Unlock 500% More Productivity: The Science of Flow with Steven Kotler

Richard Branson summed it up nicely once. He said, you know, in two hours in flow, there's nothing I can't accomplish. To put 500% boost in productivity in context. You go to work on Monday, spend Monday in a flow state, take Tuesday through Friday off, and you're going to get as much done as your steady state peers in one day a week in flow as they will over the course of a normal week. But it's not just productivity. So the Department of Defense measured they drop soldiers into flow. Learning increases 240 to 400% above baseline in flow. We've done studies on creativity. It's 400 to 700% above baseline on average. And the numbers, they just keep going like this. But learning, creativity, productivity, and then you get to emotional well being. And we talked about this the other day. Flow underpins happiness, well being, overall life satisfaction, meaning and purpose. We know that the happiest people on Earth are the people with the most flow in their lives.

Steven Kotler is a New York Times best selling author and award winning journalist and the Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective. He's one of the world's leading experts on human performance. Stephen is the author of 14 books, 12 bestsellers out of the 14, including the Art of the Impossible, the Future is Faster Than youn Think, Stealing Fire, the Rise of Superman, Bold and Abundance. His work has been nominated for three Pulitzer prizes, I believe translated into over 50 languages and has appeared in over 100 publications including the New York Times Magazine, Wired, Atlantic Monthly, Wall Street Journal, Time and the Harvard Business. Alongside his wife, author Joy Nicholson. He is also the co founder of the Buddy Sue Hospice Home for Old Dogs, a canine elder care facility. And he just does a bunch of amazing stuff. So please give it up for my good buddy, Steven Kotler, a wild and crazy punk rocker who somehow has now become the top expert in the world on flo. So thank you. Great to have you here. So we've been hanging out for the last couple of days, doing all kinds of crazy stuff, working out, doing interviews, listen to you pontificate about.

I think I've been listening to you pontificate.

Yeah, yeah, well, it goes back and forth. Okay, sorry. So this started when you flew in a few days ago. You've been staying at my place. And we did an interview with another 100k member, Tommy Mello, before he had to head off to this big thousand plus person event that he's holding at the moment that he happened to schedule a year ago on the same dates that we decided to do this meeting, and we talked about all kinds of stuff. So just as simplistic as it can be, a lot of areas we can go define flow. What is flow? And let me say it this way. So I read the book from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who became friends of yours. He was the top flow expert in his day. And you taught me how to pronounce his name, which is Csikszentmihalyi. And he wrote Flow the Psychology of Achievement. But he wrote a bunch of books and I think at the time flow, he was describing it, but they didn't quite know how to get into it. And now you've learned how to literally hack flow. So let's start with what is flow? What does it mean? Why does it matter? And then we'll get into a whole discussion about it.

Technically, scientifically, the official definition is an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best, which is. Doesn't help anybody. But that's the definition. It refers to any of those moments of rapt attention and total absorption when you're so focused on the task at hand, so focused on what you're doing, that everything else starts to melt away and disappear. Sense of self diminishes, voice in your head. The inner critic gets really quiet. Time passes strangely. Usually you get so sucked into what you're doing that five hours go by and what feels like five seconds. Sometimes time will slow down and you get that freeze from effect. Maybe you've been in a car crash or what they call bullet time in the major and throughout. All aspects of performance, mental, physical and emotional, go through the roof so that flow quickly. Psychologists have a different, a slightly expanded definition. And then the work I do, which is on neurobiology, we have a much more technical definition, but we can stop there.

Well, let me say this, because you have done so much scientific research, you've written a bunch of stuff. One of my favorite pieces of work that you have done is mapping Cloud 9, which I don't think was ever in a book format, just audio. Right.

But I did get the rights back recently, so I'm going to put it out as a book.

Oh, okay. It's fascinating. It's totally fascinating. So what I think is kind of funny and useful about you is that you think so much of the stuff that is being promoted as personal development and how to become better is just based on complete bullshit and opinions that people are just spewing, not based on any.

So there's. There's a Fundamental problem in psychology and coaching, which essentially my career has been in revolt against, which is what happens in psychology, what happens in coaching is people figure out what works for them and they try to teach other people. And the problem is so much of that is personality based and it's very, very individual. And usually if you figure out what works for you, if you're trying to train other people, it's a disaster. Because unless they're exactly like you, they exist on the same introversion to extroversion, they're right there with you. There's similar tolerances, but if those things don't set up exactly perfectly, you're gonna make a disaster out of somebody's life. Personality doesn't scale. Biology scales. So I took it down to the neurobiology, because that's mechanism, right? Evolution shaped all our brains in the same way. And so what works for me will work for you because it's based on the actual kind of core mechanism. And the problem with psychology is most psychologists, well, they won't, they don't figure out what works for them exactly. They find a model that they like very much and that's the model that they coach from or work from or heal from. And again, it's very, very personality based. And as a general rule, they make much more of a mess of people's lives than they actually, than they actually help.

Yeah, yeah. And I absolutely can see that. And there's a lot of people that the world follows because they have such a force of personality that, and they say it was in such an authoritative state that it just sounds like the absolute truth. And this is a person I should follow. And if they, you know, if you do that, and there's a lot of leaders that are sending people down paths that they're, they're, they're not built for.

