exist yet. So right now, if I want to know if you're in flow, I have to give you a subjective questionnaire. It's extremely well-validated. We've got like 50 years of research around it. It works, but it's still, there's no way to like look at that ad and say, okay, this person is in deep flow or not. So we don't have that way to do

it yet. So I don't quite know way to do it yet so i don't don't quite know how we do this research yet but it's something that's interesting so how do they know what a flow state is like you're saying that they don't have the exact ability to test it but what would they use would they use fmri or some sort of a new technology people have done it a hundred different ways and this is stuff i talk about uh in in rise of superman primarily but um so there's eeg work right where they're looking at brain waves that sort of goes back to the to the 60s um and it was at that point they just thought it was alpha waves so when you're let's put primer on brain waves yeah normal waking consciousness where are we

right now? It's beta. It's a fast-moving wave. It just means that we're talking, we're thinking, we're engaged. Alpha, which is right below that, is daydreaming mode. It's where you're sort of flitting from thought to thought without much internal resistance. Theta is below that. Theta, we only tend to drop into in REM sleep or, say, hypnagogic state, which is when you're falling asleep, right?

That weird state where you're falling asleep and you think, oh, that looks like a gray elephant and then turns into a gray sweater and then it turns into a gray Camry, blah, blah, blah. That's a hypnagogic state. That's theta as a general rule. So flow takes place. They used to think it was just alpha. Now they think it's the borderline between alpha, theta. But we've gotten very, very precise with EEG. EEG was one of these things we thought we could sort of measure it for a long time. But in the past 10 years, it's gotten very, very robust. So, we have a pretty good look at what people's brains are doing in flow. fmri the best work the cool work is uh charles lim he's at johns hopkins and uh he's got all kinds of talks you can find him online um they gave a ted talk about this work he did something really cool he took he started with jazz musicians and he built a keyboard with no metal in it so

they could put it inside the fmri and then he visualized the difference between the brain of a professional jazz musician playing a standard playing the same notes over and over versus improvising in a flow state. So we got to start to see what the differences are. This work has sort of been extended a little bit by a guy named Jud Brewer at Yale. He's also worked on this. He's looked at flow and meditation. He's found some slightly different things than Charles Lim. So it's a combination. But what we really, really need to know is the neurochemistry that I think is going to unlock this puzzle. And a lot of that stuff takes place deep in the brain. It's really our imaging technology isn't quite there yet. It's starting to get there and probably will be there within three to four years because this stuff is advancing so quickly.

But we haven't put the whole puzzle together. So, for example, I can tell you these five or six neurochemicals show up in flow states can i tell you the order that they show up can i tell do we know if the order that you drop into flow versus how i drop in are they the same are they the different we have no idea that's so fascinating it's almost like we're looking at something that's taking place behind a wall and we know what's going on over there but we just don't know exactly what it is. I think that's one of the things I've discovered about science. I sort of learned this the hard way coming up as a science writer is I'm always stunned by how much we don't know.

Like really basic, basic, a lot of really basic, simple questions. Nobody's even thought to ask them yet. A lot of really basic, simple questions nobody's even thought to ask them yet. And it's really astounding to me how little we know, how much more we need to know. But really with stuff that people speak very, very learnedly and authoritatively about, and you start poking and you're like, fuck, we don't even know the very basics here. What are you talking about? Yeah, like what is consciousness?

We know if you're conscious. For one, right? I mean, isn't that the big one what separates people from almost anything else is that they're aware of what's going on and they can communicate it and they're here they're conscious they're they're not just conscious but they're somehow another i'm imparting my consciousness into your head and you're imparting yours into mine and i'm balancing your thoughts around and trying. Okay, I see where he's coming from. Okay, I see where he's going. Like what?

Where's that coming from? You're talking about theory of mind, right? Yeah. Which is interesting because they're starting to believe that a lot of mammals also have theory of mind. It's not just humans, right? The dividing line between like what is distinctly human at this point is really thin we've only found a couple of things right now robert spolsky at stanford yeah he's great he thinks the only two things that separate humans that lower species can't do what is distinctly human is our ability to delay

gratification super long term like we have religion right you we are willing to delay gratification super long-term. Like we have religion, right? We are willing to delay gratification until after I'm dead, right? This life sucks, and then you're going to go to heaven. So we're willing to do that. And we also have the ability to synthesize opposing ideas, right? The Hegelian dialectic. I can take this thing over here on this side, this thing over here on this side, put it together and synthesize new ideas, which most animals don't seem to be able to do.

But everything else we've pretty much found. Well, isn't language one of the big ones? Because I think most animals, even if they're aware in their consciousness and even if they have some sort of a crude form of communication, what they really lack is the ability to understand how the other person thinks. What they really lack is the ability to understand how the other person thinks. Like, you're talking to me, and this is the first time we've met, and we're talking, and I'm getting inside your head, even from the whole coffee should be black, you know, and you have your methodology for achieving. You're going to hold this against me for the rest of my life.

I'm drinking black coffee. We're fine. All right. It's like I'm seeing how you think, and what I do, what I try to do at least, is when I'm talking to someone, I try to sort of empty my head out and let them get in my head. I try to think like you're thinking. I've always said that that's what's happening in an audience, when someone's on stage and they're killing. When a comedian is on stage, like if I'm watching someone I think is really funny, like Bill Burr or something like that, I give my brain to him.

I get like, like, go ahead, take me on a ride. And so when he's on stage and he's killing, I'm sort of like letting him think for me. And I'm not questioning or taking things down other paths or allowing myself to also think about my bills or I got to get gas before I go home. I'm just thinking what he's providing me. You know, there's this and that ability is uniquely human. The ability to try to understand how another person's communicating and thinking. And then I start taking into variables. Okay, like, well, especially now that I'm a father over the last this last quarter of my life,

I've really concentrated on the concept of everybody used to be a baby. When I was young and single, everyone was static. That old lady's always been an old lady. That old dude's always been an old dude. Now, once I had a kid, from then on, when I'm raising my children, people now are babies that grew up. Everyone's a baby that became an adult. I see some crazy old man with a big fucking W.C. Fields nose and he's drinking.

I'm like, oh, that guy was a baby at one point in time. And I forced myself to go down that sort of a path. So I think that the ability to think how other people think and to sort of commiserate with each other in a very broad and expansive way, I think that's very uniquely human. I'm not sure. I think we need to understand. I mean, the more we figure out about, like, whale language, dolphin language, right? There's really, Jimmy, if you look, you might be able to dig it up. There's a guy, I want to say he's at Northern Arizona University, who worked on prairie dog language.

Have you heard about this? No. This is crazy research. So one of the reasons we've never been able to study animal communication, and I could screw this up, but we'll try it, is we couldn't talk back, right? We couldn't talk to them. he did is he recorded a ton of prairie dog communication and then started sort of decoding what little things mean and but used a computer to play it back to them so what he discovered is prairie dogs which you don't think of as particularly intelligent when they started decoding their language they started to realize that prairie dogs routinely say things like hey

be careful of that right path over there because there's a fat guy in a purple sweater coming this way. That detailed. Like in the beginning. Really? Yeah. They used to think animals only sort of communicated in like nouns and verbs. Present tense, nouns and verbs.

Right. Snake. You know, there are some certain calls that are. Monkeys do that. Monkeys, right. The three calls. Now they're starting to realize they've got adjectives. They've got tenses.

They can think in the – for a while they thought animals lived in a perpetual present, right? Like the argument was all animals are always in flow, right, which is every focused, everything in the now. It turns out that's not the case at all. They have pasts. They have futures. We ask this question a lot running an animal sanctuary because if we're caring for a dog, it's not just old or special needs. It's come from a shelter. It was on death row.

It was probably if it's ended up with us because we work with the worst of the worst of the worst. It's been very, very badly abused, et cetera, et cetera. And the question my wife and I always used to talk about was do they know? Do they feel grateful to us? Can they remember their past enough to know that the present is different and we were what was different? Those kinds of questions. And after 10, 12 years of doing this work hardcore, I think they really know. And I think they live in a timescale that's a lot broader than we've given them credit for.

Now, this work that's been done on prairie dogs, has it been done on any other animals? In New Language Discover, Prairie Doggies. it been done on any other animals? In new language, discover prairie doggies. It's a Radiolab episode. Nice. Powerful Radiolab from 2011. Radiolab's fucking awesome. By the way, if you haven't listened to that podcast, folks, that's one of my all-time favorites. I've learned so much from that show.

But that's incredible. They can tell you the color of the clothes. They have a noise for the color. Fuck. It's neat, right? that's incredible they can tell you the color of the clothes they have a noise for the color fuck it's neat right it's incredible and it changes the way you think about animals oh yeah for sure you know well um the the dolphin one is really weird dolphins i've found out recently that the babies um come up with their own names they come up with names for each other like the mother will say something to them and and then the baby will say something to that, and then the mother will repeat that, and the baby will choose that as a name. Dolphins name themselves.

Yeah, they name themselves. That's really interesting. Babies name themselves. Could you imagine if we let human babies name themselves? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, dolphins all sound like babies. It's like, meh, meh, meh.

You know? I mean, they don't really have... It's like, you know, I mean, they don't really have. It's sort of like ETL helium. Right. Yeah. Well, dolphin consciousness. They don't have German sounds. Yeah.

I mean, you know, I mean, there's such, that's one of the weirdest things about people is the distinctly different sounds that we have geographically. You know, Middle Eastern has a lot of, you know, and German has a lot of the guttural sort of, and then, you know, South America is that flowy sort of, you know, and German has a lot of the guttural sort of, and then, you know, South America has that flowy sort of, you know, the, the beautiful Latin sounds to a lot of their, the way they speak. Yeah. You don't really see too much of that with dolphins, but you do see some of it.

You definitely see some dialects and some, some variables. That's always the most fascinating thing to me is that we really don't know what the fuck they're saying. At all. Yeah. At all. And we've been studying it forever. And there's a lot of, I mean, you've got to, there's a lot of human arrogance, right, in the way. There's a lot of us being full of ourselves and, I mean, you know, we want to believe in it.

You know, they put it in the Bible. We're the master of earth. And that's a hell of a lot easier to be if other species aren't conscious and aren't communicating and aren't feeling. Well, what's interesting to me is that they've determined now, at least the people that are studying great apes, that chimps have moved into Stone Age. They believe that chimps are now at the beginning stages of the stone age and if chimps continue to evolve the way they have and the way supposedly we have in a million years from now chimps might have fucking houses and tools and cars and and they might be some totally new completely different thing there's some kind of charlton heston joke

here just waiting to happen that i can't get to but i mean it makes sense if we did at one point in time if we obviously we weren't unless you believe in creationism we weren't born as human beings we weren't invented and there wasn't an adam and an eve there was some sort of hominid that eventually got smarter and through natural selection and through genetic mutations diet choice all the different variables that they think contributed to the human being becoming the human being but it wasn't always that so if a chimp like right now if we can like we observe the meeting tools i'm sure you've seen the famous photo of the orangutan um that's holding on to the branch spearfishing. Yes.

Fucking A, man. That one's a mind blower. Like, he's got a tool. So here's the interesting question, of course, because we're probably, I mean, we've already accelerated evolution among humans. We probably can accelerate it among other species if we want to. Oh, yeah. That's interesting. Well, don't you think it's happening amongst humans right now at a spectacular rate, too? Oh, yeah. That's interesting. Well, don't you think it's happening amongst humans right now at a spectacular rate, too?

Oh, yeah. I mean, that's all, you know, techno-physioevolution is Robert Fogel's term from the University of Physioevolution. He came out of the University of Chicago. Still, he's an economist. And techno-physioevolution is his term for the fact that we've massively sped up evolution. And it's interesting because if you look at his work, it's, again, nothing fancy. It was sanitation systems and cleaner water and slightly better food and slightly better. But, you know, suddenly our lifespan has doubled.

Now, when he's talking about techno physio, he's only talking about using technology in terms of the health benefits of it, medicine, or is he talking about our interfacing with technology? He's talking about our interfacing with technology. See, that to me is one of the most bizarre ones. I talked about this yesterday, but I was watching another teen movie the other night. I was writing, and sometimes I write, I keep the TV on just for a goof. And it was so was writing and sometimes i write i keep the tv on just for a goof and uh it was so unbelievably bad and weird as a movie from 2001 and it was like a time capsule and i'm watching this thing i'm like culturally we are so far removed that you could not make this movie today if you made another teen movie it's filled with racism and sexism and people get, a guy punches a woman in the face and

it's like a punchline. I mean, there's a lot of like crazy fucked up shit in this movie. And obviously it's a comedy and it's parody. It's not supposed to be taken literally, but you can't even do comedies like that anymore. Like you watch that movie and you go, wow, this is a sign of a time before people could communicate instantaneously online. Can you imagine what would happen if you released Blazing Saddles today. Holy shit.

Yeah, holy shit. So let me ask you a question since you brought it up. It's totally off topic, but why doesn't comedy age well? It's a very good question. You know, I think if you want to look at the all-time most important comedians, I feel like, and I've always felt like number one is lenny bruce because lenny bruce was getting arrested back when you can't arrest me i haven't said cocksucker yet exactly he had cultural i mean we had cultural blinders on and we had these

notions of things you could and could not say and he those. And one of the ways he did it is by going to jail. But what he was doing was he was interfacing with a society and a culture that was infantile. We were childish back then, and we are no longer like that. So the things that he was saying that were naughty and funny are so commonplace. There's nothing funny about it. He did have some lines, though, that still to this day hold up. Like, one of them was about gay people. He was like, let me get this straight. See,

if you're gay, it's illegal. So what they do is, if you have sex with a man, they put you in jail where men want to have sex with you. I mean, this guy fucking nailed that in, like, 1960. It's like, what in the fuck are you doing? I mean, this guy fucking nailed that in like 1960. It's like, what in the fuck are you doing?

I mean, people have inadvertently stolen that bit, like reinvented it themselves. Like I had a friend who was a really funny comic who did that bit. And I go, hey man, you need to know. That's Lenny. Lenny Bruce did that in 1962. And he's like, no fucking way. I'm like, yeah.

