The School of Greatness - 448 Hack Your Brain and New Technology to Reach Peak Performance with Steven Kotler

Episode Date: February 20, 2017

"Creativity is probably the most important skill in the 21st century." - Steven Kotler If you enjoyed this episode, check out show notes, video, and more at http://lewishowes.com/448

This is episode number 448 with Steven Kotler. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. If you're looking to optimize human performance and increase your potential with the cutting

edge insights, tools, and information, then this is the episode for you guys. We've got Steven Kotler back on the show. And for those who don't know who Steven is, he is a New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning journalist, and the co-founder and director of research for the Flow Genome Project. He is one of the world's leading experts in ultimate human performance, and his work has been featured in the New York Times, Atlantic, Forbes, Wired, and Time Magazine. Guys, he is an all-star.

And some of the things we cover today in this interview are why the drive for intoxication and mind-altering substances is inside all of us. Also, what the largest revolution most people have never heard of and how it's happening right now. The line between using drugs for good and when it goes south. Also, the four emerging forces in human development and how marketers are using these methods already to sell us every single day. Guys, this is a powerful one. And before we dive in, I want to give a big thank you to our iTunes review of the week. And this one is from Brooks Like, who says, these podcasts are always informative, educational, and always inspirational. I always learn new

things when I listen and a big fan of everything you do to help others achieve their own success. You are the ambassador of greatness, my friend. Keep the good work coming. I really appreciate that. And this one is from Sarah714237, who says, Lewis, I am learning so much through your podcast. I am letting go of my victim mentality and building a winner's mindset. No amount of words could describe the impact these podcasts have made on my life.

I am applying all of what I'm learning into my life and I'm seeing myself changing. Half the people you have on these podcasts, I don't know them, but I'm so glad that I took a chance to listen to what they had to say. Blessings to you. These two are the reviews of the week.

We appreciate all the reviews we get. Make sure to share yours at itunes.com slash greatness if you want a chance to be featured on the show for your review of the week also. And without further ado, guys, let's dive into this. Let's take our mind and our human performance potential to the next level with the one, the only Steven Kotler. the next level with the one, the only, Stephen Kotler. All right, welcome everyone back to the School of Greatness podcast. We have New York Times bestselling author Stephen Kotler in the house.

Thanks for coming, man. Good to see you. Appreciate it. Now, you've written many books, and you've got a new book out called Stealing Fire. Can you tell me the subtitle? Yes, I can. How Silicon Valley, Navy SEALs, and maverick scientists are revolutionizing how we live and work. Okay. And what does stealing fire actually mean? Stealing fire is a reference to Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods, right?

And this was, it's told as fire, but it really was the power to seed civilization and language and art and culture and medicine. And he was eternally punished for it. Are we going to be punished for reading the book? We are hoping to avoid that. But this is, you know, the book is about a kind of an underground revolution. And it's a modern day Promethean uprising is how we think about it. Gotcha. And so what are these individuals, these peak performers learning from this process or what have you? So what the book really is about is a $4 trillion underground revolution in altered

states of consciousness and human performance that's being driven by some of the most elite, high-performing individuals and organizations in the world, whether we're talking about the Navy SEALs or Google or Maverick, top scientists from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, take your pick. Really top of the top. And these people are driving this revolution forward. And it's probably the largest revolution that most people have never heard of well four trillion dollars industry you're calling it industry i guess and altered states of consciousness what do you exactly mean how many states are there great questions and we're we're being very specific so let me

back into it we are looking at what where this came from is at the flow genome project where we study flow which is one altered state of consciousness to kind of in our research with flow we had to kind of lay out the neurobiology what's underneath this experience and in doing that how to get into the flow how to get into flow what's what are the changes in the brain, right? And there's some, you know, 21st century normal where you're in our brains right now. Probably our brain waves are in beta. It's a fast-moving wave, right? We've got a steady kind of drip-drip of cortisol and norepinephrine. These are stress hormones.

They make us focus. And it's, you know, and the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that's right here, right, which is where most of your higher cognitive function, complex decision-making, long-term planning is hyperactive. So inflow, that shifts markedly. Brainwaves drop from the high beta down to this alpha-theta borderline. Alpha is where people are in daydream mode. Theta is only present during REM sleep or hypnagogic sleep. Time kind of goes away.

Time tends to go away. Fast or slow, it's kind of like and the i mean the telltale of theta is like you know as you're falling asleep when you're lifting that gray sweater and suddenly becomes that gray elephant and then it suddenly becomes an ocean and you're just pattern recognition there's no resistance that's a good way to figure out that you're moving in close to theta uh and then there are five or six very potent neurochemicals that get released in the system. So with this, this allowed us to map flow. But we started to realize is that neurobiology over the past 10 to 15 years has progressed so quickly that we now can look underneath other

altered states of consciousness. And if you look underneath certain experiences, experiences that get us out of our head, right, that change the channel on consciousness, whether it's psychedelic states, meditative and contemplative states, flow states, technologically-mediated states using transcranial magnetic stimulation to knock out the prefrontal cortex,

et cetera, et cetera. There's kind of a broad band of these things. So different tools that you're using, like physical tools to using. Well, there's different static techniques to get in there. You can use drumming, you can use chanting, you can use psychedelics, you can use action sports to trigger flow.

You can take your pick. What's interesting is that what we've discovered is that under the hood, these experiences are very, very, very similar. Yes. So what that allowed us to do is to create categories where there wasn't one. I mean, if you think about, go back over the past 100 years, people who were interested in flow states was primarily artists and athletes.

People who were interested in meditative and contemplative states, mystical states, it was mostly seekers, right? The new age, that category. And psychedelic experiences, it was mostly hippies and ravers, right? And these are three big groups of people that don't really like each other and don't often talk to each other and don't cross over. Don't agree with the way the other person's doing it or, yeah. But under the hood, they're all seeking the exact same experience. What is that they're seeking? So the term that we have used, all these terms are really difficult.

Altered states of consciousness brings up all kinds of baggage, non-ordinary states of consciousness, all kinds of baggage, even though that's the term we like in the book. But the term we use, and we actually got it from when we were working with the Navy SEALs, and one of the leaders of DevGuru used the term ecstasis.

Ecstasis is the ancient Greek term for very specific band of altered state of consciousness. Ecstasis means experiences that are beyond your normal sense of self. And when you are filled with, they use the term divine inspiration, we would just use it as intuition and information, intuition and inspiration. So we have rebranded like this category, the ecstatic category, all these experiences do those things.