Look, I, I learned this the hard way, right? I did what everybody else does. I look learn a little bit about a flow in my late 20s, my early 30s, and I tried to coach my friends, right? I really was just telling them how to live their lives because of course I knew better. I was a fucking disaster. I put one person in the hospital, I nearly got a couple divorced that are, by the way, still married today. Like 22 years. I mean, it was, I wrecked people's lives trying to like, oh, this is the stuff that worked for me. It's going to totally work for you. Like, you, you, this was post Lyme disease right at the front end of my actual, like, career, okay? And I, I did whatever. I got a Little bit of knowledge and I tried to teach to other people and I fucked up lives right and left.

I'll tell you that's similar to the conversation like I was just, you know, earlier today interviewing Kimberly Shannon Murphy about psychedelics. And there's some people that have like a profound experience with psychedelics. Then all of a sudden they're masters at leading psychedelic retreats or guiding people through it and they can ruin someone's life. I mean, I've seen that happen too. So. And it doesn't mean that flow's bad or psychedelics. It's how it's how it's done.

So.

Well, let's step back then, because let.

Me say one more thing before step back because. So if you want to see what happens when you try to coach flow from psychology, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi teamed up with a woman named Susan Jackson. She's brilliant sports psychologist and they wrote a book called Flow and Sports back in the 90s where they tried to train, call out Australian college athletes, like top athletes, using the psychology of flow to train athletes. You can read the book. Their hit rate was terrible, like terrible results. Like the end of the book they were like, yeah, this is maybe, maybe not. And when you go from that to the neurobiology. So we're data geeks at the flow Research collector. We measure everything and have over, you know, tens of thousands of customers at this point. We get a reliable 70 to 80% boost in flow. And that's not like our kung fu is really good and I could be really proud of that. It's our biology. Everybody is wired for that. That's what's available to all of us. If you follow the biology. But you try to go from the psychology, you try to go like a coaching based methodology. It's not going to work.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video and I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there. So I talk about like easy, lucrative and fun and hard, annoying, lame and frustrating. I use these as these metaphors and these ways of framing projects, people, things in your life that could be easy, lucrative and fun or easy liberating and fun, which is kind of how I think of flow. Right? And then you have hard, annoying, lame and frustrating or Oftentimes hard, annoying, lucrative and frustrating. Right. So I also believe that in order to get to elf or create an elf business, it ain't going to be easy. You're going to have to actually figure out and set up a lot of stuff in order for the conditions of elf to exist. Well, the same thing with the condition of flow. What is the setup? What needs to. What are the things that must exist in order to get there?

That's a tricky question. The interesting thing about the neurobiology, and that's really what art of impossible is about, is there's an actual blueprint. Like we know there's a way to follow the biology and we've known if you. The place to is always, you always got to start. And this isn't really a problem for anybody in this group. But. But if you can't, if you're rent insecure, if there's too much fear in your system because you don't know where your next meal is coming from, you can't pay your bills, you can't do any of that. That's where you got to start, like period. There's too much fear in your system. And until you're sort of like income is settled, there's nothing else I can do from that. You need to move into motivation, right? You have to get into the game. And so intrinsic motivation is what comes next. There are five major intrinsic motivators. Curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, and mastery. And they're designed biologically to work in order. Curiosity is designed to build into passion. Passion is designed to be coupled to something outside yourself. That's purpose. Once an organism has their purpose, what do they want next? Autonomy, the freedom to pursue that purpose. Once you have that freedom to pursue the purpose you want mastery, the skills to pursue that purpose. Well, so that's where this always sort of starts. That's the motivation to get you into the game. Then you can start working with flow, right? Those things usually come first. You can start working with flow easier. And flow is really. It's odd, but it's really actually fairly simple to train. There are 28 flow triggers. These are your toolkits. Flow triggers are preconditions that lead to more flow. Flow comes in two varieties, individual or group. Me in a flow state, that's individual flow. Joe in a flow state, that's individual flow. Joe and me together in a flow state, that's group flow. Group FL happens across a lot of different scales. When it's two people talking and you get so sucked in, the conversation hour goes by. And you didn't notice, that's interpersonal flow. And there's group flow, team flow. And if you want to go all the way up to, like when you're at a rock concert and everybody's sort of clapping along in sync and you've merged with the band and every sort of like one with the music, that's communitas. It's group flow at scale. And by the way, I have to say that's the most interesting thing to me in the world today is group low at scale. I'm going to deviate from this just to make this point. Peter and I wrote a book, Abundance, 15 years ago. And the point in Abundance was we now have the technology to meet and exceed the basic needs of every man, woman, child on the planet. Right. And it's a question of bringing it up to scale. And I always say to Peter, we have a last mile problem on the road to abundance. The technology is still the same. And if you look at basic standards of living, since we wrote Abundance, they've increased, like, across the boards. All those metrics have gone up. But we have a last mile problem. We don't know how to cooperate at scale. The only time people on this planet have ever cooperated at scale is if there's a global war or there's a pandemic. Right. And you're fighting an enemy. So to me, group flow, and the science behind group flow is literally what we need to learn so we can cooperate at scale and get these technologies that can solve all our problems to scale. So I look at the world today and I think we're having a group flow problem. We need to figure out, okay, we've got communitas. How do we do that at a global scale? And we actually have these answers. We know how to do that. It's just a question of how do we pull it together and roll it out.

And by the way, because I almost have to mention this just for my own interpretation, so you said a pandemic. I don't know if we collaborated.

Well, you might not like the results, but the world came together to produce vaccines.

