Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Steven Kotler: Flow Into The Future | Productivity | E32

Episode Date: July 24, 2019

Want to become 500x more productive? In episode #32, Hala interviews Steven Kotler, a New York Times bestselling author and leading expert on peak performance and flow. They discuss what flow is, how it impacts our brain and body, and triggers that can hack you into a flow state. Additionally, they cover Steven's new book “Last Tango in CyberSpace, which imagines the future we may be living just 5 years from now and radical concepts like “Empathy for All.” Fivver: Get services like logo creation, whiteboard videos, animation and web development on Fivver: https://track.fiverr.com/visit/?bta=51570&brand=fiverrcpa  Fivver Learn: Gain new skills like graphic design and video editing with Fivver Learn: https://track.fiverr.com/visit/?bta=51570&brand=fiverrlearn Get a copy or download Steven’s ‘Last Tango in Cyberspace’: https://amzn.to/2Zz9bKB Get a copy or download ‘The Rise of Superman’: https://amzn.to/2MHUbbt If you liked this episode, please write us a review! Want to connect with other YAP listeners? Join the YAP Society on Slack: bit.ly/yapsociety Earn rewards for inviting your friends to YAP Society: bit.ly/sharethewealthyap Follow YAP on IG: www.instagram.com/youngandprofiting Reach out to Hala directly at [e-mail] Follow Hala on Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Follow Hala on Instagram: www.instagram.com/yapwithhala Check out our website to meet the team, view show notes and transcripts: www.youngandprofiting.com  

Hey guys, if you're an avid listener of Young and Profiting Podcast, I'd like to personally invite you to YAPS Society on Slack. It's a community where listeners network and give us feedback on the show. Vote on episode titles, chat live with guests, and share your projects with the group. We'd love to have you. Go to Bitley slash YAP Society. That's BIT.L.Y slash YAP Society. You can find the link in our show notes. This episode of YAP is sponsored by Fiverr, a marketplace that over 5 million entrepreneurs used to their business. I've been using Fiverr for years. In fact, I got the Yap logo made on there, and if you've seen my cool audiograms with animated cartoons, I get those images from Fiverr too. They have affordable services like graphic design, web design, digital marketing, whiteboard

explainer videos, programming, video editing, audio editing, and much more. They have over 100,000 talented freelancers to choose from, and it's super affordable. Prices just start at $5.00. If you're interested to give Fiverr a shot, hit the link in our show notes. And if you'd rather learn how to do these types of services on your own, check out Fiverr Learn, a new platform that provides on-demand professional courses from leading experts. They start at just $20, but what you could learn is priceless. Check out the links in our show notes to learn more. You're listening to Yap, Young, and Profiting Podcast, a place where you can listen, learn, and profit. I'm your host, Halitaha, and today we're Yap in with Stephen Kotler, a New York Times best-selling author and award-winning journalist.

He's one of the world's leading experts on high performance and flow. Stephen is also the co-founder of creating equilibrium, which is focused on solving critical environmental challenges. In this episode, we'll talk about what flow is, how it impacts our brain and body, and triggers that can hack you into a flow state. In addition, we'll chat about his new book, Last Tango in Cyberspace, which uncovers the future we may be living just five years from now and radical concepts like empathy for all. Hey, Stephen, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.

Good to be with you. We are so pumped to have you on the show. And before we get started, I just want to share a little bit of background for my listeners. Stephen is a leading expert on the state of flow and high performance, and he explores altered states of consciousness and their effect on human performance. In addition to that, Stephen is a Pulitzer. Prize nominated author with eight bestsellers under his belt like Stealing Fire, The Rise of Superman, Tomorrowland, and more. His latest book, which we'll dig into later today, is called The Last

Tango in Cyberspace, and it's a sci-fi thriller which explores the future we may be living in just five years from now. So, Stephen, I really want to focus this interview on two parts. First, I want to talk about flow, and I know you're probably sick of talking about this, but it's so interesting and relevant for my audience, and I literally have been waiting a year to talk to you about this topic. So looking forward to that. And then equally as interesting, I want to discuss Last Tango in cyberspace and some of the connections we can make from it to real life in regards to the advancement of technology and your key messages related to humanity like empathy for all. There's so much to cover. We only have an hour, so I'm going to try to move things fast,

skip the fluff, hit all the key points. So are you ready for this? Bring it. Okay. So like I said before, you are the biggest expert on flow of our millennial generation. Let's start to dissect what flow exactly is. Many people describe flow as being in the zone, when you get so focused on a task that everything else disappears and your performance, both mental and physical, go through the roof. So what is your definition of flow? And what are the ways that people describe flow and the feeling of flow?

So the best place to start is not with my definition of flow. with the technical definition of flow, the scientific definition of flow, which is an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best. And as you pointed out, my definition is very similar to what you just said. It's a moment. So those moments have kind of wrapped attention and total absorption. We get so focused on the task at hand that everything else disappears. So action awareness will start to merge your sense of self, self-consciousness, self-criticism will vanish completely. Time passes strange. The technical term is it dilates, which is a fancy way of saying it either slows down.

You get a freeze frame effect from your enemy to anybody who's been in a car crash, or more frequently it speeds up and five hours go by in five minutes. You didn't even notice time was passing. And throughout, as you pointed out, all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go through the roof. So that's sort of the standard, you know, scientific definition of flow. And I know that you have three fundamental laws of flow. Can you go into that for my listeners? Flow science itself, it's really old. It dates back to the 1880s, 1890s. Some of the earliest experiments

run in what kind of became experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience will run on flow. In the 1970s, a psychologist named Mihai Chikset Mihai, who's at the University of Chicago, is often called the godfather of flow because he coined the term flow. That's where the term itself came from. He did some of the largest global studies on optimal performance anybody's ever conducted. And he learned five kind of fundamental truths about flow that I think are a really great place to start any discussion. As you pointed out, the first of those is that flow is definable. And what I mean by that is it has core characteristics. There are six of them. The chick sent me high identified. I listed some of them a second ago when I was sort of giving my

quick definition of flow. There are things like total complete concentration in the moment on the task at hand, the vanishing of self, time dilation, a sense of total control and mastery over the situation, a couple other things. And because it's definable, it's measurable. There are really great well-validated psychometric instruments for measuring flow. The other things that you need to know that I think are really key is flow is a spectrum experience. So it's like any emotion, right? You've got anger. You can be a little irked. You can be homicidally murderous. It's the same emotion. Flow is the same way. You can be in a state of microflow. There's sort of of a debate here. But traditionally people think it's when all the flows conditions show up.

It's all characteristics. So complete concentration, time dilation of the vanishing itself, but they're just dialed down really quietly. And then there's macroflow when you get all of those all at once. And it often historically, until the 1950s, when we realized better, this was treated as a full-blown mystical experience. Time slows down and your sense of self-vanishes and you feel like you become one with everything. And people thought it was a mystical experience. They didn't understand there was neurobiology underneath that experience causing it, but we've since learned that. So flow is a spectrum, and the reason that's so important is most people spend about 5% of their work life, for example, in flow and don't even notice it.

