Client Spotlight: How To Get More Flow & Live Your Purpose with Kary Oberbrunner
4 Jul 2022 · 40 min
In this Flow Research Collective podcast, host Rhian Dorris (with producer Joshua) interviews Kary Oberbrunner, founder of Igniting Souls Publishing and a longtime Flow enthusiast. Kary shares how chronic depression and self‑injury in her early life led her to discover flow as a therapeutic antidote, inspired by Stephen Kotler’s work. She outlines personal flow triggers—novelty, urgency, bio‑hacking, and especially recovery—detailing her use of an Oura ring, melatonin, strategic napping, and sleep tracking to avoid over‑training. Kary discusses the "dark side" of flow, noting that not everyone embraces it and that excessive pursuit can lead to burnout. She describes how she cultivates group flow in her virtual company through experiential retreats (e.g., axe‑throwing competitions) that inject novelty and competition, fostering a shared "flow fluency" vocabulary among staff. The conversation moves to concrete business applications: the One‑Day Book service, which compresses a six‑month book project into a single intensive day, generating $25,000 per client and illustrating a high ROI for the Zero‑to‑Dangerous program. Kary also touches on bio‑hacking practices (cryotherapy, temperature manipulation) and the broader hypothesis that flow may extend longevity. Throughout, she emphasizes self‑awareness, community, and the principle that flow is "living life off script," contrasting her past stutter‑laden scripted speaking with her current fluid, bullet‑point style communication. The episode blends personal narrative, practical tactics, and strategic insights for individuals and organizations seeking to embed flow into daily performance.
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Hey, this is Joshua with the Flow Research Collective production team. Today's episode is a special one. It's part of our Client Spotlight series where we interview the people that we train directly. We work with executives, entrepreneurs, and business leaders who want to rework how they work so they can get more results in less time with minimal struggle and of course, a whole lot more flow. Now, if you want to level up your performance, then tune in as we dive into their daily routines, tease apart what they're learning, and shine a light on how to achieve your goals faster without sacrificing your personal life.
I think that there's a lot of our world that is self-injuring in different ways. Maybe not with a knife or a, you know, destructive physical object, but you look at our world today and a lot of them are self-injuring. And some of the self-injury could be maintaining an uneventful routine, anti-flow life. It was interesting. Carl Jung, Swiss psychologist, was asked the question, what's the most damaging thing in the life of a child? It wasn't alcoholism. It wasn't abuse. It was the unlived life of the parent. What does it take to do the impossible? What does it take to level up your game like never before? What does it take for individuals, organizations, for even institutions to achieve paradigm shifting? Nothing is ever the same again. Breakthroughs.
Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance. Access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Rhian Dorris, and together with bestselling author Stephen Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio.
Well, thank you so much for being with us here, Carrie. Uh, we are So excited to bring you in on the podcast where we essentially get to showcase people's MTPs, right? We have these world-class performers in our community. Uh, you were brought to our attention pretty recently. So I'd love to start off with what is your MTP?
Yes. Well, I'll tell you what, I was exposed to Stephen way back when with, uh, Rise of Superman. And I read that book and I thought, oh my gosh, uh, this puts to words things that I've thought, felt, not known how to articulate. And I was just very excited with the book because I'm, uh, an entrepreneur and I believe that flow is kind of like the hidden secret. I'm very much into productivity by nature. When I took StrengthsFinder and different types of personality assessments, I rank very high on Achiever. And so as a result, I think the way that God wired me, I, I like to achieve. And therefore, if I can tap into flow and essentially have this secret weapon that a lot of people maybe aren't even sure exists yet, that's going to help my business. It's going to help my bottom line. It's going to help my teams. I'm a writer myself, so I can really respect Steven's work and research on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and other, you know, other forefathers of flow. And so I just immediately started following, uh, what Steven was doing. And over the years I've, I've picked up Stealing Fire and, uh, I think I even took Flow Fundamentals. I'm not sure if many of your guests did that, but that was precursor to the amazing course that we have now. So I'm all in, I'm very excited, and I've taken the principles and, and really applied them into my life, my family, and even my employees.