And I don't like the results, we.

Don'T like the results. But the world definitely came together to produce those vacc. And we saw cooperation at scale, at least in the beginning, before it became all.

Before the corrupt tyrants were exposed as the evil people that they are. Yeah. So, yeah.

Phil Paulus, ladies and gentlemen.

I endorse my opinion only, of course. No. So, yeah, so I hear you though. There was this book I had read when it came out, I don't know how many years ago, but over a decade ago called war is a force that gives us meaning and how we are culturally addicted to war. And when there is a war, people will come together, they will become patriotic, they will fight for, you know, obviously on both sides. Because that whole saying, you know, one person's freedom fighters, another person's terrorists, right. So it's like depending on kind of where you're at. But there, there is a lot to be said with what brings people together. And so is where I was saying, let's step back. You started studying and learning all about flow because you nearly died and you were as hell or you were suicidal at least. So.

Well, the story doesn't every starts the Lyme disease story is sexy. So everybody wants to start the story there, but it's not where it starts. It starts two different places. The first place it starts is I grew up in Cleveland and I'm an old punk rocker. And if you were a punk rocker in Ohio in the 70s and 80s, there weren't a lot of us, right? And so there was like one little street, it was like six blocks long. And if you were a weirdo in Ohio and I mean like if you were gay, if you were a lesbian, if you were a transsexual, if you were a communist, if you were a magician, if you were a musician, if you were a punk, whatever, this is where you ended up.

And every weekend you were one of those different things.

I was, I, I, I, I do a little cross dressing on the weekends as you know. So. And if you would have polled the entire state of Ohio and said who's least likely to succeed, you would appointed our little group of like two and it was a mess. I mean every was a mess and, and a lot of people died, right? A lot of people didn't make it out of that community, but that tiny little community of like maybe a thousand people. I came out of there. Emmy award winning filmmaker Howard Schacht came out of there. The band Sepultura, the band Filter, Nine Inch Nails, the comic book artist Harvey Pekar. I can go on and on and on. Like 50 culture shifting badasses came out of this tiny group of losers. Why did it happen? Because we found a way to bond together, have group flow experiences and we lifted each other up. I didn't know what I was looking at the time. I just realized that holy crap, we should have all been dead. And it's funny, like all the everybody knew each other back Then first thing, you know, when we get on the phone together, the first thing anybody says is, you know, we were supposed to be dead before we were 30. And, yeah, we were all supposed to be. None of us were supposed to live past that. And so much culture shifting came out of this. So that caught my attention, but I didn't know what was going on. Seven years later, I was at the birth. You know, I'd already look, started to learn neuroscience. I was a journalist and I was covering action sports. And I was in. I was living in what was then Squaw Valley, it's now Palisades Tahoe. And Squaw Valley was the nexus, like action sports was birthed in a couple of communities. That was one of the communities that birthed the entire action sport industry. And if you know anything about action sports in the 1990s, it's called the era of impossible. Because more things that were impossible never been done before. They're never going to be done. Not humanly possible. Got done than ever before. In fact, you would see something that was impossible for all of recorded history get done on a Monday and by like, Wednesday, people were innovating on it already. Like three days later, the impossible became possible, and now people were adding onto it. And in that community, if you knew anything about peak performance in the 90s, it was really clear, you better have the right coaches, you better have the right parents, you better have gone to the right schools. It was a money game, essentially, right? It was a breeding and money game. If you didn't have the right genetics, you didn't win that lottery, you were screwed. And yet I'm in Squavell, I'm at the nexus of this stuff. And everybody I knew, they came from broken homes, they had shitty childhoods, they had no money, they had almost no education. There was a tremendous amount of substance abuse and a tremendous amount of risk taking. And, you know, put that in a community, what happens, people, people die young or go to jail. What they don't do is reinvent what's possible for the species. And that's what was happening over and over and over again. And if you talk to all these people, the only commonality in their stories was flow, which was the same thing I saw in Cleveland, But I still didn't quite know what was going on. And then I got like, Lyme disease. And as I was sort of using flow to heal myself of Lyme disease, we could talk about what happened and why that works in a second. But the point was, I realized that the very Same thing that helped me go from like seriously subpar back to normal was taking normal people all the way up to Superman and Superwoman. And that was, it was those three things together. Because it wasn't. I saw it three times in a row. Right. First I saw it, you know, the last time I saw it myself, but I saw it in two different communities where like you would have bet against both of these communities. Everybody in this room would have bet against us. You would have looked at us and been like, you're all going to be dead by the time you're 30 and there's no way you're going to contribute anything to culture. And yet, yet this group of people squad, we were the birth of the action sports industry. Like this trillion dollar industry came out of this small group of fuckups. In fact, we were just together at an event and I was looking around in the room and I was like, oh my God, it's all the people who built the action sport industry. We were all like the biggest fuck ups you could possibly imagine. And we flow bonded together. Same thing I saw in Cleveland. And the result was this giant industry that has.

Okay, so, and I do want you to share the Lyme disease story because I think it's instructional, not just like it's kind of sexy. It's like, it explains a lot. Let's go to the 5%, let's jump to the 5% productivity. How do you know that's the case? How?

It's the 500% boost in productivity.

Yes. Just for the entrepreneurs. If you could figure out how to be 5%, 500% more productive, you'd probably be like, that would be really bad.

