Flow Expert: The Secret to Peak Focus, Creativity, and Performance

There's actually 12, 13 different things that AI is coming after. It's cognition, creativity. If you want to amplify divergent, super creative thinking, darkness. If you want to amplify logical linear thinking, light.

It's just a reminder that every expert was once a beginner, right? Every professional was once an amateur.

Flow makes you much more productive. Social media was coming for, in a sense, your mood and your attention. AI is coming for your creativity and cognition, which is much deeper and much bigger. I love AI. It's an amazing technology. It's phenomenal if you know what you're doing. But if you use it wrong, it will actually make you stupid. AI produces a fake group flow. It feels like group flow. It's actually closer to mania. Never, ever, ever let the AI start your thinking.

A lot of people are using AI as an offloading. Which is putting things in your calendar is great. Even technology is amazing, right? With her surrendering and that friction's not there, that challenge is not there.

One of the myths about when you see peak performance.

So today we have a return guest. He just got off stage. We are live at Limitless Live, and this is very special because your book's just sold out. Thank you. You've taken enough pictures with our audience because they love you. You spoke our event back in 2011 and 2000— wow, 2013 with Tony Hsieh in Vegas. These are, these are epic times. Welcome back to the show, Steven Kotler. He's spent decades basically studying what happens when human beings are playing and practicing and performing at the edge of their limits, right? And so we're going to go into the science of flow. Who doesn't want to feel their best and perform their best? All right, I want to crack some myths. also as well. He is the founder of the Flow Research Collective. He's written 17 books, many of them New York Times bestsellers. I mean, I could go on and on. He's a dear long-term friend, and thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me, Jim. Yeah, you're back.

You know, I've spent, uh, the past 4 days with you. I've seen you every day for the last 4 days. We've been doing, uh, a number of gatherings and, uh, and panels, and obviously you're here live at Limitless Live. Let's talk about flow. I mean, we haven't had this conversation for quite a few years, you and I. Um, I enjoyed, really enjoyed your last book.

Weird Gods.

Yeah, that was, that was a big one. And so I want to talk about a little bit about flow and focus. I want to make this extremely practical. I also want to, our audience is, is a little bit more sophisticated than the average audience, um, in terms of their background and their interest. Um, but what about a myth? I think a lot of people If you would, if they knew even what flow was, if you go on Main Street, they would think like, oh, this is what happens when the conditions are perfect, right? But what in your research, when people perform at a high, exceedingly high level under pressure, I mean, what are the ideal, you know, conditions for flow?

Oh, that's an interesting question. Okay. So Flow is optimal performance. And one of the things that we've learned, the field, we, over the past 25 years that my lab helped pioneer some of this work, is flow states have triggers, preconditions that lead to more flow. The most famous one is known as the challenge-skills balance. And let me back up one second and say flow follows focus. Yeah. It's a state of complete focus on the task at hand. So that's what all of these triggers do. There's 26 to 28. depending on how you count them. And we discovered there's way more, but that what they all share in common is they drive attention into the present moment onto the task at hand. So the most famous and often called the golden rule of flow is the challenge-skills balance. And it's the idea that we pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge of the task makes us stretch but not snap. Okay. So, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the godfather of flow psychology, actually teamed up with a Google mathematician, decades ago, and they figured out that the percentage difference between challenge and skills on average was about 4%. We took that into my lab, we beat on it for 10 years. I don't think we proved it. It's a hard thing to prove, but we never found anything that conflicted with it.

Wow.

