Mapping Cloud 9: Part 5 & 6 - Steven Kotler | Flow Research Collective Radio

Mind you, Eastern traditions have been saying similar things in really confusing language, mind you, for thousands of years. Now what we're getting is things turned into kind of a modern language that we can understand what people are talking about and actually work with more and more, understanding the neuroscience that's sitting at the heart of this. Hey there.

If you are a leader, a knowledge worker, or an entrepreneur, and you want to take your professional success to the next level while reclaiming time, space, and freedom within your personal life, then Zero to Dangerous may be a fit for you. Zero to Dangerous is our flagship peak performance training. You'll work one-on-one with our coaches, you'll go through our whole curriculum, you'll join a community of peak performers from all over the world.

This was like a really weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2, so then Somewhere in Sort of Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them, which is, you know, entrepreneur for 23 years, it never occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I had gotten all my work done. Like, it never occurred to me to do that. It was really, really weird. I enforced the deadline, like it had to be real. I had to create the output to really have the experience be valid and I was watching my productivity go up and up and up, and I was like, what do I do now? It's 2 o'clock. And it was just so weird. Like, when you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that, and you can put them in a way that somebody can kind of scan through those, it allows somebody to self-identify and be like, oh God, that's really meaningful to me. Because some person's going to be like a 40-year-old dad who's going to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

Go to getmoreflow.com, getmoreflow.com, pop an application through, takes 30 seconds. We will be excited to speak with you to see whether it's a good fit. So that's getmoreflow.com.

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, Ryan Dorris, and together with bestselling author Steven Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio. Hey there, Ryan Dorris here with Flow Research Collective Radio. And welcome to today's episode, which is from Steven Kotler's book, Mapping Cloud Nine. Now, Mapping Cloud Nine, of all of Steven's books, has, for me personally, the coolest subtitle. And the subtitle really is going to describe the essence of what this episode is focused on. The subtitle is Neuroscience, Flow, and the Upper Possibility Space of Human Experience. And that's what Stephen in this book today is going to be talking about. It's a chapter from Mapping Cloud 9. You're going to hear Stephen's voice going deep on the topic Stephen knows best and is most passionate about. So, with that, enjoy today's episode. It's a fantastic one and a real treat to get a sample of Mapping Cloud 9, one of Stephen's books, which came out a couple of years ago. So, enjoy. And until next time, all the best.

So now what we want to do to kick off session 5, Hacking the Ecstatic, is we're going to wind the clock back, but this time we're not going all the way back to William James. We're just going back to the same period of time when Andy Newberg is starting to do his research at the University of Pennsylvania. He's actually starting to think think about the ideas that are going to lead to his research. And this is roughly the same time that Robert Cloninger is developing the Temperament and Personality Index. So there's a little bit of spirituality starting to leak into the culture. And that same year, a neuroscientist named Richie Davidson met the Dalai Lama And this was at the Dalai Lama's request. He's been wanting to use neuroscience to study meditation, and he challenges Richie Davidson about Freud's pathological problem. He says, "Why are you using the tools of psychology and neuroscience simply to study the dark side of psychology? Why don't you use these tools to study what's good in men, to study kindness and compassion?" Now, this is exactly what Richie Davidson has been wanting to hear. Back in the '70s, him and his mentor, Daniel Goleman. They're both at Harvard. Daniel Goleman went on to emotional intelligence fame, actually based on a lot of work that Richie ended up doing. And they're interested in meditation. And Richie wants to write his doctoral thesis on the topic, and he's literally told it's career suicide. When he published his first paper on meditation back in the '70s, there were literally 3 studies that had ever been done. Put it in context, today there are over 7,000. But Davidson, who's been a lifelong meditator, he has a daily morning meditation practice that unless he's traveling, he's meditating. But he decides he's gonna come out of the closet and he's gonna let the scientific world know that he's into meditation. He decides he's going to study Tibetan Buddhists who have 10,000 hours of meditation training as a minimum, and the average is 34,000 hours. And this is back in 2000 when he actually publishes it. And he finds that compassion meditation has a real impact on the brain. We get strong activity in the insula, which is a part of the brain that's involved in emotional recognition regulation. The temporal parietal junction, the right TPJ, right? Which here is less about body integration, the stuff that's causing out-of-body and near-death experiences, and more about perspective. Active taking gets impacted as well. We see heightened activity there. We also see decreased activity in the amygdala, right? This is the brain's danger detector. So we're seeing decreased activity. And over the years, right, we start to learn that this has all kinds of long-term benefits that I'll go into as we go along with decreasing stress and pain and insomnia and anxiety disorders. Also, massive performance benefits, increases our ability to pay attention, increases our quality of life. Now, mind you, these are benefits that are very, very, very different from the way the spiritual benefits of meditation have long been classified, right? We took what was a spiritual practice and started studying it as a performance and a health practice, right? It was a bait and switch by the researchers in charge because they knew they couldn't actually study a spiritual practice. It wasn't gonna go anywhere. But what we've learned along the way— and if you haven't read Richie Davidson's and Daniel Goldman's book Altered Traits, it's well, well worth it, which is a great summation of the research— but what we've now started to find— this was research done by Harvard neuroscientist Sarah Lazar, talk a little bit more about it later— but she found that meditation actually produces neuroplasticity, right? There's an increase in brain matter volume. 50-year-old meditators seem to have the gray matter of 25-year-olds, right? Which suggests, and we now know this is true, that meditation slows down aging, right? 3 months of meditation seems to strengthen the hippocampus, which is critical for learning and memory. All these points are that altered states are leading to altered traits. So the practice of an hour-long daily meditation practice over long periods of time produce permanent changes in how we view the world. And this was Richie's early findings, right? But of course, studying monks with 34,000 hours of cushion time, not particularly practical in the real world, right? We don't have 30 hours, let alone 34,000. So people start looking at what happens with shorter and shorter and shorter periods of meditation. And there's all kinds of research here. Most of it, from a scientific perspective, is not the best, not the greatest research. But there are studies we trust, and the studies that trust have some really interesting data points. First of all, mindfulness-based stress reduction, the idea created by Jon Kabat-Zinn, sort of watered-down meditation for anyone, shows that 30 hours of meditation spread out over 8 weeks, the amygdala becomes less reactive. So the brain's danger detector becomes less reactive. So emotionally, we're going to experience this as less fear, less anxiety. 30 hours is also enough to kickstart the small molecular improvements that slow down aging. Some of the craziest research comes out of compassion meditation, right? Loving-kindness meditations, which finds that 7 hours This is incredibly fast, right? 7 hours of compassion meditation increases empathy and our positive feelings towards others, and that these traits persist outside of the meditation, meaning altered states lead to altered traits. We're also seeing very quick cognitive improvements. 2 weeks of mindfulness meditation produces less mind wandering, better focus, better working memory, and enough, by the way, to produce a significant improvement on GRE exams. So this has real-world impact. The long-term effects, we're starting to see research here. There's not a lot done, but we're starting to see, because the reason there isn't a lot done is while we can find people with 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 hours of meditation, what we didn't do is before and after studies or comparison studies with a control group over the same period of time. And these are million-dollar, really expensive, hard studies to do. But the little ones that we find show some interesting stuff. We see massive increases over time in emotional regulation. Not surprising. We see decreases in the stress response, and this includes the body secreting less cortisol. It's often mislabeled as the stress hormone, and it's really energy. We get cortisol when we need energy to deal with challenging situations, which obviously is every stressful situation, which is how it got sort of misnumbered. The most interesting finding to me is that a portion of the brain called the nucleus accumbens shrinks and becomes less active. So this is really interesting. The nucleus accumbens is thick with dopamine receptors. It gets really active in flow, and shrinking it down doesn't seem like a good thing. But do you remember how the TPJ does both kind of embodied perspective— where is my body right now and my consciousness— and also Cognitive perspective, psychological perspective. So the nucleus accumbens is responsible for all of our pleasure chemicals and our reward chemicals, but it's also where all that stickiness is. So the Buddha and everybody else who taught that long meditation makes you want less, it squelches attachment and desire, right? What that actually means is long-term meditation shrinks the nucleus accumbens. You become less attached to things. Things become less addictive, less sticky, right? This is that fabled Buddhist non-attachment. And as I mentioned earlier, it's starting to get discrete. We're starting to be able to test different meditation systems against different meditation systems. So we now know, for example, that loving-kindness and compassion meditation seems to work better as a treatment for PTSD than other forms. I mentioned earlier that creativity is