Flow: La Ciencia Del Máximo Desempeño Humano - Steven Kotler En Español

Hola, hola, ¿cómo estás? Te saluda Julián Castañeda. El día de hoy me encuentro con un gran autor. El día de hoy su nombre es Steven Kotler, pues es un reconocido autor bestseller del New York Times y también es un extraordinario y galardonado periodista y cofundador y director de la investigación para el Flow Genome Project en Estados Unidos. Sus libros incluyen varias obras de no ficción, como el último que fue junto con Peter Diamandis, el libro Bold, también The Rise of the Superman and Abundance, y sus obras han sido también y hace más de 40 idiomas y sus artículos han aparecido en más de 80 publicaciones, incluyendo The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Wired, GQ, ah, y otras muchas publicaciones como por ejemplo lo es Wall Street Journal y también para Forbes. So, I am very, very glad to connect with you here by the internet, Steven. Thank you very much for participating and joining me on this conversation.

My pleasure, I'm glad to be here.

Okay, thank you very much. You talk about something really, really interesting for people who are, for example, business owners, and it's all about the flow. What is exactly flow?

Flow is technically defined as an optimal state of consciousness, a state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best. More specifically, It refers to those moments of rapt attention and total absorption. We get so focused on the task at hand that everything else just seems to disappear. Action and awareness will merge. Your sense of self, your sense of self-consciousness, they'll disappear. Time dilates, which is a fancy way of saying it passes strangely. Sometimes, occasionally, it will slow down. You'll get a freeze frame effect. Maybe you've been in a car crash. More frequently it will speed up and 5 hours will pass by in like 5 minutes. And throughout, all aspects of performance, and that's both mental and physical, go through the roof.

Okay, that's amazing. And is flow something that occurs by itself because something in our life or something external, or is something that we can trigger and make sure it happens more regularly?

Flow is absolutely something we can trigger more regularly. Over the past 20 years, scientists have made kind of enormous progress in flow. So we first gained a really good look at what's going on under the hood, the neurobiology of the experience. We already had really great data on the psychology, so we've been able to map that psychology onto the neurobiology. And as a result, been able to kind of work backwards to what triggers this state. We now know there are, for example, that flow is a 4-stage cycle and that there are 18 triggers or preconditions that lead to more flow. If you can kind of combine these information to train yourself up in it, you can absolutely produce more flow in your life. I'll just give you an example. If you go to our website, theflowgenomeproject.com, we have an online training called Flow Fundamentals. It's 6 weeks. It's digitally delivered. Anybody can take it. It's an hour and a half long a week. Week plus homework and the homework, there's some homework. So it's not, it's not light, but, uh, 6 weeks later on average, and we've probably put 1,000 people through this training, people are reporting a 5-fold increase in flow. So 500% boost in flow. And interestingly, uh, we've just started to complete our first year after action surveys. So a year in, people are seeing that increase move up rather than drop down. So it seems like, you know, this training is sticking.

That's beautiful. And I know that some of these triggers have been taken from the action and adventure sports world. Why seeing that? And also the next question would be how we people that are not doing any adventure and those things of risky sports can incorporate that principles and have it here with us for our work and for the things that we do in daily life and in businesses?

