Steven Kotler - How To Create And Leverage Flow States

When it comes to biohacking and pharmacological interventions, I always tell people, first look at a map of the human endocrine system, which looks like the New York subway system on acid. Right? Like, trying to say input A is going to produce output B way down at the bottom of the chain is ridiculous under most circumstances. The only three nutraceuticals or right that ever work are caffeine, nicotine, and marijuana, because we evolved with them.

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast with your boys, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear. What up, my friend?

What's up?

You gonna sing?

Of course I can. I just don't show it off for you.

Yeah, well, let's hear it.

I just did. You missed it. You were talking.

That was the singing for you.

For you.

There's vibrato in there or something. I think that's the term. I can't hear it in the headphones. I don't have headphones or. I know it would sound absolutely amazing to you.

All right, so today's episode was one that you and I have been super excited for for a while, and I don't think it disappointed either.

No, I want more. This is leaving me to actually even. He even left us with wanting more, and he was like, this is actually really cruel and I don't know why I should be doing it or something like that. But, yeah, he left us wanting a lot more, so maybe we'll bring him back in the future. But today, and this is one of those episodes that, like, there's just certain guests that I like personally want to prepare a lot more, but it's genuinely out of curiosity. I'm like, wow, there's a massive body of work from this person, and I'm super curious about everything they're doing that, like, I just want to dive in and it's just like, it's forcing someone. Like when someone like Steven Kotler comes onto our show or is booked, like, shit, I got two weeks go down the rabbit hole. Hardcore. This is one of those guys. It doesn't happen all the time, but Steven Kotler, man.

Yeah. I mean, this episode is like a mind bending episode. I mean, like, I was just getting takeaway after takeaway. So most of his work is in kind of a couple areas, flow and peak performance. And then the other is sort of futurism and converging technologies. And he does a lot of work with Peter Diamandis, and he has a new book called the Future Is Faster Than youn Think.

Correcto. Yes, minus the correcto. That's not part of the book. But yeah, Future is Faster Than youn Think. And it's. That's a co author with Peter du Mantis and super, super cool book. If you listen to some previous episodes that we've had, we've talked about technologies rapidly, just everything getting quicker in all these different categories, these niches. But the book has really taught and we don't go super deep in the book here, so I'm kind of telling you a little bit about it, and I think you definitely should get it. It's a part of their trilogy. Him and Peter wrote Abundance and then also Bold, and this is now the third book in that kind of trio. Maybe there will be more, but the future is faster than you think. We'll show how it's like you can actually combine these exponential technologies and systems and people and things and whatever, and stack them and why now? Things in freaking what? Flying cars, personal rockets, colonizing Mars, 3D printing, 3G around the world, VR blockchain, all these other banking, health care, food. Everything's changing, and it's like, changing so quick. And we get into Even with the COVID thing.

Yeah, we talk about that a bit.

Like vaccines.

Yeah.

Because no shit. Like, I was talking to a doctor and he was like, yeah, vaccines typically take like 10 years.

Yeah. No, this is one of those conversations where we got him on and we're like, okay, this is an opportunity to just, like, nerd out. So we kind of go in a lot of directions in this episode and just, you know, you could just hear us being fascinated by the conversation and wanting to go deeper. And so this is sort of a fly on the wall conversation of us talking about futurism. Flow.

A lot of flow talk, too. A lot of flow.

A lot of how to get into flow. How to. Can you get into flow synthetically using outside substances? He's got an answer for that.

Also. What are some other things we have our brains default to negative. So you're getting, especially in these stressful times, could be bad. But we talk about a lot of ways how to manage that which will get you into flow. And so you can use these constraints right now, like being locked in your house or whatever, as an amazing thing. Yeah. I talked about flow activities like your primary, secondary, and why your primary should never be your work. So if you don't know what that is, you better listen. A lot of cool things.

He also told us which country is leading the charge in drone technology. And that's just an open loop you're going to have to wait to hear because it's not from where you think. That sounded like a very clickbaity title, huh?

Well, it's true. It's in the episode, so we won't disappoint. We'll deliver.

It's there.

It's probably not what you thought, and a lot of things are benefiting from it, too.

Yeah.

Animals. Certain animals. We won't describe such because it'll give.

Much of a hint.

No, no animals. No, that's bra. There's animals everywhere. Come on. I didn't say what type. That would give it away. All right. I think. All right, man. I don't know what else to say. There's a lot to this episode. It's absolutely amazing.

I got to give these intros short, so let's keep this short.

I got to give a shout out to Lisa Byer and Will from Ojai, though. Like, they helped make this interview happen. They were mentioned. They are amazing people. Just got to give a shout out, so they're awesome. That's all. And they'll work together with Steven, too, so it's even cooler.

Yes.

Thank you, guys. And we're taking notes on this one, as we always do, so you can go grab them notes over@hustleandflowchart.com comp and we'll give you the Cliffs Notes trademarked by them, not us.

Yeah, it's definitely not ours. So go get the notes. Be quick. Let's go chat with Mr. Kotler. Stephen, we're live. How you doing?

I'm well. How are you guys doing?

Amazing. And it's great to see. You know, we have a video of you now. We've figured out the tech snafus with Zoom. Some of this exponential technology actually fix video chat, especially during COVID I mean, that would be nice.

I'm sure that's what the 5G stuff that's in the works is going to fix for us, but.

Right. It is. Right? I mean, like.

All we need is Elon to put up fast satellites. Faster. Yeah.

Going pretty damn quick right now.

It seems they are going really quick.

It's like a launch.

Yeah. Well, there's five. There's actually five. It may be six at this point. Different orbital constellations going up. Right. Including Google's loon. Right. Which right there launching. And you can right now. So that's suborbital. And there's five going up above that. That's, you know, I mean, it's. Everybody's they're talking about ubiquitous global 5G within a couple of years. And it looks like it.

It does, yeah. 100%. And then probably on Mars too. Way sooner than we thought too. It seems like all the countries.

That was next Thursday, right?

Yeah.

I thought I got a text.

I already have a reminder set up. Make sure out there in time.

I got an alert.

That's right. All right. It's fascinating time, man. And I think you're like right, right in the middle and it sounds like it's kind of engineer, but also obviously you had some background that got you to this point. So super fascinating. We've been looking forward to this conversation. And you're probably busier than ever too, I would assume, digesting all the information. How are things for you right now? Actually with. I feel like with COVID a lot of us are thinking of flow states of the tech and all the changes happening.

Yeah, it's a funny time.

The Flow Research collective is literally. We're busier than we've ever been. We're absolutely operating at capacity completely across the board. And we keep hiring people.

Which I think speaks to one the science around flow and around human peak performance. Our focus is on the building the best science based peak performance training in the world. And I think the, you know, group of 30 or 35 people who work with me to do this, I think we're, we're best in the world. There may be organizations that are as good with different folks in those roles. But I like, I'll take my team really on that one. And.

