The Moral Molecule: Oxytocin’s Role In Trust, Love, & Peak Performance with Dr. Paul Zak

I think of oxytocin as the biological basis for the golden rule. If you play nice, Stephen, I'm likely to release oxytocin, I'm gonna play nice too. Now there's an anti-golden rule, which seems to be driven by testosterone. You play bad, I'm gonna play really bad.

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Access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Ryan Dorris, and together with bestselling author Steven Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio. Hey, Paul. Absolutely great to have you here. Thank you for joining Flow Research Collective Radio. It's great to have you here. I want to kick off with a general question. Can you describe to everyone the work that you do? Because there's lots of it and it's amazing, and I'd love to hear it directly from yourself.

I'm basically a tool guy, so I use different technologies to create tools to understand what humans are doing. So I think you've seen humans, they're pretty weird and I don't have a good sense of why they're doing what they're doing, and they can't tell me. And that's where neuroscience comes in, trying to figure out what the heck humans are doing.

Nice. That's a great description. I want to dive straight into a question about oxytocin, because I know that a lot of people know you in relation to the topic of trust. What happens to oxytocin in the era of physical and social distancing and increased remote work? And are there anything in terms of actions that you recommend people take to mitigate some of the harm that's happening in terms of physical distancing?

It's a great question. And we certainly have seen data on increased loneliness, increased depressive symptoms. So our brains evolved to be around other humans. So in a very real anatomical sense, we are social creatures. Our brain looks like other creatures that live in groups. So we need that group connection. And that connection activates pathways in the brain that release, for example, oxytocin. But oxytocin also reduces stress responses, improves the immune system. And so when we're isolated, we're less healthy, we're less happy, and we're more subject to disease. So I think we can mitigate that by facilitating greater connection via video conferencing, like we're doing now, phone calls. We've actually shown that video conferencing in particular has about 80% of the oxytocin release as in-person interactions. Really?

Yeah, it's not high.

Yeah, at least in the one study we did. So it's not as bad. And so how do we facilitate that and make it better?

I can look at you. If we touch fingers across the medium, does that increase it? Like, is it going up now?

No, I think it's already—

You can get to 90% there.

That authentic emotional connection. So I can say, Stephen, how are you? You look tired. You look happy. Tell me how you are. Really inquiring about that emotion.

What do you mean I look tired?

Damn it, get some more sleep. But, you know, I mean, it's just making those emotional connections. So there's a simple trick that I think we can use for in-person meetings, but also virtual meetings, which is, again, most of that emotion is shown around the eyes. So be present, look at people's eyes, and then just fill in the emotion you see. Instead of saying, "Hey, how are you? Good, how are you?" Say, "Hey, you look tired, happy, sad, worried, anxious." And then we have a different conversation, right? We talk about, "Hey, you know, you look like you're really having a great day. What's going on?" Right? So now we enter that emotional space. And from a kind of leadership perspective or leading a team or, you know, it's really effective. Right now I'm getting all that emotional information from you, which is super valuable.

I love that as a specific action. Anything else you recommend like that to increase connection over Zoom? And we can back up from there, but while we're on the topic.

Yeah. So basically any positive social interaction will cause the brain to release at least some oxytocin to get those benefits. You can also do it through coordinated movements, singing, dancing. We could sing together. You want to sing? You guys should be singing a couple bars or something. Any of that coordinated movement.

Just out of curiosity, I've seen several anandamide studies that also show anandamide is released with coordinated movement, chanting, those sorts of things. Are they working together in any way? I don't know. I don't know either. You just said it. I was just wondering. I don't think I knew oxytocin came from coordinated movement. Is it socially coordinated movement or internally, like my right and my left feet are tapping to the same beat? That's coordinated movement.

Socially coordinated. Good question. So we just— with soldiers marching and people singing and prayer. So one reason we've done our work on religious rituals, we can talk about that, and non-religious rituals, but one value of doing something as a group, church, temple, something else, is you're doing it in a coordinated manner. Bonds you together physiologically. So yeah, I'm sure there's several mechanisms. So oxytocin facilitates release of dopamine. So I get this little like, oh, this is good for me to connect to the humans and serotonin. So I get this potential kind of reduction in anxiety.

