The Blueprint to 500% More Productivity

If you were to listen to the anti-aging conversation right now, you're going to hear about nootropics, you're going to hear about supplements, you're going to hear about a million different substances and pharmaceuticals. And all that is just the cutting edge. And the reason is we don't work with substances and we don't work with technologies. And it's not that substances or technologies don't work. It's that I want to be able to perform my best when I need to perform my best. I don't want to have to rely on a technology or a substance. And that reliance can be a real big problem for people. When we train people at the Flow Research Collective, we have a rule, which is personality doesn't scale, biology scales. If you want to really extend your lifespan, extend your healthspan, that's what you want to do. These are the things that work best, and it's individuality and how, what works best for you. And you've figured it out, and that's wonderful. Completely 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 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, Rhian Dorris, and together with bestselling author Stephen Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio.

So, Stephen, I'm absolutely thrilled to have you here today. You have been such an inspiration to me. We were talking offline about my background in corporate law, which is probably the most kind of anti-flow environment. And I spent the last few years really kind of studying flow and how to achieve more of it. I love your books. I've just recently finished In Our Country. First of all, a very warm welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. It's good to be with you.

Awesome. Let's kick off with— I know you wrote In Our Country in, in lockdown, essentially. I think that's where it started, when all the ski slopes and things were closed. What prompted that?

So this is the hardest question to answer because there's like 19 things that all came together in that really tight time window. The very— the shortest answer I can probably give is in our country, there's a book called Peak Performance Aging. Peak Performance Aging is a field that only emerged in probably the past 4 or 5 years, and it's the blended result of about 15 different fields coming together. One of those fields is flow science. Flow has— Csikszentmihalyi, the godfather of flow psychology, wrote 4 or 5 books about flow as a driver and engine for adult development. Flow, we on the other side of flow states, we're not just more skilled. We don't just gain mastery in learning and flow. Our skills increase, of course, but so does wisdom and empathy, all these drivers of development. Anyways, that's all background. On paper, there have been these wild discoveries. Essentially everything we thought we knew about aging. What I like to summarize is like the long slow rot theory, which I'm sure you've heard of. It's what most of us grew up under, right? This is the idea that our mental skills and our physical skills decline over time and there's nothing you can do to stop the slide. So it turns out the past 20 years, all of that's been turned on its head and disproven. In the lab, we've now discovered that all the skills we thought were use it or lose it skills or we thought were just skills that fade over time, we now know they're use-it-or-lose-it skills. So if you never stop using them, you get to hang on to them, even advance them far later in life than you thought possible, or that was the theory. And so lockdown happens and all these things sort of come together and I decide it's time to put the theory to test, to really take it into the world and try it out. And I, so I take a bunch of the ideas out of Peak Performance Aging and blend them together, say if this thing is true, I should be able to learn an incredibly difficult, challenging skill in my 50s. And I chose park skiing for a lot of personal reasons. I had a lot of motivation to learn how to park ski, but you've got to understand park skiing, this discipline that involves doing tricks off jumps and on boxes and rails and wall rides, and it's very acrobatic and it's pretty dangerous. And for like 11 different reasons, it's considered like once you get over the age of 30, it's very difficult. Don't bother trying to learn. Once you get to 40, it's almost downright impossible. By the time you're 50, they just think you're crazy. Like, nobody tries to learn this stuff in their 50s. So that's what I did. And the book tells the story of that experiment, and the experiment worked. And then we reran that experiment with— well, I ran an experiment with a friend of mine, so there were 2 data points in the original study. And then we took the same ideas, came back a year later, and took 17 people. Ages 30 to 70 and put them through the exact same protocol. And in 4 days on the mountain, taught basically intermediate skiers and intermediate snowboarders how to park ski and snowboard. And you don't take my word for it. You go to narcountry.com.

Regardless of age, even like up to the age of 70.

Yeah. I mean, so it's— so go to narcountry.com and there's a peak performance aging video. We had a National Geographic camera and follow us around. One of the ways we assessed everything is they judge free skiing in the Olympics by a very set criteria. So we filmed everything we did from the first day on the hill to the last day, and then we assembled an independent panel of judges to rate progress based on the same Olympic criteria they used to judge free skiing. Um, and so like— and by the way, it was like a 36% increase in progress among our athletes in 4 days on the snow. And we're talking even people who were in their late '60s. And so it's pretty— it was pretty successful. And that's the story told in the book, essentially. That's the story in our country. And that— but that's why it was sort of— COVID brought a lot of things to the fore. And one was just the idea that it was time to like really test these things and hammer on them. And so that's what I did.

Awesome. Awesome. It's a brilliant book. I love it. Let's talk about flow first of all, because most people have now heard of flow, I think, and most people want to— I think it's fair to say— want to experience more flow in their life. How can you explain for those that might not be familiar with it fully or want to understand it better what essentially is flow and how do we know that we're in flow?

