1720 - The Art of Impossible, Peak Performance by Steven Kotler

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Welcome to episode 1720. 1720 and you know what that means. Regular listeners. It is a 10th episode show where we talk about a topic of general interest. How you can be more successful, improve your life, enhance your life. And today we have a returning guest back on. Last time he was on he was not here for a 10th episode show but but this time he is and that is none other than best selling author Steven Kotler. To talk about flow, to talk about enhancing our lives in so many ways, just being more effective in general. So I think you'll really enjoy this interview. But before you do anything, at least make a mental note that you must go and register for our live conference. Yes, live in person conference. And that is empowered investor live. September 10th, 11th and 12th. On the 10th, that's a Friday, we are including a special property tour and that is included with your ticket to Empowered Investor Live. So Friday property Tour Saturday and Sunday, we have the conference all weekend. We have a fun event planned for Saturday evening and by the time this conference happens in about 40 days from now, it will be our first live event in all. Almost, not quite, but almost two years. Wow. I'm so excited to see everybody. Everybody's been asking for a live event and here it is. So we look forward to seeing you there. Go to empoweredinvestor.com to get your tier two early bird tickets. There's only several days left on that tier two for Early Bird. We had tier one sold out already. But hey, these are still a great deal still under the Early Bird pricing. So be sure to join us for that property tour included on Friday before the event. And I think it's going to be a really fun and exciting time. We have some great guest speakers coming in, property managers, local market specialists, content speakers, and we're going to be talking a lot about the hci, the Hartman Comparison Index. So really looking forward to seeing everybody there. I know so many of you have been saying when is our next live event? We've got to have another live event. And so hey, here we are. And it's in Orlando. Super easy to get to, tons of direct flights, very inexpensive, economical flights and a great place to visit. Be sure to book a few extra days. We've got a great room rate you can take advantage of at a beautiful resort hotel. This hotel actually has its own Wikipedia page. It's such a cool hotel. I love this place. You know, book a couple days on either side of the event. Bring your family if you want, go to the theme parks, Disney World, Epcot Center, Universal Studios, just a lot of great stuff do in Orlando and a really easy, just an easy trip to do. So we look forward to seeing you there. Empoweredinvestor.com and without further ado, let's get to our 10th episode guest. And by the way, on Wednesday we'll be back to a normal show talking about real estate. We're going to talk about sister cities and the way the migration patterns are happening post pandemic. We're going to be talking about the MLS system, the multiple listing service and why it is such a big deal to us as investors. I think you'll enjoy Wednesday's episode, but today we're going to talk about just being more effective in general with Steven Kotler. So here he is. It's my pleasure to welcome Steven Kotler back to the show he was on before, talking mostly about his Abundance book that he wrote with Peter Diamandis. And he is of course founder of the Flow Research Collective, one of the world's leading experts on the ultimate human performance and number one New York Times best selling author of Abundance the Future Is Better Than youn Think. He's the author of 14 books, so I won't have time to mention them all. But I have read, of course, Abundance. I've read the Rise of Superman, which is about decoding the science of ultimate human performance. And A Bold that he did with Peter Diamandis, how to Go Big, Create wealth and Impact the World. And really looking forward to hearing today about the future is faster than you think about converging technologies that are transforming business industries and our lives. And his newest book, the Art of the A Peak Performance Primer. Steven, welcome back. How are you?

I am well, Jason. Thanks for having me.

It's great to have you back. And you're coming to us from Northern Nevada and you must just Spend a ton of time writing because you just turn out just a huge body of work.

I love writing. I mean, I love what I do. Like I wake every day, it starts at 4 o' clock in the morning and I write till 8am no matter what. And then often I'll write, you know, other chunks of the day. But like, you know, I like to jokingly, but it's true. I've seen the sunrise every day for 30 years. Because if I write, I get up at 4 o' clock in the morning, you start writing it, you know, it's a habit of getting up that early one. I'm an action sport athlete. So you're surfing, you want to be in the waves by like 7am for dawn patrol. So you had to write ahead of time, whatever. But it just stuck with me. And yeah, if, you know, you write that much, you're going to produce that much. And I also came up in an era of like the. My cohorts who were journalists with me at the same time, Michael Lewis, Malcolm Ledwell, were productive. It was a productive generation of writers, I think.