Can we, for folks, describe what oxytocin is? And then also, Paul, it'd be great for you to give a little bit of background as to how you came to focusing so deeply on it specifically.

Yeah. So oxytocin is a neurochemical, one of about 200 chemicals active in the brain, ancient in origin. A version of that goes back at least 400 million years to fish and it facilitates social interaction. So in fish, it facilitates sexual reproduction, which has risks, right? If I get close enough to this fish to have it fertilize me, I might instead become its lunch. In humans, it's the same thing. It helps modulate the approach-withdrawal side of us. So I want to approach, I can get value from having relationships. So Steve and I met in Brazil and we started hanging out and had fun and it was a great time. But if he seemed too scary, then I would withdraw from him. So it's that kind of motivator for social interactions. So it's a natural chemical our brain makes. And it, like most things in nature, does multiple things in the body. I had done work on why countries are poor, which is like a really deep issue, right? The West is rich. Why isn't the rest of the world rich? And trust, interpersonal trust, was a factor that was extraordinarily important. And I did work talking about the kind of environments which trust facilitated high levels of interpersonal trust, formal, informal institutions, social institutions. And inevitably people ask me, well, for a given environment, for a given country, why do strangers ever trust each other? And I couldn't answer that question. And so I had to look for a mechanism. And again, I said in the top of the podcast, I'm a tool guy. And so there were tools to study oxytocin in animals and really show that animals kind of motivated social behaviors, but no real good tools in humans. The tool in animals was drilling into the skull and sampling brain fluid. I'm not really up on what the humans like and dislike, but I'm just guessing that wasn't the coolest way to do this. So we had to develop a tool to measure oxytocin release and then eventually to shoot synthetic oxytocin into people's brains safely.

Can you describe, Paul, a little bit of the research you did within organizations on trust and oxytocin? I read a Harvard Business Review article, I believe it was, years ago, and it was super interesting on that topic. And I'd love to hear a breakdown of that work from yourself.

Yes, please ask me every question, but that was super interesting. Yeah. So 2017, uh, published a paper in HBR, which is an excerpt from my book, Trust Factor, from that year that applied our knowledge of the neurologic basis to trust, to building high-performance teams. And the reason I did that, to be honest, is because I'm poor and neuroscience is expensive. My lab is poor. And so companies started coming and saying, "Hey, we think trust is important in our organization and you're supposed to be some trust expert. Tell us what to do." And I said, "Well, I have this assay. I can take blood from your employees." And, you know, they would just turn white and just go, "Oh no, no, you can't do that. There's gotta be some general principles." So I realized again, another level of ignorance. I really didn't understand trust within organizations. I had a good sense of what happens at countries, a good sense of what happens between individuals. And so I spent about 8 years running field experiments in organizations where we measured oxytocin and brain activity various ways and measured productivity, and then identified a set of kind of 8 foundations for organizational trust, and then showed that high-trust organizations combined with a sense of purpose— and we could talk about purpose if you'd like— perform at much higher levels using multiple measures than other organizations. So higher stock price, more profits, lower employee turnover, more loyal customers, some evidence for they can charge higher prices. And so how do I do this? Well, how do I organize those humans for high performance? To me, that's a neuroscience problem, right? I want to actually use the science of trust, of oxytocin, of cooperative behaviors to understand why humans ever decide voluntarily with 100 or 1,000 or 100,000 other people, "Yeah, I'm going to be in the same building in the old days with these people and work on joint projects." If you're a Marxist, you said, "Well, that's terrible. That's exploitation of labor." But the neuroanatomy says that we dig this. We're designed to work in groups. We want to work in groups. We enjoy it. As I said earlier, we get rewards from it. So from a leadership perspective, we need to facilitate that. And that's more effective when I can build a culture that empowers individuals to be successful, to make progress, and to have the ability to make mistakes and not be screamed at.