It'S so crises in general are really phenomenal for training peak performance. Right. We fear is ramped up and when fear is ramped up, norepinephrine is ramped up. And norepinephrine is foundational to learning. It's the first thing like when information comes into the brain, goes into a couple of places and goes to the amygdala, which is our threat detector. But before it even gets there, the front end of the amygdala, what's known as the lateral amygdala, has a bunch of norepinephrine and all it does is anything that shows up there. The brain is already determined. Oh, this is interesting. I should tag it. I may want to learn it and remember it for later. Norepinephrine is that tag that's heightened? The norepinephrine in our system is heightened during crises. It makes it easier to remember bad experiences. Right. We all know this because we learn from bad experiences, but it also Actually made it easier for habit change. Charles Duhigg wrote a little bit about that on the power of habit. There's a really great time for that. And a lot of the work from home challenges in a sense that people are facing, they're phenomenal for creating a high flow lifestyle. Like you've been forcefully put into a situation that it may feel like chaos, but if we give you a handful of tools, and I really mean a handful of tools, you can actually start to sculpt it and really use it for peak performance. So it's a really good time for doing this work. And I think people are recognizing that. And on the other side, you know, the work I do on the sort of exponential text singularity like that side of it, you know, Peter Diamandis, who I co wrote the new book Futures faster than you think with we were in New York in the day Faster launched was the day the news of COVID broke.

Oh my God.

So we were literally, we were in New York and like all, all the TV people are trying to figure out what is this thing, right? We're already, we were talking about it, I think three minutes after it happened, right? Peter's a doc, Peter's a doctor, right? So like people want to ask him questions. And I remember looking at him and we knew, because a virus is an exponential, right? So we knew what was coming maybe better than some of the other people. And I said, Peter, you know what this means for like two thirds of what we wrote about in our book? I was like, I think the future is faster than we thought.

Which is what happened, especially with certain healthcare longevity, certain. There's been explosions.

Oh yeah, yeah. And just with research alone with the vaccine, what I was actually talking to a doctor, not a vaccine type doctor, but he was like, typically it takes about 10 years from what I've found. And they're saying now by the end of the year.

So I tell people this, I was talking about this earlier on, I've been talking about it a lot, but I said that if you want to look at Covid, you got to look at three pandemics. You've got the first one, which is the real pandemic, the second one, which was the pandemic of fear unleashed by it, right? And we're still seeing that in various versions. And then you see the antidote pandemic, which is the pandemic of cooperation, right? And in the beginning this was nothing more than like science going up in every frickin neighborhood in the world that said like, need help need vegetables, need anything, I'm your neighbor, call me, right? Like that was every neighborhood you could possibly go to. So we saw that. We also saw the science community, as you pointed out, cooperating. Like science. You ever want to see what a true competitive environment looks like, Go to a science conference, right? Forget, forget football, forget basketball, forget sport, go to a frickin science conference. That's competition. So the fact that like scientists are sharing information, nations are sharing information, the result, to get to your exact point, I don't know what the number is today. The last time I was checked was about five weeks ago, but there were 81 vaccines and cures already in trials. As you pointed out, it takes one to $7 billion on average to get something that far to get it into that end of the pipeline. And it's a ten year developmental timetable. It's general now.

It's funny because a lot of what keeps that really slow, of all the things we're talking about in the book, and in that book, healthcare is actually challenged. Like Covid is fairly low hanging fruit for where we are technologically. It's really interesting because we're having a global problem that you can make a good case for. Will be gone completely 15 years from now, 10 years from now, right? Like all the technology to surround this problem and get to it before it ever turns into a threat like this again. We've got. It's now it's a question of scaling it up, but it's already here and we're seeing that this is the first display of that.

Yeah, this is. I love it. We just jumped in the deep and this is the shit that we wanted, man, and expected too. Because like I had this. I think it was keeping me up at night, just this like what happens after Covid? Like no one's even thinking about that really. Like we're so consumed. Like you just said with.

I will tell you something that I think is interesting also about that, that I don't think anybody's pointing out. And I also want to say, before I say something interesting, I don't work on culture, right? I work on the neurobiology of human peak performance. I write books, I run an animal sanctuary, right? Like I have really great knowledge on psychology, neuroscience, animals and writing. That's my expertise. And then I expand into exponential technology and that's the bandwidth. So I don't know shit about culture, I don't know shit about politics. But what I. One of the things that I have noticed is because you can't do the work that I'VE done with Singularity University and Peter. And without realizing that a lot of times when people talk about the gap between rich and poor that's widening and widening. Now there are millions of causes for that and a lot of them are not what I'm talking about. But a huge chunk of that nobody is looking at is the fact that. And the reason the middle class is so gutted is it's not about a rich, poor division. It's not about anything other than you can't keep up with technology. If you did not start to digitize your business in 1995, right? You didn't. You are not you, you have not kept up. And you know, as a guy who works with a lot of companies all the time, I can. You know what I mean? Very few people, right. Unless you're in Silicon Valley or trying to work like that, you're not doing this. Right. The entire middle class is a, is a middle class that they prefer safety and security. That's the whole point of the middle class. Like you're conservative, you like to conserve tradition. You want. Right. And as a result you tend not to be early adopters for technology. And you did not digitize your business. And as a result you're incredibly vulnerable. And the middle class, the middle class isn't going away, but the middle class that did not digitize is completely gone. And what is happening because of COVID is the middle class that has not really kept up with technology for 25 years suddenly has to. Is keep. So everybody is digitizing their business and we may again, I know nothing about culture, politics, right. Not my field. But what I am starting to see is a lot of people figure out what people have already done this. Wow. It's actually remarkably easy to work from home. Wow. This technology is really great. Wow. If I create a digital product, I can make a million of them and. And my cost is zero. Right. Like these are kind of foundational rules of doing business that way. And there's an entire middle class that is being forced to discover that. One thing that I think is going to happen after Covid is we're going to see the economy may wobble, all those things may happen, blah, blah, blah. But I think we're going to see a rebirth of the middle class because of this. Because we've got a situation that is forcing my 80 year old father to figure out how do you use Zoom? How do you sell life insurance? Right. Like all these things. He doesn't, he's 80 years old. He didn't want, you know, What?

I mean, he doesn't want to change now.

He didn't want to change and I mean, he was 55 when all this started. He didn't want to change then. Right? Like, I don't blame him. Yeah, that's, you know, it's a lot of years. It's a long time. I get it. But suddenly, you know, suddenly my mom is like, dude, texting is cool. Yeah. Yes, it is.

Did you figure out emojis yet? She did.

She's got. She got one of those customized emojis that sort of looks like it freaks me the fuck out.

I don't know what to tell her.

I don't know what to tell her.

You don't want to tell her to stop?

Okay, here's the weird thing. Here's the weird thing. So my mother is a 78 year old, wonderful ancient Jewish woman, and she sent me this customized emoji. I have a friend who's going to go name this year, but she's a 32 year old. She always has sort of reminded me of my mother a little bit in my dealings with her, but she's like 32 and she's got purple hair. And so my mother's emoji has silver hair, gray hair. This woman is sending me the same exact emoji customized emoji that my mother is using. Purple hair. 40 years. I don't even know what to say to them. I'm like, it's so creepy. I don't know what to do with it. It's really creepy.