They get you out of your head. They switch the channel of consciousness. Your sense of self disappears. And you get access to a whole level of information and inspiration you wouldn't normally get. Turns out there are a couple other characteristics that all these experiences phenomenologically, they share. Sense of self disappears. Time disappears. Body awareness, right? Normal sense of self disappears. Time disappears. Body awareness, right?

Normal sense of effort, exactly, disappears, right? That struggle and toil that vanishes. Suffering disappears. Disappears. And the last would be richness, information richness. You're plunged into this high data field, right? And all these experiences. We use STIR as our acronym. Stealthless, timeless, effortless field, right? And all these experiences, we use stir as our aphorism,

stealthless, timeless, effortless richness, right? That tends to be what these ecstatic experiences produce and there's tremendous value there across the boards. And it seems that, and it's not just those subcultures, right? You can, the biohacking subculture is doing the same thing. They're aiming for these same experiences.

So you can kind of start looking at suddenly hardcore Dave Asprey biohackers and soccer moms with yoga practices who don't actually like – they would never think of themselves in the same category. Turns out you guys are actually playing the same game. You see the same thing with inside of organized religion right a lot of the so-called kind of really established pentecostal religions where they're literally trying to change state they're doing it inside of a different container they've got all kinds of different language but what is the experience of say speaking in tongues well it's selfless it's effortlessness it's timelessness information rich and neurobiologically if you look at what's going on under the hood and we've got you know

speaking tongues which is this crazy thing we now know where it comes from very similar to these other experiences so huge groups of people and we talk about the four trillion dollars where that came from is when where this started for us is we train people in flow, which is an altered state of consciousness. And it's pretty strange to go into businesses or Fortune 100 companies or Wall Street and be training people in an altered state of consciousness. That's a strange thing. For me, it's a strange thing. And yet it didn't matter really where we were. We'd come off stage and everybody would rush up to us and they're like, oh, the flow stuff is great. But my entire team, we're microdosing on a regular basis or we're going to weekend Vipassana silent meditation retreats or we're doing this tantric sex practice to get right. And it was everywhere we went, people were using all of these different techniques to change their consciousness.

Not to reach these states of selflessness. To reach flow. To change their consciousness. Not to reach these states of selflessness. So interestingly, just terminology-wise, if you go back 100 years at the start of kind of modern psychology and modern neuroscience, like William James' time when William James was at Harvard, William James thought mystical experiences, flow states, psychedelic experience, they were all the same thing. They were thought of as the same category. psychedelic experience they were all the same thing they were thought of as the same category and then over the next 100 years we broke them apart and broke them apart and broke them apart and broke them apart called them all these different things and now that over the past 10

years we can look under the hood with neuroscience advancements we're saying oh wait a minute these are actually all the same things together so the four trillion dollars is we call it the altered state economy we did a huge calculation. How much time and money do people spend trying to alter their consciousness, trying to change the channel unconsciousness? Now, not all of this is conscious. Not all of it is good, right? There are a lot of substances, caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, all kinds of... Sex addiction.

Sex addiction. That can have negative outcomes, but they're right. But we did a calculation. We were as conservative as possible. So let me give you just one example in our calculation. So the live music industry. You can make an argument, a good one, that pretty much anytime anybody goes to a show,

they want their consciousness altered. They want to get sucked up into the crowd have that group flow communitas experience right we said okay that's great that's fine but that's way just too big there are other reasons people go to shows and whatever so we narrowed it down we're like we're just going to take electronic dance music because a lot of the reasons people go to see bands well there's no lyrics that the window there's no band dj is pushing play on a tape most of the time um maybe a little mixing on top but nobody goes to see the performance they go for the state of consciousness the experience produces the feeling and what it does and how it kicks them out of their head that sort of. So we very conservatively built this thing together. But $4 trillion added up, that's 1 16th of the global economy.

Put it in context, that's the GDP of Germany. It's bigger than the GDP of India or Russia. Put it in kind of crazy terms, it's twice the number of stars in our current galaxy. Like it's a the number of stars in our current galaxy like it's a it's a huge huge number and what's changing right this is four trillion dollars that we're spending right now is we the book kind of covers four emerging forces neurobiology psychology pharmacology and technology that are emerging right now and giving us much more access to these states with far more

precision than we've ever had before. So a lot of what was unconscious is starting to become conscious. We're starting to be able to pick and choose the exact experiences we want, the way we dial them up. We're being able to scale them for the very first time. These kinds of shifts are coming or are happening right now, and it's a totally different ballgame. So I think that $4 trillion is where we are right now. And it's only going to get bigger over the next few decades. Wow. So you interviewed all these different people in different genres from the

soccer mom to the psychedelic person to the Navy SEAL to the executives who all were experiencing different, trying and implementing different strategies to reach this altered state of consciousness, correct? Did you find a group that had the most effective way or that had the easiest way to get in and tap into this, the least cost effective, the fastest, the least damaging? So it's a great question. Let's be specific about it let's so let's talk about uh work done on post-traumatic stress disorder because it's a really it's a really great case what our argument about the benefits of these states are on you know there's a healing side to it right they make us feel very alive but they also heal trauma at a really deep level um and enhance creativity cooperation all that stuff so let's just focus on the healing trauma stuff and so the first place to start is with the psychedelic research right with the pharmacological research and rick doblin who runs maps harvard trained doctor runs maps and a doctor

named michael mithoffer teamed up back in the 90s to look at mdma right which is the street drug known as ecstasy or molly or take your pick um as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder and they looked at it in soldiers so people coming back from iraq iraq and afghanistan and they looked at victims of sexual abuse and child abuse and they were using mdma therapy so it's one to three rounds of you take the substance, the compound, and there's therapists in the room who work with you. They found that one to three MDMA therapy sessions was enough to produce either a market decrease in PTSD symptoms or a total reduction. And the studies have been now running for over four years.

So when I say total reduction, we know that all the symptoms of PTSD have gone away and that has persisted for four years. I talked to one of the guys who took part in that original study, and I'm not going to give you his name because he's anonymous, but he was an Army Ranger

and got blown up in New York, neck, back, and ankles totally shattered. Non-stop nightmares. Basically lived in hell for a year. Heard about this study, got involved, and literally one session was all he needed. He said he was scheduled to do three sessions, but he had so much healing from the PTSD that literally his nightmares went away instantly. By the time he got to the second session, he was like, we don't have to talk about me getting blown up in Iraq.