4% is if you're shy, meek, timid, or not as great at the task, it's gonna be problematic 'cause it's just outside your comfort zone. If you're a hard-charging type, if you're an entrepreneur, you'll take on challenges that are 10, 20, 30% greater than your skillset. just because it wakes you up. Top athletes do that a lot also. And secret is to chunk down the task at hand. So it's 4%. Even if the task itself is 50% greater than your skill set, the thing you're doing right here, right now is 4%. So this is the myth. This is a long way of backing into your question. One of the myths about when you see peak performance, we think we're seeing somebody at the far edge of their abilities because it's the far edge of our abilities. Yeah, right. Laird Hamilton used to say this a lot. a big wave surfer. And Laird used to say, you know, people see me on a 50, 60-foot wave and they think, oh my God, wow, that's amazing. I could never do that. He's like, fine, but you didn't see me yesterday on a 49.5-foot wave, and the day before on a 49-foot wave, the day before that on a 40. You didn't see me back at Pipeline when I was a 4-year-old and my dad used to take me out and let me go swim around Pipeline, and like the lifeguards would come rescue him because he was a little like That's how people do it. You never see, very rarely do you see this huge jump in performance. You actually, what you're seeing is the next step. That's sort of what flow unlocks is the next, it's optimal performance, everything's at your best, but there's like a window for how hard it's gonna take you. And it's really more of a ladder that you climb from flow state to flow state to flow state. That's the ladder of complexity and performance anyways.

It's an example where people listening, they tend to compare themselves to people on social media or whatever, people they're admiring or people who built big businesses. And it's just a reminder that every expert was once a beginner, right? Every professional was once an amateur. But those incremental steps, the opposite would also be hard also, right? If the challenge is too low and the skill base is too high, you're not going to be very focused.

So we actually just published an article in Neural Image. It's a new— we found 12 different new ways for measuring flow in the brain. We published about it. One of the things that was interesting in this article What we're talking about, the challenge-skills balance, if you were to talk about emotionally, I would say the sweet spot, what's known as the flow channel, sits between boredom— there's not enough stimulation here, I'm not paying any attention— and anxiety and frustration. Whoa, way too much stimulation. I can't stop. So we've always thought it was equidistant between the two to get into flow. And what our research seems to suggest is that it is easier to go from frustration and anxiety into flow than from boredom into flow. Hmm. And the secret— frustration and anxiety is You've pushed too hard

and

then you back off. So you'll hear athletes always say, I want my training to be harder than my race, or I want my training to be harder than my fight, or whatever. So one of the reasons athletes are training, they're actually trying to push themselves to the very edge of that sweet spot. So when the competition shows up, it's actually easier. Right.

35 years ago, I did that same thing with mental training for speed reading. You know, if I, if I would train myself to read, you know, if I was reading super slow, I would get bored, not engaged. My mind would wander, all the things, fall asleep. And then, but I would train myself at exceedingly high levels, almost at that, that kind of anxiety limit. But then when I had to compete or perform, then I would scale it down and it was just lose your sense of self. You know, it feels that way.

You do it so the, the, where it stands out for me is As an athlete skiing, I ski with a lot of people who are former pros and whatever. And so I'm a writer, I'm a neuroscientist. I'm not a pro athlete. I'm good, but I'm not what they are. And so invariably, the whole day, I'm over my head. I'm over the challenge skill. I'm out of the challenge skills balance. And they'll get to be a point where I sort of split apart from the group. And we've been skiing the gnarliest stuff on the mountain. Now just back it off, like, 1 or 2 steps. That's when flow shows up. Always super, super consistent.

So then if somebody was going to design like a Tuesday and they wanted to create some ideal conditions for them—