So if you can learn to notice it, you can sort of learn to turn it up a little bit more and get more of that state. That's critical. And I think the most important thing is what flow has to do with meaning and life satisfaction and overall well-being. When positive psychologists talk about the three levels of happiness, their sort of baseline happiness. How do you feel right here, right now? And there's not a whole lot you can do there.

A lot of that's nature, a lot of its nurture. There are certain interventions that positive psychology has developed that can help you be happier, but there's not a ton you can do there. Their second level, what they call a life of enjoyment, is literally a high flow lifestyle. And then the top level, the best you can feel on this planet, is a high flow lifestyle attached to purpose. something greater than yourself, outside yourself. And that is literally the best experience. So when we do studies of like overall well-being, life satisfaction, meaning the people who score off the charts, the people with the most flow in their lives. So that stuff is really, really critical. It's sort of

one of the reasons you really want flow in your life and want more flow in your life. That's amazing and so interesting. And I've heard you say that wherever we see the possible become possible you see flow. And a great use case of flow and how powerful it can be is the insane progress that surfing and running have had in the last 20, 30, 40 years. Can you walk us through some of these examples and give us some context about how human performance has been unlocked in some of these action sports? So what started to happen in the 80s and the 90s is that action sports started to progress on essentially nearly exponential growth curves, meaning the level of performance, which had been steady for a very long time, started exploding. And surfing is a great example

because surfing is a thousand-year-old sport. And from 400 AD until 1996, the biggest way of anybody had ever surfed was 25 feet. And there were physics papers written about how it was impossible for surfers to paddle into her surf waves over 25 feet tall. In 1996, that started to evaporate. Now, we're just a couple decades later and surfers are routinely pulling into waves that are 60, 70, 80, 90, 100 feet tall. That's really common. Used to be believed that the largest cliff jump anybody could accomplish on skis or on a snowboard was 80 feet. Nobody believed that the human body could take more than that. In fact, in snowboarding in 1992, the biggest gap jump that anybody ever cleared was the Baker Road gap up in Mount Washington.

and it's a jump literally over a highway and it's 40 feet end to end. Now that's huge, right? That's two buses stacked lengthwise. But today, again, like 21 years later, snowboarders are clearing gap jumps that are 250, 300 feet tall. So they've gone from like two buses to skyscrapers in 20 years. Or, you know, the classic example that I love talking about is my buddy Alex Honnold, who is the star of the movie Free Solo for Free Solo. and Al Cap, but the story I like as much is Half Dome.

Half Dome is this huge slab of rock in Yosemite Valley, and most climbers take a day to a day and a half to climb it. And they bring portal ledges, they sleep on the side of the wall, and that's what it takes. And they climb with ropes and protection, of course. And then in 2012, Alex Honnold freesoled. So he climbed without ropes of protection. So if you've made a mistake, he was going to die. He was going to fall to his death.

He free soloed half dome in an hour and 22 minutes. It's like the rough equivalent of running a four-minute mile in 37 seconds. Wow. Still doesn't make any sense. These are just a handful of examples. They're all over. I mean, you're seeing a lot of progression and a lot of sports for sure. But in action sports, it's really, really clear.

But it's not just action sports. You know, I started out my work in action sports looking at this. And then I took this question of sort of what does it take to do the impossible into pretty much every domain imaginable. And I wrote books about what I discovered. So Tomorrowland, for example, which is a book you mentioned earlier, that book looked at those maverick innovators

who turned science fiction ideas into sci-fi technology. They did the impossible of dreaming up the future in abundance, which I co-wrote with Peter Diamandis. We looked at individuals or small teams going after grand global and possible challenges, poverty, health care crises, water scarcity, energy scarcity, those kinds of challenges, challenges that 20 years earlier were like large corporations

or big governments were the only people playing, and here were individuals going at these same impossible challenges and succeeding. Bold looked at entrepreneurs like Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, people who'd done impossible things in business, built world-changing industries in record time. Often, by the way, in industries where people didn't even think you could innovate.

At the time Branson created Virgin Airlines everybody said you can't create another airlines there's no way this will work and yet he bet half his music company on it big impossible crazy so i spent my whole career looking at this stuff and and you are absolutely correct it doesn't matter what domain you look in whenever you see the impossible you see the state of consciousness known as flow you see other things it's not the only thing you see flow so what exactly happens to our mental and physical when we enter into a flow state. Maybe let's start off at a neurobiological level. What happens? So if you want to make any sense when you talk about neurobiology, you want to talk about four things.

You want to talk about neuroanatomy and networks, which is where in the brain things are taking place. The old idea about the brain was things were localized, right? This spot did this thing. The new thinking about the brain is that's not how it appears to work. And most things are interlinked network connections. In the same spot, we'll do triple and double and do. duty all over the place. But anyways, you need to talk about location, right? And then the next thing you have to talk about is neurochemistry and neuroelectricity, which is the two ways the brain communicates to itself and to the body, right? And that's how it sends signals. So when you're talking about neurobiology, that's really what you want to talk about. And in flow, we see really,

really potent changes. We see large swatches of the prefrontal cortex. So this is where your executive function lives. A lot of your higher cognitive functions are housed there. It gets very, very, very quiet in flow. Most of it shuts off. We see brain waves move from where they are. So right now you and I were talking. Our brains are in beta. It's a fast moving wave. It's where we are when we're awake and alert. Below beta is a slower wave alpha. This is sort of the signature of creativity. It's daydreaming mode. It's the brain going from thought to thought without a lot of internal resistance. One level down is theta, which is sort of where we are. Not that often when we're awake, though you can have waking state theta, but REM sleep, the hypogic state. It's where you're going from idea to idea with no internal resistance, right? You're falling asleep and you're thinking about a green sweater you wore during the day and it turns into a green elephant and then turns into a green ocean and green planet, right?

That's theta. So flow takes place on the borderline between alpha and theta. So it's a lot different. Now, your brain actually pops all over the place when you're in that state, but it returns this baseline. And then neurochemically, we see stress hormones get flushed out of the system when you move into flow and four or five or six of the most potent performance enhancing, feel good neurochemicals the brain can produce, get shot into your system. There's physiological changes as well. We can now measure changes to heart rate and heart rate variability and facial expressions and facial muscles. There's a bunch of other things that we look for now when we try to figure out if people are in flow,

but those are the sort of the basic kind of neurobiological changes. So that's why when I said earlier, the scientific definition of flow is, an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best, the neurobiology and physiology that I've just been describing, that's what we mean, right? Like when we say flow, we're talking about very, very specific neurobiological changes, changes in the brain and the body that are very measurable and very distinct. And there's also like a potent shift of neurochemicals that strengthen motivation, creativity, and learning. Can you walk us through what neurochemicals are exactly and why this boost in neurochemicals is so addictive.

