The Best of 2022: Unlock Flow & Achieve Your Boldest Goals

Hi, it's Joshua with the Flow Research Collective radio production team. This episode is a special end-of-year wrap-up. Our team did a deep dive to find and edit together highlights from the episodes that were viewed the most in 2022. Enjoy, and on behalf of everyone here at the Flow Research Collective, we wish you happy holidays and a new year full of flow.

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.

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. There was a quote on creativity I wanted to share and get your thoughts on. And it goes, if I had— and this is obviously from Csikszentmihalyi— if I had to express in one word what makes creative personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes instead of being an individual. Each of them is a multitude. So very curious for your thoughts on that quote. And then just his contributions to creativity and your takeaways personally from his contributions to creativity specifically.

You actually landed upon one of his great contributions to creativity, which is his understanding. And Mike and I had a disagreement over this actually. He believes these traits are hardwired early on and like the creative personality may be a fixed personality type. Though he does say, interestingly, when he did his giant study of creativity, some extraordinary number, like 50% of his study group lost their fathers or suffered really serious hardship in early childhood. So it's not just— he does acknowledge there's a nurture component that really weighs in creativity. And we can come back to what his thinking about why that matters in a second. But This idea of the creative personality type, the fact that we are creatives are both and. You're very, very introverted for the actual act, creative act, but you're very extroverted when you kind of present it to the world. You have to be very, very naive to believe that your creativity is going to work. And yet you have to be very, very sophisticated to sell it to the world and actually make a living as a creative. And back and forth and back and forth. I think there were like In creativity, I'm going to get it wrong, but there's something like 17 or 19 different both/and binaries that creatives are. And where I think this is so important to anybody who trains with us or anybody who does flow work in general is this— I think what the adult development research continues to show is that one of the things that happens is as you get more access to flow, you start— you get more access to divergent thinking. You become more creative over time. You learn how to think more creatively over time. And especially if you're doing flow work and you want to use creativity in that pattern recognition, linking new ideas together as a flow trigger, which is such an accessible flow trigger in almost any situation you're in, you'd be a fool not to try to maximize it. If you're interested in this work, I think what happens is we actually develop these both/and personalities. I think that's part of the path towards adult development. In fact, a lot of the work I'm doing on peak performance aging based on some of the early research done by Gene Cohen, who's a geriatric psychiatrist and the founder of the successful aging movement and built a couple of the big national aging labs and things like that. He has found these same things that as our brains develop later in life, we start to gain access to like level creative superpowers, right? Levels of creativity, ways of thinking that we don't have earlier on. So even if flow doesn't make us more creative over time, life is going to make us more creative over time. We're going to have a successful second half of our life. And I think that these both/and personality types are harder for people because one of what you get is more emotions, especially in the beginning. You're going to get way more feelings than you're used to because you have to open up parts of yourself that you don't want to be creative. It requires that sort of deeper vulnerability with yourself. And I think it's going to— so I think there are emotional control issues. This is one of the things I think, one of the reasons I wrote Art of Impossible is we were training people in flow. It was very easy to train up flow because the triggers work so well, the cycle works so well, but it wasn't stable in a lot of people. They'd get these huge spikes and then return to baseline. And one of the reasons is there were creative skills that they needed to master, but also emotional regulation skills. And I think those skills are really important because as we become more creative, we become more emotional. I think one of Mike's contributions, biggest contributions is that he saw this sort of writing on the wall before a bunch of other people and was poking at it through flow and through adult development. And I think it's gone further now, but I think that's a— really important. I think that's what that quote speaks to. But more specifically, the term complexity means something very specific in adult development. Complexity, in common language, we would call it wisdom, right? It's being able to see things from all perspectives. It's being able to, you know, understand that very few things are black and white and most things are gray, and understanding that you have biases and there are noise and judgments. And all that stuff gets folded under what we would call complexity, but it basically means you're growing up, you're wiser, and you're moving up the development chain. And it also seems to me, though more research needs to be done, also seems to me you become way more flow prone. Like going through these gateways, what you get on the other side is a lot more flow, which is interesting.

