The One With Steve Kotler - I Love Marketing With Joe Polish And Dean Jackson - Episode #141

I'm dean jackson, he's joe polish and this is the I love marketing podcast. Hello, this is Joe Polish and I have an interview with my good friend Mr. Steven Kotler, who's. You're in New Mexico right now, right Steven?

I am. Awesome. All right.

We're going to talk about some really just cutting edge knowledge research, crazy stuff you've been doing on the subject of flow. If you don't know who Steven Kotler is, let me just kind of give everyone the background. I've interviewed Steven before, first met him at Singularity University, I don't know, first three, four years ago, whenever that was. And Stephen, he's basically a best selling author. He's an award winning journalist. He's written several books, including nonfiction books, Abundance with Peter Diamandis, which was an amazing, awesome book. And Peter of course is my good friend in our Genius network and he wrote also a book called Small Furry Prayer and West of Jesus and the novel the Angle Quickest for Flight. You've had articles, Steven, that have appeared in over 60 publications. New York Times Magazine, Wired, Discover, Popular Science, Outside GQ, National Geographic. You write the Playing Field, which is a blog about the science of sport and culture for Psychology Today. You're also the co founder and director of research at the Flow Genome Project and we're going to talk about that a little bit today. And an international organization devoted to putting flow state research on a hard science footing and the co founder of the New Mexico base Rancho de Chihuahua Dog sanctuary. Now that's what I'll actually read the rest of it. I'll just kind of ask you about yourself. Now, everyone that's listening, go to this website, either pause it and watch some of the videos@rise r I s e-uperman.com and then come back or just make a note of that and we'll talk about it a little bit later. But you've got a book coming out called the Rise of Superman. So I actually want to time date this interview because this will not be the last interview that we do because I've not read the book yet, but I am really looking forward to it. And you have this website, Rise of Superman that I watched a couple of videos that you suggested before we started recording here. One of them is called Flow101.5 of the world's best athletes reveal the secrets to the zone. And then your brain on flow by Travis Rice, Robbie Madison and others discuss ultimate human performance. And it really did blow my mind. You've got amazing content that people can just really Wrap their head around. So without me babbling further, who the heck is Steven Kotler? What are you really doing? What's this flow stuff you're working on all about?

Steven Kotler's a guy obsessed with flow. Clearly, that much we've learned. And let's just start by telling people what rise of Superman is about and then what flow is about. Or actually, let's invert that and start with flow and why I'm so interested in it.

Yep.

So the science of ultimate human performance, meaning how to be our absolute best, like the hard science of it, goes back kind of to the late 1800s, where they discovered there is this peak state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best. Throughout history, different people called it different things. Abraham Maslow called it peak states. William James thought he was looking at spiritual experiences, so he called it mystical experiences. We've had runner's high, being in the zone, being in the pocket. Well, in the 1970s, a guy named Haley. Chick sent me high. Don't try to pronounce it.

Well, you taught me how to pronounce it. Chick sent me high.

Yes, you're right, I did. Mihai, Chick sent me high. It's not exact, but nobody forgets that. But in the 70s, he conducts what we would today call the largest global happiness study ever. But at that time, we don't have happiness studies. There's nobody looking at that. But he basically ran around the world and asked 10,000 people about the times in their life when they felt their best and performed their best. And they too described this peak state of consciousness, and they used the word flow to do it. So we now call these peak states of consciousness flow states. And the kind of idea is not only are these states where you perform your best and you feel your best, that kind of. It's not just physical performance. You're better, faster, stronger, you're smarter. Your pattern recognition system is more fired up. Information acquisition, creativity goes through the roof. And we're starting to get some kind of ridiculously hard numbers on this. And I'll just throw a couple at you so you understand when we're talking about kind of the secret to ultimate human performance, what's really on the table here. So McKinsey just kind of completed a 10 year study of top executives in flow states. And what they found is that on average, top executives report being five times more productive in flow than out of flow. So you've got to stop and think about this. This means you get to go to work on Monday, take the rest of the week off and get as much done as your steady state peers. McKinsey did some back, but who's of course going to take the rest of the week off? So two days of work spent in flow states and you're going to start lapping your peers. McKinsey did a kind of back of the envelope calculation in their research, and it kind of jives with our research. Most people spend less than 5% of their time in flow, and we'll get to what exactly defines flow in a second. But most people spend less than 5% of their time in flow. If we could raise that number by a 15 percentage point, so people are in flow 20% of the time, overall workplace productivity would double. That is a staggering number. And let me kind of put a little more information behind it so it doesn't sound so preposterous. One of the things we know about flow is that it massively heightens learning and memory. So in research done everywhere from Montessori schools to all the electronic learning environments you can possibly think of, flow significantly accelerates the learning and memory. In studies run by the military with snipers, when they introduced flow artificially using something called transcranial magnetic stimulation, they saw learning jump by 230%. In a non military study where they took novice snipers and tried to train them up to be expert snipers, by putting them in flow states, they cut the training time by 50%. So you're not just talking about massively jacked up productivity. You're also talking about massively amplified learning and memory to add one more thing to it. And here the research is still early days, but the research on flow and creativity is ridiculous. Meaning, like in one study that was recently done, they gave 40 people a tough brain teaser and said, can you solve this? Nobody could solve it. Then they introduced flow artificially, and a significant portion of the study group solved the puzzle. So problem solving abilities, creativity kind of goes to the masks. We've been trying to put some hard numbers around how big the amplification is. In a loose survey run out of the flow genome project, we're finding seven to 10 times as productive. This isn't 10% more productive. It's 700 to 1,000% more creative.

That is totally insane. Well, obviously this has the ability to change everyone's life that radically.