Yeah. So neurochemicals, as I said, are one of the two ways the brain communicates, right? They're signaling molecules. And typically, by the way, the brain isn't very fancy. It's kind of a binary engine. So usually what the signals are is do more of this thing or do less of this thing. That's really what neurochemicals do. But the neurochemicals you get in flow, norepinephrine, dopamine, endorphins,

possibly serotonin, possibly oxytocin. They're all performance-enhancing chemicals, first of all. So muscle reaction time speed up. They dead in pain. Strength increases. This is all stuff they're doing. But their biggest impact, as you pointed out, are cognitive, and their cognitive performance-enhancing chemicals. So their biggest impacts are motivation, learning, and creativity. And we'll start with motivation, because you hinted at that. these chemicals besides performance enhancement are pleasure drugs they're the brains a reward system right we are goal directed creatures human beings are and underpinning all this goal direction are rewards and underpinning all these rewards are feel good neurochemicals and just to give you an idea so romantic love when you've fallen in love before yes it's fun right really really really really fun right of course yeah all right so that fun

that racing heart that I can't stop thinking about, I can't stop smiling, blah, all that stuff, her, I don't know your preference, it doesn't matter. Small animals, don't care. Him. Doesn't matter to me, could care less. My point is that when we're falling in love, that is predominantly norephenephrine and dopamine. And this is not my work. This is Helen Fisher's work at Rutgers on this. But falling in love is most people's favorite experience, right? And that's only two of Flows, five neurochemical cocktails. These are really potent, potent, potent pleasures. drugs. So potent that researchers talk about flow is the most addictive state on earth. And if you want to see the performance side of that, McKinsey did a 10-year study of top business executives,

and they found that top executives are five times more productive in flow than out of flow. That's a 500% boost in productivity and motivation. That's what addictive dorochemistry can do. So one of the great things about flow is you're actually getting your own biology to work for you rather than against you. And this is what that means. So you're you're you. You can get this huge step function worth of change in motivation from flow. Similar thing happens in creativity. So creativity really gets jacked up in flow primarily because all these neurochemicals surround the creative process. They surround the brain's information processing machinery.

So in studies done by my organization, some done at Harvard, some done at the University of Sydney and Australia, we see that creativity spikes in about 400 to 700% in flow. And then Theresa Mabla at Harvard figured out that heightened creativity can outlast the flow state by a day, sometimes two. Huge boost in creativity. And learning, we see something very similar. Quick shorthand for how learning works in the brain, the more neurochemicals that show up during an experience, better chance that experience will go from short-term holding to long-term storage. Another thing that neurochemicals do, they tag experiences is critically important, save for later.

flow, which is this huge neurocomical dump, really magnifies learning. So in experiments run by the Department of Defense, we see learning will spike in flow some 230 percent. These are, again, huge, huge, huge change, very, very useful. Wow. So interesting. And it's so, you know, it makes you wonder, like, how do you actually get into a flow state? How do you take advantage of all these great things that you're saying and efficiencies that we can gain? I've read that there's preconditions or triggers that can help you get into flow. And with stats, like you just mentioned, that you could be 500% more productive. I know my listeners must be dying to know how to get your flow hacking tips. Yeah, it's, you know, it's interesting. A lot of what we do at the flow

research collective is train people up, right? We're a research and a training organization on the training side. You know, we work with everybody from kind of the U.S. special forces through big corporations, through the sort of the general public. And it's one of the clearest findings that showed up and it was counterintuitive to me I really didn't believe this in fact if you would come to me 10 years ago and been like Stephen what do you believe is absolutely true about flow and flow science and training and things like that I was at the state is really hard to train and it turns out I was wrong I mean I was really wrong and a lot of this is because you're getting your biology to work for you and rather they're against you but we get really spectacular

results and as you pointed out one of the ways we do this is by training people how to use flow triggers. So flow states have triggers, preconditions that lead to more flow. And there are about 22 that we know of. There's way more, I'm sure, but that's what we've got a really good beat on. So just neurobiologically, because I think if you're going to understand anything about high performance, cognitive literacy is really important. It's important to understand what's going on in your brain and your body when you're performing at your best. That way you can do more of it. It's repeatable. And so what these triggers do, they do one of three things. They either drive two different neurochemicals, norophenephyran and dopamine into your brain or they lower cognitive load.

Let me back up one step. Flow follows focus. It only shows up when all of our attention is in the right here, the right now. So that's what all these triggers do. They drive attention into the present moment. And as I mentioned a second ago, they do this in one or three ways. They either produce noropenephrine or dopamine, which, among their many functional, functions in the brain are big focusing drugs.

They drive attention to the right here, right now, and thus propel us into flow. Or they lower cognitive load. Cognitive load is all the crap you're trying to think about at any one time. And since your brain has a fixed energy budget, if I take away some of the stuff you're trying to pay attention to, if I lower cognitive load, you got more energy to pay attention to stuff in the present. So I'm liberating energy that you can re-spend on focus. So that's what these triggers do.

simplest trigger, you know, always the place I start. Can I swear on your podcast? Yes. Okay. We work with organizations. The very first thing I do is I said, look, if you can't hang a sign on your door that says, fuck off, I'm flowing, you can't do this work. You're sunk. Forget about it. And the reason is what the research shows is to maximize flow. You need 90 to 120-minute periods of uninterrupted concentration. And Tim Ferriss has argued that if you're working on anything really, really creative. And I think he's right on this, that at least a couple times a week, you should have like three, four, five hour really time luxurious stretches to focus on your work. And for me,

what this really means is I get up at four o'clock in the morning and I start writing. So from 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. every day I write. My phone is off. My email is off. My internet is off. In fact, all that stuff gets turned off at the end of the day the night before. So when I leave my office at the end of the day, Skype gets turned off, the internet gets turned off, email gets shut down, my phone, my landline gets unplugged, my cell phone gets turned off, all the lights get turned off, and I leave my computer in Focus View. So all I see are the words on a page. It's all I see. It's dark outside. There's nothing but words on a page. There's no contact, and that's what I do for four hours. Now, sometimes I'll turn, I actually will, and this is, it's worth pointing this out so people

don't get me wrong on this one. Sometimes what I'm writing requires research, right? Our director of research, Connor Murphy, is a coder and he works the same way when he's coding. He will flit all over the internet looking for bits of code and ideas and take this, that. I'll do the same thing with research, right? It's not to say that I totally keep my focus only on the writing. I will go elsewhere and do research and come back to the writing. That stuff happens. But I will stay focused on the task at hand, usually for four hours straight every morning. And really, that's what I've done for 30 years. It's really a foundational to peak performance.

And it's really hard, right? These days, especially for people who have fear of missing out, all that stuff, that shutting down that much every day is really weird to most people. It's really hard. It's hard for companies to do. A lot of companies we work with, they have house policies that say, you don't respond to this message in 15 minutes and this email in a half an hour, like you're fired kind of stuff, that's absolutely insane.