It's a great question. So, uh, if you look at action adventure sports— surfing, skiing, rock climbing, snowboarding, the like— like a data set. So forget everything else and just look at the actual data. What you see over the past 25 years is nearly exponential growth in ultimate human performance. That's performance when life or limb is on the line. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Sports progression is slow, it's steady, it's governed by the laws of evolution. At no point in history does it quintuple in 20 years, right? That's happening all over action adventure sports. And the reason this is happening is these athletes have gotten so good at reliably and repeatedly producing the flow experience that they've been able to maximize the state to amplify their potential. And they've done it better than pretty much anybody else in the history of the world. At the Flow Genome Project, what we did is we took these athletes as our hard data set. We figured, okay, we know what the neurobiology of flow is, and with these athletes, we know they're in flow. We don't have to give them a squishy subjective questionnaire. We know they're in flow if they live through the experience. So putting these things together, we work backwards to these triggers. So that's why the action sports matter so much. What's really cool is we've also figured out how to bridge a gap from the extreme to the mainstream Anybody can apply these triggers in their own life. Before I kind of walk you through some of that, I just want to— since this is for business owners first and foremost, McKinsey did a 10-year study of top executives in flow. They found that top executives in flow are 5 times more productive than out of flow. 5 times more productive is 500% more productive. It means you could go to work on Monday, spend Monday in a flow state, take Tuesday through Friday off, and get as much done as your steady-state peers. 2 days a week in flow and you are 1,000% more productive than the competition. Okay? So this is critically important for business owners. Now let's talk about those triggers for a second. We discovered that action adventure sport athletes rely on 3 environmental triggers, triggers that are external to the body, out there in the world, more than anything else. And that one of the reasons they're in flow so often is because their sports are packed with these so-called environmental triggers. The first one is the obvious one. So before, actually, let me back up a sec. The first thing you need to know about flow is flow follows focus. So it can only show up when all our attention is focused on the present moment. So all these triggers are nothing fancier than just ways of driving attention into the present moment. Risk is the obvious first trigger. Action adventure sports are packed with actual serious physical risk, right? Ultimate human performance is fall-you-die performance. Here's the cool thing: you absolutely need risk for flow, but it doesn't have to be physical risk. So how does this apply to business? Creative risk, intellectual risk, emotional risk, social risk. Social risk is fantastic, um, because the brain cannot tell the difference between physical fear and physical risk and social fear and social risk. Which sounds really strange, but if you look at an fMRI, the same areas light up. And the reason is, if you go back 200 or 300 years, exile, you screw up socially and you get exiled or banished, it was a capital crime. You couldn't live. So the brain processes it in the same way it processes physical fear because it was that dangerous from an evolutionary perspective. So this is why, by the way, fear of public speaking is the number one fear in the world, right? It's the exact reason. And this is why, for example, you know, as anybody who, gives presentations or speeches in a business context can tell you being on stage is a massive flow state. I give probably 5 speeches a month and at least 2 or 3 times I get to the end of the speech, I get to my last slide and I'll go, oh my God, did I give the whole speech? 'Cause I can't, like I have no memory of it. Time was so compressed and I'll have to stop and be like, oh, okay, you were in flow. You gave the whole speech, everything's fine. That happens all the time to me. I think it's fairly common in business to use this risk trigger. I think organizationally, this is why Silicon Valley's model like fail forward, fail fast matters so much. I mean, it gets a lot of attention in the press for kind of being a methodology for rapid experimentation and increasing innovation. Those things are very true, and I wrote about them with Peter in Bold. But simultaneously, if you create an environment where employees can fail, right, they have the space to fail, they can take risks, and by taking those risks they are going to drive themselves into flow more readily, massively amplify performance, get so much more productivity, blah, blah, blah, and you get this feedback loop of positive gain.

Right, and it's very counterintuitive because the thing that you are suggesting is that we embrace fears in order to take risk and in order to maximize the triggers of flow. And regarding of that, how we can embrace fears and make it part of our daily routines in order to maybe, because we are facing some risk, how we can handle those fears in order to maximize the trigger flow.

So let me first walk you through a second flow trigger on the way to that answer. The most important flow trigger, it's not one of the environmental triggers, it's an internal trigger or a psychological trigger, and it's often referred to as the golden rule of flow. It's called the challenge-skills balance. What this means is we pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge of the task slightly exceeds our skill set. So you want to stretch but not snap. You are definitely moving outside your comfort zone. You're pushing past normal, but you're not moving nearly as far as most high performers, for example, think you have to go. When Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, sort of the godfather of flow psychology, he sat down with a Google mathematician. They tried to back-of-the-envelope calculation, figure out what is the actual difference between challenge and skills. The number they came up with was 4%. 4% difference between the challenge and the skills, meaning to maximize flow, The challenge of the task at hand needs to be 4% greater than your skill set. So to return to your earlier question of risk, we are telling you absolutely need risk for flow just like you need to push up the challenge skill ladder, right? But it's a 4% risk. Here's where it's tricky and this is because 4%, you know, if you're a top performer, you will take on 10%, 20%, 30%. You blow by 4% without even noticing and when we run studies with top performers in business and in athletics and we kind of give them this data, hey, it's only 4%, we're going to try to do that day after day after day after day, what they start realizing is that you don't plateau. You get continued easy access to flow over and over and over again. The difficulty is in endurance. It's grit because it's not— if you really want to maximize performance, it's 4% plus 4% plus 4% day after day week after week, month after month, year after year for a career, right? So that's really what you're committing to here. And you will obviously keep taking greater and greater risks. You'll— it's compound interest, but it's all also compound skill acquisition. So you'll always be ready to meet those risks. So really all that has to happen to get you started is we tell people that you have to shift your internal relationship to risk. The way it feels. What used to mean stop now means go. Just 4% of baby step, baby step, baby step at a time. But when challenges show up, rather than being fear things we should avoid, we lean into that 4% at a time, bit by bit by bit. And this is how we actually use risk and use the challenge skills balance and use these triggers to maximize performance. The long haul, which is because nobody builds a successful business in a day, right? It doesn't happen. And nobody wants that business. You want 5 years, 10 years longevity. And to put this differently, and Salim Ismail, who runs— he's the global ambassador at Singularity University and one of the original founders of Singularity University. We were talking and he was arguing that 1 out of 10 startups succeed. And he thinks the only metric that really matters is how much flow these startups produce on the job, especially group flow, which is what you get when a whole group of people get in a flow state together. So it's the ultimate kind of team bonding, building experience, and group creativity goes through the window and performance goes through the window. And we've seen this, you know, with stage actors and with athletes and, you know, in business over and over and over again.