I'm done with that. Let's go back into my childhood and see what else we can fix. So that's where we started. That's psychedelic approach. It's one approach. Is that an addictive approach, though? Well, not in the context of psychedelic therapy. It's risky.

So let me get through the comparison and contrast, and then we can talk about that, because that's a great question. They basically reran that study, and they replaced the psychedelic with flow. At Camp Pendleton, they took soldiers with PTSD, and over 1,000 soldiers have taken part, and they used surfing as a trigger for flow, right? Blended it with talk therapy and they found that it took five weeks of surfing and talk therapy to produce the exact same result. Mark a decrease in symptoms or total abatement, right? Five weeks surfing.

Then they redid that experiment again with mindfulness-based meditation and they found they could get similar, not total abatement of symptoms, but marked decrease of symptoms with 12 weeks of daily 20-minute meditation. So three varying techniques of ecstasy, right? They're all roughly producing

the same kind of results under the hood. The difference is A, safety. In the first case, you A, have to be comfortable with a substance. It can affect your brain. It can affect your brain now that said is so effective as these ptsd studies been the fda is now seriously looking at mdma as treatment forget about ptsd they're looking at it for anxiety and depression um and there's a there seems to be a lot of proof that that's going to get actually approved and be a prescription you, something you can actually do with a doctor.

So, yes, it's dangerous. You have to take an amphetamine. You have to be comfortable doing all that. Surfing, a little less dangerous. You can still, you know, snap your neck and you can drown. There's still risk there. Meditation, a lot less. I mean, people talk about meditation as if there are no risks, and that's not true.

If you've ever seen people come through like a hardcore Vipassana silent meditation retreat, it can really not— Yeah, it can mess with people. Sure. It can go wrong as well, but there you have three different techniques of ecstasy to access this state. They're all producing very similar results. And you can pick and choose.

And that's what this revolution is so great. That's what's so neat now is that we actually, first of all, we have the information to know. Oh, wait a minute. These are doing the same thing. And the research. And I have options. Yeah. Right?

And I think what's really interesting and what seems to be very cutting edge is combinatory therapies. So there's work that's being done in England. I want to say it's at Oxford, but I could be wrong, where they're looking at combining MDMA therapy with meditation. It seems like they're getting better results. So the combinatory therapies, which is really sort of the cutting edge of what's next and what's coming um people are just starting to look at but that's where i think this gets really interesting and that's where it's going but the other thing is by the way we're talking about these three innovations you can also use technology right i mean right now we talk about psychedelics as a consciousness altering technology but there

are a whole lot of actual technologies coming that do sort of the same thing. So there's like virtual reality therapy that could be created. You know, there's all sorts of stuff too, right? Just talking about flow, we know video games produce a tremendous amount of flow. Right? And so just neurobiologically, there are five of those neurochemicals

that show up in these states. Video games can really only get at two of them, sometimes three, but two is what most, virtual reality, a lot more work needs to be done. It seems to be able to get at two of them sometimes three but two is what most we get virtual reality a lot more work needs to be done it seems to be able to get at kind of all of them at once so i think vr is a state changing technology is is phenomenal and i think i mean i really think that's where it's going really yeah you know i saw like a video on facebook the other day of a guy who was in

some strapped into some contraption, and he was on a circular running machine where he could run in every direction, 360, strapped in with the virtual reality. And he was like, he crouched, he jumped, and he was in the game. And he probably lost sense of his body, where he probably felt like he was actually in it as he was running and punching and everything. It's just like... I got a chance to...

It's crazy. So at USC, they've been using kind of early VR techniques, again, as a treatment for PTSD. A guy named Skip Rizzo is behind this work, and I got a chance to play in one of those simulators. I also, a couple weeks ago, got a chance to fly the Air Force's Osprey VR simulator through the jaws of death. I'm going crazy. First shot through the jaws of death. I don crazy um first shot through the jaws of death i

don't even know if that's a good thing or a bad thing or um but i was very proud of myself um but the sim when i tell you that the simulations are getting really good they're getting really really realistic really good yeah when i crashed the helicopter like you're dead yeah i freaked i was like this is so immersive yeah very powerful you know why do you feel like we uh we need to seek this so much why can't we just be happy you know why do why is there so much trauma and so much so it's interesting destruction and stress and anxiety why can't we just live normal lives there's a handful of answers to it right um and there are real answers the first thing is we have a you know in the book we talk about three different like we like why have we missed

a four trillion dollar revolution like how like that's a huge revolution i don't know if you saw the headlines yesterday the pentagon tried to bury like $160 billion worth of stuff and its troop carriers and whatever. Like, you know, and like they couldn't, they could barely bury that. And yet this is, you know, $4 trillion, much, much bigger. And it's, so how the hell is that possible? And one of the reasons is we talk about these states as being beyond the pale. And there are three pales we look at, one of which is

kind of the pale of society. And we don't like to talk about it, but we really do have state sanctioned states of consciousness, which is to say that the chemicals and the states of consciousness that society supports are the ones that sort of work in a capitalist society. If you're going to have a functioning market economy, you need super hyper alert workers. So we, you know, the caffeine break and the smoke break, right? These are stimulants that drive focus. And because people are so wired at the end of the workday, they need cocktails to come down. These are state sanctioned states of consciousness. We support them. We enshrine them in our laws. We back them up with culture, right? There are a whole bunch of other things that we don't support and it's interesting because it shifts right like yoga

in the 90s was not a stanchion way to alter your consciousness it was okay maybe for hippies but now everybody's doing businesses are doing it you know it's a i think it's a 27 billion dollar industry already it's a big number um industry already. It's a big number. So these things are shifting. There's also the pale of the church, which basically says, look, these ecstatic experiences, they're really good for the founder, the first person. And they're allowed to have this crazy burning bush mystical experience. But it's heresy if the followers try to repeat it, basically. So there's a whole cultural and religious side of it.

And then there's what we call the pale of the body, which is we have a tendency, and you see this a lot with psychedelics, we tend to think that states that we produce through hard work internally, through meditation or contemplative practices, these are authentic, true, and good but anything that requires an external technology be it a psychedelic or neurofeedback or whatever it's not quite as pure right this is technically what's called the skin bag bias right things that are produced inside the skin bag are pure and good things that are outside are suspicious not to be trusted when under the hood they're the exact same thing so you know some of the answer to your question is all this has been been hiding behind kind of these views and those things are starting to kind of shatter open

we're starting to see through there right that's part of it right what do you want people to know the most about the research you've been doing about this book? What is the thing, the most important thing? Well, the most important thing is, like, to me, is that, first of all, most people actually have no idea this is even going on, right? Let alone, I would assume most of your listeners are probably part of this actual revolution. They're probably driving it forward one way or another. So first of all, that's exciting in and of itself. Hey, folks, you're part of a revolution. Didn't know, right?

