Stealing Fire with Steven Kotler - Genius Network Episode #24

Welcome to the Genius Network Show. In this episode you'll discover the concepts of stealing fire, how Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs and maverick scientists are revolutionizing the way we live and work with Steven Kotler. Steven Kotler is a journalist, entrepreneur and New York Times best selling author. If you'd like access to the special resources and show notes for this episode, please visit geniusnetwork.com 24 that's geniusnetwork.com 2 4.

Hello everyone, this is Joe Polish and I have got my good friend Steven Kotler on the line with me and this is going to be a very exciting and fascinating discussion, I predict. So if you don't know who he is, let me give you a quick bio and we are going to get into the conversation. So Steven Kotler is the New York Times best selling author, award winning journalist and co founder and director of research for the Flow Genome Project. His books include the nonfiction works of Bold, the Rise of Superman, Abundance, A Small Furry Prayer west of Jesus and the novel the Angle Quickest for Flight. His work has been translated in over 30 languages and his articles have appeared in over 80 publications including the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, Wired, gq, Outside Popular Signs, Discover in the Wall Street Journal. He also writes Far Frontiers, a blog about technology and innovation for Forbes.com and is co founder of the Rancho de Chihuahua dog sanctuary in Northern New Mexico. So Step.

How are you Joseph? Always great to be with you.

Yes, yes. I don't know how many interviews we've done at this point, but we've done ones. For our first one we did with our buddy Peter Diamandis who you co authored two books with Abundance and Bold. We did that one at Singularity University. I don't know how many years ago that was. And then Rise of Superman and a bunch of other stuff in between. And your latest book, Stealing Fire. Here's the deal. I AM at page 192 and the book is.

Holy crap, you booked through that?

Yeah, as quickly as I could.

Wow.

And I'm so bummed because there's 236 pages and I was really trying my best to make it before we actually had the interview. But it is fascinating. I mean even the first couple of chapters, it is worth the admission price times 10 for people to pick up a copy of this book. So it's called Stealing How Silicon Valley, the Navy Seals and Maverick Scientists Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work. And there's so much fascinating stuff in this book that I wanted to get into that first though, you're an Interesting guy. And for people who may not know you, how do you describe who you are other than a writer and what you actually do other than write?

I do, by the way, still, you know, the words always come first for me, or maybe kind of creativity always comes first for me. So I always lead with that, I guess, in my brain. But most of what I do and most of what I've done for 30 years now is study what it does take to achieve the impossible. That's really been my core subject. And I've looked at it. You know, my book Tomorrowland, we looked at the people, the innovators turning science fiction into science fact. In Rise of Superman, it was action sport athletes pulling off impossible physical feats in abundance. It was entrepreneurs taking on impossible grand global challenges. And, you know, in Stealing Fire, it's a look at the world's most high performing organizations and individuals and poking into their secrets.

Yeah. So you know what? There's. I mean, there's a lot of reasons I could kind of maybe think of as to why you would go down this path, but why did you write this book? And how would you kind of easily summarize it because it is so dense with fascinating stuff. I mean, I could talk to you for a week about this. Just this book alone. It's so fascinating.

I'll give you the quick summary, the elevator summary, as I've come to think of it. Stephen Fire is a book about a $4 trillion underground revolution in people hacking consciousness to massively increase performance. That's what's at the core of the book. And where it came from was my work with Jamie Wheal, who I co wrote the book with and who was my partner in the Flow Genome project. And coming out of kind of Rise of Superman and Bold, kind of. Prior to that, we had been working with top performers who really faced, let's call them, competitive environments. So that was primarily the military, special forces, top athletes, that sort of thing coming out of those books. You know, we started to kind of bridge that gap between kind of the extreme and the mainstream. And I was working with all kinds of organizations, training them up. You know, a lot of the work we do is sort of getting people who are already top 10%, top 5%, into the top 1%. Right. That's. That's where we focus our energy and we, you know, we train people in flow, which is an altered state of consciousness where you feel your best and you perform your best. And most people are familiar with it at some level at this point. But if you're not. It refers to those in the zone. Moments of total absorption and rapt attention. You get so focused on what you're doing that everything else just disappears. Since the stealth disappears, time passes strangely, and all aspects of performance go through the roof. And we had been running around the country talking to a wider and wider assortment of people. It would be Navy seals, would be Fortune 100 companies like Google or Facebook. It would be hardcore Wall street shops. It would be, you know, banks in the Midwest and average citizens. And it didn't really matter where we went. Everybody you got. I got to stop and just kind of drop in a personal note, which is, I am training people in flow. It is an altered state of consciousness. The fact that I'm doing it on Wall street and on Main street and in Silicon Valley is to kind of my punk rock roots. Pretty shocking, right? Like, I am training people up deep into the mainstream in the use of one altered state of consciousness. And that's wild to me. I can't believe we progressed that much. But every place I would go, people were coming to us afterwards, you know, in throng, saying, this flow stuff is amazing. It's great. It's wonderful. What do you think about meditation? Because last week we took the entire team to a silent vipassana meditation retreat. Or what do you think about microdosing? Because we have whole teams of engineers who are microdosing on LSD on a regular basis to increase creativity. Or what do you think about zapping your brains with electrodes, transcranial magnetic stimulation to alter consciousness? What do you think about One taste, and kind of their interesting approach to sexuality as a way to alter consciousness everywhere? When we were bumping into people at the top levels of performance who weren't just interested in flow, they were already deploying other techniques that also alter consciousness. That was the first discovery. The second discovery grew, and they tie together, and this is where the book really came from. The second discovery came out of our research into the neurobiology of flow, where you had to get everything that had been done about neuroelectricity, neurochemistry, neuroanatomy, psychology, physiology. Take your back into kind of one giant chart. And what we realized is that, well, to put it bluntly, a guy named William James was right. 100 years ago, William James, who was the first psychologist in America, founder of Harvard Psychology department, a philosopher, a physiologist. And many people consider him kind of one of the brightest, smartest Americans to ever live. No exaggeration, he pointed out. He said, hey, you know, it's kind of strange. But meditative states, mystical states, flow states, awe, contemplative states, all seem to make people feel the same way. And they all seem to have a powerful psychological impact and a powerful performance impact. And psychology took a hundred year detour around the idea, right? We got interested in pathological problems. How do we treat anxiety, how do we treat depression, how do we hurt the people who probably need the help the most? And it wasn't really until the positive psychology movement started in the late 90s when people started looking at what I call north of happy experiences. And when we did, we found out that William James is a correct. These states make us feel the same, they have the same kind of impact. And more importantly, over the past 10 years, because of advances in neurobiology, we've been able to look under the hood. We started kind of decoding flow and meditation, but now it's moved into psychedelic states, mystical states and so forth. And what we're starting to realize is it doesn't actually matter if you're in a flow state, if you're experiencing awe, if you're in a psychedelic state, if you've zapped your brain with electrodes, if you're interested in pursuing tantric sexuality, et cetera, et cetera. All of these states literally do essentially the same thing to the brain. Same knobs and levers are being tweaked, which is why all these states tend to make us feel the same and why they have similar psychological and performance impacts. And those were the realizations. We were like, oh my God, it's not just flow, it's all these altered states, consciousness. And it seems to be happening at a revolutionary level because it was everywhere we went. And then the research told us, hey, wait a minute, there's a really good reason for this. These are all the same. You can't really say they're the same thing, but these are all really similar. That was where the book emerged from. Yeah.

I love it, I love it. And you cover so many different things which I'm going to ask you about different things that I think would be most interesting and valuable to the, to the listener. And of course, my outcome and objective from this conversation is for one, people just need to go pick up a copy of the book. I think it'll blow your mind. I will tell you, this is the first book that I have picked up in a long time where I have been so drawn. It's just utterly fascinating. And it's like watching a really amazing, fun, enjoyable, intriguing, bizarre movie and linking all kinds of things together and how they make sense. And so my interest in this is of course from business, from a psychology and performance standpoint for my clients in Genius Network and all of the different worlds that I touch for my own personal use, just to simply be better. I mean, I've said this many times as I've spoken about addiction. When I was in high school, the only things that seemed to allow my brain to feel like it escaped into a better place were throwing ceramics on a ceramics wheel, which was the only artistic talent of that kind that I had ever delved into because I wasn't into sports, because I had my likings of sports ruined by a sadistic little league coach. And so ceramics was.