That's, that's amazing. And thank you for being such a loyal fan for such a long time. Yeah, I want to— I don't want to go to the very, very beginning of your sort of quote-unquote story. I'd love to go to kind of the microscopic middle of maybe even before you were reading Stephen's books, you know, that a moment of flow that you came upon and you were just like, okay, there's something here that I can use. Can you kind of break down that moment for us and, and what you deemed useful in it?
Sure. So I believe that this is probably a different interview than most of yours, but I believe that I'm hardwired by nature to have depression. So if you look at family history, if you look at just the melancholy way I was born, you can see that depression is just— was just there. And so in my young adult years, I actually struggled with self-injury. That was kind of my kryptonite, if you will. So although I haven't self-injured in two decades, you know, my young adult years were really patterned by a high-performance secret addiction to self-injury. And I see some of that actually as the answer was flow. Pretty interesting. So what do I mean by that? Well, I believe that our neurochemicals are designed to essentially help people that struggle with depression. And I'm not saying, oh, there's never a place for medicine, but I do believe that too often we go to the normal prescribed accepted solutions that the world offers. And I remember one of my ways to get out of self-injury was really tapping into writing. And I know Stephen's done a lot of work, even, um, doesn't he have a course on flow for writers?
He does, yes.
So I gotta, I gotta cross-promote a little bit there, um, the other program. But to me, there's nothing more powerful than you creating a work of art. And so if you look throughout history, there's probably a lot of artists that got in the flow. I mean, when you, when you sit up and paint the Sistine Chapel for hours and hours and hours, you know, there— I mean, you just look at master artists throughout history, and I think a lot of them got in the flow. So Right? I mean, what do you think?
I totally agree. And, and, you know, as you're saying that, I know, you know, we kind of, we kind of believe in as a culture that there is that, that stereotype of the, the depressed artist or the struggling artist, um, kind of almost thrives off of those downs in order to get those creative highs. I'm wondering in your case if that was the— if, if that shift into cultivating your creative side through—
yeah.
And maybe writing, did that take you out of the self-injury?
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So the destructive creative energy, the predictable creative energy, can be self-injury. And, and I think the listeners, who are amazing by the way, um, so glad they're tuning in, but I think that the listeners that's the easy cookies at the bottom shelf is just be like, well, let's just pop some pills or let's just self-injure. I think that there's a lot of our world that is self-injuring in different ways. Maybe not with a knife or a destructive physical object, but you look at our world today and a lot of them are self-injuring. Some of the self-injury could be, maintaining an uneventful routine, anti-flow life, where they— it was interesting. Carl Jung, Swiss psychologist, was asked the question, what's the most damaging thing in the life of a child? It wasn't alcoholism, it wasn't abuse, it was the unlived life of the parent. Yes. So you see that That is self-injury. When a parent comes home and for 18 years of the kid's life, they see their parent kick the proverbial dog, curse, and say, give me the remote so I can veg out. Veg is short for brain dead, vegetable. There's something that's very anti-flow with being in a vegetative state. You look at flow, And flow is the opposite. Flow is, I'm very, very encouraged by flow triggers. And one, I was thinking of how to prepare for this interview. And I thought one of the flow triggers that I use every day is novelty because it actually jacks you out of this, you know, uneventful, blasé life. And getting novelty. And you might say, how, how are you tapping into novelty? Music when I write, um, different foods. So travel. This is why a lot of people, when they travel, they're like, oh my gosh, I saw all these things and my mind was on fire. And I, um, you know, had the best time of my life. It's because they experienced a flow trigger. Novelty.
Getting out of that numbed-out, immobilized state and at least pulling some levers that they have. There's some semi-control in cultivating that novelty, right?