That's a great question. So flow scientifically, if we're defining it technically, it's an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best. That doesn't get us very far, but that's the definition of flow. What it refers to is any of those moments of rapt attention and total absorption. You get so focused on what you're doing, so focused on the task at hand that everything else starts to melt away. Action and awareness are gonna merge. Your sense of self, self-consciousness, your inner critic, that voice in your head, the nagging always on defeatist voice in your head gets really quiet. Time passes strangely. It dilates sometimes. It'll slow down and get that freeze frame effect when anyone's been in a car crash. But much more frequently, it speeds up. And like, we get so sucked into what we're doing, 5 hours go by in like 5 minutes. And throughout, all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go through the roof. And that is not hyperbole. There's all kinds of different studies. I'll just give you some numbers from some of them. McKinsey, the business consultancy, wanted to know how much more productive and motivated are top executives in flow than out of flow. They spent 10 years. They went around the globe talking to people, on average it was 500% more productive. That's a giant, extraordinary thing. And you would— if normally anytime somebody trots out a number like 500% more productive, you should call bullshit like right away. And a lot of researchers did. And then you start to see the other numbers. The US Department of Defense does a study on soldiers and flow. How much faster than normal do they learn? 240 to 500% faster than normal. Work done by ourselves at Harvard and some of the University of Sydney found that we're 400 to 700% more creative in flow. And that's all aspects of creativity is measuring around the problem. That's why the numbers go all over the place. But we see the same thing with happiness, well-being, overall life satisfaction. In fact, psychologists now know that flow is so important to all of those categories that when psychologists define happiness, there are 3 levels of happiness achievable by all humans. The top 2 tiers have flow built into the definition. So foundational to happiness, meaning, well-being, purpose. And on the other side of flow, it's not just these like very measurable, clear skills. You also see a huge increase in empathy, wisdom. Wisdom is a measurable skill. It's mostly emotional intelligence writ large, but it's a measurable skill and it's a discrete skill in the brain. So anyways, everything goes through the roof in flow and physical stuff too. Strength, stamina, fast twitch muscle response, endurance. We can keep going. How do you know if you're in flow? This was Csikszentmihalyi's first major discovery. We call him the godfather of flow psychology because he went around the world talking to everybody he could about the times in their life when they felt their best, they performed their best. And everybody said the same thing. When I'm at my best, I'm in this altered state of consciousness where every decision, every action flows seamlessly, perfectly, effortlessly from the last. That's why we call flow flow. Because when Csikszentmihalyi went around the world talking to tens of thousands of people, one of the largest studies ever performed in psychology, actually, everybody used that same term. He also discovered that flow states have 6 core characteristics. That's how you know if you're in flow. They all show up. So I've mentioned a bunch of these as we were going along. Complete concentration on the task at hand, the merger of action awareness, the vanishing of self, time passing strangely. We don't feel peak performance on the inside, right? That's what I look at you in flow and it looks like you're performing your best. I see peak performance. What you feel is a sense of control. Oh my God, I can control things I can't normally control. Oh, the basketball hoop is no longer tiny. It looks as big as a hula hoop. I can't miss. Or I'm a writer and my sentences are doing amazing things. Things on the page for like 5 AM on a Monday morning. What the hell is going on, right? Um, that's what it feels like. I'm controlling things I can't normally control. And finally, there's this euphoric sense psychologists call autotelic, means an end in itself. It means the experience is so damn delicious that I'm going to go really far out of my way to get more of it, right? And those 6 qualities are how we define flow. It's also how we measure flow. So if I want to know We're gonna say the microflow when all those characteristics showed up, but they're like 1 or 2 versus macroflow where they're all 6 show up and they're turned up to 11. We can measure the intensity of those characteristics. We can measure whether they show up. Now there is a little bit of an ongoing argument. Little bit is probably an understatement. How many of them? Do you need all of them? Csikszentmihalyi said you need all of them. People have gone back and forth. In fact, I think in Rise of Superman, I went one way and I think I probably changed my mind by stealing fire. I think I've gone, a bunch of different ways on this. We need more data, but it does appear that all 6 need to show up to some percent. But they don't all show up at once. They come on gradually. We know, for example, time distorts before our sense of self disappears, and we know why that happens.

Why does it happen?

So time distorts for 3 different reasons. The first is that dopamine levels in the brain When there's more dopamine in the brain, it— the world speeds up. When there's less dopamine in the brain, it slows down. So that's very short. At the medium term, so as we move into flow, a bunch of different things happen in the brain. One of the things that happens is there's a deactivation of the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is part of the brain that's right back here. Very crucial part of the brain. This is higher cognitive function, sense of morality, sense of willpower. Long-term planning, logical decision-making. In flow, there's this efficiency exchange. You need all this energy for paying attention to the task at hand. So the brain has a fixed energy budget. It's always trying to conserve energy. So what it starts to do is it shuts down non-critical structures to the task at hand and repurposes that energy to pay attention to what's going on. And a large portion of the prefrontal cortex go down. Time is a calculation performed all over the prefrontal cortex, and it's a network basically. And as that network collapses, like any network, we lose our ability to separate past from present from future. So we've all had that experience of awe, that eternal present, the elongated now, right? Time stretching out. That's happening because past and future are vanishing. Now this has big performance implications as well. So most of our anxieties We talked about before the show that anxiety is really bad for peak performance. Anxiety blocks flow. Most of our anxieties are things that either took place in the past and we'll avoid, we're steering around them in the present, or they're scary things that could happen in the future, right? And we're trying to steer around them from the present. And when I remove those things, anxiety levels plummet. In fact, stress hormones get flushed out of our system at that moment, and nitrous oxide pushes them out of our system and replaces them with a bunch of feel-good performance-enhancing neurochemistry that underpins flow. So that's sort of the transition into flow.

When we talk about dopamine there, I know that obviously there's two forms of dopamine, wanna avoid those. But when we talk about dopamine, people process this in different ways. And you can look at, I think there's a gene, the COMT gene that kind of regulates dopamine. One thing I've found is there's a bunch of people, right, who need a degree of pressure that they feel to get their best work done. And they almost need to create— when we're looking at time, a little bit of time boundary around something. And there are other people who naturally need to be more organized and they want to have this perception of time and they can say that makes them more productive. Otherwise they're going to experience anxiety at the kind of the extreme ends of the spectrum. So some people need the pressure of time, but that seems like a flow blocker. And some people also like process dopamine more quickly. My question would be, I know we have that struggle phase and we can talk about the phases before you get into flow. For me, if I have set aside a whole day, it can be harder to discipline myself to get down to it, and that struggle phase can feel longer. If I have a set period of time in which I'm going to tackle a piece of work, sometimes it's easier to access. But I think the boundaries of that time are quite critical in that. I'm curious, you've worked with so many people on this. What you've found is the best way to achieve that peak level and whether it is different for different people in that sense.