One of the other things that I always found very compelling in Csikszentmihalyi's work in general and also in his creativity research is the emphasis on meaning. He says that creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives. Most of the things that are interesting, important, and human are the results of creativity. So I'm curious for your take on his emphasis of meaning through flow, through creativity, and through some of the other pieces that fall under that as well.

Chick Set Me High and Myself started with a very similar core question early on, which was we saw a lot of adults— we were both kids who were really miserable within their lives for whatever reasons, but really miserable. And it didn't make sense because they had all the stuff that was supposed to make you happy. And they were all automatons in a sense, and nobody was happy. And that question of what makes life meaningful in a sense, you know, that what is the meaning of meaning? Was a question he was asking. I was asking it in West of Jesus. And it led me to flow, though it didn't really lead me deep into his work on flow because I was much more interested, especially in the beginning, in the neurobiology more than the psychology. But I will say that I think one of the things that's sort of comfortable about the flow research is that what we call meaning is experiences that take place when these certain neurochemicals are present. Now, that's not the only thing we call meaning, but it certainly— it shows up a lot. You know, when you go into terrorist training camps and you look at what— how are they indoctrinating people? Are you going to cults? How are they indoctrinating people? They're altering consciousness and putting people into micro or macro flow states of varying kinds, or sometimes trance states, and then altering their beliefs. And when you feel that good, especially if you haven't felt that very often— and, you know, that's why I always say, um, the minute somebody else starts making meaning for you, run. Just run, right? Especially if it's about flow or these kinds of altered state experiences that is one of the things that I think it's weird. Flow is ethically neutral. War can be deeply meaningful. The cat burglar can go out and rob your house, and it's a deeply meaningful experience for them. Now, that gets built upon. And this is sort of— it's funny that it gets built upon the most in his book Good Business. It's interesting that Good Business turns out to be a book about meaning. But what does it mean to do good business in a sense is It means that the work I'm doing serves the world, serves other people, is useful, isn't just about making a dollar. And that also plays a role. And, but, you know, in Art Impossible, it's again, we're talking about getting the neurochemicals of social reward. It's not good or bad, but it's about, you know, what we call meaning is the presence of certain neurochemistry during certain experiences. Those experiences are ethically neutral and can be viewed from different perspectives, radically different ways. It could be deeply meaningful for somebody and could be the worst thing in the world for somebody on the opposite side of that particular fence. That's also tricky. But that's part of, I think, what we mean by complexity. But he definitely— I mean, how to make a life more meaningful, how to increase overall life satisfaction and those sorts of things, I think he, as much as anybody, has shaped our practical answers to those questions.

One of the big things that people really want to hear about is how to not flake on new intentions for the new year. And I'm going to just read out a quick passage from The Art of Impossible here about keeping your word to yourself. So you said, most importantly, this rule always applies to goal setting. If you consistently break your word to yourself, once you set a goal, your brain immediately starts hunting for an easy way out. Meaning if you don't keep your word to yourself, your brain moves into "I quit" mode long before you've even gotten into the game. So I'm curious what your advice is to folks around keeping their word to themselves and how that impacts behavior change and goal attainment over the longer term.