Yeah, a lot of people listen. Our big meditators do practices to get in the flow. They're constantly looking to be peak performers. They want to achieve higher results, greater results. So the other half of your question, and I think this is what I want people to know, is because of these pales, because we haven't looked at these states,

because we haven't understood the neurobiology, because of all that, we are missing what high performance really looks like. I think most people in a lot of situations, if their creativity is a great example, creativity tops everybody's list of skills most critical in the 21st century, right? Whether it's the 21st century skill list where it's school, kids, and education, or IBM did a recent study where they surveyed 1,600 CEOs from 60 countries, 1,600 CEOs. What's the most important quality in a CEO? Creativity, number one.

So in the 21st century, creativity seems to top the boards. And by the way, if robots and AI are coming for our jobs, and the new study out of Oxford says that 40% of our jobs are vulnerable replacement by AI and robotics over the next few decades, the jobs that are going to be safe are the ones where there's creative problem solving. Now, the interesting thing is we got a chance to take part, we meaning myself and Jamie Will, my partner who I co-wrote the book with, and the Flow Genome Project, we took part in the Red Bull Creativity Project, which is the largest meta-analysis of creativity ever done. And they learned a couple of things, right? Out of like early rounds of this.

The first was what I just told you, which is creativity is probably the most important skill in the 21st century. Second thing they learned is we suck at training people to be more creative. We're flat out terrible at it. We have almost no tools for it. And the reason is we are trying to train people on a skill when we really need to be training a state of mind. So non-ordinary states of consciousness are the tools that evolution gave us to perform in peak states. We see this in flow.

You see this in other things. We've been trying to train up all these skills and we keep getting stuck when we should be training people to alter their consciousness, to train up states of mind. The way of being too. And it filters down from there, right?

That I think is the most important takeaway. Collaborative skills, creative skills, inspiration, intuition, all these things that are fundamental to success in the 21st century, these are best accessed by changing the channel and consciousness turning off your normal state of awareness and going here and by the way the craziest part about all this is and this is uh ronald siegel's work at ucla um really neat guy but he is one of the other people have written about this but he started to realize that pretty much every species on the planet, every mammal and most birds have found a way to alter their consciousness. He talks about the urge towards intoxication as the fourth urge, the fourth evolutionary driver. So there's sex, food, water, shelter, intoxication, which sounds crazy.

Like, why the hell would that be? But as it turns out, if you go into nature and humans are really good at this we get stuck in ruts right we keep doing the same thing over and over and it happens in the wild as well and the easier you have to change the channel so the creative problem solving you get from non-ordinary states of consciousness are so fun is so fundamental that evolution actually shaped it into a basic drive that's found across all mammals. And you can go into the animal kingdom and you will see elephants will drink fermented bog water. Mandrill baboons will take ibogaine, one of the most powerful psychedelics on Earth.

Really? Jaguars will use ayahuasca. Goats will gobble magic mushrooms. And the list goes on and on and on. There's a great NPR story from a couple of years ago about a dog that dogs seeking out magic mushrooms. The famous one is dolphins will take puffer fish and they will get it to excrete its nerve toxin, which in tiny quantities is a state-changing drug. Wow. Right?

Too much and you get poisoned. And there was fantastic footage online of a pod of dolphins doing this with puffer fish, like passing it. Shut up. Yeah, they gave puff, puff, pass an entirely new meaning. Right? Totally changed it. But this drive towards intoxication, it's in all of us, but it's really all over nature

This drive towards intoxication, it's in all of us, but it's really all over nature for the fact that it is so powerful to change the channel in terms of creative problem solving. Why can't we just tap into it and get in those states without having to use one of these other mechanisms to get there? Are we capable of accessing? Well, I mean, meditation will get you there pretty quickly. And it's interesting because it's not even that much meditation, right? Like when they started doing the early meditation research, they were researching on, you know, Tibetan Buddhists with 30,000 hours of cushion time. And they were saying, oh, my God, okay, their brains are more creative and blah, blah, blah. But who's got 30,000 hours, right? New studies, you know, then they dropped it down to like there was a whole bunch

of different studies where they're like well that's impractical for anybody but can we shrink it you know what i mean like could maybe we get to 10 years so they started doing studies and you know in the beginning they found oh wow you can do this in three months oh wait a minute you can do this in eight weeks and now they're down to like four days of meditation training of is enough to start shifting the brain unlocking these things so yeah i just got back from india uh two weeks ago where i did a two-week intensive meditation training and i literally feel like now with a 15-minute practice in the morning that i got into some you know crazy states where i felt like i was literally floating in the universe and moving everything around in the universe and moving

everything around in the universe it was like kind of crazy and maybe it sounds weird and i was floating through the stars i came back through the earth and was like diving into the core of the universe or the earth and was able to see everything perfectly it's amazing and i was able to move like the stars it's just like slight movements everything was able to move like the stars. It's just like slight movements. Everything was able to move and shift. And it was crazy. And even yesterday morning, as I was meditating, I literally felt like everything around me, I was in the middle of the universe. It took about 10 minutes, but then I was meditating with someone else. I didn't have awareness that they were in the room. I didn't have awareness of, I felt like I was just floating.

I still had like foundation, but I was kind of like, I wasn't in the room. I didn't have awareness. I felt like I was just floating. I still had foundation, but I was kind of like I wasn't in my room anymore. Wow. And it was crazy. And I was there for two weeks learning these techniques and practices and diving in. And it's definitely a powerful experience. But for me now, it's 15 minutes. It's only happened a couple of times since then. That's amazing that you can get that powerful experience.

That's phenomenal. It's crazy. It's really cool. But no drugs, no, you know. Well, that's, I mean, one of the things that, you know, the interesting thing about the drugs is that they can show you what's possible, but the really critical lesson that people need to learn is all of those same experiences are available without the drugs, right?