Yeah. I mean, literally it's a corporate policy that goes against our biological hardwiring. And we know when there's, you know, copious research, the late great Clifford Mass, or was at Stanford kind of proved this more than anybody else. The brain doesn't multitask. It just is not built for. It's not wired that way. You can sort of slowly over time, start to train that a tiny little bit, a little more than we thought,

but it really doesn't do it. So uninterrupting concentration is how we're built. You need to maximize that for flow. So that's absolutely the place you've got to start. Yeah. I think that's such a key point from my listeners. It's just that like if you have something super important to do, you need to just turn everything off and dedicate, like you said, 90 to 120 minutes

just to concentrate on your task at hand. And I know it sounds so simple, but for millennials, literally, I just feel like every five minutes we want to check our phone. We want to, you know, like we get the pings and the rings constantly. It's a dopamine addiction. Yeah. And the only way, so here's a fundamental truth. The only thing more powerful than neurochemistry is neurochemistry. Literally, you will not beat the little, like that little dopamine rush that you get when your phone buzzes in your pocket and there might be a message or a like or whatever, right? That's dopamine. That's a reward chemical. It's the same thing that's produced by cocaine, the most addictive drug on earth.

That's no joke. It's a real addiction. The only way to beat it is with a bigger addiction. So you're not going to be able to replace that desire until you actually start replacing it with the bigger successes that come from deep flow states, more neurochemistry, and that kind of reward success loop. And that's more powerful than the phone, right? So what you have to do is sort of you've got to run the experiment. You're going to be like, oh, I'm going to conduct this experiment for two weeks, three weeks, whatever, and see how I feel on the back end.

And I guarantee you you're going to feel better. There's going to be more flow. There's going to be more meaning. There's going to be more. It's going to be a richer experience. You're going to get more done. Yeah. Let's talk about another one of your triggers, novelty and complexity.

I thought this was really interesting. Well over 2,000 papers have been written on flow fairly recently, by the way. There's a lot of work, a lot of really, really, really smart people have contributed to this field and have thought about this. And the triggers – so this is built out of the work done by Robert Sapolsky at Stanford, who discovered that whenever the brain encounters novelty, complexity, and uncertainty, it produces large quantities of dopamine. And if you start getting like novelty and complexity together or novelty and unpredictability,

Spolski calls it the magic of maybe. The brain loves maybe. We love maybe. We love the thrum of possibility. It's a really, really, really addictive and you get a lot of dopamine from it. Huge, huge squirts of dopamine. So this is why, for example, you've had this experience yourself, I'm sure, where you've traveled and it's sort of like instant flow states.

Right? You find yourself you're walking around Italy or Greece or wherever the hell you go, upstate New Jersey. And it's totally new. And you find yourself in a low-grade flow state. And it's just kind of encountering novelty and unpredictability around every corner. It's driving dopamine into your brain. Pretty soon it's going to drive you into flow. Cool.

And then how about immediate feedback? This is Chick-Semey-Hy's work, one of those well-validated of flow triggers. And again, flow follows focus, right? So we pay the most attention of the task at hand when we know how we're doing, right? Where you don't have to wonder how am I doing. And so you can course correct in real time. This is why sports are so great at producing flow. Same thing with some of the arts, performing arts, and even some of the tactile arts, right?

The very, very, very immediate feedback. In fact, there's direct correlations between those professions that get the most feedback and performance and flow as well. surgeons, high flow activities, they get a lot of feedback, right? Like your patient dies on the table, you did a bad job, that's immediate feedback. But jobs that have a lot less satisfaction, like radiologists, they read radiological screens and they never even know what happens to their patient. So they can't improve. And there's not a lot of flow in their jobs because they're not getting enough feedback writing, for example, out of my own life. As publishing has shrunk over the past 20 years, editors have been able to do less and less editing. And so my, my

editors don't really edit me anymore. If I'm writing a book, if I get an editor to look at my book two or three times along the way, that's huge. That's big. And that doesn't work for me. I need feedback a couple times a week on my writing. In fact, I need somebody to read my writing aloud to me a couple times a week and provide feedback. So that's where I have somebody on my staff who does that because I need that kind of feedback. So I tell people, one of the best things you can do if you want to do this kind of work is find a feedback buddy at work, a friend, whatever. It's tricky to find the right criteria because everybody comes in with individual biases, right? So you have to learn how to steer and what you need to steer for, and everybody's going to be different.

You have to figure out what is the feedback that best drives you towards flow. I have not found a diagnostic that works for it. The only thing that I have found that works is when you find yourself in a deep flow state, One of the things to ask yourself is how much feedback did I receive along the way that got me here? You can only triangulate that way and what kind of feedback is most useful to you. Those are things you have to figure out for yourself, but immediate feedback is a great flow trigger. Yeah, and I think related to this, Jeff Bezos at Amazon, he institutionalized yes in order to create states of flow, where basically if somebody wanted to say no, they had to write like a two-page paper on why they said no.

You have done a lot of research into me. I have. You have. Yeah, so I talk about this a little bit. This is a group flow thing. So individual flow is you or me in flow, but we can also get into a flow state together. It's a team performing at their best. It's a fourth quarter comeback in football.

It's a great brainstorming session. It's a band coming together and when the music just sort of blows the roof off the stadium kind of thing. Right. So the basic group flow trigger is the first rule of improv, which is the first rule of improv, which always say yes, yes and. And so in improv, they say this because if you and I are doing improv and you say to me, hey, Stephen, there's a blue elephant in the bathroom. And I say, shut the fuck up. No, there's not. Well, that's not very funny and the story doesn't go anywhere. Right. Like, not funny. But if I say, oh, crap, I hope he's not using up all the toilet paper. Well, now we can

build a scene and it goes someplace exciting. Right. So conversations, idea generation needs to be additive, not argumentative. Now this doesn't mean you can't criticize. You can. In fact, in brainstorming sessions, brainstorming sessions that are all about yes and positive feedback don't work. You need to be critical, but you have to find something to be additive to build on to. And Jeff's point was that Amazon is so freaking easy, especially for middle managers who don't want to get in trouble to say no to things. And we need Group Flow to succeed that he instituted an institutional yes policy. So if you're at Amazon, Amazon and you want to say no, you've got to write a two-page memo and you've got to post it on the

company website about why you say no. So he can sort of work around this. And that, by the way, this is sort of what we've seen and what I've seen with kind of the organizations that are sort of good at flow stuff is this stuff has to sort of be baked in. It's hard to bolt it on afterwards. It's a lot easier when it's at the center of your culture sort of from the beginning. And I think this is, by the way, one of the advantages I see sort of with millennial companies, younger companies right now, they get this. This is not a question for them at all. So, you know, working with tech companies, I don't have to really even explain.