Some of it's about self-confidence, right? You start with the idea that Flow states have triggers, and the challenge-skills balance is flow's most important trigger, meaning we pay the most attention to the present moment when the challenge at hand slightly exceeds our skill set, right? So, you want to stretch but not snap. When we're paying that kind of focus, tends to drive dopamine, tends to drive us into flow. Now, the question is, well, what creates challenge and skills? Like, how do we set that level? How does the brain do it? It happens at a very unconscious level. One of the keys is self-confidence. In fact, Susan Jackson, I believe this study is in Flow in Sports, the book she wrote with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Susan Jackson is a sports psychologist who did a lot of early work on flow at the University of Chicago and is now in Australia still doing great work on flow. And she, in her work, they found among athletes 81% of what could be meant by like the challenge— where do— how high— how great is this challenge and what are my skills? 81% was actually about self-confidence, and less than 19% was actually the skills you're bringing to the challenge. So in certain scenarios, confidence plays a huge role. What creates confidence? One of the things that happens is in goal setting, as you pointed out, if you always break your goals, right? If you always— if you never keep your word to yourself, you have no confidence in yourself, right? This is why your brain starts looking for an easy way out. If you never break your word to yourself, meaning that you never create a goal for yourself that you don't put everything into, don't go after with everything, never back off, don't stop until it's done, then your brain even if you set an impossibly hard, challenging goal, your brain just keeps problem solving. If it thinks, oh wow, you never quit, quitting is not an option, it will keep problem solving your way towards that solution, which is one of the things you're probably going to need to get to any high, hard goals. So that's, that's first and foremost. And what I mean by keeping your word to yourself, I don't set a goal, meaning I don't write it down in a, in a notebook, in a goal setting notebook, or say it out loud to anybody else if I do not intend to accomplish it. And what do I mean by that? In my mind, everybody's a little different, but when I set a goal, it usually means I'm going to work on it for an hour a day until the problem is solved. Like, I will just keep going if— and I just keep going. Now, obviously there are certain times when you want to back off and you want to say, okay, this is This is a bad idea. I'm going towards something that, you know, it turns out I shouldn't be going towards, or it's not going to work that way, and I need to regroup. There are those situations. But as a general rule, if I say it out loud, if I call it a goal, I don't stop until it's done. And so if it goes onto my clear goals list, my daily clear goals list for the day, I don't stop working for the day until everything on that list is done. If it, you know, et cetera, et cetera, high, hard goals or massively transformative purposes, I just think of it that way. And I'm very, very, very cautious to not talk about my goals out loud. This is a—

this is—

I talk about this in Art of Impossible. I've talked about this a lot out loud and in public, and I think it's really important, especially, uh, Gen X is a little different, but when you get into, uh, millennial, the millennial generation and younger, I see this happening very frequently. People sort of lead with their goals. Hi, I'm Jack. I'm here to save the world, or whatever it is. And it turns out that when we talk about our goals, the brain gets all excited. It releases all the dopamine that we would normally get when we actually went after our goals. Now, dopamine is the reward chemical, the feel-good motivating chemical that gives us the energy to go after our goals. Talking about your goals out loud actually gives you that energy, gives you that dopamine. So you get the reward without having to do the effort, without having to do the work. And you, and you, and you then trying to get like up for the hard fight of, oh, I got to go after this goal. Now it's twice as hard, right? You're still as far away from the goal as you were, and all the kind of motivating neurochemical boosts that you could use to get towards that goal has already been exploded. And worse, since dopamine is such a big driver of flow, you're now going to have a harder time getting into flow along the way. So there's a lot of penalties for talking about your goals out loud rather than putting them on a list and keeping them to yourself and just working on them until they're done. And that also means, um, I try to set goals that I can accomplish that are, that are, you know what I mean? I do set impossible goals. I have massively transformative purposes, but those are more about process goals. Like what I'm writing, how am I going to do this today? What am I going to do tomorrow? Um, I don't tend to set huge impossible outcome goals very often. Um, because I won't, I won't quit until it's done.

So, Todd, one thing I wanted to ask you is about your overall sentiment for the US over the next century or so. I just finished reading two books, one by someone who I believe is a friend of yours, Balaji Srinivasan. He wrote The Network State recently, just came out. And then someone who you, I'm assuming, are also familiar with, Ray Dalio, wrote a book called New World Order. Both of those books in one way or another, point to the decline of the US and are, at least with respect to the US, I think fairly pessimistic. And I'm curious if you share that sentiment and what your sense is for where the US is headed over the next few hundred years.

A few hundred years is a little hard to say. Even 100 years is hard to say. But for the foreseeable future, I'm very bullish. On the entire Anglosphere, the US, Canada, also Ireland, Southern England, Australia, New Zealand. I think the English language is worth more and more. For all our problems, we have relatively functional forms of government with some accountability. And you look at China, people were praising it to the skies like Ray Dalio, and now they're stuck in this terrible zero-COVID policy headed toward a recession or depression. Can't fix their falling birth rate, put a million people in concentration camps, arguably wish to invade and take over Taiwan, and they're still locking up their, you know, significant parts of their citizenry. What kind of system is that? So autocracy often looks good for a while, but information flows to the leaders get cut off, or you get a bad leader, and then they start making terrible major correlated mistakes. And that's what we're seeing with China. I'm not bullish on China at all.