Let me back it up a step. What is flow? Amplify. Right. I said mental, physical and emotional. The physical side increases fast twitch, muscle response, strength, stamina and a bunch of other things all go up on the physical side. On the cognitive side, the mental side, productivity spikes. 500% above normal. I'll talk about so that 500% above normal. Not my data. McKinsey, the business consultancy did a global study. They spent 10 years going around the globe talking to leaders of companies, top leaders of companies all around the globe. And you got to take it with a grain of salt because it's self reported. But they said, how much more productive are you in flow than out of flow? The average was 500% more productive. Right. Richard Branson summed it up nicely once. He said, you know, in two hours in flow, there's nothing I can accomplish. And that's pretty Much standard to put 500% more productive boost in productivity. In context, you go to work on Monday, spend Monday in a flow state, take Tuesday through Friday off and you're going to get as much done as your steady state peers in one day a week in flow. They will over the course of a normal week. But it's not just productivity. So the Department of Defense measured, they dropped soldiers into flow. They want to know how fast, how much didn't learning increase? Learning increases 240 to 400% above baseline inflow. We've done studies on creativity. A bunch of other people have done studies on creativity. It's 400 to 700% above baseline on average. And the numbers, they just keep going like this. But learning creativity, productivity, and then you get to emotional well being. And we talked about this the other day. Flow underpins happiness, well being, overall life satisfaction, meaning and purpose. We know that the happiest people on earth are the people with the most flow in their lives. Right now there are three tiers of happiness. When psychologists define happiness, there's baseline happiness. How do you feel right here, right now? Dan Harris was right about baseline happiness. We can get about 10% happier because there's something known as an emotional set point which are sort of locked in by the time you're about 10. There's a low level emotional set point. This is the worst you're going to feel on the planet. There's a high level, this is the best you're going to feel. And we live our lives in between those emotional set points. You can with them. A little regular access to flow over time will extend the upper boundary. The death of a child or chronic unemployment will extend the lower boundary. But those are about the only things that will move it. You want to get to the next level of happiness. It's known as enjoyment or engagement. It is a high flow lifestyle where the thing that is driving you into flow is to test your goals. You want the best you can feel on the planet. It's purpose. It's a high flow lifestyle where where the thing that is driving you into flow is attached to something greater than your self purpose. And by the way, all that sounds really fancy purpose and things like that. The reason it's a big deal is when you're just dealing with yourself, you can only get access to 3 or 4 of the feel good neurochemicals in the brain. But once you add other people into it, it unlocks all the pro social chemicals. So you start getting things like oxytocin and endorphins and these other feel good chemicals. So purpose sounds really high minded and oh, I'm helping the world. It's totally selfish. You're getting extra feel good high performing neurochemicals for helping other people. Evolution basically has incentivized us to work as a team.

Yeah, so we talked about this the other day. Being in the addiction recovery space and being in recovery in my worst states of being, despair and depression and hopelessness and feeling this life just sucks. Constant angst, fear, shame, guilt, you know, every negative sort of emotion I would have on in the worst states. Now the very best states would be flow. Like so the Johann Hari line. The opposite of addiction is connection. And I think the ultimate form of connection would be flow. And so I think of how do we help people to get sober and stay sober? And I think the word sober is interesting. It's like not engaging in the activity, which is different than thinking about it because that's where the term like dry drunk comes around. Where people quit drinking but they haven't dealt with any of the underlying issues that cause them to drink in the first place. So they could still be assholes, they could still be hating life, they're just white knuckling it and they're not drinking. So they're dry drunks. And so there's a lot of of people that stop the behavior, they abstain from it and they're quote unquote sober. But that's stage one recovery, which is sobriety. Stage two is dealing with the underlying relationship issues that came like Ernie Larson who wrote Stage two Recovery. It's his book written years ago. He traces so much of addiction to relationships. The inability to be in relation ship with another person. And I think the inability to be in a relationship with yourself, which is I think what flow gets to.

So I always say that that's funny that you point that out. It's a hard. One of the things that is really interesting, one of the reasons I like flow a lot and I think this is, this is true for a lot of founders, a lot of leaders, probably a lot of people in this room. One of the things about being like the world's leading expert in anything, what that really means is I've got very few people to talk to about the thing I care most about, right? And that's most of us in the right. Most of you in this room, you're the leader in the thing that you do. And it's essentially it's lonely at the top for just the basic reason that like you're the expert, and that this is the thing you're most passionate about and you can't share with anybody because there's nobody who knows more than you. Flow somehow makes us feel. It reconnects us with ourselves in a way that really heals that loneliness. And I don't. Like. That's one of the mysteries of. I don't know why that that is. Right. But it somehow makes that. That loneliness, especially if you're an entrepreneur and you're a founder and you're at the top of your game, it makes it less lonely in a really deep way. And then it does a lot of other stuff. But that's one of the things that really matters to me.

Yeah. Yeah. And so what have you learned about flow with animals?

Well, flow. This is really funny, but flow's really old, right? It's. It's peak performance. So. So all species have had to, like, fight battles, just fight for their lives or search for, like. Flow is conserved across species. Years ago, a friend of mine, Arnie Dietrich, did a study. Really funny study. He taught ferrets, dogs and humans. Humans were obviously the hardest here. How to run on treadmills. And then he measured their neurochemicals. And we found that, like the line, all social mammals can get into flow. So horses is horse rider, flow, as Simon was talking about the other day. Dogs get into flow. Dogs and humans get into flow together. Ferrets don't seem to get into flow because they can't produce anandamide. But which was the finding then? That doesn't make sense to me because the endocannabinoid system which produces endamide is very, very old. So that may not be quite accurate data. Might have been how they were measuring it back in, like, I think it was the experiment done in 2003. But basically all social mammals and everything sort of above ferrets has been proven to get into flow.