I have to ask one geeky question, which is you looked at trust across scales, right? Individuals, organizations, obviously, I would assume you went from like, you know, small companies up to larger companies, and then you looked at countries. Was there anything you noticed about oxytocin or anything else that when you were looking at trust across the scales that changed or stayed the same that was surprising?

Great neuroscience question, Stephen. Yes, small is beautiful. That, you know, once teams get to be over about 15 or so, depending on the organization, that it's very difficult to sustain that very high level of trust and reliability on these other individuals. And so a lot of companies actually have found this, like W.R. Gore has been very open that they keep their teams very small. When they get to an office of more than 200 people, then they break it down and make it smaller again. Enterprise rent-a-cars do the same thing. They get to a size of about 20 people, 25 people in a location. They just spin out another location. So all the '60s people were right. Small is beautiful. That scale also works on the country level. So small countries, the Singapores, the South Koreas, sustain these relationships much more strongly. Trust is very high. And these larger heterogeneous on, on multiple levels countries, the Columbias, the Argentinas, where income distribution is very wide, ethnicities are very broad, different religions, much harder to build that trust without very strong formal institutions. And the US is kind of in the middle. We're heterogeneous, but we have strong institutions, so we balance that out. So institutions to me means culture, right? How do I actually organize the humans or how do I give them a sense of security that if things go bad, I have a backup plan, someone will help me out of this mess.

Could you talk, Paul, a little more about the 8 foundations for organizational trust?

I can. They're really about empowering individuals. Somehow magically they have the acronym Oxytocin. I don't know how that happened. It's really about empowering individuals to be their best at work, which means creating an environment where people can flourish. As I said earlier, where they can make mistakes and learn from them, where they have a chance to grow, where they have a sense of understanding of not only what we're doing, but why we're doing what we're doing, a sense of openness and transparency, and where they can be their authentic selves at work. So I don't want to have a work me and, you know, a home me. They're just me. And I think also part of the neuroscience is understanding that people are not going to bat 1,000. No one does. People are going to make mistakes. And so if I'm a leader, if I'm leading a team or part of a team, I would expect occasionally my team members to screw up. So it's very common. And as you guys probably know, Silicon Valley, they have these monthly congratulations, you screwed up celebrations. We're going to have pizza and beer. We're talking about the biggest mistake we've made this month. Why? No innovation without mistakes, so let's celebrate mistakes. Let's also share that information so that if I made that mistake, you guys don't make that mistake too. And so that's a culture, right? It's a culture that says, if you innovate, you've got to make mistakes. So like Facebook, right? Move fast and break things. So if you want to do that, it also means you need constant feedback. So I've got to have a culture of honesty, of transparency, and I've got to have someone who's going, Hey, Stephen, that was a bad idea, right? That sucked. Let's debrief. Let's share that. Awesome, you tried something new, didn't work, and I got to give you feedback right away. So we've got to be in this safe space where I feel comfortable doing that. And also, you know, there's lots of evidence that the more collisions you have at work, the more innovation occurs. So there's a famous story that people probably know about Steve Jobs, who, you know, always had fingers in everything, designing the new headquarters for Pixar. And he wanted one entrance, which they have, and he wanted one bathroom, which they rejected because it's too big of a building. But he wanted those collisions, right? So many organizations now have, you know, food areas. And so every time I've been at Google, you know, you go to lunch there and all these people are just sharing tables and they're like, "Oh, you're working on the AI project?

Oh yeah, I heard about that." By the way, I have to say, for an introvert, the Google cafeteria is terrifying. Like, I hate, like, I literally, I like, I walk in, I'm like, oh, this is terrible. It's like I'm back in high school. They're at tables and, oh, it's spooky.

I like it. I guess I'm an introvert.

You're not an introvert.

No, I'm an introvert who plays an extrovert, you know, in the media.

On TV, I know.