helped by an open-senses, vipassana-style meditation. What they did is they tested this against focused meditation. What they find is that focused meditation is great for convergent thinking. This is logical, linear— it can be creative, by the way, but it's logical, linear decision-making. And divergent lateral thinking, connecting far-flung ideas together, seems to be helped by open senses. So we're getting a look at the neurobiology of this. Mind you, Eastern traditions have been saying similar things in really confusing language, mind you, for thousands of years. Now what we're getting is things turned into kind of a modern language that we can understand what people are talking about and actually work with more and more, understanding the neuroscience that's sitting at the heart of this. This meditation line of research, it starts in the early '90s and it gains steam throughout the '90s. And where it really, really, really sort of comes together and coalesces into a movement that really leads us to kind of the era that we're talking about, we're talking about mapping cloud nine, where we're learning enough about the brain to be able to make interventions that improve our lives, right? As you can see with the meditation stuff, it starts to show up in the early 1990s and it gains more steam in the later '90s and the early 2000s. And I think one of the biggest shifts is that the University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman essentially makes the conscious decision to end Freud's 100-year Detour. And the funny thing about it is Seligman has got to be one of the leading lights on the dark side of psychology, investigating our illness and our pathology. He is the guy who pioneered learned helplessness theory, which has to be the bleakest theory in the world. And it's the idea that if I torture you or pick on you or bully you, and I do this over and over and over again, and there's nothing you can do to stop it, it, you will give up. You will learn to be helpless. You will just stop fighting back. It's an energy expenditure thing. Again, the body is a homeostatic system, right? It's always trying to save energy. And if you cannot do anything about the fact that you're being tortured every day, you will eventually give up fighting against it. Learned helplessness theory. And Seligman's the guy who pioneered this really, really dark, dark dark thinking. But one summer day, middle of the 1990s, he is working in his garden with his young daughter Nikki, and he has, in his own words, an epiphany. So Seligman is a meticulous, grumpy scientist, a serious grouch by his own description. He's also a serious gardener, really serious. And he is picking up weeds, he's very meticulous with his trowel, and he's setting them aside in a neat discard pile, and Nikki, who is all of 5 years old, is just having as much fun as she possibly can, and weeds are flying up in the air, and Seligman gets pissed off. He starts screaming at Nikki, and Nikki is not having any of it. She stomps over. She's got a stern look on her face. She says, "Daddy, I want to talk to you. From the time I was 3 until the time I was 5, I whined a lot, but I decided the day I turned 5 to stop whining, and I haven't whined once since. If I could stop whining, you can stop being such a and Seligman decides to take her up on the challenge, and he decides to bring the entire field of psychology along for the ride. 1998, he becomes president of the American Psychological Association. This is a time where literally 1 out of 10 Americans are taking antidepressants. And his inauguration speech carries really strong echoes of his promise to Nikki, and, by the way, Maslow's earlier ideas about psychology. And what he says is the most important thing The most general thing I have learned was that psychology was half-baked, literally half-baked. We had baked the part about mental illness. We had baked the part about repair of damage. The other side's unbaked, the side of strength, the side of what we're good at. The exact same realization Dalai Lama forced on Richie Davidson, Martin Seligman came to through his daughter Nikki, right? And as president of the AMA, he gets to choose the central theme for his term. And he chooses positive psychology, which is then a brand new field. Writing his first presidential column for the AMA newsletter, "I want to remind our field that it has been sidetracked. Psychology is not just the study of weakness and damage. It is also the study of strength and virtue. Treatment is not just fixing what is broken. It is nurturing what is best within ourselves." Big breakthrough comes in 2000. Csikszentmihalyi, godfather of flow psychology, is in Hawaii. So is Seligman. They bump into each other, they drink a ton of gin and tonics, and they write a manifesto for positive psychology that essentially unites the work of William James and Abraham Maslow and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Richard Davidson and all these other thinkers, and it's now funneled under this this banner of positive psychology, right? And one of the interesting things that come out of positive psychology and that starts to wrap all these disparate threads together— and by the way, this is of course the point where the spiritual and the high-performance side start to come back together and merge again. And one of the big realizations was that there are 3 ways to have a good life. You can have a pleasant life, an engaged life, or a meaningful life. Now, a pleasant life is about moment-to-moment happiness, right? How happy are you right now? How happy are you right now? How happy are you right now? Right? This is a pleasant life. And what they realized and what psychologists have realized for a while is there's not a hell of a lot you can do here. There are little things you can do, and we'll talk about what they are. But as a general rule, there are something called emotional set points. Now, emotional set set points are the bandwidth of experience. Literally, they get set up sometime in the first 9 to 12 years of life. Nobody knows exactly why, where they come from, but what we know is that these set points determine how happy, how sad we will feel over the course of a lifetime. So once they're set up, we will not feel sadder than the sadness set point, and we will not feel happier than the happiness set point, and it's pretty much locked up for life. Now, interesting data point. What the research is starting to show is that there are two ways that you actually can alter emotional set points. One, they can go downward. Chronic unemployment or the death of a child will lower your bottom level emotional set point. Those are the two things that will do it. On the upper end, what will raise your emotional set point? Consistent access to non-ordinary states of consciousness is the only way it seems to raise your emotional set point, meaning flow experience after flow experience after flow experience and so forth. But you also seem to have to do the emotional work, right? To do that, you have to integrate the experiences. You don't just get to take a bunch of psychedelics and move up the chain. You have to do the integration hard work on the back end, right? So the pleasant life version not a hell of a lot you can do, right? As I said, there are some stuff and we're going to come back to that. The next step on the rung is the engaged life. This is a high-flow lifestyle, right? And we're going to talk about what this means in a minute. But the engaged life is a life that has a tremendous amount of flow in it, right? The next step up is the meaningful life. And this is where those high-flow activities are in service of something positive and bigger than yourself. And this seems to be the pinnacle of happiness, the best that we can do. And when I think about all this stuff, when I think about what this means for cloud nine and the upper possibility space of human experience, and I think about all the discoveries of positive psychology, I think of their discoveries as baseline high performance. This is like mental health hygiene. It's all the shit that you're a moron to not be doing. In really blatant, blunt terms. You're just dumb if you're not deploying these tools in your life because you're making yourself miserable for no reason whatsoever. Right? And more importantly, if you are on a spiritual path or a high-performance path that is going to involve altered states of consciousness, right? These are fast-moving experiences. If you're in a car and you're doing 10 miles an hour, you hit a tree, you dent the fender. You're in a car, you're doing 100 miles an hour, hit a tree, you got real problems, right? Altered states of consciousness, these non-ordinary states, whether we're talking about flow states or really serious— I'm not talking about mindfulness-based stress reduction, but I'm talking about a serious tantra practice, a serious flow practice, a serious psychedelic practice, or as usually is the case, all these things mixed together into a life. There's a lot of energy moving through that system, and if the foundation isn't stable, if you don't have what that positive psychology baseline, you're absolutely going to become unmoored. Right? Earlier I said if you've got a spiritual problem, you may need a high-performance solution. This is one of those places, right? If you are going on a giant spiritual quest and you don't want to lose yourself along the way, really, really important.

Hey there, just going to interrupt. If you are a leader a knowledge worker, or an entrepreneur, and you want to take your professional success to the next level while reclaiming time, space, and freedom within your personal life, then Zero to Dangerous may be a fit for you. Zero to Dangerous is our flagship peak performance training. You'll work one-on-one with our coaches. You'll go through our whole curriculum. You'll join a community of peak performers from all over the world.

This was like a really weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2. So then somewhere in Sort of Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them. Which is, you know, entrepreneur for 23 years, it never occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I had gotten all my work done. Like, it never occurred to me to do that. It was really really weird. I enforced the deadline, like it had to be real. I had to create the output to really have the experience be valid. And I was watching my productivity go up and up and up, and I was like, what do I do now? It's 2 o'clock. And it was just so weird. Like, when you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that and you can put them in a way that somebody can kind of scan through those, it allows somebody to self-identify identify and be like, oh God, that's really meaningful to me. Because some person's going to be like a 40-year-old dad who's going to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

Go to getmoreflow.com, getmoreflow.com, pop an application through, takes 30 seconds. We would be excited to speak with you to see whether it's a good fit. So that's getmoreflow.com.