Spider monkey, sloths.

Spider monkeys. I don't know about sloth sauce. Would be interesting. What is sloth flow? Sloth flow. It's my new training. $100,000. You heard it here first. Sloth flow. How to hang from a branch and really like it.

That's a. I love those.

Kamal, you want in? All right, good.

We'll get a first seed round. Is gonna. So, you know. All right, so let's frame it from the set. So I'd written down when we're like flow killers, because here's what they want to ask you about. So I. You have a great way of explaining why I like to Clean up and do what could often look at as minimum wage work or something. When I have a messy office or a messy house and I just want to clean it up now, I could maybe get someone to clean it up, but if I kind of just. Which I do. And I will hire people, obviously. I've a whole team of people that clean up my messes all day long.

That being said, though, there's my job.

It should be. Yeah. Especially in my house. So what is it about, like cleaning up a messy desk or whatever that frees them up?

Yeah. So let's, let's go back to flow triggers for a second. They said there's 28 of them. Flow follows focus. It only shows up when all of our attention is right here, right now. That's what all the flow triggers do. They drive our attention in the present moment. Neurobiologically, they do it one of three ways. And usually it's a combination of these. Either they're going to drive dopamine into your system, which is a focusing chemical. Right. When dopamine is in our system, we're awake, we're alert, we're really interested in the thing in front of us. Norepinephrine, which is roughly the same thing. Or they lower cognitive load. Cognitive loads, all the crap you're trying to think about at any one time. And if I lower cognitive load, what happens is I liberate some extra energy, which the brain will immediately repurpose to pay attention to the task at hand. When you clean anything up. Right. The reason one of. One of the first, like you don't know where to start. Right. A lot of us will clean our office first. Right. Why is that? You're lowering cognitive load and you're freeing up some extra attention, so now you can pay attention. One of the classic flow triggers, one of the most important, is known as clear goals. It's basically a very well made daily to do list. And we can talk about how that to do list gets functioned. But the important thing with clear goals, flow follows focus. When goals are clear, emphasis not on the goal part. You say this to western audiences and they hear goals and they're like, oh, goals. But goals are in the future. Clarity is the important point. Your brain wants to know, what am I paying attention to right now? What's important right now? And maybe what's the next thing I have to do so that when you get to that transition point, you don't have to pop out of flow and you can immediately go into the next thing. That's a Clear goal, right? And so I always give examples, like writing. I write every day. I write books. My goal is I want to write a thousand words in my new book. And when I'm done with it, I want my readers to feel fear or curiosity or happy. That's a clear goal. I'm going to write a thousand words and it's going to produce this emotion, my readers. That's how I set up my to do list every day. That's a clear goal. And clear goals massively lower cognitive load. So one of the things I tell people to do is if you can, the night before, write down your to do list, write down your clear goals list, and we could talk about how to, how to. How to make it work, work specifically. But that way, when you arrive at your office in the next morning, you know exactly where you're starting, you know what comes next, and you know what order it should go into. But don't let me get off this stage until I sort of break down the full way to set up a clear goals list. But let's go on to the next question.

Yeah, so. So lowering the cognitive load, like, for instance, I will oftentimes get overwhelmed because I'm a master at adding too much to my plate than I have the bandwidth for, because I've this eyes for opportunity, right? I have one of the gaping void images in the back says, intoxicated by possibilities. So we're sitting in a room of people that are possibility thinkers. They take on big projects, they do big things, they're big thinkers, right? And oftentimes that can become the kryptonite. And I also learned from the anticipation of the neurotransmitter dopamine whenever I'm overwhelmed. The thing that adds instant relief to my, my plate is to add a new project because in the moment, the newness, the fomo, the, the possibility of it somehow causes me to forget that I already have like, plenty of stuff and so come back down. So what happens in those moments is like, I have a lot of important stuff to do, but if there's any mess somewhere, I find myself wanting to clean up a mess. And I never understood why, but it's because I'm trying to lower cognitive load so I can actually bring some more focused, not fractured attention to the stuff at hand and learn how to, you know, and then triage if I need to, and then figure out what the hell to do. But it's. And that's why I hate messes. And I think, I think a lot of really driven, successful Entrepreneurs, they create a tremendous amount of shrapnel from their activity, but they don't like the mess. They want a tunnel. So in the midst of chaos, I'm curious how you have found and learned and discovered to bring order. Because everyone here is juggling that sort of activity, I believe, believe, you know, in terms of their ambitions.