Just maybe settle it in your mind and be like, yeah, this is.

I've been stalked by real stalkers before. That's frightening. Emoji stalkers, though. That's fucking next level.

Think about the trolls on that one, huh?

Yeah, the emoji stalkers really convey age very well either. They're all kind of very universal.

Matt, you've been. What do you got over there?

No, I was, I was going to make a comment about how I feel like the world after Covid is going to feel very similar to that movie Wall E where everybody's like fat and in chairs and all the food and entertainment is just like being fed to them. Like, that's sort of my fear of what's going to be like afterwards is because we're. We're sort of getting used to, like, everything's coming to us now. Like the world got so easy for us to just sit in our house, sit in front of our screens and have all this shit just brought to us. And I'M a little worried about the consequences of that.

One thing for sure. All the technologies. Right on. Faster. There's a lot of like drone pizza delivery, right. Robotic pizza delivery, which is Domino's is involved in, but it's really being like rolled out in Europe already and blah, all that stuff. Autonomous cars.

It's going so much faster. Right. We're going to have drone delivery across. I heard. This is. When I hear the. This is the craziest thing I've ever. Let me ask you, literally, I will give you any of my books signed, like a stack of them. If you can answer this, either of you. What country now leads the world in drone. In drones, Drone design, drone building, drone testing. Where is the hub of the drone universe right now?

It's obviously not somewhere that would be like the first to pop to mind.

I'm going to think, for some reason I'm thinking Israel, but then I'm going to like Belarus. Like some, like really off. Like some country. Yeah, yeah. I don't know.

For some reason, the first thing that popped in my head was like South Africa or something like that.

Oh, you're getting very close. It's Rwanda.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

And the reason is they've got no. First of all, there's no roads. 50% of the country has no roads. They need drones. Right? So the drone. A lot of the drone companies that were testing drones for medical supply delivery and emergency supply delivery, we're testing in places like Haiti and where there are no roads, there's no faa.

Well, also, aren't they kind of doing a lot of work in Africa to try to like, prevent poachers through drones?

Yes, that's the other reason. Poaching. That's the other reason. And there's no faa, so there's no overflight regulate. You can fly the fuckers. Fuckers anywhere. Right. So you can do all kinds of tests. So first of all, Africa skipped a whole generation and landlines went right to cell phones. Same thing with banking. Right? They went right to E banking and now they' to drone delivery. Like, they're bypassing roads, taxis, buses, trucks, all of it, and just jumping to drones. And I want to point out, by the way, when you talk about exponential entrepreneurship, that if I would have asked, the worst genocide in the world out Post World War II, essentially, was Rwanda. If you want to talk about exponential entrepreneurship in dire conditions, right. Like how it can work and what it can actually do. Holy crap. And the cool news, by the way, is the Veruga Mountains, which are in Rwanda. And have the mountain gorillas and have been. Their territory's been shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. And it's been a huge problem. A lot of the drone money is being repurposed into environmental causes. And now Rwanda's national parks are some of the best in Africa.

So true.

You're gonna have radical turnaround dice to this stuff.

So. Yeah. Yeah. Post Covid. It's interesting. Yeah. And what's cool with COVID I would assum now for the right perspective. And I think it's always funny when.

You start a statement.

What's cool with COVID Well, it's the constraints of it all. It's kind of the sounding of what I'm hearing you say is we're all constrained in some way, but it's up to us on how we use our constraints for better.

Everything we know about creativity research. Neuroscience of creativity research, innovation research I write about. I've got a book coming out in January. My new book on it's everything I've ever learned about peak performance is called the Art of Impossible. It's one book. There's obviously a lot of stuff on creativity. And we know limits drive creativity, right? Absolutely. Limits are phenomenal. In fact, nothing is worse than a blank page and no constraints. Right. You're screwed. Every great creative flowering, the Renaissance took place during that crazy time of upheaval. Shakespeare was writing in between plates.

Yeah, that's right.

People forget this, but like Shakespeare is what happened when they opened the theater after, like. Right. Why did he write so many goddamn plays? Because the theater was closed for three years as a play.

Only thing to do. Write plays and sleep with other people's wives. Write about in your plays.

Yeah, it's pretty fruitful.

Very creative period.

Yeah, I love it. Yeah. But again, it's like, it's how you use it. You could veg out and just demand food all the time and not learn how to maybe cook your own damn food and you know, maybe, you know, some. Some passion that you were trying to grow or skill, you know, don't veg out in front of the tv. Of course, but so many entrepreneurs that we've worked with, like they've. Now I feel like the good businesses have just gotten amazingly better, you know, exponentially better because they've kind of prepped themselves, like you said, since the 90s. But the other ones, it's quick to fall off right now. And it's.

It's like if you're like, I feel bad if you're in commercial real estate. Yeah, right. Like, I don't I don't know what to tell you to do. You know what I mean? I have. I've got like get out.

You know, somehow heliports. I mean, I mean.

Or start to, you know, be on the cutting edge of what is a. We can, I mean you can. We have bio sniffers. They exist. I mean they're not. This is not pie in the sky. We can sniff the air, we can sequence path it. You can build totally safe office buildings if you. These are your issues. We just haven't done it. So until that starts happening. That's a difficult business, right. For the people who are going to be on the cutting edge. What's the skyscraper of 2021? It's a whole new ballgame.

Could be 3D printed and even the construction company could be completely.

I mean that is the other thing, right? We talked about this in the book. There's this Chinese company who put up a. I'm going to get it wrong because I always, I always think it's smaller than it was. It's something like 139 story skyscraper in 19 days. They use modular construction and 3D printing and they built off. I want to say it was two stories a day or something like that. Maybe it was more 10 stories. It was some unfathomable. You know what I mean? Like you built a skyscraper in 19 days. 90 days. Less than a month. I like I've built that. I built an office once. I built like I wanted to build something with my bare hands. So I built like a 700 square foot office with a friend of mine over a summer. It was a great office and I worked out of it for a long time. But it took like us three freaking months a summer, you know, like all of our working 12 hour days. Right.

Just.

Hopefully you had some footage. Yeah. Just to tick a box. Right.

I think when I read the book Bold, one of the most fascinating things that came out of that book for me was the potential for 3D printing for satellites.

Right.

Like the ability to sort of like email a satellite to the ISS and then have them print it out and deploy it. Like that shit is crazy. That's what we're getting.

I mean Maiden Space is already there, right. So like in. But that was the difference. We introduced him in Bold but in faster. The fricking printer's up there and working and those micro swarm sats are printable at this point. It's. Yeah, it's. And for what it means for.

God. I guess I could see the words colonizing space out loud right now without seeing crazy.

I don't think you're a weirdo anymore.