My exercise, Stephen, was to, which maybe you saw me do, is to force myself to talk to people in elevators. And it is the most interesting thing for introverts. One is half the people are just freaked out that you're saying hello to them. And the other half, you have these great 30, 60-second conversations like, "Hey, you got an accent. How come you're here in D.C.

or New York?" Like, "Oh yeah, I'm here for this meeting for—" By the way, it's a good name for a book of short stories, Elevator Stories, just a little like, you know, 100 different 30-second encounters. Hey, can I ask a weird oxytocin question? It's a little complicated, so there's going to be a little bit of preamble, but I think it's I could be totally wrong about this. I know from the work on marriages and for long-term marriages, they go from dopamine and norepinephrine addiction in the romantic love stage into— this is Helen Fisher's work, obviously— into oxytocin, serotonin, the much more stable stage. And so I was thinking a lot about Scott Barry Kaufman's new book on transcendence and Abraham Maslow. Maslow talked a lot about the plateau. Which is sort of beyond the peak experience. And this is, you know, other people use terms like enlightenment, blah, blah, all those terms that flow around it. And what I was quite simply wondering is, look at high-flow individuals who have done this work over a very long time. They talk about at a certain point, and this is certainly true in my own experience, but I've heard this a lot in interviewing people, people who have managed to sustain very high flow selves, They ride the highs a lot lower. The highs show up. They just don't ride it like that dopamine high all the way up. Same thing with the lows. And it sort of stabilizes in the middle for like peak performers over time and how they relate to flow and things like that. And I was wondering— and it's a much more stable relationship with peak experiences because if you're just sort of addicted to the dopamine of peak experiences, it's a big up, big down, big up, big down. You're on a frickin' roller coaster. And as great as the flow is, the actual ride over time It can be exhausting, and I don't think it's ultimately sustainable. So I was wondering if when we look at like how flow changes for people over time, are we looking at the same— you know how the brain is, it likes to conserve the same mechanism over and over. So I'm looking at the same mechanism, like, wait a minute, if that's the transition from romantic love into stable long-term love, is there something similar that happens with peak performance? Is Maslow talking about with the plateau phase? Those sorts of things?

Such a deep neuroscience question. And luckily I have an answer for you. You're exactly right. So for listeners, you know, the brain is an energy-hungry organ and it is lazy in the sense that it wants to conserve energy. And so what we see for oxytocin is that it is highest when we interact with a safe, trustworthy, pleasant stranger, not with our family members, not with our why. Because I've already actually formed a long-term memory that my wife is safe to be around. I don't need a big oxytocin burst to motivate me to interact with her. So which is really odd, right? So it's kind of a learning. So I've actually learned that this person is safe. And so the oxytocin response is that connection, motivation to connect, higher empathy. And I think from a romantic relationship or even friendships, there's a downside to that, which is we sort of start taking people for granted neurologically, right? I don't get that same, oh, on the back of my neck when I see my wife, or even I don't get the oxytocin-fueled empathy for her. So I think this is where kind of mindfulness comes in and even quantified self, right? We need to have some feedback to say, hey, you know, I gotta actually look at my wife, figure out that she's not happy, or my friends or whatever. So time together, being present, getting rid of distraction, All very important.

Is that part of, you know, when you see self-help seminars where people are doing vulnerability exercises and trust falls and things like that, and there's a real sense of a hit from that, is that the reasoning behind it? That, you know, going—

Trust falls are about dopamine. I mean, that's a huge dopamine high. You're falling over, somebody's catching you, that you're taking a risk.

I hate the trust fall more than anything in the world. I wrote an article in Scientific American, you know, popular, some years ago, and they put that on the COVID Don't put it on the COVID Who's going to not catch you? Who's not going to catch you? What kind of psychopath is going to let you fall? So anyway, I never thought about it. Probably that's part of it, right? Is that, again, we want to move out of our comfort zone for sure. And that vulnerability is a very effective way to induce oxytocin release. This is how con men work, by the way. So it's not that if I'm a con man, I get you to trust me. So I show I trust you. Oh, Stephen, did you lose your money? It must be yours. I found it on the street, and I know you're a good person. So cons are all about showing you trust others and then that reciprocation driven by oxytocin. Right. So, yeah, this can be manipulative.