Yeah, yeah, Good stuff, good stuff. Well, talk to us a little bit about the future is faster than you think. I'd like to start with that one. And then we'll get to your newest book, Art of the impossible. In reading Abundance years ago, there's so much pessimism out there, but really it feels like if you're looking at that graph right, you know, that we're at a hockey stick inflection point with technology. Would that be fair to say, or is that too optimistic?

Yeah, I mean, no. I mean. Well, it's not optimistic. Meaning it's true. It's not. I mean, you're talking about an exponential growth curve and abundance was about the fact that there are 11 at that point, 11 technologies all advancing on exponential growth curves. And that these technologies give us the ability to, for the first time ever, to tackle kind of global grand challenges. Poverty, energy shortages, healthcare crises and you know, that sort of stuff. Bold was a how to essentially, how do you take these ideas, use them in the world? How do you build companies around these hockey stick technologies? The new book, the future is faster than you think. What's different, what happened is, as you'll remember from abundance, we're really talking about individual exponential technologies. There's a chapter on energy and it's mostly about solar, et cetera, et cetera. There's a chapter on robotics. But what's happening now is these formerly independent lines of exponential technologies that are all Accelerating wildly. All they're starting to converge, overlap. And what you get as a whole is much greater than some of those parts effects. So now this is not optimism, this is what I say, this is the fact. Then we'll come back to where the optimism is going to come into play. The fact is Ray Kurzweil, who's sort of the smartest guy in the room on exponential technology and has been for a while, his predictions are very accurate. He has said we are going to experience roughly 20,000 years worth of technological change by the end of the 21st century. This means we're going birth of agricultural to the industrial revolution twice in the next 80 years. What it means is in the next 10 years we're going to experience about 100 years worth of technological change. So if you think back to 1921, fast forward to now, think about all the technological change that's happened. Compact that into about 10 years. That's Ray's prediction. That's what's happening with converging technology. That's what we're seeing. So what Peter and I did was we said, okay, if this is happening, let's go through all 11 of the major industries on earth, the biggest industries in the world, and let's plot what's going to happen over the next decade where like the optimism is more wealth is going to be created over the next 10 years and possibly has in the whole history of humanity. Opportunity is amazing. That said, if you are a legacy organization and you're trying to hold on to what was, you've got a big problem. Right, like so that's why I paused when you said it's very optimistic because we're wired that way. But if you're not embracing the idea that we have to learn to move very fast to keep pace with today's world, that's where it's pessimistic.

Yeah, right, good points. So I want to make sure that I ask you how you think that wealth that's coming, that will be created, will be distributed, Will it be very concentrated at the top? Will it be widely dispersed? And I certainly don't want central planners to distribute the wealth, I'm just saying by nature of the economy. But I want to make sure also I ask you for some examples of these convergences because is, yeah, let me.

Well, let me give you a great one because it's sort of, we opened the book with flying cars and flying cars. People have been fantasizing about flying cars for literally like 4,000 years. There's like you can Go back to ancient Hindu texts and they talk about flying chariots, right? Like this is an old fantasy. There are now 100 different flying car companies. In fact, the battery technology breakthrough that we've been waiting for to unlock all of them show, I saw the news release of it yesterday. So the point is that why did it take so goddamn long to get a flying car? Like, what's the deal? Flying cars are flying robots, right? Essentially they're AI controlled. So AI meets robotics inside the flying car because you can't fly a flying car that way. They have all kinds of radical new materials because they have to be durable enough for travel, yet light enough for lift. They have cutting edge battery technology that's a spinoff of the solar industry that allows for kind of the energy density and the lightweight that you need for a flying car. And I could go on. And there are about 11 different kind of technologies that all come together in flying cars.