He's like, I thought it was like too obvious. Like, yeah, it is too obvious. That's pretty funny. I'm like, yeah. He's like, I thought it was like too obvious. Like, yeah, it is too obvious. That's pretty funny. But he, some of the physical stuff, I mean, you know, Robin Williams, a lot of it's not funny, but what he can do with his face, Jim Carrey, same thing. Like some of the physical stuff seems to hold up because it's still amazing. You're like, how the fuck did you do that? But, you know, interestingly, Steve Martin still holds up.

Like if you listen to like, let's get small, like it still holds. It's so silly. And a lot of his stuff was very physical, too. We'd do the balloon animals on his head and shit like that. A lot of Richard Pryor hangs in there. A lot of Richard Pryor still holds up. Some of the stand-up seems to last a hell of a lot better than the funny movies. Go back and try to watch some of the... My wife had a very strange childhood so like didn't

see everything i saw coming up so i you know i showed her everything including all the like bill murray movies stripes and all that stuff from back when stripes now is a really sad movie about war right i mean at the time i remember like falling off my chair and being under the seat couldn't even breathe i was laughing so hard and now i watch my wife and she's looking at me she's like are you sure man this is supposed to be funny i'm like no no honest this is it's coming it's coming and it never comes yeah i mean i think that movies are in a lot of ways like a slide like a slide for a microscope where we can look at a culture you know from a time period like oh this is 2001 another teen movie let's look at this under the microscope and you can check out aspects of the culture i mean watch try to watch uh father

knows best it becomes a comedy like it's sort of kind of a comedy when it came out and then it becomes lame and now it's a comedy again really because now you watch it and you go what in the fuck are they talking about it's it's almost like some sort of a weird sketch on you know some alt television show similarly it's it's a different thing so my wife was what my wife's a writer also and uh she was working on a project that didn't end up going when it was a tv series based around uh the women in the manson family so i ended up reading everything I could possibly, you know, to help her out, learn about the Mansons. And the most interesting thing is how they talk to each other about emotions, right?

Like whatever else you want to say about the Mansons, at that point, they thought they were doing the deepest shit out there in terms of, before things got crazy, right? When it was just like a psychological cult before it got totally nuts. But you listen to how they talk about psychedelic things or emotions. And she had – one of the problems she ran into is she was like, I don't know what to do here because I can't use their dialogue.

They sound like absolute morons all the time. There's nothing like his pages of, look into my eye. No, you look into my eye. No, you look into my eye. You're like, holy crap. It's that dumb. I'm always interested in, and I've looked at it and I can't really, but I'm interested in how the language has changed. I always thought that in the 60s, we had no language for a lot of these ideas. By the 70s with the me generation generation we started to put a little more language around

psychological states and what that was by the 80s it got a little firmer and around the 90s is when it kind of normalized and suddenly like guys could talk about having emotions for the first time people don't talk about this back in the 80s but like the most rebellious thing a guy could do in the early 80s was have feelings which nobody and now you'd be like what really are you kidding but that's you know i thought that was really interesting and you can see it in the language and how we talk about things like emotions and psychological problems you see it evolve yeah men didn't cry in the 60s right did they no not definitely not in the 50s definitely not in the 50s there was the strong silent i mean you know obviously it's a stereotype so it's not real but it was the strong silent type yeah that's what people wanted they wanted that john wayne guy or charles bronson yeah yeah that's interesting i i you know i mean maybe that's

just a sign of the times because the world was hard and you're coming off of the depression and from the depression you grow up and you're living in the 1950s now i mean that's the that's those are the adults that grew up during that time you know you're in your late 30s early 40s and you're you know you're dealing with the ramifications of all the shit that you had to go through and what what society was going through when you were a kid and it was hard hard times no room for pussies you asked my grandmother what life was like in russia before she died she only had she would never tell us she had one answer which answer, which was, we ate potatoes. Whoa.

What was Russia like, Grandma? We ate potatoes. So was Russia difficult? We ate potatoes. Yeah, my grandmother, when she died, had money stashed all around the house. She'd take money and put it in coffee cans and tuck it under a floorboard or stick it behind books somewhere. She had stashed things everywhere because she was always worried that it was going to fall apart again because she had grown up.

She was a depression baby. Yeah, she had grown up in the heat of it. And it was just people not knowing if there was going to be any food and wondering if they were ever going to get a job, if they're ever going to get out of this hole. Yeah, we're soft as fuck right now so we concern ourselves with the 78 different gender pronouns that they've decided exist right and all the other different is that a real number are we making it no it's real now it's apparently it's deep into the 70s and you're supposed to recognize them yeah no not kidding

i'm jordan peterson coming on in a couple weeks to talk about this. He's a professor at the University of Toronto. And in Toronto, Canada has different laws. And they don't really, they have censorship. They have legitimate censorship. And they have a human rights council. And the human rights council can determine whether or not you are insensitive to someone else's belief systems. And if you are, you can be charged. So you can go to jail, you can be brought in front of a court, you could be fined if you don't use the correct gender pronouns that they have decided.

I mean, right now, it's just theoretical. It hasn't been, you know, no one's... That's straight out of Orwell. Well, it's also in New York City. I don't know if you know this, but New York City now has new laws where 31 different gender pronouns are recognized. And if you are either an employer or if you are a landlord and you choose to misgender someone and not use the appropriate gender pronoun that they prefer, you can be fined $250,000. That has not happened yet, but that is a real law that has been passed to try to stop transgender discrimination. But how would you know in advance which... You have to ask, what pronouns do you prefer?

I see. So everybody gets to be special without doing anything special. Why? Because it's easy to get food. And there's nothing dangerous on the horizon. So we look for problems. And these are one of the problems that people look for. And what's really fascinating is that it's not really, it's not transgender people that really want this. It's weirdos.

Because transgender people want to be either, if it's a man, they want to be a woman. And they prefer to be, for the most part, prefer to be called a she or her and use the female gender pronouns. And for females to male it's the opposite it's these people that want to be a z or a here or a bunch of different fucking weird ones that they've invented they're just they're playing a game they're like uh they're they're in narnia i mean they're they're playing dress up i mean it's this weird bizarre thing i've i'm now i'm making up names for what I am. I'm a foxkin. You know, I mean, you know, I've, you know.

You know, you look a little like a foxkin. Thank you. I was thinking that when I came in. I mean, this is exactly the same kind of thinking that's behind it. It's like, this is not an anti-discrimination problem. It's a self-indulgence problem more than anything. Yeah, and, you know, what passes for creative self-expert? Like, go out and do something in the world. Yeah, go do something. Yeah. And, you know, what passes for creative self-expert? Like, go out and do something in the world.

Yeah, go do something. Yeah. What are you doing? You have time to be coming up with 78 different gender pronouns. What the fuck are you doing? Right. Let's examine what's going on here. Tinder updates including 37 new gender identity options.

37 new ones. New ones. 37 new ones. We're going to look back at this time and we're gonna fucking laugh the way we don't laugh at old comedies we're gonna laugh at the actual historical documents that show how fucking ridiculous people in 2016 were we're gonna look back people 50 years from now gonna look back and go what in the fuck were they doing before the asteroid hit right they were going

crazy they mean it's almost like Rome before the fall right we're all just going crazy and just completely obsessed with nonsense but i think that that also it speaks to the desire or the the requirement that human beings have for a certain amount of engagement in their environment and a certain amount of uh of drama and like conflict i think we're wired for it i think we're wired for a certain amount of conflict and resolution and problem solving and i think that's one of the reasons why people really like doing things that are difficult i've been writing about this lately because i've become obsessed with yoga over the last couple years, and I suck at it.

I'm not very good at it, but as I do it and continue to do it and get better at it, I feel like it's making everything else in my life better. Yeah, I don't think there's any way to grow old as an athlete without yoga. It doesn't work.

You just break too many things without it. I think you're totally right, and I think it has a negative woo-woo connotation because people think of it as like being soccer moms and but it's fucking hard oh yeah the first so i put about 65 hairline fractures in my legs i shattered my legs and whoa um 65 hairline all in one so okay longer story but when i was uh 16 skied off a cliff in switzerland and split my didn't see it didn't know it was there uh and split my patellas so my knees never folded right so when i started when you say split my patellas i mean i cracked my kneecaps and back then they couldn't do anything for it like they couldn't so they just let it heal and my legs didn't fold quite right.

So the angle was off. So when I came up, I started out as a journalist. One of the action adventure sports was starting out. It was the early 90s. And you could ski and write or surf and write or rock climb and write. There was work. And I couldn't do any of those things very, very well. But I lied to my editors because I wanted the work.

And I was really fascinated with it. So I spent about five or six years chasing athletes around mountains and I broke a lot of bones along the way. But what happened was every time I impacted, right? So if skiing bumps dropped off a little something, I would put a micro fracture in my legs, a little one. And then. Because of your knee structure? Because they weren't. It wasn't folding.

It wasn't folding, right? So the shock absorbers weren't working. Wow. And so, you know, one day they all turned into bigger fractures and I sort of collapsed. And I, you know, I remember when I was at the Cleveland Clinic and the doc walked out holding up my x-ray and he was like, what happened to you? He's like, how do you even walk in here, man? And I was like, what are you talking about? He's like, yeah, man, your days of skiing or running.

He's like, that's over. And I was like, fuck if it's over. You're out of your mind. I was like 24 or something like that. No. And I, for whatever, I don't even remember what kicked me into it, but I started doing a shnalanga yoga. And the reason I started, I mean, like I went, I was like, maybe I needed more flexibility. Maybe that was the key.

reason I started, I mean, like I went, I was like, maybe I needed more flexibility. Maybe that was the key. But I remember the first time I went into the yoga class and, you know, you sort of like, you look to your right and there's a 75 year old woman who's doing stuff that like, I can't even begin to do. And I like, it hurts so much. I've got tears rolling down my, you need to try to like get into that position. And I was like, fuck that. There is no way I'm going to be bested by that. And I just stuck with it because I, you know, I'm competitive and I was like, fuck that. There's no way I'm going to be bested by that. And I just stuck with it because I'm competitive. And I was like, if she can do it, I can do it. Yeah, this is one old woman. I hate calling her an old woman. She's a nice lady. I don't want to use any pejoratives, but she's probably deep into her 60s, I would imagine. And she's there every time I'm there.

I don't know how often she goes, but she's there almost every time I'm there. That lady busts her ass every class. And she walks out of there smiling and happy. And I'm like, how many people that are in her age group have that kind of energy and that kind of vitality to get through a 90-minute hot yoga class and be smiling and chipper when it's all over? That's awesome. yoga class it'd be smiling and chipper when it's all over that's awesome it's awesome it's but my point was that i really think that doing difficult things oh yeah totally very important well you also you know what we were talking about flow earlier right flow shows up when our skills are stretched to the max and we know and this is go back to chick sent me hi um but there's massive data on this at this point.

The people who are happiest, the people who have score off the charts for overall life satisfaction and well-being are the people with the most flow in their lives. So people with the most flow in their lives are people who are constantly challenging themselves, who are constantly pushing all the time. That totally makes sense to me. I'm absolutely at my most happy when I'm involved in difficult activities. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. And also, shitty results sometimes, too, where you don't feel good. And then you just rebuild and figure out what went wrong and then bounce back from those shitty results and then achieve something that you hadn't achieved before. And then you get this giant boost of happiness and satisfaction. something that you hadn't achieved before. And then you get this giant boost of happiness and satisfaction. And it's also I feel energized and engaged as long as I'm doing difficult things all

the time, whether it's archery or martial arts or yoga or something difficult things for whatever reason, when I'm doing them, my brain is in like a good state. You know, it's one of the reasons why I've been so fascinated with your work and these these concepts of flow is because i i feel like there's a whole bunch of different variables that um or different states that you achieve in the mind like there's there's a momentum state that i feel like i get when i'm doing all the stuff i'm supposed to do when i'm writing a lot i'm exercising a lot i'm eating healthy a lot i have this momentum state and that momentum state is a different state than the flow state it's like this uh um it it propagates

success or it propagates um the the concept of uh continuing to improve i know what you're talking about and it's i tend to notice let's call it the momentum state. Yeah. When I'm getting into flow fairly frequently, that tends to show up at other times. And I, you know, I always think like when that feeling, you know, is really present, that's when you make big bets. That's when you really go because you've got, you know, wind in your sails. There's something driving you. If I'm not feeling that i mean i will always be willing to take a big risk and challenge myself and whatever but i'm much more comfortable doing it when i'm feeling that momentum because then i you know i know i've at least i got a shot

at it for sure 100 and that exists with uh it's a big one with martial artists it's a big one with fighters you see that with fighters when they have a bad result. They have this rebuilding period where oftentimes they're on shaky legs, and then sometimes they never come back from it. Sometimes one bad result for a fighter and their career is essentially over. They're a ghost of themselves. But up until that moment, fighters have these states that they achieve. A perfect example is Anderson Silva when he was in his prime. Anderson Silva was widely recognized as, if not number one,

certainly in the top two or three best fighters of all time. And UFC considers him the best of all time. But he had achieved this state of mind and of performance when he was at the end of his reign as the middleweight champion, when he was almost in the matrix. I mean, he would fight guys and stand right in front of them, and they would throw punches, and he would just slide out of the way effortlessly and then knock them out and drop them.

There's this famous fight that he had with Forrest Griffin for the, well, it was one of his first fights at light heavyweight when he was the middleweight champion. So he's fighting 20 pounds above his weight class against a really, like, watch this. Look at this. This is, look at this. Watch how he's standing right in front of him, and he just moves out of the way every time Forrest tries to punch him.

He's not there. And then watch this. Bing. He just cracks him. I mean, it's, watching it live, I was like, this guy is a fucking wizard. Wow, that's really strange. I mean, he was standing in front of him

like he saw everything coming in slow motion. And Forrest is a world-class fighter. I mean, there's a bunch of videos of Anderson like that, being in the Matrix. He stood with his back. He fought this guy, Stefan Bonner. Stood with his back against the cage. Just stood there, dropped his hands, and invited the guy to just throw punches and kicks at him. And then when the guy tried to attack, he just slipped right out of the way.