Just to ask a really sort of like geeky basic question. When we look at Bowlby's attachment theory— so for those of you who don't, Bowlby did sort of foundational work on kind of relationships between mothers and infants. He worked in animals and he just basically figured out that there's what's known as like the person who is your mother basically, or whoever you attach to becomes your secure base. And then people venture farther and farther. It's called like in animals with dogs, you talk about it as flight distance, right? How far will they get from their secure base before they need to reattach connection? Is that an oxy— is that a measure of— when you look at like secure bases in attachment theory, do you see oxytocin? I know endorphins are involved in that because it's maternal bonding, but do we know? We do. Yeah, absolutely.

And so very strong maternal response, even babies crying, a big oxytocin response. And so you'll see that, maybe more technical than you guys want, but lactating mothers actually begin to lactate when they hear their child cry, without touching them, right? This is a built-in response. And again, oxytocin is doing lots of things. And as Stephen said, lots of other neurochemicals and networks in the brain are active here. So we're not just going to focus on one thing. So we have studied really intensively psychiatric patients who were severely sexually abused as children. And we see in about half of them that attachment system driven by oxytocin is dysfunctional. So they are not able to sustain long-term attachments. We see a dysfunction in the action of oxytocin, particularly in the amygdala, which is this area that's balancing kind of good and bad emotional responses, if you will. So it doesn't, you know, they get lots of the bad and not enough of the good. So again, that's back to this kind of lazy conservative brain, which is, if I'm not getting love as a child, if I'm in this high stress state, I don't really develop the ability to love others or to share love. And it's, you know, I don't know if you can get people out of that. So again, oxytocin is very protected. It's in the brainstem. So it's the oldest part of the brain. And, you know, if I mess with people enough, I can screw up that system or you just get really bad genes. But generally it's fairly well protected. So even among criminal psychopaths, we see some oxytocin release, although not very much.

So Paul, what's super interesting to me about what you mentioned earlier around creating high-trust environments within organizations is the notion of transparency and then kind of this buzzword that you see a lot in business books of candor. And I think that your work provides a really good kind of neuroscientific breakdown for the value of these kinds of things, transparency, candor, obviously honesty, feedback. Are there any more specific action steps that you recommend for leaders who want to create high-trust environments, or ways that you recommend that people, you know, layer transparency and candor into their cultures?

Yeah, I think a lot of the stuff, you know, in, in the book Trust Factor is about empowering individuals to be successful. So it's giving them more and more responsibility, holding them accountable. So again, trust is not unbounded trust, it's giving you more trust. I think you try things out, but again, pushing people, even little things like language is important, right? So I don't like the word employee or worker. Worker sounds very Marxist to me. Colleague, teammate, right? So, you know, we're all in this together. We're all working together. So I want to give you the opportunity to grow, to lead a team. So in the tech world, which I think we're all starting to, you know, be part of, you know, it's very common to have a team leader Rotate, right? It's not like I'm the person who's been in the business long enough, I'm going to run this team. No, let's rotate this around. Let's mix it up. So Google, the average team is together for 3 weeks, 3 weeks by design, right? They want to bring in some new blood, some chaos, a little bit, some new ideas. So, you know, you have to sort of accept that there's going to be some mistakes, which means, as someone famous said, you know, the war for talent is over. Talent has won. So these talented individuals, give them a chance to feel like they're making a difference, to be heard, to grow, to make mistakes, to lead a team. Once you empower that, then you give them an opportunity to put in a lot of discretionary effort to what they're doing. So money is a very weak motivator for performance at work, but having freedom, having choice, having a chance to innovate, working with a trusted team, and then the sense of purpose, and maybe we can talk about that for a second. So, so a couple of kinds of purpose. One is sort of transactional purpose, how we do business, how we take stuff in and push stuff out. I'm talking about a different kind of purpose, which I call transcendent purpose, why we exist as an organization. So this draws out of Peter Drucker and Edwards Deming, and Drucker and Deming said that at its core, every organization's purpose is to improve people's lives. That's the only reason you're paying for this good or service. For-profit, nonprofit, government, doesn't matter. And so organizations that embrace that purpose are much more productive because as social creatures, we want to feel like we're helping the humans at some deep level, right? So again, in experiments in my lab where we put in a social purpose, I had the same task without a social purpose, people are around 50% more productive when you tell them how you're helping the humans.