So you asked where to start. Right. So if I'm training people in flow, I've gone through the stuff we talked about already. First of all, it's a high energy state. So if you're not sleeping the seven, eight hours a night, you're not going to have enough energy for flow, Right? It's that simple. And if there's anybody in here who's still trying to get by on less sleep, let me just cure you of that. I'll give you a simple to run this experiment and if you win on it, go ahead. Don't sleep at night. I always tell people there's a bunch of free IQ tests online. Take one one day you've slept five or six hours and then come back like three weeks later after you've slept eight hours and take the same IQ test. Most of us drop 10 to 15 IQ points when we're tired. You've now gone from genius to stupid, basically. It's crazy. It's really simple test and most people run it once and they like, they're like, okay, I'm cured, I'll sleep at night. So seven, eight hours of sleep, it's a high energy state. And then distraction management. Distraction management, right. So most of us, I said two days ago that most of us, the modern world has been designed to block flow. When I first started training people on flow, I don't know, 20 years ago, 15 years ago, we had email, we didn't really have messages yet, maybe had a SMS at that point, and phones, right? So we had two or three ways that we could get distracted. Somebody could stop by your house, they could email you, they could call you. Now I go into like executive teams and they're like 15 different channels of communication or they get slack and canva and blah, blah, blah, and WhatsApp and messenger, like it's everywhere. And there's this FOMO. The first thing we try to teach people is distraction management. You got to turn all that off. You find one emergency channel. This goes to your family, this goes to your co workers who really need you. Everything else gets turned off because flow follows focus, right? And if you. There's no possible way we're not going to be more powerful. Than our devices. Right? Everybody in this room knows this. This device was modeled after a slot machine. The most distracting and addicting technology on earth. And you're not going to win. You're not more powerful than your biology. You're just not it's going to win. The only way we can win is by shutting it out. So give you an example from my life. I write my clear goals list the night before. Everything in my office gets shut down. I turn any way you can communicate with it's all turned off. I turn off all the lights in my office. I take what I'm going to start writing the next morning. I put it on my computer screen. I put it in focus view so all I can see are the words I leave. I wake up at 4 o' clock in the morning. It's pitch black outside. I literally the only thing I can see in my world is what I'm writing. That's it. Nothing else exists. And that's for the first four hours of my day. That's where I live. And it's most people. People just don't want to do it right. They're so, they're so scared they're gonna miss out. And what I always tell people about this stuff. The other thing with distraction management is really important. Have your conversations first, right? You gotta go to your spouses, your partners, your kids, your bosses, your co workers, right? 500% more productivity is huge. You're going to get so much time back for your family, your partners, your spouses, your kids, your everybody the time that you're going to have more time for all that stuff. You just got to. I always tell people when I work with companies if you can't hang a sign on your door that says off I'm flowing, you can't do this work. By the way, for anybody who's got an open office plan, it's a disaster. Stupidest idea ever. Bad, bad for flow, not good even for group flow. You have to wall the team off from the rest of the world. The the best group flow methodology ever was basically what was is the skunk works, right? If you go through the original rules for skunk, there are 14 rules for how to build a skunk works. Kelly Johnson wrote them back in 1944. I think Dan will know, but I think it's 1944. If you look at the 14 rules for how to create a skunk works, six of them are how do you deal with the army? Because he was trying to contract with the army at that point. So six of the Rules are ways to get the army to leave them alone. All the other ways are ways to preserve autonomy and wall the rest of the company off so you can actually innovate in peace. So this is not even new technology, right? Like, we've known this shit since the 40s.

Well, that's. That's fascinating. So I guess the, the main benefit of all of this, this is there's this line that I really like, which is, how do you solve one problem that solves 10 problems or 20 problems or 50 problems? And when I'm describing getting myself into an overwhelmed state, that usually happens when I'm not in flow, because then I make decisions that don't expand me, but they contract me, even though I might be in fantasy.

Right?

Because, you know, I put a lot, I look at a lot of the world through the lens of addiction, which is, you know, my friend Chris Doyle, who's an interventionist, I recently did an interview with him, and I've asked so many people how to define addiction. You know, what's your definition of addiction? There's, you know, doing things that have negative consequences and there's all these different, you know, definitions. And he said, well, two words. Can't stop. Like, can't stop. I mean, you're doing something and you can't stop doing it. So, you know, I can't stop looking at the phone before you go to bed. Can't stop reaching for the phone first thing in the morning. Why? Because dopamine anticipation, right? So it seems to me that how do you solve one problem that solves 50 problems in your life? It would be flow. If you can actually get into flow, there's all these other areas of your life that would just work that currently are more difficult. Not that they're not working, they're just not.

Well, it's also. So you talked about this. You pick a new project. One of the things I always think about, flow. There's not really a term for this in science, but I always think of it as the high perch experience. Flow picks you up. You're like a thousand feet above your life and you can sort of see everything in perspective. And a lot of that is because our sense of self has been turned off and time is passing strangely. And by the way, the reason those things happen is as we move into flow, the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain is right back here, tends to deactivate most of it. The goal directed network stays very active, and the executive attention network stays active. Everything else shuts down and your sense of time and your sense of self are both produced in your prefrontal cortex. So when I shut down the prefrontal cortex, it's like a network. Time is a network. And like any network, when the nodes start going down, eventually the whole network is going to collapse, and we lose the ability to separate past from present from future or plunge into what people talk, research, call it the deep now, the eternal present. And the same thing happens to our sense of self. Self is. It involves some deeper structures in the brain, but a lot of it is produced in the prefrontal cortex. As that network goes down, we lose our sense of self. The inner critic goes offline, and we get to take a break from ourselves. And it brings us a much bigger perspective. The reason what you were talking about is the same thing when you pick a harder challenge, right? The reason that works is once you pick the harder challenge to go after all the niggling, like, the little stuff that was overwhelming you, you look at it and you're like, oh, this wasn't a really big deal. I could solve all this. Do do doom. Because now your focus is up here, right?