So what is that baseline positive psychology recipe? Couple things to know. First of all, power positive thinking. So what does that mean? Well, as I said earlier, the amygdala is the brain's danger detector. What that means is your brain takes in about 400 billion bits of information a second. Now, this is the most recent estimate. Comes from a book called The User Illusion. Fantastic, fantastic book on consciousness for anybody who's interested. But 400 billion bits of information a second. Consciousness, stuff you're aware of, the stuff you use to create your reality, 2,000 bits. So the vast majority of what the brain does at the first level is filter down information, right? And since the first order of business for any organism is survival, the first stop of all incoming information has to be an organ that is primed to look for danger. Now, the amygdala technically is primed to look for novelty and salience, but it is privileged towards the negative because it's really looking for threats that can keep you alive. What that means is— this is work that came out of Berkeley— is the amygdala will pick up 6 to 9 bits of negative information for every positive bit that comes through. Research out of positive psychology, by the way, tells us that you need 3 positive thoughts to counter a negative, right? So one place you got to start is self-monitoring and adjusting self-talk, right? This is critical. Now, more interestingly is the use of gratitude. Gratitude is one of these new agey ideas that have been around forever. Well, now it's a positive psychology idea. And what positive psychology at Baseline High Performance recommend is a daily gratitude practice. This means either gratitude lists. The standard positive psychology prescription is write down 3 things you're grateful for and turn one of them into a longer paragraph. I personally believe writing down 10 things you're grateful for is more effective, as long as you take the time to really feel that gratitude along the way. I find that's more effective. But the reason you're doing this is you're tilting the brain. The brain will start noticing, because when you're grateful, it doesn't set off the brain's bullshit detector. You're not grateful for imaginary things that might happen in the future. You're grateful for stuff that has already happened. It's real. We know it's real, right? I am really grateful I ate dinner last night. I definitely ate dinner last night. And being grateful reminds me of the fact that I had this basic need and it got met. And it probably is going to get met in the future, by the way. So what happens is with a daily gratitude practice, very quickly we start to tilt the ratio. We start taking in more positive information. Now, this is fundamental for a lot of things, very fundamental for high performance and creativity, because novelty, right? Brain is taking in new information or seeing old information new ways, right? That's the foundation of creativity. You need novel information. If the brain is only hunting the negative, it's not going to find you the stuff that you need, right? Also, because of Richie Davidson's work and all the other work at the heart of every positive psychology practice is a mindfulness practice. It's everywhere. And you're doing this for stress reduction, and you're doing this to get into that gap, right? There is a gap between when thoughts arise and when we tag them with emotion, right? And emotion is meaning. Once we've tagged a thought with emotion, it's got so much energy, we can't do anything with it. It's already too late most of the time, unless you're a really seasoned meditator. Most of what what we want to do is we want to intercept that thought before it gets the emotional weight, right? And that you get from any kind of mindfulness practice. So that's really, really, really fundamental. The final component in the positive psychology recipe, and I think this is really cool, and it is one of the first real flow hacks we're going to talk about, and this comes out of work done by Martin Seligman and a guy named Peterson who's at the University of Michigan. They wrote a book called Character Strengths and Virtues. And what they realized is that if you are interested in living a high-flow life, right, you want to make that jump from the first level of I'm happy to an engaged life where there's much more flow. One of the easiest ways to do it is to cultivate your 5 core strengths. So there's all kinds of strength-finding diagnostics available online. Seligman and Peterson have a fantastic one that I really like. But what they basically say is cultivate your 5 strengths. And if you could find a career that's at the intersection of 5 strengths, that's a very high-flow career. Now, we're going to talk about in a couple of seconds why this is the case, why this actually works. But I just want to give you the baseline positive psychology recipe. And I also want you to understand that the reason we have this recipe is— earlier we talked about how neuroscience biotechnology has been accelerating on exponential growth curves. To just put this in perspective for you, biotechnology has essentially been accelerating at 5 times the speed of Moore's Law, which means it doubles in power roughly every 4 months. And This at just a health and well-being level impacts all of us every day. Literally every day you manage to stay alive because biotechnology is moving so fast, you gain 5 hours of life expectancy, no exercise required. Now, all this stuff, all this biotechnology, it's leading to huge breakthroughs. We talked about neural imaging, fMRI, MEG, EEG, all that stuff. What's also starting to happen is older metrics, physiological metrics, heart rate variability, galvanic skin response, EEG, these are less accurate. And when I say less accurate, what I mean is there's tons of noise in the system. So if I put an EEG headset on you and you yawn or blink, that's gonna show up as brain activity noise. So it's really hard to separate signal from noise in all this research. Been a problem going all the way back Enter AI, artificial intelligence, big data, machine learning, neural net. All these things are allowing us to tackle aspects of cloud nine in ways that we've never done before. And where this, I think, is its coolest is on the spiritual side of things. Let me give you an example. So right now you can get online and you can find enormous databases databases of near-death experiences, global databases, so we can do things we've never been able to do before. Turns out, by the way, that Thai folks and Europeans, very different near-death experiences. Culture seems to play a role. What you experience is shaped by culture. And now we know this, right? So we can strip out a little more of the near-death experience, sort of the part that was on the mystical side. We didn't understand what it was. There's mystery there. And we can say, oh, look, culture accounts for some of this. We can do that. And we can also find things in this research that science can't explain, right? One of the things that has showed up since they've started doing all this NDE work is lots and lots and lots of people have experiences, gain information when they are supposedly technically brain dead about things that they don't know about. There's a really famous study that was done in the Nordic countries by a researcher named Pim van Lommel of people who died in the emergency room and were brought back to life. And the famous example he gives is an old man, and he was dead, and they were gonna work on him, and they took his eyeglasses off his face. He was flatlined. And they put it in a medical chest of drawers, in the second drawer from the top to his right. And then they revive him, they bring him back to life. A couple days go by, and he wants his reading glasses, and he asks for them and nobody can find them. And he says, oh no, that was because when I was lying on the table, you put them in that second drawer, right? This is a scientific study taking place in a hospital, and this stuff happens over and over and over again. So some of this stuff gets explained away using big data, and some of it we go, wow, there's still a mystery here. We don't know what that is. We don't know what's going on. The same thing has been happening with psychedelic experiences. So, for example, you go to places like Erowood, you can put in trip reports, right? I took San Pedro cactus and this was my experience. I took DMT and this was my experience. And what we're getting is— so DMT, for example, produces, as Rick Strassman found out the hard way, really strange, strange, strange experiences. So, for example, I had a DMT experience where one of the things I saw was hieroglyphics in languages I didn't think I spoke or knew. And for 10 minutes, I just saw black and white hieroglyphs moving past my vision or through my field of vision, though my eyes were closed. Right. Well, turns out that's not very uncommon. In fact, one of the first entries is for the Akashic Record. Right. This is the Akashic Record experience. It shows up in mystical literature going all the way And it's very common in DMT. So what does this suggest? It suggests there's some biology there. There's something in our brain that makes us see language or see symbolic representations of things that look like language. What is that exactly? Who knows? But it's everywhere across many, many cultures. Then you go, "Oh, wow, this is cool. We should use science to take a deeper look at that." By the way, I have a friend who's at Los Alamos who came up with the fabulous DMT experiment to figure out if the information is real or not. So one of the things that is impossible for anybody but a savant to do is to factor large primes. This is the very thing that they give supercomputers to solve. It protects cryptography, right? This is how we encrypt data. And it turns out with DMT, you can usually carry one question into the experience. So we haven't done this yet, but the idea is Give somebody a large prime to factor, somebody without any mathematical training, you know, give it to thousands of people. And if one person comes back with a real answer, now that's interesting because that's something we couldn't find. So then maybe the information is coming from someplace more than just the person's imagination, right? So this is really, really cool. We got to use this, for example, one of the largest diagnostic studies ever run in optimal psych. And it's built on Dr. Jung's early work, the Big Five personality type, and a bunch of different flow triggers, preconditions that lead to more flow that we're going to talk about in a second, built atop both those things. But if you would have asked me 15 years ago if there was something I would, you know, bet all the money in my wallet on flow-wise, I would have said, oh yeah, for sure, the highest flow categories, the flow that we're going to find The most people find flow doing action adventure sports or doing collaborative creative endeavors like playing in a band or acting in a theater company or doing improv theater, that sort of thing. I would absolutely— I would have bet every cent I had on that. And it turns out, out of the 80,000 people or so who have taken the flow profile, so a big data approach to the problem, the vast majority of people fall into a deep thinker category. They find the most flow doing knowledge work. Book, being doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers, coders, designers, writers, and so forth. So we're starting to gain insights. We're starting to map Cloud 9 with much finer-grained detail than ever before because of big data. And what all this is doing is giving us leverage like never before. And one of the places this leverage shows up the most, and this is where I'm going to spend most of my time, is with flow. So over the past 10 to 15 years, most of the past 10 years, as we've been able to peer deeper and deeper in the brain, figure out where is flow coming from, the next question, the next obvious question, optimal performance. How do I get more of it? What everybody wants to know, right? And here We've made some really good strides. We now know that flow states have triggers, preconditions