Yes, it is different for different people. And what you're actually talking about is the flow states. Two things to know. First, let's go back to what you mentioned. They're not binary. You're not in the zone or out of the zone. It's flow is actually a four-stage cycle. Starts with the struggle phase. This is the actually the opposite of flow. It's a loading phase. You're learning skills, you're onboarding new skills, and it's frustrating by design. Literally, the more frustrated you get, the better off you are for a bunch of different neurobiological reasons. So in peak performance, frustration is a sign that you're moving in the right direction. This is followed by an incubation phase, what's known as release. You gotta take your mind off the problem, work really hard, thinking about it, struggling on it. Take your mind off the problem. Low-grade physical activity tends to work best. Studies have shown that building model airplanes or models with their hands is really great. Gardening. You can work out, but you can't— don't want to get tired. You just want to distract yourself. Long walks in nature tend to work best. Philosophers forever have argued for this. A lot of philosophers, they call themselves walking philosophers, a whole category. Philosophers who went walking in mountains to trigger their ideas. This is why. Um, and Einstein famously used to sail a sailboat into the middle of Lake Geneva for this. And, uh, funny tidbit about Einstein is, uh, he couldn't swim and he was a shitty sailor. So, and Lake Geneva is prone to all these freak storms because of where it sits in the Alps. And so Einstein, this was part of his process. He'd struggle in a lab and then he would sail his boat out for this release phase and the storms would blow in and he'd have to get rescued again and again and again. He wouldn't stop because it was part of his process. On the other side of that, there's the flow state itself. And, uh, then on the back end, there's a recovery phase. What goes up must come down, right? And, uh, flow is a very energetic state to produce. There's a recovery phase where you need deep delta wave sleep and you need a bunch of other things, right, on the back end of flow. Now, that's big macroscopic picture. This is the map of where you are. So you know where you are at various times in the flow cycle. To move from one stage to the next, there are 26 known flow triggers, preconditions that lead to more flow. They all work the same way. Flow follows focus. So all the triggers drive attention in the present moment. Now they do it a bunch of different ways. One of the ways they do it is by driving dopamine into our system. So dopamine— all neurochemicals are multi-tools. So one of the reasons people get confused around neurochemicals is because they don't— they think, well, I heard it does this and it does this and it does— yes, they do dozens. Evolution is conservative by design. When something works, it will get used again and again and again and again. So dopamine does like 11,000 different things in the brain. That's a huge exaggeration, but In peak performance, it plays a lot of roles. One of the most important ones is it drives attention. And so when dopamine's in our system, we're excited, we're alert, we're awake, we're paying attention to what's in front of us, we're psyched about it, we're curious about it. Of flow's triggers, and this is the answer to your question, the most important one is known as the challenge-skill balance. This is the idea we talked about before the show a little bit that we pay the most attention to the task at hand. When the challenge of that task slightly exceeds our skill set. So you want to stretch but not snap. And Csikszentmihalyi, the godfather of flow psychology, put a number on it. We sat down with a Google mathematician. We talked about this. He said the difference is about 4%, meaning we pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge is about 4% greater than our skill set. Now, what does that number actually mean? First of all, we hammered on that number a bunch at the Flow Research Collective. And like Csikszentmihalyi, we agree with him. We think it's a deadly accurate metaphor. But there's no real— we can't find a way to test it. I can't tell you it's real. I can tell you that we've hammered on it for years and we think it's real, but I don't. I think it's the best practical metaphor I can give you. But 4% means if you're meek, shy, timid, scared— and remember, those are situational things. Nobody is meek, shy, timid, scared all the time in every situation. Certain— in certain situations, we're more or less of those things, right? But when you're on that side of the spectrum, 4% is tricky because you're just outside your comfort zone. So you've got to get really comfortable being uncomfortable, right? It's going to feel edgy. It's going to feel like you're pushing yourself. It's going to feel scary a little bit. For hard-charging Type A types, that 4% is a problem because hard chargers like to take on problems that are 50% greater than their skill set for the thrill of it. It keeps us awake, right? And great, those big, big challenges are important. They drive motivation, in fact, at a really basic level. But what you have to do is chunk them down. So what's right in front of you is 4%. What you're doing today is 4%. The big problem may be 50%, but today's portion is just 4%. And that's how you approach it. Now, you asked questions about procrastination, one. So what you've noticed, which is very true, people are— we are hardwired as human beings for peak performance. And we will naturally move in the direction of peak performance. We don't know we're doing it, so we have other names for this. Procrastination is one name for this. So when we are procrastinating, what are you doing? You're saying, wow, the challenge-skill balance is not tuned enough. I'm bored. There's not enough stimulation here. I can't pay any fucking attention, so I'm going to delay until the night before the paper is due because now you got my full attention and I got a chance of getting into flow and writing a kick-ass paper. We are designed for peak performance. We will move naturally in that direction. If you're overwhelmed, that's the other side, right? Too much anxiety, you're putting off, you're procrastinating because the anxiety is too overwhelming. Now what you have to do is chunk it down so it becomes this small, tiny little thing that you can just do one tiny little bit of today, another tiny bit tomorrow, because the problem is now too big and it's out of whack. Different people have it differently. It sounds like you were somebody who likes time stress. A little bit of time stress gets the best of you. I'm sure it's not true in every situation, Sure, there are situations where time stress works against you, but in certain situations, the ones we're talking about, I would assume time stress is beneficial for you. And time stress, it tends to work against creativity. We know that because of how the anterior cingulate cortex works. So there's certain things that are not going to work well around time stress. So, you know, if you have a logical PowerPoint to build, probably okay to delay that one. But if you've got a poem to write, probably not. Okay, earlier rather than later kind of thing.

Yeah, very true. And actually the creative ideas I find come to me mostly when I'm not looking for them, right? They pop up. I could be walking in nature, kind of some of the activities you've described, and then it's a case of like grabbing them. It's almost like the universe delivers them to you and you need to note them down. Yeah, they can kind of go.

There's a famous poem by— I cannot remember her name. Um, God, I can't remember her name. Uh, but there's a fam— about trying to catch a poem before it— like, is it— is it before it passes by you in a field? Like, it comes on like a wind and you got to catch it before it's going to pass you by. Um, I think that's true, uh, for a lot of experiences of creativity. And a lot of it has to do with the anterior cingulate cortex, which I mentioned earlier. So it does a bunch of different stuff in the brain, but one of the things it does is it helps us detect the remote association between ideas, pattern recognition. Now, by the way, dopamine amplifies pattern recognition. So dopamine, because it boosts our mood, calms us down, makes us happier, and it allows the anterior cingulate the ability to find these remote associations. The more fear, the less remote associations. Why? When you're scared, the brain doesn't want a novel creative solution. It wants something tried and true that's going to work 100% of the time, guaranteed, right? I got it. Like, I'm going to fight. Don't give me some novel solution. I got to win or I'm going to die kind of thing. And this happens— most extreme version, we know it's fight or flight, right? You get really scared, the brain says, oh shit, you can't have a lot of options. You can freeze, you can flee, you can fight. Those— you got 3, that's it. In fact, one level up of that, the most extreme example of this is extreme pain. And extreme pain, there's only one option, there's no choice. You can only think about the pain, there's nothing else to think about. If you've ever broken a bone, right, it's just— it's entirely— your focus is on one thing. It's all-encompassing. So fight or flight is— so interestingly, flow and group flow, which is the shared collective version, is the exact opposite end of the spectrum. So we often— this is a really technical, weird detail, but you may like it. We were told by Freud that the spectrum is pleasure-pain. We run towards pleasure and we avoid pain. And for all the 20th century, we thought that was true. We thought that was the how humans did motivation. We run towards pleasure, we run from pain, and it turns out it's not true. And the reason we know this is group flow and flow are the people's favorite experiences on Earth. And yet, if you've ever been in flow as an athlete, you know you can be in extreme pain and still be in flow. You can be working incredibly hard and you're still in flow. Flow shows up when we're sweating and pushing ourselves and often in pain. We don't notice We don't care, but physically it doesn't feel good. Why do we prefer flow more than anything? It's because of choice. We like options. In flow, we're performing at our best, and so whatever direction we go in, we have the best chance of success. It's 360-degree choice and freedom, whereas extreme pain, there's no freedom. We have one choice. We can think about the pain. That's all we can do. Next up the scale, fight or flight, and then you get to flow. And group flow, which is the shared team version of it, we like even better. People prefer group flow to flow. This is the actual favorite experience on earth, and the reason is it maximizes creativity and innovation. The group is always more creative, more effective than the individual. And when the group is in flow and performing at their best, they have maximum options. Whatever direction they go in, they've got the greatest chance of success. And that's the actual spectrum of human experience.

Interesting. Which is why it's more fun actually dancing with other people, right? It's kind of a group flow situation when you talk about the pain there and you're saying you can be in pain and experience flow. You also talk about in the book that we must try to avoid too much grit, which I think is what was happening when I was practicing law, because that is linked to willpower. So it's depleting. How does that transition then between flow moving into kind of gritting it out? How can you avoid that grit?