Well, I had one of those too. He was my father, but that's another story.

And that has so much to do with life together.

Right?

No, yeah, same here. I mean, you've heard some of my crazy ass stories of childhood bullshit and then doing drugs, of course, because I've openly talked about being a really bad drug addict in high school and getting clean from drugs and then later in life that compulsivity and that addictive sort of wanting to satiate uncomfortableness and pain in the brain became work, exercise, you name it. And now one of my biggest things is helping people with addiction because we recently launched Artists for Addicts, which I believe you've seen the video trailer.

Yeah.

We'Re close to doing a documentary and we're going to do another documentary. And as I read this book, I'm like, I am freaking going to come to your flow genome location and basically bring a video camera and film you showing stuff and explaining stuff because it's totally fascinating. And so that being said, throughout the book you talk about float pods, which I have one in my office where I'm at right now. FloatPod.com is the company that manufactures them. They're one of my tenants and they started Tru rest, which is truerest.com, where people can find float pods. You talk about that. You talk a lot about psychedelics and about drugs in different altered states. I'm the first person in the world to have brain scans of before and after, of doing ibogaine and 5 Meod DMT because I'm being my own human lab rat where we went out of the country to do this in order to look at how they're treating very effectively people with horrible addictions. You know, heroin and cocaine and crystal meth and you name it. I've been to Burning Man a couple of times. I helped the People at Summit series with the funding, with one of their very early on things. You talk about Summit in there.

Yeah. You've played with everybody we play with in this book, come to think of it, now that I'm listening to this. No, exactly.

So I'm sitting there going, you know.

Yeah.

I mean, you just cover so many things. I'm like going, wow, this is like a ride through, you know, my own history here, but from a completely different perspective. So you talk a lot about altered states and. Stasis. It's like ecstasy, but it's a. Stasis is how you pronounce it.

Yeah, it's the Greek. Yeah.

Explain it. I want you to define altered states in that.

Yeah. So let me. Let's. Yeah. So we were faced with a problem, right? We had this whole broad category of experiences. Not just flow, but psychedelic states, meditative states, mystical states, trance states, the works, they all were kind of experiences that took place, as I said, north of happiness. But there's not really. They don't share a category. The larger category, altered states of consciousness, so literally stretches from dreams on one end to schizophrenia on the other. It's a vast category. Right. So we needed a subcategory. Altered states was too big. Non ordinary states was problematic. A lot of the terms are problematic. We were hanging out, working with the Navy SEALs and the commander of DEVGRU SEAL Team 6. So the kind of the pinnacle of the SEALs, Lieutenant Commander Rich Davis, who we write about in the book, used the term ecstasis. He was talking about how his men have to get into group flow. And. But he used the term ecstasis to describe it. He called it flipping the switch. And what was. When we heard it, you know, it caught our attention because we certainly weren't going to stretch the boundary of the term flow beyond any, you know, recognition. When we looked up the definition of ecstasis, it literally means to stand outside oneself and to be filled with what they called back then divine inspiration, what we would call insight into an intuition. And two of the characteristics that these. All these states all share is our sense of self completely disappears. So it's dead accurate. You do stand outside yourself. And all of the brain's information processing systems go on to overdrive, which is why these are states of inspiration and information. We talk about kind of. We talk about ecstatic states essentially as an information technology, which is basically what they are.

Gotcha. Okay, so. And you know, how often, since when have you started, like, consciously being aware of. Not only that these states Exist, but being able to put yourself into it and doing it in ways that won't kill you.

So I don't know if we've ever had this conversation, but I kind of dropped out of college for a little while and ran around the country and lived in ashrams and lived in monasteries. Spent a long time studying martial arts until, you know, too many surgeries made it impossible for me to take a punch. You know, have a long action adventure sports past for triggering flow. I've had a 20 year yoga practice, I've had a 20 year meditation practice. I've, you know, went through a very heavy psychedelic period and experimented wild. So all these things have been in my life, you know, since I was 16, 17 years old. I have been looking at them for, you know, 30 years and asking questions about them for 30 years. I. It was flow that was finally the way in because there was enough research that had been done. I'm a science guy. I need the neurobiology. I have to understand how does this stuff work before I believe it. So I could start with flow. But there had, you know, I've also, as a reporter, one of the things I've always been passionate about is the drug war. And, you know, I was passionate about it because when growing up, I knew a ton of people like you. I knew people who went to rehab and went to jail and got in and out. And, you know, my job most of the time growing up was to talk to the cops. I kept people out of jail. That was my job. So I was always a lot more sober than most people. But I was around all of this stuff and, you know, first of all, saw how a lot of it could burn through lives, you know, when handled wrong. And I also saw how, when handled right, you know, this massive community of misfits in Cleveland, Ohio, that I was a part of, that was easily the trailing 30%. Nobody was going to look at this group and say, yeah, these fuckups are going to change the world. But I saw people starting to tap into these states of consciousness, use them. One of the things that they do, and we can talk about why it has to do with the neurochemistry. But these are bonding states, among other things, right? They boost collaboration and cooperation and group creativity. And so this community of misfits, like 1,000 punk rockers in Ohio, produced Nine Inch Nails, Harvey Pekar, Sepultura, myself, and like 20 or 30 other major shapers of culture in the past 30 years. And that really caught my attention, right? Like this was a group that nobody would have bet on to make a dent in society at all. You would have bet the opposite way on almost every last one of us. And yet most of the people emerged pretty unscathed with really kind of normal, healthy, happy lives. Or they shot to the upper echelons of culture and really sort of changed the world a little bit. Right.

And there's been a lot of collateral damage along the way. And you actually kind of address that even towards the end of the book. I flip to the back of things that, you know, there's a downside to all of this. However, what has been vilified and what has been completely taken out of context, you're exposing like a different way to look at what's actually going on in this emergence of these new discoveries. I don't even know if I'm saying this right. Hopefully that's landing because I can only. I'm thinking a million miles an hour right now, trying to summarize the linkages of how all of this actually fits all under the umbrella of how do you be a better, more effective, happier, more connected, more bonded human that not only creates enormous value for yourself in terms of just your own, but life experience, but how you can translate that into doing amazing shit in the world. And you've kind of. I mean, this is really the first book about flow that I have read that really is like, wow, you've really laid out how to get there in a lot of ways and do it without all of the dangers that have existed in the past.

Isn't that, I mean, so let's be totally honest. And you read the nothing new under the sun section already. Maybe you haven't. That actually might be okay. So one of the points we make in the book is this is really not the first time in history there's been a revolution in altered states and high performance. Right? Like one way or another. We've seen it a lot, Tim. Ken Gezy sneaks LSD out of a Stanford research lab and all kinds of tie dyed. Hell breaks loose. 1970s come along. People realize that sexuality is a great tool for altering consciousness in the sick. Sexual liberation is born, you know, out of the women's movement and out of a whole bunch of other stuff. And you know, what's the end result? The end result is spiking rates of marital dissatisfaction and divorce. Right? So this has happened before, it has gone wrong. The argument we are making is twofold. One, there is now a considerable amount of data. Research into flow dates back 150 years. Research into psychedelics Been kicked, restarted. Most people don't realize that before it was outlawed there were a thousand published peer reviewed papers. So there's a lot of literature there. Meditation is getting caucopias and mystical experiences. As we kind of talk about in the book, which is probably the strangest category, the very first one was decoded, the feeling of oneness with everything. We figured out why the brain produces this experience back in 1997. So 1996, you walk into a doctor's office to doctor, I feel one with everything. You go to the nuthouse. 1997, you walk into a doctor's office, say doc, I feel one with everything. He says, oh yeah, your right parietal lobe has deactivated probably because you were doing some kind of focused meditation, right? Like suddenly, suddenly it's understood. It's a huge breakthrough, it's enormous. It is now 20 years later. And the list of mystical experiences we have decoded, like we understand where they come from is almost complete. Literally. Like we have done trance states, we have done speaking in tongues, we have done every kind of meditation you could possibly imagine. Chanting versus singing versus prayer versus meditation, all kinds of different varieties, out of body experiences, near death experiences, and the list goes on. Right. It's down to the point that my buddy Shahar Arzi, who runs kind of the lab at the university, excuse me, at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, decoded the doppelganger experience, which is this rare mystical experience that only as far as anybody can tell, shows up in kabbalistic Judaism in the writings of one rabbi from the 13th century. That's how specific things have gotten. Like we've really decoded a lot of this stuff. And the point is, the reason all this stuff matters so much is finally there's a middle path. One that is not based on superstition, not based on mythology, not based on hype, that's actually based on research. Something is not squishy. So hopefully this time we have a shot to not blow ourselves up along the way. Now those are not the only dangers there are. You know, we can talk. There are issues in marketing for absolute certain because these same states of consciousness, that up level performance can be used to sell us more stuff very effectively. And that like we're already starting to see it work its way into the market and it's going to be abused and we're going to need to know how to kind of protect against that going forward. So that's sort of a newer danger, but very real and right in the smack of your business.