Okay. So I could see there that we've, you know, we've got to have the computer technology needs to be fast at processing, needs to have an A.I. add on, maybe needs to be self driving. The whole thing needs to be maybe made out of graphene or some, you know, very high strength, low weight product. So yeah, there's a lot of convergence there, right? Yeah.

Here's the point. It's not just flying cars. We're also getting in the same decade, hyperloop. These are maglev trains, 700 miles an hour. Los Angeles, Las Vegas in 20 minutes. There are 25 different hyperloop projects in the globe right now. Elon Musk wants to repurpose his rockets that are going to get us to Mars in the 2000-30s for terrestrial space travel. Electric cars. I can go on. The point is that all of these things are converging on transportation. And this is going to have huge effects. The difference between abundance and now is an abundance. We would have a single exponential. And it's going to disrupt products and create opportunity. Like new products, new services, new markets.

And when you say abundance, you mean the book abundance?

The book abundance. Yeah, 2013, where you're talking about single exponentials or 2011, I think single exponentials. The opportunity was, oh, start a robotics company. Oh, let's start an AI company. Right now the opportunities are at the center of six, seven, eight different exponentials. And so you're getting. And it's not just the level of disruption has increased. So it's no longer just products, services and markets. Now institutions are really kind of foundational fabric of society stuff like if you live in Los Angeles and you can now go to Las Vegas in 25 minutes, which will be where we'll be by 2028 or so. How big is the local dating pool? How big is the local school district? Where do you do your banking? Where do you do your shopping? Right. Like really simple, basic how we organize our lives suddenly really changes, really expands.

Right. You know, Stephen, one of the things I often say is geography is less meaningful than it's ever been in human history.

I think that's smart. Yeah, yeah.

Because you know, when I say that, I'm talking about the self driving car coming and I'm talking about teleconferencing technology. Right. It's still meaning when it comes to the three or four blocks around your house, but once you get past that, that walkable area, it doesn't much matter. Yeah, it's really interesting. And Covid has even expanded on that or accelerated that idea even more.

Yeah, I think so too.

Can you give us maybe just another example of the convergence that is going to.

Yeah, I mean, I'll give you. So let me give you the one that I. When Peter and I started talking about this a while ago. But the thing I noticed that brought it to my attention when I was like, okay, this is interesting. I work at the Flow Research Collective on our board as a man named Adam Ghazali. Adam's a neuroscientist at ucsf and he created a video game that treats cognitive decline in older adults. Basically cognitive declined, about six different things that decline. He has found a way to reset two of them basically to where you are in 2020, put it into a video game. This video game, he made it. This was on the COVID of Nature four years ago, but it was approved by the FDA last year. So you can now go to the doct and get a script for go home and play this video game a couple hours a day. So a couple years ago I was giving a big talk to all the executives at NBC and they wanted to know what the future of convergent technologies looked like. And I told them about Adam's game. I said, look, you don't understand. Right now you think entertainment and health care are totally unrelated fields, and they are. But 10 years from now, are you going to the movies? Are you going to go to the movies? That makes you smarter or treats cognitive decline or is neuroprotective or play video games? And that's where this is going. And so that's a, that's an example of a mashup market. Right.

Interesting. Very interesting. Which, by the way, leads me to a question for you about neuralink. Are we getting close to that? You know, Musk demonstrated it on pigs several months ago.

So I. I think the neuralink work is amazing. I've been following where it started at Harvard and where it's going. And I will tell you, as a guy who works in neuroscience and works with a lot of the top neuroscientists in America, I don't know anyone, myself included, who hears his timetables and his predictions and thinks they're real. I think his technology is real and the development curve is at, like, it's there.

Well, he's famous for missing deadlines. We all know that.