Those substances, for somebody who, you know, when they're just starting out, sometimes that can be a useful, you know, kick your head sideways. Just like, oh my God, look, there are a whole bunch of universes inside you that you had no idea existed. But what's really interesting, I always say that for me, and I've had psychedelic experiences, I've had meditative experiences, and I've had flow experiences triggered by action adventure sports. I think I've experienced way stranger things

through sport and flow than I have in other situations, for sure. Yeah, yeah. I mean, as an athlete, I think why I'm addicted to sports and being a part of a team and other things is because I'm able to tap into that place. Just going to play pickup basketball, I can get there quickly in a few minutes.

If I allow myself to forget about all the stresses or work or what's on my mind and I just am present to playing ball and making every play my best and being a part of the team and getting beyond myself, I can play for hours. You lose track of time and you just feel like you're invincible in a way. And I tell people, you know, for a guy who's been hit over the head thousands of times, literally I don't know how many times I led with my head playing football

for a decade, if a guy who's been hit that many times in the head has probably got brain damage, if I can get there, then I think anyone could get there just through meditative practice and action sports, things like that. So music as well, which I know you talk about

all the different ways to get in the flow. So yeah. What do you think is missing for people in their lives right now? Well, you know, the other thing that we see with kind of these ecstatic experiences is, and this is research that was done at Harvard. It, there's something called adult development theory, which basically is how do adults continue to grow and mature?

And what we've seen is what the research shows is that people who have more access to these experiences, they move farther up the adult development scale. Now, what happens as you move up that scale is you get more empathetic. You can see problems from multiple perspectives, and you get this kind of polyphasic awareness. So I think one of the things that's missing, we also see the research is pretty consistent that frequent access to these experiences gives you much more overall life satisfaction right much more well-being what much greater happiness and i you know what's missing for people today i mean the studies now show that you know one out of four americans are on psychiatric meds suicide rates are

increasing for everybody ages 7 to 70 that's those are insane numbers right there there those are crazy numbers about our mental health as a society so clearly something is wrong with us psychologically. And again, I think a lot of it is we have kind of banished this whole, there's a whole set of experiences that are north of happy, right? All the experiences we're talking about to sort of take place north of happy. And we ignored them for the past hundred years, right? If you look at, it wasn't until positive psychology showed up, right? Psychology in the 20th century, even though it started with William James, who was really interested in human possibility, very quickly it sort of devolved into fixing pathological problems. It wasn't about exploring psychological possibilities. It was depression and anxiety.

And we've gotten very good at that stuff. We made a lot of progress but it's only with you know fairly recently when martin seligman became head of the american psychological association that people started to say hey wait a minute these north of happy experiences might be exactly what we're missing what we need um and it that's so i think that's some of it that we just turned away for 100 years and we're now turning our attention back. That's what I think is missing. I'm curious to learn more about you

and who's been the most influential presence in your life since growing up till now. I don't even know if I can answer that question. I mean, obviously my parents were usually influential. I don't even know if I can answer that question. I mean, you know, obviously my parents were usually influential. I don't know. I think I've had great mentors, you know, every step along the way. I think I learned different things from different people. My partnership with Peter DeAmandis, my friendship with Peter,

we've known each other a long time. I mean, we knew each other back in the kind of early 90s and um so i uh before the x prize was won like right when the x prize right before the x prize actually got announced officially was when peter and i first met so being that close to peter as a guy who actually like helped open the space frontier and you know like do like, Peter's been a phenomenal mentor. Like, what do I think individuals can achieve? Well, my friend Peter helped open the space frontier and establish what is, you know,

becoming a multi-billion dollar, you know what I mean? So, like, I learned different things from different people along the way. You know, in all honesty, like, and if I were going to start pointing at who the people who are most influential in my life were other writers who i didn't even know but their books

impacted me so much um like you know i'm fundamentally an author right like that's that it like at my core i'm a guy who likes to put words together in a straight line that's really what i love doing most so a lot of a lot that, a lot of me was shaped by that. I was also shaped, I was a professional magician. Really? Most people don't know this. Yeah, I started working when I was 11 years old. Wow.

I was in restaurants doing birthday parties and bar mitzvahs and blah, blah, blah, all the way until I was in college. So there were a lot of magicians, actually, who were massively influential on me. And magicians were a very weird group of people. So I learned a lot of really key, key core fundamental lessons from this strange group of people when I was growing up. They had huge influence on me. Wow. What's the biggest lesson you learned from that group or being in that profession? I mean one was they were a profession without judgment.

It didn't, these were really weird people. They were truly strange artists. So, you know, and this was, you know, in the 70s, we're going back to the 70s and this was a group of people, they didn't care who you had sex with. They didn't care what color your skin was. They didn't even care.

You could be annoying. You could be a drunk. If you had the goods they didn't care what color your skin was they did like they didn't even care you could be annoying you could be a drunk you if you get the goods and can could do the magic if you you were fine um so like one thing i you know a fundamental lesson uh at a time i you know i grew up in cleveland and chicago there was a lot of sexism there wasn't yeah i'm from Ohio. I'm from Columbus. It's Cleveland. I'm a Browns fan. Long suffering. I'm Browns too, man. It sucks. Damn. Yeah. That's heartbreaking.

Do not go gently. Hey, Cavs, baby. Cavs. I know. Do not go gently into that good night, Cleveland. That's all I'm saying. There was a lot of racism and sexism and things like that. So just being around people who, you know,

didn't, weren't that way was really important. I think the other thing, the most important thing I learned. So when I was growing up in Cleveland, the magic store was Pandora's box. It was in Richmond mall in Mayfield, Ohio. And it was kind of a long skinny store. And in the back, there was a big wall of books and magic stores are like eye candy everywhere, right? It was kind of a long, skinny store. And in the back, there was a big wall of books.

And magic stores are like eye candy everywhere, right? But the books sort of had like the most prominent display. And I remember asking Joe Leffler, the guy who ran the shop, I was like, at one point, you know, I was 11 or 12. I don't even know how I phrased it. But I was basically like, why do I see the books first when I come into the store? Why not all these crazy, you shiny other other blinky shiny objects and he looked at me and went well books are where they keep the secrets and he meant two things first of all i i just thought he meant books are where they keep the secrets right in he was actually giving me like magic

specific things and what he really was saying is, look, man, this was an oral tradition until like the 50s or the 60s when this stuff started getting written down really for the first time. And right now, like at the back of my store, the best magicians in the world have put their tricks in books for you to learn. Like you can actually get expertise here. That's what he was talking about i just thought he meant hey man books are where they keep the secrets so i just i mean i was already an avid reader but to me it was just like oh my god of course that's where they keep the secrets and you know i still you know found fundamentally think that you know reading reading books is the number one thing anybody can do to improve their lives.