If they were ready to get it, they just want more of it. Whereas older companies, they need some more understanding around it before they're willing to kind of embrace some of these ideas. though I've done a couple big trainings recently into very conservative and very big law firms and I kind of figure if this stuff has spread, if you're reaching law firms and accountants, you're everywhere. It's mainstream. Okay, so let's continue and discuss about this idea of communitas and group flow. I'd love for you to just give some more examples of how this is so powerful and how teams can

work together to have group flow and be more impactful. at Yap, we have a super unique company culture. We're all about obsessive excellence. We even call ourselves scrappy hustlers. And I'm really picky when it comes to my employees. My team is growing every day. We're 60 people all over the world. And when it comes to hiring, I no longer feel overwhelmed by finding that perfect candidate,

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So working genius helps you uncover these genius gaps, helps you work better with your team, helps you reduce friction, helps you collaborate better, understand, why people are the way that they are. It's helped me restructure my team, put people in the spots that they're going to really excel, and it's also helped me in hiring. Working Genius is absolutely amazing. I'm obsessed with this model. So if you guys want to take the Working Genius assessment and get 20% off, you can use code profiting. Go to workinggenius.com. Again, that's workinggenius.com. Stop guessing. Start working in your genius. I wish there was a lot I could say here. It's sort of the black hole of flow research because it's very hard. We have no way of

measuring shared collective consciousness as of yet. Even a psychometric survey, I haven't seen a group flow survey that is well validated. So this is the very cutting edge of the field, really. But Keith Sawyer, who's brilliant, who's now at the University of North Carolina, spent 15 years working with Second City Television, which is sort of one of the big feeder comedy troops into Saturday Night Live, big improv comedy trip in Chicago and he observed and videotaped basically comedic improv for 10, 15 years straight to figure out what drove a group together. And he's come up with 10 triggers. I write about them at length in Rise of Superman or if you go to my website in the rabbit hole, you'll find

I think there's a group flow rabbit hole where I break them all down. But those are the triggers much in the same way. I mean, you know, complete concentration also exists for the group. Those sorts of things are true, always say yes is another one. There's some interesting ones that have more to do with how you build your teams than what the team can do together. And I think this is really tricky and interesting. One of the things that the research shows is that you sort of need everybody to be at roughly the same level of skill. For example, take a band, right? If the drummer doesn't have as much skills as the guitar players and the drummer's the guy who's keeping time and driving everything forward, the band is screwed. Right?

So everybody sort of has to be at the same sort of skill level to really maximize group flow. They also need a level of familiarity with one another. And what that's about is sort of common language, shared language so they can communicate really, really quickly and effectively. So those are, you know, a handful of basics there. Awesome. Well, very interesting. Moving on to part two of the interview. Most people know you from your work from Flow, your nonfiction book, The Rise of Superman.

But you're also a trained novelist, and your latest fiction is called The Last Tango in Cyberspace. So let's take the rest of the interview to talk about your new book. It's a near-term future thriller taking place five years from now. It's about the ramifications of future technology, the evolution and critical importance of empathy, and the impacts of consciousness expansion in an accelerated world. The protagonist is named Lion Zorn, and he is the first of his kind. Lion is an empathy tracker or an M tracker, and he can feel empathy much deeper than most, and he empathizes beyond humans, plants, animals, ecosystems, and so on.

He can even track cultural trends before they merge. Before we get in some of the main points of the book and how they relate into real life, tell us a bit more about the book in your own words, why you wrote it, what the name means, and so on. I wrote it because, as you pointed out, I've trained as a novelist, and I think I've written eight nonfiction books in a row or nine nonfiction, but some colossal number of books in a row. And I just miss the genre. It's really fun to be able to kind of create a world and tell a story. And sort of more importantly, I think this is both what the title means and sort of why I wrote the book. A lot of the books I've been writing, four of my past books, I've written fairly recently,

Abundance, Bold, Tomorrowland, and in a certain extent, stealing fire are all about disruptive technology and accelerating disruptive technology and the change that's coming. And, you know, those books have to make sense. So I do it one technology at a time and one innovation at the time. But that's not the future, right? The future is all these technologies at once, all these innovations at once. And people would often ask me, Stephen, you know, what do you think's coming? What's the future really like?

And I didn't have an answer to the question. And one of the main reasons is because I couldn't put it all together. And so that's one of the reasons I wanted to write this book is I wanted to put all the technologies together. So everything in the book is either real now, It exists in the world just probably not evenly distributed or it's in a lab somewhere. So there's only, I think, two technologies in the book that I made up for plot reasons and everything else is real. And one, I wanted to create a world and sort of like tell a story in that world and see what it was like.

And, you know, Last Tango in cyberspace is a fancy way of saying goodbye to something new, right? It's the end of something new. And in this case, what I'm really talking about is sort of the world as we know it, because that's what, you know, you quickly discover when you put all the technologies that are accelerating and emerging right now, if you put them together in one world and you spin the clock forward just a little bit, it becomes a staggeringly, shockingly different place to live. So that's where it started for me, is wanting to kind of create that world and put a story inside that world so everybody could get a sense of what's coming and how fast it's coming. Yeah. It's so fascinating that you

decided to write this book about the imminent future, just five years out. Like you mentioned, all the technology you wrote about in the book exists in lab or is rumored to exist. So what are some of the technologies that you talk about in the book? And how do you imagine five years from now to be? So that's an interesting question. I'll give you, you know, autonomous cars are everywhere in the book. Autonomous taxis are, you know, Uber and Lyft. They're all rolling out autonomous car companies this year. That's the technology that's coming very quickly. There's, augmented reality and virtual reality are both set to explode and with augmented reality it's really weird because they're literally like the technologies really haven't started showing up

but every major entertainment company advertising company is putting millions and millions and millions into the technology and they're using it to create an information layer that literally hovers between the you and the real world you put on a pair of glasses is going to show up so five years from now you're going to be walking down the street in new york you're going to put on on your glasses and it's going to be everything from like, you know, the buildings that you're walking by, their history is going to pop up. Or if you're hungry and you happen to like Chinese food, all the Chinese food restaurants on the street will start glowing orange and their menus were rejected into the sky kind of thing. Like all this is coming very, very, very quickly, very,

very soon. Flying cars, by the way, even though it's not a technology in the book, but earlier this year I wrote about this another book that's about to come out. Uber had their second annual flying car conference and it's because Uber wants flying taxis, autonomous flying taxis in Dallas, L.A. and a couple of other cities by 2023. So this is coming really, really, really quickly these kinds of things. Artificial intelligence is moving at ridiculous speeds. Quantum computing is moving at ridiculous speeds and only getting faster. So all these things, nanotechnology, biotechnology at levels. I'll give you a simple example from biotechnology. A little bit of this is in the book. six years ago, I got to hang out with U.Hare, who's the head of biomechatronics in MIT,

and he invented the world's first bionic body part. It's a bionic ankle. And at the time, it was so robust, soldiers were returning to combat in Afghanistan and Iraq wearing them. So really amazing bionic body part. That was six years ago. Today, 50% of the human body is replaceable with bionics. Within five more years, it could be 70, 80% of the human body. This stuff is moving very, very, very quickly. And, you know, some of the technologies that we, I explore in the book are consciousness-altering technologies. Those are also, as I, you know, I started working on this subject a little bit in stealing fire, but those things are exploding as well. And people don't think about that, but there's interspace technologies just like there's, you know, real-world technologies

and those are also accelerating. And some of them are like brain computer interfaces that are getting totally bizarre. I mean, in 2015, researchers in France, from Harvard researchers working in France, sent thoughts through the internet to a guy in India. And they used an EEG headset as a transcranial magnetic headset as a receiver. And they sent thoughts through the internet. That's pretty crazy. Brain communication, right? Brain to brain communication. That's start. People are working on that. millions and millions of dollars is flooding into it and billions of dollars at this point flooding into this stuff we're seeing the same thing with you know psychedelics is another example if you go back if you just think about until roughly the 80s there were about 10 different