Totally. And you know it's funny. That's the section that I have not gotten. That's right where it ends of. Where I'm at in the book is right before the marketing part. And not having read that section yet, what I will say, having been in the business of marketing, I find it interesting that people are like the marketing industry. I actually think that everything is marketing. Getting a date, how you present yourselves, how you communicate. That all has to do with the setup and the influence. Robert Cialdini, who's one of the most cited social media. Yeah, he's become one of my dear friends. And I've had him at the last Genius X meeting, which is my 100k group and the last Genius network meeting. And he lives in Tempe, Arizona. I've interviewed him several times. He's just an amazing guy. And he's got all of this research on influence that's proven, and he's so adamant about the ethical applications of it and not abusing it and how, how much you can, you know, it can be misused. But when people are like, you know, the marketing industry, that's like saying the oxygen industry, it's like everywhere.

Yeah, no, I, like, I agree with you. Like, you know, one of the great realizations of my career and it happened, I think I got really massively lucky was the realization that writing the books was only half the job. There was a whole, like, how do you talk on radio, how do you talk on a podcast, how do you talk on television? How do you market? Like, you know, most of, of my education the past 20 years would easily fall under the heading of marketing. I totally agree with you. And I also agree with you that it's a fundamental ninjutsu skill that if you don't have in this modern world, you're fighting for behind.

No, totally. I mean, you could have the greatest value on the planet. You could really help people. But if you do not have the ability to connect with what you have, the solution with people that need it, if it's a solution or it's entertainment or whatever, you're going to be woefully ineffective unless you get lucky. If you just happen to invent something and then it gets into the hands of someone that has the ability to do it, I mean, even right now would be. I would put this under the umbrella of. I think your book Stealing Fire is fascinating. Let's do a podcast on it. Let's share it with people and hopefully people will go out there and I mean, that's how ideas spread. That's One way. That's one way that ideas spread. But the reason I bring this up is. Yes, like the. The way that you describe stuff, I had a whole sense of validation about things that I think about. Like for instance, my. One of my. I don't know if it's the main one, but one of my biggest callings is to be a hero to entrepreneurs and to people that struggle with addictions. Why? Because I understand both of them, inside and out. And I have spent most of my life in angst, not in joyous flow state pleasure. And I remember this line from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, one of the original authors on the flow that you know very well, where he said that the same neural pathways that we use to reach a flow state are the same neural pathways that an addict uses for self destruction. And the way that my brain interprets that is we have the same roads in our brains, the apparatus. And one leads to this state of performance, bliss, connectedness, disconnectedness, what. You know, just that that flow state and the other leads to self destruction. And the question is, which path does cause what things cause a person to be here versus there? You know, is it biochemical, is it environmental, is it upbringing, is it movement? And so your way to tie it all together, you know, I mean, I went and got training in transcendental meditation probably four and a half years ago. When I meditate on a consistent. I feel better when I'm halfway through a spin class, the feeling of just that movement. Or in a really great yoga class, which I do a lot of yoga, I feel better than if I was to get an award from the president or something. I mean, there are certain things that just the feeling. And you talk so much about. I think one section of the book, you talk about not a concert, but like a big rave show. And people, people don't go there to hear the music, they go to feel it. And.

Yeah, go ahead. Oh, I'm sorry, you touched on a bunch of things. And I want to walk through a couple of them just because I think it'll be the most useful for your audience. And I'm going to start with the altered state economy, which is when we started to realize that this was sort of revolutionary. As a science guy, I was like, okay, if we're going to call this a revolution, I want to see some damn numbers. And we realized we couldn't quantify what we were looking at, but we decided we were going to do something different. We were going to see how much money was spent globally trying to alter our consciousness, trying to shut off the self and maybe tap into this information layer, right. That that basic action. And some of this is very addictive and unintentional. Some of it is very, very intentional. And we were as conservative as possible. You brought up edm, electronic dance music, for example. You can make a very good case that nearly every time somebody goes to see a live concert, they are going for the state change. They are going to lose themselves in the music in the crowd, to experience what University of Chicago anthropologist Victor Turner called communitas, which is sort of a large scale version of group flow. Right? It's the feeling at a stadium rock concert when you're totally, you know, totally lost. But we wanted to be as rigorous as possible. So we said, okay, you could make that argument and I'm willing to accept it, perhaps, but there are a lot of other reasons people go to concerts. So let's instead just drill down into electronic dance music where as you pointed out, all, most of the reasons people go to concerts don't exist. There's no band, right. There's nothing to see. You see a DJ often just pushing play on a tape deck, essentially, right? So there's nothing to look at. There are no lyrics to sing along with. There is just a lot of state shifting light shows, a lot of state shifting dancing, lots of state shifting substances. We don't go to EDM for the music, we go for the state shift it provides. And that's really clear. So doing these numbers, we came up with $4 trillion a year. Now that is a super hyper conservative estimate is probably off by a factor of two. But you got to put that in context. We spend $4 trillion a year trying to alter our consciousness that is larger than the GDP of India, of Russia. It is essentially, if you were to make it domestic, it's one quarter of the US economy and that's how much we're spending. And also turns out there are really good reasons for this. We now know, and this is Ronald Siegel's work at ucla, he sort of pioneered it, but it's, you know, and Dr. Underwild has chimed in, a bunch of other people have done worked on this as well. But we now know that every human, almost all mammals and some birds and a few insects have found ways to alter their consciousness to shut off the self. It is widespread. In fact, it's so widespread that Dr. Segal believes it's a fourth evolutionary driver as powerful, as forceful as our drive towards food, shelter and sex. So that's kind of that's our pull towards these things. We can put numbers around it. For the entrepreneurs who are listening, that means there's $4 trillion worth of opportunity out there right now. Just a side note, no, it's huge.

And I mean even when you start talking about how animals reach it into the book, you talk dolphins basically getting.

Found on puffer fish toxin. Yeah.

And then they spit them out because if it's too poisonous, it'll kill them. But they basically are getting high that dolphins are altering their state and that animals know how to do this. And then you make the comment, if you don't believe that people pursue an altered state, look at a Starbucks line at 7am in the morning for sure.