I always start at the same place. First, you manicure the environment, then you give the brain a target, and then you figure out how to attack the problem. So complete concentration is a flow trigger. That means very specific things, but what it really means is Shut off your damn phone. Turn off your notifications. Shut off email. Hang a sign on your door. I like to tell companies to hang a sign on your door that says, fuck off, I'm flowing. I like to swear at that point so they get the point. You're not going to be more powerful than your devices. They're literally built to distract you. That's what they're designed to do. So you know this, of course, if you teach this. Shut all that stuff down. Batch your communications if you can. So you answer emails and messages, the work other people make for you early in the morning, late at End of the day, that those kinds of things limit communication channels. Have conversations in advance. Flow makes you much more productive, really amplifies performance and productivity, so you get more time back for the people who need you. They just got to leave you alone so you can focus and concentrate. Then the brain needs a target. So that's we've manicured the environment, right? Then the brain needs a target. Clear goals list, daily to-do list. Flow follows focus. All the flow triggers drive our attention in the present moment. A clear goals list says, "Oh, this is what I'm supposed to." focus on. This is what I'm not supposed— and this is what I'm supposed to ignore, and this is where I'm supposed to go from here to this one to this one. One, when you cross those things off, you get dopamine. That's added motivation. And one of the systems involved in flow, you always see the executive attention network and the goal-directed network working together. Those are the 2 main networks. The default mode network gets quiet. Those 2 networks tend to work together. At the front end of flow state, they're metastable. At the back end, they tend to be synchronous brain entrainment. Um, but it, it's a goal-directed state. Yeah. So if you give the brain a goal, that's what it wants anyways, to get into flow. You're working with your biology. That's the second part. The third part is I always tell people, on your, on your daily to-do list, if you can start your day with your hardest task first, biggest challenge, the biggest win for the day, One, and make sure it's your thing, not some work other people made for you, because you are more fired up to do your work. It's more aligned with your motivation, your purpose, your meaning. All that stuff matters more. So your hardest task of the day, the thing, if you finish it, you've won the day. And then the question is, how do you attack the challenge? And I just gave you that answer. The challenge-skills balance. So you want that task, whatever you're doing, about 4% greater than your skills. So let me give you an example from my own life as a writer. You've written books. When I start a book, I usually try to write like 500, 600 words a day. The reason I like that target is almost anybody writer can write about 350, 400 words, cuz that's about a single idea. Yeah. That's what it takes to communicate an idea. Then you have to transition to the next idea, which is always the hardest thing to do in writing, as you know. So it's about 4% greater than my sweet spot. It like, that's what that is. Now, in the middle of the book, I know more of what I'm doing. So 400 or 500 words a day? No, no, no. Now it's 700,000, 800,000 words a day. End of the book where I totally know where I'm going and most of the stuff's been done, 1,500 words a day. So you always have to remember the challenge-skill sweet spot. It's a moving target. If you went out partying the night before and are hungover and tired, it's probably 1%.

If

you've got a lot of trauma, illness, any of those things in your past, allostatic overload, shrinks the challenge skills spot a lot. So you have to sort of like read your energy level, read your recent history, and sort of set it accordingly. And no, it's just enough, as you pointed out, just hard enough that you're slightly challenged by it, but not overloaded.

And then what does your, that first stage in terms of your environment look like generally? If people are, you're going to paint a picture when you're writing, you know, to eliminate distractions.

Yeah, I wake, so I'm, As you know, a little nuts with this stuff. I'm an early riser to begin with, so I start my day at 3:30 or 4:00 a.m. every day. I've literally seen the sunrise every day for 30-some years at this point. I open the document I'm working on the night before. I put it in focus view, so it's literally just the words in black, and the lights stay off in my office. So if you want to amplify divergent, super creative thinking.

Yeah.

Darkness. If you want to amplify logical, linear thinking, really? Yeah. Light makes you convergent. If you want to do your taxes, turn on the lights. If you want to write fiction, turn them off. Really? Like quick hack. Not my work. John, Mark, Mark Beeman and John Coen, those 2 friends of mine at Drexel, they're experts on insight. They've done all the, all the foundational research on insight. So I like to keep the lights off. Everything is off the night before. There's one emergency channel that stays open for like

A

handful of people who love me, my managing director, my assistant, my chief of staff, and nobody else has that, can get in that channel. And so those are the only, like, you know, and only bug me if it's an emergency. And I work from 4 a.m. till 8 a.m., and then at 8 a.m.

No breaks.

No breaks. I will get it. Sometimes I'll get up. You know, there's a natural focusing window that's about 90 minutes long. It's just called a wake-alert cycle. So usually you find at the end of one of those cycles, what I will do is I will walk outside and I'll watch the sunrise for a little while, like just for a minute, and just do some deep breathing. I will definitely not do anything to activate my prefrontal cortex, my emotions. Never check social media, never be distracted. The reason I go outside is it's another creativity hack. A wide view, when we're right, wide field of view also increases insight and creativity.

Yeah.

So darkness, and then as it starts to turn light, Wide field of view. So,

yeah, a more narrow view is like, even if you're in threat, right, you're going to focus.

Yeah, because then fight or flight is directly in front of you. So you can trick the brain to calming yourself down. You know this, right? You deep breathe and you look at the world out of the corner of your eyes, and in a minute or so, you'll calm down because your brain goes, oh, look, you're using peripheral vision. There's no way you could be under attack. And it calms you down because it doesn't want to waste the energy to build stress chemicals.