consciousness altering substances available and think about how much culture they shaped think about how much culture alcohol caffeine THC nicotine ayahuasca psilocy handful of substances, how much they change culture. And then Alexander Shulgin came along and he invented 200 psychedelics in his lifetime. And now we're at the point where we're getting 3D chemical printers. So everybody gets to be at, you know, an at home psychopharmacologists if they want to. This is coming very, very quickly. So consciousness exploration is being facilitated by technological change and it's coming very, very quickly. That's so fascinating. Very interesting stuff. So like I mentioned before, the main character of your book, he's an empathy tracker. And at the heart of your book is this concept empathy for all. And I heard you go so far as saying that our survival going to the future is really dependent on empathy for all. And you don't just mean all humans. You mean empathy for plants, animals, ecosystems. Tell us about that. Yeah, it's a slightly complicated idea, not a quick answer, but really, really critical and really, really fundamental. By the way,

I think people are waking up to this idea as well. I don't think it's super radical. But let me tell you what I've talked about. Obviously, empathy is critical for humans, right? We're a globally interconnected world facing biosphere-wide problems, right? When we look at things like poverty, terrorism, water shortages, climate change, biodiversity, species, die off. These are global problems, right? So we're obviously going to have to work together as a globe to solve them.

That's going to absolutely require empathy to be able to get past our prejudices, our biases, and do that. But it goes beyond that. And for this to make sense, I have to talk a little bit more neuroscience. So every second of every day, the brain takes in tons of information. It's been estimated to be 400 billion bits of information every second. Huge number. Consciousness, meaning what you can pay attention. to is only 2,000 outputs. So huge 400 billion coming in, 2,000 are what we actually

get to see and construct the world out of. So a lot of what the brain does is it sift and it sorts and it tries to tease apart the critical from the casual. And since the first order of business is survival, the first stop all that incoming information makes is the amygdala. It's your danger detector. And so most of what gets through, most of what actually creates reality is stuff that is either we're scared of and we might want to run away from or we have basic survival functions and we run around towards food, sex, that sort of thing, or it's goal directed stuff. Very little gets through. So eco-psychology, which is a 50-year-old field, which studies the psychology of how people interact with the environment and the world, the

biosphere. And they will tell you that if you live in boxes and you stare at boxes all day long, the brain, by necessity, is going to filter out what is not essential, what is not fundamental, what you don't need to survive. And if you're staring at boxes and you're living in boxes, then the thing it filters out is the natural world. And this means, if you ask most psychologists, why are we in the middle of, you know, a giant environmental meltdown at a level that we've never seen before on this planet? They will tell you that most people can't even perceive the very thing they're trying to save. Literally, plants, animals, ecosystems, these things get filtered out of the brain.

It's standard biology. It's just what happens. Now, if we're going to survive climate change, if we're going to survive species die off. By the way, these threats are real. I don't know if you are following the numbers, but the UN just gave us 12 years to halt warming at 1.5 degrees, 2 degrees, or we face catastrophic, catastrophic destruction. Researchers out of Stanford said we have three generations to stop species die off. Otherwise, ecosystem services and by extension, life on this planet starts going the way. These are really eminent, hard, big threats.

Can you stop and just define what ecosystem services are? Because I don't think my listeners know, and it's so interesting. Yeah, it's such a great important point. So ecosystem services, this is why when you talk about plants, animals, and ecosystems, biodiversity matters so much. And so if you ask scientists and you say, hey, what of the crises we're now facing? Is it an AI waking up or is it global poverty in the gap between the rich and the poor? What scares you the most?

Pretty much every learned answer in the world is going to be the species die-off. And the reason is the web of life isn't a metaphor. It supports what are known as ecosystem services. These are all the things the planet does for us for free that we can't do for ourselves. These are everything from flood protection, disease protection, water filtration, pollination services, food production, wood production, climate stabilization. The list goes on and on. There are 36 of them in total. The value of them has been calculated at the low end minimum at like $41 trillion a year, which is more than half the global economy. So even if we wanted to, we couldn't pay for these things ourselves.

and we have no idea really how to recreate them. Ecosystems are complex systems. We just can't really work at that level. AI is starting to give us a little bit of leverage here, but we're nowhere near where we need to be to simulate anything as complicated as an ecosystem. So if we don't preserve plants, animals, and ecosystems, if we can't stop the sixth grade extinction,

then ecosystem services shut down and we go away. Right. I mean, we, you know, climate stabilization is one out of 36 ecosystem services. It's going away. And the result is climate change, right? The low end of the climate refugee spectrum with two degrees of warming played out over the next century, it shows something like 187 million people on the move. Climate refugees. The largest mass migration in history is the forced separation of Indian Pakistan. It was 20 million people. This is 187 million people at the low end of the devastation spectrum. We've never seen anything like it. So how do you fight back? What do you do? It starts with empathy. Empathy is a goddamn superpower. Rilke pointed this out.

Roka the poet who is most famous for writing Live the Questions, which is actually kind of at the fundamental idea in Last Hango in cyberspace. The idea is everywhere. But he talks about empathy is by superpower. And the reason is empathy literally expands perception. It lets you take in different bits of information per second and allows you taken more information per second. When you decide to empathize with a plant, with an animal,

with a person of a different color or a different sexuality that you've never been able to sort of cross that barrier before, once you do, what happens is perception literally unlocks and you will start noticing things that you didn't notice before. And I'll give you a simple example. Everybody can run this experiment. Don't take my word for it. Don't believe me.

If you have an animal or a plant in your life for the next two weeks, treat that animal or plant as if they were your brother or your sister, as if they had the exact same emotions, the exact same feelings, as if they were equal in value to the way you would treat a sibling who you loved to death. Do that for two weeks and then tell me what you've noticed different about the plant or the animal in your life. You're going to see information flood into your brain that you never had access to before. And you're literally going to be like, holy crap, like what just happened to me? That's empathy. It's a superpower. It literally changes perception.

And so if we cannot learn to empathize with plants, with animals, with ecosystems, we got a problem. And the other thing is the data backs up the argument. Let me give you two examples. Dogs. People drop dogs off at the shelter all the time, right? Oh, I got to move. I can't take my dog with them. I'm going to take them to a shelter.

Well, my wife and I run a dog sanctuary, and I can tell you that shelters in America, on average, youth, and I's 90% of the animals you drop off there. That in itself is massively alarming. It's about 10 to 20 million dogs a year. Here's what's really crazy. What we've learned about canine neuroscience over the past 10 years is that not only do dogs have all the same six basic emotions that humans have, humans have, they all of our social emotions. In fact, many of their social emotions are better developed than our own.

On top of that, average dog intelligence is roughly a three to four year old child. So all the same emotions, all the same pain receptors, all the same social emotions. and the intelligence is a three or four year old child. So the next time you go to think about dropping a dog off at a shelter, think about dropping your three-year-old daughter off at a shelter to be euthanized because that's what you're doing. That's what the research tells us. Here's where it gets really weird.