And you got, by the way, most important point is why we pursue these states. And the reason is, right, because you got to understand when you've got stone dolphins, they're easy prey, right? Just like in humans, this stuff can have bad results. Right. In all species, the burning evolutionary question has been the hell's going on? Why is this drive in all of us? And the answer is it turns out there are certain things. Creative problem solving, high speed decision making, healing our nervous system, resetting our nervous system, healing trauma and deep anxiety and cooperation, collaboration that we need these states to do. Every animal gets stuck in ruts and you need to be able to alter your consciousness to get up on the balcony and have that high perch experience and see beyond, come up with new solutions. Non ordinary states of consciousness are the tool, the very tool evolution designed to solve certain kinds of problems. So for example, if you look at so called 21st century skills, right, in education, these are all the things that our kids need to thrive in today's world but are not taught in school. And it turns out all these skills are also things that show up at the top of every business list. These are the things that most are most desirable in the CEO. These are the things we need to handle today's fast paced environment. Take your pick. And their creative problem solving, situation awareness, collaboration, cooperation. All the skills that you get from non ordinary states of consciousness. And we suck at training people to be better at these skills for a very simple reason. We keep trying to train up skill sets. We need to be training up states of mind, right? That's the big takeaway here, is that a lot of the stuff we need just simply to perform at a high level at work, we cannot access without altering our consciousness. Now doesn't have to be fancy, can just be respiration, right? Five minute yoga session with some good breathing that can do the trick but you have to change state.

Well so yeah, that goes into the question which. So someone's listening to this right now. They want to unlock higher levels of what you said, performance, cooperation, creativity and whatever else. What would you suggest to them based on your research? Because you've done a lot of it, but it's basically become a lot of your life work and the subject of this book, what do they do?

So I'm going to answer that question by starting where we start with every organization we work with and we start with flow. And the first thing you need to know is all of these states, flow included, have triggers, preconditions that lead to these ecstatic experiences. And in the case of flow, flow follows focus. It only shows up when all our attention is focused in the right here right now. A lot of these same states work this way as well. So the best thing you can do is learn to focus all your attention right here, right now. So the first thing we do when we walk into companies is we say look, if you can't hang a sign on your door that says Fuck off, I'm flowing. Turn off your email, turn off the cell phone, not answer messages, not answer texts and focus in quiet for 90 minutes minimum at a stretch. You cannot get in this game. It is almost a non negotiable because of how this stuff works, right? You need to be able to do it. Tim Ferriss thinks if you're really trying to create a problem solve, you should use four hour blocks. I personally use a three and a half hour block. I get up at 4am to start writing and I write till about 7:30 and that's my kind of, that's my period and that period is meant to drive flow. Now what can people do next? Let me just give you an example from my own.

Oh please stop for just a minute because I want to back up on that one. So you get up at 4 in the morning, you write till 7:30. What time do you go to bed? And other than yeah, tell me that like how's your sleep?

My sleep is great. So if you're going to play with these are high energy states and if you're going to, you know, really be tapping into them, often you have to prioritize recovery. You have to really, really, really have the grit to recover. So I end my day with a 50 minute sauna every, almost every day I do 25 minute meditation in there, 25 minute reading when I'm in there and then I shut it down usually 9, 9:30.

Okay so you're in bed. So you're sleeping by 10, is that fair?

I'm sleeping by 9:30.

By 9:30, okay. And then you get up at 4, and then no get up at 4.

But here's. So here's where, here's where I want. This is, this is a little bit of the kung fu. So here's the interesting thing. I get up at 4, I write till about 7:30, right? I have sort of exhaust, you know, if it went well. I've been in a bit of a flow state. But I certainly am out of the flow state by 7:30 and I'm back in my body and you know, aches and pains and you know, the day is starting to slide into me and weigh on me, all the things that have to get done. So before I even leave my office, right? I have a gratitude practice which is very fundamental because it's basically how the brain gets information. We will take in six negative things for every one positive thing we take in. Because the brain's always looking for things to be afraid of. If you're really trying to do innovative, creative work, you have to tip that balance in your favor. A gratitude list which focuses on things that are safe and good and positive and tilts that balance. You start taking in different information. I follow that by usually a three to five minute. I do a little bit of box breathing, which is sort of an apnea kind of meditation. So you're holding your breath a little bit and I follow it with a one minute breath of fire, which is a yoga. Breathing very fast. It's a very fast state shift and it totally calms me down, makes me very neutral. And then I go into my day and I help. By the way, exercise gets prioritized in my day. You have. So there's something known as exercise induced transient hypofrontality. When the prefrontal cortex, the front of your brain, shuts down, the brain gets very, very quiet. This is known as transient temporary hypo frontality. Hypo is the opposite of hyper, means to slow down. Frontality is the prefrontal cortex. This is sort of the part of your brain that does complex decision making and long term planning. It's also where your sense of self lives. Self is kind of a network. It's calculated all over the prefrontal cortex. So as parts of it wink out, can't perform that calculation. This is how self vanishes, right? And you know, good things happen when our self gets out of the way. Our inner critic, that nagging defeatist Always on. Voice in our head shuts up, goes quiet. What happens? Risk taking goes up, creativity goes up. Because we're no longer judging our ideas so harshly, we feel this as kind of liberation, as freedom. You can get it from about 25 minutes of exercise when you're, you know, exercise. Induced transient hypofrontality is what they call it. I think about it like after I'm done doing my stuff in the morning, I do my little meditation. I take my dogs for a hike in the backcountry, usually about 45 minutes off and uphill. And I'm basically hiking myself into a low grade flow state. I'm shutting off my consciousness, letting my subconscious sort of take over in problem solving mode. So usually by the time I get back to my desk at the end of that walk, whatever problem I've been trying to solve, my brain has solved it for me. And the answer's waiting.

Love it. And you're very ritualized about this. So when you're traveling and you don't have those options, like I think you're in New York City right now or.

Something, something I'm back. But I was in New York City last week and I go to the gym. I like throwing iron, I do some high intensity training. I like jumping rope as well. I'll go for long walks in New York. And when I'm on the road, I actually make sure I do this stuff kind of twice as long. Gandhi always used to say that, like when things get worse, I meditate two hours instead of one. So, you know, I don't have, I don't think I've ever meditated. I probably meditated it for two hours a handful of times along the way. But mine's usually, you know, seven minutes in the morning, 20 minutes at night. But when I'm traveling, I'll try to put a half an hour in before I start my day.

Okay, that makes sense. Totally makes sense. So, well, what about eating? When do you start putting food in your body water?

I'm drinking nonstop. That's the first thing I do when I wake up is drink 8 ounces, walk into the bathroom, drink 8 water. Before I do anything, I'm always hydrating. I have found that one of the secrets to high performance for me is I need to drink two to three times the amount of water I want to drink. Really, really fundamentally important to me. I tend to eat when I come back from the hike. I'll take two hours, I'll eat, then I'll work for a couple more hours, then I'll usually shut it down and take a 25 minute nap. Then I'll get up, do an hour. If I'm not, you know, on days that I'm not going to the mountain and skiing or something like that, I will do, you know, an hour of weight training and then I will work another four hours or so, eat dinner, sauna, go to bed. Gotcha.

Gotcha. And so for so well, let me. You were then going to continue on. I just wanted to interrupt your ritual pattern of where you're going.

All I to want wanted to point out was look at all the different times I'm intentionally shifting my state throughout the day. Right. Whether it's an, it's a power nap, there's two different exercise periods kind of built in. There's two different meditation periods, there's periods that are, you know, built for flow. You know, two different writing sessions where I can really drill down. So I am, you know, I have built my life around this state. And by the way, that's what we see with individuals who are great at this. That's what they do. They build their lives around these things. Organizations who do this do the same thing. Now, you can do it at small, medium and large levels, Right? Take your pick how you want to start integrating these things. And I can go through organizational examples at every level, if you're curious. But that's what we've seen consistently and that's what we're looking at in Stealing Fire. One of the things we look at is, is what are all these top performers doing? And what they're all doing is interweaving these periods for stage shift and really utilizing kind of our own internal biology to our advantage.

Right. Well, you covered so many extraordinarily interesting things. Or what are some of the most fascinating insights and case studies that you discovered while writing the book? I mean, what are the things that if you just had to.