Radically. Radically. Radically. And now let's. So let's go back to rise of superman and let me kind of tell you what rise of superman is about and why it matters so much. So I'm switching topics Here to action and adventure sports, which I know sounds a little strange, but if you look at action adventure sports, surfing, skiing, rock climbing, snowboarding, kite surfing, skydiving, etc. Over the past generation, past 25 years, you see something that you've never seen before in history, which is nearly exponential growth in ultimate human performance. So that's performance when life or limb is on the line. So that's the slowest group to advance normally and we've got near exponential growth. Sports performance is slow, it's steady, it's linear, it's governed by the laws of evolution. Nothing like this has ever happened before. At no point in history do you get athletic performance quintupling in 10 years. So let me first give you a couple examples and then tell you why this is so important, just so you can wrap your head around it. Surfing is a sport that dates back about 1,000 years. So from 400 something ad to 1996, the biggest wave ever surfed is 25ft. And they think that's a hard and fast limit. You can't go bigger, it defies the laws of physics, et cetera, et cetera. People are now surfing. Hundred foot waves go back to the early 90s. The largest gap anybody had ever jumped over on a snowboard was 40ft. It's now 240ft. You don't get these kind of massive jumps normally in sports. It just doesn't happen. So the question of the harder rise of Superman is what the heck is going on? And the answer, for some really critical, important reasons, is that action adventure sport athletes have essentially become the very best flow hackers on earth. They have figured out how to get themselves into flow far more than probably anybody else in the history of the world. And they've done it by necessity. The danger level has gone up so high in these sports that if they're not in flow in the zone when they're performing, they're going to go to the hospital or they're going to wind up dead. And a lot of people have and do, and they will flat out tell you this. So by necessity, they have figured out how to gain access to flow better than anybody else. So everybody else is in flow 5% of the time. That is not the case. In action adventure sport athletics, the numbers are much, much higher. And what's critical here is the technology has advanced so much since Csikszentmihalyi first came up with this idea of flow that we have started. We've mapped the psychology very thoroughly. We, we are starting to map the Neurobiology and the physiology. What this is allowing us to determine are what are called flow triggers. These are preconditions that drive people into flow. We now know there are environmental triggers, psychological triggers, social triggers, creative triggers. We understand the neurobiology behind them. What action sport athletes did was they created an environment that maximized flow triggers. They built their lives around the state and around these specific triggers. But here's the key, there are none of these triggers cannot be applied across all domains. So we can take what the action adventure sport athletes have learned, combine it with a whole bunch of what science has taught us in the past 20 years about how these states work internally and create a roadmap that can get anybody into flow. So this same kind of massive amplification performance that we're seeing in the athletes, we're also seeing, we all can see everywhere. And I'll give you one final example and I'll shut up and let you talk for a second. Rees Jones, who is one of the founders of the Internet and one of the founders of Singularity University and a big time VC and a friend and on the board of the Flow Genome project, we were talking, this quote is in Rise of Superman. He said, you know, I've kind of been in Silicon Valley throughout the entire high tech revolution. I can tell you that at the heart of this entire revolution are three things. Circuit design, network design and software design. And you can't do any of those things really well without flow states. So he said, if you're looking for a non athletic example of what happens when a bunch of people start getting into flow frequently Silicon Valley is not a bad place to start.

Interesting. Yeah, I know Reese also that's fascinating. Let me ask you this because I think it will make a heck of a lot more sense to people listening.

To.

To bring it down to your own life. I mean you gave a great talk at one of my 25k groups about flow probably a year ago and towards the end you actually talked about your own experience, about how you really kind of discovered flow when you were in an incredibly sick state, physically ill with a disease. Can you talk about that and how? Because I think that is the seed of where all of this stemmed from.

Absolutely. More than happy to. So when I was 30 years old I got Lyme disease and I spent the better portion of three years in bed. I lost pretty much everything you can lose, you know, the house, the girl I was going to marry, went bankrupt, etc etc, etc trying to cure myself and the doctors had pulled me off meds Saying there's nothing else we can do for you and your stomach lining is bleeding out and blood, blah, blah, blah. And so I was going to kill myself. Because I was lucid and functional, I could work 10% of the time, literally about an hour a day tops. Usually it was about 20 minutes. So all I was going to do was just be a burden to everybody who loved me and cared about me for the rest of my life if this was my functionality. And Lyme, just to deviate for a second, in case you don't know, is kind of like the worst flu you've ever had, crossed with paranoid schizophrenia. So, you know, crippling pain, a lot of, you know, fevers, chills, aches, I can't move, I'm sick as a dog, can't walk, can't whatever. But the worst part is it gets, well, it gets into joints of horrible arthritis also, but it also gets in your brain. So I was dyslexic, I couldn't spell. I had no short term memory, I had no long term memory. I literally, I could sit on the couch and watch LA Clipper games because they were fast up. The Clippers were so bad, they were the only thing I could pay attention to. Lakers, who played that plodding half court boring shit, couldn't pay attention to it, couldn't even follow it. Like, that's how sick I was. So I'm gonna kill myself. And a friend of mine shows up my house and says, let's go surfing. And I just started laughing because I couldn't walk across a room, let alone go surfing. And she was an absolute. She was a pain in the butt. She would not leave and would not leave and would not leave. And finally I was like, you know what, I can always kill myself tomorrow. What does it matter? Let's just go surfing today. It'll shut her up at least. So, like, you know, they, people basically help me to the car. They drive me to the wimpiest beginner wave in the history of the world. Sunset beach in Los Angeles. They give me a board the size of a Cadillac. And the bigger the board, the easier it is to sit on. It is the smallest day, there's nobody out. I mean, the waves are maybe a foot to three feet high. The tide is so low, I can wade out to the lineup. My friends literally have to help me out to the lineup. And they put me on this board and 30 seconds later, a wave comes. And I'm not sure what happened. I would assume it was muscle memory. I don't know I, you know, I had surfed a lot when I was younger, but it'd been about five years since I'd been on a board. But whatever. I spun the board around twice, I paddled a couple times and I popped up and I, you know, I popped up into this other frickin dimension. I mean it was, I left Ria, first of all, like I stood up, which was, you know, amazing in and of itself that I could move that fast, that alone was miraculous. But I was, I mean I was totally like clear headed and I felt great and I felt alive and I had kind of weird sort of panoramic vision and time seemed to have slowed to an absolute crawl and on and on and on. And it was, you know, an astounding. What I now know is a deep, deep flow experience where kind of all the, all the things that happen in a flow state all showed up at once and, and I felt so good. After that one wave I caught four more waves and after those five waves I was totally disassembled. They like drove me home and put me into bed and people had to bring me food for 14 days because I couldn't move. And on the 15th day, which was the day that I could kind of walk around again, I got into my car and I drove to the beach and I did it again. And when there was nothing else going on in my life and the doctors had given up on me and everything was gone over the course of about six months, surfing only a handful of times and continuing to have these crazy, was I mystical experiences. I went from about 10% functionality to about 80% functionality. And that led me to like two kind of fundamentally deep questions that are related. The first was the hell is going on? Because, you know, surfing is not known as a cure for chronic autoimmune conditions. So what is that? And second of all, Lyme is only fatal if it gets deep into your brain. And I'm trained kind of as a science writer. I don't have quasi mystical experiences. Time does not slow down. I don't have panoramic, you know what I mean? Like this doesn't happen. I thought, oh my God, I must be going crazy. Which means this Lyme is in my brain, so I'm going to die. So I was, shall we say, very motivated to figure out what the heck was going on. And over the course of, you know, what has now been 15 years that, you know, first I, you know, the early for early things I discovered is that I was actually looking at flow states. And then I understood that the neurobiology of flow, if you start to understand, we can talk about it. And you've seen some of that in the Flow 101 video explains the quasi mystical experiences. We know why time slows down in a flow state. We know why your ego, your sense of self disappears. We know why focus becomes laser pointed and all these things. We understand why that's happening and we actually understand how to kind of maximize it for the most benefit at this point. But we didn't really back then. There weren't many people doing that research. But I found some of the early folks and I kind of put myself in the middle of the conversation for a very long time. And that's essentially what happened. It led to the flow genome project, which was an attempt to take all these various balkanized researchers that I had encountered and bring them together and put them on the same page. And I think we've started to really do that. So I think that's happening and you know, really make a concentrated push at kind of flow research to try to explain what was going on. I also discovered, and this is thanks to Herb Benson's work at Harvard, among other things. But all the neurochemicals, there are a lot of very powerful neurochemicals that show up in flow. They massively boost the immune system, so you get a profound immunological response. But they also reset the nervous system back towards zero in a very kind of fundamental way. And that was the big deal with the autoimmune condition. Just so you know, autoimmune condition means your nervous system has gone haywire. And if you can kind of reset it and calm it down on a regular basis, it massively speeds healing. So that was where that came from and what we learned a bunch of years later. But all this, you know, grew out of a what the hell happened to me? And I may be dying, so, you know, I should figure that out. And it just, you know, it led down this kind of rabbit hole that brings us that, you know, concurrently. I'm also, you know, I've been around action adventure sports my whole life. My early career as a journalist was, you know, covering a lot of these athletes. And I've kind of witnessed this exponential growth in ultimate human performance and know both as myself as an athlete and knowing these guys, what was going on with Flo. So it all, all this twirled up into where we are today.