And then he went right back to the spot, and he goes, Come on, let's do it again. And the guy who was fighting was like, What in the fuck is happening to me here? Because he was being humiliated. That's embarrassing as hell. Fifteen seconds later, he smashes him with a knee to the stomach and knocks him unconscious.

I mean, it was just, he had achieved this weird state because of the momentum of his success, his confidence. And he also had this weird aura about him when he was at the top where everyone was terrified of him because he could do things like that. And you had a feeling that maybe he was going to put his back up against the cage with you and humiliate you. So you were almost training in vain,

like training thinking that like one day I'm going to get in there with this guy and I'm going to get fucked up like everybody else. Be like water, my friend. Yeah. Well, he was like water for a long time. But the thing that got him, well, Father Time got him for sure. But he had he got knocked out by this guy, Chris Weidman. He got knocked out doing that.

He got knocked out, like joking around, putting his hands down. And Weidman just judged where he was going to be and faked him out and caught him with a big punch and knocked him unconscious and he's never been the same again oh that's interesting yeah just all stopped right there i didn't i have noticed uh and i think it's one of the more interesting things about kind of breaking bones as an athlete is it doesn't matter consciously how brave i want to be like a couple years ago i did this and i basically nearly severed my hand from my what's going on there that was a 25 foot cliff that i sort of i was a 35 foot cliff and i under jumped it and i basically went wrist i flipped

upside down wrist went down um but for a year and a half after it whenever i was above exposed rock so which happens as a skier downhill mountain biker all the time you're always i would have an immediate fight or flight response i would freeze and just start shaking and i couldn't there was nothing i mean i just you know i just had to kind of expose myself to it over and it took about a year till i come down i've discovered that after a big accident like a broken bone torn rotator cuff something like that it's going to take me six to eight months at to just like get my unconscious back and ready to kind of take risks again it doesn't matter you know i could be healed from

the injury. I could be in better shape than I was before the injury, whatever. It's going to take like six or eight months for my subconscious to like get all that fear out and actually reset towards normal. Yeah, that makes sense. And when fighters lose, there's a physical aspect of it too. The injury, like if they get knocked out, especially they're worried about taking a punch, and sometimes that takes a long time before they can feel confident enough to take a blow again. But there's also an illusion of invulnerability that they achieve when they're at the very best, and that illusion's shattered when they realize, like, oh, well, now I'm the nail. I used to be the hammer, but today I'm the nail.

How do you deal with being the nail? And that's, I think, probably one of the biggest psychological barriers that a fighter can overcome is their own mortality. So what was your answer to that problem? In what, which one? How do you come back from becoming a nail? Depends on the person. Depends on where you are in your career.

For some fighters, they have to recognize that because of the amount of damage that they've taken, like you have a certain, the way I always like to describe it is like you have a ticket and there's a certain amount of holes you can punch on that ticket. And when you punch too many holes on that ticket, you don't get those back. That's it. It's over. And you have to really be aware of that. Because if you start getting delusional or and you start having this uh ridiculous idea that you're different than everybody else been there before you and

even though you've been getting knocked out regularly and training because your chin's gone that somehow now they're going to be able to put it together when the fight comes you can only take so many shots you know you you can only take so much trauma particularly in the brain but i'm sure in the body as well i, I don't know how much work has been done studying body trauma, but I can only imagine the amount of scar tissue that you build up by getting kicked in the liver, you know, camp after camp, fight after fight. I mean, it cannot be good for you. Your kidneys get abused.

Your internal organs get smashed by kicks and punches on a regular basis. Your body only has so much resilience. So if someone is there because someone's in a bad state because they're 22 years old and they fought someone that got knocked out, I would say they just need to take some time off, rest their brain, because that's very important. It's one thing that a lot of fighters fuck up on is they try to get right back in there. And you're vulnerable. You're much more vulnerable than you were before. When you've been knocked out have you been knocked completely unconscious and flatlined it is way easier for you to be knocked out again well that's where i mean well

that's all the tbi stuff right like that's why there's concussion protocols yeah you gotta wait super vulnerable right afterwards i remember like i think it was a car accident concussion but i remember going rock climbing and it it was two, three weeks after. And I was, you know, 500 feet up on the wall. Did you get like vertigo or something? All kinds of craziness. Oh, no. Like vertigo started sweating.

Things started, like it was, my brain just was like. Jesus Christ. Cannot handle this at all. It was fine. There was lots of ropes and protection. My friend just got me off the wall. It wasn't a big deal. But I remember at the time, and I was like, you know, I i'm looking for a hold i was looking for a cold and a crack and

something like there were like three cracks and i was like wait a minute there were not three cracks here a second ago what the hell just happened yeah brain trauma is no joke so i think for fighters there would be the physical aspect of it and the mental aspect of it both of them are very difficult to overcome i think if you're younger the physical aspect is it and the mental aspect of it. Both of them are very difficult to overcome. I think if you're younger, the physical aspect is easier to resolve. You just need time. And the psychological aspect, some people get over it better than others. Some people have a more honest assessment of themselves as a human and as a competitor, and they understand that this is just a really difficult thing they're doing.

And sometimes it's going to work out and sometimes it's not. And other people just think, I am the baddest motherfucker that's ever lived. And then, boom, something happens. They're like, oh, my God, I'm just normal. And that's really hard for them. It's a mindset thing, right? It's a different fixed and a growth mindset. Yeah, it is.

And it's also, it's a difference between someone who's been lucky and understands that they've been lucky and someone who's been lucky and feels like they've been blessed by the gods. And then all of a sudden the gods have rescinded their program. They're fickle that way. You're just normal. You're mortal. There's so many variables. And it's like how it happened to you.

Was it a lucky shot that you got hit with? Was it a prolonged beating? Which is oftentimes the worst. When a guy really gets beat up, it's really hard for them to come back. Because what you see inside the octagon when a person gets beaten up is just the beginning of it. for weeks, vertigo, fucking horrible bruises all over your face and your body and aching and in terrible pain for a long time. When you see a guy get the fuck beat out of him, that's just the beginning of his struggle. You know, when you see especially a really bad knockout, it's entirely possible you're seeing someone who will never be the same again. That's heavy.

Yeah. It's very heavy. That seeing someone who will never be the same again. That's heavy. Yeah. It's very heavy. That changes the way you watch fighting. Well, my good friend Dr. Mark Gordon is a specialist in traumatic brain injuries. Oh, I know Mark. Yeah. Palladium? Yes.

Yeah, yes. I know Mark. Mark helped me when I had Lyme disease. Oh, did he really? Yeah, he did. That guy's awesome. I love him. But he's worked with so many football players and soldiers, and now he's done, he's done some work with fighters too. But you know, he's adamant about it. He's

like, once you start ringing that bell, you know, you, you got to do everything you can to heal that thing up and you cannot just jump right back into it. So when you see these football players that are getting fucking cracked and then two periods periods later they're jumping back in. You know, that's crazy. You're doing a crazy thing. You got flatlined, and then you're jumping back in the game three quarters later or two quarters later. That's crazy. It's nuts.

Yeah, and it's common. It's really common. Well, I mean, you know, try to tell anybody anything when you're 22, 23, 24, you know, at that age. Yeah. tell anybody anything when you're 22 23 24 you know yeah at that age yeah especially if you're a professional athlete and you train yourself to be fiercely competitive and that ferocious and everything else it's hard to dial that back well it's just such a scary thing though because compromising the ability to think correctly to me is one of the scariest things that could happen to you that was i had lyme disease and and one of the and i spent three years in bed but the worst part about life three years yeah i was really sick jesus christ that's where the flow

research came from i yeah i i pulled myself out of it through surfing in these crazy altered states that i was having while i was surfing and my first question was what the fuck is going right surfing is not a known cure for chronic autoimmune conditions and why was i having these crazy altered state of consciousness experiences while surfing that's where it started for me um but with lyme i law i mean i you go crazy you become extremely paranoid the most common misdiagnosis for lyme is paranoid schizophrenia so you become extremely paranoid i was hallucinating short-term memory gone long-term memory gone i became dyslexic i couldn't write i couldn't even read because i would get to the end of a sentence i couldn't remember the beginning

of the sentence that i read but it's like watching yourself go mad i don't know if any i don't i've been through a lot of physical pain i've been through a lot of different illnesses whatever nothing is worse than watching yourself go crazy wow terrifying my good friend tommy his girlfriend just this past weekend was telling me about she had Lyme and she was misdiagnosed. She had to go to just more than a, I think she said more than a dozen different doctors before somebody finally listened to her. If you find, my second book, West of Jesus, which is the book where I write about this, this is very early. It's the first couple of pages. I have a list of all the diseases that I was told I had before they actually discovered it was Lyme.

And it's half a page of diseases. It's just a thick paragraph. I'm so confused by that because Lyme is common. Well, first of all, I got it on the East Coast, but I was here. I was living in California. I was living in L.A. at the time where they hadn't really – now they've seen it. But at that time, nobody had really seen it, and they didn't believe it was a

West Coast disease. It's still at this point that diagnostics are not fantastic for Lyme. Well, I was saying, my friend Katie, my friend Tommy's girlfriend Katie, she lives in New Jersey, or Connecticut, rather, where it's really common. I mean, Lyme, Connecticut is where

it came from. So they live in a place where it's really common, and the doctor was is where it came from so they live in a place where it's really common and the doctor was like nah nah not lime she's like i think it might be lime no not lime you're going crazy i went in i don't know if i could talk about this i can't talk about this a little bit but so we'll keep names out of it so the first time i walked in to see my uh doctor um i'd been sick for a while. And I just moved to LA, so I didn't have a regular practitioner. I finally got one and I'd been sick for a while. So a lot of my friends had been trying to figure out what the hell was going on with me. And one of my editors said, hey, I've been doing research. I think you have Lyme. Go ask your doctor. And I remember walking into the doctor. It was the first time

I'd seen him. And I was like, hey, man, blah, blah, blah. This is what's going on. I think I have Lyme. And he's like, no, no, you don't have Lyme. You have AIDS. Which by the way, like, you know, I was like, are you sure? You just decided you were gay? Well, no, I looked at him. I was like, are you sure? So my mother was one of the very first AIDS activists in Ohio.

So like I've been having protected sex my whole life. Poor baby. Yeah. True that. Heterosexual. like i've been having protected sex my whole life poor baby yeah true that heterosexual no intravenous drug use at least at that time and you know kiss any dudes nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing at that point and you know i'm willing to learn if you'll send me someplace special but uh so this guy decides and this guy just looks at me do you think you're gay no i don't know what he thought i was like like, buddy, I'm not, like, I haven't had homosexual sex. I've never used IV.

Right. He's like, right, sure. I'm like, that was what happened. AIDS, bro. The worst thing is, like, you know, go home to your girlfriend who you're living with, and she's like, how was the doctor, honey? Yeah. Did he test you before he said this?

No, he tested, he tested. Let's just say I won the lawsuit. Oh. By the time you before he said this? No. He tested. Let's just say I won the lawsuit. Oh. By the time it was all said and done. Holy shit. You had to sue him. Wow. It got really obnoxious.

I mean, they wouldn't test me for anything. It dragged on and on and on. No. Is that because they're worried that if they do test you for something and it confirms that they were incorrect and it sets them up for malpractice, so they trying to drag it out and it was an hmo thing so the insurance has changed but back in that this was early 2000 yeah 99 98 i paid i think my premium was hmo coverage was like let's say at the time it was like a couple hundred bucks a month of that 200 bucks a month seven dollars went to the doctor for testing the rest of the insurance company the doctor got seven dollars a month to treat me so how incentivized

are they to run a bunch of big expensive tests so he looks at anybody on an hmo he's like aids you got aids you got aids just get the fuck out of get him to run out of my office hopefully the guy'll just do drugs and die. Just drink himself to death. It was ugly. Wow, that's crazy. So this was a long time ago when Lyme wasn't nearly as prevalent. But now, Lyme is a goddamn scary disease. Because I don't know when it originated.

And they just started sort of treating people for it over the last few decades, right? I don't know if this is still true. Over the last few decades, right? I don't know if this is still true, but there was a period of time where it was the first or the second biggest communicable viral disease in the world. I think it was second to AIDS. Well, one of the things I studied, I did this show called Joe Rogan Questions Everything for Sci-Fi. And one of the things that we looked into was something called Morgellons. Do you know what Morgellons is? Morgellons is a very controversial disease where people feel like they have fibers growing out of their skin.

And they scratch themselves and develop these like open sores from itching. And then they think that like they'll get like carpet fibers in their skin. They'll think it's coming out of their body. Like fibers from their clothes that they'll detect on their skin. And so it has this sort of weird psychological aspect to it. What's interesting about it is a disproportionate number of people who have Morgellons or believe they have it test positive for Lyme disease. So I was talking to a doctor who had Morgellons who also has Lyme. And he was very candid and honest about it.

He thinks that there's a direct there's something going on there's a neurotoxic effect that's happening with the Lyme disease that's twisting his mind doesn't I mean I went crazy I'll tell you I was at that's why I wanted to talk to you I was at Fairfax and Sunset I was driving my car it was a stick and it was I was coming back from the doctors this was a typical lime what happens to your brain and i'm the lights red and it's rush hour you know what fairfax and sunset is like at rush hour and uh the light turns from red to green and i no longer know what green means whoa my brain is just like and i'm like what am i supposed to do what am i supposed to do people are honking supposed to do? Holy shit. People are honking and honking.

And finally, I'm like, oh, crap. Green means go. And I look down at the stick shift, and I no longer remember how to drive stick. Whoa. I had to literally get out, and people had to push my car into whatever that little grocery store is right into the parking lot. Oh, my God. It was really crazy. So, like, you know, fundamental skills that I'd had since I was 16 years old and, you know, the ability to go when the light turns green. I mean, you watch yourself go crazy.

