The Creative Leader’s Playbook

Hello, everybody. Welcome to Flow Radio. I'm your host, Steven Kotler, Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective. Can't even say my own title today, but I am joined and very excited by my dear friend, Jodi Levy. Jodi is an artist. She's a designer. She's an educator. She's a systems thinker. She's a serial entrepreneur who's built too many companies, everything from Watermelon Water, which was the category defining beverage brand to Neuropraxis, which is a platform bridging the gap left by one-size-fits-all approaches to brain and spinal cord injury rehab. She also leads large-scale recovery operations and now serves as the global director and CEO of Summit, the legendary community of creators, builders, and change agents that I wrote about in Stealing Fire. Judy works, lives at the intersection of wellness, innovation, and impact. She has an incredibly rare ability to turn bold ideas into real-world systems for healing, creativity, and human optimization. Today, we're going to explore her journey, her creative process, and most importantly, what it takes to lead a high-flow global community. Jodi, welcome to Flow Radio.

Thank you so much for having me. It is such an honor to have this conversation with you. I love you so much.

I love you too. All right, I wanna, I wanna start sort of with your background and experience design. So you've created everything from immersive art experiences to companies that sort of turn wellness into ritual. So how define experience design at its highest level, and how do you build for flow within that framework?

So I think about experience design as the connection point to all of the sensorial receptors that we exist with in our body, in our intuition, in the energetic spaces around us, and, and how we move through space and how we're inspired or triggered by the things in our environment. And the, the easiest and most logical way of describing that is like, I'm a trained design systems thinker. And so I use the process of identifying what the core communication or core story is of anything, whether it be my sister who's solving a life problem, or, you know, a Fortune 100 company that's launching a new product or story or brand. It's the same process. It's kind of identifying the opportunities, identifying the constraints, figuring out who we're creating for, and ultimately what we want somebody to— somebody's outcome to be. And that can go into, you know, an interactive art installation at the MoMA, and it can go into a multi-city tour for an automotive company, and it can go into an underground dance party. And it kind of all is the same kind of thinking around what do we want people to walk away with, the impression or the action.

So you're starting with story and you're ending with feeling.

I think we're starting with— well, first of all, it's a little alchemy, right? It's like some science, some art, and a whole lot of like intuition, and as you would say, flow state in the in-between. So I think that whether I'm doing this on my own or you and I are solving a life problem as friends or I'm doing this with a team of people, it's really similar, right? It's like, okay, let's take the things we know, let's take the things we don't know, let's make assumptions where we can, let's not make wrong assumptions where we shouldn't, and let's put it all together and kind of like deduce and architect and this sort of space of the known and unknown in between. It sounds pretty ethereal, but it actually tends to be a lot more logical. And as you know from kind of being on this ride together, I would say it starts with story and it ends with story. And all that other ethereal stuff around it is kind of what informs how that story is expressed in all of the different disciplines and iterations.

Let me roll it back before the companies, before the installations. When, when did it— when did this— you see the world differently, when did that start for you? Where did when you start thinking about things this way? You think— one of the things I like about you is you are, you are willing to tackle— you're one of my friends who are willing to tackle the biggest projects fearlessly, right? I've seen you tackle tiny little things fearlessly, but I've also seen you go giant. Um, that's a, that's a scary hard thing to learn how to do. So before we go big, where— I want to start small. Where did that start for you? When did you first realize you were different from everybody else, Jody Lee?

There's actually a moment. I had a moment. I was in second grade, public school, Detroit suburbs, and I was asked to, um, to copy a Georgia O'Keeffe painting. And wow, okay, it's like purple and pink, and it's that paint that like is made out of eggs, so I can still smell the sulfur from like the gouache. Gouache, is that right? No, gouache is the thing for your skin. I'll think of it.

I believe you.

We'll come back to it. And I hit flow state for the first time. I lost all sense of time and space, and I suspended for the first time in my life. And it was— I remember the bell, the public school bell ringing, and it brought me like back into my body and back into this classroom. And I went home from school that day and I said to my parents, I'm an artist, I'm a painter, that's who I am. Second grade, 8 years old.

And what did they say?

Well, luckily they were like, okay, like, you have this determined, you know, little kid who is like a tiny little version of me today, who was very focused and knew what I wanted and knew what I liked and knew how I showed up. And I kind of knew, like, and I, and I was very, very lucky because both my parents were entrepreneurs. My dad at the time, I think, had 8 businesses. Our family business started in the motion picture industry, and my my family really embraced my pursuit of art and painting and sculpture and all the things. And so I luckily had this moment and was surrounded by people that said yes.

And you still take to that, you know, in the Alliance for Microdosing Creativity, for drawing, writing, microdosing creativity, which I know you still do on a regular basis. How does it help you, uh, maintain— is it balance? Is it flow? Is it just retouching that past? It's funny because creativity is one of these things that nobody trains, and yet if you look at the list of like performance benefits, it goes on for pages, right? Everything it actually brings to your life. You're one of the people I know who actually consistently works at that.