I can't like it. It's at the top of every list. Do you have a trick that you still use or you still like to perform? There are a couple. We're not going to do them here. No matter what, I will not be doing it. That was one of the things I discovered about myself. And it's one of the reasons I walked away from magic is I don't like fooling people.

To be a magician, you really have to like lying to people. And it makes me really uncomfortable. People get a rush. Magicians get a rush from that. I never did. I'm uncomfortable with deception. And so it really put me at ease that i loved what people don't realize about magic is you've got michael jordan level dexterity taking

place in nanoscale right that's what's going on at the now that's what i like the athletic prowess of magic is what really amazed me um but the deception part of it i just wasn't good at it didn't like it it wasn't it wasn't who i was i couldn't make it i couldn't make it fit so who was uh which of your parents was more influential and what was the biggest lesson that they taught you you know you're i i think you'll appreciate this and you know it was what i learned i mean it's what you learn in the midwest right which is midwestern values, work hard, don't lie, right? Those are the core Midwestern values.

And, you know, my father taught me so much about hard work and, you know, what's really required. That was just a great lesson to learn early. What part of Cleveland? Well, a bunch of different parts. In the end, Pepper Pike. Okay, cool. I'm not sure where that's at, but... East side. Yeah, you keep going east.

Gotcha, yeah. I'm actually from Delaware, Ohio, if you've ever heard of that. Which is where? It's about 30 miles north of Columbus. Okay. Very small town, yeah. About an hour and 45 from Cleveland. Very cool. What else do we need to know? What else do we need to know?

What else do we need to know about this besides buying the book? Oh, besides about stealing fire? Yes. That's super interesting. Well, it's worth talking a little bit about kind of the four emerging forces, right? The neurobiology, psychology, the pharmacology,

and the technology. And some of the stuff that's going on technologically is is really interesting at this point for example um there's a company called palo alo neuroscience very they're at the front end of their work but they have using they you can go in there they can take a tibetan bud Buddhist who has 30,000 hours of meditation training. They can put themselves into a meditative state. They can record the biomarkers, a bunch of different biomarkers that are present. They can then take the device, put it on you who have no meditation training and using neurofeedback walk you towards that same state.

No way. Yes. So that's one example of where things are going, right? It's like Matrix. It's like the Matrix. So what we're looking at, the psychology, what shifted fundamentally is if you go back to the 50s,

the psychological personas you were allowed to inhabit were pretty like you got the strong silent masculine type and you've got the betty homemaker and that was kind of you know the edge of psychological possibilities but psychology and our versions of ourselves and who can we can be in the world have expanded so much in the past you know 75 years there are versions of ourselves that are gigantic right now and can hold a much bigger container and can hold all this stuff. Neurobiology has allowed us

to look under the hood. It's turned stuff that was mystical into the empiric, which is phenomenal. Then psychopharmacology is allowing us to access a lot of these things nearly on demand.

They've taken these sort of like the neurochemistry that underpin these states. It's now a cookbook, right? And even more interestingly than just the cookbook is there's an open— so I'll give you an example. If you go back, foundation of any religion, Moses went up, had a conversation with God, came down, bunch of tablets, got angry, shattered him. That was the only time in religious history where God spoke directly to man.

He gave him vision, and the proof disappeared. Gone, right? And so you've got to take this guy's word for it, which, you know, maybe you want to, maybe you don't. What we're getting now, and you're seeing it, it's emerging out of DMT, which is an extremely potent psychedelic, but there are now all kinds of open-source research projects online, the hyperspace lexicon, where they say people take this substance,

they have profound, cosmic, religious birthing-style experiences, but they're open-source databases. So hundreds of thousands of people are recording their experiences. So now, yeah, you can have a major epiphany, but you can compare it to all this bit where it's a big data analysis of something that before you would have had to take somebody's word for.

And right, so that's super interesting. That's starting to change. And as I said, with technology, technology is allowing us to bring this stuff to scale. And as I said with technology, technology is allowing us to bring this stuff to scale. You brought up music, right? Music's ability to shift consciousness and the research on it is getting incredibly robust. Even just like the research on music's ability to bond us together. Apple did this crazy experiment with Sonos speakers where they wired up people's homes. They wanted to know how much music do people listen to on average, four and a half hours a day. And what happens

when they do? And almost every metric for togetherness, whether it's number of times you say, I love you, number of times people have sex, hugs, cooking dinners for friends, any metric you look goes through the roof so music's power to shift consciousness and bond us together really extraordinarily powerful and if you think we talk about in the book the kind of evolution of we focus on function one which is a really high and loud speaker manufacturer the guy who started the company started it because he thought music could be a bonding tool to shift people's state of consciousness and bring them to this higher plane. And so he has literally spent 60 years

building bigger and better loudspeakers that can take more and more and more people into these altered states of consciousness. We don't think about it that way. We don't think about the evolution of music in terms of a state-changing. But if you, you know, back when this guy started out, you could only really get that kind of fidelity if you were, you know, literally listening with through headphones, really high quality stereo. And he wanted to bring what he calls the audio moment that, that phase change that we're talking about to the masses. And now we can do it at scale, right? You go to boom fest or something like that and the entire place is wired to shift your consciousness right that's a relatively new change in tech i mean we you go back

to prehistory and people were using sound to alter consciousness right like this is uh stephen johnson did this work but he was looking at kind of caves uh in france where there are early cave paintings and one of the things they noticed about like these cave paintings is the paintings are really deep in the caves. And why, if you have to truck your paints and your torches and everything, why would they be so like a mile and a half

into these caves? Why not near the surface where it's easy, right? And the answer is they were looking for the most acoustically powerful spots in the cave, the places where the reverberation of the voices could actually alter consciousness. So with the flickering torchlight and their cave art and sound and chanting, right?

So going back into prehistory, we've been using sound to alter consciousness. What's different now is the scale. And of course, just one example. But I think we're seeing it across the consciousness. What's different now is the scale. And of course, just one example, but I think we're seeing it across the boards that these experiences are now sort of, we can experience them at scale, which is radically new and radically different and really cool. Amazing. Amazing. Do you have a question that I should ask before I wrap things up? It's a fantastic way. I think it's, it's relevant across the boards here so we talked about adult development earlier and the interesting thing is child development like

everybody knows child there's the terrible twos that's a developmental phase right there's teenage years um and kids go through them no matter what right like you're going to progress out of the terrible twos you're not going to get stuck there your whole life but adults can actually get stuck adult development is not guaranteed at all you can get stuck and so all of these states can be very very sticky right they're grabby flow is as good as we can feel on the planet it can be deeply. There's a lot of studies also that show that kind of the more flow you seek, the more risks you'll take to get into flow. Oh, and that continues,

that will increase over your whole lifetime. Keep pushing the limit. These experiences are like across the board. They can be sticky and grabby. As I said, they can, some of them can be very, very addictive.