For a long time you couldn't say something like that because like every outlet. Cause they're just like. And I'm like, no man know they're gonna do it. Whether there's.

Start with the moon, though, maybe not Mars, but the moon's a little bit.

And you know it's gonna be.

There's really good cases to be made. And this is sort of Bezos's plan also. Because he was influenced by the same guy that you just. You wanna build space stations, huge space stations. You don't actually. Planets are. Cause all kinds of problems. I obviously space is not in the same category as science, neuroscience, animal. The things I know about it, you know, I know what I know about from space. I learned from Peter Diamandis, though I did learn how to. I did learn. Somebody once taught me rocket science. They were like, I could teach you all of everything you need to know about rocket science in one sentence.

What?

And I was like. And it was a serious rocket. And I was like, okay, what is it? He's like, check it out. Big flame, small hole. Everything else is steering.

Okay, you win.

I understood rocket sight.

I got it.

Yeah, it's that and making sure the shit doesn't fall apart when you make the big flame go through the small hole.

Keep it together. Yeah.

The whole team of people. The Apollo 13, your shit from back home. When it goes wrong and you've got like duct tape, a thumbtack and a Tic Tac.

What do I do now? Oh, my God. All right, so I don't know how we got here, but I love it.

I'm not really letting you answer any question.

It's obvious this is how we flow anyway. We just like to see where the conversation naturally goes. So we're.

Yeah. And I mean at the top of this, like. Yeah, we have a bunch of entrepreneurs listening. They're going to be fascinated. This is just. Humans should be fascinated with this kind of stuff that we're chatting about right now. But yeah, entrepreneurs in general, of course, you have the flow. You go so deep on flow. How long have you been in that space now?

I started working on it in. I was just talking to Andy Newberg was my first mentor. He was at the University of Pennsylvania then he was a neuroscientist. And he. We were just talking about this and I. We think I called him in 99, which means I've been working on it for a year already or a little over. So nine since 97. Wow. So I'm. I guess I'm. It's a while.

You don't need to do the math.

It's a while not doing the math. Scaring me. 23 years. Yeah, 23 years. But.

The neuroscience has come so unbelievably far, I'll give you. Here's the classic example. So one of the things that the neuroscience has enabled us to do is figure out where flow states coming from, what's causing them, what's triggering them, and as the downstream of that. And this is the work we do at the Flow Research Collective, how to train them. So if you go back to the 1990s, like Flow, the original foundational work Mihaly Csiks and Mihalyi did in the 60s and 70s, he wrote beyond Boredom and Anxiety, which was his first book. I think it came out in 72, 74, 76. And it's.

Hold on for you listeners. He has a whole bookshelf behind him.

Yeah, sorry, I'm reaching and grabbing a book just so we know when this is.

Can you repeat his name?

I've heard it before, but yeah, it's Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Okay, gotcha.

And that was 75. So he must have started publishing that stuff in the late 60s. Right. So in other words, this work has been around for a really long time, even to the 90s. And if you look into the data where people could we train it using the psychology, which was very well advanced by that point, the hit rate was terrible. Terrible, Right. Best in the world at this stuff. And they had very, very, very little success. And what success they did have, they found they couldn't repeat it or anything else because the neuroscience, right. When I got involved, right, we had just done the very first. We. The field is just on the first work on the first imaging study that looked at one of the phenomenons that show up in flow was just done. And where we've come to now, when you go through any of our training, right, our digital deodorant dangerous training, we measure flow pre and post and we're seeing on average a 70 to 80% boost in flow. Our Kung fu is really good, but it's. I've always say this, when you're talking about peak performance, there's no such thing as a hack. There's only one thing. There's getting your biology to work for you rather than against you. That's the only thing you can do, right. And.

All this stuff, using the biology, you can get by the way, it's not always sustainable. There are problems. If you train up peak performers, they'll ever be able to get the 70, 80% boost. What happens is most normal people have a substantial return to baseline. It has nothing to do with flow. It has to do with the flow massively amplifies the motivation triad of drive, grid and goals, creativity and learning. But if you don't have super solid foundations, like if your grit skills aren't really frickin dialed in and your intrinsic motivators, like if curiosity doesn't point to passion doesn't point to purpose doesn't. Right. If it's not all lined up and stacked, if you don't know how to think creatively. Right. If you haven't practiced divergent thinking, if you haven't practiced finding multiple solutions to problems, if you haven't learned how to think about things from I could train up all the creativity in the fricking world in you. But if you don't have the skills, you don't have the skills. So what happens is if you do where people wobble is not the flow stuff. That because of the biology, we can really do something with that. It's. And we have the biology on the other stuff too. But those were that those tend to be the problems. The problem isn't around flow, though. If I give you a shit ton of flow and then sort of it cuts off because your grit skills aren't lined up right. Right. For example, I've just given you a ton of crack cocaine and then taken it away cold turkey. And it like it's a miserable experience. Right? It's why flow? This stuff, this work isn't for everybody. Everybody.

That answered one of your questions. Actually. I think the synthetic way to get in a flow. Well, crack cocaine. No, no, it's not.

So we just. I will get that there is no synthetic way. And I. But so let me two things on that one, you guys may feel differently and some people in this space get very offended with what I'm about to say. But I don't really care.

We offend our audience all the time.

So, okay, so when it comes to biohacking and pharmacological interventions, I always tell people, one, if you first look at a map of the human endocrine system, which looks like the New York subway system on acid, trying to say input A is going to produce output B way down at the bottom of the chain is ridiculous under most circumstances. The only three nutraceuticals that ever work are caffeine, nicotine, and marijuana because we evolved with them, we evolved with these plants, right? So like this is Michael Pollan's point in the Botany of Desire. We co evolve with them, they can work with our system. Those seem to be, those are the performance enhancing chemicals that we, that family that works. There's a couple other things. You can sort of mimic caffeine with taurine and do a couple other things. But as a general rule most out all the other stuff is sort of nonsense and you're just being lied to so people can sell you shit.

But what about microdosing psilocybin and things like that?

So I wrote about it in Stealing Fire. I personally am not a fan of microdosing. It makes me irritable, does not boost creativity, it doesn't do anything, it makes my chest hurt. It makes me irritable. So clearly not for everybody. Some people are getting astounding results. Astounding results. I know more sober, successful, wildly successful entrepreneurs, people like familiar names in the business community who have been microdosing every day for years. Right. I mean it's like, it's astounding and I don't like that. Clearly seems to work for some people. I personally would prefer for the same thing, marijuana. I think marijuana is a better drug for creativity. And certainly if you're interested in flow, this is what you had will on, right? So you probably talked about this.

Oh, hi.

Yeah, right, we know that. And this.