Yeah, no, and I think, I think that's so critical for people to know because, you know, I mean, even in my own world, you know, learning my expertise in the area of direct response marketing was all a byproduct of desperation and me being a small, struggling business owner and having to figure something out. Here you're talking about figuring out how to live and not die. I think on one level, what you have written about, and of course, I've known you for several years now, and so I'm very aware of the sheer volume of research that you do and what you write about. One of the articles I just read from you in Forbes is Legal Heroin is Virtual reality our next hard drug. And what's fascinating about what you're working on is it's not just about having human beings become just more incredibly capable and happy and performing better. In the video flow 101 that's on your website, Rise of Superman, you talk about pattern recognition, future prediction, information processing, which maybe I'll come back and ask you about those. But I also look at flow as a way to deal with crippling depression, anxiety, addiction, disease. And so it's not just something that will allow human beings to become incredibly more productive and capable, but it could also dramatically, it could save lives, it could eliminate human suffering. It could just change so much. And so I think what you're working on is such an incredibly important topic, was why I wanted to do this interview with you and turn people onto this. Because most people probably are oblivious to the fact that this level of research on flow at this state currently exists. So can I ask you about just brain chemicals? Because as far as I'm concerned, being a former drug addict and having an addictive personality and having just anxiety and angst in periods of my life, and then having other periods where I've been incredibly excited, doing amazing things, totally engaged. I believe what's going on is all biochemical. It's this pharmacy in our brains. Flow being defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. When he wrote the first book, Flow talked about the state. But you actually have figured out to whatever degrees you're capable of how to actually replicate it and get into that state.

Yeah, let's peek under the hood of Flow for a second second. And we won't go crazy, but I just. I want to give you a map of the territory first, and then we'll drill down into a couple bits in a way that hopefully people will be able to understand. So when I say back in the 70s and the 80s, we determined what the psychology of flow is. Right. What I mean is we understand what the psychological preconditions are that trigger More flow. And we also understand the kind of seven psychological characteristics that would define a flow state. Right. So concentration, task specific attention, et cetera, et cetera, time dilation. So time slows down those kinds of things. We have since gotten a peek under the hood at the neurobiology. When you say neurobiology, and this is Joe, you're right and wrong when you isolate it on neurochemistry. But I like. One of the things that has held flow research back is that we have done it, bits and pieces. And when you talk about the brain, you have to talk about three things. You have to talk about neuroanatomy. So where in the brain is something taking place? You also have to talk about neurochemistry and neuroelectricity, which are the two ways the brain communicates. Right. It sends chemical messages or it sends electrical messages. I am going to kind of skip over neuroelectricity because we can cover a lot of the same stuff and more interesting stuff in the other two categories. So let me talk about first what happens neuroanatomically in flow, and then we'll get to kind of neurochemistry and your questions. So neuroanatomically, what happens in flow is that what is called what is known as the prefrontal cortex, which is essentially the area of your brain that's behind your forehead, which is where all of your higher cognitive functions are housed. This is where you create your sense of self. It's where you make executive decisions. It's where you make moral decisions. It's where you kind of sift through all the complexity of ideas and things along those lines. In flow, what happens is something called transient hypofrontality. So transient means temporary hypo. Hypo, it's the opposite of hyper. It means to slow down. And frontality means this portion of the brain, the prefrontal cortex. So during flow states, as attention starts to tighten, the brain has to perform an efficiency exchange. It's got a limited energy budget, since I've only got so much energy. And right now it's very critically important that I put all this energy towards paying attention. So I'm going to shut down unnecessary parts of the prefrontal cortex to shift this energy over. Right. It's also a move from kind of conscious explicit system processing to unconscious implicit system processing. Unconscious processing is a lot faster. I mean, significantly faster. It's like a turtle versus a light wave. So that's a big deal. But what happens as parts of your frontal cortex go online is we get these amazing boosts. So a portion of your brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. I'll never make you say that again or listen to that again.

Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

All right, so that is where your inner Woody Allen lives. That is your inner critic. That is your voice of doubt, of despair, of fear, of disparagement of all that stuff. That is where you second guess yourself. That is the voice that makes you go crazy all day long and makes that anxiety you were talking about earlier so much worse, right? The voice that takes that little fear of, oh, wow, I wonder if I'm going to be able to make rent next month to oh my God, I'm going to lose my house, my wife's right. That's the part of the brain that does that. It gets shut off in flow. So we feel this as absolute liberation, as freedom. It's that feeling that somebody, at long last, somebody else is driving the bus. We're liberated from ourselves. This massively jacks up creativity, but it really calms down the nervous system also. So that's part of the big deal. Why does time slow down in a flow state? Because time is calculated all over the prefrontal cortex. And when part of it gets shut down, your brain can no longer distinguish past from present from future. So you're plunged into what psychologists call the elongated now, the deep now. And everybody's been there. If you've ever been in felt awe, right? When you see, you know, a starry sky or the beauty of a Grand Canyon and you get kind of sucked in, time seems to pause for half a second, right? That's the front of a flow state. That's kind of that experience. If you've been in the freeze frame of a car crash, that's what happens in deeper flow experiences. So we've all kind of tasted this just comes on at a much deeper level in flow because the parts of your brain that parts of your brain are shut off. So that is just kind of a look at, at the neuroanatomy because it's super neat. And I just, you know, most people don't know that goes on and I just wanted to tell you about it. So neurochemically, which is the other thing that we want to talk about, what we know about flow neurochemically is complicated. It's a complicated cascade of neurochemicals. All of them are pleasure inducing chemicals and they are very potent. You talked about addiction earlier and here's kind of what you need to know that way so Flo combines norepinephrine, dopamine, anandamine, endorphins, serotonin. So these are all massively performance enhancing neurochemicals. Norepinephrine and dopamine, these are focusing chemicals, they help, they drive focus and motivation. They're also reward chemicals. So dopamine, which is the principal reward drug in the brain is. Cocaine is the most addictive drug on earth. And all that happens when you snort cocaine is it releases a bunch of dopamine into the brain and it blocks its reuptake. This is the same thing that happens in flow, though on top of just getting dopamine, for example, you also get endorphins. So endorphins are the body's natural heroin, except the brain's version is better. Meaning like the most common endorphin secreted by the brain is 100 times more powerful than medical morphine. So you're also getting norepinephrine, which is essentially speed. Serotonin is ecstasy, Anadamine is the psychoactive. And marijuana, these are huge pleasure chemicals. So when flow states produce them, they're incredibly motivating. They're very addictive. You will do anything to get more flow. But as Csikszentmihalyi pointed out so long ago, unlike other addictions that lead backwards, flow states are addictions to possibility, to hope, to forward progress. Not only like is performance all jacked up in a flow state and this is so key, you get a glimpse of what else might be possible for you. So not only are you at your best, but you can imagine what it would be like to be like this more of the time and what kind of change you could affect in your life. It is an addiction that drives you forward instead of sending you backwards.

Can I ask you something about that real quick? Just because you're on a roll here and this is great. I remember reading oh God. Several years ago from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi about the same neural pathways in the brain that gets someone into a flow state are also the same pathways that lead to self destruction, addictive behavior. With all of your.

Is that still accurate or A, it's accurate and B, this has all been like, you know, we've been on the phone, we've been talking for a while now and we've given everybody all the great news. So let's talk about the bad news because there is a dark side to flow and let's talk about why this is not self help and what so self help, human optimization, all this stuff Whether it's, you know, Tim Ferriss stuff or whatever, it's very gradual, it's slow, it's like a 5 to 10%, you know, improvement. And honestly, you know, if you look at the stats of how many people keep diets or make New Year's resolutions and then, you know, break them, blah, blah, the results aren't great. Not most of the people who kind of go down that path don't get those improvements. So when you go down the flow path, yeah, you are going to get the massive amplifications. But you are also, you are playing with really fundamental psychology. These are, you know, flow states are about autonomy, mastery and purpose. And these are the most powerful psychological drivers out there. There are also about five of the most addictive neurochemicals the brain has to offer. The problem with flow is that there is no guarantee, there is no magic pill. There is nothing I can do that is going to put you into a flow state. I can tell you what the preconditions are. I can show you and tell you everything I know about hacking it. I can tell you we're learning more all the time and it's getting better. But I can also tell you that if you start getting easy access to flow and suddenly the spigot turns off for whatever reason. And I have to tell you, this is really common, what happens to people a lot in work environments is they take on a project that they love, they fall in love, it becomes a passion project. They end up getting in flow states all the time. Because a lot of the triggers, the social triggers, the creative triggers, whatever that bring on flow, they show up in passion projects. People do passion projects at work, they get great, fantastic results and then the boss says, hey, do more of that and suddenly the pressure goes up. The challenge skills, balance, which is very critical in flow. Flow exists when the task at hand is slightly harder than your skill set. And if you tip those proportions out of whack, you're going to get too much fear based reactions and you're not going to get into flow and it's going to cripple you. That's pretty easy to happen. When your boss sees you do crazy, get crazy results from flow at work and then suddenly ups the ante and says, hey, do it again, only this time faster. And all this stuff and maybe you don't care so much about this project. Suddenly there can be a downside to this. It is not, it is dangerous stuff, it is a huge boost and you can do literally impossible things in flow states. But there's cost here and there's risk here. So it's not a one stop, you know, cure. All right, interesting.

Okay, well, so how does one approach it knowing that then? I mean, now I know. Let me say this too. Everything you're talking about in depth, you have written about in Rise of Superman.