Yeah, the most fascinating, the most surprising thing came out of our work with the Navy SEALs. And that happened because a handful of SEALs had red rise of Superman, my book about action, sports and flow. And they noticed a huge overlap between what I was talking about in the book and their experiences on the battlefield. So we got invited to Norfolk, Virginia, to seal Team 6's headquarters to kind of observe the man in action and kind of offer them any secrets we had on flipping the switch. And, and I have to tell you, going in there was a lot in common. I just got to say, I'm a guy who puts words together in a straight line and they're real life superheroes. So big overlap. And we really did. I really, I was like, what the hell am I going to have to teach these guys? You know what I mean? It turns out there was a massive amount of overlap. It turns out the most shocking thing we learned is so it is very expensive to train a secret cost $25,000. You want to turn Johnny on the block into a combat ready US Marine. Seals cost a lot more. Yeah, yeah. Just to get in. It's half a million dollars to make it to the uber elite Seal Team 6. It's $3.5 million per soldier. So these are one of the most expensive kind of groups of war fighters ever assembled. And the vast majority of that money gets spent once you get past a certain level of kind of in fitness and skill acquisition. It is all spent screening for and training up people how to shift state and drop into group flow almost at will. That we learned is they consider it the absolute secret to being a seal. So what was most shocking to me was going into the SEALS thinking, wow, these guys are going to be good at it and what are we going to teach them? And finding out that, you know, they're spending the bulk of their resources there. And these guys, you know, they spend kind of more in ammunition alone in a year than the U.S. the entire U.S. marine Corps. So they have really big budgets and they're extremely well trained and most of that training is spent on state chains. So that was, you know, one of the things that was very, very shocking to me for sure. Another thing I mentioned earlier was I, so I talked a little about neurotheology, the study of mystical experiences. And I, in my second book, which is west of Jesus, I got to know Dr. Andrew Newberg, who's the scientist, University of North Carolina or University of Pennsylvania, neuroscientist, who decoded unity or the feeling of becoming one with everything. So I've been inside this world since 1997, writing about it, reporting on it, learning from these guys and working there myself in doing this book, in cataloging all the different so called mystical experiences that we have not only decoded because decoding them is crazy, right? But let's take the doppelganger experience we have not just decoded. This is the appearance of one's double. So in mystical Judaism, you can do this very specific meditation that involves body movement and chanting and visualizations and all these crazy things. And it produces a vision of your double. You see yourself and you can ask yourself questions and you sort of will answer yourself and tell the truth. And people use to do this for like prophecy. And so we have not only decoded how the brain does this, we have also found using virtual reality, we can have, we can reproduce this experience in anyone. We've got transcranial magnetic stimulation that can reproduce out of body experiences that can produce sense presence. So the feeling of a ghost or a God being in the room with you, visions, all these sort of things. I was shocked by how far down the rabbit hole we've actually gone. And you know, sort of thinking this forward, every religion is built around creating these experiences. That's what's at the core of religions. These are the most spiritual experiences on earth in history, and they're at the center of all our faiths. And we can now reproduce them, you know, sometimes pharmacologically, but now technologically, that was pretty shocking.

Super shocking. I mean, yeah, because one of my questions I'd written here is, you know, how are psychology, neurobiology, technology and pharmacology, you know, basically driving and creating this revolution towards altered states.

And so, so, yeah, so I mean, you look as a guy who came up through abundance and bold, you know, you Ray Kurzweil, which means that once a technology becomes an information technology, right, you can program in ones and zeros. It jumps on the back of Moore's law and it starts accelerating exponentially, doubling on a periodic basis. So biotechnology is now accelerating at five times the speed of Moore's Law. It is doubling in power every four months. Also moving on the same curve are psychology, neurobiology, pharmacology and technology. What we call the four forces for ecstasis. These four domains are all kind of driving this research forward. And they're doing it at an exponential rate. And they're all starting to intersect in very interesting ways. So we have ways to map and measure what's happening in our brains and our bodies when we're literally experiencing the inexplicable. We, through pharmacology, we can produce these experiences merely on demand and tune them with increasing precision. With technology, we can take this stuff to scale. So experiences that were once available to like 10 people dancing around a campfire on mushrooms can now be pumped into a stadium filled with a quarter of a million people at once. So all this change is happening right now, and it's. So this stuff is driving this forward, which is why we've kind of crossed that final barrier. And it's high times on Main street, right? This stuff is showing up everywhere. 44% of American businesses are Going to offer mindfulness based stress reduction to employees next year. One out of 10Americans has a regular meaning. Annual psychedelic practice. Yoga is a 28 billion dollar industry. And on and on and on. This stuff is going very, very mainstream. These forces are driving it forward. So the interesting thing, the two interesting points that come out of this. One is like it or not, we're moving in this direction. Two and more important I think to your listeners is businesses are getting involved in this stuff. So let me just put in some numbers around it so we can quantify it for people. McKinsey, the business consultancy did a 10 year study of top executives and they found that top executives in flow are 500% more productive than out of flow. That means you could go to work on Monday, spend Monday in a flow state, take Tuesday through Friday off and get as much done as your steady state peers. Two days a week in flow and you're 1,000% more productive than the competition. This stuff is already showing up in industry. We work with a ton of companies every year and we're not the only people in this game. There are a lot of people playing this and doing it very, very well right now. Top performers, top individuals, top organizations are doing this stuff. So if you're not very shortly, especially because these forces are accelerating, it is going to be almost impossible to keep up.

Yeah. Which is interesting as hell. So let me ask you a question then. So what is. So there's an altered state and then there's a flow state. And based on what you said, if you are in a flow state, you're just. Everything is going to be, for lack of a better word, better. And there's going to be improvements and there's going to be feelings and there's going to be consequences and there are a shit ton of people in the world and from the addiction side that are suffering. And like my friend Gabor mate says, the question is not why the addiction but why the pain? And the more that I've been around looking at addiction, I see addiction as a solution to a lot of pain. It's a shitty solution. It has terrible consequences, but it certainly gets people out of the angst and the pain temporarily. And usually if you can survive it, yeah, you might go to some fun, enjoyable, pleasurable places. Because there's many parts the of of those altered states in that pursuit to satiate mental pain, physical pain. But the key is not having an altered state. The key is creating an altered state that puts you in a positive sort of place. Not something that ultimately leads to destruction. Like going through ayahuasca and going through ibogaine. And these experiences that I've done is very dark, I mean horrifying at times. And on the other side there is a beauty and there are. But people say, oh, you know, where should I go do these things? And I said, well, it's not just about doing these things, it's about how you do it, where it's being done, the intention behind it, the set. I mean, there are a lot of people out there that are promising.

Let me address this for a second because it's really important, right? If flow got you to enlightenment, surfing is probably the highest flow activity I can think of. But certainly every surfer out there is not a Buddha, right?

Clear.

So what we know, this is where things get interesting and important and you bring up super critical points. The first is that comes out of research into adult development. And this is going to sound like a tangent, but it's a good place to start here. So adult development is literally the study how adult develop and mature over time. And as you move up the adult development scale, what happens is you gain perspective. You can see yourself from farther and farther away. You can see situations from multiple sides. You gain the facility to solve sort of so called wicked problems where binary solutions don't normally show up. Because you can surround a problem, you gain a lot of empathy, you gain a lot of wisdom. The downside is it is not automatic moving up this scale. Jim Collins talked about this in Good to Great. He said, Level 5 leaders, they're at the top of this scale. They run our most important businesses. We have no idea, other than experiencing great personal tragedy, how they're made. Turns out we now know how they're made a little bit more. And one of the things that shows up in the research is that frequent access to non ordinary states of consciousness to these states that we've been talking about moves you up the adult development scale. But there's a big if here. If you do the homework right? When you get into these peak states, you talked about ayahuasca and ibogaine. So you know these experiences, you don't just get shown kind of the ecstatic wonderland that is your life. You also get shown all this stuff that is broken in you places where you're an egomaniac, places where you're a narcissist, places where you're not telling yourself the truth places, right? And when you come back from these states, if you really want to move up the adult development scale, if you really want to use These states to maximize performance, you got to do the gritty homework, right? Nobody can do your push ups for you. You got to solve these problems in the real world of day to day life. And then you get to kind of move forward. And you know, as you pointed out, these are all very addictive states. They're very, they amplify performance because you get five of these, the biggest, most high performance boosting neurochemicals the brain can produce. That's what shows up in these states. Norepinephrine, dopamine and andamine, serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins, six of them. But you know, those are also all the neurochemicals that are released by the most addictive substance on earth. Right? You do cocaine, widely considered the most addictive substance on earth. And all that happens is the brain releases a massive quantity of dopamine. Endorphins are our internal version of heroin and oxycontin. And just to put it in perspective, 20 different endorphins in the brain, the most common one is 100 times more potent than medical morphine. These are very addictive states, whether they're flow states or whether they're chemically induced states. And you have to know what you're doing. This is not positive psychology. This isn't 10% happier. You know what I mean? If this was 10% happier, we probably would have called the book Borrowing a Nightlight, not Stealing Fire. These are high energy states. And there are dangers. The back of the book, like the back of the book gives the four places that people most commonly go off the rails with stuff. We spend a lot of time on the dangers of hedonism, militarization and commercialization. And you need to know what you're doing. And it's, you know, it's bad things can happen if you don't. But, but you quoted Csikszentmihalyi earlier and I wanted to match your quote with something very similar that he says in his book Good Business and I love. He said flow is an addiction. But unlike other addictions like gambling or sex or drugs which lead backwards, flow, because you're using your skills to the utmost, is an addiction that leads forwards and into the future. Right. So used positively, these things are massive accelerants, used wantonly. And you're just going to get the same mess we've always gotten.