So you say something very interesting at the beginning in is that flow only happens after focus, after we focus our attention right in the present moment. Do you find maybe this actual society, as one of my mentors called it, the dot-com humans, the ones that are in the chat all the time and interrupted by the phone, by WhatsApp, by all the things, are you seeing that as a difficulty to overcome, as an obstacle to flow?

So Yes, it's a fundamental obstacle. Let me tell you how I overcome it and let me tell you what we teach people to do. First and foremost, I'm a writer. I get up every day at 4 o'clock in the morning and from 4 AM till 8 AM, I write. My phone is off, my email is off, nobody bothers me. You can't call me. There's no Skype. There's no instant messages. There's no Facebook. There's no nothing. It is a what Tim Ferriss calls a maker schedule, blocks of uninterrupted concentration. Now, you can go as short as about 90 minutes. Montessori education, which is an education system that's very, very high flow, research shows that it produces more flow than almost any kind of other education system on earth, built around 90-minute to 120-minute blocks of uninterrupted concentration. So 90 minutes will work, an hour and a half. I think if you're going to do any kind of complex problem solving like writing is, 4 hours. It doesn't have to be every day, but it should be at least 3 times a week so you can kind of think through that stuff. Absolutely, you have to turn off the digital world. If you're running an organization, there's a lot of organizations that we work with where you have 15 minutes to reply to an instant message from anybody. That's insane. You cannot do that. It totally goes against everything. We cannot multitask. Amazing research done by Clifford Nass at Stanford on multitasking in the human brain. We are terrible at it. In fact, the only time we can actually multitask is in flow. It has to do with information processing. It gets amplified in flow. One of the other things that we train people to do actually is at the tail end of your 90-minute block of uninterrupted concentration, Once you've worked yourself into flow that way, then you want to multitask. So just take all the crap you were going to do at the beginning, push it to the end, start with the biggest challenge of your day, start your day this way, do an uninterrupted block of concentration on the task you need flow the most for, and then once you've kicked yourself into flow, on the tail end, you'll be able to go through stuff that would have taken you a couple of hours to multitask in like 20 minutes.

That's right. And so many people think that maybe they are going to be more productive and going to be doing a lot more stuff if they have more time. But as you show, maybe it's not the more time that you have, but the more focused you are on the flow state on that time that you have that is really productive. So one of the things that you say is that one of the most important things on the flow process is the recovery part, and I want you to specifically talk a little bit about that. Why is it so important to sleep well to give ourselves the time and space and rejuvenation to recover in order to get more flow?