All of this is in Rise of Superman. And it's probably. Actually, since you know, I'm better at writing than I am at speaking, it probably makes more sense in the book.

No, but this is completely fascinating.

So let me. I mean, here's the funny thing. I will give you the one secret, and it ties to the neurochemicals a little bit. But the one secret that most people don't know about flow, that if they know, they avert most of the problems. I'm not saying you won't find yourself kind of locked out of the flow state and fighting to get back in. But if you know one thing, it's actually four things. But if you know these four things, pretty much, it will save you a lot of bother along the way. And the thing where people make errors about flow states, one of the most common errors made about flow, about these performance states is they're binaries either in flow or you're out of flow, switches either on or off. That is not the case at all. Flow. And this is based on research done at Harvard. Herpin's work, a lot of the foundational work, discovered that flow is a four stage cycle, and a number of the stages don't feel flowy at all. And if you know your way around the flow cycle, and I'll go through it in a second, you can save yourself most of the pain and torture because you can know where you are on a roadmap. So you know what you need to do. And this, we cover this, you know, in depth in the book. But I'll go, I'll go through it here for you. The first stage of the flow cycle is known as struggle. Struggle is a loading phase. You are overloading the brain with information. So if you're an athlete, this means you're trying to learn a new skill. If you are a writer like me, working on a story, this is when I'm doing all my research. This is when I'm reading and I'm talking to people and I'm trying to figure out what the hell it is that I'm going to say. The thing about the loading phase is the farther along you get in it, the more anxious you're getting. Things are not making sense at this Point, you are literally just struggling, struggling. You're essentially, you're trying to train up the unconscious so it gets to the point that it can take all this new information and create new patterns with it and, you know, turn it into meaning and stuff that you can use. But until that point, it feels awful. And the closer you get to flow, the worse it's going to feel. So that's the first thing. Okay. Second thing to know is the second phase is called release. And this is literally. You've heard this a million times and a million different people talk about this. You have to take your mind off the problem. You have to get yourself to that boiling point and say, you know what? I'm done. I'm totally overloaded. I can't think anymore. You have to take your mind off the problem. This is the time to go for a long walk. This is the time to build model airplanes. You want activity that is stimulating, will take your attention, but it will not totally sideswipe it. Go do something fun that you're engaged in. Take your mind off the problem. What happens neurochemically, there's a cycle going on. So on the front end, you got cortisol, norepinephrine, and adrenaline. These are all rising. These are all your stress hormones. They're going up, they're pointing up, and you're paying more attention. You're trying to solve more problems. Your prefrontal cortex is all over the situation. Then you take your mind off the problem. What you get neurochemically is a global release of nitric oxide, which is a signaling molecule in the body. And it basically tells the body to calm down, and it allows the problem to move from your conscious mind to your subconscious. From technically, if there's anybody who speaks neuroscience, who's listening from the explicit system to the implicit system. Subconscious and conscious are really vague terms that don't mean so correctly. It's that. But once you take your mind off the problem, you can then get to the third stage, which is the flow state itself. What happens is nitric oxide gets flooded into the body. All the negative stress hormones leave the body, and instead you get endorphins, you get dopamine, you get all the pleasure chemicals on the back end of the flow state. This is the third state. It's the flow state. And if they huge, huge high. And that's the thing to remind. It's a big, big high. And knowing that is critical for the next stage. Because after the flow state, the fourth stage in the cycle is a learning and memory Consolidation phase in which for learning and memory to happen. Quick shorthand for learning and memory is the more neurochemicals that show up in an experience, better chance the experience has of going from short term holding to long term storage. It's one of the reasons why flow amplifies learning so much. Neurochemicals are expensive to produce. There's only a limited amount of them. That's why people who do cocaine are depressed the next day. They got no more dopamine to feel good. People who do ecstasy are depressed afterwards because they've got no more ecstasy making them feel calm and safe and secure, right? Same thing happens with flow. So here's where the problem comes in. People have this enormous high of the flow state and there's a huge delta between the low that follows when you're in learning and memory consolidation. And what happens is people start disbelieving. Everything that happened in the flow state, oh, that wasn't real, it'll never happen. All those plans I made, all those id, it's never going to work, that kind of stuff. And they get really anxious. And the problem is if you want more flow, if you want to solve the problem you're having, you want more of the drug that you've just put in your system, you have to move into the struggle phase. And it is very hard to buckle down for massive amounts of learning and work when you're coming in that anxious. So you have to know that this is coming. And I always tell people everybody's been drunk and hungover, or most everybody has been drunk or hungover. And most people along the way have learned the lesson that when you're hungover the day after you have learned, don't pay attention to the voice in your head because it's telling you all kinds of horrible, negative things. But you know, it's the hangover talking, so you learn to ignore it. Same thing has to happen here with flow states. When you are in that recovery period, when you're letting your body kind of get ready for the next round, you have to relax and really kind of let go and not worry about it. And don't kind of care how you feel. You're going to feel bad. You just felt really, really good. You just had an enormous breakthrough. You're going to feel bad afterwards, or less superheroish, right? And you just got to let yourself be there, know that's part of the cycle and know that you will kind of move through that and move into struggle. And you know, usually you're, you kind of know when you're ready as a general rule, like if you start paying attention to your body, you kind of figure out where, when you're moving to the next phase on that one. So knowing, just knowing what I've just kind of told you will save people from a lot of heartache. I'm not saying they're going to get more flow. It takes a really long time to figure out how to do these things. The one thing I can tell you is the more flow you get, the more flow you get. You're grooving new patterns in the brain. You're teaching your brain how to do new things. You get better at it along the way, but you have to know that there's a cycle, and you have to know you can get kicked out of the cycle. And sometimes you can get kicked out of flow for long stretches, really long stretches. Usually it's because you're not paying attention to things that you should be doing to get into more flow. But it happens to the people who are really, really good at this, and those can be rough times.

Let me say this then, because you actually take. You have a hospice sanctuary for dogs that are deathly ill and ready to die. And I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, I believe a lot of these dogs end up at your sanctuary because everyone else, you know, from vets to the owners to the pound or whatever, give up on them. And you are, you know, saving dogs and they don't have, you know, the mental capacity and capabilities of a human, but you're bringing these dogs in and you're putting them into a flow state in order to. To allow them to recover and save their lives. Is that correct?