So there's definitely a dark side to these experiences. Like there's a reason these three pales exist, right? Like state sanctions, state of consciousness, and pale literature. It sounds like, oh, these are the bad guys. But no, those guys were trying to keep us safe for a reason, right? Like those pales exist for really good reasons. What's changing now and what hopefully is different is with the amount of precision information we're getting, we're able to tune these things much more specifically and we're able to use them much more maturely. But they bring enormous amount of responsibility.

We talk about three levels of danger. One, which is what we've been talking about now, which is hedonism, right? It's easy to go off the rails with any of these experiences. But there's also dangers of commercialization and militarization. For example, when Rise of Superman came out, the first two groups of people who reached out, who wanted the Flow Genome Project involved, was the military

and the marketers. The military saw a strategic advantage, and the marketers went, holy crap, can we put people into Flow and sell them things? And the answer is yes. The answer is yes. And it's already going on.

We're starting to move, and we talk about this in the book as well, from kind of the experience economy, where you go to Starbucks because it's that cozy third place to what we're calling the transformational economy where you use a product because of who it's going to turn you into. The great example is Equinox was a classic experience economy gym.

You go in there and it's bespoke. Everything in the hot towels and the eucalyptus is steaming, blah, blah, blah. That's an experience economy. CrossFit is transformational economy. It's not, all that stuff is gone. You're working out in a box in an ugly gym in somebody's garage.

You're paying as much as you were at Equinox. And, right, it's somebody's dungeon, as you said, right? But the reason is because it's going to transform you, right? It's not just like at Equinox they're saying, well, you do this and you might look like the woman in the black and white photo. CrossFit says, no, you do this. You commit. You be fierce.

You're going to be a radically different person three months from now. And you do a shared experience too. Shared experience. All that stuff. So they're selling transformation who you can become. And we're getting more. And now that transformation is available in lots of different ways. So that's going to change.

And militarization, which sounds like tinfoil hat conspiracy stuff. But if you look at like, and the problem is like, like when we do, there's a, from the very, so the very first time anybody invented a state changing technology, right? Was Dr. John Lilly back in the 1950s. And he basically invented a pleasure probe that you could, it's a probe that goes into the brain and you could stimulate basically your the pleasure centers of the brain and they you know they found uh when they when he i think he was using it with uh monkeys and monkeys trained to use this device will literally like choose to orgasm for 16 hours straight then they'll sleep for eight hours and

then that's what they'll do right and he like he was in you know when the military approached him and everybody like they heard about in every three-letter agency you could imagine beat a path to his door he was like whoa wait a minute you know in the wrong hands you could literally use my device to fundamentally alter people's consciousness to change their beliefs so So even this is the 1950s, right? Then in the 60s, everybody's heard about MKUltra, right? As the psychedelic experiments where the CIA was using psychedelics and the army was using psychedelics. What they don't realize is there were thousands of research organizations involved in those experiments and they never really went away, right? We have a 70-year history of trying to use consciousness altering techniques as one kind of

weapon or another right whether it's to you know confuse any combatants or brainwashing blah blah so and now that we're getting more like it's farcical because the technologies weren't very good turns out lsd doesn't make a very effective weapon. And it's fine and it's funny and you can have all kinds of tinfoil hat conspiracy theories. The problem is that the technology is getting really, really, really good. And so what wasn't possible and what was funny and comical

and conspiratorial 70 years ago is suddenly a little nerve-wracking today and worth paying attention to at least. Gotcha. Very cool. Awesome. Answer the question. Cool. We've got a few final questions.

One is called the three truths. I asked this to everyone at the end. So bring it. If this is your last day, many, many years from now, and you've accomplished everything you wanted, you've done everything you want to do.

You've built everything you've ever dreamed of. It's happened, but it's the last day and you feel accomplished, fulfilled, done. And everyone there you care about is there who cares about you. And for whatever reason, all your books have been erased. All your books have been gone and all the content you put out has been gone. And- I've accomplished everything, but I've vanished from the earth. For whatever reason, it's gone. The information is gone. And you get to write down, and someone says, well, you write down the three and you get to write down and someone says,

will you write down the three things you know to be true? You've written so many books. You've created so much but if it comes down to three simple truths that you would share with your friends and family and then to the world, what would you write down?

Three simple truths. Those lessons or those truths? You're not a nice man. Can we come back to this? let's go to the next question where can we connect with you personally online this is the lame question I got two more

stephencottler.com for sure stealingfire thebook.com is where you can check out the book and flowgenomeproject.com is the three places. You can find me on Twitter, Stephen underscore Kotler. Okay, cool. Do you want to wait? Want to ask one more until you get back to this? Yeah, we're going back to the truth one.

Okay. So what I want to do next before I ask the final question is acknowledge you for a moment, Stephen, for your incredible wisdom and your intelligence and your ability to find and discover all the secrets in the world and write them in books for us to discover them as well. this information, to learning these tools, and you spend so much time and energy discovering these secrets. So I want to acknowledge you for putting them in simple terms for us to all get the secrets as well. It means a lot. Appreciate that. Thank you so much. Yeah. But before I ask the final question, you got to share the three truths. All right. So I'm not, I don't know if three, I don't know if I'm going to get there. All right. So let's start with one. Let's see if, let's see if we, so number one is, and I don't know if three, I don't know if I'm going to get there. All right. Let's start with one. What's number one? Let's see if we... So number one is, and I don't know, I don't have a pithy phrase for it, but to be really

blunt, if you're not, if passion isn't fueling your life, you're f***ed. We know this. This is pretty clear. You need passion and purpose to drive you forward but the thing that i would want to remind people is that we think passion we think when we think of passion we always see it in its mature form right we think of passion for basketball and you see michael jordan in your head what you don't see is what it looked like on the front end which was oh wow I'm curious about this