Yeah, very much. I mean, and you bring so much awareness to this in the way that you write about it and the way that you describe it in the book. And at the Same time clearly showing what we currently know and what you have researched, the validity of so much of this. And so what I'd like to ask you is studying, researching, seeing all of these things, dealing with it on a day to day basis. Now, what are the enemies of flow? What are like things that people do all the time and are probably part of their rituals that lead to just cutting you off from these very connected, positive states of mind? I mean, you know so much about if someone's on Facebook and what it's going to do to their brain or if they watch pornography, what will happen? But beyond this particular point, what's going to happen to their brain or just environments that they're in? So there's pros and cons to everything. What are some things that people probably wouldn't think of that they do every day that are so incredibly damaging to keep you from a flow state?

Well, I mean there are you know, just certain obvious non negotiables. First thing we do in going to a company is we tell them to put a, you know, the sign on the door that says fuck off, I'm flowing. So you have to be able to, I like to tell people, protect the first hour at least of your of your work. Protect it from any interruption. You do your hardest task first, the one that requires the most creativity. I would argue for 90 minutes or more, but you got to do that. The second thing we do is we put everybody on sleep monitors because if you're not getting seven and a half a night, you're going to have a hard time with this over time it's not sustainable, you'll absolutely burn out. So those are sort of bargain, bargain basement basics. I also think one of the things that I've noticed that is very necessary when people start, start doing these kind of practices, this kind of work is you need to have your conversations, right? If you're going to sort of import this into your job, you should tell your co workers and your boss what you're doing. That thus the sign on the door makes some sense, right? If you're doing your spouse, your wife, your partner, they need to understand this stuff, right? These are high energy states, Interesting things start happening fast and you want to sort of have your conversations up front and out front. I think those things are really important at a really basic level. I also think it's really important to have some kind of daily meditation practice. Mostly for no other reason other than if you can get, yes, you get cognitive benefits within four days, literally it's that fast. So Creativity will start going up, focus will start going up, decision making will start going up after as little as four days, which is amazing. But you get a couple weeks in as you know, and you start getting a little distance from your emotions. You become less reactive. This is a really big deal. And the reason it's a really big deal for all of these states, right? You want yourself out of the picture when you're being really reactive. The reason you never want to check your email first thing in the morning before you've done your creative task is because your emotions are going to get hijacked by other people's problems and other people's agendas. You're getting pulled off your stuff. Your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that you want to go quiet to do the work that you need to do and to shift your state is going to go into overdrive. You're going to get stress hormones flooding your system. This is going to block flow. So you want to really. That emotional management becomes really important. And meditation, getting that there's a gap as you know, your emotions come up and before you actually feel them, once you're feeling them, there's nothing you can do. You're. You're along for the ride until they burn themselves out. But if you can get into that gap, you can say, oh, wow, that's a lot of anger. Do I really need that right now? And it allows you to make really interesting kung fu moves. And I'll give you an example that I think is incredibly useful. Turns out anxiety and excitement are the exact same signal in the body. They are norepinephrine and cortisol, either side of it. The only thing different is the frame we build around it. How we interpret the feeling of those chemicals in our system is am I anxious or am I excited about the tasks in front of me? How do you lean into challenge? Well, you see it all as excitement. How do you see it all as excitement? You get into that gap one second before the emotion arrives and you say, oh, wow. Wow, there's that feeling again. I'll bet this is excitement. Really simple hack works and works much more effectively if you add meditation in. So those are just some really simple basic ones, but I think they're non negotiables.

I love it. I love it because, you know, here's one thing that last year I went through a breakup of a relationship and it was one of the most painful. I don't know quite why, but it was just. Just the way I experienced it was one of the Most painful that I have had in over 15 years and I just could not shake it. And I'm a guy that's done a ton of therapy and hang around a lot of amazing people that have a lot of people to talk to. And I just had this literally a real pain in my brain, in my heart, in my body. It just hurt. And it was grief. And I hired a yoga instructor to do private sessions with me. Done yoga on and off for years. I've told this story many times, but she said to me, if you do yoga three times a week, it will change your body. If you do it every day, it'll change your life. I had heard that saying before, but I had never done it. I never did yoga every single day. I made a commitment that I would do it every day for a month and just see how I felt. After a month, after about a week, I started getting into the swing of things. It just felt really good. I wasn't doing, know, 10 minute YouTube video yoga. I was doing private instructor. When I was traveling, I would literally go to a studio, I would go to, you know, I'd have her as a private instructor about three times a week. The rest of the time I was going and doing, doing classes. And in a 90 day period, I did 80, 81 or 82 days of yoga straight. And it just. What I noticed the most out of all of it is that it just increased the space between me reacting to life and responding to life. And that ability to respond made all the difference in the world. Did it completely eliminate the grief? No, I mean, I still have some pains from it, but I have this awareness and I've learned a process on how to deal with it and the amount of growth that has come out of that, just the whole ability to respond. And so, so when I read Stealing Fire, I now feel so much more equipped to like, okay, this is actually what the hell's going on? And here's all kinds of things that I wasn't even aware. And I see this as like, I mean, you've written something here that I think is going to be a pivotal piece of work on anyone that really takes this shit seriously. For what you've learned.