We are. So we are using. We use kind of action adventure sports to get at. We use three of the same, three environmental triggers, and a lot of the social triggers we kind of duplicate here. And we do. We work with the worst of the worst kind of dogs. Kind of. My sad joke is that we're the last stop on a train of misery. But, you know, it's hospice care and special needs care, and everybody's really, really sick. And we create an environment that is packed with flow triggers and we get significant results. Our dogs live a very, very long time. They come back to health. I am not making any claims about what flow can do in humans, but what I've seen in animals is pretty spectacular. Dogs who are very, very sick, who are supposed to live for a month, end up living for three years. And they can go into the mountains and run up and down Cliff faces with me. You know, the recoveries are spectacular and we see it in dogs. I saw it myself, health wise, for sure. And other people have had similar experiences.

Give out the website for your dog sanctuary just for in case anyone even wants to see this because it's kind of cool.

I just think it's rancho Day. It's www.rancho. r A N C H O Day. D E Chihuahua. C H I H U A H U a dot org Small dogs, big problems.

Okay, so let me ask you about that. Now if you want to create flow in your life and obviously there's a lot of advantages here and you just described the downside of this. Where does it start? Does it start with the environment? Does it start with a certain type of activity? If someone per se is in a wheelchair and they cannot do physical activity, can a person get into a flow state? I mean, those sort of things?

Sure, let's, we won't go too crazy, but let's take a couple of things from each of the categories just so people get an understanding of it. Flow shows up when attention is very, very focused. When flow is defined, when I get so sucked in by the task at hand that all else ceases to matter. Time goes away, the ego goes away, performance goes the roof. That's kind of what you're looking at. But what you really need to know is that flow follows focus. So everything we're talking about are these are ways to hack attention, right? To get used to pay way more attention to very specific things. So we know what did we learn from the action adventure sport athletes and we learned, for example, why are they getting into flow so much? Well, one of the reasons is there's a tremendous amount of risk in the environments they're going into. These are high risk environments. So that is one of the psychological things you need to know. They're in a high risk environment. It drives people into flow. This is important for a couple reasons. What happens when we take risks neurochemically is the brain releases dopamine. So that same pleasure chemical we were talking about, the brain does it because it amplifies focus, but it does something else. Dopamine lowers the signal to noise ratio, meaning it allows us to notice more patterns. It heightens the pattern recognition system. So it does this like one new idea can lead to the next and lead to the next. So the dopamine is important and that's what you're actually trying to get at. You don't actually have to just take physical risks. That's the secret. You need to take risk to get into flow, but you can hack the physical risk by taking emotional risks, by taking creative risks, by taking social risks. For the shy guy, all he has to do is walk across the room and talk to the pretty girl and that's enough to produce the risk reaction. So you can hack the physics, you need the risk, but you can hack the physical risk with these other possibilities. One example, if we go into the psychological tools we know, I talked earlier about the challenge skills, balance. So flow exists essentially emotionally on the midpoint between boredom and anxiety, right? You need a task that is interesting enough that you can focus deeply on it. You're not bored. So the challenge has to be there. Your attention is fully there. But it can't be too crazy. Otherwise you're going to get swept out of what people call the flow channel, which sits between anxiety and boredom right in the middle, and into a fear based reaction. So Csikszentmihalyi did a back of the envelope calculation with a Google mathematician and they kind of were looking at it. So what they discovered is that, and this is not hard and fast and it can change, but it's usually a 4% sweet spot. So the challenge has to be roughly 4% greater than your skills. And you know, it's hard to figure out what that is for yourself. You have to really kind of work at that and kind of move towards it to figure out exactly what 4% is for you. With most high achievers, I find that 4% is actually doing less rather than doing more. Most high achievers, overshoot 4%. They set goals that are way too high. And underachievers, they don't go near 4% because 4% is, you're definitely sweating at that point. You know what I mean? There's effort there. It's hard. And it's hard enough that underachievers get a little daunted and overachievers think, oh, this can never work, I'm not pushing hard enough. Right. And it's tricky to calculate for yourselves, but that's a psychological trigger. So I've just given you two triggers that somebody in a wheelchair can work. They can also work in a business environment. Of course, one of the other things we know straight ahead for any business tip is the absolute worst thing for flow are cubicle plans. Open office cubicles. Why you need long periods of uninterrupted concentration. So when Csikszentmihalyi and Kevin Rathunde, who's at the University of Utah, he's an education researcher, went Looking for the most high flow environments they could find. One of the things they settled on was Montessori education. Why is that? One of the main reasons is Montessori is built around 90 minute blocks of uninterrupted concentration, which is what most people need. So shut that office door, turn off the phone, don't answer the email. Create an environment where you can pay attention to one thing 90 minutes at a time. Very important.

Do you do that yourself when you write?

I do it when I do everything, but yes, absolutely. When I write, I get up. I mean Joe, I don't know if you know this about me, but I get up at 3:34 o' clock in the morning because my phone will start to ring or my people start sending me emails by, you know, 7:00am New York time that I, you know, sort of have to pay attention to. So 3:34 o' clock in the morning till, you know, 7:00am Every day is when I write. Wow, okay.

Interesting. Yeah. You know, I mean my friend Tony Schwartz, you know, he wrote about like he learned. He wrote a book called the Power of Full Engagement. And one of the things that he did prior to his previous books he wrote was he actually did them in 90 minute chunks, took a 30 minute break and he ended up just massively increasing his productivity. Something that would typically take him a year, year and a half to write. He would end up doing in six months just by doing the 90 minute chunks uninterrupted. And there's a lot to be said about that. Okay, so that being said, what would be your advice for people listening other than, you know, obviously read the book? What would be some of. Just if they've liked what they've heard, if they want to, you know, arrange their life to make just, you know, not just being more productive, but better decisions. Where do they start? Unless you've got a couple of other things you want to cover first.