70 years of anecdotal evidence and starting to be actual real evidence because we're working on this at the collective. If you want a fake, like the fastest fake flow you could get is to combine about 20 minutes of light exercise. So it gets quiet up here, right? That's technically exercise induced transient hypofrontality. Front end of a flow state with I used to say high grade sativa. Now I say marijuana. That's very high in terpene, specifically limonene and a couple others that boost dopamine. Right. That's really an anandamine Amandamine. You'll get across the board from any strain. But what you're looking for is the anandamine coupled to the dopamine boost and a cup of coffee. Those three things they call it in exit sports, they call it the hippie speedball. They have for years, right. And it's, I mean. And action sport athletes have been using that combination, right? Let's do three warm up rounds on the hill. We'll go in, we'll get a cup of coffee and we'll smoke a fatty and we'll go back, right? Like that's, you know, cup of coffee and while on the chair lift we're smoking the fatty. And like, I mean people been doing this for Time Memorial and you know, there's a lot of neurobiology underneath it. It's not.

It'S not a one way ticket and it's not like. And there seem to be, besides the pharmacological work that we've been doing with Will and stuff like that, there seem to be in science there's a lot of what psychologists call moderators, if then conditions. So if goal seeking, for example, I'll give you one example. When you're setting high hard goals, a higher goal is the mid tier goal, right? You have your big massively transformative purpose. This is I want to save the world. And then your higher goal is I want to save the world by writing great books and cooking great food, right? So a higher goal might go to cooking school or learn how to write a level. Those kinds of higher goals for hi hard goals to be properly set, they have to be aligned with beliefs and values. Otherwise simply because one of the goals focus attention. And anything that gives you focus for free is phenomenal, right? Because we burn a lot of our energy on focus. So, so goals, one thing they do is they give us focus for free. But if it's not aligned with core beliefs and values, we're not going to pay as much attention to it. Right? Like because it's not us. So you can't really fake that shit at a biological level. You have to do it. So that's a moderator. I think one of the moderators that we're going to find around THC is if there's too much fear in the system. It won't, it won't. It doesn't seem to work. There's a woman who I work with, Heidi Williams, who works with the Collective, who at one point she called me and she was looking at the endocannabinoid system and she said so I have said for years that the endocannabinoid system promotes lateral thinking. Anandamide promotes the ability to find distant connections between ideas. And that is primarily based on the work done by an Italian guy named Greg Sammarini. A lot of people have tried to duplicate that since then. And no, it's, it's hard to prove. Is it exactly lateral thinking? Is it something else? Blah, blah, blah. So there's something that I thought was true for sure and wrote about it in a bunch of my books may not be exactly true the way unfortunately, that's the way science. Right. But Heidi, she's like, dude, I think the reason anandamide is boosting creativity is nothing more than nandamide lowers fear. And we know this. Like, it directly works on the amygdala and it lowers. She's like, I think you're just less afraid to find wacky connections between ideas. And that's what happens. And.

It'S not a bad answer. I don't know. My answer was, wow, that's really cool. Let's test that.

Maybe.

How do we test that? That's a really cool idea and we haven't taken the next step. But it's a really interesting question. And maybe that's why marijuana boosts creativity. Maybe it's nothing more than, like, fear abatement. I think there's something more going on.

Yeah. Because I mean, it could bring in factors like anxiety for the wrong reason, potentially.

Or we also know, for example, a good mood. So one of the best ways to have creativity is be in a good mood. And the reason is when you want to find alternative possibilities. The part of your brain that does that is the anterior cingulate cortex. And it can only do that if you feel safe and secure. You're not safe and secure. It's going to look for immediate solutions to your problem, right. If there's fear, cortisol, norepinephrine in the system, the az. Whoa. No, no, no. We're going to be logical, we're going to be linear. We're going to solve this fucking issue, right? But if you're totally safe and you don't have time constraints and your brain goes, oh, wow, I could just consider, blah, blah, blah, right? And that we don't think much of it, but we know, for example, all creatives, one of the things. When they image the brains of eminent creatives, people who have had a lifetime of creativity, they find a number of different things. One of the things that they find is that the brains are creative. Creative brains exhibit what is called latent inhibition. If you're a psychologist, you call it latent inhibition. If you're a neuroscientist, you call it repetition suppression. Either way is. I'll give you an example. So if I put you. If you suddenly move to San Francisco and you live at the base of Lombard street, the first time you walk by and you look up and it's all crooked, you notice everything. Oh, my God, look. It's so cool. The second time you look up, your brain actually you get a diminished response. If I were to look, the first time, neurons really fire. Second time, it's slightly diminished and your brain starts recreating some of it from memory, and it doesn't give you all the fun. And by the fourth or fifth time, it's just the shit that's blurring in the background when you go in to get your coffee, right? That's repetition suppression. So latent inhibition is when information comes into the brain. How long does it sit in your brain before you judge it, before you say it means this? Because the minute you say it means this. It can't mean that.

Yeah, you locked it into something.

Locked it into something. So create. Most people, it's really fast, right? People who have a long mindfulness practice, they get to slow that down a little bit. And in creative brains, you see it naturally slow down. This is why when you talk about beginner mind, when people say things like that, what they're really talking about is latent inhibition. That's the ability. It's the ability not to determine. This means this right away, just to. And the brain is so fast. If you can delay it just a second in brain speed and in what connections, right? That's a massive amount of chain. So that's what. That's one of the reasons mindfulness can boost creativity and blah, blah, blah. I don't have no idea how we got here.

I don't know. But that was one of the big star things on my sheet here that I want, because I've heard you talk about this. Well, okay, a couple things. There's fear in there. That came up. There's constraints. You said there's mindfulness. Seriously? Based off of my research on some of the latest things you've been doing, I noticed you were doubling down on mindfulness things like breathing. And I've literally swiped what you said on a couple podcasts. I think it's like, okay, five second inhale, 10 out, or ramp it up 10 in, 20 out. That shit has done wonders for me. Just in the moment. I've actually practiced it a little bit right here too, for the heck of it. And it just makes you feel good. You think, clear.

I'll give you a faster one, dude. This is from Dr. Andrew Neuberman. So if you look. Try to look at the far corners of your eyes. Like if you hold your fingers out to your side and try to see both of them at the same time.

Just do that and breathe and watch what it does to your nervous system. You got to try to see out the far edge of your eyes, feel yourself calming down.

Peripheral vision calms you down automatically. It activates the parasympathetic nervous system. You don't use your peripheral when you're under attack. When you're scared, you focus. It's laser focus. Right. So the minute you go to peripheral vision, it activates the parasympathetic. The rest and relax system immediately. And it's the fastest way we know of to do that. Interesting thing also, when you're processing information peripherally, this seems to happen in flow also. Right. If you've ever been in flow as an athlete, you tend to see a wider field of vision and. Right. It moves a lot slower.

They even say that too. A wider field of vision.

Yeah, exactly. It's because of this. And one of the interesting things is. And this is, is part of what happens in flow. When you're looking at things peripherally, you process information four times faster.

Whoa.

A lot of information processing takes place in the retina. People don't realize that, but your eyes are actually brain cells. Your eyes are part of your brain. They're just on the external side of it. They actually do information calculation. They're not passive in that way. They actually process a lot of data.