that lead to more flow. Now, there are, based on our research, about 20, 21 of these that have been discovered so far. Now, there are way, way, way more of them. This is just where we are right now. Before I go into those triggers, I need to tell you two things first. Flow states, as I hinted at earlier, common couple of varieties. The most common individual flow. This is me going into a flow state or you going into a flow state or group flow. This is me and you together going into a flow state. Group flow is a group performing at their very best. And we've all had experiences of group flow. If you've sung in a church choir, if you've played in a band, if you've done improv theater or Improv comedy. If you've gone to a concert, right, where the band comes together with the audience and the music just starts to soar, right? Small group of people, that's group flow. If it's a large group, it's communitas, as I pointed out earlier. All of these are group flow experiences. If you've ever taken part in a great brainstorming session where ideas are just bouncing off the wall, that's group flow. If you've seen a fourth quarter comeback in football, best example I can think of is what the New England Patriots did to the Atlanta Falcons a couple of years ago in the Super Bowl, where they scored an godly record number of points in the fourth quarter against incredible odds. That's group flow in action, right? So there are, as I said, 20 triggers, and there are individual triggers and there are group triggers. And all these triggers seem to do one of three things that we know of. They probably do more, but this is what we know right now. They either drive norepinephrine or dopamine, which are the brain 2 principal focusing chemicals, or they lower cognitive load. Cognitive load is all the stuff you're trying to think about at once. And if I lower that, right, you can pay more attention to the present. And this is not accidental. That is what all these triggers have in common. I said earlier, flow can only show up when all of our attention is in the right here, the right now, right? Intense focus on a limited field of information, right, is what drives flow. That's exactly what these triggers do. They drive norepinephrine, they drive dopamine, the brain's two focusing drugs, or they lower cognitive load. They give us less anxiety, less busyness in our head so we can pay more attention to the right here, right now. I'm going to walk you through some of the triggers just so you get a sense of of how they work. So on the individual side, right, first couple ones are obvious, passion and purpose. This is simple, right? We pay more attention to those things that we believe in, right? Go all the way back to Nietzsche. What did Nietzsche say the foundation of high performance was? Find something you're passionate about, right? Find something that matters. Why does this matter so much? Passion is one of these words that people love to give all kinds of mystical attributes to, and we love to gussy it up. We pay more attention to those things that we believe in. That's why passion works as a flow trigger. We also see risk as a flow trigger, right? Flow follows focus. Consequences catch our attention. This is one of the reasons there's so much flow in action sports, but it's not And it's not just physical risk. It can also be emotional risk. It can be psychological risk. It can be creative risk. It can be social risk. Social risk, in fact, is fantastic for this. Your brain actually can't tell the difference between physical pain and social pain. They're processed in the exact same neuronal structures, which sounds crazy, like, why the hell would that be? And the reason is, if you screwed up socially, socially, right? Go back earlier than 200 years ago, before we sort of have any kind of individualization and women's rights and things along those lines. If you screwed up socially and get kicked out of the tribe, kicked out of the village, kicked out of the town, often that was a fatal problem, right? You don't go wandering off alone in the forest in the 1500s and expect to come out the other side alive. That just wasn't very common. So the brain processes social phobia in in the same place it processes physical phobias. This is why, by the way, that fear of public speaking is the number one fear in the world and not something that would make more sense, like fear of getting eaten by a grizzly bear, right? So we can use risk to our advantage to drive flow. The next triggers to consider are novelty, complexity, or unpredictability. These are three things, very similar to risk, by the way, that massively increase the amount of dopamine in our system. In fact, novelty and unpredictability increase dopamine so much, the boost, it's almost as much as produced by cocaine. So it's a huge, huge squirt in dopamine. Novelty is obvious, right? It's encountering new information. It's why— this is why travel produces flow so often, right? You switch locations and suddenly there's novelty everywhere. And it's a bit of dopamine and a bit of dopamine and a bit of dopamine. It's driving focus flow. Complexity is what happens when we encounter something that is too complicated for us to process consciously. So when we look up and see the vastness of the night sky, right, and suddenly we're struck by awe, right, reality seems to pause for just a second. What's really happening is the brain is short-circuiting and saying, holy crap, I can't process this much vastness with a working memory that can hold 7 items at once. And it sort of kicks it over to the adaptive unconscious to deal with it. And we experience it as awe. It's the front end of a flow state, right? Unpredictability, same thing. I don't know what's going to happen next, right? Brain loves that. The next flow trigger is called deep embodiment. Deep embodiment is a really simple idea, and it's the idea that we pay the most attention to the present, the moment at hand, when multiple sensory streams are engaged in the present, right? This is why learning through doing trumps everything else, because, you know, don't just read about the windmill, go out and build one. It's not just engaging your eyes while reading, it's engaging your hands, your senses, vestibular awareness, all ears, smell, all of that gets woven in, drives attention to the now. So we also have 3 really famous psychological triggers: immediate feedback, clear goals, and the challenge-skill balance, which I sort of broke down for you way back when. And I'll go into more detail as we go along. And there's also a creative trigger for flow. This is built on top of pattern recognition. So whenever we recognize a pattern, we get a little squirt of the feel-good neurochemical dopamine. Dopamine. So we've had this experience. You've done a crossword puzzle, you've done Sudoku, right? When you get an answer right, that little rush of pleasure, that's dopamine, right? That's pattern recognition. In fact, this creative trigger, it's interesting. Remember when we started this whole thing out, I told you the story about action sport athletes in the '90s, and suddenly, you know, everything's going through the roof and was accelerating wildly, and what the hell is going on? A couple things went on. One, action sport athletes started to live in a way that they were building their lives around these triggers. They were living in communities of practice, right? Same thing you would find in a monastery or an ashram for meditation practice. They were living in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, or Squaw Valley, California, or Whistler. And there were a couple other spots. These were communities of practice built essentially around these individual flow triggers. But the big difference and what really changed is in the '90s, you got the free movement in action sports. So up until that moment, right, if you wanted to do a career as a professional skier, you were a racer. Fastest man or fastest woman to the bottom wins. And that was it. No novelty, no complexity, no unpredictability, no creativity, no pattern recognition. Do the same thing really, really well, right? In the '90s and moving into the 2000s, suddenly people are free surfing, they're free riding, free skiing. What that means is outside the bonds of competition, these are expression sessions, and suddenly creativity became the most prized value. It wasn't fastest guy down the mountain, fastest girl down the mountain who won the race. It was the most creative interpretation of the terrain. And by creatively interpreting the train over and over and over again, they were pumping them filled with dopamine from the pattern recognition, from the novelty, from the complexity, from the unpredictability. The amount of time they were spending in flow went through the roof as a result of this. Group triggers to switch sides. We see things like complete concentration in the present moment, another individual trigger, right? And instead of clear goals on the individual trigger side, we get shared goals on the group side. Instead of individual risk on the individual side, you get shared risk. You also, and this is the most famous of the group flow triggers, it's the first rule of improv, yes and. And interestingly, the group flow trigger research was done by a man named Keith Sawyer, who's at the University of North Carolina, and he was in Chicago at the University of Chicago studying under Csikszentmihalyi, and he started researching second Second City Television is the comedy troupe that was the main feeder into Saturday Night Live. So, he was doing improv comedy and a little bit of improv jazz research, and he was videotaping sessions. And he was looking for, for example, in comedy, like the moment that everybody sort of came together and the level of funny, as measured by audience reaction among other things, just goes through the roof. Goes through the roof, right? Really good sign that people are in group flow is when the level of creativity goes through the roof. So he sets out to measure all this stuff, and he videotapes all of it, and then he does frame-by-frame analysis, painstaking, painstaking analysis, working backwards to these moments and trying to figure out what the hell is going on, right? Like, what's driving these moments? So what they also find is, yes, Ann, the first rule of improv is maybe one of the most important group flow triggers. And "yes, and" sort of works on our selfishness, right? We pay more attention to shit when we're involved in it. So "yes, and" means that whatever I say, you build on top of it, right? Conversations are additive. It's "yes, and." So if you were doing improv theater and you come to me and say, "Stephen, hey, there's a blue elephant in the bathroom," and I say, "Shut the hell up. No, there's not." Well, that's not very funny, and the story is not going anywhere, right? But suddenly if I'm like, come to me, Stephen, there's a blue elephant bathroom. Holy crap, I hope he's not using up all my toilet paper. Well, now we've got the beginning of something that could get somewhat vaguely interesting. Yes, and it goes somewhere. It's additive. And by the way, for those people who are trying to produce group flow in brainstorming sessions, this doesn't mean, as the research consistently shows, that you can't criticize. You absolutely can criticize, but you have to find something to build upon. Because if you just tear somebody down, they're going to get defensive. Defensive and they're going to not pay as much attention. You got to give them a window to build them up. We also see closed listening. This is active listening, right? I'm not thinking about the cool, neat thing I'm going to say next, my witty repartee. I'm completely listening to what you have to say. I'm actively listening. Autonomy, a sense of control. This shows up both on the individual side and on the group trigger side. And interestingly, This is some research that Csikszentmihalyi did on attention starting way back in 1975. Autonomy. I mean, quite simply, when we're driving the bus, we pay more attention to where it's going. It's not fancier than that. But what Csikszentmihalyi has noticed is that autonomy is a huge driver of