It's a great question. So when psychologists talk about motivation, it's a big category. There's extrinsic motivation, external rewards, money, sex, fame, things we're going to work hard, rewards out there in the world. There's intrinsic motivators. The big 5 are curiosity, Passion, purpose, autonomy, and mastery. Those are the 5 internal drivers that create the most motivation. Then there's grit and resilience, right? And goal setting. This is the full suite of motivations. When you talk about motivation, that's what you're talking about. When most people hear motivation, when most people think about, oh God, I got to do this thing, the only tool they reach for is grit. I'm just going to fucking tough it out. I'm just going to do this, right? And that is a recipe for burnout, period. It's just a recipe for burnout. And but invariably it's what most people do. But what really good peak performers do is grit is the last resort. It's because, as you pointed out, it's limited on a day-to-day basis. It's linked to willpower, which is linked to energy levels and states of consciousness. So if you want to reset willpower, you actually have to alter your consciousness. You have to sleep, you have to eat, you have to meditate, you have to like get good in the flow. You have to do something. Otherwise it just depletes over time. And it does that anyways. Even if you do all those things, it's going to deplete over time until you get a night's sleep. So, you know, this is why good people, people on goal setting will say start your day with your hardest task first, right? Always, or your biggest win first, because you're going to have the most energy, the most focus at the start of you when willpower is highest at the start of your circadian cycle. Besides the point here, peak performers will, um, instead of reaching for grit, they'll say, oh, uh, can I get at this through autonomy or mastery? Let me give you an example. I was a journalist. I was a freelance journalist when I started out my career, and in order to, uh, make my living, I had to be writing like 40 stories at once, and I would pitch 5 stories a day to a different magazine. And, you know, every day, 7 days a week, and just like keep pitching. I was always doing stories, and invariably I'd get stories that I— I'm curious about almost anything, but sooner or later you'd find a story where I was just like, I'm doing this, this is for the money, right? Or I did, uh, for years I went to Hollywood, I did a bunch of celebrity interviews, covers, magazine covers. Not because— and I did this, so this is a perfect example. Celebrity interviews are the fastest way to make money as a journalist because the celebrities themselves will only give you an hour. So it's the only situation in the world where you're going to get an hour to do your interview and then you have to write it up immediately afterwards. So it's this really fast loop. The money was great, but I knew, I knew to become the writer I wanted to be, I knew I needed a lot of cycles through interview processes. And a lot of experience turning interviews into words and scenes and things like that. And so I hated the celebrity interviews. I wasn't— it was a really big fad of like, that just wasn't my thing. I didn't hate the celebrity interviews, but they weren't really my thing. But I knew gritting it out was a bad idea. So what did I do is I found mastery. Oh, well, I can do this. I can make a lot of money doing it, but I got to get really good at turning interviews into prose in order to become the writer I wanted to write. Like, all of my books are story heavy. They're all made possible because I took 5 years and spent 5 years really becoming world-class, and not just interviewing people, but turning it into scenes and storytelling and that sort of stuff. And I needed a ton of laps, hundreds of laps with editors beating on my ideas. That's how I did it. I used— that's a little bit of mastery as a motivator. I didn't try to grit it out. I found something inside the problem that was a skill I want to become excellent at, and that was deeply motivating to me. And right, so I did it that way. Curiosity works the same way, and on and on and on. So peak performers, when they're faced with a tough challenge, the first thing they try to do is align it with intrinsic motivators. Um, then they start playing with, with other things, but Um, this is the same thing with, with flow. Like, I don't— if the situation, if the challenge-skills balance is getting too high, if the situation is producing too much anxiety, for example, um, you can lateralize. We used to do this on the ski mountain all the time. We'd go out and be big mountain skiing, skiing harder and harder lines and bigger challenges and things like that, and get to a point where you're like, okay, I'm burnt. Like, I'm freaked out. That last line scared the hell out of me. I'm outside the challenge-skills balance. I don't want to go anymore. And so we would lateralize, go to the terrain park. We don't actually go to the kiddie park, the baby park, but where some of the challenges are tiny. And by the way, you could really get hurt in the baby park, don't kid yourself. But the challenges seem tiny in comparison to what we've just been doing, and it shrinks the challenge-skill sweet spot again, removes a bunch of stress, and so then we're making progress in the terrain park. So you can— this is a— this is another way of like, I'm not going to grit it I'm not going to try to fight the fear and keep pushing. I'm going to lateralize, mess with the challenge-skill sweet spot, and, you know, get into a situation where I can be curious and exploratory and those other intrinsic motivators rather than scared.

Thank you for tuning in to Flow Research Collective Radio, and please pardon the brief interruption. I've got a question for you. Do you have great ideas and big goals? My assumption is you have more skills than most You're paid well to use your brain, and you've reached this level in your career by being uncommonly effective at what you do. But maybe something's changed. You're typically relentless, but fatigue has started to slow you down. You used to be crystal clear on your priorities, but mounting responsibilities have started to blur your vision. Now, on your best days, you can focus for hours on end on the most critical tasks and blaze through a massive workload with ease. But perhaps you're inconsistent. Some days you can barely focus focus for more than a few minutes before your attention gets yanked elsewhere. People rely on you, so you're constantly reeled into conversations, task switching, and multitasking. Or perhaps you've got no trouble keeping focus. You can consistently execute on your highest priorities, and you're fully able to manage your time wisely, but you know that something is missing. You're looking for a way to perform at your absolute best, and not just some of the time, but all the time. On your best days, you can get 10 times more work done half the time, and it feels nearly effortless, and it's enjoyable, and it's energizing. At the end of a 10 out of 10 day, you hit the pillow that night feeling unstoppable. Now, this level of extreme accomplishment is its own reward, but you get the external rewards too by excelling in your profession and your craft. Have a 10 out of 10 days, you exceed your own expectations and surprise yourself with what you're capable of. And if you've ever suspected there's a way to operate at a 10 out of 10 level every day, you're right, there is. And we're going to you exactly how to access apex performance like this at will, without fail. To train with us at the Flow Research Collective, go to getmoreflow.com. That's getmoreflow.com.

All the best.

Interesting. It's a bit like when you come away from something, right, and you have a— you sleep or something, and then you come back. It's almost like the brain has been reset and you have a renewed kind of focus with which to approach it. And it's almost like neurologically you've made connections with something you're really struggling with, the next day it just seems like there's clarity that wasn't there before.