Great question. So earlier I mentioned that we know that flow states have cycles, right? It's a flow cycle. It's 4 stages. The third stage is the flow state itself, which is a very big high. On the back end, there's a recovery phase, which is actually a very deep low. Now, without getting kind of lost in the neuroscience, what you need to know is that flow is an expensive state for the brain to produce. It requires a bunch of neurochemicals, a lot of energy, right? Those neurochemicals exhaust themselves. They take a little while to replenish, and you need nutrition and vitamins and sleep and sunlight and a whole cocktail of stuff. So there's this enormous high of a flow state and there's kind of a deep low on the back end of it because you've exhausted all the brain's feel-good neurochemicals. So recovery is twofold. One, you have to rest and recover at the end of a flow state. We don't do this in business at all. Oftentimes, especially with group flow and teams, Your team will pull off something amazing using flow to get there. You'll come together, you'll create an amazing creative project, product launch, whatever it is. You'll work really hard for 6 months, tons of flow states, and immediately afterwards the boss comes to you and says, "That was fantastic. That was great. Now do it again starting tomorrow in half the time and with half the budget." Right? And that happens all the time. You use flow to succeed and then there's no built-in recovery period. You get this greater challenge that kicks you out of the challenge-skill sweet spot, right? And locks you out of flow that you need to even meet that challenge. So on the tail end, you have to recover. To just talk about sleep for a second, this is my favorite kind of sleep in high-performance study. They did a study of American baseball teams and to measure sleeplessness, they simply used how many time zones they had to travel to play a baseball game. They found that a baseball team that had to travel 3 time zones to play a game, before the first pitch had even been thrown out, they had a 40% chance of winning. That's the impact on performance of sleep deprivation. If you put sleep monitors on most people, even if they're trying to get their allotted 8 hours of sleep a night, most of us only get about 6.5. You can use— there's tons of apps that will monitor your sleep. You can download them for free. For free. We use a bunch of different ones and it's a really good thing to do to make sure, you know, you're getting high quality sleep for this very reason. It's really critical to know how to recover and it's also really, really critical. And this goes back to the deep low. When you're recovering in this period, you're, you're not gonna be happy and you cannot, you can't attach too much importance to that idea. You just sort of have to just grit your way through it and don't mind it. And the reason is this: one of the things that happens in flow is it massively amplifies learning. For that to happen in the recovery phase, you have to recover. If you start to get stressed out in recovery, like you don't feel good anymore and you get stressed out about not feeling good, you'll produce cortisol, the stress hormone. A little bit is fine. Too much, it blocks long-term learning. So while you'll get that accelerated performance in the flow state, the actual accelerated learning, which is the long-term benefit of flow, it will be cut off from you. So you got to like recovery and kind of emotional fortitude kind of go hand in hand there. Business people don't often let themselves recover and worse, A lot of us use the kind of negative darkness that's on the other end of a flow state as motivation to get busy and we do it. We want to use it as motivation. Of course, it's the fire in the belly, right? You want to just pause and give yourself a couple of days, a couple of weeks. Personal story, I published a book. 4 books in the past 3 years, so incredible schedule, and did a lot of work with the Flow Genome Project. In July, when I finished the pt tour for the last book, I was so exhausted that I was locked out of flow from July until basically last month because it took me that long to recover. Wow.

Wow, wow, wow. One of the things that I noticed in all the the things that you are sharing with us is that there is no flow state that is during a long period of time. I mean, we have periods of flow and we experiment them here and there maybe. So the exciting idea that maybe someone who is listening to this conversation is, wow, I want to be always in flow. And as you, as you told, is, is not viable, is not realistic, and you should rest. And also one of the things that you say is one of the also most important parts of the flow process is the first step, is the overwhelming step, is, is, as you said, the flow state itself is the third step on the process, on the process. So what are the two primary ones, the first and the second, and how we can integrate it to— in order to have the flow state itself.