Wow. That must be insane. But you knew how to walk. You knew how to talk. You knew how to say there's something wrong. You had full access to the language. I had full access to language. I couldn't write. I started developing dyslexia. I would scramble words up when I was writing. But I could talk. I don't think I ever lost my powers of speech that I remember. What a scary little fucking disease Lyme is. It was weird. Scary, creepy disease. Well, this doctor, he was absolutely convinced that the two of them were correlated. He said that there's something going on with Lyme disease that produces this thing where you start seeing these fibers coming out of your body.

produces this thing where you start seeing these fibers coming out of your body. And, you know, we had a ton of people just send in videos and show us images, and they had slides that they had prepared. They were convinced these fibers were coming out of their skin. And so doctors oftentimes just completely label it as a psychosomatic disorder. But this one doctor who had it said i believe that the correlation is lyme disease and it completely makes sense but listen to what you're saying and the other thing is everything is a psychosomatic disease right i mean there's not aids well the mind all i was saying is like i don't mean it that way it's kind of funny now because it's uh it's like you could

kind of avoid it. It used to be we were all worried everybody was going to die. Like you can joke around about AIDS now, which is rare. You know, if you look at like the time when Magic Johnson came out as HIV positive, everybody was terrified we were all going to die. You know, I lost a lot of friends during that period. I'm sure you – Because they thought you had AIDS? No, because –

Oh. I might have lost some friends that way, too. But now, I mean, yeah. Because of AIDS itself. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was a death sentence for a lot of people.

You know, I had a guy on who is a super controversial character. He's a biologist out of the University of California, Berkeley. I don't know if you've ever heard of him. His name is Peter Duesberg. He's a weird guy, man, because he's, first of all, his credentials are rock solid. He's done some amazing work with cancer research. He's a legitimate tenured biologist, right? And he believes that HIV does not cause AIDS. He believes that AIDS is caused, he believes that it's not a communicable disease, that it's caused by rampant drug abuse, and that people taking crystal meth

and amyl nitrate, and that in the gay community, there's so much partying that they're destroying their immune system, and that's why HIV is showing up. He believes that HIV is a very weak virus, and it only shows up in the immune systems or in the bodies of people who have compromised immune systems already. That it's not the cause of the immune system, but it's a symptom of a compromised immune system. It can't just be drug abuse, obviously, because there's tons of people who have AIDS who never have used drugs in their life. Right, like Africa, right? Yeah, right? Here's what's weird about that.

They don't test them for HIV. When you get money from AIDS organizations, they're not spending a ton of money to test people for HIV. They're just looking at their T-cell count. They're looking at people with compromised immune systems. AIDS meaning acquired immune deficiency syndrome. So they're seeing these people that have obviously compromised immune systems, and they look at their T-cell count, and they go,

oh yeah, you have AIDS. But it doesn't mean they have hiv and what he i mean he's fucking super controversial and no one agrees with him and no one wants to debate him either because i had him on and people were really angry with me for having him on like hey i have zero background in biology this guy's a fucking professor at the university of california berkeley he's written all these articles about it he's talked to all these people about it. I want to hear what he has to say, but people are so angry at all. But as you look into it deeper and deeper, it demands that someone shut him down. Like some, some biologists should have a debate with him and show step-by-step why he's wrong. Because if he's just

running around there saying that and everybody avoids him, a lot of people are going to get sucked into that rabbit hole. You know, I don't, i don't obviously don't know who's right i doubt he's right i highly highly highly doubt that all those other biologists are wrong and this one guy is correct but it might be both it might be that hiv does cause aids that aids is a communicable disease and also that drug abuse accentuates it right it makes it much worse so instead you know he's looking at this one factor when this one factor which absolutely everybody knows when you're doing crystal meth and you're doing amyl nitrate and all these crazy drugs these people are doing anybody doing that stuff you're going to have a fucked up body like it's

going to compromise your immune system you drink every night it compromises your immune system any drug abuse is not good so if that drug abuse is going on and it's coinciding with an infectious disease it just makes sense that it would accentuate it that's what i probably think it is but his path like the path that he's chosen to pursue is just extremely controversial and you know people think that he's anti-semitic and then he's anti-gay and he's anti this and anti that because of it so a lot of uh a lot of weird stuff gets tossed around with that it's crazy yeah interesting yeah i'm sure he's wrong i don't know the fuck do i know but for you what do they have to do to you to get you off the lyme disease and isn't lyme something you keep semi-permanently so i mean i you know i was in

bed for three i mean i'll tell you yeah i was in bed for about three years they had to pull me off antibiotics because my stomach lining started bleeding out um there was nothing else anybody could do for me and i'll just tell you the the full story and i was gonna end my life i like i was at that point i was functional about 10 of the, maybe like an hour a day. I couldn't work. The only thing I was going to be was a burden to my friends and my family. And I was just like, all right. How old were you at the time? 30.

And in the middle of this, it was when I was still living in Los Angeles, a friend of mine showed up at my door and said, we're going surfing. I said, do you fucking mind? I can't walk across the room. I mean, I literally, I literally couldn't do it. And she wouldn't shut up and wouldn't leave and wouldn't leave and wouldn't leave. She's trying to drown you. And after like. This bitch is tired of me complaining.

She's going to drown me. Four hours of this or three hours of it. I was like, fuck it. Let's go surfing today. I mean, what's the worst that can happen, right? I'll always kill myself tomorrow. Right. And she dragged me out to Sunset Beach.

And they literally sort of had to walk me to the car right take you know by the shoulders because i was really weak and you know they gave me a board the size of a cadillac and the bigger the board the easier it is to surf and this was enormous it was a tiny day like waves were like two feet at best and it was so crappy nobody was even out but the water was warm and they sort of like they took me by the elbow and they walked me out to the break and i was out there and i knew how to surf a little bit it'd been a long time so i had surfed at that point but 30 seconds later a wave came and you know i don't know what happened muscle memory took over whatever but i spun my board i paddled a couple times and i popped up and i just popped up in a dimension i didn't even know existed right suddenly i pan

around my vision i felt like i could see out of the back of my head and I felt amazing. I felt like that kind of full thrum of lifetime. It slowed down. None of it made any sense. It felt so good. I caught like four more waves that day. And by the fifth wave, I was disassembled. They kind of put me back in the car and drove me home. And I was so sick after that that I got into bed and people had to bring me food for like two weeks because I couldn't walk to my kitchen,

which was like 60 feet away. So you were just exhausted from that surfing experience? But on like the 15th day, which is the day I could walk again, caught another ride back to the beach and I did it again. And again, I had this crazy

altered state of consciousness experience. And again, I was disassembled this time. Maybe it was like 13 days that I was in bed. And I did it again. And over the course of about six to eight months where the only thing I was doing differently in my life was surfing, I went from about 10% functionality to about 80% functionality. So my first question is, what the fuck is going on? Like as I said earlier, surfing is not a known cure for chronic autoimmune conditions right so and i lit out on a giant quest the other thing was my background as a

science writer so like i don't have quasi mystical experiences and i sure as hell don't have them while surfing which has got to be the flakiest you know thing ever yeah and um so i really believed that even though i was feeling better, Lyme's only fatal if it gets into your brain. And I was pretty sure that even though I was starting to feel physically better, that the disease had crept into my brain, because why else would I be having these mystical experiences? I must be totally losing my mind, about to die. I lit out a giant quest to figure out what the hell happened and you know very quickly discovered that these states of consciousness have names we call them flow states and the version of

what happened to me health-wise um and this is her benson did some of the work on the neurobiology of this he's at harvard um he wrote about it in his book the breakout principle but uh all the neurochemicals that show up in flow, two things happen. So one, when you move into flow, there's a global release of nitric oxide. It's a gas that's signaling molecules anywhere in the body. What it does is it flushes all the stress hormones out of your system and it pumps you full of these kind of feel-good performance enhancing compounds. Lime is essentially any autoimmune condition is your nervous system gone haywire. So when you go into flow, it resets your nervous system. It calms everything down.

It gets rid of all the stress hormone, all that stuff. And the worst part about Lyme is you don't even know where normal is. It has been so long since you have felt normal. You can't even find it on a map. So suddenly I was like, oh, this is what normal feels like again other thing is you know the positive neurochemicals that show up in flow dopamine serotonin anandamide cetosin those are all immune system boosters i mean they do a ton of other stuff enhanced cognitive performance and whatever but her benson at harvard and i think this may be overstretching a bunch but he has kind of gone on record and said he thinks most cases of so-called spontaneous

healing actually have a flow state at their heart and it's this particular process that's doing it wow it almost makes sense if you look at it look at the opposite right what what is the the big diminisher of people's health it's stress right it's stress and depression bad feelings and it's always followed by degrading of the immune system health goes poor it totally makes sense if you're happy and you've achieved this that's what i meant earlier when i said every disease is psychosomatic right like i'm not saying there are physical causes yeah but like you know whatever we used to think about the mind body split is you know absolute complete nonsense right we now know that you know there's as many kind of neurons in your heart and your stomach as you had in your brain it's a full body system

yeah i'm sure you um have concentrated on probiotics and the effect probiotics have on consciousness and and the way you feel way i feel yes consciousness yeah they think it even forms your personality that's interesting the microbiome yeah well one thing so you know candida which is another one of those diseases nobody believes you have um when you're on antibiotics for three years you totally throw off the you know microbiome and one of the things that happens when candida, when you get overrun by yeast, right, is you get extremely, extremely anxious and paranoid. Why? Because yeast feeds on sugar, which is fast energy. So if I make you super anxious and paranoid, you're going to want to eat sugar because you're going to want the fast energy because you might have to fight or do something. So you can get taken over. It's

a chemical imbalance and it makes you paranoid and anxious and what it really is is is the yeast set craving sugar but it totally takes over your consciousness and i always thought that was interesting because if you were to you know if you really poke at people and you're like well what is really you what is that what is the you they're gonna often come back to their emotions well i am my right? And here's this tilting your microbiome where the first thing that happens is they hijack your emotions, right? So it can get the food at once, but you're definitely not completely in control of your emotions. Well, it's so difficult. When we look in the mirror, we see an individual,

we see a unique thing, but what we are is some weird- A community. Yeah, you're a hybrid. Yeah, yeah. I mean, so one of the questions, and nobody has an answer to this question, but I think it's really, really neat. So if you study flow, if you study optimal performance, and I've been asking people this question, well, okay, I can tell you how it works in the brain for sure and some of the body. But if I'm going to drop into flow, does my microbiome help? Is this a collective experience? If it's optimal performance, is it everything in the system? Nobody can even start to poke at those questions, but it's optimal performance is it everything in the system nobody can even start

to poke at those questions but it's super interesting to me if they think it affects your personality and they think it affects your moods and they think it affects your intelligence level your iq level i mean there's there's all these new things they're constantly correlating on a daily basis with your your gut biome that i mean and taking in probiotics, for me, it's vastly improved my sick to healthy days. Oh, yeah. That for sure. 100%. For sure. Without a question. No question whatsoever. Once I started eating kimchi, kimchi is a big one for me. I eat that

stuff all the time. I drink kombucha daily. Every day I drink that stuff. I eat a lot of yogurt and I'm constantly taking in different kinds of probiotics once i start and i also think this uh thing uh called total gut health it's an on it uh thing that we sell i just try to get as many different forms of probiotics in as possible and because of that i'm fucking constantly traveling i travel constantly i rarely get sick and if i do it's like a day or two and then it's gone and i really i credit i think it's the probiotics i think it's kimchi and kombucha i think those are two big ones i also noticed and this could be me talking about but because there

may be no science here but i stopped once i started taking probiotics regularly i stopped tearing things as much tearing muscles for whatever reason and that could be due to the core that I've never read anything about, but it's one thing that I noticed. Maybe you're just not doing stupid shit. Maybe you're not as anxious. Oh, no, I'm doing stupid shit. That doesn't stop. Yeah, I wonder, man. It is incredible to think of yourself as a community.

It's incredible to think of yourself as some sort of a weird ecosystem. I wrote an article. I think it's on Forbes that I yourself as some sort of a weird ecosystem i wrote an article i think you could i think it's on for yeah i think it's on forbes and i wrote uh called you are not you is that on your website uh no but it was it was one an article i wrote for my forbes blog so if you go to i wrote a blog for forbes for like four or five years called far frontiers um and i think the art the piece is called you are not you well it wasn't until recently that we had the knowledge to understand this and also the time to actually sit down and contemplate it most people for the last you know whatever hundred thousand years people have been people it's been a fucking tooth and nail claw struggle

to stay alive you haven't had time to contemplate on your gut biome you know this is all like really new stuff to human beings for us to be even considering so our cemented observations and ideas of who we are are now being challenged by this notion that no there's a community of fucking weird bacteria that you need like that's the thing that kills you the most about those antibiotics right it kills all the good stuff too like you feel like well that was yeah no i mean i i often think that one of the hardest parts i'm sure this happens with a lot of other diseases but i've noticed with lime and i've talked to a lot of other lime patients is the

antibiotics fuck you up so much and they mimic when your microbiome gets that scurry it mimics the symptoms of lime so sometimes you can't even tell like you the antibiotics actually might be making you feel better but you can't tell like the Lyme may be dying off but you still feel so crappy because of what the antibiotics have done to your symptoms and it feels like the same kind of ailment whoa wow I had staph a few years back and I took a really strong antibiotic for it and uh the first thing i felt like was lightheaded and weak i was like this is a weird feeling like it i just i felt really like how long were you on antibiotics i don't remember wasn't that long because i caught it

really early my friend tate caught it i was super lucky we were at the airport and i was wearing shorts and he just looked down at my calf and he's like what's that on your leg and i go i don't know and he goes you got little zits see those little zits i go yeah he goes i think you have staph i go are you fucking serious i go it's just like little zits he's like go get it checked out got it checked out yup staph immediately boom antibiotics and went you know it was gone pretty pretty quickly but i remember feeling like a shell for for weeks i just felt like like there was like i was probably down to like 50% or 60% of what I used to be until it all sort of built back up. But luckily, I was super on the ball when it comes to probiotics and replenishing my gut biome because I know some people that just don't. They just sort of try to keep on keeping on.