Yeah.

And people. You say that and people think it's really mechanistic and it's really not like. Or it's really. They said sounds really high fluid. It's not like how the brain works. It's really mechanistic. It's like filters. If there's this kind of light, it can pass through. If it's this kind of light, it can't pass through. Right. Like it's that mechanical. It's really, really basic at the level of the pattern recognition. But I have no idea how it got here.

I mean, it makes a lot of sense when you think about like the like real high speed, high danger sports. Like think of like, like motocross or something like that.

Right.

The rate at which they need to make decisions as they're moving around the track seems to need to be heightened.

I mean, highlight. The fricking ball goes 200 miles an hour. Right.

Scared the shit out of me.

Are you kidding me?

That's a good, very good point.

Moving it twice as fast as a fastball from a major league pitcher. Right.

I've done racquetball before and I scare the shit against stepdad who was like basically a pro at the time. Like, okay, no want to die.

I don't give a that you're beginner. You pretty much.

Thank you.

You missed the operate term there, which was Stepdad.

Yeah.

Very true, very true.

No, we got there. I mean there's. There's something else that I thought was so fascinating is that the brain defaults to negative. And I think you said it's nine to one, maybe six to one. It's like a range.

Yeah, that's. I mean, I, I want to. It is this. It's about 9 to 1 is the research that Shawn Achor did at Berkeley on this. Other people have looked at it, but it's really high. Six to one is what. Roughly what happens if you have a daily gratitude practice. That's what a gratitude practice does.

So it drops the negative side.

Yeah, yeah. It's because you're being thankful for things that are already true. Right. Your brain doesn't have to wonder. I am really happy that I woke up this morning feeling healthy. It already happened. Like it's a done deal. My brain. So your brain goes, oh, the world is a little less dangerous. And so it can start letting in more positives, which as creativity is always recommendatory, you need novel information. So if you're tuned towards the negative, you may be staying safer, but you're not. You create creatively, innovate. And your learning rates are going like so many things are going down. It's, you know, not that you want false. Like I'm not a you. The power of positive thinking is actually like, actually that's kind of dumb. You want to be optimistic, but you want to be realistic and that like you have to be both at once and that, that's sort of the kung fu stance and the like, you know, you. When you're trying to like, like water, you know, you're trying to put a. It's lipstick on a pig. And your brain notices. You can't lie to yourself. Right. You can tell the whole world, you can bullshit the entire world, but we all know the little voice in your head is going, shut the fuck up, man. That's just not ego. I mean, no, that's not your world, man. You're lying. You're lying to them.

It's a lot easier too, so you don't have to make shit up here. It's like, yeah, think about what happened yesterday or this morning. Like you said, just be thankful at the little things and start stacking them, you know, and you don't have to do the affirmations so much. I mean, if it works for you, I guess, cool. But that's almost future. Yeah, your make believe. You're kind of coming up with these not tangible things in the future. Though. Yeah. It's harder to trick your brain.

Well, it's, I mean it doesn't work. I mean, right. Like it may work for like visioneering works, but even that's difficult because the human brain has a very hard. We have very limited time horizons and there's specific. If you want to try to imagine 10 years in the future, there's specific techniques to use because our brain does not like to do it. It's very, very hard to plan that far in the future. I train people to have a, to have like two year time horizons, to think in two year increments. I think with today's technology pushing much beyond, like once you get past three years, I find it very hard to make any kind of real reliable prediction on anything.

So I think, especially after reading your book what's Happening, it's even more so. Well, I think he even said something there was like, the further you get out, the less you're attached to like yourself. So you're actually. Yeah.

Your medial part of your, this part of your brain, the middle of the, your forehead, the medial prefrontal cortex, it does a lot of different stuff, but it does creative self expression and helps us choose action plans and things along those lines. But when we think about ourselves, gets really active. When we think about other people, it gets very. It deactivates and the farther away the other person is. You know, if you think about your mom, it's going to shut down a little bit. You think about, you know, a friend a little bit more. You think about that woman you met at the grocery store two weeks ago, it's almost right. If you think about your future self five years from now, it's almost totally shut off. Your brain treats the person you're going to become as an absolute stranger. Which is why it's one of the reasons it's hard to plan for the future, hard to save for retirement, hard to get a prostate exam because just sign up, it's going to help future you, right?

Yeah, that's a good point.

Dudes.

As a guy who has to go get a colonoscopy next month, do it.

Yeah, we all kind of aim for gratification now, but never really think of the preventative shit that can affect us in the future. I'm curious when it comes to flow.

So when it comes to flow states, it feels like, at least from my perspective, you realize you were in flow after the fact, but you don't ever really kind of realize it in the middle of being in flow.

So there's a yes. So it depends.

Baseball players, golfers, skiers.

Where, like, there's time in between the things. So a skier doesn't know. You won't notice it on the hill. You'll notice it on the chairlift. Right. For a writer. Right. When I'm actually writing in it, I don't notice anything. Right. But when I pop up five minutes later for whatever for, then I'll feel it, and then I'll drop back in. Right. So you're right. And Martin Seligman, actually, from the University of Pennsylvania, one of the godfathers of positive psychology, pointed out inauthentic happiness. It's in the footnotes. He's talking about flow. And he said, you know, the interesting thing about flow is the state itself is emotionally neutral, like it's everybody's favorite experience, but the experience itself is emotionally neutral. Emotions steer behavior. Flow is defined as optimal performance. Right. Every action, every decision leads perfectly, effortlessly to the next. And you don't need to. You don't need to change. You're doing everything right. Right. So you don't need to modify behavior. So it's an affectively neutral state. And it's only on the back end. And there's. So there's. There's an argument. I don't know if I agree with it or don't agree with it, because I just don't think we know. But people have made the argument that. And the very back end of a flow state in that afterglow space, you get.

There'S people who have argued that it's serotonin. And we know you have a lot of dopamine on the front end of flow. And usually dopamine and serotonin are sort of antagonistic. They're not in the system at the same time. Right. As a general rule.

And so, you know, you have a ton of dopamine in the front end, but it seems that peaceful afterglow is serotonin that shows up after. As the dopamine starts to fade.

How the hell did I get here? You asked me a question.

No, so I was saying I looked.

At you, and you.

Sorry. Screwed you up. It's a speak microphone, right?

No, we were just kind of talking about how flow, from my perspective, you kind of realize it after the fact.

Oh, after the fact. Yeah. Okay. So Seligman said flow is affectively neutral. And we think. Think it's only if the serotonin shows up. That's maybe when more of the emotions start to show up. Is literally. That may be sort of part of it. But Most of it is, you know, you're even right. Your body sensation is gone, your sense of self is gone, Everything's gone except the thing that you're doing.

Yeah. So I'm curious, how do you actually like quantify flow for the sake of like researching it and studying it like.

Yeah, it's a great question. So there's so depends what level of scale you want to come in. Psychologists define flow and have since chicks at my high with six core phenomenological characteristics. So complete concentration in the present moment.