So the first stage of the flow cycle is known as struggle, and it's called that for a reason. It is a loading phase. You are loading and then overloading the brain with information. So if you're an athlete, this is skill acquisition, right? This is how to kick a shot on goal in soccer. This is, you know, for a writer, it's learning how the rhythm of language works together. You know, it's really primary basic. And what's interesting about struggle is in struggle, you have to, again, treat your emotions differently. So in struggle, you will get frustrated. The point is by overloading the brain with information, You are literally frustrating yourself and it's not hard to do. Your working memory, which is the number of things you can think about at once, most people tap out around 4. So you're going to get frustrated. Most people think frustration is a sign that you're failing to learn, that it's going wrong. In this work, it's actually a sign that you're moving in the right direction. And what I always tell people is you wanna sort of take yourself to the point that feels like your head's gonna explode and then you wanna stop. And you want to move into the next phase, which is the release phase. And release literally means take your mind off the problem. And the reason is, and so the science is what we're doing in flow is we're trading conscious processing, which is very, very, very powerful, but it's also very, very slow and energy inefficient for unconscious processing, subconscious processing, which is extremely fast extremely fast, has an unlimited kind of RAM capability and is very energy efficient. To do that, you have to stop thinking about whatever it is that you've been thinking about. You literally have to get your conscious mind off the problem. So there's lots of different ways to do this but what the research shows works best is low-grade physical activity, really low-grade. So I like to work in my garden. Tim Ferriss and a lot of other people like to go for long walks. Albert Einstein famously used to Row a rowboat in the middle of Lake Geneva and stare at the clouds. My friend Lee Sladoff, who's done a bunch of research on this, thinks building models, model airplanes, model dinosaurs, whatever works the best. There's lots of different options. The two things that won't work here are television. Television will change your brainwaves in a way that will kick you out, will lock you out of flow, and exhausting exercise. Like a 20-minute run is great. Going out for 15 miles, it's too much. It's going to exhaust yourself. You just want to take your mind off the problem. Turn the problem over to your subconscious. Once your subconscious comes up with that right answer, whatever it is, it could be an athletic, kinesthetic thing, like you figure out how to swing a bat. Excuse me for a second. Sorry about that. Figure out how to swing a bat, could be creative, right? Whatever it is, that will come together and once that happens, there will be a big neurobiological change in your body and it will kick you into the third state, the flow state itself. As you pointed out, it's a brief state, usually about an hour and a half. There are longer versions. There is an altruism-triggered flow state known as helper's high that can last a day or two or sometimes three. For sure with startups, you see them on a big project, you know, moving towards launch. They can be in flow states almost every day for a month kind of thing or 2 months. You know, you'll kick out of it at the end of the day but in the morning it's so packed with flow triggers you seem to dive right back in. You seem like to pay a flow penalty on the back end of that like you get locked out for a couple months. Not always but it happens. There's definitely a longer recovery phase. I've had that experience. I wrote half of a book in like a 2-week flow state, where I just one after another, and, you know, I looked up 2 weeks later and I've written 200 pages. I've never done anything like that in my life, and I, you know, still don't know how I did it. But, you know, so you can— those experiences do show up, but as a general rule, they're short, they're brief.

Yes, and it seems to me like a What is very counterintuitive, and because, for example, I grow in a culture when you are most productive when you work a lot, when you sacrifice your sleeping in order to get more done, quote unquote. But actually, as you pointed out, maybe there is a balance between having to rest, maybe doing other things in order to produce more. How maybe How do you think we can shift our perception, our mindset, in order to embrace the idea that we have to work less or do less of the busy work in order to really embrace the elements and the triggers that you are doing, that you are suggesting us on flow?

Well, at the Flow Genome Project, you know, one of the things we're always saying is don't believe us, don't take our word for it, conduct the experiment yourself. Right? The point here is I can't shift your mindset for you. You have to believe this is going to work. You have to start to realize that when you get more flow in your life, you've got to watch how your productivity goes up, how much more you can get done in a 2-hour flow state than in a 7-day work week. You really just have to dial it back along the way. I think it's one of the hardest lessons to learn. For example, when I say it's one of the hardest lessons to learn, the more stressed out you get, the more your brain cannot— it doesn't use all of its— it shrinks in terms of like the neural nets that start to probe and get very, very tight. We get very, very logical but we lose our creativity. As you get more stressed, that gets tighter and tighter and tighter. So one of the things we teach people to do is make a list of all the things that work for you and drive you into flow that you're going to forget because your neurobiology is going to shift as you get more stressed, as you work harder and harder and harder. Not only will you be locking yourself out of flow, you'll be forgetting to do the things that you need to do to put yourself into flow. So we keep like, you know, I remind on my list, I remind myself that I have to get daily exercise. For this to happen. You need to be able to shut off your brain for 40 minutes, an hour a day, and exercise is great at this. That's something on my list. This is the struggle with putting this at the center of your life. It's difficult and you have to resist a lot of our natural urges. What's interesting is as you get better at this, you're going to start to realize that the human body is actually optimized. For flow. Once you learn to interpret the signals correctly, what's going on inside your body and what it actually means, your body will drive in the direction of flow naturally and we just interpret things wrong. As you can tell from this conversation, if you're working with flow, a lot of your emotions don't mean what you think they mean. Fear doesn't mean stop, it means go. Frustration doesn't mean you're failing and not learning. It actually means you're moving in the right direction. So once you kind of learn to understand this, but you can only do it by conducting the experiments yourself. I can tell you these things out loud, but they probably, some of them probably don't even sound, they sound a little nonsensical until you conduct the experiment yourself.