That's interesting. That's another explanation for why we do these peripheral vision kind of to be able to take in more words when we're teaching people how to read faster, so they'll have less fixations because they're more relaxed and they could take in—

By the way, flow, this is very new research. One of the things people report in macroflow, the high end of the flow state where it's really intense, is this feeling like they can see out of the back of their heads, like they've got panoramic vision. What's happening in flow is you actually get peripheral vision. Your peripheral vision widens out And your focal vision is very attuned. So it's very rare to be able to see straight ahead and sideways at the same time. And in flow, you can do it. One of the reasons time passes so strangely in flow— there's a bunch of different reasons time passes strangely, but if time slows down, one of the things that's slowing it down is not the time slowing down. It's that your brain is going from super focal to wide and back again. And that produces a Time dilation effect.

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This is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's basic, like, what— how do we know we're in flow, right? What are the 6 conditions? Flow is— it's an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best. But that doesn't help, right? So more specifically, it's any of those moments of rapt attention and total absorption. We're so focused on the task at hand. Complete concentration is one of the characteristics of flow. Everything else starts to melt away. The next thing that happens is action and awareness start to merge. Right. That's the second characteristic of flow. The third, as you mentioned, your sense of self disappears, diminishes. Your inner critic gets really quiet. Time passes strangely. It's time distortion. We were just talking about it slowing down, which doesn't happen that frequently. If you've been in a car crash or action sports, it's a little more common. Usually it speeds up. You just get sucked into what you're doing and 5 hours go by. It feels like 5 minutes. Right. And there's that sense. There's a sense of control. You don't. Doesn't look like peak performance from the inside. From the inside, it looks like wow, I can control things I can't normally control. It's four o'clock in the morning, and my sentences are dancing all over the page. That doesn't usually happen when I write, but in flow it does. I'm controlling language, right? Or you know, on and on. Could be a business leader reading, leading a great business meeting, and suddenly, like instead of like checking their phone and being just everybody's on the same page. Ideas are bouncing off the walls, right?

So is that— there can be group flow?

Oh yeah. Group flow, shared collective, comes as an individual. And group flow comes in all kinds of varieties. Like if we get lost in a conversation, 2 hours go by, we don't— that's interpersonal flow. If it's a 4th quarter comeback in football or like a great improv theater performance or a band coming together, that's group flow. Team flow is group flow with a goal at the end of it. So you see team flow in work environments. a lot. And then scale. When you go to a rock concert, everybody's clapping in sync, or a political rally. That's communitas. That's group flow at scale. That was actually the earliest flow research. Early flow research was done by Goethe and Nietzsche, and they were trying to— this is great. A lot of early flow research in the 1800s was done in and around beer. Don't ask. Yeah.

Wow.

So the first flow work was done because they were trying to figure out what the hell happens to people at German beer festivals. They're like, yes, everybody gets drunk, but there's this change in consciousness in the crowd, and everybody started behaving like one singular organism rather than a bunch of drunk people. And what is that? And communitas is what that is. And so that was where flow research started with that very question. By the way, the challenge skills balance.

Yeah.

Founder of experimental psychology is Wilhelm Wundt. So he's German. He finds it, founds it in Germany. Germany, really? In America, it's William James. But Wilhelm Wundt comes first, and he is hired by a German beer manufacturer in the 1870s to figure out if there is a perfect amount of bitterness in beer. And what he figures out is it doesn't matter what the thing is— bitterness, loudness, it doesn't matter what the sense thing is. There's a threshold below which we're bored, we're not paying attention, we don't notice the stimulus. There's a sweet spot, the challenge skill sweet spot, the flow channel

where

we're fine. And there's a threshold above it that we can't stand. It produces anxiety. It's true for bitterness. It's true for the challenge skills. But that's in physiology. That's the Ehrckes-Dobson curve. This is one of the oldest findings in modern neuroscience and modern physiology. It's still called the flow channel. Yeah. We found it the first time in the 1870s. We found it again when we were studying fight or flight and the Ericsson curve in the 1910s and teens. And then it shows up again when Csikszentmihalyi— and by the way, this is when Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was doing the original flow research. When he was looking for optimal performance, he didn't find flow. He found the challenge-skills balance first, and that led him to flow. Like, he knew people were getting into a state, but what he noticed is Everybody was right in this sweet spot. That's what he found first. And if you read his original book, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, which is why it's called Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, because he was looking at that exact ratio. That was where the early research in flow came from. We found the trigger before we found the state.