Let's stop for a second because you, like, you walked us through to kind of the one point that I really want to make, which is for the first time ever, we've got tools and we've got options. And let me, you went through horrific grief, trauma, breakup. So the coolest research in the book, you ask for shocking things or surprising Things. My favorite part of the book is we do side by side comparisons of three state changing treatments for post traumatic stress disorder, right? The most extreme anxiety trauma, right. Farther along that scale than even, than even grief. And by the way, until the kind of turn of this century or last century, grief was considered a mental illness, right? They didn't think you were in your right mind when you were like grieving a relationship. It was considered, you know, it was considered, you know, a true altered state when you were grieving. So PTSD is more severe than that. But the interesting point is this. In early 2000s, Michael Mitha Hoffer teamed up with Rick Doblin and MAPS Multiple Disciplinary association for psychedelic research. And they looked at MDMA as a treatment for PTSD in soldiers and in victims of child abuse and sexual abuse. And they found that as little as one to three MDMA therapy sessions. So that's, you take the psychedelic, you know, the empathedelic mdma, the street drug, ecstasy, and you get therapy, you know, talk therapy during the experience if you want to talk. Otherwise two people just sit with you. And one to three sessions was enough to significantly reduce or completely remove symptoms of PTSD in 2007. From 2007 to 2011, they redo this experiment at Camp Pendleton with soldiers with ptsd and instead of using a psychedelic, they replaced the psychedelic with surfing as a trigger for flow and they couple it with talk therapy. It's the same protocol, just flow instead of mdma. And they get the exact same results. Significant reduction in symptoms or total removal of symptoms. After five weeks of surfing last year, they redid the same experiment with meditation and they got daily meditation. Four weeks, they got the same massive reduction in symptoms. So that's the point. We now know we have options when it comes to healing trauma, dealing with grief, dealing with anxiety. These methods are all extremely valuable. You said it took you three months of yoke to overwrite your grief. But this is how we overwrite. I always say if you want to get over heartbreak, the fastest way over it is to go skydiving. And it has to do. All you're doing is when you're in love, you're grooving pathways in neurons. Now, how do pathways in neurons groove? They groove because they get electrical signals going down them and they groove because they have chemical signals going down them. Non altered, altered states of consciousness. You go skydiving, you're going to get a very powerful deep flow experience. Going to dump a bunch of neuroelectricity and a bunch of neurochemicals into your brain, and it's going to literally overlay that pattern. The problem with heartbreak is everything you think of for months on end goes back to that person. Right? And so you have to. You have to do something that is more powerful, that things can start forming connections to. Thus, you know, and state change is the way to do it. Right. You can do it if you. If you really want to get over it fast. You know, action, adventure sports mixed with powerful psychedelics like ibogaine and ayahuasca. That's, you know, that's very, very quick if you want to slow it down a little bit. Yoga, meditation, surfing instead of skydiving. Right. Like, you know, transcranial magnetic stimulation, a supercharged state changing sex practice, like one taste. Even going to a transformational festival. You mentioned Summit series and Burning Man. And one of the things Molly Crockett's research out of Oxford shows is that all the other experiences that I'm talking about shift our states in a very specific way. Burning man does the exact same thing to the brain, works on the exact same systems. It produces the exact same experience, which is why they call all those festivals transformational festivals to a literal description of what's going on in the brain.

Yeah, it is. And it's, you know, it is, like I said, kind of a walk through memory lane. I mean, I've jumped out of an area twice. I've skydived twice. One to help me get over the fear of heights. And that was years ago, and it actually helped quite a bit. Believe it or not, it was terrified to step out of the plane the first time because I did it through a. I didn't do a free fall the first time. I actually did a static line. We literally climb out.

That was my first experience. Did you jump around? Did you have a round parachute? I had a round parachute. That's how long ago I did it. Like, static line on. You're standing on that little step.

Yeah.

Holding onto the wing arch. Yes. And you're dangling in the air canopy. Oh, my God. It's one of the. I. I jumped. This was literally. You want to know where this stuff started for me? I wrote about this for Discover magazine years ago. I was 17 years old. We went, you know, got drunk at a party on Friday night. We're going skydiving tomorrow morning. And somehow, like, six of us showed up and we went and I jumped out of that plane and flew right out of my body. I watched my parachute open, close and open, which happens too fast for the eye to see from a position like 30ft away from my body was the first and one of the only kind of so called mystical experiences I ever had. It was the first time I went the hell just happened. What. What was that? How is that possible? And you know, I lit out on a giant quest that became west of Jesus partially to solve that riddle. Yeah, that is awesome.

You might. My static line, it was actually a rectangular one in it and it actually opened and twisted around and which they, you know, showed on the, you know, the video. They played us a video before because it was like several hours of preparing and basically it. Mine opened up and it turned and I had to kick my way out of it. And I was fucking scared shitless. I mean, it was like, oh my God. Because I've already had. And I literally went into an altered state just stepping out. I had to disconnect from myself to even, you know, because my, my mind was just interpreting. Like, what am I doing? I'm like, I'm stepping out to my own death. And I mean that's, that's how terrified I was. But man, when you're up there, it's like, oh my God. I mean, it's so wild. And so that, yes, I've. I've pursued a lot of things and mdma, I actually went through a guided therapeutics with it. And it's incredibly valuable in the right circumstances. And see, that's one thing because I have a lot of friends that, you know, I went to Burning man twice, but when I went to Burning Man, I didn't have any alcohol, I didn't do any drugs, you know, and a lot of people, you know, I went there to experience it in a different way because Burning man, anything you want, you can pretty much experience there. And you know, I have a lot of people that they, you know, I'm this guy that wants to help reduce human suffering as much as I can use my marketing skills. Because if I had all the money in the world, I would put it towards helping people get out of addiction and find alternative ways to experience life. And the drugs that save people's lives, many of them are illegal. So you have to go out of the country to do them, assuming you want to do it legally. And the many drugs that kill people are legal. And there's 78 people a day that are dying of opiate addictions alone. And all the soldiers that commit suicide because of ptsd. And so the things that you're talking about here, my interest in these is not just increasing north of happiness, as you say, but it's literally. This would save millions of lives.

I mean, Joe, 25 million Americans at any one time are suffering from PTSD. That's insane. And the only thing available to them are SSRIs, which don't work in the worst cases, only work in some people, don't seem to really work for PTSD in women at all. And only work for as long as you're taking a drug. Right. You stop the drug and you go back to where you started. That was one of the crazy stats. If you look into that meditation study, I mentioned their control group, they used soldiers meditating, Right. Their control group didn't meditate and stayed on their meds. And after a month, while the guys who had meditated their symptoms were almost gone, total remission. 80% of the people who stayed on their meds needed to increase their meds over the same period of time. Right, right. This could be this stuff, which is, by the way, if you're talking about psychedelics, it's why the FDA has already started looking at MDMA for treatment for anxiety and depression. Right. More kind of more common traumas. So this is, you know, this stuff is moving very quickly and it's going to offer, you know, tremendous relief. And you know, to go back to where I started, which was, you know, in a community, you know, of insane fuck ups, who started, you know, getting into all of this stuff in a positive way together as a group. Group. I saw it produce tremendous innovation, a lot of healing and tremendous innovation.

Yeah. So now when we wrap up, I'm going to go sit in a float pod because I do have a float pod here at my office and I worked out earlier today and I will probably do a yoga class tonight. So I am going to fit in a lot of things. And the more and more I think about the issues are in the tissues is something I've always liked that saying. And what your book does is help validate so much of this and it gave me like a real awareness. And so I do want people to go and get a copy of your book. And I would like people that are interested in this to go deeper with it. So I want to ask you about that. It's a simple question and of course, you know, you're probably biased because you have a book here. What will people actually get if they read this book? What is your hope? If you could like wave a magic wand and say, okay, someone reads this book and here's what I, what I hope that they get out of it. I mean, it's quite Entertaining. But beyond that, it's a lot of good stuff.

Like, you know, really simply, I've spent my career kind of interested in how do people achieve the impossible. And I think, you know, I wrote Abundance for a reason. I wrote Abundance with Peter because I believed that we had the power to significantly raise global standards of living over the next 20 to 30 years. Right. But it was also abundance or bust. If we didn't do these things, I thought we were going to blow up the mothership. And I still think that's the case. So what all this research in Stealing Fire has shown is that if you really want to do the impossible, if you really want to level up creatively and innovate at this level and take on those kind of grand global challenges that we need kind of people to, then you need these kind of state changing technologies. But that's not what I want people to take out of the book. That's why it's important to me. I think what you gain from this book is, first of all, a lot of insight into a lot of stuff you've probably been doing already. If you're listening to this podcast, chances are you're a top performer. If you're a top performer, you one way or another figured some of this stuff out already and are moving in that direction. So hopefully this will give you kind of a big framework so you can hang those individual ornaments and go, wow, this is what I'm doing. This is why I'm doing it. This is how it's useful, this is how it's dangerous. And you can have a little more cognitive literacy. You know what's going on inside your brain and your body. You know what tools you have to apply to whatever problem you're trying to solve. And a little more cognitive liberty. Right. You will also know when somebody else is trying to rent space in your head and you can kind of defend a little bit against what's on going coming, I think.

Right. No, that makes a lot of sense. So where do people. Well, no, let me ask you this first for. Then you tell like any websites, anything, recommendations to go deeper with this, anything that I should have asked you that I did not.