That's really interesting. Yeah, I read recently that at its continued birth rate, China will have a population of 600 million by 2100, which was mind-blowing.

I would way rather live in Limerick than in Shanghai. That's one way to put it.

That definitely drives the point home for anyone who knows Limerick. What else is it that makes you bullish about the West, first of all? And then what changes, as per the argument that yourself and Patrick make within the Atlantic article, what changes would make you even more bullish on the West?

I'm a big believer in democracy. I fully understand on any given day it looks and sounds very ugly and you make a lot of mistakes. but its error correction properties over time, I think, are unparalleled. And if you look at US, Canada, Ireland, UK, Australia, New Zealand, those countries are very solidly democracies, and I think will be so for a long time. They are also mostly capitalistic. Now, I don't believe in unrestrained capitalism, but capitalism and big business and prosperity and growth and just doing things and entrepreneurship and startups are pretty strong in those parts of the world. And those parts of the world also, with some exceptions, but they don't have too many national security problems. That is, they're not next door to major enemies. Australia-China is a little tricky, but they're not Ukraine, they're not Belarus, they're not Poland. They're pretty secure, most of all, US and Canada. And I think that will count for more in the near future.

Tyler, if you were— and I know this goes against your your like of democracy, but let's just imagine as a thought experiment you were the unrestricted ruler of the US. What would be 3 initiatives or changes that you would institute to maximally accelerate progress?

I would have much more immigration into the United States, both high-skilled and low-skilled. As a general rule, I would just have us treat our foreigners better when they show up at the border. Even if they're tourists. I would radically reform science policy to make ours much more a government of science and raise the status of science and bring better management and more risk-taking into science. I would have more YIMBY rather than NIMBY, and in general, I would just try to make the regulatory state simpler, more transparent. I would say on climate, have tougher regulations but simpler ones. So we need to do something, but regulations are so complicated. You start a business, you can't even tell whether or not you're breaking the law. And that to me suggests something has gone wrong. Hmm.

Simplification. Simplification of the tax code as well, I'm assuming.

Absolutely. More transparency. I think we have too many layers of government that have a veto over different things that happen. Too many layers of environmental review. It costs far too much to build a mile of subway track in New York City. Just so many veto points accumulate and they don't go away. So we need to reverse that. It's a hard thing to do as one person being— I guess you had me as dictator, president, whatever, but I would at least push in that direction.

Are there any changes to the tax code specifically that you've thought a lot about or fantasized about that would really positively impact growth, do you think?

Well, I think we did a good thing in cutting our corporate income tax rate. I worry that capital gains are not indexed for inflation. That matters more now that the rate of inflation is higher. In general, I would be fairly lenient on the taxation of capital income and encourage risk-taking. We have a lot of backdoor vehicles of having people save tax-free. Like, all things considered, it's better than nothing, but it's so complicated, so non-transparent. We ought to just make all that simpler and have more open, obvious, non-tricky ways of helping people save tax-free. I would consider personal savings accounts for some portion of medical expenditures. We had that briefly. Obama basically did away with it. It can't run your whole healthcare system, but at the margin, I think it's useful. Get people spending more of their own money rather than relying on third-party payment.

Hmm. One of the big arguments that I've heard around government spending is that the focus is on the spending and not on the value or the return that is generated from the spending, and that there is just enormous, enormous amounts of, of low-hanging fruit for increasing returns on government spending. So I'm curious if there's any changes with respect to visibility or accountability or approach that you would love to see in terms of government spending?

Well, as a general rule, each year we're spending more and more on the elderly. I would prefer that we skew our spending more toward younger people. So you can always argue how much should the government spend, but when you're spending more and more and more on the old, I think that's not healthy, and we're neglecting our young, and they're the seed capital for America's greatness in the decades to come.