Yes, absolutely.
Do you ever cultivate like uncontrollable novelty? Do you set up situations where you don't even know it's coming? Like today?
Oh yeah, I showed up. Oh yeah, that is my life. Um, so, and I'll tell you what, there's a warning. And I love that Steven and Ryan and others warn you about the dark side of flow too. And I think that's one of— isn't that one of the modules? The dark side? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. And some of the dark side of flow is that not everyone wants to go with you. So there was a time in my company 12 months ago where I started to see some new trends in the industry. So I, I'm actually a publisher and I help other authors get into flow. So we publish, you know, today over 1,000 authors. So flow is very important for, for our authors. But it's interesting because a lot of, a lot of people don't want flow. I started to see Web3 trends. So I'm talking about metaverse, which I think is going to be a whole nother way that you strap on flow, you know, and maybe, maybe your team's getting into that. I don't know, that would be fun to talk about. But, but I think that our society— Stephen talks about this being a multi-trillion-dollar business flow, and I believe it is. I believe that we were meant to be creative. I think it's in our DNA. And I think when we're not in flow, we— our productivity goes down, our quality of life goes down, our relationships go down. I mean, think about it. People who don't experience flow, think about their dinner conversations. It's like, how's the weather? Oh, good. You know, how's the economy? How bad? You know, Yet, yet you get around people that are in flow, and they're almost experiencing in conversation like a time travel. Yeah, right. Here's where I've been on flow recently. Here's where I've been. So I'm very much excited. It's part of my life. It's part of my writing. What I did, what I want to encourage people to do is create flow expression. So one of the things I tapped your, uh, your organization with was, um, I wrote a, I wrote a non-fiction book about flow, but I also wrote a fiction book on how flow— it's called Elixir Project. And, and the answer of the dystopian society is some young adults who essentially save the world by getting in the flow. Oh, that's pretty, it's pretty crazy.
So I'm gonna give Dune a run for its money.
Hey, yeah, it's, you know, it's just, it's changed my life. And I don't mean that like, you know, it's not over the top. It's literally something that— oh, and here's another thing, sleep. So probably the biggest thing for overachievers, their kryptonite is lack of recovery. You know, when people say— because I get a lot of people that reach out, I don't know how, but they reach out and they say, hey, I see that you endorse, um, you know, the, the, the program and, and the Flow Research Collective and this type of thing. I tell people that probably the number one thing is recovery. Because it's the fourth step in flow.
Yeah.
And for the overachiever out there, if they don't recover, they're actually preventing future experiences in flow.
Absolutely. Well, I want to— I'd love to sort of bring spotlight on you because you are an ultimate overachiever, self-proclaimed. How did you actually incorporate more of that recovery so that you just didn't burn out?
Right? Because we're—
Yeah. People who know flow well and can harness it are either overly blissing out or they're burning out, right? So how did you find that cultivating?
So one thing is I bought an aura ring. Okay.
Nice.
So this is a great subtle prompt. And it's funny, but once we even just measure something, we're more aware of it. It's like that RAS filter where you tell your brain to focus on it and now all of a sudden it sees it everywhere. So I have as part of my daily routine, just a very simple, go to the app, look at my sleep score and realize that you cheat sleep. That, that's how I was essentially burning myself out. Because if you're in flow, it's like, do I want to be in flow or do I want to lay on a pillow in a dark room? You know, yeah, for, for the overachiever, you're like, I don't need to sleep, I don't want to sleep, because you're accomplishing, you know, you're writing books, you're making deals, you're doing incredibly exciting things. Well, just like Michael Phelps and that type of athlete, their biggest struggle is overtraining.
Yeah.
Right. So you're right. What do you think?
Yeah. I fully agree with you. And a lot of times that, um, I find at least people overcomplicate what levers they need to pull to actually solve that, that more recovery or more sleep equation. So what did you end up pulling? What was the simple remedy for that for you?