That's what I mean. Like, I think his deadlines for this shit are off by a decade, if not more. But yeah, the technology is real and it's progressing. I also think there are going to be. As we start to scale this up into humans, you want to interface with the inner. Like, everything that consciousness does, everything the brain does, is it tries to filter out reality. We take 11 million inputs a second, come into our sentence senses. Consciousness is 2000 bits, and what you can actually pay attention to is under 300. So everything in our filter screen is in. Our brain is designed to filter out massive amounts of information. So I don't give a shit if Elon can hook my brain up to the cloud because he still hasn't dealt.

With the filter problem, okay? So it's how fast we can receive and process the information. I mean, we can think faster than we can listen. The typical speaker talks at, you know, 200 words a minute or something. We can process 600 words a minute or something like that. I've heard. But the neural link can't get it into us fast enough.

I mean, my point is, right? I have the World Wide Web on my phone. Do I need it in my head? Because there's the same biology that sits between my phone and me, which is I've got all these filters that process out external information, otherwise be overwhelmed by the amount of stuff, we'd be flooded. What would you pay attention to? What's important, what's not important? These same, all these issues exist. I know this so well because flow is the only time you can actually turn up the amount of information coming in through the brain that we can process. Flow amplifies all kinds, all the, all the kind of foundational information processing structures in the brain. So I'm well aware of, like, what are the bottlenecks? And it's not just me. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book flow in 1990.

I read years and years ago he.

Wrote about this bottleneck in 1990 in that book and other people have written about it since. So I like there are things like that where I think, okay, the thing you're talking about is kind of real. But I'm not saying these are unsolvable. I'm just saying these are puzzles. These are what we're gonna have to come to next. And I don't think think his timetable is accurate. I think we'll get there. I just think the timetable is crazy.

The distribution of the wealth. There will be a lot of wealth created with these new technologies and the convergence of them. Just huge amounts of new wealth. How will it be distributed?

So that's an interesting question.

Few big tech companies, no, not at all.

So we've made this really clear in bold and abundance and we reiterate it again and faster Exponential technologies follow a six. We call it the 60s of exponentials. Right? It's a very, very well established by now development cycle. And they start out, they're deceptive, they're small, they're weird, then they're disruptive. The last three are dematerialized, demonetized and democratized. So right, My smartphone has a million and a half dollars worth of 1980s technology in it for free. That technology has been demonetized, right. I don't have to go out and buy an ipod anymore. I don't have to go out and buy a camera or a video camera, blah blah, blah.

It's democratized because everybody has one.

Everybody has one, right? So this is, this, this happens with all these trends. So what you get with your money and what you start to get for free, like that is just like what's available to us from a goods and service perspective is going to continue to increase. 3D printers, democratize stuff, we're getting 3D printed houses, et cetera, et cetera. So all that is still coming, all that is still happen. I don't, when I look at like clearly there is a huge, right, there's a huge concentration of wealth right now. And some of that is legacy money, right? It's family money, it's generational. But the new wealth, the difference is not it's not a rich, it's a digital non digital and it's really about companies, it's not about individuals anymore. It's whole industries that haven't wanted to digitize, haven't wanted to step into the 21st century. And if you work in a non digital industry, you are suffering right now, without a doubt. If you work in a digital industry, you're not suffering. There's no wealth divide at all. The opportunities are amazing. There is a digital, non digital and it's not even about like personal technology anymore. It's about the actual kind of the app. So this, that will all really start to shift over the next 10 years because you're not going to be able to compete non digital. So I think that's going to start to. I hope that's going to start to shrink. You know, I think we'll start to see another generation of tech companies where, you know, there's concentrated power because there will always be a new industry and there will always be an industry leader. Right. And the VR version of Google, is it going to be Google or is it going to be some VR, AR version of Google that, you know, you know that search that takes over?

Well, certainly Facebook buying Oculus years ago, they're making big inroads and they might be the first to make it, you know, widely used. So that's interesting. But you know, certainly these big tech companies are, in my opinion, abusing their power dramatically. It's really. Especially lately. But that's a. Another subject.

I think it's absurd. I mean, I think it's absurd.

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. I mean, by the way, the fact that Apple.

You agree?