Do you ever experience boredom yourself?

Not often. As a kid, I did. My parents are the children of immigrants. You know what that family, You get the weight of a lot of tradition. You get a lot of expectation. You get a lot of stuff, right? It weighs a lot. That goes away over time. Like, it went away over time a little bit, and there was more freedom. Absolutely convinced there was, like, a whole world going on that adults weren't telling me about. I was right. It was a lot, right? But I was really convinced that, like, there was a— it was more interesting elsewhere.

Right.

So I remember that as a kid, but I also remember solving it with art and performance. And that was sort of early flow for me, was trying to deal with boredom and anxiety, which I felt a lot of both unless I was immersed in things. And it was early stuff. It wasn't action sports at the time. We would jump our bikes off anything we possibly could. We were riding skateboards. We were building obstacle courses. That was what— you know what I mean? So that was the physical side. But I was— I started writing poetry when I was 4 years old. I started making art projects and designing things, games. I built a lot of games as a kid. And by the time I was 8 or 9, I was doing professional magic. And I was working by the time I was 11, doing birthday parties and bar mitzvahs and all the performing on stages. So, like, I just sort of rode risky athletic activity and creativity into flow. And that was sort of how I Navigated my childhood.

A lot of people are using AI as an offloading, which is putting things in your calendar is great. Using technologies, it's amazing, right? But what if, um, what if we're surrendering and that friction's not there? That challenge is not there.

Most people know about cognitive offloading, but if you, so I like to say we have one of the only labs in the world that's fully dedicated to how to use AI and not get stupid, right? That's one of the things we've been looking at. And I'll tell you the flow tie-in in a second. We'll come back to flow and AI in a second, and you'll understand why we're studying it. But there's actually 12, 13 different things that AI is coming after. It's cognition, creativity. Do you know you're less sympathetic, empathetic, and compassionate after you've used AI? So you need to do a resetting ritual. I like drawing. Drawing is a really good— like, you need a reset ritual. If you're going from AI to, I'm talking to my girlfriend, my spouse, my kids, my boss, Your tolerance for their disagreement with you, because the AIs are built to please us, right? And the feedback is really fast. So if your boss waits 5 seconds before he answers you and doesn't agree with you, you have less sympathy and tolerance and more aggression. And this is very well established, like 8 different studies.

So people are agitated because they're used to getting instant responses.

So much so, my lab is working With one of the top epidemiologists in America. He's at Vanderbilt. And the head of the UT Law School, Laura Fields, were writing an article about how AIs need to come with warning stickers like cigarettes. It's taking the challenge away, and you can't get into flow, and you can't learn without challenges. Sure. You know, right? If you look in the brain, you need a little bit of norepinephrine in the system that comes from challenge. To even learn. So all of these are— and by the way, I love AI. It's an amazing technology. It's phenomenal if you know what you're doing. But if you use it wrong, it will actually make you stupid. The way I always tell people, explain it, is I always like to say that we had soft skills in the 20th century, right? If I walked into a boardroom, I entered the business world in the late '80s, early '90s. I walked into a boardroom in 1990 and said, you know what we need in this company? We need some focus training, maybe some mindfulness. Maybe we're going to need a gratitude practice. We've got to roll out a gratitude practice, especially about the C-suite. We're going to need more flow, purpose. Do we all have a purpose? Are we aligned on purpose? You would have gotten laughed out of the room, and if you brought it up again, you would have gotten fired. Right? They were dismissible soft skills. In the 21st century, they're hard skills. And what I mean by that is they're mandatory. Because if you're not actively training creativity right now, AI is stealing your creativity. If you're not actively training cognition right now and protecting your cognition from AI, it's stealing it. If you're not actively training focus and attention, your cell phone, social media is stealing it. If you're not actively working against anxiety and depression, social media is pushing. So all these things that were optional in the 20th century, if you wanted to perform at your best, you did them. But It wasn't commonplace for everybody. You have to do them in the 21st century.