So I do, I do take melatonin. Okay. And I don't know, I'm sure there's people smarter than me that say that's good or bad, or you're jacking yourself up. I don't know. But for me, that helps. It helps. It works. So that helps. Then, um, the Oura Ring, just to say, because listen, if you're an achiever You want a good sleep score. You don't want to wake up and be like, crap, I got a 50. So, so you start gamifying sleep, and, and as a result, it shows patterns. It shows— here's what else I started to do. It sounds weird, but napping. Yeah, I've never taken a nap in my life before I was 40, I think, because I just didn't like it. And I don't know, maybe it's that guilt. I'm from the Midwest and there's a Protestant work ethic type of thing that they joke about. But if you're napping, you're not achieving. But here's what I began to do. I began to say, you know what? Napping, sleeping will actually help me get into flow. More and it will actually help me achieve more. So it's like you have to choose the acute pain to overcome the chronic pain.
That's right. We talk about that, um, that recovery grit, right? And almost needing to put those mechanisms or structures into place to make sure you, in your case, take that nap and get strict on the— maybe the other little things that you do, your little release triggers, in order to fall Because, you know, if you're having an intense meeting or you're, you're, you're in a creative burst, sometimes it's hard to, to come down, right?
It is, it is. And I feel like you have to, you have to create your own life. There's a lot of these, you know, rules that are not even good rules that say, you know, you've got to get 8 hours straight. Well, maybe you do, but my— you want to know what my pattern was yesterday? I knew I'd be— get up— I knew I would get up early to have this interview. Glad to be here. But I started to feel tired around 5:30 PM. You know, I've been, I've been cycling a lot. I got a family, you know, hung with the family, did dinner. And then I'm like, I got this beautiful screen porch on the backyard, in the backyard. So I said, I'm just going to lay down for a nap after dinner. I slept 2 hours, which is crazy. And then, so now it's 7:30 and now I'm wired, right? That's the problem. But that's a rule that I had to break where I just was in flow till like 1:00 AM working on things, popped a melatonin. Went and then went to bed. And I feel great. I feel absolutely great. But see, there, there's a rule that you had to break where it's like, well, you shouldn't nap unless it's 1 PM. And, you know, well, you should get 8 hours straight. And I think that flow is breaking the rule by its very nature.
Yeah, you know, you, you, you bring up an important point around breaking those rules and, and Sometimes that's beyond the cerebral or the intellectual knowing of it, right? Like, have you found yourself just picking up on just certain signals in your body? Were you getting more sensitive to your stimulation and when you have to, when you can dial it up or dial it down?
Yes.
A little bit about that.
Yeah. Yeah. I think self-awareness is absolutely huge. You look at all the Stoics, all the ancient writers, they talk about knowing thyself. And, um, I believe that there is this healthy awareness. I believe you probably have to have very clear communications with close relationships because think about it— novelty, sleep, napping. If you're just taking this flow thing and hiding it and kind of saying, look, this is a solo journey I know that you even talk about group flow and secret of dangerous. I feel like this is all healthy. My team, I've done some of my staff where I've encouraged them to read the book. I've played clips of Stephen or others reading on YouTube and they recognize. And so it, it's almost a fluency. That would be interesting. There's a product, there's a book, Flow Fluency. But it could be essentially a score where how aware are you of key terms. And I think when you can create a vocabulary, especially as a company, so I want to encourage all the entrepreneurs out there, you, I mean, think about that. You look at startups You look at entrepreneurs and they have to have flow. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's almost like maybe that's why there is this surge right now in the global market to be an entrepreneur, to have a side hustle, to explore, create. That's interesting. That would be an interesting chat. Um, because our, our grandparents tended to be in one job, tended to do one thing, tended to do a widget in an assembly line, and look at their lifespan. You know, I wonder if getting in the flow is tied to longevity.