Pardon the interruption, and thanks for tuning in to Flow Research Collective Radio. If you're listening to this, here's a bold bet I'm willing to make about you. My guess is, even though you're a high performer, you're still only performing at about half of your capacity, maybe even 10%. Now, even if I'm wrong, assuming that you're performing at less than your full potential opens up the possibility for you to improve. And that's good news. When you've already outperformed most of your peers by a long shot, you've got a skill stack the people envy. It's why you earn what you earn. And yet you're just warming up. You know those days when you knock out more in your morning than most do in an entire day? Well, what if you could perform at that level every day, reliably, consistently? What would that unlock for you? Now, here at the Flow Research Collective, we study the human nervous system when it's functioning at its absolute best. After training thousands of high performers, from Navy SEALs to Fortune 100 executives, here's what we've found. You're evolutionary hardwired to perform at your best. All it takes is pressing the right mental buttons and pulling the right biological levers, so to speak. It's about getting your neurobiology to work for you instead of against you. Now, if you want to make operating at a 10 out of 10 level as natural as breathing, just go to getmoreflow.com. I'll show you how to reliably trigger a flow state where you feel limitless and you do your very best work. This won't require any biohacking or nootropics or gadgets or caffeine guzzling. This higher gear is endogenous, which means it's a state that your brain produces on its own. No external stimulus is required. Just go to getmoreflow.com to learn how to get your biology working for you instead of against you so you can make peak performance second nature.

All the best.

So I would love to actually put on both of your hats for a moment, the financier, the invest— the investment banker, and then also the, the biohacker long longevity guy, right? So if we start getting into the age of, you know, sort of the 50+ brackets, can you make asymmetrical moves in order to gain more of that wealth/health back?

What would be your— Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. I was in the car with my boss who's down from Singapore, and we, we were discussing— he's 52— and we were just discussing that. And there are a lot of things you can do. But let's look at the 3 basic things that you can do. Everything is food, but we all get mixed up, right? Because there is a science of food and there is an emotion of food. And emotion always wins, right? And rightly so, right? Not just in India, all over the world, food is celebrated. Food was always in evolutionary sense seen as celebration. Celebration was when you indulged. But now we have moved to the world of food abundance where I don't even say that obesity is an epidemic. No, for me, food is an epidemic. The quality of the food and the quantity of the food. So I think the first thing all of us can do is eat less often. So for example, I am on 2 meals a day. I eat my lunch at 2 and I eat my dinner between 7 and 8. I have an 18-hour fasting window. From a longevity standpoint, We have, you know, longevity genes which Dr. David Sinclair came up with, the sirtuins. And it has two more cousins, the AMPKs and the mTORs. All these three pathways are called the longevity pathways, sirtuins being the most important. When you put your body through 18 hours of fasting, you are creating adversity. You are telling your body you will not get food for 18 hours. and the body then turns on its survival mode. And its survival mode is to increase the production of SIRTU genes, sirtuins, AMPK, mTOR. As these 3 survival pathways get activated because of 18 hours of fasting, essentially you are getting younger because the body is now setting up mechanism to survive. Which is the strongest evolutionary mechanism. So that's the first thing that you can do. Remove snacking, remove midnight snacking. Please omit breakfast. Breakfast is not the most important meal of the day. Sorry, science doesn't support that. But how you break your fast— I break my fast with lunch— is important, right? Remove sugar. Sugar is poison. Stuff like that. So that's first thing everybody can do, irrespective of 20, 30, 40, 50. Because in 20s also, this is as relevant. Because when I reflect back on my age, the mistakes that I made in my 20s compounded and made me— I was 92 kgs, Amina, before this. I last week did a post on LinkedIn showing my before-after picture. So that's first thing you can do. Second is exercise. The highest ROI from a longevity standpoint is exercise. Not people realize, but Muscle— your muscle is your biggest weapon when it comes to fight aging. When you eat more glucose, more sugar, that caramelized glucose that floats in the blood ultimately will get absorbed by the muscle. And you have more glucose in your muscle, muscle is getting weaker. How do I make the muscle more? How do I use the glycogen that is stored? Through exercise. So the highest ROI is exercise. Third thing which I learned from frc, which works brilliantly well is sleep. Sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep. And sleep.