You know, it's like water for me. It's like air for me. Even if I'm just moving my, you know, bamboo painting brushes and ink across paper to make mark. There's something about being in that state for me that is absolute survival. When stuff gets really hard in life, my painting tables are the first thing that get set up in spaces. And the bigger the crisis in life, the bigger the table that comes out. When things are pretty even and like easy, my paintings tend to be small. You know, I just make sure that there's like some pens and some paper and some ink nearby and it's less, uh, less of like a lifeline. But it's also interesting because I made a choice when I finished art school that I never wanted to be in a position where I was living on my paintings. So I paint for the expression and the artistry of my work, and I sell my work, but it's not because I have to or feel the pressure of it, which is a real luxury.

So many ways to go here. And I have a list of questions that I promise you I will stick to at some point. But there's one thing you touched on. So I think one thing you said is just super important. The bigger the problem, the bigger my art table. You're fighting. This is a thing that I think is so important to people in terms of emotional regulation. We live in a time where emotional regulation is a real issue where everybody is distracted. Everything's very unpredictable. People are really upset. I always run to art. I try to go from bed to desk first thing in the morning as fast as possible because when my brain wakes up, it can wake up, it can say terrible things right out of the gate. And I want to be writing and dropping into flow before it can come awake. So, I love creativity that way, but I also want to say that I know you and you have very strict— So, I know that you bring out the art when things get tough and when things get super tough, you go dancing. That's when you actually go into the next phase. So it's not just that you microdose with writing or art with painting when you— it's the same knob. When things get really bad, you're like, oh no, now I need to be fully embodied. My hand isn't enough. Now I need to be completely in my body. So talk a little bit about that as a way to lead into my next question, which is actually about embodiment.

Um, for sure. I think that part of you asking me when did I know I was different or weird, whichever word you used, I think that the best way—

spectacular, I meant spectacular.

I knew that that's what you meant.

That's exactly what I meant. I'm so sorry.

I think it was also a realization that I experience the world in a matrix of energetics. And my painting and my artwork is a version of that. It's a version of expressing, you know, energy and the way that energy changes and shifts in a moment in time in a particular space with a particular experience that's being expressed. Music and sound coming out of well-tuned sound systems and what happens on a dance floor is another expression of that, arguably a bit more primal and maybe with more intensity and maybe with more kind of forced presence because of that intensity. And you're right, I very much rely on the medicine of what happens on a dance floor to bring me back to that center of, you know, where I am very much embodied but also very much in my joy.

Yeah, you skiing in the exact same way. And the reason I think this is so important for people to hear, I want everybody to understand, like, Jodi's doing these things and she's running how many companies? 11, 12? I have no idea how many companies you run at once. It's way more than most people I know. They've maybe Peter I get madness. So this is going on while you're wearing a lot of very formal hats at very high levels.

All right.

I want to tilt a little bit off the dance, give the embodiment to so many of your projects as an artist, as an experience designer, center around a body and intuitive knowing. And I've heard you talk a lot about this. I want you to talk a little bit. How's your relationship with intuition? Evolved? How do you teach others to trust intuition? We've been doing a lot of work on flow and intuition, the neurobiology that, as you know, and it's still like one of the big lessons is, hey, when you're in flow, you should really trust your intuition. You'll make better decisions. Get out of the way. It's hard. Some people love that advice. Other people get really hesitant around that advice. How do you think about it? How do you lean intuition? How do you teach others to trust their intuition? Etc.

Well, I find that like many things in life, you learn this lesson the hard way when you don't trust your intuition and everything falls the wrong direction. So I'm no different than that. I think that because of the nature of some of the endeavors that I take on, and some of them being really big, and also having an appetite for riding a very fine line between success and failure, that many people that love entrepreneurial endeavors and innate risk related to that experience. Trusting my intuition or not following my intuition can be a very make-or-break result. And so over the years, I think I've just— in the moments where I knew better, or I had that feeling, or I doubted myself, or I wanted to give somebody else an opportunity, whatever the situation is, and usually it's well-meaning and, you know, for all the right reasons. Maybe I'm trying to be a great leader, or I'm trying to inspire somebody, or I'm willing to take the risk. You know, those are the places where I've reminded myself and kind of proven to myself that when you know, you know. And you take a calculated risk sometimes to go the other direction. Sometimes it hurts more than others. There have been a handful of times where my intuition was drastically you know, different than like where logic would have taken me. And maybe I made a decision with my board or with my business partners or who knows what. And, you know, you look back and you're like, really should have trusted my intuition. It's the only time I get into trouble. I am lucky because of all of the businesses that you speak about, I manage them, I own them, and most of them I have control over. So when I don't trust my intuition, it's usually a very calculated reason why. The second part of that question, I think there are a lot of different truths and everything can go in different, different directions and paths at any time. So there's another part of my belief system where like once you make a choice, you own it. I'm okay with whatever happens in either direction. I'm unattached to how it was supposed to be and I'm like good with the repercussions that come. And so that's a huge part of it, especially when you're collaborating with somebody or like in a partnership with somebody. You know, I tend to look at all of the reasons why, understand the good parts and the bad parts and what can come out of it, and I'm okay with it. And you ride. There's very few times in my life where I can look back and I have any regret over a decision, even knowing that I— if I had trusted my intuition, we would have potentially been in a better place.