It absolutely could be. Yeah, maybe our biology is screaming out to us for longer horizon novelty where we have to switch careers and change things up a little bit more. Nowadays it's like 3 years, right? If you've been in a job longer than 3 years, it's almost too long.
That's true. So I, I think humanity is, is wired to explore, expand, grow. And probably one of the coolest things about Zero to Dangerous and Flow is the community. Yeah, you don't have people around you are like, what, what are you doing? You should just, you know, you should back off a little bit. You should fit within the boundaries. Instead, you have people that are kind of encouraging you in your flow journey.
Yeah. And now when you're around that tribe, what do you end up, you know, kind of going really deep into? Where do your conversations usually go? Like, what do you love talking about when it comes to flow, which is such a massive topic?
Yes. So I think that a lot of people like to share experiences. Um, the term is Some people use flow hacks, shortcuts, tips, tricks. I, I tend to hang with people that talk about a lot of biohacking. So I think biohacking and flow go hand in hand. So biohacking could be certain experiences. Right now I'm reading a book by David Sinclair about lifespan. And he talks about how freezing your, your body or cryotherapy. They did a test on mice where they just lowered the body temperature by like 1 or 2 degrees, and they had a large percentage of their lifespan increase. So you think about that, that itself is a flow hack. In my opinion, it's saying my body's normally at this temperature, but I'm going to expose it to elements, not in a damaging way or a hypothermic way, but I'm just going to damage, or I'm just going to expose myself to a little bit more than normal, which is novelty, which is a flow trigger, which then kicks into your genes this normal survival stress. Think about that. To get in the flow, um, Stephen talks about a loading phase. You want stretch but not snap. And the flow channel is all about struggle. And I think we as a society, whether it's academics, temperature, deadlines— that's another big flow trigger that I use every day is urgency. So, you know, to, to put stressful but not undoable, you know, the term is literally, I believe, eustress, which is good stress. So I'm very much into this whole, hey, listen, I gotta be stretching always because if I'm not, I'm bored. But if I am thrown into that deep pool, too big of a deep cool, you'll snap. And so that flow channel is something that I, I get to, and even by the, by the very research, to always be stretching, you're naturally achieving at a very high level.
And with that sort of acute awareness that you have as a leader, how do you design your company around something like that? So you do that for yourself on a personal level, but I was up earlier when you were talking it's not about the solipsistic path, right? It's about really sharing with others. So how have you kind of designed your company to, to be in that flow channel and to create the right kind of challenge against everyone's skills?
Yeah, well, here's a crazy practical thing. We're a virtual company, so that means we're not often physically in the room. And I think a lot of companies these days are virtual. Even COVID has you know, helped with that or caused that. But one thing that we had recently was a physical retreat. I didn't— I had no expectations. I thought, you know, this is just going to be an expense. And I'm okay with that because we need to connect, we need to hang. But I took them on experiences rather than, hey, let's sit in the room. So one of these experiences It's not even that dramatic, but it's axe throwing. Okay. So, so here we are, none of us had done it. And now we're at this place where we have this facilitator who, ooh, get this, it's now a competition. And I think competition is a flow trigger. Okay. And group competition. So now we're in this, group competition with our team, our staff, where we're competing against each other. And then check this out, little things. This is so smart that this axe company does this. You name yourself. So I was Axel Rose, you know, after Guns N' Roses. But everyone kind of chooses their name with an axe word in it. So now your identity shifted. I mean, these are little things, but now you start calling each other by your nickname. Again, that's novel. You're, you know, I was never called Axl Rose in my life, but now, now you're competing against each other. Now you're doing an activity that you're not used to. You're using muscles that you, you have to learn technique. And by the end of that, oh my gosh, the creative energy that we had. When we went to lunch, it was like this idea, this idea, we should do that. And we didn't even say, let's talk about work. But it was just this, hey, we're now tapping into all these neurochemicals. And we made changes at that lunch where we said, look, oh, you're doing this thing in the job that you don't like? Well, I love that. Well, you two should trade. And, you know, there was this synergy. And I want people to realize that You know, Zero to Dangerous, there is an investment financially, but these are the types of things that— what's the ROI? Oh my gosh, um, saving a staff person salary, the Zero to Dangerous course paid for itself tenfold just right, right there. So I want people to realize, like, it's not always this go to the accounting and check out the ROI. That is immeasurable. But now we have team members that literally love what they do versus, oh, I have to do this thing. And it— and the flow activity is what tapped us into all that.