Non-negotiable.

Non-negotiables. So for reasons that are going to take too long to explain, flow is our favorite experience on the planet.

And you can't live in flow, right?

You can't live in flow. It's a cycle. So you move out of it and back into it, and the neurochemicals that produce the state have a shelf life and they'll burn out. A lot of the things that AI does, it agrees with you, it sees you, it provides very— feedback is a flow trigger, fast feedback, because focuses our attention in the present moment. And mastery is an innate driver, so we all want to get better. So feedback really works. We trust, we love flow and group flow better. They're our favorite experiences on Earth. And group flow, people prefer to flow. There's more research needed, but it seems like group flow's our favorite state on the planet. We also trust it extremely. And one of the reasons is, one, we trust flow because it's optimal performance and we're at our best. And you know, 2 brains are more creative, more innovative than one. So 2 people together. But if you and I are in flow together and I suddenly go off the reservation and start talking about flying pineapples from Mars, you're going to be like, Stephen, why don't you come back? And why don't we talk about flow some more? We can revisit them. You're going to error correct me. You're going to get my back. If you and I are playing jazz together and we're improving and I do a crazy sax solo and I go to Mars, you're going to find some melody that leads me back towards planet Earth, right? That's— we error correct for each other in group flow. We trust it a lot for that reason. AI produces a fake group flow.

Yeah.

It feels like group flow. It's actually closer to mania. And I always point out that the differences between mania and somebody who's snorted a lot of cocaine are negligible. And if you've ever spent any time around somebody who snorted a lot of cocaine, you know you get nonstop blather, nonstop ego, and not much good critical thinking at all because it messes up your brain. That's what's happening to people. So it's producing this fake group flow, and we trust it more. So now you're trusting a system that we know hallucinates, right? 5% to 10% of the time, the AI is hallucinating anyways. So you know it's doing that. And now the most trustworthy experience on Earth is being faked. So you have a deep level of trust, and none of it's deserved. So you have to really guard against that. And the other thing is, So one of the other things that happens is cognitive offloading, right, where the machine starts to think for you. It's also cognitive overloading. So if you think about when you and I were coming up, if we wanted to overload our brain with research, we'd have to go to the library, use the card catalog, gather books, scan through. It would take a day to get enough information around your topic to overload your brain. Yep. Even with Google search engines, they weren't great. It still took an hour or so to 2 hours. With an AI, you can do it in like 3 minutes.

Yeah.

Right? And so that can take you out for the entire day if you're not careful. So it's sort of a double-edged sword. And that fake flow leads into cognitive offloading a lot. I always tell people this. When social media showed up, whatever it was, Facebook, MySpace, whatever the first social media site you got on, for the first 2 weeks, You were giddy. You were dopamine high. You were like, oh my God, look at all these people I'm connected to. I am so safe. I've got so many friends. I'm never going to want for a date on Friday night again. I'll always be able to get a job. And like 2 weeks in, you were using it and you started to feel a little icky, a little lonely, a little weird afterwards, like you watched too much television or too much junk food. And we all ignored that. We all ignored that icky feeling that we were getting from social media. And What were we ignoring? The largest mental health crisis in history. That's what it felt like. That was the front end of the largest amount, and we ignored it. AI is giving you the same ick signal. You're getting it. If you work on AI too long or doing it the wrong way, you get that same icky signal. Social media was coming for, in a sense, your mood and your attention. That's what it was coming for. AI is coming for your creativity and cognition. Which is much deeper and much bigger. It's like nuclear power, right? Amazing energy, but it can blow us all up. It's the same kind of thing with AI.

Even, even the earliest technology, you know, fire could cook your food or could burn down your home. I mean, it's how it's used and managed. But if someone's listening right now, you brought awareness to things maybe that wasn't in their awareness, but then now they feel like they need to do something. I mean, the choice is not, not use technology. Right.