attention, right? As he pointed out, you can definitely get slaves or factory workers to do the work you want done. What you cannot get them to do is to pay full attention to the work that they want done, right? Autonomy matters. Blending egos matters. Familiarity. And what familiarity means is you have a shared language, right? You speak that same sort of shorthand with one another in the group. Equal participation, open communication. These are all the 20 group flow triggers. This is sort of the high-performance toolkit. You want more flow in your life? These are the tools to reach for. And I'll go into more detail in a second, but I really want to emphasize this because we are going to talk about technological hacks for flow and meditation and things like that to come. And we've obviously— there are pharmacological possibilities that already exist, and there are more that are coming. The reason I like these triggers so much is I don't want to have to depend on a substance or a technology energy to be in a state of optimal performance. Optimal performance sounds like the kind of thing that I might need to do on my own when I need to do it, right? So I like the psychological triggers because they're totally portable. They go everywhere with me and I can work with them. And some of them are really simple to work with. So let me give you a couple more examples here. Complete concentration in the present moment, right? That's the most important flow trigger. Individual group. So when I go into organizations, the very first thing I do is I tell people, if you can't hang a sign in your door that says "Fuck off, I'm flowing," you're sunk. You can't do this work. What the research shows is you want to maximize flow, 90 to 120 minutes of uninterrupted concentration. This is why I get up to write at 4 o'clock in the morning. I write from 4 to 8 o'clock in the morning because my cell phone's off, my phone's off, my internet connection, unless I'm doing research, is severed. It's pitch black in my office. I don't even have lights in my actual office. And I write in focus view. It is literally me and the words. That's the only thing. Complete concentration in the present moment. And now I want to talk a little bit more about the challenge-skill balance, right? I said earlier, this is the most important of flow's triggers. It's often called the golden rule of flow. The reminder we pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge of the task at slightly exceeds our skill set. You want to stretch but not snap. Emotionally, we say flow sits near the midpoint of boredom— not enough stimulation here— and anxiety— whoa, way too much stimulation, right? Not on that midpoint exactly, maybe a little off of it, right? This is interesting. So if you are a shyer person, a little meeker, a little more afraid of risk, challenge-skill-sweet spot is going to be tough because you're outside your comfort zone. You have to push past your comfort zone to get there. But for top performers, for Type A types, their problem with the challenge-skill balance is it seems too small. They take on challenges that are 30 times, 40 times, 50 times greater than they need to, and as a result, lock themselves out of the very state they need for that level of high performance. And by the way, the secret is not not don't set those huge large goals. Those huge large goals are great. In fact, motivation theory tells us that you get a 20-25% boost in motivation simply by setting a high hard goal, right? Set those goals, but chunk them down small but manageable. This is what I'm going to do today. Now, by the way, this channel between anxiety and boredom, it's the flow channel. The flow channel is also the Dobson curve, which is also what Wilhelm Wundt discovered way back when, when he went looking for the perfect point of bitterness in beer. So remember my point when I started this stuff out where I said there's really nothing that we knew in the 1870s that we haven't learned since, again and again and again and again? This is a clear example of that. Now interestingly, and this is a little bit in Rise of Superman, And I think it's worth talking about a little bit. Csikszentmihalyi and a Google mathematician sat down a couple of years ago and they wanted to know, could you put an actual number on the ratio between challenge and skills? You know, could you identify that? And they came up with 4%. They said, we think to maximize the challenge-skill balance, the challenge needs to be about 4% greater than your skill set. And we took that number and a bunch of different researchers on our team have been poking and prodding at it for a couple of years. And the crazy thing is it seems to hold. And I'll give you one example. So what the hell is 4%? How the hell do you measure it? I don't know. One way we did it is downhill mountain biking where there are fixed obstacles on the course, right? There's a— this is a 12-foot gap jump. This is a 20-foot wall ride, right? And so you could measure where people were right now, like, what are you capable of doing? What's the— right? You could get actual numbers and then you could work from that. And what we did, we did that. And I'll just tell you my experience because this was a very inaccurate, just let's see if there's a there there kind of study. My experience is this. Typically in a given mountain biking, downhill mountain biking season, for me, it starts in June and it ends in October. And I will get a big, huge, powerful flow state state early on, somewhere day 4, 5, or 6. It's usually the day that I got used to the fact that I'm going so goddamn fast downhill that I'm no longer terrified, that I can start to work with the speed. That tends to produce— like, the novelty and excitement of that tends to produce a lot of flow. And then you can plateau for a really long period of time, and maybe I'll get another flow state sort of at the end of the summer. And often what happens in that gap is like the heightened skills that I got in flow in that early session, I spend the whole summer developing and learning how to do without flow. And after I've learned how to do everything that I could do in flow at the start of the summer out of flow, they come, all these skills come together again and I get another big flow state and I level up, right? So it's a couple of flow states, big long plateau, and then some more flow states at the end. Now, this has been my experience as an action sport athlete and a downhill mountain biker. For, for a decade when I was trying to push every time I went out riding by 4%, 4%, 4% every time, and I just stayed right there. And sometimes— most of the time this meant dialing back my ambition, right? What I found is that I was dropping into flow almost every time I went out there, and that there was no plateau. It was flow state after flow state after flow state after flow state. And I made more progress over one summer than I had in years of mountain mountain biking. So I thought that was really, really cool. So just to give you a sense of what is the challenge-skill balance sort of look like in your world, how would you apply this in your world? I just gave you a mountain bike example. Let me give you another example from me as a writer. So when I start out a book, I write 500 words a day. In the middle, I write 750, and at the end, I write 1,000. That's my goal. And that's because it is is challenging, right? For me, 300 words, 200 words, like, I'm gonna do that automatically. It's not gonna take anything. But 500, 600, that starts to get difficult, starts to get challenging. When I'm writing nonfiction stuff, a couple of my books have memoir-ish layers to them. So, with memoirs, I always know that I'm right in the sweet spot. If I feel like I'm revealing a little too much of myself, I'm telling a little too much of the truth, truth, right? Then I know I'm in that sweet spot. So that's my own stuff from writing. Toyota is fabulous. Kaizen. You probably heard about Kaizen. This is their fabled manufacturing process, right, that they introduced in the '90s and suddenly productivity went through the frickin' roof. What did they do? They upped the challenge-skill balance. They said anybody who works for Toyota, if you work on our line, you can improve our line. In fact, that's your job. Your job is to not only do your job, It's also to try to figure out how we can do our job better collectively. What does this do? It ups the challenge level. Suddenly they're not an automaton doing assembly line work. Suddenly you've got some autonomy. The challenge-skill balance is involved.

Boom!

Lots of flow. Facebook has another one. They've got a Hack-a-Month program. This is really cool. They realize that most people don't usually take the job they most want, right? Oftentimes you take the job you can get, and maybe there's some other job in the company that you really want, right? So the problem is when you take the job you can get, it's probably not in your challenge-skill sweet spot. And a lot of organizations don't let you move laterally, horizontally. You have to stay in your job and you have to work your way up and work your way up, right? Or something worse happens, like this happens all the time in sales, right? You'll get salesmen who are really, really, really, really good at their job, and maybe they don't like it but it was the job they could get. Now the boss doesn't want to move them because they're making them too much money. Right? Facebook says, no, no, no, we can solve this problem. We've got our Hack-a-Month. Hack-a-Month says if you've worked here a year, you can audit any department. You can move horizontally. You were an engineer. Why not move into marketing for a month? You can audit marketing for a month. And if you like it, you can petition the company on the back end and stay there. And you would think, right, like some dude coming from engineering into marketing isn't going to have that much of an impact on marketing. It turns out that's not the case. Why? Lots of novelty, lots of complexity in that challenge-skill sweet spot, lots of flow. You end up making a big contribution. So there's 3 different ways to sort of employ the challenge-skill balance as well. Immediate feedback. We talked a little bit about this earlier. We talked about how it shows up in action sports, right? You either set You hit that ski on top of the couloir, the ski edges there, or you're on a face first, that slide to the bottom. That is immediate feedback, right? Now we see this. You probably have seen this in your day-to-day life. If you work anywhere near computers, you probably know about the agile software movement, right? This is a software movement that says don't release a product with thousands and thousands of features. Release a product with 3 or 4 features. And get feedback and make it a better product, right? So Gmail, for example, was built this way. When Google introduced Gmail, it showed up with 4 features. They used this agile process. This agile process is also a high-flow process. You're getting more feedback, right? This is also why you see rapid experimentation at the core of every skunkworks. Skunkworks are those isolated pods of innovation. It's basically how every big company has innovated. The most effective innovation technique in the past 150 years are the skunkworks. This is Walmart. This is Steve Jobs when he built the Macintosh. In fact, he left the company that he founded, right, to establish his skunkworks. He rented a restaurant behind the Good Earth restaurant in Palo Alto, California, and flew a pirate flag over it and said it's better to be a pirate than join the Navy, right? This was his skunkworks, and they did a ton of rapid experimentation there, right? Because you get immediate feedback. In my own writing, for example, You never get feedback from editors. I get feedback once or twice over the course of a story or a book, you know, in big chunks that's worthwhile. Well, that's amazing, but that's not enough feedback for flow. So there's somebody on my staff who reads almost everything I write whenever I write it so I can get that immediate feedback. And by the way, there is a reason I just walked you through these 3 triggers: complete