And you're eating cheeseburgers and fries and you don't ever get probiotics in your system and your gut biome suffers and you you know you go on this sort of spiral of deterioration because of that health-wise it's critical so did so why did your lime get so bad like i've never heard of anybody having it for three years like that well it took them i don't know so it took them almost a year to find it so that's really what it is it's how long do you have it before you get the system so it took them you know i i was tested for everything um because they just didn't like the guy you know the guy didn't believe i have line nobody believed i had line so it's the aids guy the same guy same guy you didn't get a second opinion i was it was i was i was right there i was poor i didn't have i was this is my health care this is my doctor that you know fuck wow so because of that because by the way i did when i

finally was like okay i gotta like just go out of network and find an infectious disease doctor i remember walking in i told him all my symptoms i like, you don't think I'm crazy, do you? I'm starting to wonder, am I hypochondriac? Am I making this shit up? What's going on? He looked right at me

and said, no, I don't think you're making it up. I think you have Lyme. Let's test you for it. Sure enough. So did you call the other guy up

and go, hey, fuck face, I don't have AIDS? Something like that. I'd be so mad. Yeah, I mean, the incentive of someone getting $7 to treat you

yeah not a lot so they put you on yeah i blame the insurance companies much more than the doctors on that one i'm sure so they put you on these hardcore antibiotics um and i mean you how is that how's one year without diagnosing become two years of treatment well it uh i couldn't get better i just was not getting better in fact i got even after they found it i you know it took me a long i was probably on the antibiotics for like four or five months before i even like started getting majorly better and then yeah it was just a long slow process that scares the shit out of me. That's all coming from a tick. A buddy of mine, his son got it, and it's the same thing. Took him to a pediatrician.

No, I don't think so. I don't think it's Lyme. And he starts getting Bell's palsy, where half his face is paralyzed. Half-grown paralyzed. Yeah, and then finally they test him for it. It's interesting. I guess this happens. It produces really bad arthritis. right yeah um but and i guess it can go either it gets into your it goes either towards

your brain or in that direction but i'm i met a woman beautiful beautiful beautiful probably late 20s but if you looked at her hands look like they had the hands of like a hundred year old woman her fingers had literally twisted almost into circles I'd never seen anything like it it was insane and again it was it was Lyme it was really a strange thing how long did she have it before

it did this to her a while same kind of thing god damn so now you don't suffer any repercussions no I'm one of the I've totally back to normal. A lot of people don't ever recover. It took me – so it was the surfing and the flow and all that work got me back to about 80. It took a long time to go from 80 all the way to 100%.

And I worked with Mark Gordon then. So we – people always ask, what did you do to cure Lyme? Can I use your protocol? And I'm like, you won we we you know i always people always ask what did you do to cure lime can i use your protocol and i'm like you won't do it and people like what do you mean i was like well i used action sports and flow states i took steroids and medical marijuana and those were the three things that really worked for me so steroids pot and action sports that's my sounds like a party magic healing protocol for lime um so what other was it just the surfing or what other um action sports did you engage in that put you in that state at the time it was mostly it was mostly surfing um though i was doing a you know as i was

sort of recovering after like the surfing was what i was doing and it would knock me on my ass for a long time but after i started to get a little more physical, I started, you know, I would do long hikes with my dog through the woods, which to me will produce a low-grade flow state for sure. Being out in nature obviously does that to me a lot. And being with, you know, being with my dog at that time did it. So there was that. it so there was that also um once i got enough of my brain back and i started writing at that point i was writing quest to jesus my second book which was the book that sort of covers this a little bit of this stuff um that started producing mass amounts of flow one of the things about flow is the more flow you have the more flow you have and flow will cross domains

if you end up with a lot of flow while surfing or fighting or whatever. It will start bleeding into your other work because it's just a focusing skill, right? It's training the brain to focus in a particular way. And you can train it up. So the more flow you have, the more flow you have. So those used boosts in performance that you start getting in surfing will start bleeding into your writing. And suddenly everything in my life just started clicking and the writing started producing a lot of flow. Suddenly, you know, everything in my life just started clicking and the writing started producing a lot of flow. And eventually, skiing has always been my core deep sport.

But it took a while until I was strong enough. It's a hell of a lot easier to ride a longboard in the waves than it is to try to go hurling down a mountain on skis. Really, is it? For me, it was. In terms of energy expenditure, I can't speak for everybody else, but for me, because I already knew how to surf. I didn't have to learn how to surf.

And once you know how to surf, riding a longboard, especially if you're riding super friendly waves, Sunset or Malibu, places like that, not severely taxing. I've never surfed, but I've always been compelled. There's something about it,

being on that water, and it's moving in its own thing. But the whole monsters in the water thing, I can't get over that. It's amazing how many people have this phobia. It is astounding how many people are afraid of sharks. How weird. Where do you think that comes from? They're fucking sharks, man. That's what it comes from.

There's millions of them. They're out there fucking swimming around eating everything in front of them. Your chances of getting hit by lightning are greater than getting eaten by a shark. Next time you say that to someone, I want you to recognize that your chances of getting eaten by a shark are zero if you don't go in the ocean. Zero. Zero percent. It will never fucking happen. That's one thing you never have to worry about.

There are very few things on this planet that feel as good or as uniquely good as surfing i believe you and you'll never get that experience for an experienced junkie such as yourself i don't know about that man i think you're missing something you might be right you might be right but i ain't skydiving i have a buddy of mine who's a fucking he does one of those squirrel suits yeah andy he's always sending me videos it's crazy fuck he's like he holds a world record doesn't he hold the world record for like the longest uh squirrel fucking flying squirrel suit jump he's crazy i think that's the official term to fucking squirrel yeah but he's a he's a legit wild man what's andy's last name stump former navy seal and you know he he's just super type a alpha needs that risk

and he sends me videos of like him with a gopro looking down what is this here there he is yeah 18 miles yeah what in the fuck 18 miles come on son that's awesome he sent me a video the other day of him like looking over the edge of a cliff from his perspective, and then he just slowly tips forward and jumps off of it and starts flying. You're like, fuck that. I threw my phone across the room. I'm like, I don't even want to look at that, man. Like, why do you do that?

Like, what? You know, it must be fun. It must be. Well, I mean, you know, Dean Potter, before before he died he was a climber and a uh another windsuit guy and he you know he died see the guy that slammed into the bridge not the bridge oh what he slammed into a notch a notch and rock and oh he was flying he was in yosemite he slammed into a cliff called uh lost brother i want to say How fast was he going? Terminal velocity. So 140 miles an hour is terminal velocity per human.

Holy shit. I could be wrong on that number. Why do they call it terminal velocity? Because everybody dies? Is that why they call it terminal? Because it's the maximum that you can hit. Oh, if you're not a perigene falcon. Exactly.

Is this Andy? Fucking crazy asshole. Look at this. It's beautiful. God damn, that must be fun though, right? Would you do that? Yeah, I've skydived before. Would you do this?

Hesitation. Well, the hesitation. So it's only because I'm married and I run a dog. When I get cancer, hell yes. You won't just cure it with flow state? Well, I may. Yeah, you're not going to give up like a pussy. And by the way, that's a huge flow trigger.

Oh, I would imagine. You're flowing like crazy when you're flying 18 miles in a squirrel suit. We now know there are, we think there are, we know of 20 flow triggers, right? There are probably a lot more flow triggers right they're probably what are they can you list them off no but i can list off some of them i mean i could probably list them all but just give me a couple uh so but think about all these ones that so these are all things that grab hold of your attention and sort of drive it into the now so risk and it's not just physical risk right you you can emotional risk spiritual risk intellectual risk social risk is phenomenal

your social risk yeah your brain can't tell the difference between social fear and physical fear. So when people have unsafe sex, when they have sex with strangers, is that a flow state thing? Maybe a flow state thing. Pick up some weirdo at a bar and just, come on, let's do it. Take them back to your house. Now they know where you live. Oh, I don't even know you. I like how you roll.

Yeah. No. That's not a flow state? may be it may be um no we one of the i was just talking about this with somebody a couple days ago we haven't i mean obviously there's all kinds of sexual flow triggers because obviously sex grabs all your attention we just haven't it hasn't been looked at um but novelty uh complexity unpredictability uh deep embodiment which is when you're paying attention to multiple sensory streams at once. So not just like a head on a stick looking at a computer screen, but instead of learning through that way, you're learning through doing. So often, I'll give you an example, Montessori education.

When they went looking for non-sports examples of really high flow environments, Montessori education is very high on the list. And one of the reasons is Montessori education is often talked about as embodied education, and they emphasize learning through doing. So don't just read about the windmill. Go out and build one. When you're going out and building one, you're engaging multiple sensory streams. You're working with your hands, working with your eyes working with your eyes obviously drives attention and then out tends to drive flow yeah a lot of like super successful and creative people came from montessori education yeah there was that uh wall street journal article about the montessori mafia about all the

ceos in silicon valley who are montessori educated hmm wow that's a my friend went, he took his son to Montessori, but he was like, why is my kid, like, who's six, in school with a bunch of, like, 14-year-olds? They're all in the same class. He's like, they have different age kids all hang out together. Yeah, because it's self-directed learning. Yeah. Okay. But it makes sense. I mean, it makes sense. Look, I would imagine that having all these different things, examples of, you know, oh, that's what a 16-year-old girl's like, you know, when you're six. That's what a 12-year-old boy's like, you know. The greatest, I mean, for me, I mean, I don't know about six, but I was, when I was 10 on, I was a magician. That was my first job. I was a prestidigitator. I did birthday parties and bar mitzvahs. No kidding.

Yeah. You got hired? Yeah. At 10? No, 11. Wow. So Arthur Benjamin. Dude, you've lived a crazy fucking life.

I have lived a crazy life. This guy was Arthur Benjamin who became a mathematic genius. He's the guy. He's got a famous TED talk where he squares numbers faster than calculators or whatever. Really? I knew him. He was from Cleveland, Ohio

with me and he was a magician at the Ground Round restaurant. He was doing birthday parties on Saturday and Sunday. Ground Round. He went to college and I was one of the only

other magicians he knew so he gave me the job and I was 11 or 12 at the time. So, you know, I was, every weekend I was, you know,

and I was making a ton of cash for like an 11 12 year old i was making 40 bucks a day for doing like three birthday parties on saturday and three on sunday a ton of money for for kid i think i bought a car in cash when i was 16 with it um which was but they must have been the most obnoxious thing in the world this 16 year old kid walking in with a big roll but um i don't know how we got into the magic where we start i don't know flow state risks uh how did we get to magicians jamie first job no job this we're still not getting back there i don't know okay so interesting tidbit about steven that not many people know now they do yeah there we'll call it that well what we were

discussing was all the various flow triggers and we're talking about unsafe sex so maybe that's what it is you have an unsafe sex you know lots lots i'm gonna leave that one those other 12 year olds i'm not going there with you showing up pulling rabbits out of your hat all right you suck me and you found me out. So when you document all these various flow states, whether they're social flow states, whatever it is, or triggers rather, social triggers, environmental danger, risk, you were talking about a bunch of different stimuli that's happening simultaneously. You were talking about not just one form of information coming at you, but several. And that's when you started talking about not just one uh form of information coming at you but several and that's when you started talking about the being a magician wasn't it am i right i think so i think so yeah that was it uh yeah i'm not going to be able to rewind it back you

heard you heard a magic story and there's all these different factors and all these different forms of stimulation that can sort of trigger this optimal state, this optimal state of consciousness. And you've sort of documented these and studied these. And what is your take out of it? Like, what is like when you step back and you look at the book you wrote and you look at all the research that you've done, you look at all the talks you've given and all the conversations that you've had about it, what can you impart on people that would allow them to sort of be able to absorb some of this into their life? Does that make sense? Meaning what can average people do? Yeah. What can the average person do to sort of – I feel like most things require a step.

do yeah what can the average person do to sort of i feel like most things require a step most things require like a little a dipping your toe into the water as it were to sort of get get stimulated or get excited about doing something like this what do you think the average person should do just to try to feel what a flow state could be is there any one thing yeah that's an interesting question it's kind of a it's it's a great question i think there's lots of stuff um how do you yeah i mean yoga is a pretty good one right you a lot of a lot of people can use yoga as a great kind of gateway into flow it's really easy because it it combines you know a lot of like we'll do really simple things when we start working with people like if we're working in a corporate environment

for example people you know mckinsey did a 10-year study and they found that top executives in flow are five times more productive than out of flow so that's 500 more well how do they just how do they decide that you're in flow or out of flow? Oh, yeah. This was a survey. They surveyed thousands of top executives and just asked them, how much more productive are you in flow? But there are psychological questionnaires. Isn't there kind of a sampling bias there, though? Because the people that are successful are like, yeah, I was flowing, bro. You might be right about that. I haven't dug deep enough into that.

That's an interesting point. Okay, so this may be maybe maybe it's not that right that said um first thing we do when we start working with corporations is tell people that you know turn off your cell phone turn off like flow requires uninterrupted concentration so shut everything off you know have you if you can't you know you can't it's hard to sort of tack flow onto your life. You sort of got to put it at the center of what you do. And for most people, it seems like the state is – there's so much creativity.

There's so much motivation. There's learning accelerates, all that stuff. The upside is worth it that people start to build their lives around the state. You know, yoga is a pretty easy way in. I think a lot of people can kind of taste it that way. You know, it's interesting. So in Stealing Fire, in my next book, in the book that comes out in February. What is it about? underground revolution in altered states of consciousness that is you know involves kind of the top performers from pretty much every domain and no one's talking about it and yet if you know where to look it's everywhere you look so it's a book about a revolution and people utilizing

altered states of consciousness um to massively drive performance and across all different kinds of voltage states. Wow. Did that piece of shit crash again? How dare you, TriCaster. Whoever the fuck is making the TriCaster, you fucking mutts. Your machine sucks. What is it? It goes down every time.

It's the video switcher. So now we're still recording, but the audio version, Jamie will have to splice the audio recording into the video recording now. And we're going to have to yell at these TriCaster people. This has been happening on a regular basis now. Only the best thing you can buy. It's only the best fucking piece of equipment you can buy. Anyway, this altered states of consciousness research, like what are they concentrating on?