orange ball. I wonder if I can put it through that hoop, right? That's what curiosity over time, multiple intersections of multiple curiosities over time is what breeds passion, right? As far as I can tell. So one thing I, you know, one truth that I think is really fundamental, especially now that people are recognizing how important passion and purpose is, and I think people are super frustrated because they want this thing that they can sort of see out in the world, except all the examples, all the people you're modeling after, you're modeling mature passion. You're not seeing what it looks like at the front end, which is just like cultivated curiosity over time right so that to me would be one of them okay that i think is is sort of fundamental the other thing i think is just the first of all the fact that we are all hardwired for ultimate performance it comes built in there isn't a person on the planet who can't get into flow

can't change the channel of consciousness and access these states we're all built for these experiences this is the stuff that evolution designed for us to amplify our performance and if you're not taking advantage of it first of all other people are so there's no if you just go back to flow and you look at mckinsey's research and mckinsey said people in flow are after 500 more productive than out of flow so 500 more productive says you can go to work on monday spend monday in a flow state take tuesday through friday off get as much done as your steady state peers right two days a week in flow you're a thousand percent more productive than the competition and the competition is using

this stuff right like it is my job to train up companies to train up executives to train up coaches blah blah that's a lot of what i do in the world at the flow genome project and we're doing it this is happening already so if you're not doing this stuff you're going to start having a very hard time competing so i think my second whatever however we phrase that second truth is you know take advantage of the advantage you you have like you're this comes built in with every human being we can change the channel in our consciousness and it can massively improve performance and the competition is already doing it so you are only falling behind

if you're not playing this game. And with the four of fours that we were talking about, this stuff is only accelerating. So you're falling farther and farther behind. You don't want to be AOL. You want to be Google. And a third truth, huh? A third truth.

Well, books are where they keep the secrets maybe maybe maybe one of them um i think we're going to go with books are where they keep the secrets because it's pithy and we did it already there you go i like it okay um is there any question that you wish someone would always ask you or that you haven't answered? Well, there's a question that I want to ask you, which is what are your three heart tourists? If I had to sit here and do this, I'm like, teach me something, Brother Lewis. Come on, man. I'm here. You just got back from India having your psychedelic trance state experience. Bring me up to your level, having your psychedelic trance state experience bring me up to your level brother oh man uh i'll share with you afterwards all right excellent because you could you can mess with me but uh-huh i see how this is gonna roll is there any question that uh you wish people would ask

you or that you never could ask you like oh why don't they ask me that? Or you think they should be asking? You know, I don't know if I have, I don't know, can I give you a slightly longer answer? So one of the things that I've noticed, a lot of what I've done over my 30 years basically working is ask the question, how do we achieve the impossible, Right. And I've looked at this in extreme athletes who have achieved impossible feats. I looked at it in terms of empathy and altruism. I wrote about animal rescue, which is part of the extreme hardcore. Everybody understands when you're helping people, you get a lot of accolades for that. It's not the same when you're helping animals. So this is kind of the extreme edge of empathy and altruism. I looked at in abundance, what does it take to take on grand global challenges? Bold, it was how do you build the fastest, biggest company as fast

as you can? And Tomorrowland is what does it take to invent the future, right? The very people who dreamed up all the technology. And it turns out that you see very similar things under the hood, right? And one of the things that, I mean, one of the things that i mean one of the things that i think is interesting like the question is you know what does it take to achieve the impossible might be the question might and and the thing that i want to point out is if you start talking to these people what you'll realize is there is in a weird way no real difference between i want to do this absolutely impossible thing like open the space frontier or kind of, you know, one of my mission decode ultimate human performance

as it is to be an extremely successful dry cleaner. Like it takes just as much fricking work and time and energy and everything else. Like you're going to, we all have the same 24 hours in the day and across the board, it's the size of your vision. Everybody's got the same amount of energy and if you're going to be successful as a dry cleaner, as a librarian, you have what it takes to change the planet. You do. It's the same amount of energy. You need a bigger vision, right?

You need the confidence to believe that you can do it, right? You got to go after it. right you need the confidence to believe that you can do it you right you got to go after that's what i think um is so you know if you meet the actual people who have invented the possible very rarely do you find some uber genius where you're like oh my god what your brain does i don't like i don't even know what that is occasionally you do bump into that guy you'll meet the ray kurzweils of the world like you do. And you're like, holy crap, what your brain does. I didn't even know what that is. But most of the people who have radically altered the planet, they're just me and you,

right? They really are. It was just the size of the vision that really is the distinguishing thing. So I don't know how to put that into a question. What does it take to do the impossible? How big should my vision be? I'm not sure what the question is there, but maybe this is one of those truths that I... Maybe that's a truth and I need a different question. I don't know. There you go. I like it. It's a good thought, good truth. Final question then is what is

your definition of greatness? Nothing easy with me, huh? So it's my favorite quote from Jack Kerouac. There's a couple of them that I like, and I'm not really a big Kerouac fan, but he said a couple of things. And I don't know if this is going to make sense, but what he said was walking on water wasn't built in a day, which is sort of my answer to greatness. Like, what do I think of as, I mean, like true greatness when I think of it is, you know, A, if you're not brimming with joy, like you're not there, right? Like whatever my definition of greatness, if it doesn't come with like massive amounts of wellbeing and life satisfaction, it's not there.

If you're not changing the world, I have one metric for people. Is the world better with you in it or with you out of it? Like that's it. I've got that. Am I judging you? Yes, I'm judging everybody I meet on that metric. And so greatness, obviously, you're here to, you get one, the one thing we know is we get one shot at this life.

Do not waste it. You are, you know, may try to have the biggest impact you can possibly have. That's kind of my definition of greatness. But really, like, when I think of greatness, I think of people who show me something I couldn't even imagine seeing. The walking on water wasn't built in a day. You know, that's really, you know, the paradigm shift is really what I think of when I think of this greatness. And it could be anything. It could be paradigm, you know, a new way of rapping,

a new way of making music, it doesn't matter. Show me something I've never seen before. That's great. Try to change the world with it. That's cool. Make sure you guys go get the new book, Stealing Fire. Thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for having me.

Yes. There you have it, guys. I hope you enjoyed this special interview again make sure to share it with your friends lewishouse.com slash 448 leave us a review over on iTunes iTunes.com slash greatness for your chance to be featured as a review of the week on the show make sure to connect with Stephen connect with him on social media and stay up to date on all the things that he is up to. And check out the full show notes again, lewishouse.com slash four, four, eight, full video interview, all the photos behind the scenes and all that

other good stuff that we talked about on today's episode. I love you guys very much. It means the world to me that you continue to show up with a full heart, learning and taking action in your life to make a difference and following your dreams. It means the world to me. You know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great. Thank you.