Well, I appreciate that. Yeah, people do tend to calculate that ROI, and sometimes I, I push them to think of, well, what's the consequence of not doing this?
Oh, that's good.
I'd love to ask you, like, can you imagine yourself if you had not had flow in your life, you know, whether through FRC or not? But if you had not implemented these principles for yourself, um, you know, what would, what would that difference look like?
Yeah, I think that, well, number one, I wouldn't be on my, my journey. You know, my whole brand is— it's funny, but my whole brand is Igniting Souls. So yeah.
Great name for a company.
Well, thank you. So yeah, we're Igniting Souls Publishing Agency. And I believe that, to just borrow some, some quotes, Ferdinand Foch said, the most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire. And there's an old saint, Irenaeus, who said that the glory of God is a man or woman fully alive. So when you think about me not being in flow, I, as a, as a leader, I couldn't lead my readers, my clients. I now have a program. Get this, this is a little nutty. You start trusting yourself and you start trusting yourself to go on the edge where you don't even think it's possible. You might even fail. So here's a prime example. I mean, You got to take this as a quote. FRC, Zero to Dangerous Course. Zero to Dangerous Course. Are you guys still calling it that name?
Yes.
Okay, it is. So, so, because again, I'm an, I'm an oldie, man. I, I took it way back with floor fundamentals.
But Flonosaur.
Yeah, there you go. I like that. So you can quote me on this. You And the process helped our team create a $25,000 product and experience. Okay. And I'll explain it. It's called One Day Book with Carrie. So think about it. In the past, I was, I was scared to do this in the past where a client would have more money than time. They'd want to write a book. But they wouldn't know how. And I knew I had inside me, maybe, but I wasn't sure, the skill to sit down with an influencer for 8 hours straight face-to-face and map out their entire book and then hit record on Otter.ai and literally write their book in 8 hours. And I was scared to do this, by the way, which is flow. I mean, flow is like that stretch, right? So a gentleman comes to me and he says, look, man, I heard that you can help people write books. It, by the way, it usually took 6 months. And he said, I don't have 6 months. I'm speaking on a stage in about 45 days. Do you think I could get a book out? And I'll tell you what I said, let's try it. It's called, and I literally made it up on the spot. I said, it's called One Day Book with Carey. And he's like, great, I'm booking my plane ticket. He came and it was the most magical day. And then by the way, it was so good that now a second person and a third person, fourth person have done it. But, but it was that. So I mean, if you, if you say, Carey, what's the ROI of Zero to Dangerous? A $25,000 product that has now been purchased 4 times. So $100K.
And, you know, even beyond, beyond that product, which by the way is phenomenal, and I love how you took the principles of One Day Month and like made them your own.
That's interesting.
What we want, it's exactly what we want in this program. But the clarity of which you speak about, um, coming up with that product and why it's useful for people is— that's also a product of doing the course. You were so clear that it— and it was the way you were talking about it was very resonant. It's kind of like this guy is doing what he is meant to be doing.
I— that's so cool. Thank you.
And I, I was listening to one of your videos. You talked about, you know, what you like to do is basically turn wisdom into wealth.
Yes. Right.