Well, the fact that, I mean, I love Apple. I've been a Mac fan since the beginning of time. Literally, I've owned every computer they've ever made. And yet I was looking at the.

My love for them has waned a lot recently.

They keep changing. Every time they put out a new phone, it has entirely new peripherals. So you have to buy.

Greedy.

They're just, they're just. I agree with you. I agree with you. That's my problem now is like that's. You're bad for the environment and you're scamming me.

They're terrible for the environment, they're outrageously expensive. And you know what? Frankly the other products have caught up quite a bit. You know, I mean that Microsoft Surface is a pretty awesome product, but I got my more than enough complaints about Microsoft and Bill Gates too. But you know, that's another discussion. I mean, look at. Nothing's perfect. It's just that this democratized angle, it, it would be really nice to see it kind of stay that way and go that way. But, but the, the leverage in tech is so massive that it's this Winner take all type of.

Of world.

You know, it's, it's just sort of the way capital formation works in this country. I don't think we're going to change that. But if you have a comment on that, great. But let's, let's switch gears to talk about your new book because you really mentioned a good thing about flow, allowing the information to come into you faster and how that state. But if you have a comment about the capital formation, feel free.

No, no, no, no. Let's jump to flow. I don't. I don't at all. That's not my expectation.

So the Art of the Impossible.

It's a peak performance primer and sort of like let's start. But what the hell do I mean by peak performance? Right, let's just start there and then we'll go into what the book is about. When I say peak performance, I don't mean anything other than getting your biology to work for you rather than against you. You that biology, especially if you're talking about businesses, a business wealth podcast. Cognitive peak performance, physical skills, mental skills. That is essentially a set of skills that we file under the heading of motivation. There's another set of skills under the heading of learning. There's another set of skills under the head of heading of creativity. And then finally flow. Flow is technically defined as an optimal state of consciousness or feel our best and perform our best. More specifically refers to any of those moments of rapt attention and total absorption when it's so focused on the task at hand, so focused on what you're doing, that everything else just seems to disappear and all aspects of performance tend to go through the roof. That's the entire suite of cognitive peak performance meaning.

And we've all felt that at one time or another, probably that we've been in a state of flow where things just work, they just happen. If you haven't read the Rise of Superman, which is a great exposure to this Stephen's prior book. Most of us have felt that state at one time or another, to one degree or another.

Some people, I mean, you've got. So it's universal. When I say all human beings are hardwired for peak performance, what I mean is flow is universal in humans and show it's actually universal in most mammals and all social mammals, including humans. We all can get into flow. The amplification is motivation. Productivity and grit are amplified about 500% above baseline. Learning is accelerated. This is worked on by the US Department of Defense soldiers in flow learn 250 to 500% faster than normal. Creativity and innovation spike 400 700%. Collaboration, cooperation, collaboration, communication and empathy. Why do you care about these skills? I've literally just listed off every single skill that experts agree you need to thrive in the 21st century. So that's the like and flow amplifies all of them significantly. But there's more to peak performance than just flow. I've written a bunch of books on flow. What I haven't done is taken the hard neurobiological research that we do at the Flow Research Collective on the science of peak performance and put it into a how to primer. This is start to finish how to apply the tools of cognitive peak performance to taking on hi hard challenges. What I call the book is essentially lessons learned from people who have done capital I impossible that which we thought could never be done. And this is in all domains, sports, science, technology, culture, et cetera. But it's meant to be applied by anybody who's interested in what I call lowercase I impossible, which those things we think are impossible for ourselves. I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, wanted to be a writer. From the time I was five or six years old, it was a blue collar steel mill town. I didn't know any writers. Know how you became a writer? There was no books, there was no Internet, there was no one to ask was a small lie impossible? Right. Arriving at poverty, small lie impossible. Becoming a successful entrepreneur or another small line possible coming world class at anything that you do. And because peak performance is nothing more than getting our biology work for us rather than against us, the toolkit is the same. If you want to go after capital I impossible, great. It's a suite of tools that start with motivation, go through flow, small I impossible, same thing. And if you just, if you listen to me, you're like, dude, forget about small I impossible capital. I just like what Monday to be a little bit better and easier and a little more productive and I want to get along better with my kids kind of thing. Well, it turns out the biology is the same. So that's what the art of impossible is about.