I think that's one of the things you see in our country, right? In our country is, I've written a lot of books about peak performance and flow. This is the first one where I give you, where I've had the opportunity to do applied peak performance, right? It's a, it follows a diary format almost through the course of me running the ski experiment. And one of the reasons it gives you a look at what goes on day to day. And so you can see the struggle, you can see exactly the process here where we've been talking about shows up. And this is one of the main reasons I wrote the book the way I wrote it. And there's— nobody's done this before in book form for a couple of reasons. One, you need expertise in peak performance, but you also have to be a really talented writer because If not, all you're doing is a diary and it's boring as hell and nobody's going to be willing to read more than like 10 pages, right? So I had to— it was a huge challenge. The book was incredibly difficult because I was constantly like, I never wanted the reader to get bored. I always wanted them to be learning and having fun going through the adventure, but really seeing what applied peak performance looks like. But the collective, right, Mike, which is the Flow Research Collective where I'm the executive director, we train people in 130 countries. And tens of thousands of people every month in flow science. And the one problem we've always had, and my CEO and I are always talking about this, is, God, we need an example of applied peak performance. It's the day-to-day that's really hard. Doesn't matter how we train it in a classroom. You have to go out and experience it. Or I could write a book like this. So I wrote the book to solve a bunch of problems because I needed the very thing we're talking about I needed to make visible in the book so people could see it and understand what this looks like on a day-to-day basis and what to expect from sort of like adopting peak performance into, you know, into their lives.

I found it super interesting and the routine that you talked about there and how you'd mixed it up according to what you were doing with the skiing and how like there's a period where I think when you were doing the training You're waking up at 3 AM and then you're pushing your work schedule. There's like a block at the beginning and then other times they're sort of smaller blocks. And I was curious in relation to how you set yourself up in that term and what part exercise plays in terms of achieving peak performance, because I think you talk about the fact that if you work out too hard, actually that can block it. And, and I'm curious about it because for me, if I get straight out of bed and work, I have an amazingly productive 2 hours and there's something magical about those early hours. But then after about 2 hours, I need a break. I need to go and move myself. But if I do that for more than a day, I'm itching for the early morning workout. And then if I've done the early morning workout, I feel like I come back and I'm super productive and it's almost like I have to cycle them. But I think you speak about a workout possibly inhibiting it. I'm just kind of curious because if anyone that's listening that really wants to opt in—

Yeah, no, so this is a complicated answer. There's like 7 different things in here. So one, what— so let me just address with what I was doing in the book. When I ski, right, which is I was running a ski experiment, I leave everything on the hill. I go as absolutely hard as I possibly can. And when I come back, there's very little work I can do, right? My brain is mostly shot. So why did I start? Now, mind you, I'm, I was getting up at 4 AM. So like that 3 AM wake-up time, people make it sound very heroic. I pushed my wake-up time an hour earlier. It wasn't like, it was, it sounds ridiculous, but I was already, I'm an early morning person. I'm most awake at 4 AM. Um, so I wanted to— anxiety blocks flow. For me, my ability to pay my bills, my ability to make my living, my ability to do my job, uh, is really important. And not being able to do those things produces too much anxiety for me to go to the ski mountain and leave everything on the hill. And then come home and not have a brain. So I had to get my— at least my writing, what book I would— which is the most important thing I have to do well every day. I had to at least get my writing and usually like some kind of company meeting with the Flow Research Collective done before I got to the ski mountain. So that was why I was doing that. Um, I also have this ridiculous schedule because when I started out, I lived on the West Coast of America and most of my editors were in New York. They would— so they're 3 hours earlier, and they would get into their offices early, and we're all young, and they would call me, and well, like, I was poor. I needed to say yes to any assignment that came my way, and I also knew that if I didn't get my books written before the editors called, I wasn't going to be an author. I was just going to be a journalist. I wanted to be an author too, so I just got up before they started calling me, and they would— get in at 8:30, and, you know, which was 5:30 my time. So I was getting up even earlier to like, just get my writing done. So this is just a long-standing habit that I pushed a little bit earlier, but it was so I could get all of my actual major work done before I got to the ski hill, because I didn't want the anxiety that came from not being able to make a living, right, mess with my experiments. That was why I sort of took that approach. And as far as the day-to-day, you know, which is better, I— it's interesting. I personally find that, and maybe this— I don't know how to— I've got one speed. I always tell that, say that to people. I got one speed. And so I don't know how to go to the gym and just be mellow. I don't, I'm not mellow. I've never, that's not what, that's not who I am. I don't do that. So the way I do what you're talking about is I write, my normal schedule is I'll write from about 4:00 AM to 7:30, 8:00 AM. And then I go hike my dogs. And the reason is because the morning may be a struggle phase, right? Or it may be flow. One of the two things is gonna happen. I'm either gonna just stay in struggle or I'm gonna drop into flow. If I get into struggle, I need to follow that with a release phase. Low-grade physical exercise works best. You don't want to exhaust yourself because you still have to get into flow, and that requires a lot of energy. So I'll go for a walk, take my dogs to the backcountry. I'll hike for like 45 minutes, an hour, and then I'll eat breakfast. That's my normal daily schedule. Um, and then I'll go to the gym at the end of my day and then leave everything at the gym. Um, but So my morning hike, and you know from the book, I usually involve a weight vest. So I'm doing some work, but not too much. So, and then the actual exercise comes a lot later. And if I've gotten to flow, I need to follow flow with a recovery activity. And a long walk in nature is a great recovery activity. I just will leave the weight vest at home. We know a long walk in nature is a great recovery activity because it It does a bunch of things. It shifts the brain into alpha, it produces serotonin, it lowers stress levels. It's a peak performance aging tool. It's also, you know, it does, it does a lot for us.

Interesting. So you'll always do the work first before you wouldn't go and exercise at all. You wouldn't even do the walk before you wrote.

The only time I vary that is when I'm traveling and I'm on the road. And there are times when I don't know what my day is going to hold, so I want to just get to the hotel gym and get a workout in before my day starts. But I also, I don't write on the road, I read. So I don't do any work on the road, I just read. But I read nonstop on the road. I don't watch television. I don't like, I just, I read. If I'm standing in line, I read. If I'm on a plowtail or on an airplane, I read like just it's nonstop. And so I can— that doesn't require the level of creativity that writing does. So I can. But even sometimes when I'm on the road, I usually will probably read for an hour and then I'll go to the gym. Interesting.

And the reason I bring this up is because, and I guess a lot of listeners will be in a similar situation. So I'm a very early morning person like yourself. And I think those hours are magical. And because I have 3 children, I have a whole bunch of staff that starts at 7 a.m. with them. And that's not— that's very difficult to access flow, right? When there's breakfast going on, there's school runs, there's kids, there's all this stuff. And so I kind of look at those hours of kind of 4:35 up until 6:37 as like the magical hours. And so I have to be selective. Is that work? Is it gym? What primes me for the best part of my day? That's the reason for asking that question. And those 2 hours could be a combo. It could be work. It could be the gym or a workout or a walk.