Say it one more time for our audience.

Sleep. Eight hours. But not the quantum of sleep, my friends. Quality of sleep. What's your REM Sleep? I wear a whoop. I measure my sleep every single day. I spoke to you about my pre-COVID times. My resting heart rate was 62 or 63. My resting heart rate today is 50. Usain Bolt is at 45.

It's funny, I think they've actually lowered the, the sort of the resting heart rate average when you do body health checks because the mean average of populations has gotten, had gotten so out of whack.

And then when you get into deeper quality of sleep, then, you know, dark room, cold, no device for an hour. Once you decide, I want 8 hours of quality sleep, it's not going to happen overnight. You will have to do something. You will have to take your sauna, you will have to take your cold shower. I do that 6 days a week. Cold room. It's okay to be bored for half an hour in a day. Just lie down, sleep will come. But that sleep that comes is so important, right? I think the biggest contribution FRC made to me was not just making me productive, but making me realize that sleep is the most important. And I think somewhere, I think Rhiannon mentioned in the lecture that sleep is a flow state. For me, it was poetry.

I saw the mantra on your website is rise to your purpose because life is way too short to live without purpose. So as you know, a big piece of what we do at FRC is helping people identify their massively transformative purpose. So I was hoping maybe you would share your massively transformative purpose with us and tell, tell us a little bit about how that plays a role in your work.

Yes, well, Miles Monroe, great preacher, he's passed now, but he, he had a statement that said— he, he made the statement saying the greatest tragedy of life is not death, but rather it's a life without a purpose. So that's the greatest tragedy. And even at 10 years old, I felt emptiness because I felt like there was something I needed to be doing to make life better for people. And I wept. I would weep about that because I, I can't— I cried about the conditions that we lived in versus the conditions that I saw on television. How things were so different on television than they were in my, in my life. And so when you don't have purpose, you wander around trying to find something that's meaningful, something to attach to that's meaningful so that you can feel like you, you're alive or you, you're here for a reason. So my— always been, uh, as far as I can remember back, is wanting to solve a world problem. But as I was moving into the, the High Flow Leadership Institute trainings, I had my mind start going, going toward love. How that if we are going to regain mastery over life— my whole thing is help people regain mastery over life so that we can solve all kinds of problems that we face and not find ourselves hiding in caves trying to, you know, ignore the problems, but actually come out and deal with the problem. I was watching this movie sometime back with Anthony Hopkins, and I can't remember the name of it, Richard Gere, but it was a bear that was chasing them, and the bear was trying to kill them, right? And so Richard Gere was like, oh, what are we going to do? This bear is going to kill us. He's not going to stop chasing us until we kill it. And Anthony Hopkins said, no, we've got to kill the bear. He said, we got to kill the bear. He said, kill the bear? How can we kill the bear? Really? Well, that's the way I see that with purpose is that we have to deal with the challenges in front of us, not hide from them, not ignore them. So regaining mastery over life, um, really requires that we go to our— what some people call the highest emotion, but I'm going to say the most sacred value. Because I think that when we start talking about selfless love, because that's what I'm talking about, really using love to help guide us to solve these problems, is more than an emotion. Love is an emotion like romantic love or lust or long-term love, which Helen Fisher calls attachment. It's more than that. It's a sacred value. It's a value in our heart that we love people, that we love each other, because we realize— I realize that I am one with everything. I'm one with the bugs. I'm one with the evil man down the street. I'm one with the good man on the other end of the street. I'm everybody and everything. So I need to— I have to bring myself up to a level to be able to love everybody in every situation that I'm in. I don't weep when I go through hard trials. I just understand that they're part of me, the journey for me to get where I need to go. So I'm not afraid to be face to face with some type of confrontation. Well, a lot of people don't want confrontation. I have no problem with it because I realize I have somewhere to be. I have an appointment and I got to get there, and that appointment is to help people Remember how to use the power of love to solve all kinds of persistent problems.