But no, I mean, let's. I mean, first of all, you know, Rise of Superman, all this stuff is really broken down and it's a really fun book. So everybody will have a great time with Rise of Superman. And it is really like, it gives you enough information to kind of get into the conversation simultaneously. Go to the flowgenomeproject CO FLO F L O W Genome G E N O M E Project P R O J E C T CO the website for the Flow Genome project, which is my organization. We have tons of other videos. We have a flow profile. So everybody can kind of take this and figure it just start to figure out what it is that triggers that gets them into flow. Then there's. And there's all kinds of supplemental information there. So those are the first two steps. And as far as what people can do at home, you gotta, I mean the easiest place to start, you know, we always say we can't. Like you have to kind of throw out your life and start over. In a sense that you want to start doing things. You want to maximize the amount of flow in your life. So for example, I only do things that produce flow. Excuse me, of the six or seven things I do every day, six of them, you know, are flow production machines. So I write that requires uninterrupted concentration and a lot of flow triggers that can produce flow. I do a lot of action sports. That's what drives me into flow. But you need athletic activity. You need stuff that puts you physically into your body. It's a different line of development, will also create more flow. You need something creative. If you're not writing, start doing something creative that can trigger you into flow. There are a lot of triggers in creativity that drive people into flow. And, and it sounds like you're thinking, God, I want more flow in my business life. Absolutely, you will get there. But you also need more flow in the things around your business life. That's critical.

So would business burnout as an example, would that be just simply a case of too much time not spent in flow or is that something else?

So it's complicated, but essentially business burnout is built on this idea of delayed gratification, right? You can massively delay gratification, keep working towards the goal and then the goal keeps getting higher and higher and higher. The solution is you got to get into the now. You have to write and flow is what drives you, puts you in the now. You can't be any other place. There's no other way to do it. You can meditate for 20 years and learn how to do this right. Or you can start hacking flow and pick up an action adventure sport. Perhaps start doing something great. Do put yourself in a high flow environments and get at this way it's faster. The results are the same.

Gotcha. Okay, and as far as what are the things that improve once you get yourself? I mean is it like everything? Sleep, concentration, decision making, appetite?

Well, here's what I that's a hard question to answer. And I don't know how many who's really looked at it outside of the performance metrics we've laid out. But when Csikszentmihalyi did his original study. And this has been confirmed a lot. There's a lot of research. There's a huge pile that basically shows that the people who have the most flow in their lives rate the highest for overall life satisfaction. Now, that is slightly different than happiness, right? Sometimes they correlate, sometimes they don't. They don't always correlate. And that's because life satisfaction is more about, like, the challenges you're willing to face, the amount of meaning in your life kind of. It's overall a far more powerful metric. So we know that. We know flow, you know, massively amplifies overall life satisfaction. It makes you more creative, it makes you more contented, and it makes you more consumed. It's really a path for people who. I always say, with Rise of Superman, people like to pigeonhole books. This is who this book is for. It's a sports book. It's a whatever. And I don't have. Mine doesn't silo into a vertical. It silos into a horizontal. In that flow, isn't anybody who's interested in maximizing their game and playing their best game is interested in doing this.

I mean, other than sports, what would be other industries that tend to have the most people?

Well, coding, for sure. You see it. I mean, it's all over the software industry, to the point, like going to the Oracle developer series, which is kind of their online textbooks for coders. There's a chapter on flow. If you read PeopleSoft, which is a very big book in the software industry, PeopleSoft talks about hacking flow. It points out that they believe that flow is so important in coding and software software development and design, for example, that they should pay people not for hours spent on the job, but in flow time. Literally hours spent in flow. So it's been encoding for a very long time. The video game industry is essentially built on the back of flow junkies. The success of a video game these days is about. Does it drive people into flow? That's basically the core requirement to make a successful sticky game. Website design, the stickiness of a website and the slipperiness of a website. So how much it grabs your attention or how easily you can move in and out of it online and offline seems to be determined by flow. Everybody who works in learning and education is obviously super keen to have flow. My question is, where doesn't this apply? Is kind of the answer.

Right?

Right. I mean, if you have a job where you don't. Where you don't pay attention, perhaps, but I mean, when Csikszentmihalyi did the original research. He talked to everybody, meaning Navajo sheep herders, Detroit assembly line workers, professional dancers, neurosurgeons, stock market, everybody you could possibly imagine. And they all said they felt their best and they performed their best when they were in flow. So we know the state is ubiquitous. It shows up everywhere. And if you're interested in high performance, then you're interested in flow.

Well, I would hope that would be most people that listen to my stuff.

Yeah, I assume it's most people who listen to your stuff. And I mean, what's different and what most people just don't know is most people heard this stuff, right? They've heard about flow. They know that there's this state that they sometimes feel, and sometimes it's group flow when they're working with a team. And it's a shared flow where also huge amplified effects, same thing, but it's just group flow or individual flow. Most people are familiar with this. They just usually don't know that the science has gotten far enough that now we understand the state. It's not gobbledygook. This is not new age stuff. There's hardcore neurobiology here. And we know how to hack it. And we're starting to know just a little bit about how to tame it and use it.

Okay, so you know, what I've always liked about you is because you have your science background, you're very careful to not over hype the shit out of something.

All right, so let me put it to you differently. Peter and I wrote a book called Abundance. You're a big fan of abundance, right? Abundance is about four forces that make it significantly possible for us to raise global standards of living over the next 20 to 30 years. The last chapter in Rise of Superman is called Flow to Abundance. And this is just the honest to God truth. Both Peter and I feel that abundance is kind of erasive against time. The issues that we're facing are very critical and we either solve them or they're going to kind of eat our lunch for us. And. And the results won't be pretty. So for us, it's kind of abundance or die on a certain level. And to me, abundance, it's not just that these four forces enable us to raise global standards of living to pull it off. This is not techno utopianism. It's going to require the largest cooperative effort probably in the history of the world. And I don't just think it means us showing up. I think it means the very best of us showing up. So I really like if you Want the grandiose idea. I think flow states are fundamental if we're going to create the world we want to create. I don't think we get there any other way.

Yeah, did flow save your life or.