When I screw up and don't listen to my intuition, it's all— you mentioned it, it's always because I'm trying to like be collaborative with somebody else in a way where what I really need to be is a boss and be like, no, no, no, this really isn't going to— like, I have the full signal. I know it's not going to work. And I always forget that when people work on projects, they get very invested in them. So you want to like cut it off early before somebody's really invested in the project. And I mean, that's the error. I find that when other people people, people and my desires for a working relationship with those other people, that's where I screw up. That's the other, other people tend to screw that up for me.

But don't you think it's like sometimes that's exactly the way it's supposed to be? Like you give them that opportunity, then you roll through a new experience together where you have to kind of like cope with the thing, right? Like it might have been easier and it might have been more of like how you imagined it. But usually, there's like a gift that comes out of it, right?

Sometimes. Sometimes. Usually, there is. I've been in a bunch of situations with business decisions where, no, actually, I knew exactly what I wanted and letting them go. You know what I mean? Like, no, I wish. Like, sometimes, there is. All right. I want to back up. You started here in one of your first answers. And so one of the things I really like about working with you and knowing you because you think this way, you talk a lot about constraints and be it budget, time, or space. And I am a big believer that constraints drive creativity and they drive innovation. Many of the biggest launch points in my career to a next level were because I was faced with constraints. I immediately was pissed off about that. But once I was like, "Oh, I got to play inside this box. That's the rules." tends to unlock a great number of things. And now, only in the past 4 or 5 years have I sort of— because we've spent enough time together, I've been watching you do it. Now, I start with the constraints sometimes rather than like, "Oh, this is the thing I got to deal with." Now, I'm like, "Oh, no, let's treat it like an engineer. These are boundary conditions. They're not a constraint. They're boundary conditions. What do we build inside the boundary conditions?" I find that really liberating. So, where did that come from for you? How do you think about it? I find it, uh, it's very useful for, for driving flow, I think, because it just drives focus so much. I don't know if that's what you see too.

Well, I have this very weird thing where I really loathe going backwards. Like, it, it really disrupts something in me to have to, like, turn around. If I think that I left my stove on and I have to, like, come back down the street and walk into my house and check my stove. It's like, it's very frustrating to me.

Does that happen often with the stove? I'm just wondering. Is it a thing?

That's an example of something that happens every once in a while.

I'm like, Nest camera. There's— I think they make a thing for that.

I think I was raised in a family where my mom had a fear of this, and so it definitely, like, it happens more than once a year, I'll tell you that much.

Okay.

It's not happening monthly. So I think that I just— I love doing a lot. I love doing things. There's like a momentum that I can build within myself which allows me to be really good at going from zero to something. Like, my sweet spot is zero to something, right? And then once I get to something and I create the systems, I like passing it off to someone who loves to operate. And the momentum that I am able to build works at a certain pace, and in order to maintain that pace, there's a certain efficiency to it. And so in that combination of me not wanting to go backwards and me not wanting to waste time, and I don't like wasting other people's time— of all the currencies in the world, time is the most sacred. And when I can show up and respect people's time and they can respect my time, it's the best. It's the best relationships. It's the best partnership. And so a lot of it comes from, from those things. And so I tend to— like, there's a way to solve everything, usually more than one way. And if we can sit down and be like, all right, understand what we need to sort of get to or solve, what the problem is, before we can do that, like, let's give ourselves some guardrails so that we can see what we're bumping up against and be efficient and spend our mindset space and our ideation and the energy that we're putting towards it in the direction that's actually going to be implementable. And I think that that makes it more fun. It keeps everybody in like the world of, okay, we're in the realm of potentiality. We know where we're, you know, what like edges we're bumping up against. And then when we get excited about it, we get to go deeper in it. We're never pulling ourselves out being like, that was a waste or we went down this path, and instead it's just like micro-corrections to keep it moving in the right direction. So I think a lot of it's building that momentum for myself and for the people that get to collaborate, so that we keep lifting each other instead of the disappointment that inherently comes when you start designing solutions for something that's impossible. So I'm just managing my own mental health.