And so what are some of these steps? I mean, this is like a more practical tactical book, right?

Extremely practical, yeah.

What are some of the steps we can all use use to get into that flow state and take advantage of increased productivity.

So there's a sequence. Our biology was designed in a certain order, in a certain way. The sequence starts with motivation, goes through learning, goes through creativity, ends on flow. But if so, and you have to train up all these skills at the same time flow states. If you would like more flow in your life, one of the things we know is flow states have triggers, preconditions that lead to more, more flow. I won't go into too much detail from a neurobiological standpoint, but flow follows focus. It shows up when all of our attention is focused in the right here, right now. That's what these 22 triggers do. They drive our attention to the present moment. So if you want more flow in your life, these triggers are your toolkit. Now there's no simple way to train these things. Right. That's why at the Flair Research Collective we have an eight week training called Zero to Dangerous that we use to train people in this stuff. But I can tell you, and if you're interested, we send you through it with a PhD neuroscientist or psychologist is your coach. It's a thick, it's a lot of work. But we measure flow pre and post with the standard psychological instruments, the same ones that Miha chicks and AI developed, and we see a 70 to 80% increase in flow. So it's very trainable. The thing why you care about motivation, learning and creativity, these other things that are also amplified by flow. Flow is very trainable and you can actually massively increase the amount of flow in your life. It's not stable. Right. I can get a huge jump. I can teach you these tools to tell how they work and you can go out and apply them tomorrow and you'll a get a huge jump in the amount of flow in your life. But you can't sustain it over long periods of time unless you sort of. You have to learn to amplify that. Everything that flow amplifies. You also have to learn to kind of work with. It's like a, it's like think of a bottle T. You take a model T, I can soup up the engine, put in a turboster and go 200 miles an hour. But if it's still got those shitty skinny tires, it's going to explode sooner or later, right? Same thing.

Yeah. Okay, so can we, or would we want to be in a state of flow all the time or is that just inappropriate to even want? That is. Would that be unhealthy? Well, so would we always want to be.

Let's just start with. We have a term in the industry for, for being in flow all the time. We call that mania, sometimes schizophrenia. So yeah, you can't actually live in flow. There's no such thing. And like, and there's a bunch of like the new age community loves, oh, I want to live in flow. That's enlightenment. And actually you're totally wrong. Flow is a four stage cyc there. Yeah, there's neurobiology. There's different neurobiological changes underneath each stage. You have to move through the whole cycle to reboot into flow. And no, you don't want to live in a permanent flow state. Flow is phenomenal for a ton of stuff. But you know what turned off in flow? Long term planning. Risk taking goes way up. Long term planning has turned way off. And on top of that, your sense of morality and your sense of is also turned off. Flow's ethically neutral. Right. But I always like to point out that cat burglars are in flow. In fact, I just read a phenomenal paper by Chicks at Me High that I'd never seen before from like the 90s, early 90s on Flow in school crime. So flow is. It's neutral. It could be used for good or for ill. If you go Back to the 50s, the literature on flow is all about war. It was soldiers in flow. So depending on how you're feeling is on, you know, the military industrial complex, you know what I mean? So. So you don't want to be there all the time. And for those reasons, there's a thing, a lot of marketers, a lot of the new age people, a lot of the self help gurus, they like to kind of put their customers into flow and sell them shit that's like, let me put you into an alternate state of consciousness and upsell you. This is a standard self help tactic. And I always say this is the most ethically dubious thing in the world because you're literally putting people into a state of consciousness where risk taking has turned way up, they're euphoric and they've got no long term plan planning. Right. Are you making good financial decisions when that's going on? You know what I mean?