And so tell me more about how you extract that wisdom out of people. Yes. How that's, that's part of your own personal flow. And then maybe, you know, as we're, as we're kind of slowly landing the plane in the conversation. If you could tie that into sort of wisdom that you'd love to leave to our listeners as well.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So there's a scene from Inception. I don't know if you remember that movie, if you ever saw it, but he's sitting with the architect and he basically says the only time you realize you're in a dream is when you, you know, think about that for facts. And then the whole world starts exploding. Right. And I think that that's very common about flow. So think about it for a moment. This is actually, this is really cool. Um, Steven talks about how our prefrontal cortex goes dim, hypofrontality. And how when you're in flow, the inner critic shuts up. If I was in that one-day book judging myself, okay, Carey, this person invested a lot of money. They're with you for 8 hours. What if you don't get it? What if you don't get it right? What if you mess up? How are you appearing right now? What is the person thinking about you? Was that a dumb question? Flow goes way down. But what I do is I've gotten to the point where I think flow, you begin to trust yourself. You just trust that you're going to get in the flow. It's like the doctor who's going to do a surgery. And I know Stephen talks about this quite a bit where someone who's in flow and they haven't done surgery, they almost crave it. I think he talks about them traveling, certain people, doctors, overseas and to some tropical island, and they're in this bliss, but they have to do a surgery because they know that they're going to get into flow. Well, it is that type of thing. So the 1-day book for me, Turning Wisdom into Wealth, for people that have more money than time, it's a, it's a trust. It's a sacred relationship where they fly into my city, and for 8 hours I'm not— I don't have a script. I'm not sitting here saying, okay, I see you went to such and such a school, tell me about that. It's literally the person and I strap on the trust and the creativity to go way off script. And whether it's Captain Sully landing a plane in the Hudson River, I've studied that. Concept in that situation quite a bit, but he was totally in flow. I mean, to land a plane in the Hudson River when people's lives are on the line— he was trained as a glider pilot, but whether he admits it or knows it or not, he tapped into flow because flow is lateral pattern recognition. And so it's like that scene from A Beautiful Mind where The individual just puts all these disparate facts and, and, and situations and then creates this immediate eureka moment that we talk about, the gamma spike in the Course. That's happening every day. And so I literally love my life doesn't mean that depression never comes knocking. So I want people to realize that, like, you have to be self-aware. Exercise is huge. Oh my gosh. I, I get into flow in my exercise where I'm pushing and going. So I cycle. I know Stephen skis, but I go down different roads with different groups of people with different playlists. I track it all with Strava. So there's that whole competition thing going on, self-competition. But yeah, it's a very cool life, and I can't imagine what I would be or who I would be without understanding flow.
Well, thank you for sharing that. I mean, and also demonstrating that you've, you've built essentially the black slopes of a career, or this thing that you do with the one-day book in your career, that, that truly is like your, your diamond black slope. But you also are happy to admit that, you know, life still isn't perfect. You have the—
down.
We'll have to work through that. And it's entirely a work in progress, isn't it?
It is so fun. Um, last thing I'll share really quick. I used to be so scared to publicly speak because I had stuttering in my past that I would have a script. And when I would speak, I would literally have the script. And it was a horrible speech because I would read it and it wasn't from the heart and it wasn't and because I was scared. But today, when I get into flow, bullet points. I really believe that flow— I mean, here's the quote of the day: flow is living life off script. Boom, boom. So thank you to your team. Thanks for having me. I'm indebted to Steve. Steven Kotler, and, you know, I helped him launch a little party with his last book. But he's, you know, anything I can do for you guys at any point, I'm just a big advocate of Zero to Dangerous.
We'll definitely pass that gratitude on. And thank you so much for being such an awesome fan of ours. Don't be a stranger in our community. Yeah, you're, you're definitely, you know, one of our— what did I say? Flowasaurs. You're one of the gurus there.
Well, thank you. Thank you, Ameena, for all that you do. You know, just, I love the global team. Everyone's been super helpful. And I can tell you, you all are passionate about this. It's not just a little hobby. I mean, you really believe in this as something that's going to help humanity.
Absolutely. Thank you so much, Kerry.
All right, take care.
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