No, I mean, one of the things that I think is really important there— it's funny because, um, When I work with companies, one of the things I always sort of work this into the speeches often, even if it doesn't belong there, because I want people to hear it, which is when you go into the burnout literature, flowest wage is burnout. But there's a but. There's a but. And there's a but in the burnout literature, which is if you have a passive-aggressive boss, which is two steps forward, one step back, or one step forward, two steps back, right? You said you don't like going backwards. I hate it as well. It makes me truly— it's one of the few things, like, I can do it once on a project or twice, and then I become unhinged in a sense. And it's that thing because I know it's a guarantee of burnout. So, if you have passive-aggressive bosses, for example, the best advice from a peak performer standpoint is quit because you actually can't win that one, right? You will not win. It burns everybody out. It burns you out. It burns me out, right? We're good at this stuff. It's a no-win situation. All right. I'm going to flip it. We're going to go in a totally opposite direction to constraints for a second. You spend a lot of time building environments and products even that produce strong emotion, sometimes even altered states. And I noticed it, one of the clearest things, and you and I talked about this, but I've been involved with the Summit community since the very beginning. People may not know this, but when I was founding my first flow company, the Flow Genome Project, a company ago with Jamie, It was Summit who gave me— you guys had the Malibu mansion at that time and they literally gave it to me to have a giant— I could have never afforded to start that company. We launched it, 100 people showed up at this giant event on the lawn of Malibu because you guys gave us the house. We've worked together for a very long time. And when you stepped in as CEO, someone was already a high-flow interested community. But you, I think, really took it to a different level. The entire vibe at events changed in a really powerful kind of alchemical way in a sense, to use your favorite word and one that makes me cringe, by the way. I'm doing this because I love you and we're friends, but I would never use that word otherwise. Fans are like, "What did he just fucking say? Alchemical? What?" But you're really good at sort of building environments for state change? Are there things you lean on in that way? What's in your toolbox? What do you always go back to? I know music plays a big role for you. Obviously, we talked about dancing, but how else do you think about it? Because you really did change the entire feeling of an event that already felt amazing. You took amazing and took it up a couple notches and it was sort of visible and visceral and everybody was talking about it at the event because we've been to lots of those events. Well, first of all, good question. I know.

No, but thank you so much. I mean, I, um, was with you, always part of the Summit community, and experienced so many amazing things and so many, like, meaningful, deep connections. In a lot of ways, most of my most important friendships came out of Summit because it was all these people from around the world that understood my kind of insatiable desire to build things and run businesses and invest in things and collaborate. And so, um, I always had these ideas about how to uplevel in some ways or just make different in some ways, and I've gotten the chance to do that over the past handful of years. And it does mean the world to me that, you know, other people that have been involved for more than a decade like I have kind of have the same experience. From a toolkit perspective, you know, designing experiences Creating the impact like you're talking about, designing companies or healthy structures, it's all similar. I, I think time becomes the foundational framework, and when we can give human beings the groundedness by using time and the predictability of time and we can animate the experiences that happen in the layering of spaces. It allows for the space where people don't have to necessarily have definition to what they're doing or what they're stepping into, whether that be a dance floor that they're going to hear music, or it's an interactive workshop that they're curious about that they want to, you know, participate in, or a talk on a topic that might be controversial or provocative to their brain, using the foundation of time gives them enough safety to trust that they can dip in and be curious and say yes to things that they might not otherwise feel comfortable.

What does that mean, the foundation of time?

So I think being very organized— so like, let's use the example of a business. A business might have 20 people prior to a reorganization, and those 20 people might kind of have a little bit of an idea what they do every day. They love to collaborate. They're really dedicated to the mission, but they don't necessarily have so much clarity on their day-to-day role. And then you come in and you say, okay, there are 5 clear departments. There are 5 clear leaders. And this is what every single person does within their company. They wake up every day, they want to run through walls, and this is your job, and this is how it interacts with the other people in your department. And like, here is the structure. Structure, right? In that company, that 20-some people is going to be so much more organized, happy, they're going to deliver better, the results are going to be amazing, they're gonna like— it's gonna be a thriving organism. And I look at that the same way. It's using time and structures to give people the confidence and clarity of what they do so that they can get up and do it and then do it better and better and In events, it's similar. It's just a little less articulated, right? Because at a summit event, we'll often have 20 activations happening at one time. It's like a choose-your-own-adventure. You know, people might be interested in a longevity immersion in one area. They might be interested in the future of AI and emotional intelligence on one of the main stages. They might want to go to do roller skating outside in a parking lot. And then in the spaces that happen in between, are a lot of times where the magical connections happen. In a similar way to the example of the business, by using the foundation of time and really, really strong organization and having everything run like trains with impeccability and having the level of execution be at a certain very predictable level where everything is excellent and perfect, it allows for the spaces in between, the less defined, the flowier areas, to be able to be trusted more. And I think that in the toolkit experiences, that's one of the tricks. It's creating this very, very strict, if you will, structure where the animation of spaces and experiences and how they layer along with the clock where people are of different interests, it allows us to weave, weave the kind of different interests, like currents that go throughout an experience.

A couple points of clarification. One, all those 20 things take place except when I'm speaking, when everything else gets shut down and just all the focus is—

I don't want them to know that I program things around you. This is our little secret.