Plants, plant neuroscience is the cutting edge of neuroscience. Here's what we now know. We know that plants process information the same way humans do, using neurochemicals. Those same neurochemicals we were talking about earlier show up in plants. Plants exhibit empathy. They practice altruism. You can knock a plant out with a human anesthetic.

The hell are you knocking out, right? My point is that every time our measuring technology seems to get better, we tend to find consciousness. That has been what has happened. I'm not saying plants are conscious by any real definition we can use, but they might be. And it's an interesting question. And it's important to think about it that way. It's also important to start thinking about it upward the change. Hello, young improfitors.

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They're reading 60 to 120 data points a second off human faces and physiology. And they have to because if you're an autonomous taxi and you're driving down the road and there's a pedestrian and they're 100 yards ahead, if that pedestrian is angry, their chances of running into traffic and darting in front of your car are much, much greater than if they're calm. So the car has to be able to know. So we're using neural nets, which work the same way the brain works, and we're programming in emotional.

detection. You got to ask yourself, function creep being function creep, maybe we're not going to get to consciousness, but some level of sentient awareness that starts to be raised questions about respect and values and morality and ethics. And I'm not saying there are answers, but I'm saying we have to answer, we have to have the discussion. And we need to start having the discussion now, I think. So that's what all empathy. I told you, it wasn't a short answer, but it's kind of You went through like every point I was going to come up with that. So let's stick on AI. I know in your book, like you just mentioned, you talk about AI and how there's a fine line between, you know,

AI becoming awake and conscious and the progress that we're making in that area. So. I think you're totally right. And the line, people think the line is because Elon Musk and Stephen Hawkins got people all worked up about an AI becoming conscious and going rogue or something like that. And sure, maybe at some point, though I'm not going to wade too deep into that one, though I have some strong opinions about it, but they're just like anybody else's. They're just guesses. So I'm not going to weigh too deep into that one. What I am going to say is there's a different line that's a lot weirder and a lot earlier.

And that's the point at which we can't tell the difference between our machines being alive and not being alive. We all come with built-in life detection machinery. It's really foundational. And I'll give you an example. When you've had a party and afterwards, the house feels empty. There's an absence of life. You can feel the fact that life is emptied out of your house. You used to be crowded.

Now it's empty and the absence of life has a feeling. Presence of life has a feeling. We have built in life detection machinery. Motion reads his life. Agency reads his life. All these other things read as life. Our robots, our eyes are getting very good at breaching this gap. There's a term in robotics.

They call it the uncanny valley. This is a robot that almost but not quite mimics human and facial expressions and human behavior. And we can tell and we get queasy and nauseous. If we see something that is almost but not quite alive, it freaks us out. We have really bad reactions to it. By the way, you see the same thing in animals. If you have a dog, change your gate and do like a zombie walk around your dogs, dogs will go crazy because it looks alive but not quite right.

and they go crazy. We all come with this built-in life detection machinery and our machines are getting very good at tricking it. And that's interesting. Some of it is really, really good, right? Like Japan, for example, who is leading the charge into robotics. And one of the reasons is they have a massively aging population. They need people to take care of the elderly.

They don't have enough people. They're going to use robots and they need those robots to be able to make emotional connections. Otherwise, it's really bad for your health, right? This is simple. We all know this. So the robots are being programmed to do that. A couple years ago, I got to sit down with Ellie, the world's first AI psychologist. She was built at USC for early detection of soldier depression

and PTSD because they wanted to prevent soldier suicide. And it was built at USC. And it's like sitting with the regular psychologist. It's uncomfortable. They ask revealing questions. And like the LiDAR sensors in your car, you know, Ellie reads 60 at the time. It was five years ago.

It was 60 different data points a second. And she understood human emotion better than I did. That's crazy. It's scary, to be honest. It's really scary to think about, I know there will be a lot of advancement and, like, health care will be better and things like that. But it's scary to think about the fact that all of this is going to happen very quickly and it's already happening now. It is crazy fast. The way I like to explain it, and this is not going to make you feel any better, and I apologize for it.

But it's worth understanding this. And this is, again, where the title comes from last hang on cyberspace, the end of something. new. If I were to elaborate on it, what I would say is that Ray Kurzweil, who's the head of artificial intelligence at Google, and he's the guy who kind of created the original exponential growth charts for technology, and he's been very good at predicting where technology is going to be. He hasn't missed and he's been excellent at it. And he says that we are going to experience 20,000 years worth of technological change over the next 100 years. So what that means is, by the end of the century, we're going to go birth of agriculture to the Industrial Revolution,

twice in technological change to put it in a different context over the next 10 years we're going to experience about 100 years of technological change. So I want you to think about where the world was in 1919 and where it is today and think about how big of a shift that is and then assume that's where our planet is going to be by 2030. Wow. That's incredible. That's hard to believe, but the proof is in the pudding, I guess. The last topic from this book that I want to cover is counterculture. So another underlying theme you have is counterculture and the fracturing of our species. So tell us about the rise of counterculture, evolution, and why it matters.

Yeah, so there's slightly two separate discussions here, but we'll start with counterculture of evolution. So if you want to understand evolution and innovation and how culture progresses, you never want to focus on the center, the mainstream, on the center. of a system. In any system, it doesn't matter what we're talking about, the center of a system is too stable. Centers are designed for safety and stability. And so whenever you see innovation, innovation always happens at the edges. And in nature, right, if you're talking from an evolutionary perspective, we call this niche creation. If you're a business, we call it a skunk works, right? Don't innovate at the heart of the company. It's too difficult. Move the innovation to a separate unit, a skunk works, that is autonomous, self-reliant.

This is how innovation in every major corporation has essentially been done for the past 100 years. Skunkworks are great for this, and you have to do it that way. And in culture, we don't innovate it in the center of culture. We innovate at the edges. We call it subculture. And so if you want to track how culture is progressing,

you have to watch what's happening in subculture. And what's happening in subculture is mind-blowing. Because for the first time, so in the 90s, cable TV happened in the late 90s, the internet happened and for the very first time in history, subculture was made visible. I'm an old punk rocker. I grew up as a punk rocker in Cleveland, Ohio. At a time, there were like 2,000 weirdos in Cleveland, Ohio was in a fight almost every day. The time I was 13 and I was 17 because I had funny hair and earrings, right? The internet happens and suddenly it doesn't matter where

you live. It made it safe to have funny hair and earrings because online there were millions of people like you. If you were a shy, gay boy living in Pakistan 20 years ago, you were absolutely screwed. Now, you might be screwed a little bit, but you can get online and you can find millions of people who are just like you, right? So that was what happened first, and the next thing that happened is subcultures started blending together. So we're getting mash-up subcultures. In the book, I talk about this weird little subculture that shows up in southern Chile. They call it the Pokemon subculture, and I have no idea why. But they literally, like, they've blend East Coast emo-style goth haircuts with like Japanese cosplay, Guyuru makeup,

with West Coast American hip-hop gear. They've got Brit punk sneer attitudes, California bisexuality, etc., etc., etc. It's a mash-up subculture, and you're seeing more and more of this, right? You're seeing subcultures from India. The Mumbai tantras are a goth movement in Indian. India that started out, you know, it was sort of Brit and American goth culture that sort of made its way into Mexico and then into India. And so we're getting these hybrid countercultures that are mashing things up. Simultaneously, we're also starting to see the fracturing of the human species.