It's.

Peter has a great line about it. In Peter's rules, if at first you don't succeed, begin again one level higher. And I always think that it works because of the same mechanism.

Well, so you talk about the 4% with flow, which I would like you to do. But first, though, tell the lyme disease, like, what happened to you that. Where flow literally helped you heal.

Does anyone in this room not know my lyme disease story? Yeah. All right, then I'll retell it. Okay. There's a couple. There's a couple newbies in the audience. So when I was 30 years old, I got lyme disease, and it took everything. The woman I thought I was going to marry, I went bankrupt. Why am I so cynical about functional medicine? Because I went bankrupt trying to cure myself with functional medicine from lyme. Doctors gave up on me. There was nothing more they could do for me. After three years, my stomach lining started bleeding out.

Out.

They kept me on doxycycline because they didn't know any better back then for, like, a year and a half, which, like, can you possibly imagine what that drug will do to you? After a year and a half, I was a freaking mess, and I was going to kill myself because I was functional literally 10 minutes a day. So the worst part wasn't the physical pain, but physically, it was terrible. I couldn't walk across a room. And lyme produces something like, it's called phantom pain. So I would wake up in the morning and my knee would be the size of a great. And I couldn't straighten my leg. And by, like, 2 in the afternoon, my knee was fine. My shoulder was the size of a grapefruit. At one point, I went into a. See an orthopedic surgeon. He wanted to operate on five different joints at once. And I looked at him, I was like, isn't it weird that five of my joints have failed all simultaneously? He was like, not my department. Talk to infectious diseases. Which was about what. I gave up on Western medicine completely. But there was nothing anybody could do for me. And they had no idea if I was ever going to get better. I was just gonna end my life. Because, like, it's very clear at that point, like, the only thing I was gonna be was a burden to my friends and my family. Like, I couldn't do anything. It was. It was totally worthless. I didn't want to be a burden. So, I mean, I had sleeping pills.

I had.

You know, I had a plan. It was just a matter. It was like a countdown, right? And in the middle of this, my friend Andrea showed up my house and demanded we go surfing. And I was living in LA at the time. And, I mean, it was the most laughable thing in the world because I literally couldn't walk to you. You like, I'm gonna go surfing. I. And she wouldn't leave my house, just wouldn't leave and wouldn't leave. And after, like, four or five hours, I was like, fuck it, let's just go surfing. I mean, what is the worst that can happen? I die. Good. Okay, let's go surfing. Just shut up. Leave me alone. They had to basically carry me to the car. When we got to the break, we went to Sunset Beach. Anybody who surfs in LA or surfs knows that Sunset beach in LA is the wimpy, heaviest beginner break in the world. It was summer, so the waves were really small. The water was a little warm. They had to walk. They had to carry me out to the break. Literally, like, carry me out there. They gave me a board the size of a Cadillac. Bigger the board, the easier it is to surf. And I was out there maybe 10 seconds, and a little wave came. There was nobody else out. And I spun my board around. And I still don't know why. Like, I just. It was sort of like I hadn't surfed in, like, five years. And I was never, never that great of a surfer, but I saw the wave. Muscle memory Whatever I like spun my board around, paddled twice and popped my feet and it was literally probably all the energy I had left in the world. And I popped up into a dimension that I didn't. I'd been in flow before, but I had never seen a full blown macroscopic flow state. I popped into a dimension I suddenly could see out of the back of my head. I was having an out of body experience. I was one with the ocean, all this other stuff. But the most amazing thing was I felt good. Like the pain was gone and I was happy. And I like, I didn't even have a memory of happy. It had been so long since I felt anything but like suicidally depressed. It felt so good. I caught four more waves that day and by the end of the fifth wave I was, I mean, forget, like done. They brought me home, they had to put me into bed, they had to carry me into the bed. People had to bring me food for the next two weeks because I couldn't, I was so sick and tired, I couldn't get out of my bed. My kitchen was 50ft away, maybe I couldn't make it to my kitchen. And after like 14 days in bed, I got up and I had a neighbor who I didn't even know very well was a pro surfer or semi pro surfer. And I knocked on his door and I was like, hey, you don't know me, I live down the hall, but you have to take me to the ocean right now and we have to go surfing. And he did. And over the course of like six months when I was like maybe 10% functional when I started and the only thing I was doing differently, I mean my days were spent lying on a couch moaning. I could no longer read, I had no short term memory, so I couldn't read because by the time you get to the end of a sentence, I didn't know what happened at the beginning. Right. The only thing I could do during this period, you're going to laugh. Was watch the Los Angeles Clippers play basketball. I couldn't watch the Lakers, they played a half court game. It was too slow, I couldn't follow the game. I didn't know what was going on. But the Clippers were playing that like Phoenix Dan Antonio offense was like seven seconds and you could score and it was the only thing, like it was fast enough that it, like it fit inside my short term memory so I could actually pay attention. That was all I did. But. And then I would surf every time I could get any energy. And over the course of six months, I went from 10 functional to like 70% functional. And I was totally blown away. I was like, what the hell is going on? Like, I didn't even, like, I flow. I didn't sort of knew it was flow, but I, like, all I knew, I was having these, like, quasi mystical experiences out in the waves. And somehow I was getting better. And I really, at that point when I started this quest, I thought, so Lyme is only fatal if it gets into your brain. And I was absolutely certain the reason I was having these mystical experiences in the waves was because it had gotten into my brain. So even though I was feeling better, I was absolutely certain I was now going to die. And I had, like, suddenly, like, been reborn. I really didn't want to die at that point. So I lit out on a giant quest to figure out what the hell had happened to me. And very quickly, I discovered a couple things that are really important about flow. As we move into the state, there is a global release of nitrous oxide. So anybody who's ever worked out right, 20 minutes into your workout, your lungs open up and your head gets a little clear, that's nitric oxide. And what it does is it pushes, pushes all the stress hormones out of your system, and it replenishes them with all these positive, feel good neurochemicals. So all the neurochemicals that underpin flow significantly boost the immune system. Most importantly, as anybody in most of us know, an autoimmune condition is a nervous system gone haywire. It no longer, like, you don't even know where baseline is. Your body doesn't remember where normal is. So when you push all the stress hormones out of your system, your brain can go, oh, this is normal. Normal. This is where I'm supposed to be. So you see, if you go into the literature of autoimmune diseases, you'll see a lot of cases of, quote, unquote, spontaneous healing around flow states. It's not spontaneous healing. It's this mechanism that is resetting your nervous system and helping you get, oh, this is baseline. This is normal. This is where you're supposed to function. And on top of it, you get these neurochemicals that massively boost the immune system. What we also now know, though we didn't know this at the time, but Barbara Fredrickson figured this out, that when we have really positive emotions and flow produces a sense of mastery and a sense of control, and these are our two favorite feelings on the planet. We love getting better at things, and we love being in control. Of things. And when we get these really positive emotions, it boosts the production of T cells, which are the cells that fight off disease. Right. The immune cells. And it boosts the production of natural killer cells. Cells. So flow plays a huge role in peak performance aging. Why? Because natural killer cells fight off tumors and cancers and things like that. So this was the mechanism. And now there's a whole lot of, like, psychoneuroimmunology that backs us up and it goes farther and we. We know more about it, but at the time, we knew very little. But that was where I started with this and some of this work. Luckily, Herb Benson, who was at Harvard, wrote the breakout principle. Breakout Principle is flow by another name. Every generation wants to rename flow for branding purposes, and he called it the breakout Principle, but it's the same mechanism, so.