There's 4 things I like to teach people, like 4 practical bits. I just gave you one. Pay attention to the icky signal. If you feel it at all, put the machine away. That's time to walk away. This is the single most important thing I can say about AI. Oh, and I gave you the second one. Have a ritual when you're done using AI that resets you as a human.

Drawing or something.

One of the things, so you know this, if you're a speaker and you come off stage, it tends to put you in a fixed mindset. You've been an expert on stage, and that will put you in a fixed mindset, and you have to kick yourself back into a growth mindset. How do you do that? You ask people questions. You get curious about them. You stop talking about yourself. You turn off your ego, right? You have a humanizing ritual. If you've been a public speaker and you know this is going to happen, you don't want to sound like an egomaniac when you come off the stage.

Right.

Somebody comes to talk to you, you don't answer the question. You ask about them. Everybody does this who wants— that's what you're doing. So AI, you need a humanizing ritual when you come back. And I said, I like drawing. I like sketching for 5 minutes, just a little draw a tree for myself, whatever, something low friction. The most important thing I can always tell people is never, ever, ever, cardinal rule, let the AI start your thinking.

Yeah.

You write the first draft, you make the first art product because we have an associative cortex. So if you let it come do the first thinking, you've locked your brain out of the equation. Now the AI's getting smarter and you're not. You have to start the thinking. You need a ritual on the back end. I also think you've got to simultaneously train attention because the world doesn't provide feedback.

What would be an example of that?

Just at any attention training systems. Reading a book. Great attention training. Mindfulness. Great attention training. Vipassana. I like vipassana meditation and reading. You and I, we go in the same direction that way.

Someone watching this right now, and they are fascinated, as I imagine most of our community is, with your work, how can they stay connected? How can they go deeper in your work?

Books are everywhere.

Yeah,

right. Art of Impossible, sort of the flow book more than anything else.

Highly recommend it.

The new one is We Are as Gods, and that's sort of how flow and technology, a lot of the conversation we've been having. Those are the decent places to start. @StephenKotler on Instagram. My Instagram is literally just a how-to collection of great videos. And if you want to train with us, we have a brand new training after 25 years of work called Flow for the Many. And it was, how do you train really just ordinary folks into flow? A lot of our early work was with C-suite executives or top Navy SEALs, and it's sort of a different protocol. But I was interested in questions. I saw technological unemployment before other people, so I was interested. I knew whatever the solution to worker reskilling is, flow amplifies learning. So it's going to involve flow, right? We learn 250% above baseline, 230%. But baseline, depending on which numbers you're going from, in flow. And so it was very clear that it was going to be flow plus AI is how we're going to reskill people. But we were really looking at it for a long time, and I was looking at the question of how do you reskill truck drivers? Because they're going to lose their jobs to autonomous trucking, and that's the largest blue-collar workforce.

Yeah.

And so that was the question. Or a single mother raising 2 kids, working 3 jobs. This woman definitely needs more flow. How do you get her more flow? Or an entrepreneur. who, you know, you're starting out, you have no time. College athletes. These were all patient populations in a sense where I found that our training was awesome and seemed to work for almost everybody. But there was this big— there were gaps. So Flow for the Many was designed for that. So flow.stevencotler.com will get you to Flow for the Many. Find me on Instagram.

I love it. So, I mean, who doesn't want to feel their best and perform their best, especially in a world of AI rapid change? And I love this conversation, and I love this idea of just building your intelligence before you borrow from the AI, right?

For sure.

Then even when you wake up and you're focused, you're doing that deep work.

One last thing you got to say about this, because I think we were talking about this the other night, or this was a conversation here. I don't know if you were involved in it. It's very clear that the people who are most successful with AI, they're generalists more than specialists. But generalist is a bad word. The people who really thrive with AI have like 3 or 4 or 5 different things that they're pretty expert in, which is to say they're very, very well-read, in all honesty. First of all, to error-correct with AI and really advance it—

You need distinctions and schema. You need points of view. You need range, right?

Easiest way to get successful is to outread the motherfuckers. I've always said that. I think it's 3 times as true in an era of AI.

Especially now. I love it. We'll put all of the links that Steven Kotler mentioned in our show notes, as we always do, at jimkwik.com/notes. And thanks for being on the show, buddy.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, we'll see you on our next episode. Until then, be limitless.