And I think, you know, you— one of, one of the many amazing things about you is that you have such clarity on this purpose. And, you know, if you look at your, your journey professionally, you can see that purpose show up time and time again. Can you talk a little bit about how, how this purpose has evolved and how it's helped you with— how that clarity has really helped you just consistently overcome obstacles, right?

And like I say, one of the probably biggest obstacles for me was my teaching, the way I perceived the teaching, what it meant in the church in those 40 years. And I'm still a part of the church, I love the church, but I realized that if we are going to succeed and fulfill the purposes of God, we got to live according to the word of God. We can't make up stuff, okay? We can't have traditions talking about this is it. That's not it, OK? So I'm not afraid to speak out about it. And for some people, they get uncomfortable. So going through these challenges, one of the things that I can really point to is when I ran for office, when I first ran for mayor of the city of Chicago. You probably don't know about that. But I ran for the mayor of the city of Chicago before I ran for the Senate. And I ran for mayor because I felt that this is one of the biggest races that was going on. The world was watching it because Chicago is a big— it's a world city, basically. And all of the candidates were talking about making Chicago, you know, taking Chicago to the next level and achieving just great things with Chicago and all that. Nobody was talking about the challenges of everyday people, the struggle that people had, that when their kids couldn't go out to play, where 3 of the high schools, like in my district, 3 of the high schools in my district have 80%, 100% chronic truancy. Kids don't want to go there because they're afraid, and they can't play outside, they can't take a walk. I mean, we have food deserts. To me, if we're talking about bringing Chicago up, we need to be bringing the whole city up and not ignore the fact that we have a group, a large percentage of Chicago, that is suffering in a different— living in a different world than everybody else is in Chicago. It's a tale of two cities. So I ran to carry that voice into, into the marketplace. And so that's what gave me the strength to do it, because who runs a race and nobody knows you, right? You're running for mayor and I'm in a race with all these famous people. All these famous people were in the race, and then Patricia. And quite naturally, my people were like, what are you doing? Who are you? You know, because it's like, we know you, you're not the mayor, okay? But I felt I had to because people needed to hear their voices. Out there in the discussion about improving Chicago and improving the world. And I didn't win that race, thank God. I shouldn't be the mayor anyway. It's too much work. I pray for the mayor all the time. But the next day, my senator quit. And because I had such name recognition, 66% name recognition at that point, when my senator quit, people wanted me to be the senator. And even though the Democratic Party appointed a different person, I just waited a year and I ran against her and I was able to beat her about 12 points, 12 points total in one, one area, 8 points in the other side. So I got— was able to really just win that race by a landslide. And that's because people heard my voice, that I was carrying their voices. I wasn't talking about my dreams, of my vision. I was talking about their dreams, their visions, their hopes for their families. That is what I'm calling the neurobiology of love, which is what I'm teaching on now. It's about how you can use the power of the neurobiology of love to really help people see and feel you and give you— also give you access to information that you otherwise wouldn't have if you hadn't opened yourself up to love. Now, for some people, that's very painful, painful thought to think that, you know, I'm going to love everybody. But for me, I've learned that it's the most valuable feeling I can have is to love every single person. And so because of that, I was able to work with transsexual people. That was something I would never have been able to work with, transsexual people, you know. I was able to work with Muslims, I work with atheists, people from all walks of life, all ethnicities, because all of them are me and I am all of them. And I recognize that, and I love me and I love them. So that's how I've been, that's how I've been able to operate in all these spaces. Even when we get down to the Senate, there are votes that people said, "I know you're not going to vote yes on that because that's not abortion." Being able to have an abortion, being able to have for a child to be able to get an abortion, all these things like this, they think that I shouldn't vote on it, but I vote on it because I don't represent these people as a preacher. I'm not their preacher because if I was their preacher, they could come to church. I'm their representative, so I carry their voices into government. So it's not my will, it's their will that I carry. And if I would come to a point where I feel like I can't carry their voices, then it's time for me to resign because that's what they elected me for, to carry their voices into government.

I don't want to go to the very, very beginning of your sort of quote unquote story. I'd love to go to kind of the microscopic middle of maybe even before you were reading Stephen's books, you know, that a moment of flow that you came upon and you were just like, okay, there's something here that I can use. Can you kind of break down that moment for us and, and what you deemed useful in it?