Okay, my bad. What I liked about what you just said is, in a sense, it's the same constraint thinking, right? Except it's applied outward to other people's experience. And that makes a lot of sense to me. You're putting really tight boundaries around delivering really high quality events and very consistently. And I see that, that makes a lot of sense to me. That's a really interesting, I would've never suspected you thought about it that way. That's really cool. I like that. That makes a lot of sense. Let's, and I know this, this can be challenging and I know you can be really good at it and I know it can be challenging. So let's talk a little bit about flow and leadership. So you've led some really flowy teams. I've heard you could play when the teams aren't flowy and take steps and fix it. Let's just say. So how do you think about cultivating flow on teams? One thing that I know, because we've collaborated on so many things, you sort of have the same, it seems like you have the same thinking as I have, which is collaborate with the most creative people you can find, put them in boxes to succeed, and then get the fuck out of the way, which is what I've, that's what I've seen in working with you. But how do you about that in teams inside of businesses, smaller scale? I've seen it with, with outward partners that you've created, collaborated with.

The tricky part of answering this question is that I am often, you know, at the helm of businesses that are operating so fast that I'm constantly feeling like I wish I had twice as much time in a day to devote to my teams instead of just the outside world. But I'm oftentimes out there, you know, being like the magnet to all the things that I then to like hand to my team. I also learned something from my dad years ago that I now really see, especially in Summit. I love being in the middle of everything and just doing work for everybody on my teams so that they can do their work better. I like, you know, I've had moments in my life where things are sorted for me and maybe I wake up and there's glam squads and there's morning television. I am not in that. I am like, you know, running my own calendar and like running my own appointments and writing copy with the— like with everybody and designing graphics. And that is very much my happy place. And I think that, yeah, I'm— you and I are very similar. Like, I— my expectations are very high of people. I like to collaborate and create stuff all day long. I don't like to micromanage. I'm a creative director, like you know, innately. So I do love the micro details, but there's such a huge difference between micromanaging somebody's stuff to do and managing the micro details that make something really special. So like, I want to know, you know, that I have a— I have some participation in what the roller skates look like for the roller skating experience that might be a surprise for some at Detroit. But I don't want to micromanage the whole process of bringing it to life. I want the team to like have the autonomy and to flow and to, you know, make their own connections and be able to tell the stories of the people who built this business and are bringing it that we can help storytell and bring awareness to their small business in Michigan. And so it's a really fine line. I think a lot of times I move that momentum we talked about, I move at a pace that's I can't expect others to move at. And it's more for me, it's just how I keep my flywheel spinning. And sometimes there's things that slow me down, and it's just part of the process. And I try to take it with grace and handle it with love, and, you know, wake up the next day and do my 5 AM coffee hour and catch up, and, you know, do my emails while I make sure I'm smiling, and just try to like hit that stride so that by the time everyone else plugs in.

Wait, wait, wait, you make sure you're smiling while you do your emails? I want to go back to this. This sounds like an interesting hack. What, so you just force yourself to smile? Are you literally like—

No, I won't force myself. I have to be in the mood to be smiling for me to like send follow-up emails.

That's interesting.

Like if I'm sending like outbound to sponsors or partners or speakers or people that are interested in our business or like, you know, who knows what. Don't get me wrong, I send plenty of aggro emails through the day when I just need to like send stuff out and, you know, but yeah, from when I have this rule that like I won't do a follow-up email unless I am happy and like exuding joy into that That's amazing.

That's amazing. I mean, people must, you know, if I did that, I think people would wait months for a follow-up email for me.

Well, there's definitely times where my partner Brett says to me, he's like, hey, you haven't followed up on that yet. I'm like, I know it's been a couple days, but like, I can't break my rule. He's like, you haven't smiled writing an email in days. I'm like, it's the first one on the list. You—

it's funny, uh, in your last, uh, You mentioned getting up at 5:00 AM and ritual is very important to you. And I know that in your life, in your events. What is it about ritual? I know you use it to ground people in sort of the chaotic modern world. I know that's part of it. How do you think about it? One of the things I add in before I shut up and let you talk is at Zero to Dangerous, one of the things that we emphasize is like a pre-flow ritual. And it's funny because I go from bed to desk in under 5 minutes, but there's a pre-flow ritual that involves taking my dog sort of for a stroll around the house at 4 o'clock in the morning so it can pee on the way, and then I make the coffee. And it all compresses in under 5 minutes, but it's a little ritual that I sort of transition from one space to another and enter into it. How do you think about ritual? How do you use it in your own life? How do you use it at events?

Well, you know that my morning coffee and my time with my typing box is like my most sacred time. I— the only time I know that I'm in trouble in life is when I wake up and I don't have ideas dripping from my fingertips when I wake up in the morning. You know, that I know I'm in trouble because most days I wake up with that. And, um, you know, I think I love supporting people's projects and dreams and visions. I love making meaningful connections for people's businesses. Is I love taking the hard lessons that I've learned in my own businesses and helping, you know, the next generation of thinkers and young entrepreneurs to not make those mistakes in their own businesses, especially in a different time with even in some ways harder constraints. And so I, I give a lot of my time and it feeds me. Don't get me wrong, like, I love it. I do it very consciously. But those things that I do, like my mornings, my coffee, you know, I tend to like get everything for all my businesses out, and then at like 10:30, 11, I'll go work out when I know that everything is out there and everyone's sort of like in the— in their mix and they have what they need from me and I'm not holding anybody up. And those things throughout my day, my week, my months, my year are the things that feed me, and most of them have to do with like the creative spirit that's in me and that thing that when I was 8 years old and I hit flow state for the first time and I was like, oh yeah, yeah, this is the good stuff, like I'm dedicating my life to this whole— this whatever this is. That's what all of those things have in common, and they're non-negotiables for me.