concentration, immediate feedback, and the challenge-skill balance. And this is— we did a bunch of creativity research and we found that if you're looking to increase creativity, these are the 3 triggers that have the best impact. And I figure in the modern world, everybody's looking to increase creativity at least a little. So now you know how to do it with flow, right? And we see this stuff getting more and more. We talked earlier about how we're seeing, you know, the altered state economy growing, how we're seeing this stuff starting to go mainstream, flow in organizations, flow in business, you can import this stuff. There are small, medium, and large ways to do it. I'll give you a simple example in the small category. Patagonia, outdoor retailer, always tops lists of American companies, best place to work in America. Patagonia is always up there. Patagonia is a company that was built around flow ideas and flow triggers. And they really focused mostly on autonomy. And autonomy at Patagonia is actually, it's not even a ton of autonomy. They let employees make their own schedule. And then the Patagonia headquarters is right on the Pacific. And it's founded by a big surfer, Yvon Chouinard. And he has one rule at Patagonia, let my people go surfing. If you work at Patagonia and there are waves breaking outside, you can leave your desk and go surfing. Surfing. Why? Why would you do that? Well, autonomy itself, right? A little bit of a flow trigger. But we know surfing packed with novelty, complexity, unpredictability, risk, creativity. It's packed with flow triggers, high flow activity. And we know from McKinsey study, employees in flow 500% more productive than normal. So what does Patagonia care if you hang up the phone and leave a meeting to go surfing? Because you're going to come back, you're going to be so much more productive, right? If you want I wanna see another one. This is pretty funny. So this is Amazon. Amazon decided that they wanted a higher flow environment and the trigger they wanted to play with was yes and. And Jeff Bezos just said it was so easy to say no in a corporate environment, right? Not to say yes and, that they have what they call an institutional no policy, which is if you want to say no, if you're a manager at Amazon, you wanna say no to somebody's idea, idea, you gotta write a 2-page paper about why you said no and post it on the company website, right? So we're starting to see this stuff introduced into companies at really basic levels. It's there in education. So Montessori education— when they go out and they look at the most effective forms of education they can find, Montessori always tops the list. Why? Well, Montessori education is built around a number of fundamental flow triggers. First First of all, self-directed learning, autonomy, right? This is really important, by the way. So kids, when you talk about challenging the challenge-skills balance, it's interesting. You go to a child or teenagers even with a challenge. If you go to them with a challenge, they will see it as a threat to themselves and will not drive flow. They will not take it as a challenge. It will be registered a threat. If they generate the challenge themselves autonomously, self-directed, they can view it as a challenge. So if you're working with the challenge skills balance in education with children, this is a real issue. They seem to have more of a fixed mindset somehow about challenge and tends to cause some problems. So anyways, autonomy in Montessori education, also uninterrupted concentration. Montessori education is built around 90 to 120 minutes of uninterrupted concentration. And finally, deep embodiment. Montessori education is often called embodied education, right? This is the very place— if you don't want to read about the windmill and you want to go out and build one, Montessori education is the place to do it. So that's a meeting example of how these triggers are being imported at a meeting level. Of course, when you're talking about deep cultures of innovation like the action sport athletes that we talked about in the '90s, well, now you You see an entire culture built upon all of the triggers, right? You've got all the individual triggers and then you've got the group flow triggers, shared risk. You know, these guys are going into the backcountry together. You get groups of female skiers going helicopter skiing together, right? This is shared risk, shared goals, etc., etc. Really high flow environments. But the point is, of course, as I said, it's not just action adventure sport athletes. It's not even just skunkworks, right? A friend of mine who was one of the original architects of the internet pointed out to me not too long ago that all the basic activities that lead to today's high-tech Silicon Valley revolution—circuit design, software design, and network design—they all require laser-focused attention and produce flow. And doing all those tasks well without the state is impossible. So in other words, if you're looking for a non-athletic example of the kind of revolution that occurred occurs when a lot of people start harnessing flow on a regular basis, Silicon Valley is not a bad place to start. Next thing I want to tell you about these flow triggers, and this is really, really fascinating to me, is they're easy to work with. And I would have bet against this. In fact, if you go back into the '90s in flow research, you will find that this state is really hard to train up. And what shifted though is in the 2000s, we started working backwards from the neuroscience, the mechanism And turns out that you can, using these triggers, you can train this stuff up really easily. I'll give you an example. A couple of years ago, joint learning project with Google, and we took about 70 Googlers from all over the company. So this was, you know, people out of marketing and coding, but some people out of facilities and groundskeepers and whatever. And we trained them up in 4 high-performance basics. And I mean I mean, like sleep hygiene, get enough sleep at night kind of basics, and the use of about 4 flow triggers over the course of 6 weeks. On the back end, we saw a 35% to 80% increase in flow. That's incredible. To put it in context, when McKinsey did that original research, they pointed it out, and this was actually a number Csikszentmihalyi had come up with. Csikszentmihalyi noticed that people spend about 5% of their work life in flow, often without noticing it. These are states of microflow. You don't even know it's happening. If we could increase that to 20%, so 15 percentage point boost, this is what McKinsey discovered, overall workplace productivity would double. So earlier I said to you flow state percentage, the amount of time employees spend in flow is one of the most important management metrics for the 21st century. This is why. The next thing that is really, really cool is we are starting to get techno-mediated flow. We're starting to get techno-mediated meditation. There's tons and tons of meditation apps that are out there. I should tell you, by the way, with all those meditation apps, that as far as Daniel Goldman and Richard Davidson can tell in Altered Traits, nobody has done any follow-up research to find out if their thing is actually working. They tend to point at a lot of other meditation research, but very few of these individual meditation apps have been studied. And I will tell you the exact same thing is true true. There are a lot of technologies out there. There are a lot of people claiming their technology is going to tune your heart this way or that way, and it's going to get you into flow. They're lying. And the reason they're lying is they're all single-correlate hypotheses, right? So yes, there is probably some heart rate variability signature for flow, but it's only important in conjunction with 6 or 7 different neurobiological, physiological markers, right? What has happened across the board is people have built technologies that are capable of measuring one thing, and then they want to claim that the one thing they're measuring is perfect mindfulness or perfect flow or perfect whatever. And what it's really perfect for is taking the money that's in your wallet and putting it in their wallet, which is a neat trick. Tends to work very, very well, and we call it capitalism. That said, what we are finding is you can do this work in flow. For example, transcranial magnetic stimulation, right? You can send a weak magnetic pulse to the prefrontal cortex. You can knock out the prefrontal cortex. You can artificially induce a 20 to 40-minute flow state. In fact, they are now doing this with radar operators. One of the reasons is when you're in flow, we pay more attention to incoming information with radar operators. That's salience, right? Radar Radar operators, it's really easy to tune out the same signal that you've been paying attention to for too long, right? This is just what the brain does. It's habituation, right? This is why William James says you can walk across a room being bombarded by information, but it's crap if you're a radar operator. But if you put a radar operator in flow, pattern recognition, which is exactly what they're doing, goes way up. Salience goes way up. So this is now standard operating procedure. I talked earlier about the University of Sydney experiment where they artificially induced flow and gave people the 9-dot problem, this is what they did. I also, on the meditative side of this, I recently got a chance to try out ultrasound where they used ultrasound to knock out my PCC, which is one of the brain structures implicated in the default mode network. Now I will tell you that I wasn't all that impressed. Rather than just sort of quieting my default mode network, my experience with that particular technology was made me stupid, and I didn't love it. And I will say that Tim Ferriss, years ago, kind of biohacker extraordinaire, pointed out to me that you can do transcranial magnetic and transcranial direct and all these technologies that they're using to knock out the prefrontal cortex and artificially induce transient hypofrontality. You can do it with, you know, a car battery and some wires. You really can. But you get it wrong, you're going to make yourself stupid for quite a We're also, by the way, starting to see, as I said, the same thing is happening in meditation, right? Years ago, Richie Davidson, he did all that work. He wired up those monks and found all kinds of cool stuff. Now we have neurofeedback devices where we can record the brainwaves of a meditating monk with 34,000 hours of cushion time. And we can use their brainwaves to steer in a neurofeedback kind of way. And while there's a ton of work left to do, it does seem that we're starting to be able to shortcut some of the procedures, right? And there's at-home versions, right? Like, companies like Think and Halo are making brain training devices and mood-altering devices that are along these ways. As I said earlier, I, out of all this stuff, I will prefer the psychological triggers for flow because I like their portability. I like how effective they are. And I think most of the technology right now is weak sauce, but it's still going on and it's going to keep growing and keep growing. So what's weak sauce today is going to start becoming really, really powerful powerful. Now, with all that said, I want to wrap us up by going all the way back to the beginning. Let's talk about what Nietzsche said. Let's talk about what James said. Let's talk about what we learned early on. Let's see what they were right about, what they were wrong about, and what's interesting there. So first of all, remember that Nietzsche had essentially 4 fundamental points, right, with a caveat. His first point, start with a big goal, a core passion or purpose, right? And this is how you get past the limits of self and culture. What do we know from positive psychology? What do we know from flow research? Absolutely smart thing to do. Do we find art and creativity and self-expression a way to overcome world weariness, nihilism, and the herd mentality? Well, of course we do, right? This isn't that big of a big deal now. Now we've got an entrepreneurial individual