Sure. So I believe that this is probably a different interview than most of yours, but I believe that I'm hardwired by nature to have depression. So if you look at family history, if you look at just the melancholy way I was born, you can see that depression is just— was just there. And so in my young adult years, I actually struggled with self-injury. That was kind of my kryptonite, if you will. So although I haven't self-injured in two decades, you know, my young adult years were really patterned by a high-performance secret addiction to self-injury. And I see some of that actually as the answer was flow. Pretty interesting. So why— what do I mean by that? Well, I believe that our neurochemicals are designed to essentially help people that struggle with depression. And I'm not saying, oh, there's never a place for medicine, but I do believe that too often we go to the normal prescribed accepted solutions that the world offers. And I remember one of my ways to get out of self-injury was really tapping into writing. And I know Stephen's done a lot of work, even, um, doesn't he have a course on flow for writers?

He does, yes.

So I gotta, I gotta cross-promote a little bit there, um, the other program. But to me, there's nothing more powerful than you creating a work of art. And so if you look throughout history, there's probably a lot of artists that got in the flow. I mean, when you, when you sit up and paint the Sistine Chapel for hours and hours and hours, you know, there— I mean, you just look at master artists throughout history, and I think a lot of them got in the flow. So, right? I mean, what do you think?

I totally agree. And, and, you know, as you're saying that, I know you know, we kind of believe in as a culture that there is that stereotype of the depressed artist or the struggling artist kind of almost thrives off of those downs in order to get those creative highs. I'm wondering in your case, if that shift into cultivating your creative side through maybe writing, did that take you out of the self-injury?

Oh, absolutely.

Yeah. So the destructive creative energy, the predictable creative energy can be self-injury. And I think the listeners who are amazing, by the way, I'm so glad they're tuning in. But I think that the listeners, you know, that's the easy cookies at the bottom shelf is just be like, Well, let's just pop some pills or let's just self-injure. I think that there's a lot of our world that is self-injuring in different ways. Maybe not with a knife or a destructive physical object, but you look at our world today and a lot of them are self-injuring. And some of the self-injury could be maintaining an uneventful routine anti-flow life where they— it was interesting. Carl Jung, Swiss psychologist, was asked the question, what's the most damaging thing in the life of a child? It wasn't alcoholism, it wasn't abuse, it was the unlived life of the parent.

Yes.

So you see that that is self-injury. When, when a parent comes home and for 18 years of the kid's life, they see their parent kick the proverbial dog, curse and say, give me the remote so I can veg out. Veg is short for brain dead, vegetable. There's something that's very anti-flow with being in a vegetative state. You look at flow, and flow is the opposite. Flow is— I'm very, very encouraged by flow triggers. And one I was thinking of how to prepare for this interview, and I thought one of the flow triggers that I use every day is novelty, because it actually jacks you out of this, um, you know, uneventful, blasé life. And getting novelty— and you might say, how, how are you tapping into novelty? Music. When I write different foods. So travel— this is why a lot of people when they travel, they're like, oh my gosh, I saw these things and my mind was on fire and I, um, you know, had the best time of my life. It's because they experienced a flow trigger— novelty.

Hey, it's Joshua here with the production team. According to the World Health Organization, poor worker mental health will cost costs the global economy $1 trillion this year. And without intervention, 122 billion working days, or 500 million years of work, will be lost between now and 2030. Can you believe that? So our mission at the Flow Research Collective is to solve this problem by decoding the neurobiology of flow states and helping humans access peak performance on demand. And that's exactly what we do in our flagship program, Zero to Dangerous. Zero meaning meaning you're distracted, you're on the brink of burnout, and you're rarely in flow. But when you become dangerous, you get into flow reliably, regularly, and surprise yourself with your new capacity. By working with hundreds of thousands of peak performers, we've perfected the 3 conditions for inevitable flow. So if you're interested in training with us, just go to getmoreflow.com. We'll free you to thrive in the face of pressing demands and endless distractions. That's getmoreflow.com. Thanks for your time, energy, and attention. All the best.

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