Was it just, oh, yeah, not only did flow save my life, but one of the fun things about the flow Genome project is I've gotten to run around the world for a long time now talking to thousands and thousands and thousands of people about flow. And. And the most common thing I hear from people is, I wouldn't be alive if it weren't for flow. And one of the other more common things I hear from executives is, oh, yeah, the idea for my company, I got that in the flow state. And if you go on the video page, by the way, on the Rise site, there's testimonials by Adam Braun, for example, the CEO of Pencils of Promise, which is a huge nonprofit that builds schools all around the world and has done a tremendous amount of good in the world. And he talks about where the idea for his company came from in a flow state. James Marshall Riley runs the Guild Speakers Bureau, which is an astoundingly successful speakers bureau. You know, talks about flow states and how it's massively amplified. You know, just knowing about this information and being able to talk about it with his team at work, how much better they are as a team. And so those videos are on the Rise of Superman website, on the video page, too.

So let's talk a little bit about what you have available online, because the purpose of wanting to have this conversation with you is to introduce a lot of people to this world and this research and this knowledge that they may not know exists. Secondly, you're an amazing writer. I mean, just reading your stuff is great. I mean, if people just google you, they can read articles from you. There's all kinds of great stuff. Definitely. If they have not read Abundance, read it. Read pre order the Rise of Superman and buy the book for someone in your life that you think. I'm sure everyone that's listening to this could think of many people that could probably really benefit from this and would really just geek out over how cool it is with HackingFlow and go to the website. So talk about some of the things on, say, like the website riseofsuperman.com that is there for people, because this is literally free.

Yeah. So risemen.com, first of all, our blog is a fairly exhaustive or inexhaustible source of everything from flow hacking tips to flow stories and whatnot. There are all kinds of videos on the video page. We are doing a six part Flow video series. Five of those are going to be available over the next couple of weeks on the video page. There are two there already. There's obviously the trailer for the book which just as a teaser, watch the trailer because we think it's the most expensive book trailer that's ever been made. So you've just got that sex appeal there. There's Flow testimonials from experts kind of in lots of different fields on the video page, just talking about what Flow has meant for them and their companies and their lives. So those are there. You also can sign up for Flow Hacker Nation which will keep you apprised of everything from pre order offers through Flow hacking tips and it will keep you on the Flow Genome Project mailing list. So as we roll out over the course of the next year Flow to impact training programs that are open to the public and things along those lines, people can find out about that stuff and our Flow training seminars and things like that. So sign up for Flow Hacker Nation, check out the Rise of Superman site. If you want more, go to the Flow Genome Project. Check that out if you want even more than that. The Flow Genome Project Facebook page is a kind of full breakdown of all the kind of new neuro research that we're poking at and looking at in psych research and whatnot. It's all kind of housed on the Flow Genome Project Facebook page. So there's a lot of stuff kind of online for free that people can access. And there's even more videos on the Flow Genome Project website page. And check out if you're super curious, Andy Timonore, who's won Sundance a couple times, is a friend of the project. Has a cool kind of web based series around disruptive entrepreneurship. Just did a mini documentary on the float Genome Project. So if you want to know more about the Flow Genome Project, go to the flowgenomeproject co video page and check out her little video there. It kind of goes on and on, but I think that's the place to start.

No, that's awesome. And I'll put the trailer up on. I love marketing also where I'm going to put this interview as going to put it out as a bonus podcast just because I think this subject matter will improve all aspects of people's lives, including business. I really believe smart entrepreneurs, or anyone for that matter, they really want an unfair advantage. And not an unfair advantage to be unfair to people, but just something that's just going to really help you in all areas of life. And I can't think of something that would probably give someone a more unfair advantage.

Yeah, the one thing that I'll leave you with kind of as a final thought on the unfair advantage, and this is really the core thing you need to know. Flow, psychologists believe is the source code of intrinsic motivation. Right. So those things that produce the most flow in our lives are the things we are most motivated to do. If you are doing what you love every day and what's producing the most flow and you're most motivated to do, that's the edge you need. That's the edge everybody needs.

Totally just what you just said, that lie the source code of intrinsic motivation. I mean like really, what would be more damn valuable?

Think about it. By the way, we've all seen this in action, which is, this is the greatest example. Surfers are not known to be the most reliable group of people in the history of the world. Right. I mean there is a stereotype about how unreliable and spacey surfers are, but when there are overhead glassy tubes, they're up at 4 o' clock in the morning at the beach working really hard to ride those waves. They're not just at the beach hanging out. It is hard to paddle out for that kind of stuff. It is a lot of work and they're there every day. That's what the source code of intrinsic motivation looks like. Yeah, that's right. That's why I'm up at 4 o' clock in the morning every day. Yeah.

And there's a lot of people that would love to be able to have that. And so I think you've just given people an opportunity and opened up door that they may not even know existed. So last thing, so someone reads the book, what is your hope that their takeaways and what they will get out of it by reading Rise of Superman?

Well, I mean the first thing is Rise of Superman. You know, it gives you a look at what's possible. So I use the action adventure sport athletes as case studies. So a much more detailed, drilled down, science based, Malcolm Gladwell style book. Except instead of reading business case studies, you're reading literally the most jaw dropping possible feats in history. So on the front end, by the way, you're going to take away, oh my God, I had no idea human beings could do that. On the back end, you're going to take away, oh my God, this is how they did this. And then you're going to walk away with oh my God, this is how I can do this. So that's the takeaway. I mean, the point of Rise of Superman is it's one stop shopping for how to significantly raise your game. Yeah.

Love it. Love it. Well, Steven, I mean, always a pleasure to talk with you. To everyone listening, Stephen Kotler, K O T L E R go to Amazon, pre order the book, go to rise of superman.com, watch some of the videos. We're going to put this on I love marketing also. Share this with anyone you think needs to hear it. And just please comment on I love marketing. Let us know what you thought of this as Steven develops and more. I'm going to just let our audience know about it. I'll put the trailer up on I love marketing also so people can see it. Please comment and share the results. As usual, Steven, you're one of these freaks of nature that just puts thousands of hours into learning about fascinating stuff and then writes very eloquently, very useful stuff for humanity to improve their lives. So really appreciate it.

So thanks. My pleasure. Super fun as always.

Yep. Talk to you later. And have fun, everyone.

Let us know what you thought. Take care.