All the different various altered states of consciousness? So one of the interesting things is – and we talk about this in Stealing Fire – is a lot of – we use the term ecstasis. It's a Greek term and it's what ecstatic comes from. It's what ecstasy comes from. But it originally means, if you go back to Plato, it means a state beyond your normal sense of self where you tend to be filled with information and inspiration or intuition. So that was the classic Greek definition of ecstasis. So we are interested in those altered states that tend to produce this particular experience, and that's everything from contemplative and mystical states, flow 100 years, William James, who kind of early Harvard psychologists, you know, thought, you know, flow states, mystical experiences, contemplative experiences, psychedelic experiences, he thought

they were all the same thing, right? They weren't split apart over the course of the past 100 years. We split those things apart. But what's happening now is we can look under the hood. And when you look under the hood and you look at flow versus, say, a near-death experience versus a psychedelic state, very, very similar things are happening in the brain. In all these states, prefrontal cortex, parts of the brain are deactivating. You get the same five or six neurochemicals. You have brain waves moving towards alpha theta. They're all very similar. They may get you there in different ways. Like psychedelics, for example, in flow, it's an efficiency exchange. So what happens is we trade – brain has a fixed energy budget.

It's an energy hog, right? It uses about 25 percent of your energy yet 2 percent of your mass, 20 or 25 percent of your energy. It's got a fixed energy budget. So what happens in flow is we allocate more and more energy for focus and attention, and then the brain starts shutting down non-critical structures, right? That's what happens. That's why your sense of self disappears. That's why time passes strangely. It's an efficiency exchange. Psychedelics also downregulate the prefrontal cortex. They do it by overwhelming you, right? They let in so much stimuli that you can no longer process it with your conscious mind.

It sort of kicks things over to the subconscious, but the end result is the same. You get this sense of selflessness and timelessness and effortlessness and information richness that shows up in all these states. So all these states, they have different names, but you look under the hood and the neurobiology is the same and the experience, like how we feel in these states. Well, we feel like our sense of self has disappeared. We feel like time is passing strangely. They're all effortless effort. Like when you're in flow, every decision, every action follows seamlessly, fluidly, perfectly from the next. That's sort of the definition of flow. And they're all information rich states. So we tend to think, I tend to think about these things. I'm saying we, because I co-wrote this book with my partner, Jamie Wheel, who I started the Flow Genome Project with.

I tend to think of all these states as sort of like big data for the mind. It's access to much more information and inspiration, but they seem to be all the same experience under the hood. So what this means is why is this giant revolution? Well, because there's all these different subcultures that are doing different things. And it's not, you know, you can get the same effects technologically, transcranial stimulation, you can use weak magnetic pulses to knock out the prefrontal cortex. And they're now doing that. I don't like I don't know if you're following this. But, you know, in stealing fire, we did a lot of work with the Navy SEALs. And, you know, if you dig under the hood with SEAL training, they'll tell you that,

you know, obviously there's levels of physical skills and, you know, tactical skills that you have to have. But most everything else that we think of as SEAL training is a giant group flow filtration system. So they can get, you know, they're screening for people who can drop into group flow together, kind of with a click of a a hat because it's how you work best work at a team. You see the same kind of things across the boards in all of these high-performing groups, but the SEALs don't think of themselves in the same way that the yoga moms think of themselves. They would never say we're doing the same thing or the hippies and ravers who are taking acts or – you would never think these people are involved in the same revolution.

They weren't involved in the same movement. It's absolutely the same thing. They're seeking the same ability to change the channel. And the reason is there are certain quote-unquote skills, 21st century skills, whether it's healing massive trauma and anxiety or creativity, cooperation, these kinds of things, where the way we've been built from an evolutionary standpoint to optimize these things is through altered states, is through changing the channel and utilizing non-ordinary states of consciousness. So the book is about kind of the giant revolution that's going on with this and kind of four emerging forces that are driving this forward and making it go faster and wider. Have you concentrated on holotropic breathing or meditation practices or kundalini or any of those things?

We focus on – we looked at all that stuff. And obviously, respiration, breathing stuff is the easiest possible way in the world to change your consciousness. Right. And I mean, and everybody, you know, whether it's on the Vim Hof side with his kind of crazy version of, of breath of fire,

which has a long history in yoga, you know, everybody saw, or whether it's, you know, what Laird Hamilton and Brian McKenzie are doing, you know, extreme pool training.

They're just, it's different version. They're using, it's different versions of apnea training where they're using various breath holds and things along those lines to alter consciousness and abet performance. It seems to be kind of going on across the boards everywhere in terms of the respiration stuff. Hicks and Gracie, who's probably the greatest jiu-jitsu practitioner of all time, at least he certainly was in his era, recognized by everyone as being the best, was a massive yoga practitioner. He was a yogi. And one of the things that he was really deeply, deeply invested in is breath work. And he would do that crazy shit where he sucks his stomach up deep into his rib cage. Have you ever seen him do that?

Yeah. When he does it, it's super bizarre because he's got amazing control. So his stomach is like going in in all these weird ways. It's also the secret. People say it's the secret if you want the lower kind of ab band. You have to learn to suck it in.

I don't know. I never really played with that. Well, that's aesthetic. It is aesthetic, right? Yeah, that's the ego thing. He's not doing it. I mean, what he's trying to do is achieve this complete control of the

breath for sure and in jujitsu that's really important because there's many times where you're locked up on something and you're you're panicking and when you're panicking your heart beats too fast you need more oxygen you and you can't breathe and you freak out and the ability to stay calm and controlled is directly related to your ability to control your breathing. One of the first things, you know, we train people to do is, so if you, if your exhale is about seven seconds or longer, you probably know this, you can't have a fight or flight response because your brain goes, oh, look at this long, luxurious exhale. You must be calm. So you won't panic.

So one of the, you know, with when working with action sport athletes or people – I guess you could do it with fighters as well. We've done it with some of the special forces guys. Just really slowing down the breathing, the exhale a little bit. In most situations, probably couldn't do it mid-fight. Probably certain sports situations, you can't do it. But you can always usually get like a three-second inhale and a seven-second exhale. But you can always usually get like a three-second inhale and a seven-second exhale. And you do about three of those, and you will really calm down your central nervous system really quickly.

That's really interesting. There's a thing that happens in bow hunting that they call target panic. And it's dealing the difference between a closed-loop system and an open-loop system, meaning when you are in the middle of doing something and when you're drawing back on an animal, you panic and you just slam the trigger and you freak out and your emotions and your anxiety gets carried away with you. But if you follow a certain protocol and pay attention to all your movements and have everything in a row, then your concentration on your movement sort of overtakes your anxiety and all the issues that you would have.

And it allows you to carry through with this very difficult thing in this very intense and sort of like pressure field filled situation. That makes sense. Did it go down again? It's like, it's completely acting way up. I can't even like click on anything right now. I've tried to reset it five times. Okay.

So I'll figure it out. Well, we'll splice in the audio to the video. This fucking piece of shit. When you guys, when concentrating on these different altered states of consciousness, do you have like a hierarchy of them? Do you just examine all of them? Are some of them more beneficial than others? No.

So let's talk about, let's look at trauma for example. Okay. So what – they all seem to do the same thing. It's time scale. So we know Michael Mithahoffer's work used MDMA to treat PTSD in victims of child abuse and sexual abuse and trauma from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, right? This is the work that went down in South Carolina that led, right? That was the foundational work. And what they discovered, what he's discovered is one to three sessions with MDMA therapy is enough to significantly reduce or completely remove PTSD symptoms, right?

And they've done a lot of this. So they redid that at Camp Pendleton with about 1,000 soldiers. And instead of MDMA, they replaced it with flow. They used surfing as a flow trigger and talk therapy. And they've done this with about 1,000 soldiers at this point. And they're getting the same end results, but it takes about five weeks of surfing and talk therapy so the mdma get you these results in about one to three sessions so three days tops five weeks with the surfing uh with the surfing and talk therapy and then they redid it again different different

scientists with meditation and it takes about 12 weeks with meditation. And they can't get it. I don't think they've gotten a total reduction of PTSD symptoms with meditation. But for sure, people's meds drop. So it's the same sort of result, different time scales, right? So the interventions are doing the same thing inside the brain. Right. The same thing is sort of happening. It's a question. And it's really right. How much risk you want to take MDMA? Well, you got to put an amphetamine into your system. Surfing. There's a little bit of risk out there in the waves. Not particularly dangerous meditation. There's almost no risk. So where where are your risk tolerances? How much time do you have? Those are the kinds of questions you can ask around this. Well, it seems like the MDMA also would be way easier for it to be effective, whereas with surfing or something like that, you'd have to really stick to some sort of a protocol. You have to stick to constantly doing it, really getting involved in it, staying engaged in it, where if you do ecstasy, you kind of have to be engaged.

It just takes you with it. Yeah, what Hunter said, right? Buy the ticket, take the ride. Yeah, it just takes you. Like, here be engaged. It just takes you with it. Yeah, what Hunter said, right? Buy the ticket, take the ride. Yeah, it just takes you. Like, here we go. Come on. Come with me. Right.

When I talk about effortlessness, right? With flow, it's every action, every decision leads seamlessly, perfectly to the next. When you talk about the effortlessness of a psychedelic experience, you know, drop the pill, take the hit, and you are effortlessly in another altar. You know what I mean? You're there. Yeah. Well, I'm really excited about the fact that marijuana has been legalized in California.

And now I hope we're going to start to see some headway being moved into other psychedelic drugs, whether it's mushrooms or LSD. I think there's a lot of drugs that could be incredibly beneficial to people that aren't being utilized, whether it's ibogaineaine i believe we were talking about that before the show you were talking about animals that target various uh various ways of altering their states of consciousness you know i know dolphins find puffer fish yeah exactly puff puff pass i think here i think of a whole name. Yeah, pompous are. Goats gobble, I think it's goats gobble loco weed. Loco weed. Loco weed is cats or catnip.

Baboons, as we talked about, were iboga. The reindeer, obviously, are going after the mushrooms. Amanita muscaria. Dogs are going for psilocybin is what they've found, but there are probably other things. Elephants, pretty much any animals found a way to alter their consciousness. Elephants will drink fermented bog water. There's otters. If they can't,

and I can't remember what their drug of choice is, but if they can't find it, they will actually hit themselves in the head with a rock to alter their consciousness, right? Oh, my God. I've done that personally on occasion a couple of times, you know. You know when I'm really hard up.

I watched an otter kill a monkey the other day online. The otter drowned a monkey. It was fucking crazy. And the other monkeys are trying to rescue the monkey, and he's like, fuck you. And the otter took the monkey and was holding on to him and drowning him. Wow. Yeah. Otters are murderers.

I had no idea. I had no idea either. Yeah. I had no idea either. Yeah. They're crazy little animals but you were listing before the podcast started all the various animals that have found some way to alter their consciousness and it's almost all of them yeah so this is not this is the the guy who did this original work let's give credit where credit is due it's ronald k siegel

he's at ucla and if you really want to read the core text on this it's a book called intoxication and it covers kind of everything but at this point they believe that pretty much every you know at least mammalian species on earth but birds do it too birds will go crazy for marijuana seeds if they can get them um has found a way to alter their consciousness and there's very we were talking about this earlier, but there's very good reasons for it. And it's animals like humans get stuck in ruts and they, you know, you keep doing the same pattern over and over and you're getting no results and you have to be able to kind of shift your state,

change the channel. And so using the, Edward de Bono talks about psychedelics and these kinds of substances, depatterning instruments. They allow us to break out of our patterns and they allow us to innovate. talks about psychedelics and these kinds of substances de-patterning instruments. They allow us to break out of our patterns, and they allow us to innovate, basically. They put us in innovative systems of mind, which for survival is critical. So every species seems to have found one way or the other to alter their consciousness to up kind of cognitive performance and creativity to problem solve. This is fascinating that these animals would

want that you would think that what they would want is to be constantly hey look at that we're on tv we're back up no you would think that these animals would want to be constantly aware of their surroundings and constantly alert yes so that was the question right that was the big question that they started to ask is like where the fuck would this come from? Like how if it's, you know, red and tooth and claw out there, why would you possibly, you know, want to take a psychedelic like Iboga? We were talking about the Jaguars taking ayahuasca where the effects are significant and long lasting. So and the answer seems to be that the creative problem solving boost you get from psychedelics is worth it. It could just be that the high feels so good that everybody wants it. Yeah, well, it also could be like some sort of a stress alleviation mechanism

for a lot of these animals that are dealing with the tooth, fang, and claw existence of being a wild animal. Just the stress of it all. Sometimes they just need a little break. So drink some fermented fruit. Fermented bog water. Get whacked out and chill out for a while. We were talking about the jaguars that take DMT-rich plants.

Yeah, so here's the thing I don't understand. Isn't ayahuasca a blend of two different plants, right? So how did the jaguars get both? That's a good question. Well, the question would be whether or not jaguars have monoamine oxidase in their stomach. Okay. Yeah, that's the exact question. I'll bet they would be whether or not jaguars have monoamine oxidase in their stomach. Okay. Yeah, that's the exact question. I'll bet they don't.

That would make sense. Yeah. So if they don't, that means that it's active to them. Right. So wheat, plants, and wheat meat, we're omnivores. They are obligate predators, so they don't eat any plants. So when they do eat plants, they're just eating them for a goof. So if they do eat them, they probably don't have the compensatory mechanisms in their system to process the dmt

rich plants and we do you know that's what monoamine oxidase does that's why mao inhibitors are you know they use harming and they mix it up with the but people that have uh taken actual like pharmaceutical grade mao inhibitors to have horrible experiences like if you if you try to use a real mao inhibitor like from a pharmaceutical company and then throw some dmt in there as well apparently it's a real bad time oh wow yeah and it's super dangerous and you know you could break your fucking brain there's uh some Arrowwood story, some horror stories. It might be Arrowwood. It might be some other website where the people were documenting trips.