This is one of the things that I always tell people, and this is a thing that this is really at the heart of my book, The Art of Impossible. When we train people at the Flow Research Collective, we have a rule, which is personality doesn't scale biology. Scales. Everything you're talking about, everything we've been talking about for the past half an hour is examples of your personality and its individuality and how— what works best for you. And you've figured it out, and that's wonderful. There's this thing people do in coaching, critical error. They figure out what works for them, they try to train it, teach it to other people, and it's a disaster. And the reason is personality is individual. It's based on nature. It's based on nurture and early childhood experience, et cetera, et cetera. And so it's squishy, it's subjective, it's individual. It's very hard to train from. In fact, when you go back to the '90s when people were trying to train flow from the psychology of flow, the hit rate— you can read Flow in Sports written by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Susan Jackson. Susan Jackson's a brilliant sports psychologist from Australia. They were trying to apply all this stuff with athletes using the psychology. They got nowhere. It was like their hit rate is terrible. Like, it's almost embarrassing. And then you jump up to where we are in 2023, the Flow Research Collective. We measure flow pre and post using the exact scale that Susan used, her scale. We use her scale and we see on average a 70% to 80% increase in flow on the back end of our trainings.

Why?

Our trainings are based on neurobiology. So neurobiology is shared by everyone and shaped by evolution. So the individual stuff is going to be different for everybody. It's absolutely right. Key things like where are you on the introversion extroversion scale, or what are your risk tolerances? That's like, depending on your answers to those questions, that's how I train you, right? But everybody's totally individual on that one. And so like, how do we find the challenge skills balance? The challenge skills balance and the fact that when we get it right, it produces dopamine and norepinephrine. That's neurobiology. How to tune it individually, that's personality, and that's everybody. So the point I'm trying to make is that you've done the work here, right? Which is figure out exactly, like, you know internally, okay, today's the day I got to go to the gym. Okay, today is the day I gotta write first. Like, as I said, we will naturally move in the direction of peak performance. We got to get really good at listening to those signals though. You've gotten good at listening to interoceptive signals and being able to act on them. That's really, really crucial here.

Interesting. It was very individual. So, and how many hours of peak performance do you believe we can have in any one period of a day? I realize it may be broken up with recovery.

Yeah. So there's a difference between peak performance and flow. And when I say peak performance, I just mean getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. That's a lot of biology, right? How much time in flow can we spend? That's an interesting question. There's no— so there's no one number. Some flow states can stretch on and on and on and on. You'll get like stories, Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road in one, like nonstop drug-addled flow state, right? But like, that's stuff like that happens. Startups on the way towards launch, right, will get into group flow every time they show up at work. And right, and it'll happen like every day for 2 months. That, that's not unusual. Normal circumstances, what we think is you can have 2 to 3 micro flow states a day easy. Macro flow, like the big turn it up to 11. You could probably have a state of micro flow instead of macro flow. But if you're going to get in a state of macro flow, getting back into that state of macro flow again, probably going to be delayed by a little bit because it takes so much energy. So you might be able to get into micro flow the next day, but it's going to be really hard. So this is, this is, I'll give you a really classic example. This happens to people a lot. They go on a ski vacation or they go on a surfing vacation or something, and that, you know, day 1, getting used to the new location, and it's— things are new and I don't quite know where I am or what's going on. Maybe it's a little flowy, but it's not super flowy. Day 2, I've got my bearings, I'm not so scared, deeply flowy. And day 3, they think, oh my God, I had this kick-ass day yesterday, it all came together for me. Day 3 is going to be fantastic and day 3 is terrible. And it's because you've used up most of those peak performance neurochemicals. You actually need a rest day. Um, and go— and this happens, by the way, I'm one of the world's leading experts in this and I make this freaking mistake all the time. Like, I will have an amazing ski day, huge flow experience, learn a whole bunch of new tricks or whatever, and I'll be so fired up that I'll go back the next day expecting more of the same. And no, I've exhausted myself. I've left it all up the hill and I've got no feel-good neurochemistry to drop me into flow. And it's a joke. I can't do it. I need a recovery day. And so I make that— everybody makes that mistake. Flow is delicious and we want more of it. And that's why knowing the flow cycle is actually so useful.

I actually find that really reassuring. Now you don't expect because you can beat yourself up and be hard on yourself. Like, why? Why can't I replicate it?

Yeah, I will say, just on this point, because, man, this is— for me, I can't tell you how many days I've lost to self-expectation. Like, if there is a crusher of days, I'm either gonna— I'm either gonna go down because I've been packed to death by ducks, and it's like, you know, I'm dealing with like banks and lawyers and forms and details, and I'm just getting packed to death by ducks, and I can't like this struggle. It's just I'm overwhelmed and I'm going to lose that one, or, or it's going to be this flip side anyways, um, of self-expectation where I just come into the situation with expect— I kicked ass yesterday, I wrote great yesterday, or, you know, blah blah blah. And I come in and it's just not that way. And rather than meeting myself where I am and tuning the challenge skills balance accordingly, which I will eventually do, I have to first get super frustrated and beat myself up and hate myself and feel bad and feel like a failure. And then eventually I'm like, oh, okay, let's tune the challenge skills balance and make it really small because you don't have a lot of energy today. And sure enough, you know, there's a micro— there's microflow for me. But, you know, the only thing that's changed over time is that the cycle of self-expectation to like shame and frustration, all that. It's like I still go through it. It's just shorter because I can recognize them. Like, oh, this is where I am. Let's just tune the challenge-skill balance and not deal with yourself.

And what are the optimal things for recovery that we should do to facilitate a kind of macro— you talk there about microflow, but yeah, in the book you talk about treating yourself as an athlete. So the recovery is as important as the work.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, so Remember, in our country is about peak performance aging. So, um, when it comes to peak performance aging, once you get to around your late 40s, your 50s, if you're not going forward, you're going backwards. So we talked in the beginning that there's all these use-it-or-lose-it skills, right, that you want to keep training, right? But literally, if you're not training them, you are losing them. So, um, uh, Part of, uh, part of, uh, peak performance aging is train like a pro, recover like a pro. But in general, peak performance demands it because flow is this high-energy state. So the rules are roughly the same. And where people screw up is quite simply passive recovery versus active recovery or proactive recovery. Active recovery is a specific term, means specific thing, but I'll just use it across the board. So passive recovery is what most of us do, is TV and a beer. And it turns out alcohol blocks recovery. Not a single, a single drink is okay. But once you get above 2 drinks, or if for me, I don't weigh a lot, so it's a drink and a half. It starts to mess with REM sleep. It starts to mess with sleep. And one of the non-negotiables for recovery is 7, 8 hours of sleep a night. And it does not vary. It's, that's true for all of us. And I, I don't know. And people push back and they push back and they push back. And I have mothers pushing back and saying, I got a career and I got kids, fuck you. And I got, right? Like, so I hear that, I hear this a lot. And let me just, here's what I tell everybody. I agree with you. I hear you. There are a million IQ tests online. There's a bunch of them. They're free. Take one, one day after you've slept 7 to 8 hours and now come back another night that you've slept 4 or 5 hours and take the same IQ test. You will never miss sleep again and go to work. Like, you won't do it. You can't. Once you actually prove to yourself how much stupider you are, um, without sleep, like, it's, it's gone. The other thing is this: flow amplifies learning and memory. We talked about it at the top of the show, right? Soldiers in flow, 240 to 500% above normal. You cannot learn without delta wave sleep. So if you don't sleep 7, 8 hours, it doesn't matter How much you're tuning the skills. Flow is a sign of mastery. I've learned these new skills, I've onboarded them, I can now do them unconsciously. Fantastic. It all came together. But you don't get to hang onto those skills if you don't sleep the next day. If you don't sleep the night after a flow state, you will not move the ideas from short-term holding into long-term storage. So you've just blocked learning. So you have the best, most productive flow state at work, learn all, all this stuff, and if you don't sleep that night, or you go out and get drunk to celebrate and it messes with your sleep, you've not learned anything. You've just wasted a flow state. You're gonna have to do it all over again.