And this is happening in a lot of different ways. This is not that unusual. Historically, it's been pretty rare that there was one hominid species on the planet throughout history, right? evolutionary, from an evolutionary perspective, there's been a bunch of us here at once. The current thinking is that our species sort of hunted everybody else out of existence and we're the only one, but it's really rare that you're the only lineage and we're starting to fracture it. And this is taking place in all kinds of different ways. The most obvious way is through technology. We're taking control of evolution. CRISPR. We're literally altering, you know,

DNA and they've already in China, right? They use CRISPR to edit genomes of newborn children. So we're already doing this. You're also seeing it happen sort of naturally. I'll give you an example that I love, but this is very true. So people who are on the spectrum of autism and aspirers, their brains work a little bit differently from other people's, not better, not worse, different. And that comes with certain superpowers, whiz-bang math skills, for example, not always, but very common. And certain hindrances, social problems, right?

Normally, because of the social problems, if you were on the spectrum, you didn't really procreate, right? You weren't popular chances of getting a boyfriend, girlfriend, and procreating were less than a lot of other people's. Silicon Valley comes along and suddenly people on the spectrum who can focus really intensely for very long periods of time and have whiz-bang math skills, oh my God, we need you. Come here. Work for us. Have a job. Meet other people like you. Go to parties, be popular, have sex, have kids. On the spectrum, breeding with on the spectrum, generation after generation after generation, because it starts off with a slight difference in brain function,

you're going to end up with a new species. We are also leaving the planet this century, probably in the next 10 to 15 years. That's niche creation. That will cross more speciation. So we are starting to fracture the ecosystem. And one of the things I was looking at is empathy, because we know, by the way, for example, millennials are way more empathetic than their generation

above them. In fact, my generation, the empathy that my generation has at 50, millennials have at 30. And we know that empathy, there are changes in the brain. There are people I run a dog sanctuary. My wife is kind of an empath. Right. She has a very, very, very acute, deep, deep, thick sense of empathy, deeper than most people's. And it, you know, it's a hinder. and it's a help. And if she were to, you know, find other empas and they breed together for a handful of generations, you don't know what's coming next is my point. That's incredible. And then I think another interesting one that you talk about is synthetic biology and genetic modification. I don't know if this is exactly related, but it seems like it. Yeah. It is and it is. I mean, like the point I was

making, so I think this is really interesting and weird, but it's going on now. I don't even know how we think about it. So every generation has essentially outrebelled the previous generation. Now, rebellion is a built-in biological instinct. You have to leave the nest, get away from your family, because you need to spread the genes around. Otherwise, you've got inbreeding and it's bad. So we have a rebel instinct. And at a cultural level, it seems like every generation, at least from the 60s on, has tried to out-rebelle the previous generation. So in the 60s, that was long hair and bright clothing, right? And flowy bright clothing. In the 70s, punk came along, and the hair got a little more severe, and you started to see body modifications and tattoos, more permanent changes.

The next generation after that, grunge and the body modifications became really big and rave culture. Suddenly, facial piercings, stuff that's way beyond anything punk rockers were doing. And now the cutting edge is bio implants, right? You're seeing body modification, people, implant, technology into their body. Well, what's happening at the deep underground, synthetic biology allows us to program DNA. It uses DNA like computer code. And it's far along. Autodesk is a software company, Fortune 500 software company. They have a synthetic dialogy department because they believe 10 years from now we're not going to be coding in ones and zeros anymore. We're coding in DNA. And there are a lot of people who think this is the future of coding and the future of modification.

but there are already people who are using these technologies in the punk rock world in a sense to create human animal hybrids, people who wanted horns or tails or cat's eyes. And in the book, there's something called the Cat Eye Open Source Project that I'm joking a little bit about, but it's based on, you know, a group of people I met from Eastern Europe, Turkey, and a couple of other places, who are literally working on this. They want cat's eyes. It's like a vampire fetish club, right? They're vampires, they're goss.

They want cat's eyes. And so biology can give them that. And they're working on it. This is going to be the next form of rebellion. These are going to be tattoos and piercings 10 years from now, I think. That's crazy. And the sad thing is that I can definitely imagine this happening. Of course you can.

It's going to happen. You know, it's going to happen. Oh, my God. You know, we are now at a point where teenagers are switching sexes because they're wrongly identified. And that's happening at that level. Right. If that's happening at that level, and I'm not equating one sexuality, you know, with this rebel instinct. It's not a one-to-one thing here at all. But I am saying that, like, we are changing our bodies at deeper and deeper and more fundamental ways. It's becoming more acceptable to do this kind of stuff. And of course you're going to have punks with two heads and, you know, cat's eyes and anything else you could possibly imagine over the next 100 years as this stuff becomes possible. We're going to be walking around with robots. We can't tell if they're conscious or unconscious and, you know, half cat, half humans.

It's going to be interesting. Well, Stephen, this was so interesting. My mind is blown. Appreciate all your wisdom. Your latest book sounds amazing. I'm definitely going to link to it in our show notes so everybody knows where to find it. Where can our listeners go to find more about you and everything that you do? Yeah, the best place you can go is either www.

stephen cotler.com s t-e-e-v-en-k-o-t-l-e-r.com actually let's just stop there and let me tell your listener something because it'll be useful anything I talked about today if any of it sort of tweak your curiosity if you go to my website there's a section called the rabbit hole literally and you can find an exponential technology rabbit hole you can find an AI rabbit hole you flow is your thing you can find a rabbit hole that's called the frequently asked questions of flow so anything we've touched on there's a deep dive

free, lots of fun content, lots of video, lots of cool stuff. Awesome. How about social media? What's your favorite platform? You can find me everywhere. I tend to have conversations more on Twitter. I don't know why, but I'm everywhere. I'm not a huge social media fan, but you can find me everywhere, and I do pop up there

every now and again. Awesome. Well, thank you, Stephen. I really appreciate your time. Hey, it was my pleasure. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Young and Profiting Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to write us a review on Apple Podcasts or

wherever you listen to the show. Follow Yap on Instagram at Young and Profiting and check us out at Young and Profiting.com. And now you can chat live with us every single day on Yap Society on Slack. Check out our show notes or young and profiting.com for the registration link. You can find me on Instagram at Yap with Hala or LinkedIn. Just search for my name, Hala Taha. Big thanks to the YAP team for another successful episode. This week, I'd like to give a special shout out to PART. PARTH manages our YouTube channel and helps support social media efforts alongside Stebs. Our YouTube channel has seen tremendous growth and we couldn't have done it without him. Thanks for all that you do, Pars.

And shout out to Stebs for ramping up our social media efforts on Twitter. This is Hala, signing off.