Hyperspace lexicon. Yeah, and they were just saying, hey, don't do this. Important safety tip. I've also heard horrible experiences of people mixing mushrooms and DMT. I've heard really bad experiences with that as well. That's interesting. DMT has a habit, not to get metaphysical about DMT, but it has a habit of smacking down certain users. A lot of people tell those stories that something about the substance doesn't allow itself to be abused.

You find that a lot in Arrowhead and the hyperspace lexicon places like that. It sort of gets to a point and then it warns you and kind of kicks you out yeah it's interesting i don't have any idea what the hell that means and i just said it but like it's interesting that's the exact exact description of the tattooist that i know who had done it like a hundred days in a row and then finally he said like literally when he tripped he went into this dimension and they were hey they were kicking him out they're like listen you fuck you got to dimension, and they were kicking him out. They were like, listen, you fuck. You've got to stop doing this. And they were very adamant about it. You're doing damage.

The exact story happened to a friend of mine. He was told. He was, you know, whatever. He was tripping balls. And they were like, you're not to do this again. Wow. He's like, okay, I'm done. It completely makes sense.

I mean, it seems to me like something that you can only really handle in small doses occasionally. You go in, you get your brains blown out, and you come back, sort of regroup, try to assess what, if anything, you can take out of that and learn, get humbled by the fact that this exists at all, and then sort of try to reassess your life. We talk about that a lot in Stealing Fire in the book that's coming out in February, We talk about that a lot in Stealing Fire in the book that's coming out in February, whereas it seems like if you've never had any experiences with altered states, with any of these flow states or whatever, you need some kind of reality-shattering first experience just so you know that this domain exists. And maybe go skydiving and have that kind of a flow state experience or do a psychedelic. And then you need it less and less and less and can get a lot farther with less. And there seems to be something there with that. What about the idea of mixing up a bunch of different modalities?

I mean, is there any benefit in, you know? Yeah, so that's, you're right. What's interesting, and this is what I'm really happy about. And, you know, I was talking to Rick Doblin. Have you had him on? Yes, love that guy. So Rick's a longtime friend of mine. I've known him for a while.

He's so important. He's awesome. Yeah, he's a great, great, great. What he's doing with MAPS is just so huge. So we were talking about, you know, psychedelic medicine at this point is kind of everybody knows what's going on. But what's interesting going on at the cutting edge, and it's so basic, it's almost stupid. You can't even believe this. But lo and behold, they're discovering that if you combine the occasional MDMA session with meditation occasionally, you get farther faster.

Big surprise, right? Occasionally, you get farther faster. Big surprise, right? Yeah. And, you know, the truth of the matter is once you move into these cultures, everybody's blending state-changing technologies, right? You're using your martial arts for flow states. You're using your yogic breathing techniques. You're having the occasional psychedelic experience at Burning Man. Maybe you're smoking pot, blah, blah.

I mean, everybody's blending all this stuff together. man maybe you're smoking pot love I mean everybody's blending all this stuff together yeah it's very rare that you find somebody who's like okay I I only do one thing hmm you know any of they do if they're so rigid that they're probably not getting the same benefits out of it that they would if they were just more open and loose about anything that's probably true too I think there's so many different ways to endogenousously trigger these chemicals that I think we need to explore more. And one of the ones that I've been talking about for so long when I really never get off my ass and do it, I've talked to so many people that get into kundalini. Kundalini yoga? Yeah, and that kundalini yoga, once you practice it for long periods of time, and once you get really good at it, you figure out a way, or your brain figures out a way to access these dimensions that you would normally only achieve if you were on psychedelic drugs.

That's interesting. States of minds that are very similar to the DMT state, and you can do it through kundalini yoga. But it's 45 minutes of intense practice for long periods of time many many weeks in a row and then you can kind of get there i will say that uh in talking to uh brian mckenzie and laird with about their kind of what they're doing and it's this blend of uh kind of like box breathing coupled by sort of like the wim hof protocol for for the breathing protocol but they've they've developed into a. They claim that they're getting full-on DMT experiences. Laird Hamilton's tripping balls.

Through the breath-holding work. I don't think he's doing the substance. Well, he doesn't have to. I mean, the brain produces DMT, which is the most fascinating thing about it. The most potent psychedelic drug known to man, and it's made in the body. It's in pretty much every cell in your body right what did uh who said maybe it was mckenna i think it was probably danny was dennis it wasn't it was dennis who i think he pointed out that every one of us is walking around with enough of an illegal substance in our system to go to jail forever you go go buy an orange yeah right there's

enough dmt in an orange to send you to jail for the rest of your life is it really it's everywhere an orange i didn't even know they had them in oranges that's amazing yeah it's a weird drug when your whole i mean it's like making saliva illegal or water it's it's so common it's very very strange but the fact that you can make your brain produce large dumps of it that you can figure out a way and apparently kundalini yoga is the big one that's interesting my wife practices kundalini yoga did you ever ask her she's tripping no she hasn't she hasn't reported any tripping this dude i mean she certainly gets her into flow states right story of my life right yeah it is uh I think what we were saying before about marijuana being legalized and the fact that it took until 2016 in California is hilarious, really.

It's so filled with folly. I really hope that this opens up the door to all these other non-toxic drugs like psilocybin, which has this ridiculously high LD50 rate where you would literally have to eat pounds of it to die. And I'm really hoping that we're going to get more and more research and more and more understanding. Things like Ibogaine that we were talking about before the podcast where my friend Ed, who has a center down in Mexico, he was hooked on pills. has a center down in Mexico, he was hooked on pills. And he went to Mexico, went on an Ibogaine trip, completely cured him of his addiction to opiates, and now he runs a center.

And so many people that have had these problems with pills, which is a gigantic problem in our culture today because they're so prevalent, I think so much of that could be cured with Ibogaine. Well, the Ibogaine opiate addiction research, that, how the drug got interesting to people in the first place, right? They're going all the way back to the, I want to say 50s or 60s when they first started realizing it. Certainly, you know, I just, there's so many great questions that you can start asking. You can ask, we were talking about consciousness earlier earlier right there these are phenomenally good tools and you know i'm really uh in stealing fire

we write about the work of robin carter harris who is uh the first person to use fmri to do visualizations of the brain on psychedelics so we now know what the brain looks like on lsd we know what the bird looks like on you knowocybin. He says, we're starting to understand where all this mind expansion is coming from. And we actually, the heightened creativity that we've been talking about, we now know what that looks like and why that happens. I think we're at the front edge of starting to ask the interesting questions, right? A lot of what we've done in kind of psychedelic research, in this renaissance that we're going through, What we've done in kind of psychedelic research in this renaissance that we're going through is rerun all the experiments they ran back in the 60s and 50s, right?

Because nobody trusts those damn hippies in their research. So we've just redone a lot of that work. Yes, we've done it more rigorously and with slightly better tools. But if you think about the classic psilocybin study, the Good Friday experiment, you know, it was done in the Mars Chapel in 1962. And this was the first study that said, hey, do psychedelics produce valid, quote unquote, mystical experiences, right? And they did this study. And then Rick Doblin redid it. And then Ronald Griffith at Johns Hopkins redid it. then ronan griffith at johns hopkins redid it and then it's been so this one study has been redone four times to get the exact same result because nobody wants to believe it because they don't trust it because these substances are so volatile and scare scare us so

much well not and here's one thing i think also to concentrate on not just substances but also states of mind that can be achieved consciously, like on purpose, like mindfulness, like concentrating on being in the moment, like that you can alter the way you view the world by the way you concentrate on the actual moment that you're existing in right now. For sure. It also, the combinatory stuff, as you brought up, is where also this is going to start to get interesting when you when we start really figuring out how to skillfully blend these things together turn them into protocols do that stuff a little bit of mdma a little bit of meditation a little bit of yeah a little bit of this for flow a little bit of you know and the other thing is you know psychedelics are the technology we're talking about most now, but most of these things are achievable with actual technology, right?

Different – and we're going to get more of that. For example, there's a company called Palo Alto Neuroscience. Palo Alto Neuroscience – and this is early stages, so we're not there yet. But what they're working towards and they're figuring out is, say, you are a trained Tibetan Lama and you can meditate and drop your brain down to that alpha-theta borderline. They can record various biomarkers, galvanic skin response, a bunch of other things, while you're in that meditative state. And then they can take that recording and put it on somebody who's an absolute novice and use that as neural feedback to guide somebody else into your state into the

state you were in this is we're at the front edge of that right but more and more this is really starting to come some of the stuff with you know know, with flow states, we've got, you can use neural feedback to drive people into flow. That's all the work that Chris Barker did at Advanced Brain Monitoring. And I don't know if you've seen her TED Talk. She's got a great TED Talk. She did a lot of work with the Navy on it. So, you know, we're using, we've got technology that'll drive you into flow. We've got technology that's going to be able to mimic altered states. So, I mean, you know, right now today, 2016, we're talking about psychedelics and, you know, these pills that affect these molecules. But

we've got technology that's coming that's letting us, you know, just interface directly with the brain. And that's coming. So, I'm a little confused. How are you experiencing someone else's flow state? What is the mechanism like if if someone if they're recording something oh i'm sorry uh what what chris burke and what the guys did at

advanced brain monitoring is they were working with archers for example marksman um but they will record kind of what is going on in the brain of an expert marksman as at the moment they're drawing and firing, right? And then they're using neurofeedback with other participants to drive them towards that same brainwave state. And what they've done is they've cut learning times in half. How do they do it? You can train up – they've managed to train up absolute novices to expert performance in 50 less time whoa using using this and but what are the novices experiencing like what what are they doing to them they're the novices are just using neurofeedback right what does that mean though

neurofeedback means i i don't know how system – I can't remember exactly how our system works. We'll have to pull up the TED Talk so I can see it again. But let's say it's a tone, right? Let's say expert performance takes place at this borderline, alpha, theta, borderline brainwave-wise. There's a whole bunch of other things going on. I'm scrunching it down. But when you're closer to there, you hear a low-pitched sound. And when you're farther away, the pitch gets higher and higher and higher.

So you just – you don't know what you're aiming for. It's brainwaves. You can't control your brainwaves consciously. But just by providing the feedback and knowing, oh, this is the wrong state, oh, this is the right state, your brain will start to learn. That's how neural feedback works. It trains you, just trains your brain to move to this brainwave state just by giving it a little feedback loop to play off. And doing this during the actual activity itself is what accentuates the learning? So are they doing the archery themselves while they're being inundated with these tones?

Yes. Wow. That's fascinating. So they're not even consciously thinking what i've always wondered and this is why i'm bringing this up i've always wondered how far away are we from actually recording memories like you say if you decided to get on your um snowboard and go down a mountain and you're wearing some sort of a device or some you're interfacing with some sort of a device that can record all of your physical

experiences, your emotions, your nerves. I mean, you might slip a little bit and have a little scary moment and that also can be relayed in those memories. And then someone else can be sitting here. You can put your whatever device it is on them and they can interface with your memory and they could experience your memory i mean how far away are we from doing something like that i don't know my friend salim ismail uh and he does this in a speech he gave uh and i'm gonna i'm blanking the name of the company that's doing this but they are trying to figure out how to record what goes on in the visual cortex while you dream.

So their ultimate goal is to be able to play your dreams back for you. You've got to get arrested. What if you get arrested for your dreams? What if you're doing horrible shit in your dreams? This is precog, right? We're in minority report? Yeah, it's happening.

Well, you can now go to jail and be fined $250,000 in New York for using the wrong pronoun. So that's probably coming too. Yeah. I would imagine. I mean, if you really can find that people have a higher propensity for violence and they're closer to committing violent crimes, they haven't done it yet, but they're pretty close. Well, what do you – I mean, we talked about this earlier, right? What do you do with the 5% of the population that is, you know, sociopathic?

Yeah, what do you do? It's a good question. Hitler had a couple ideas. I don't think that's the way we should go. I think maybe there's a way to fix them. I mean, maybe cognitive research is going to lead down paths where you can understand how to... Increase empathy? Well, yeah, I was going to say how to cause it, you know, how to actually unlock it.

Maybe there's some sort of a biochemical roadblock in the mind, and they can figure out how to unleash that and make people understand what it is that their actions do to other people and have them feel it. You know, for whatever reason, if someone doesn't feel empathy or doesn't have any feelings for anybody else other than themselves, there's a lot of people amongst us that they believe are just acting like they care, like they're mimicking actual emotions. And I think we've been around, I think you've probably been around people like that. And it's weird, you know, like you'll, they'll talk about something, you know, some horrible tragedy and they have some weird sort

of disingenuous take on it. It's just, it's very awkward. And you're like, whoa, I think that guy's a robot, you know? And then you get out of there and you're like, I think we might've been around a sociopath, you know, that someone doesn't feel it. They just don't feel it. Maybe there's something in the brain that could be unlocked and we can eliminate that. I mean, it might be as simple as, you know, like some people have Asperger's, some people have Alzheimer's, some people, maybe some people have a lack of empathy. Maybe there's a doorway. Well, for sure. They've, I mean, they're having some success. You know, this is anybody with on

the spectrum, the autism and Asperger's, um, empathy is an issue, right? Um, and it, you know, a lot of that is their mirror neurons aren't mirrorings. So they're not, um, the last time I said that out loud in public, I got screamed at for a very, very long time. Somebody screamed at you? Seems to be fairly well established. Well, I wrote a little bit about autism in a small furry prayer, and people really got upset when I said, you know, one of the things that's going on with autism that we think is that your mirror neurons aren't mirroring.

So you're not reading facial expressions and emotions and people in that community got very upset with me why i don't know but it was this established science yeah it's pretty much at this point yeah sasha baron cone and you know he's he's a smart dude um their take was i was wrong and i shouldn't be talking about it in public sasha baron cohen the actor not not no no no he's a like borat no not borat same same name neuroscientist okay so he was upset at you no no he was the guy who did the research okay and so he feels like no people in people in that community i got um i got letters and email and things along those lines.

People posted stuff online. They were offended that I had written about their disease, apparently. Just because you had written about it and you don't suffer from it? Yeah. You're asking big why questions and I can't answer them, but I don't know. Hmm. That's weird. I thought so, too.