Interesting. I think you've definitely made me, including you, pay more attention.

The other thing is, um, active recovery. So it's not— sleep is not enough. So what's active recovery? Epsom salt bath, sauna. Saunas are phenomenal. Massage is, is really good. Yoga, stretching, long walks in nature, mindfulness, breathwork. Those are all active recovery things that lower stress levels in your nervous system. And this is— I always tell people the 3 best ways to check your nervous system are daily gratitude practice, a daily mindfulness practice, support, regular exercise. And what I tell people is, under normal conditions, you got to do one a day. If you're stressed out, do two or three. During COVID for example, you work for the Flow Research Collective, we're a peak performance organization. I expect my people to be at their very best, and COVID was super freaking stressful for everybody. If you wanted to work for me, you had to do a gratitude practice, a mindfulness practice, and get regular exercise every day. Otherwise, otherwise you couldn't work for me during COVID Especially during the lockdown, because it was just—

So the mind— sorry, so that was exercise, gratitude, mindfulness. So the mindfulness—

Yeah, so gratitude is a 5-minute practice. It's write down 3 things that you're grateful for, turn 1 into a paragraph, write down 10 things. The most important point is you want to get at the feeling of gratitude. And I can talk about the neurobiology of gratitude. We're running out of time. I won't go into it, but like, it works. It's an incredibly effective tool. The second thing is mindfulness. 11 minutes of focus on your breath meditation lowers stress levels. You can run a loving kindness meditation script, which takes about 11 minutes too. Very effective tool that, which I actually prefer to breathwork, or you can do a Wim Hof breathing protocol. 3 rounds of Wim Hof will take about 11, 12 minutes. That'll take care of it. Or exercise. And if you want to exercise for anxiety, you want to exercise until it gets quiet upstairs and your lungs open up. That's a signal that nitrous oxide has been released and has flushed stress hormones out of your system. So one a day under normal conditions to perform at your best, to just enable peak performance, um, two or three a day during times of stress. And definitely if you get into a flow state and need a big recovery, Any of those things are really good for recovery.

Amazing.

Though, though, obviously if you've worked out and you need recovery now, you're just doing like, you know, restorative yoga instead of a vigorous workout.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So one last question before you go then. What, what is your view on nootropics and the use of any kind of substances to help facilitate a flow state?

So, um, I have a couple of different views. One, we don't do that work at the Flow Research Collective, and the reason is we don't work with substances and we don't work with technologies. And it's not that substances or technologies don't work, it's that I want to be able to perform my best, um, when I need to perform my best. I don't want to have to rely on a technology or substance. And that reliance can be a real big problem for people. And so, you know, if people are only able to check their nervous system by using a meditation app, and you find yourself skiing an extreme line, and you're at the top of the line, and you need to tune up your nervous system, and you don't have Wi-Fi, what the fuck are you going to do then? Right? People really get into habits. So I get— I'm wary of that. Alcohol can sort of produce some of like— it pushes a little dopamine into our system and it artificially induces transient hypofrontality. It turns off parts of the prefrontal cortex. It feels a little flowy. And writers are famous for using alcohol as a writing lubricant for this reason. And I will tell you, a very close personal friend wrote her first book using alcohol. And in book one, it was a glass of wine. By By the end of book 2, which didn't go as well as book 1, it was 2 bottles a night, and now she had 2 problems. So that's, that's not uncommon with that stuff. There's also a bunch of nootropics that people think, uh, produce flow. So Ritalin, Adderall, uh, modafinil, all those things actually are flow blockers. They amplify anxiety, they amplify norepinephrine too high. They might— it's like a fake flow state. Feels flowy, but the quality of your thinking is reduced from what's actually true in flow. Now, all that said, we have also been doing a bunch of research on caffeine and flow at the Flow Research Collective, and there is a definite relation. Caffeine definitely seems to work as a flow booster for a lot of people. Flow follows focus. Caffeine amplifies focus. Now, it is easy to drink too much coffee. It's very individual and etc., etc., etc. But there is a link. There's also a link between marijuana and flow. So in our country, there's a bunch of marijuana in, in our country, and the reason is that the combination of marijuana and caffeine has been an anecdotal flow hack for 50 years. Called the— people talk about it as the hippie speedball in action sports. It's 25, 30 minutes. Do your warm-up exercises, then get a cup of coffee and smoke a sativa-based joint, and you've got a chance of getting into flow. Doesn't work for everyone, and, um, there are lots of individual caveats. So for me, for example, it, uh, like, that will work occasionally, but if I'm tired, if I'm cold, if I'm hungry, won't work at all. It'll— in fact, it'll block flow. If I'm scared, it won't work at all. So there's very specific conditions where that combination will work for me and a lot of conditions where it won't. And it's very individual, very, very individual. And on top of it, marijuana is a performance-enhancing chemical if you practice with it. You can't use it out of the box and expect it to enhance performance. It produces state-dependent learning, which is— you heard about state-dependent learning in regards to the SATs. So or any task. Study for your high school exams in purple sweats and then take them in purple sweats, right? That's state-dependent learning. Well, marijuana produces state-dependent learning. So what happens is most people learn to use marijuana when they're in high school, and it's like eat Cheetos, smoke pot, and watch Monty Python movies with your friends, and you learn to laugh and eat junk food. And that's what you think marijuana is used for. Um, it actually— you can use it for performance, but you actually have to train with it, and you have to start very small and work up into it. Again, this isn't— we don't do this work at the Flow Research Collective because it's so individual. It's not going to work for everyone, and I don't want to rely on substances. But at a personal level, I will occasionally use marijuana. Besides those things, most of the other nootropics that are out there, I'm not— I've played— I, I'll experiment with tons of shit, and I do all the time. I'm always running, you know, whether it's peptides and nootropics or whatever, and I Yeah, I'm not impressed. Caffeine, I like it. So as a general rule, I, I've said this for a long time with supplements and things like that, I like things that have a long global history. So turmeric for inflammation is true in, you know, dozens of countries across the world and was true long before there was mass communication. So there's a lot of anecdotal data from a lot of different regions that, hey, Now there's a bunch of science backing it up. I'm interested in things that have been time-tested and battle-tested. So I sometimes I'll look for herbs that have been around for a long time and have been used in a lot of places rather than what is coming out of a lab. And I say this with a lot of affection. I've been running, you know, and I talk about this in our country. I've been running peak performance aging experiments and experimenting with regenerative medicine now for 30 years. And I will tell you from firsthand experience that, you know, when it's, it's got about a 10 to 20% hit rate. So, you know, it's, it's at the cutting edge. You hear about it, you think it's amazing, and you, you using it over time, you'll probably find 20 years out, 10% of that stuff remains. The other 90% is bunk or bad for us. So, you know, buyer beware. And I, I'm, I'm, I'm always, don't believe the hype. Don't believe the hype. Don't believe the hype. There's always is somebody making a buck on the other side of a nootropic. Let me give you one final example here: peak performance aging. So peak performance aging in a sentence is this: if you want to rock till you drop, you want to regularly engage in challenging, creative, and social activities that demand dynamic, deliberate play and take place in novel outdoor environments. Now, I'm not going to unpack that. It's all in our country. But that's peak performance aging in a sentence. What you'll notice about all those interventions, two things. One, they're all psychological interventions that produce neurobiological results. That's what the— those are the big levers. There's 60 years of data that shows if you want to really sort of extend your lifespan, extend your healthspan, those— that's what you want to do. These are the things that work best. If you were to listen to the anti-aging conversation right now, you're going to hear about nootropics, you're going to hear about supplements, you're going to hear about peptides. You're going to hear about mitochondrial boosters. You're going to hear about a million different substances and pharmaceuticals. And all that is just the cutting edge. So maybe, but historically, 10% of it is going to turn out to be true and the rest of it is going to be bullshit. What do we know is real? All those psychological triggers that I just talked about, we know that's real. There's 60 years of data and we know it's significant, but nobody can make a buck off How do you patent and sell challenging creative and social activities, right? Like you can't do it. So it doesn't get as much hype because they're not supplements and nobody's selling them. So it's, you know, it's a different thing. But the data, the data is on the side of these interventions.