It's also what I love listening to you talk about. This I've said for a while, I think I wrote it about it in Art of Impossible, if you're dealing with peak performers, but that like anybody in the top, let's say 25% of whatever it is that they are, top 15%, the biology is the biology. And so we always tell people, if you could start your workday with an uninterrupted block of complete concentration for the most important task of the day, that's what you want to do. It's creatives get that immediately. They understand it. And I think along the way, creatives learn that if they don't do that, the day will sooner or later, it'll get in the way of your creativity. You can't park it for later. You have to write. It has to happen first. Whereas, and I think this is true across the board for people, but knowledge workers push back a lot against this one. It's super easy to tell creatives to start your day with this block of uninterrupted concentration for you where you And where I get really a lot of pushback is people in exactly your role where you're managing tons of teams and tons of people. The biggest pushback comes from managers who are like, "Oh, no, I don't want to take the time to organize my thoughts." And I'm like, "No, no, no, you don't understand. This is the most productive thing you could do." But it's funny and creatives sort of get that instinctively. And I think it's something that comes from just following your creativity a little bit. I think creativity is a really good teacher that way. I don't know if there's a question in here.

By the way, well, I think it comes back to time. You know, I have— when I have the gift of time, I'm like, oh my God, what am I going to do with it? Am I going to do this? Am I going to do that? Like, how do I want to use this time, this precious time, right? Do I want to paint? Do I want to write? And I think creatives get that. Like, we never have enough time. I think people that don't have that, like that insatiable, you know, like, thing to quench. People don't necessarily know how to fill time. And unfortunately, now when we're like, you know, in this world, right, with our digital universe, even less so. And so I think some of— and that's, that's the hardest part of finding great leadership, is like somebody that is structured enough, has the emotional intelligence to understand the gray area between everything. Can exist in the negative space, right, that we are trained as artists, and can kind of thrive creating guardrails with time and being okay with it being undefined and knowing that there's productivity there. Like, if we can figure out how to bottle that and train that, that's the next generation of leadership.

Well, that's interesting. So sort of related, but it's one of the things I'm sort of always fascinated with, with watching you work, which is sort of pattern recognition. You move fluidly between so many worlds, startups, wellness experience. I've seen you go from disaster management to creative events in 2 hours and major disaster management. She's got a business where she manages, used when things go really wrong in the world, Jodie and one of her companies comes to the rescue. And I'll see you literally from like dealing with major hurricanes, major fire, like heavy stuff. And then, you know, and then you're going to run an art tour the next day and it's amazing. So my question is, what patterns, maybe truths, have you seen repeated across all these domains? We talked about constraints earlier and how you think about time, that way. Is there anything else? Is that the, is that the main pattern you're looking at? Are there others?

I think that especially within those two examples, right? Like, you know, taking on a large-scale FEMA disaster at a city or a state level and bringing people to Detroit and giving them an hour where we walk them through the UNESCO Design Heritage Site of Detroit. It's similar. Right? It's totally different. But for each of those people, it's about optimization in the worldview that they're living in. So for somebody that's running a large company or building a startup, or a community director that comes to Summit once or twice a year to see their peers and to get filled up and to learn new things and to get their curiosity quenched, and to leave after those 4 days, you know, with their operating system reset to go out into the world and do what they do, which in most cases with our community is leading by example and making great impact in the world, as well as helping a city or state figure out how to support, you know, a medical system or people that are in need in the wake of a disaster. It's all about optimizing those communities in very, very different times with very different types of resources. For me, I show up the same way for both of them. It's about, you know, creating opportunity, doing as much as we can with as little as possible, and helping as many people in the immediate and the mid to long term. And the exercise of looking at the psychology involved in order to make the most impact is kind of the, the, the thing that's similar. Now the patterns are different, the need states are different. I would argue, you know, if the world was coming to a crashing end, of course the disaster recovery stuff comes first, but it's a very similar process by which I and the teams around me tackle the right solutions in those moments.

In a weird way, it sounds like we've returned to sort of where we started, which is starting with story, going through an experience, ending with story. It's the Patrick, so I guess the same question. You've mentioned Detroit a number of times. You have a really special summit event coming up in Detroit. And for everybody, we get lots of complaints that I don't do anything in public where people can actually buy tickets and come. This is something you can actually buy tickets and come to. But I'm really excited about Detroit. Why don't you tell people what's going on and we'll go from there.