We covered so much ground, I cannot think of anything. But that just sounds lame. So why don't you ask me just some random interesting question and I'll give you an answer and we can go out. I'm just. And then I'll tell people where to find the book.

If someone. Well, you've kind of already given some other things, something that you've not mentioned. Let's say someone is struggling with a state of hopelessness and they, you know, they're hearing this but they're not, they're not being. They're not somehow able to get their body into like a place of action and movement which of course is necessary. If someone now and frankly start by bringing breathing.

I mean first things. Yeah start. The simplest way in here is always respiration. And the most important thing for the person in the situation you were talking about is to downregulate their nervous system. You got to calm down that fight or flight response essentially, right. If you're spinning, really hurting and really spinning and can't like you're depressed so you can't get off the couch depressed. Every thoughts go back to the things that hurt the most. What that looks like by the way on a brain scan is ocd. It's just loop and you have to shift your state. So the most simplest tool is this. If your inhale is at least four seconds long and you double your exhale, right? So your exhale is double your inhale. So it's a 4 second inhale, 8 second exhale. And you try to build that up 5 second, 10 second, 6 second, 11 second. Here's the cool thing. When your exhale is twice as long as your inhale and when it is longer than seven seconds, your brain does this really cool thing. Your brain is always trying to conserve energy. It's got a fixed energy budget. It's the first rule of the brain. A lot of the state changing stuff we're talking about actually happens works because the brain is trying to find ways to conserve energy so it shuts off non critical structures. In this particular case it goes, look, damn exhale is super long. They must be calm. I guess we don't need these hyperactive neurons going in circles. We don't need to produce so much cortisol and norepinephrine. These things are expensive, will save some energy. And you start and it literally starts to down regulate your nervous system. You come out of fight or flight and it can happen very, very, very quickly so that like you know, first things first. Start with respiration. The simplest tool and there's a reason, right why every meditation system is built around follow your breath. Some of it is it's a good thing to focus on on some of it is it down regulates your nervous system, calms you down.

That was actually extremely valuable and useful advice. As simple as it sounds, it's so true. I'm a fan of 12 step groups and My buddy Tommy Rosen, who's created this Recovery 2.0 community and it saved his life. And one thing he says though, what's missing in 12 steps is nutrition. Nutrition and exercise and breath. If you don't bring that in to the community because the community is helpful, but if you don't bring these other things in, you're just going to get to a place where you have to breath. Work is so critical. Would you say the same thing about overwhelm? Because I would say that the commonality between most of my entrepreneurial friends that would be listening to a podcast or buying your book is they're trying to read too many books, they have too many emails, they have too many podcasts to listen to. There's just too much stuff and they're overwhelmed with things. And that state of overwhelm is painful, depending on how you interpret it. So is it really overwhelm or is it just the way you're experiencing overwhelm? And so your book is how to experience life from a different angle in the same way that you said anxiety and excitement are the same. So would you say the same thing for someone in a state of overwhelm, just go right into the breath is the thing to do?

Yes, of course. Yes, for sure. I mean, it's a really, you know, it's 21st century normal is essentially the edge of fight or flight where we live. Hyperactivity in the prefrontal cortex, brainwaves in the jagged fast moving beta wave range and a steady drip, drip of stress hormones like norepinephrine and cortisol is literally tiny per century normal brainwave. It's the neurological signature associated with life in the 21st century. And it's colloquially referred to as tired, wired and stressed. And what happens in, by the way, in all these non ordinary states is we drop out of that. That's what happens. That's what respiration is the gateway to. Hyperactivity in the prefrontal cortex, it calms down. Brain waves move from agitated beta down into meditated alpha. You get really good. You go down to deep meditative theta, right? And stress hormones. As we move into these states, they're flushed from your system and they're replaced with the feel good performance enhancing chemicals, dopamine, serotonin, anandamine, endorphins, oxytocin. So that's like, that's why this stuff is so fundamentally important. And you know, the thing I said earlier, you know, when it comes to creativity, for example, we keep trying to, you know, train up a skill and we need to be training up a state of mind. The same thing is true with anxiety, with neurosis, with depression. I've always said, like, one of the reasons I pursued this is, you know, left to my own devices, it's bad upstairs. Why do I get up at 4 o' clock in the morning and start writing? Because my normal high neuroticism panic level, I will secrete massive quantities of norepinephrine at 4am and I will start panicking. Why I'm on my desk writing within five minutes because if I wait six, bad things are going to start happening upstairs. Like that's just, that's how, you know, that's just how I am. And by the way, I think it's how most top performers I know are. And the reason is, honestly, you know, what I've seen over and over. If you want to do the impossible, you want to take on these grand challenges, all the people are doing it. They're running from something just as fast as they're running towards something. And it's, and it's that double motivation. It's learning how to take all that fear and turn it into something positive that is driving the bus. And the only way, by the way, to take that fear and turn it into something positive really is through kind of learning how your consciousness works and using state change to do it. Because that's how you solve the problem of too much fear.

There's so much truth in that. I completely agree. And that would also mirror my own existence. I mean, a lot of the things that I do, people are like, oh, I wish I could do that. And it's like, you know, I mean, for one, you could if you wanted to enough. And secondly, you know, to me, if I didn't, I'd hate to. Things go dark and there's, there's the world's highest achievers live with the highest levels of dissatisfaction sometimes, and there's a lot of pain and angst and, and it's just a matter of finding workarounds and ways to transcend it and pursuing and achieving these states that you are speaking to and having them more available in a way that you can actually do it is great. So I feel infinitely more capable and more confident of being in far better states as a result of reading Stealing Fire than prior to. And so for people that want to pick up your book or even work with you, what do they do?

Everything. I mean, pick up the book, go to Amazon, go to barnesandnoble.com, support your indie bookstores. Any which way. If you want more info on the book stealing firebook.com. everything you need to know. If you want more info on me. Stevencottler.com Brand new website by the way. Just got an upgraded yesterday. New and live. Lots more kind of information there on all the things we've been talking about. And if you want to work with us, flowgenomeproject.com Flow Genome Project and let.

Me spell Steven Kotler. For those of you that are listening and probably driving around. It's S T E V E N Kotler. K O T L E R Steven Kotler. If you want to watch the first interview I ever did on video with Stephen and Peter Diamandis, let me pause.

You for a half a second and say still to this day, the finest interview anybody's ever done with Peter and me. Really, like, honest to God, I'm actually having it loaded on my new website this afternoon because I love it. I still think it's one of the best interviews anybody did with Peter and me. And it was, was our first one and it was beautiful by the way. Well lit, cool little studio you built.

No, that was done in Singularity. And the camera guy was amazing. And so. Thank you. Yeah, to this day, people love that interview.

That was Matthew Rutherford, of course. The camera whack guy was amazing. He's a very talented documentarian. Of course. He's a total guy. Now I get it.

So, Stephen, here's what I'd like to ask of you. Also. Anything related to addiction or anything that would be helpful, please feed it to me and I will share it with people on the addiction platform that we are building. We have artistsforaddicts.com I want to do a future episode with you just literally.

Talking about, yeah, we raised this. You could really go deep. There's a lot to say on everything we've been talking about today. And addiction. Right. Let's just say there's copious amounts of research that says because these states of consciousness give us a very potent tool against addiction.

Yes, yes, exactly. And so I'm super excited for that. And so to all the listeners, thank you so much. I hope you found this really, really valuable and pick up a copy of the book Stealing Fire. Trust me, this book will blow your mind. It is so worth reading or listening to it if you're not going to read it, but get a copy of the book right now because I'm going to tell a lot of people to buy this thing, it's such a great book. And share this interview with anyone that you think could benefit from listening to it and any famous last words.

Stephen, I want to leave you with another William James quote because as you were talking it just came into my mind. And such a great quote. To sum up, I think almost everything we spent the past 15 minutes talking about, which is the great thing in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. Love it. Love it. Awesome.

Thank you my friend. I appreciate it. And until next time, we will speak again and to all of our listeners. Please comment on what you thought of this and also after you read the book, let me know what you think and have yourself a wonderful day.

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