Time passing, time dilation, time passing strangely, self being diminished, the merger of action and awareness, so forth. So what we do when we give you a psychological questionnaire is you've got a like art scale, one through five, never to always and how much did you feel your sense of self disappear? Right. Those kinds of things. Now that has its limit. It's proved remarkably robust over time and it has really worked and led to a lot of breakthroughs. It's a little too soft and squishy for a lot of people, including us. So neurobiologically there's an entirely different definition of flow. Neurobiologically we are looking for things like deactivation of the prefrontal cortex, right. So less activity coming out of this part of the brain, except for this spot which gets hyperactive. Everything else, especially over here, very, very quiet brain waves will move down to the alpha theta borderline. So if we're looking for that, we're looking for five, well some combination of five neurochemicals. And now we're starting to get really good physiological data. So we know that for example cortisol, stress hormone goes up, doesn't shoot crazy high. But there's, it seems like so parasympathetic sympathetic activation. When the body wants to really fine tune a process, it doesn't give you one or the other, it gives you both at once. Right. So you can. Right, you'll have a better. If I've got a shower in my bathroom, my office, it's got one knob for hot and cold. I've got two knobs in my house, two knobs gives me more precise hot and cold than the frickin knob in my bathroom, that I have to stand there and adjust the whole time.

Same thing with the brain. If you want to really fine tune something, you want both states at once. That's what it seems that flow does. We know what some of your hormones are doing in flow. We know, we're doing some research to try to prove this again. But there's work that came out of the Carolinsk Institute, Sweden, that shows that your frowning muscles may be paralyzed in flow and your smile muscles may be hyperactive.

Whoa.

There's a heart rate variability signature for flow, et cetera, et cetera. So we're getting it really down to the physiological. What we're doing at the Collective. One of our is we're working on a device, a biophysical based flow detector that's going to combine.

Two different sets of neurobiological signals with some physiological signals and B. Elder House. And just to give you an idea how fast this shit is moving, I would have said, forget us doing it. I would have said 10 years ago, this is not going to happen in my lifetime. I would have said five years ago. It was a long way off. I think we're a year away in our organization and we're not the only people working with it. We're partnered with, with Adam Ghazali. He's at the University of California, San Francisco. He's got a whole research team that's taking a totally different approach to doing the same. Right. There's like three or four. There's a team at the Platypus Institute doing the same thing. They're coming in through a different angle. So we are. The flow is a measurable biophysical, neurobiological process in real time is like a year, year and a half, two years away. I mean, I could be totally fricking wrong because that's the way science can go, right? You think you're right there and it turns out it's 20 years out.

You forgot to look at this little detail.

There's a great. The first artificial Intelligence conference took place, I want to say, in 69. I'm going to get it wrong. Marvin Minsky helped host it. And they literally, it was held at MIT and they were like, oh, yeah, we think we're going to. We think we'll crack it over the course of a summer.

You're like, I don't know about that.

So is there a future where we have, like, wearables and we can like, see like, how long we spent in flow for the day?

Yeah, that's an interesting. That's actually.

Yeah, perhaps I don't see people ask me crazy tech questions all the time. And I don't. I always tell people I don't do substances and I don't do technology. The main reason I, you know, I. Every time I say this out loud, I guess most people don't nearly die as often as I have nearly Died.

You've been to some things.

Yeah, I was just talking about this with a friend of mine who's a professional action sport athlete this weekend. And like, we say stuff. I say stuff out loud that most people think is outrageous and to like, the community I'm in, it's like, okay, that was Monday, right. So I've been, you know, over the course of my journalism career, I was probably shot at four or five times, and at no time could I look at the guy wielding the gun. Like, excuse me, sir, would you put that down until I use this brainwave entrainment device and we wait for the microdose to hit so I can dodge your bullets. Shit just doesn't work that way.

Right, right, right.

In my experience, the times you need peak performance the most are the times you have like the least access to a technology or a substance when it's really. And so I'm interested in the psychological intervention that one work for everyone and are affordable for everyone. You know what I mean? Pharmacological solutions and technological solutions have. Are at least now until the tech gets cheaper, they're cost prohibitive for certain communities. And that's not interesting to me in general. I'd much rather like the biology works for everybody. Let's use that. Right? And it works in real. Right, like that's. I'm much more interested in that approach.

Yeah, no, you and I were talking before we hit record earlier about how, like, now is the time to focus on flow and the stuff that you're passionate about. What was the context of that?

Yeah, there was something that you said about the primary and secondary states of flow. And then maybe after this we could kind of start to wrap. But you. You were saying something that it's, you know, your, Your primary focus or flow is primary flow.

Activity is secondary flow.

Secondary.

Yeah. Yeah. So this is not. This is just terminology we. We have. This is not a. This is not standard in the in. And you'll never find it in the scientific literature. We use it, the collective, to describe a phenomenon that we've just seen over and over and over and over again. And people we work with, which is that everybody tends to have a primary flow activity, which is usually that thing you did in your childhood that you just got lost in for fucking ever. Right. Like for me it was skiing. For some people it was dancing. For some people it was. Right. And. Or if you don't tend to make your living this way later in life, it tends to be a creative activity. You play the guitar, you knit, you take Your pick, right? Those kinds of activities, that's a primary flow activity. And the reason they're so important is, first of all, when people get older and responsibilities start to happen, they're the first thing. It's the thing that goes. It's the thing we cut, right. And it's. From a performance standpoint, it is the literal, worst thing you could do for performance. One reason is flow is a focusing skill. Essentially. It's a specific way of focusing the brain. And the more flow you get. The brain's plastic, so the more flow you get, the more flow you get. Right. If I get into flow a lot while surfing, right. It translates literally the next day into more flow in the office. We also know that the. This is Teresa Amabile's work at Harvard. But the flow, the heightened creativity you get in flow, different people have different numbers. We've tried to measure it a bunch. It's usually between 400 and 700% of an increase. It's a huge increase in creativity.

Primarily in divergent thinking. But.

It lasts a day, sometimes two, after a flow state.

So that's the primary activity.

So if you go into your prior activity, that heightened creativity and some of the heightened motivation and definitely the heightened peace, like the calm, it's going to persist for a little bit. So that. But it also is the focusing skill. So. And in times of crises, like we're current, like, if you want more flow in your life in the middle of COVID and everything else that's going on in the world right now, if it is available to you in a safe way, meaning, like, you're not going to go get Covid to do this.