I remember when I was a little kid, I went to this ant. My mom is an antique collector and I went to this expensive antique auction in LA where we lived. And I met Barbara Streisand who was there when I was a little kid. And it was interesting because it was unheard of at the time to have this big bar at the antique auction and it included free unlimited drinks. And so all the adults were drinking and bidding, you know, so their financial decisions were.

He.

He got people into a different kind of.

Yeah, no, I mean, it's just. But it's the same problem. It's dopamine I mean, it flows worse because it shuts off the prefrontal cortex, but booze will downregulate the prefrontal cortex as well. So actually, yeah, I don't know which is worse.

Yeah, right, right, yeah, interesting. And that's why, you know, people in sexually excited stages, they take huge risk and make terrible decisions. Right. So, you know, we don't need to talk about that. But you know, yeah, I think everybody gets it. Can you connect this with, with another book of yours that I really enjoyed, that I also read called Stealing Fire and that's about, you know, this peak state. Is that the same as flow or is that flow being introduced by outside?

So Stealing Fire, there's a suite of human experiences that all are north of happy. Okay. So flow states are up there, trance states, ecstatic states, out of body experiences. Like we understand neurobiologically what causes all these things. Dreams. These are all north, the happy, altered states experiences. They share psychedelic states as well. They share similar overlapping neurobiological mechanisms. So flow, when we define flow neurobiologically, there's. And physiologically there's 11 different markers or 12 different markers, 13 different markers, depending on what you're calculating, that we will look for to say, ah, this is flow. There's overlap gap. Psychedelics share 6 of those markers. Meditative states share 9 of those markers, 10 of those markers. So the point that we were making is, hey, since the Enlightenment we've been sort of rational. Materialism has kind of ruled the roost. And we've had a very rational skills based approach to mastery, to progress, things like that. The skills we want in the 21st century, creativity, innovation, cooperation, collaboration. These are actually states of consciousness. When the brain wants to you to be more cooperative and collaborative, it floods pro social neurochemicals into your system and it turns up your pattern recognition skills so you can notice more of what other people are doing and you're friendlier.

And more open to them, remember names and faces even.

Yeah, that's right. There's a whole bunch of things that aren't skills and you can't train them like skills, they're states of consciousness. Flow is an example. Right. You have to shift your brain to shift states, to drop into flow, to unlock these skills. So where we are now kind of as a species is, oh, we've gotten really good at the skills acquisition side of this coin. Now we have to sort of like start working on the states. And that's sort of what we talked about in Stealing Fire. And Stealing Fire was Really a look at like all the different places in society and culture, whether it was like the US Navy SEALs or Silicon Valley executives or wherever where they were harnessing altered states to improve performance and productivity. And that was Stealing Fire. So flow was a part of it, but Stealing Fire was a slightly kind of bigger picture and it was more of a, I think a trend story than anything else.

Yeah, very interesting. Your work is just fantastic, Steven. So thank you for that. Any things you want to say, question I didn't ask you, just whatever you want to leave the listeners with as we wrap up.

Yeah, let me give them a gift because if you hear me talk about flow, you're like, okay, I want more flow in my life. What can I do? Right? And I don't want to take one of his classes yet. Go to www.flowblocker.com. there are six. It's probably more, but there's six major, well diagnosed blockers of flow. Things that stand between you and more flow. We built a diagnostic. So it's a free diagnostic. It's very well validated at this point. Tens of thousands of people have taken and gotten good results. It will tell you where you're at and then it'll email you a bunch of steps. And it's thick, it's robust. It's not like it's not a skimpy marketing thing. It's a, hey, we built a serious diagnostic because we wanted to help people and so that's out there.

Okay, so@flowblocker.com that's a three minute quiz, right?

It's about a 10 minute quiz. And I think, yeah, and then you get a bunch of information on the back end that includes, you know, action steps and videos and things like that that you can take to get that out of your way.

Excellent. Good stuff. Well, Steven, thank you so much for joining us today and we appreciate that and thanks for helping us pay attention to flow and being in that state more often when we need to.

Thanks, Jason. It was fun hanging out with you again. Good to see you.

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