Jewish culture where it thrives on this kind of stuff. Big deal back when Nietzsche started, but now it's actually, you know, lionized in tech culture and things like that. Rausch flow is the only way to achieve our big goal, right? Art matters because it produces flow, and it is— flow lets us tap into everything from that feeling of unity, oceanic boundlessness, oneness, with everything to heighten performance. He also says suffering is not optional, right? It's got to be the goal, right? As Bruce Lee once said, do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one. And finally, his caveat, right? Self-actualization is not for everyone. Was he right? Pretty much across the boards, he was right. And even about self-actualization. And this is an important point. I said earlier that flow is a dangerous thing to play with. It will continuously increase your risk profile. The other thing is, these are 5 of the most potent addictive neurochemicals the brain can produce. These are very, very, very addictive states. And if you have a high-flow lifestyle and it changes and you're suddenly locked out of flow, you are going to be miserable. It is going to destroy your equanimity. Right? And we also talked about the dangers of STIR, right? How selflessness leads to ego inflation, and timelessness, you know, makes it all about the now, and effortlessness produces bliss junkies and spiritual bypassing. The information layer is endless and you can get so sucked in. And even if you read Michael Pollan's book about psychedelics, you know, I like to think of it as psychedelics for herbivores. And one of the reasons I say that is he spends a great portion of that book talking about how scared he is of a bad trip. Now, I will tell you something. I had Lyme disease, and I watched myself go mad with Lyme disease, and I spent 3 years in bed. And one of the reasons that didn't crush me is 'cause I've had bad trips. I've lost control of my consciousness before, and I went, "Oh, okay, you just ride this out and do this this way." So I think bad trips are really, really effective and totally overblown. Own and a really phenomenal learning opportunity. But either way, Nietzsche's point, this is not for everybody, and that is probably true. So William James, next up, right or wrong? What do we think? Well, what did William James tell us? Habit is our frontline strategy. It's how we win. James called habit the enormous flywheel of society. Anxiety, right? What are his suggestions? Make actions automatic. Make resolutions, publicize on them, act on them, and persist, right? Habits acted upon and pursued regularly become embedded in the brain. Sow an action, you reap a habit. Sow a habit, you reap a character. Sow a character, you reap a destiny, right? By doing this, this is his formula for high performance. Is he wrong? Well, The Power of Habit is still on bestseller lists today. What else did James believe? He was a huge believer in exercise. A calm mind requires a sound body. What have we learned since? He was totally right. Like, duh, right? He lobbied for optimism and empathy and tolerance and gratitude as keys to a meaningful life. We've got positive psychology and their gratitude practice. We've got loving-kindness meditation. Proving empathy and tolerance. And we've got all kinds of power of positive thinking things coming out of both positive psychology and adult development theory, right? James also interestingly pointed out that action precedes emotion, right? He called it the power of positive acting. You want to feel brave, act brave. You want to be cheerful, smile and laugh. This is Amy Cuddy's work on embodied cognition, right? And finally, his big idea that the path to serenity and meaning requires altered states, mystical states, spirituality, yoga, meditation, flow, whatever, right? Felt this was the only cure for chronic stress and anxiety, right? Is absolutely right. And his one universal commandment, and I'm quoting here, there is but one unconditional commandment, which is that we should seek incessantly with fear and trembling, so to vote and to act as to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see. Which, by the way, sounds like everything the Dalai Lama has been saying. It's the spiritual path, it's the high-performance path rolled into one. And I think what's amazing about James's discoveries is, as I said when we started, all of this happened before we had modern science, before we had modern technology. James, Nietzsche, Wilhelm Wundt, they came to some amazingly smart, bright conclusions 100 years before we had the science to back them up. Similar things are coming out of the Eastern traditions as well, right? We're learning that thousand-year-old wisdom holds up when scrutinized under modern science, which isn't to say that there aren't some open questions and some unfinished loops. What I want to do is I want to walk through a handful of the big questions that I don't think we've come close to answering but are still massively intriguing. I want to point out the gaps in the research, a lot of the stuff we don't know, and what's coming. And I want to talk a little bit about the forces driving all this forward. So the first question I think I want to start with, which is the question I introduced earlier, it's one of the big questions, and it's the question of where does the information come from in these altered states of consciousness, right? There's a lot of people on the spiritual side of this equation who really, really, really want it to come come from someplace beyond our brains and our bodies. And what the data shows is maybe. And let me give you an example of what do I mean by where does the information come from. And I'll tell you a personal experience, a flow state experience. I was surfing in Santa Monica in California, and I took off on a wave, and the wave sucked up, which meant it pulled all the water off kind of the floor of the ocean and into the wave. And it got really, really steep and started to pitch me forward. And it dropped me into a really, really deep flow state. But I was literally falling towards a sand bottom 10 feet off this wave. And I was about to end up in the hospital and dropped into this really deep flow state. And I was a mediocre surfer at this point. I was not a great surfer by any stretch of the imagination. And I linked together 4 or 5 moves that not only have I never done before individually, I'd never done any of them in combination. I had not even seen a couple of these. So I can tell you in flow, my muscle reaction time was through the roof and that my pattern recognition system, because I had dopamine and norepinephrine in my system and they were tuning signal-to-noise ratios and that was through the roof. And I can explain I can explain a huge chunk of what I did to escape that, you know, getting crunched by that wave and actually managed to surf out of it. I can explain it that way. I could even say, okay, we have mirror neurons that are meant to imitate other functions, and maybe I saw surf videos and I saw some of these moves, but I still put them together in a very unique way, in a way that I had never, ever, ever done before. So I can explain huge chunks of this, 80%, 90%, through performance enhancement, through the science we've been talking about for the past 6 hours. But there's an added bit that shows up that raises questions. We see the same thing with intuition. We've done a lot of research on intuition. Most of it is on rapid cognition, right? Is that gut instinct we get. And Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for his work on this. And if you talk to him about it, he will tell you that what the research consistently says is if you are not an expert in a particular field, do not trust your gut intuition because there are too many cognitive biases between you and the actual information and you don't know enough. Okay, fair Fair enough. But we've all had what is— there are a bunch of different technical terms for this. I like Steven Johnson's term, slow hunch intuition. This is where I get a sense of a book maybe 10 years before I write it. Maybe it's about the intersection of like 3 or 4 topics I don't even know anything about. I just know there's a book there. I may even know the title. And over the course of 10 years, it turns into something. But I saw that something it was going to turn into long before it showed up. Now, people talk about this as the interplay between the brain's prediction mechanisms, the goal-directed system, kind of the same intuition thing, but played out over long timescales. And there are questions still. Where does that information come from? We can't quite explain it exactly. So these are open questions and these are open loops, but we're nowhere on it. We haven't taken it much farther. So open question. Another open question is the question of oneness and unity. Right now, this shows up every religious tradition, every mystical tradition on Earth. We understand the neurobiology of it. We understand that the experiences where we experience it feel realer than real. And we understand that pretty pretty much at any level of scale. Remember at the beginning I said, hey, the scale we're focusing on, it's a thin slice. But as we know, when it comes to unity, right, it's not just a cliché to say that we are stardust. We actually are stardust, right? We are all built out of the same fundamental atoms, and these atoms are recycled, right? We all have atoms from Shakespeare and Genghis Khan and Napoleon floating around in us right now. So you go to the quantum level, you go down below that to the level of information. It seems like this question of unity is true at almost every level of scale we look at except discrete rational reality. So is that the illusion, or is everything else the illusion? What's going on? What's realer than real? Are we really all just one? One, or is this a comfortable illusion that helps us live better lives in some way? Does this fact that we can get glimpses of oneness— maybe it's a brain illusion that actually serves a survival function, helps us cooperate better, helps us collaborate better. Could absolutely be the case, or could be the case that we actually are one with everything and that's the natural state of things. But we cannot definitively one way or another. And anybody who tries to tell you different is making things up. They are not looking at the facts of the case and what we actually know and where the questions still lie. I'm not saying that we can't have opinions and ideas and visions and epiphanies and all that stuff, but ultimately, I feel it has to bear up to some level of scientific scrutiny. And it's just not there. We have a lot of smaller questions. For example, right now, one of the things that the psychedelic therapy community is terrified of is that the same exact treatments that will get you from subpar back to normal, meaning I am broken and now I'm not, can get you from normal all the way step to Superman, right? And there is something unseemly to certain people about psychedelics for high performance. Seems like cheating. It's the skin bag bias. Once again, it's like psychedelics for spiritual experience. So we lack a lot of really good data here. We have little bits and pieces about creativity, and I will say that we're starting to get a little bit more on microdosing and those things, but there's huge questions. There enormous questions about marijuana and high performance and marijuana and spiritual activity as well. The only appropriate use for marijuana these days mostly is medically. It's to heal trauma. It's so people with AIDS and HIV don't lose their appetite and waste away, etc., etc. It's for pain or arthritis. And all these things are very, very true. But for example, there is significant anecdotal evidence that the quickest, easiest way to produce a flow state is a 20-minute bit of exercise, what will produce exercise-induced transient hypofrontality. So basically you work out till it goes quiet upstairs, you drink a cup of coffee, and you smoke a joint, and it should be sativa. Neurobiologically, that combination essentially mimics a flow state. And a lot of people in the therapeutic community, the