Yeah, because if some established neuroscientist has made some sort of a connection between that issue and you know you're not allowed to discuss it that seems really bizarre there's a there's a lot of that going around yeah there's a lot of that going around it's just i think there's also obviously they call it the spectrum you know for a reason you know when you say someone's on the spectrum. I mean, I know people that are probably mildly autistic. And I know some folks that are just gonzo, full-blown, you know. So, you know, some people where they don't recognize that in themselves or maybe they don't want to admit it.

You know, I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley where there's, you know. A lot of that. A lot of time in silicon valley where there's a lot of that a lot of that and you know in fact normally it used to be you know if you were on the spectrum you weren't procreating as much right but in silicon valley rich they're rich they're on the spectrum and they're banging hotness up yeah they're coupling up so it's one of the autistic people are having sex with other autistic and it's one of the places we're looking at their So it's one of the... Autistic people are having sex with other autistic people? And it's one of the places where like... Looking at their phone.

It's an interesting question because one of the questions that this raises is, will it start to splinter the species? When that starts happening, are you looking at the first step towards something? Because there's definitely something going on differently in their brains. There's all kinds of superpowers and there's all kinds of limitations, right? Yeah. It doesn't take much to start speciation. Well, that's totally a good point because if you think about it, at one point in time, we had to develop emotions and empathy in order to unite ourselves and to stay together, connected in a community. But other animals don't have that.

Like ants don't have that, at least as far as we know. Right. You know, they seem to be pretty robotic. And they also don't have any free will whatsoever, which is why they have those crazy ant spirals where they – you've never seen the ant death spiral? Mm-mm. Never seen that?

Mm-mm. What happens is the female somehow or another will get separated from the rest of the colony, and the males are still trying to follow the female, somehow or another, will get separated from the rest of the colony, and the males are still trying to follow the female scent, and they can't follow it, so they're following each other, and they follow each other in what looks like a hurricane, where there's an eye of a hurricane in the center, and it's an ant death spiral. See that right there? See, they're spinning around in a circle, and they will do that until they die. Wow.

Yeah, they can't find the female. They're looking for the queen. They can't find the queen. And they're confused. There's some sort of disruption in the signal that they get, the pheromones that they're getting. And they're just wandering around all fucking crazy. And the ones in that center, I mean, that mimics exactly what a hurricane looks like. Yeah.

Nuts. That looks like. Yeah. Nuts. That's interesting. Yeah. Non-empathetic little no-fucking-free-will-having bitches. What do you got against ants? Nothing. They're important.

You're an ant hater. I'm a lover of ants because without them we wouldn't be alive. I'm just joking around. They're as much biomass of ants as all the other animals combined. I know.

It's awesome, right? Think of that. Yeah. It's a weird animal, but they exist alongside us but they have completely different rules of engagement you know their their world is very strange and almost almost like mechanical they're almost like some weird bio mechanisms you know it seems like a it's i mean it's a collective consciousness right it's a shared consciousness yeah yeah which you know i don't how do you even grok that how do you get your head around that well in our little world i don't think we have you know but we step on them we don't mind you know they're they're so little we don't mind squishing them you know like you can squish

them in your kitchen and you just brush them off your pants like if you kill an ant on your pants in your kitchen like most people don't pick that fucker up. And you just let it drop to the floor. You know? Instead of the proper burial, you think? Yeah, you don't dig a hole and say your prayers and light a candle and put up a picture of the ant before it died. No. It'd be weird if I did that too.

It would. But there's a certain size. Like if you kill the tiniest little gnat, you're not really going to do anything with the body. But if you stomp a rat, you've got to clean that up. You need to dispose it. Yeah. There's a line. Yeah, there's a line.

There's a biomass line where animals become, like, super significant and important to us. That's interesting. Yeah. You think it's totally size related it's some of it's size related but it's also appearance we we like little cute mice more than we like big fucking scary spiders you see a big scary spider you crush that fucker with a hammer i don't know i really like spiders do you oh yeah one of those weird guys yeah i mean most people don't most people suffer from at least some form of arachnophobia where they see some creepy spider walking towards them like, ah!

Because, you know, a lot of spiders will kill you. It's true. We go specifically out hunting for, like, the tarantula migrations in New Mexico. Do you really? Yeah, when that's going on. It's really cool. If you've never seen it, you can see if you go to Pinnacles National Monument, which is kind of around gilroy um you can see them they have tarantula migrations up there too and it's amazing whoa just huge column you know how many of them hundreds hundreds of tarantulas

you freaking out jamie has got arachnophobia look at him he's covering his mouth through to throw up look at that he's like like he's seeing a vampire. Did you pull up a tarantula migration? He's terrified. Look at him. He's literally covering his mouth. Like they're pulling a cross on him. My favorite spider is the Brazilian wandering spider. You know about that one?

Uh-uh. It bites you. Or it stings you. And it gives you a raging hard-on that will kill you. And if it doesn't kill you, your dick is broken. It will break your sexuality. It will literally wreck your dick like a fucking ballpark frank that you left on a grill for too long. You know, they plump when you cook them and then they pop?

No, I got it. Yeah, that's your dick. It literally, it makes your body somehow or another, through its injection of venom, makes your body have this overflowing Brazilian wandering spider. If it's doing that, why does it have a scarier name? I know, right? That's what I'm saying. It's scary looking.

But they're looking at it for an erectile dysfunction drug because it's so fucking potent. It makes Viagra look like a joke. Jesus. Yeah. That's interesting. Fascinating. Yeah.

And it apparently does it to all the muscles in your body. Everything goes rigid? Yeah. Something to do with nitric oxide. Nitrix? Nitric or nitrix? One of those. or nitrix one of those and it uh you know the same sort of stuff that exists in you know like um those uh pump up workout pre pre-workout formulas that give people all this energy and pump your

muscles up yeah it does that nitric oxide has some sort of an effect on muscles and it's also the same sort of an effect that you get from taking a viagra which is why those vasodilators are illegal in the olympics you can't – Viagra has a performance-enhancing effect on muscular – I did not know that. Muscular performance. Yeah. It's illegal in the Olympics. I had no idea.

Yeah. Yeah. Viagra, it actually enhances endurance. That's the reason why you get so much blood flow to your penis is because you just got this crazy blood flow throughout all your muscles. So it gives you more strength and more endurance. I don't know how much of it is desirable boost energy it's a good question it's a good question uh i'd have to look into it but this brazilian wandering spider apparently is that times a fucking thousand and just you're like funny

funny story i did some work uh with a woman named patricia right she's a macarthur genius award winning conservationist she helped start uh ramana fana national park in uh madagascar and uh they have these huge hairy spiders in ramana fana national park how big big you're showing me like a football i'm showing no i've this like this big oh my God. They're big. They're huge. Bigger than a softball. Big tarantulas. Like, big tarantulas. Big. Crabs. Not quite, but yes, we're in the right vicinity.

They're harmless, though. There's no dachshund. Too bad. I'm going to kill them anyway. Stomp on them like you're demons. There was a researcher. I want to say she was at Duke at the time. And one of the researchers there asked if she would kind of bring these spiders back for her to do some research on.

And kind of fill the container with it. And it was under her seat on the airplane. Oh, my God. And she's wearing a skirt. And she's sitting on the airplane. And she suddenly starts to feel something walking up her skirt. And she's not. She looks down and she's like, oh, crap crap and they're all over the first class oh my god it was literally spiders on the plane it was spiders

on the plane did she get arrested no i don't think she got arrested did they get mad at her no she got them all back in before i did i think it was like eight oh he was like eight i could have the number rock i need to ask ass scientist lady, what are you doing? Seriously. But you couldn't put those things down in the hub, or the hull rather. They'll freeze. They'll freeze, yeah. Wow, so she had to take them like a little poodle.

It's spiders on the plane. What do you got? A giant huntsman spider that was going around the internet last week. Oh, God. It's so big. How big is that? What is that thing that it's on? I need something to compare that to.

Yeah, what is that thing? Are those its babies? Yeah, I think so. Whoa. It's an Australian spider. Oh, boy. There's a person. Oh, my God.

Oh, my God. It's a crab. That's like one of those crab people. The deadliest catch. It looks like the thing. The face sucker. The thing, right? Yes, yes.

The John Carpenter? Yes. It's like the thing. Or the thing from thing. The face hugger. The thing, right? The John Carpenter? Yes. It looks like the thing. Or the thing from Alien. The face hugger from Alien. Oh, the face hugger from Alien. That's what I was trying to get at. But similar.

The thing is the one that the head had the crab legs that came out of it. Fucking A, man. Boy. You know, I've always said that

about insects. We're so lucky they're little. Because if bees were the size of horses, they're just flying through the air. Just giant bees everywhere. Imagine a colony of horse-sized bees. Isn't there a movie where either the insects get bigger, we get small? Probably.

Probably some 1950s movie. 60s? Zaparay or something. All the people shrunk. Late night. Yeah, man. They're fucking terrifying. or something. All the people shrunk. Late night. Yeah, man. They're fucking terrifying. We're just really lucky they're little.

You're right about that. Most of them. Yeah. Anyway, our time's almost done. So I hate to leave with- Leave with insects. With spiders and bugs. Let's close it out with something exciting.

Okay. I don't know. I don't know where we're going here what is the conclusion to your book um this this new one stealing fire where we're going with it um there's obviously tremendous opportunities and upside there's also some dangers for sure um commercialization militarization hedonism these areonism. These are all, you know, dangers that come with, you know, hedonism, overindulgence, overindulgence, but commercialization too, because these same impulses can be really harnessed to sell us stuff. Um, and, uh, is there also an issue in commercialization?

The same issue that has been with opiates, like opiates have a real benefit for people that are in chronic pain, but they've been sold so many times and they're so available and so over-prescribed that you're dealing with this massive amount of people that have addictions to them now. Well, let me just put it this way. One of the things we tell people, you know, the flow genome problem, is don't ever go shopping in a flow state

because you've got massively heightened pattern recognition and information processing and everything looks great. Right. It can get very, very expensive. Like going to the supermarket when you're hungry? Right. Same sort of thing.

Everything looks great on you. And, you know, because it's optimal performance, you feel great. And those, we can abuse those for commercial ends, for sure. We can abuse those for commercial ends for sure. And this is not wild speculation. Two or three years ago, the Flow Genome Project presented the Advertising Research Foundation, which is a collection of pretty much every major media and ad company in the world. And they brought us in to talk about kind of flow and advertising and could you start to harness non-ordinary states of consciousness to you know drive buying behavior and the answer is yes for sure um so they're you know they're this stuff requires a massive amount of responsibility we

feel that open sourcing the research and open sourcing the exploration is the best way to kind of keep it free and tamp down those impulses. So, but ultimately, you know, where do I think it's going is, you know, I think most of the skills that we need in the 21st century, whether it's kind of, as I said earlier, dealing with trauma, anxiety, those kinds of things, or create the heights of creativity and cooperation and all that stuff. Those are best accessed through altered states of consciousness, through non-ordinary states of consciousness. In a sense, these are the tools evolution gave us for ultimate performance. And I think, you know, whether it's, you know, sometimes for a long time, we didn't have the

science to understand what was all going on with, there's a whole bunch of kind of moral issues that got layered on top of it. I think some of the moral issues are getting kind of peeled back and the science is showing up. So I think we're going to see a huge kind of revolution in this stuff. We talked about this crazy boost in learning that DARPA and advanced brain monitoring achieved with the military. 400 to – or 230 to 500 percent increase in accelerated learning. You see a similar spike in motivation. You see a similar spike in creativity. These are huge step functions difference, right?

If you're in self-help and I can get a 5% improvement over like six months and it will stick, oh my God, it's a miracle. It's giant, right? It's giant. And you're talking about creativity spiking 400%. And it's not even just in the moment, Teresa Mable at Harvard discovered that the heightened creativity that shows up in a flow state can outlast the flow state by a day, sometimes two days. And it suggests more research needs to be done, but it suggests that flow actually rewires the brain to think more creatively over time, which is amazing, because it's really hard to train people up in creativity. But we're not talking about a 5% increase, you're talking about a two a step function worth of difference.

And we're just starting to kind of tap it into this function. You know, and I'm sure you've had similar conversations with people in the high performance world about this but anybody you talk to who's done much work on high performance will tell you we think we've you know tapped five percent of what we know and what's actually possible so you know i think what's coming is going to be incredibly exciting and incredibly interesting how's that how's that for a high note best way you fucking nailed it dude just knocked it out of the park. Thanks, brother. Thank you so much for coming on here.

Where can people get a hold of you? Give out your website. Give out your Twitter, Instagram, all that stuff. Absolutely. You can find me at stevenkotler.com, S-T-E-V-E-N-K-O-T-L-E-R.com. I'm steven__kotler on Twitter, and I'm really responsive on Twitter. So if you want to follow me, want to ask me questions, whatever, they're flowgenomeproject.com. One resource I want to give people is if you go to the flowgenomeproject.com, there's a free flow profile that anybody can take. And it basically says, it's a traitology.

It says if you're this kind of person, you're likely to find flow in these directions. So you asked, what's the easiest entrance place for people? The flow profile is a really easy entrance place. It'll tell you what direction to go in. And it's actually, interesting point, it's become one of the largest studies that anybody's ever run in optimal psych. It sort of happened accidentally. We didn't expect it, but like 40-some thousand people have taken this thing. And the weird fact that I will leave you with is even though we normally associate flow with athletic achievement or artistic achievement, the vast majority of our respondents, I think it's 47% of our study group, find the most flow. They fall into what we call the deep thinker category.

It's essentially their knowledge workers. They're finding flow, doing contemplative, creative tasks. So even though we associate this with artistic and athletic performance, it seems like most people get the post flow in their lives really just working in things like that, which is interesting. That's awesome. And your book is out in February? February.

It's called Stealing Fire. You can pre-order it. Now it's popped up on Amazon. And yeah. When it comes out, let me know. We'll tweet it. We'll put it out there. Thank you so much.

Really, really appreciate it. I really enjoyed this conversation. It was fucking awesome. I got a lot out of it. Alright, folks. We'll be back tomorrow with Scott Adams. Trump supporter. Whoa.