So we are gathering the Global Summit community for our annual flagship event, and instead of being in the beaches of Baja, Mexico, or chartering Richard Branson's cruise ship and going out to sea, or being on the top of a mountain, or insert many different places where we've gathered the Summit crew in the past, we are going to Detroit, Michigan. In June, which, Stephen, you know from being an Ohio kid, it's like beautiful weather and lush green, and it's sort of like the, the best-kept secret, right? Like spring and fall in the Midwest. And we are building a Summit campus and gathering our people in a place that totally embodies the spirit of Summit. It's entrepreneurial in nature and Detroit has had this amazing revitalization and amazing food scene. Awesome. And the people we're bringing in from all over the globe are all so excited. And it's— yeah, it's my hometown. So I'm very excited about this one.

And you've leaned in and it really— I don't know if, you know, Detroit and Cleveland were the cities that burned to the ground in the '70s and right during the riots and the insurance companies came in and said, no, no, It's our acts of God. We don't have to pay to rebuild this. And Cleveland and Detroit were fucked. And they both had the same long, slow path to recovery. The automotive business took a hit in Detroit. The steel business completely went away in Cleveland. And I think both of us are sort of tied to Midwestern communities that have revived themselves. I'm really looking forward to this. I think it'll be really special. It's nice to see kind of one of these events in the Midwest. I always— it's funny with flow stuff, I always sort of said, I think my work may be done when they start bringing me to like Iowa or Kansas to speak. Like, it's sure, it's fine to be in like New York or LA or Seattle, but like, if your goal is sort of flow for the many, you don't— like, I got to speak 6 months ago. I spoke at Target in Minneapolis. I was like, oh, this is awesome. I'm getting closer, right? I'm getting closer up. And it's really funny because my hometown is Cleveland. I've never actually, other than books where I've spoken at bookstores, I've never given a speech in my hometown. I think I've given one speech in Detroit. The one that we're going to do together is the second one. So I'm excited. It's taken a while to get these kinds of forward-thinking projects into the Midwest, but I'm excited about it.

Talk a little bit about what you're planning for us.

So it is up in the air whether I'm going to talk about creativity and flow. For sure. I may or may not weave an AI layer into it and talk about creativity with AI and flow or not. But if the focus— a lot of my work these days is focusing, as you know, on creativity. I fervently believe that the future belongs to creatives in flow who can collaborate with each other and with AI. I know you do too. So one, it's always been on a mission to help train the future. So that's a big part of it. And the chance to talk about— and this is, by the way, I mean, it's a topic I've talked a lot about, but I don't think I've ever stood up and given a speech before on creativity and flow and the overlap. And it's really my work on flow and intuition. We've been publishing papers. This is really the rabbit hole I've been crawling around in for the past 3 to 5 years. And the alliance is starting, which is on this topic and sort of some of this is debuting to the world at Summit Detroit in that. So I think that a lot of, a lot of the next chapter for myself, for Flow Research, is going in this direction and it's going to debut in Detroit. So did you just start interviewing me in the middle of our podcast? Talk about what this is going to be about. Listen, control freak much?

This lifetime is an us thing. Okay.

Okay. Fair enough. Fair enough.

It's like that first, first chapter in Stealing Fire. Where the SEALs lead and then they shift and then they lead and then they— right?

You are right about that. Dynamic subordination is what that's called, right? Whoever knows— it's, it's, by the way, it's what's interesting about that, that you bring that up. The SEALs do it, but I think any good leadership team does that. And the reason is that for mammals, dynamic subordination is the most natural way to lead. It's the person who knows what to do next gets to be the leader. It makes the most sense. And the SEALs use it to great advantage. You see it with dogs, right? We have packs of dogs at our dog sanctuary and you see it. So, everybody thinks that dogs live in alpha groups and they don't. They live in fission-fusion groups, which is whoever knows what to do next gets to be the leader. So, inside our house, it's usually one of the tiny little Chihuahuas that is the alpha because if you get a small dog that's an alpha, they make sure all the other small dogs get fed and the big dogs don't hog the food kind of thing. And but when you go into the backcountry, no, then, you know, the Doberman is the alpha because she knows what to do. And humans seem to work best in that way as well. And so I don't know, apropos of nothing, final question, and I mean this in the most science-based way I possibly can ask this question.

This is going to be good.

A lot of your work, sort of, we use the word term alchemical earlier. It's magical, it's intimate, It's sensory and you seem very good at whatever that is. You are very good at scaling and bottling that kind of magic. And my question is, as you grow a thing, how do you protect that? How do you do that? But how do you really protect it? Because one of the things that I've noticed, and it's the hardest thing to do, is like you have all these magical ideas when you first start out with something and reality tends to punch you in the face. That's not going to work. That's not going to work. And some of these things are and some of them you're like, wow, the life is just getting squeezed out of this, the magic is gone. And you seem really good at preserving the magic. So I thought as a place to end this discussion, how do you do that?