Yeah. I'm always curious about them. I guess for me it was one would be L-theanine because it's been used like in green tea by Buddhist monks for so long. I mean, that's just that kind of smooths out caffeine a little bit.

I would— with that stuff, what I always say is true, probably true, to the source. Find great green tea and like go to the source. Um, and now, and, and I— the thing about L-theanine, um, Max Lugave, Garvey, is a huge fan of L-theanine. And I remember talking to him about this years ago, years and years and years ago. And, um, I, I took it for a while and I was like, okay, Not for me. Like, it didn't do anything. But I've met tons of people like you who are like, oh my God, this is the shit. That— this is the problem with supplements. It's very, very, very, very, very, very, very individual, and nothing is going to work for everyone. And the most important point, as our insides change, right? Um, which— I mean, just think about the supplements that are going to work for a woman pre- and postmenopausal. Weight loss, right? We know those supplements have to change because the entire hormonal profile is going to change. So people act as if like it's these supplements, or the— and the only thing that tends to work that way are the herbal supplements that have been around for thousands and thousands and thousands of years and are sort of like battle-tested. We know cayenne pepper is going to fight inflammation. We know turmeric is going to fight some of those things, but they're really low-level interventions. So like if you're a biohacker and you want a big, huge, you know, I'm gonna inject BPC-157 into my joints, which is great, I've done it, right? It works really, really well. But it's gonna stop working after a little while cuz your joints get used to it and then you gotta cycle off and whatever. The turmeric doesn't have that effect. You can, it's anti-inflammatory all the time. I don't know why, but it, these things seem to be true and they seem to be true for everyone.

I think mushrooms are exciting, lion's mane, things like that, because of nerve growth factor. But yeah, I'm— I like experimenting.

But I'm an investor in a big mushroom company, so I'm with you on that. Um, I'm not a huge fan of the psychedelic mushrooms. I know a lot of people are. They just give me headaches and make me feel lousy, but people love them.

They're each their own. Thank you so much, Stephen. You've been really generous with your time. I, I mean, in our country inspired me that actually moving into my 50s is exciting in terms of what's going to happen to the brain, particularly as as you say, if you keep using it, not losing it.

Oh, it's cool.

Um, so, um, yeah, you've— that's the first time it's made me feel like getting to 50 is going to be— no, it's good, even though my teenagers don't think so.

No, it's, it's interesting, right? I mean, it's, it's actually like once you take a lot of the fear out of it, you're like, oh, this is neat. And it really like that shift in mindset of what my best days are ahead of me. Um, and literally, like, literally, like, there's massive amounts of evidence that if we get it right, literally we will enjoy the second half of our lives far would have in the first half. Like, all those things go through— meaning, purpose, happiness, well-being— all of it goes through the roof, uh, naturally and biologically. We just have to get it right. So yeah, it's exciting. I'm glad you had that, uh, experience. And thanks for having me on.

Thank you so much, and thanks for all your work. Um, where can people find and connect with you? What's the best way?

Find me on social, uh, at Stephen Kotler. Uh, you can find me at stephenkotler.com is my website. Flowresearchcollective.com is organization's website if you're interested in training with us or learning more about flow. And I think, and narcountry.com if you want the website for the book and you want to see the peak performance aging experiments, the videos that, that we had, um, you can, you can find those there.

Awesome. Thank you so much. It's a brilliant book. Thanks for all your work and for coming on the show.

My pleasure. Have a great day.

It's Joshua with the production team. Question for you: when was the last time you were in the zone? When you were in so deep that afterward you were stunned by how much you got done, even though very little time had passed? Now you've got bold goals, yet you're slammed with work and you're short on time. And you know the heights of productivity you can achieve when you get into the zone because you've been there before. But it's a mild form of torture knowing how productive you're capable of being without access to that level of output all the time. So how do you get into the zone whenever you need it? There's still a lot that we don't know about flow states, but over the last 25 years of researching it, we've learned a lot, and we've shared our findings with thousands of high performers. You're in flow during those moments of total absorption when you're so focused on the task at hand that everything else disappears. Time passes strangely and performance just soars. I mean, motivation and productivity, creativity and innovation, learning and memory, cooperation and collaboration all skyrocket. In some studies, as high as 500%. About baseline. Now imagine what you can accomplish if you could reliably increase your productivity by 5x. And the best part? Flow is accessible to everyone, anywhere, at any time. You don't need to pop a pill. You don't need to be surfing a monster wave. You don't need to meditate on a mountaintop for 10 years to get there. Flow is accessible to you right here, right now. If you'd like to amp up your productivity and get leverage on every second, go to getmoreflow.com. Just think of your 10 out of 10 days when you get more done in the morning than you typically do in a full day. Now imagine if you tapped into that level of performance with push-button consistency every day. All this is possible when you trigger flow frequently and reliably. Just go to getmoreflow.com to unblock your flow and unlock peak performance.

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