All right. There's so much more I could ask you. However, we are coming to a close. So in your research, have you discovered any surprising flow triggers that people might not expect?

Surprising flow triggers that people would not expect? No, but. So, I mean, one of them. That's interesting. We've been looking at. It's not well proved, it's not proven yet, but we think frame rate past the eyes is going to be a flow trigger. So when things moving, if you think about it from a evolutionary standpoint, the fastest humans could ever run is about 23 miles an hour. And if you're running like away from a predator down a mountain, you can get it up to about 26 or 27. And above that, your feet can't move fast enough to keep up with gravity. So there's some threshold, 16 miles an hour, 17 miles or whatever it is, where once you get to moving that speed, your brain goes, you're either chasing prey or you're running from a predator. And I gotta drop you into flow. And it seems. So frame rate past the eyes is interesting. That's one we've been poking at. I'll give you something surprising. You'll like this. We can end on this. So why is bad sex bad?

Why?

Because sex is one of the flowiest things we can do. And when we have sex with somebody and we don't get into flow, that group flow together not only. I mean, yes, there's a skill thing going, right. If you put that aside, it's really a flow problem problem when we don't actually lose ourselves in the experience. Bad sex is so bad because we were expecting an easy flow state and that tight bonding that comes from it afterwards. And when it doesn't show up, we feel really robbed of that connection, of that flow. Bad sex is bad because we're all innately flow junkies and we hate it when we're denied flow and we really expect it from sex. Right. You totally lose yourself in the experience. You're not there. You're totally gone. So I figured we could end there.

That's a good one. We can start. We can start the video with the big erection thing and edit it that way.

Excellent. It's gonna be so good for my business. Yeah.

So how do people follow you and find out more about what you're working on?

StevenCottler.com is is the easiest way. StephenCottler on the Instagoogle tweet face and flowresearchcollective.com all those things will get you to me.

And I think one day we maybe we'll do a flow for writers event here or something because I think that'd fun. I think it'd be interesting to do a genius network flow for writers.

Yeah. And if anybody wants, I'm running. I only do a handful of live events. They're pretty rare. At the end of October, I am running another flow for writers. It's a three day intensive. It was originally developed for book writers, but now we've expanded it out. Any marketing copy, advertising copy, sales copy, anything you're writing. The course is on the deep fundamentals, under underneath language. It's also on the neurobiology of how language and creativity works and on flow. So incredibly useful. Really fun. It's a very intensive, fun boot camp and there's one at the end of October, so I told you about it. I'm not allowed to pitch from the stage, so I was not pitching. You should not, you should not go to that. I'm not pitching. It was more like new.

I'll pitch from here. I actually went through your flow for writers in Venice and I'm not a writer. I write copy and emails and stuff. And I thought it was for all the. For all the people with deep dive questions. You covered just about everything. I was actually really surprised to your question the pattern. I'm a pattern recognition fanatic, but I had no idea that it was a flow trigger. It just naturally was part of my life. So totally, totally, totally great event.

Thank you, John. Awesome. Appreciate you.

All right, everyone, Stephen Kotler.

Thank you, guys. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Chad.

Okay, I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome? Click here.

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