Double down on your primary flow activity. Because if you're super nervous, you've got a lot of shit is scary. This is actually. It's gonna be like putting on a familiar sweat jacket, right? So it's a really. It's a really good thing. And then there's your second. And you also, I have found, try not to work in your primary flow activity. It'll ruin it. It'll just ruin it. It won't be as flowy and it won't be as fun, right? And then, like, for me, writing is my secondary flow activity. I'll get like. I always say that, like, I go skiing, you have to usually have expert level skills for this to be true. But I've got expert level skills and I go skiing. And 95% of the time it's a flow state. There are usually two or three days a year that I don't get into any kind of flow state. And usually one is because I got an effect with my wife, and the other two times are because I've been traveling for weeks on end and I just don't. Like I haven't stayed in shape, you know what I mean? Like, physiologically, I'm just not. I need to sleep, I need to eat, I need to recover a little bit, blah, blah. But writing. 60 to 70% of time I get into flow when I'm writing, right? It's a secondary flow activity. Again, expert level skills. Because flow, it's automatized process. So if you don't have the expert level skills, that's why learning matters so much. You've got to keep being able to do that.

But yeah, no, that makes so much sense too, because I know so many people that are like really high achievers in business, but they surf every morning or they do jiu jitsu like five days a week. So I mean, that kind of ties.

Together, I will tell you. So this is something else we believe and we're starting to get more and more data on this, but it's gonna take long term studies. Executive burnout, right? Which is really difficult for everybody if you have a good active recovery protocol. Not passive recovery, right? Not TV and a beer, but like saunas, massage, Epsom salt baths, light restorative, yoga, breathing, all that active yoga. Active. If you have an active recovery practice and you are pursuing your primary flow activity at least once a week, provided.

You'Re. Provided you're not in a work condition. The number one cause of burnout is like, you work for a narcissist who is never gonna like your work right there. Like they're. Because that's what narcissists do, right? So like, unless you're. As long as you can get sort of consistent and steady feedback, right? As long as that. This is a business. How to burn out Proof your life. You will not burn out. If you have an active recovery protocol in place and a primary flow activity. We don't think you can burn out. Maybe you can, but it's as close to burnout proof as we can get you. And. Good God, is that a problem?

Oh, man. Yeah. Wow. I think we end it there because I think there's so much actionable stuff, man. Yeah. I mean, we can nerd out, but we won't right now. Yeah.

We're approaching the hour mark right now, so we want to be respectful of your time. I'm sure we could ask you questions for another three hours, but that's well.

Yeah, well something actually I think that you've said on some other places. But you have a flow blocker quiz that you mentioned in I.

Did you take it?

I did and it fricking nailed it. And it was actually a few things I was already working on collectively. I haven't taken it yet.

Joe pointed it to me right before we jumped on this call. So I'll do it after the call.

Yeah, for anybody who wants. It's we basically there's been a lot of work done on kind of what are the biggest blockers for flow. We have a pretty good list and then we added a bunch of our data. I think when we got to like the first thousand people we put through the course, I think we started to aggregate. That's when we started looking at this stuff or whatever it was a while ago. So we found the 10 biggest. Seems to be the 10 main flow blockers. Just built a diagnostic. It's flowresearchcollective.com flowblocker. Sweet. Totally free. And yeah it seems to be pretty damn effective for people.

Not only that, but the follow ups we won't go into but flow channel. When you talked about flow channel I think it was like first or second email, I was like holy shit, this just makes sense. Like especially as entrepreneurs you're trying to achieve so much. But then basically the long and short it seems like oh, you just gotta do like 4% better.

Yeah, you gotta do 4% better. And the other thing that I always tell people is.

If you're successful in anything like I don't mean if you're good at anything at a really deep level.

And by the way, if you're a good cat burglar, if you're a good gangster, this is probably true, right? Like just so just to the full spectrum had to get. There's only the biology. Right. There's nothing beyond the biology. So what we find is that when you start to train, like when people take our courses who are successful, whatever often most of what we're doing is just showing them they were stuff they were already doing anyways and saying here's the science and here's the framework. This is why you were doing these things. Here's how to do them a little more effect like that's right, that's it.

As far as I can tell though, we're not going to. There's a teaser and then I'm not going to. This is an awful thing to do to you guys. But as far as I can tell what we really mean by peak performance is six or seven things you have to do every day and about six things you have to do every week.

So it's got to be in the book, I'm assuming, right?

Yeah, it's going to be in the book. And I mean, but some of them are like, you know, some of them are no brainers. Like you have to get a good night's sleep every day. Right. And you know, you have to hydration, nutrition. It doesn't like, it doesn't have to be fancy.

A little bit endorphins, I'm sure.

Okay, we'll stop there.

So the latest book right now is the future is faster than you think. Can you what's the name of the upcoming book that you're referring to?

The Art of Impossible.

The Art of Impossible.

And it's coming out in January. January 15th. I think you had actually pre ordered. Now somebody, I haven't seen it. Somebody told me the COVID is up on Amazon and you can now pre order it. I haven't gone to look.

We have great researchers on our team, so we'll just have them source it for us. I'm sure we'll find it.

But seriously, I don't think nothing says Merry Christmas like the Art of Impossible.

I would agree with that. I would agree with that. All right, Steven, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you.

Thanks so much for tuning into that episode. I hope you dug it. I know Joe and I dug it. I actually kicked Joe out of the room. He's not here right now. Because I wanted to tell you about a tool that I really, really dig. We use it in our business. We recommend it all the time. It's called Easy Webinar and it's a tool that lets you do live webinars, automated webinars, hybrid webinars, and you know, pretty much any other kind of webinar if there are other kinds of webinars. But anyway, this tool is kind of like your all in one, do it all tool for anything webinar related. It's Easy Webinar. It's put out by a dude named Casey Z. He's been on the podcast. If you haven't listened to that episode, it's a killer episode. He's a really smart dude, but his software is amazing. It does everything. It's, you know, the title tells you exactly what it does. It's an easy webinar platform and we use this in our business to run automated webinars all the time. We don't do a lot of live webinars these days, we like to do the kind of automated webinars where somebody can register and then it, you know, they can either watch it like 15 minutes later or they can watch it the next day, but it's just kind of always running. And it's a system that helps us make autopilot sales off of our webinars. Super cool tool. If you haven't tried it yet, you know, it's an amazing tool. And Casey is actually hooking you up. He said for listeners of Hustle and Flowchart, I can't believe he's doing this, but he said for listeners of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast, he's giving 25% off of the membership to use Easy Webinar. It's already super, super inexpensive for what it does and all the cool features it has. But he's hooking you up with 25% off because you're a listener of Hustle and flowchart. Go to easywebinar.com hustle that's where you can get that 25% off discount. That's easywebinar.com hustole. It's a awesome tool. You're going to dig it, so just go grab it. Check it out. Easywebinar.com hustle See ya. No, not see ya. You'll hear me in the next show. I don't know. I don't know how to close these things. Go get Easy Webinar. Talk to you later. Thanks, everybody, for listening to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast, for taking the time to listen. We want to give you something a little bit special. Every single episode that we do, we actually have somebody on our team take notes. We basically have a Cliffs Notes version of every episode where you can go and find all of the tips and tactics that they laid out, all of the resources that they laid out, all the good stuff from this episode. We actually have have a nice, simple notes version that you can find on our website. So go to evergreenprofits.com find this episode that you just listened to and give us your email address and we'll send you the notes. Thanks for listening.

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