That's right. And actually you say something very interesting, is that flow not only happens with our ourselves, but with teams, working with other people, producing in team environments. How we can, if we are business owners and we run a team, or maybe we are a solopreneur working with colleagues, with somebody to make things happen in the world, maybe incorporate the flow state in our group interactions and in team working?

So the good news here is that group flow, from a trigger standpoint, what triggers it, is extremely well researched. A guy named Keith Sawyer, who's from the university, he's a psychologist at the University of North Carolina, spent 15 years with the kind of very famous improv comedy troupe Second City Television. And he basically spent 15 years analyzing their group performances, studying the moment the group came together, because you can actually In group flow, when a band comes together, an improv troupe comes together, you can see it. Creativity goes from here to here really quickly, right? Same thing with like an American football game, fourth quarter comeback, where suddenly it looks like ballet instead of football. Everybody's in the right place at the right time. It's always group flow. Same thing on a soccer pitch or whatever. Keith deduced there are 10 triggers that produce more group flow. So Rise of Superman covers them extensively. Keith wrote a great book called Group Genius that explains his research and breaks it down. And actually, if you go to my website, StephenKotler.com, and sign up for my email newsletter, you get a free PDF.

It's in English, but it breaks down all 18 of the flow triggers, including the social triggers, and kind of walks you through how to apply Okay, and as probably everybody knows here, you are the primary investigator and researcher in the topic of flow in the world. So what have you seen that are the latest trends or the latest discoveries in regard to flow?

So this is the coolest, this is cool. If you go to our website, theflowgenomeproject.com, you'll see a flow profile. It's free. Anybody can take it and it's basically, it's a typographic survey. It says, if you're this kind of person, you're likely to find the most flow doing these kinds of activities. Really basic. In the 3 years it's been up and running, it's become the largest optimal psychology study anybody has ever conducted. 24,000 people have responded to this survey. It's such a huge data set. Here's the crazy part. Historically, for all the 20th century, flow has been associated primarily with either athletic performance or kind of like artistic physical performance, dance or music, right? That's what most people think of first when they think of flow. 48% of our respondents get the most flow in their life doing knowledge work, running their businesses, being creative at a computer, coding software, writing books, all that stuff. So our intuition about where we think the most flow in the world seems to show up turns out to be totally different from what the data says. So a lot of what we're doing now is really diving deep into that data and analyzing and building research projects off of that. So that's sort of latest and greatest.

Okay, that's amazing because that's the thing that we are doing right now in our society. As we see the world moving forward to a technological society, we are now in a technological society, but we are moving even forward in the digital world. And for instance, here in Latin America, the penetration over the internet and over the smartphones, all the technology that we have, is very, very good. So I find myself and my clients and all the people that we work with working a lot with technology. And as you pointed out, That's a flow state that we need to have working in the computer, doing some presentations, doing closing sales, doing a lot of things. And one of the final questions before we let you go is, how is technology helping us right now to enter in flow? Is it in the measuring? Is it on the things that we can maybe engraining ourselves, in our bodies maybe, in order to have more flow. Where do you see right now that we are in the world and where do you see that we are moving ahead in regards to technology for flow?

So networks, sensors, all this stuff is accelerating exponentially right now. Neuroscience is accelerating exponentially. Biotechnology as a field is moving at 5 times the speed of Moore's Law, so it's doubling in power every 4 months. This means we've been able to look very, very deeply under the hood of flow for the very first time. So we're understanding more and more where it's coming. This is only going to continue to increase. I think virtual reality, video games produce flow, we know this. But it's really a low-grade flow state. It's missing a lot of components. Virtual reality will be much better at producing flow. So I think the possibilities of using VR as a flow training tool are really, really interesting. I think because we know flow amplifies learning, I think we can build educational-based flow games, for example, for virtual reality. Massively amplify learning, make it really addictive because flow is so fun and so addictive. And it's totally distributed, so I think it solves like some cool education problems perhaps. That's some of the stuff I'm looking forward to.

Okay, perfect. Thank you very much for this time, Steven. If someone— if somebody wants to know more about Flow and more about your work, can you please repeat the websites that you told us already?

Sure, stevenkottler.com and theflowgenomeproject.com are the best two places to start.