people who have been fighting to bring psychedelic science and psychedelic medicine back from the dead and make it legal again, they're very wary about the high-performance aspects. And it also raises a lot of problems in competitive sports, especially marijuana. There's a lot of proof that marijuana could be used as a performance-enhancing drug? And what do you do in professional sports with this? So these are ongoing issues in the research itself. And when it comes to the flow research, we sometimes— we're nowhere. For example, I was very, very authoritative where I talked about the 5 or 6 neural chemicals that show up in flow. And we know from individual studies that all those chemicals show up in flow. Do they all show up in every flow state? Is it the same with men and women, children and adults, me and you, different genetics, different environment? We have no idea. Neurochemicals are incredibly hard to image in the brain. They show up deep in the brain near the brainstem area. This is really hard to get at. There's a lot of stuff in the way. And so anytime, by the way, you're hearing almost anybody outside of a neuroscientist make claims about neurochemistry, right? There's a lot of so-called spiritual protocols out there with neurochemical results, or what they're claiming neurochemical results. Anytime somebody says anything neurochemical to you out loud, this produces dopamine, the first thing you got to ask is, how do you know? Because most of the time they don't. There are— in flow research, there's holes in this research that we can drive a bus through. But simultaneously, we are starting to understand the neurobiology of different flow triggers as they compare to one another. So those are questions that we're really at the front end of exploring. Can we build a biophysical-based state-of-consciousness detector that can say, "Oh, this is the state you're in based on these signals," right? We are closing in on the signals that matter matter. Also in the neuroscience, EEG is great if people are sitting still, so you can get pretty great EEG data about meditation. But the minute people start moving— so this could be flow in action sports or practices like yoga, right— we cannot get signals that are that clear. A lot of people are racing to try to figure out ways to clean up those signals. Still an open question. Same thing with fMRI. A lot of people have argued that what we're looking that doesn't mean what we think it means. These questions go up and down in terms of validity and who believes what, but everything that we are using to measure everything we've been talking about remains an open question, right? And on the spiritual side, I think the open questions are so much greater. And I think, one, there's no standardized language. Each tradition has its own language. Each tradition is soaked in culture and politics and sociological issues. This is very hard to strip out and get at the core underlying technologies and then do comparison and contrast studies. And on top of it, you get gurus with very little life experience wanting to tell you how to live. You get 20-year-old yoga instructors telling people how to live their lives. Life. You're a 20-year-old yoga instructor. That's what you've managed to add up to so far. You may become something else and you may at some point have a lot of wisdom, but right now you're a 20-year-old yoga instructor and you're really going to tell adults how to live their life? Are you sure? But that's all over the spiritual community in every variation. It's amazing for a community that so loves to talk about humility. You certainly don't see a whole lot of it. So we have problems on both sides of the coin. But the whole point of mapping cloud nine, right, is one, we now know that the stuff the spiritual community has been pointing at for thousands of years, saying, hey, there's a there there, for the very first time scientists are paying attention and saying, you know what, you're not full of crap, there is a there there, right? And now there's a language that's standardizing around it, and there are research protocols that are developing. What this means on the spiritual side of things is as we continue to move along, there's gonna be less space for bullshit. We're really gonna be able to test this stuff in laboratories. You say that your spiritual technology does this? Okay, we know what this is now, and we can see if you're making it up or if it's real. As Nietzsche said, we can ring the idols, right? We can do philosophy with a hammer hammer. We can ring the idols and see which are hollow and see which are real. And we're getting better and better and better at it. And both what it means— I think it means 3 things. I think it means maybe 4 things. One, it means quality is going to continue to improve, right? Both on the path of high performance and on the path of spirituality and the places they come together. We are getting more information. And in a global society with big data, we can start comparison and contrasting stuff that we never could before. So that's fantastic. I think we're also going to see the beginnings of some new techniques, different kinds of spiritualities, things that are based on the technologies, things that are based on the pharmacologies, things that are maybe a little more flow-based. Flow is a very hard state to produce at will until fairly recently, right? So we're going to see new emerging, evolving versions of religion and spirituality and high-performance pathways that are gonna be blending together coming forward. And I think the most important thing to know is none of this is slowing down, right? We went from Nietzsche to now, right? We went from human performance and a mystical pathway becoming the same thing. We've seen how all of this has added up today into a $4 trillion economy that's continuing to grow. And when I say it's continuing to grow, the reason is there are 4 forces for ecstasis. Ecstasis, the upper possibility space of human experience. The Greeks nicknamed this the ecstatic space, right? And there are 4 forces for ecstasis that are driving all of this forward. And the crazy part is all 4 seem to be accelerating exponentially, right? Neurobiology is moving at exponential speeds. It's blitzkrieg speeds. We're learning more and more and more about the brain. We're being able to decode experiences that for thousands of years were fantastical anecdotal reports, right? We are finding biology underneath our mythology. Psychology is also advancing exponentially. And it's not just the science of psychology, which is really critically important. It's also our own personal psychology. We talk about this a little bit in Stealing Fire. If you think about who we were, just in the West, in the 1950s, and who we were allowed to be, right? Men were the strong, silent types. Women were nurturing caregivers, as a general rule, right? So you had the Marlboro Man and Betty Holmes, filmmaker, and these were the acceptable realms that you could be. This was who you could be, who yourself was, what was permissible. Think about what is permissible today. Think about the 90 different terms for expressing sexuality. Think about the fact that it doesn't matter what color you are, doesn't matter what you believe, doesn't matter what race you are, who we are as people, who we can be in the world, world has expanded massively and continues to expand. Pharmacology is also going at leaps and bounds. In fact, most of the new technologies, for example, quantum computing, which is really the cutting edge of what's going on in computing, one of the very first fields that we think quantum computing is going to be relevant is in drug discovery. There's a scientist in Scotland named Lee Cronin a 3D chemistry printer. This is a 3D printer that instead of, you know, printing materials and being used to print jewelry or clothing or houses these days, it's a chemical 3D printer. It's drugs on demand. And if you don't think this is gonna be used for experimental psychopharmacology, you're out of your mind, right? So pharmacology is moving incredibly quickly, and technology, of course, according to across the board. We talked about how biotechnology is moving at 5 times the speed of Moore's Law. So these are the 4 forces that are essentially driving the exploration of the upper possibility space of human experience, right? They are the forces underneath MAP and Cloud 9, and all of them are accelerating. So what we know now is going to pale in comparison to what we know tomorrow. In fact, Ray Kurzweil who I mentioned earlier is the director of engineering at Google and who has done a lot of kind of the fundamental work on exponential technology and its acceleration and what it means, points out that we are gonna experience over the course of the 21st century, 20,000 years of technological development. That's how fast we're moving. So what this means is over the next 100 years, we are going birth of agriculture to right now twice as fast. And all of this speed is coming in, and acceleration is impacting the upper possibility space of human experience. It's impacting our ability to understand it, to hack it, to use it for our individual benefit as high performance, to use it for sociological benefits, to use it for all of humanity as a whole. And I think this brings us to the kind of the final reason all this stuff is really important to me. And so a bunch of years ago, I wrote a book with Peter Diamandis. I mentioned it earlier called Abundance. This is about individuals and small teams of people going after grand global challenges, right? Climate change, the biodiversity crisis, healthcare shortages, energy shortages, education crises, and so and so forth. And what the book really says is for the very first time in history, we have the technology to solve these problems. But we are also really clear the technology alone is not enough. It will not get us A to B. In fact, one, if we don't use the technology to solve these problems, it's kind of abundance or bust. Whatever you're tracking, whether it's climate climate change, species die off, take your pick on the environmental markers, or the rise of so-called exponential dangers where these same technologies are putting incredibly powerful technology into the hands of ordinary people, right? These are exponential dangers where suddenly one person can unleash a chemical weapon that can take out a city, right? That's an exponential threat and something we've never had to really deal with before, but it's right there with synthetic biology. And genomics and everything that's coming. It's either abundance or bust, as far as I can tell, and as far as Peter Diamandis, my co-author on Abundance, can tell. And it's not just the technology that is going to get it done. If we're going to do this, if we're going to pull this off, it is going to require the largest cooperative effort in history. And it's not even just the largest cooperative effort in history. It is all of us working together together in states of peak performance, at our best, doing our best collaboratively. Nothing like that has ever happened before, but nothing like that is possible without what we've learned in the science of spirituality and the science of high performance. We now actually have the tools to upgrade this human project. We have tools to expand empathy, to expand loving kindness, to increase flow, to increase perspective. Just think about it this way. I often say this at the end of my lectures when I'm talking about flow. I think that the information about flow puts a wonderful yet kind of horrible burden on each and every one of us, right? Because you got to ask yourself, what kind of grand global challenges, what kind of problems am I going to try to solve if I can be 500% more productive or 400% more creative, or I could double learning time? Times, right? If I could be much more empathetic or loving. This is everything we've been talking about. This is exactly what flow, with altered states of consciousness, make possible. But what each and every one of us choose to do with this information is entirely up to us. But thanks for listening.

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