Yeah, that's an interesting question, and it's probably more of a personality thing than anything else. So if we were to go take magic and think of it as art, because I think a lot of the brands that I've created and the experiences that, um, I've designed and built around the world. It's about bringing art, like what we often see in fine art and museums and kind of the inaccessible, and bringing that into the world of products and retail and fashion and kind of bringing it to a place where we use a product as an interface to a bigger message. There's, uh, it's kind of the culmination of intuition and knowing what's right. I don't let a lot of inputs shift what I know is right or wrong, and I am also willing to tackle and walk directly into problems or tough conversations to fight for and justify what I know is right. And I think that that's probably the quality that I have that others don't necessarily have, or that doesn't come as naturally. Because I'm willing to really fight for what's right, because I believe in doing things differently and building products and brands and stories and experiences that are not like anything else. Because I think that when you're investing time and energy and money, all of which are, are very hard to come by, into creating things, I never want to do that into something that could exist somewhere else. And it's that willingness, you know, nobody will ever accuse me of being passive-aggressive. I am as direct as it gets. Nobody ever questions where they're at with me in any moment in time. And I tend to love that, and I keep it humorous and light. And when there's something that's uncomfortable, I keep it humorous and light. We tackle that together, we go into it together, we navigate navigate it, we come out the other side of it. Sometimes you don't, but most of the time you do. And so I think it's like the willingness to put the time in to kind of validate intuition and then to be able to, for lack of a better word, fight for it, not let anybody try to change it. And some of that comes from the way that I've been able to structure my businesses. I tend to maintain enough autonomy and ownership of the things that I do where I have that, that ability. And I think for people listening that maybe don't have, you know, their own businesses and don't have creative control over the worlds that they live in, or maybe aren't as established yet to have that kind of like trust built from the people around them, I think that it's, it's like never— you never want a shortcut. So if you know something is intrinsically right, finding all of the ways to prove and just never giving up, right? Just continue to like find all the ways to prove it. And of course, like, you know, you win some, you lose some. You pick your battles. I'm very big on picking my battles. I do not, you know, go after everything. I'm incredibly— I have a governor on what I put my energy towards. And just, you know, sometimes you sit back and watch and you know you're right and you don't win the first battle, and then everybody sees that you were right, and then the next 3 you get to just kind of lead. So I feel like it's all about timing, and I think that sometimes when, um, you know, when it comes to building brands and experiences and stories, it takes a lot of work to maintain the preciousness and the perfection of it. And you have to really love that process in order to want to spend the extra time and attention and energy and time and time and time. It takes so much time to keep it, to maintain it. All right, you can't— there's no shortcuts ever work. And you and I have that in common. We like, we really want there to be excellence, and we're okay with the stuff that ebbs and flows in the meantime, but we, you know, we don't give up when it comes to making it better. I think it has to do with that. That's, that's where magic comes from.

I think it's funny because I just think, I think about that in terms of writers. And when I train writers, it's always the thing I tell them, which is you think the job is writing. That's the fun part. The job is actually editing, and the real job is turning the editing into the fun part, right? Because it's the— if you're going to make things great, and I rarely get to make things that are excellent, right? When I say things are excellent, meaning I look back at them later and I don't want to do things differently, right? There's— I don't have a book yet that I've written where I'm like, I can look back and I go— I go through phases where like, I'm like, oh yeah, now I'm hating that book. Yeah, that book's— I hated that book. That book was terrible. I shouldn't have ever written that. But like, you know, they go through phases that way. But you do. It is just a process of loving sort of the editing process, loving the— we're going to go back, we're going to do this again, we're going to do this again, we're going to do this again. If you can learn to enjoy that, there's a lot there. If it can become flowy, which I know it is for you, that's sort of the real magic, right? Because then, then you get all that goal-directed juice every time you, like, push it a little bit forward.

I think you just nailed it. Like, you just summarized everything I just said. I love what I get to do, and I try to create environments where everybody that I work with every day loves what they do. And I realize how lucky I am to be able to live in a world like that. You and I are really lucky. And when we don't love what we do, we work together to like edit with one another to figure out how we shift one of our lives to like fall back in love with what we do.

It's true. All right, so where can people go to learn more about you? Where can they go to get tickets for Summit Detroit?

www.summit.co will tell people everything about Summit, the Summit community, our commitment to entrepreneurialism and business what we have going on at Summit Detroit. There are some exceptional people coming in to speak, teach, perform, all kinds of stuff. And it would be amazing to have some of the people that are Flow State students and aficionados joining us.

It's amazing the crossover between communities. So the last event I was at, every time I turned around, I was bumping into people who had taken one of our trainings. So I think there's been a lot of crossover between the communities over the years, which is, which is wonderful. Jodi Levy, I love you very, very much. Thank you for joining us on Flow Radio. This was wonderful. Thank you for letting me pick your brain.

Thank you for having me. And most of all, thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about the things that are most important in my life, like my art and the love of what I do every day and the use of the word alchemical, which I know makes you intrinsically uncomfortable.

I did it for you. I did it for you.

Thanks for having me. It means the world.

Thanks, Jodi. Bye, everybody. See you.