You did this with a gambling task, right? Did you start with a gambling task when you were looking at purpose?

We do that on a really boring data entry task. What we did was entering emails for alumni to hit them up for scholarship money. And we'd say, you know, the control condition is like, hey, this is boring. We need to be accurate and we'll pay you $15 an hour. And the purpose was, here's a student who got a scholarship, first time in their family anyone's ever gone to college. Her name is so-and-so. Here's a picture of her. And so you're helping her and people like her Yeah, people just much more, but they're still paying them $15 an hour. They just work a lot harder and more accurately. They entered more emails and they were more accurate in those emails.

So just holding up a photo of somebody and saying, you're helping this person, people like this person. Did it matter? Did you try it with different pictures of people? Like, did she have to look different? Did you change that? Did you look at susceptibility? I'm just curious. We did a bunch of different ways.

So we actually use Kiva, you know, Kiva, this micro-lending site. So, we use Kiva ads and we use like a whole bunch of different like African— Oh, great. Okay, cool. And we added in social purpose or non-social purpose. So same thing, we saw a much bigger reflection of oxytocin release. In this case, we're measuring that in electrical signals. And again, much more lending. I mean, you know, we're torturing people in the lab, right? And they're still donating money to Kiva to help these entrepreneurs. It's sort of weird. Humans are a really weird species. Like we're just too social. Settle it down, people. Be a loner like me and Stephen. Exactly.

One of Stephen's favorite sayings is, "Have a passion, have a purpose, and keep it to your damn self." So I'm curious as to how do you reconcile that? And I know there's also good research behind that statement, I think, Stephen, as well. But how do you reconcile that notion of the risks around kind of introducing organizational purpose just being seen as like trite and there being a lot of cynicism to it and stuff like that? How do you make that shift?

That's a good question, Ryan. So I call this lived purpose. It's got to be part of this. So I'll give you two quick examples. One is I was at LinkedIn a couple of years ago, and LinkedIn's purpose statement is, we are here to make our members more successful and more productive. So every group I met at LinkedIn, the first thing they said is, at LinkedIn, our purpose is— they just say it every time. And Jeff Weiner told me, former CEO, told me that's a screen. We're going to do a new project. Does it make our members more productive or more successful or both? If not, We probably shouldn't be doing it. We've got to go back and ask why we're doing this. So that's great. The second is the professional services company KPMG. Same thing, Rian. They sort of thought, oh, you know, we've been around forever. And so they went to the archives, got these beautiful posters, black and white posters of all these momentous times in history when KPMG was behind the scenes. So the Yalta Conference, end of World War II, their analysts were there doing some whatever. The Iran hostage crisis, KPMG Consultants were there trying to help the negotiations. So they put these posters up and, you know, for a week everyone was like, ah, this is awesome. And, you know, then you just get tired of it. So then they created this app, which was very aspirational. They said, well, you know, our consultants must have these kind of small stories about how they changed some business, how they improve people's lives. So the aspirational app was called 10,000 Stories. I thought, well, you know, in your spare time, maybe in 5 years we'll get 10,000 stories. They got 10,000 stories in 4 months, right? So people started putting in stories like, what I love coming to work at KPMG is doing this thing, or this gives me energy, this really turns me on. And last I looked, they had 30,000. People are really motivated by that, right? So I want to share my own story, and I'm actually interested in my downtime, in the whatever, on a break at lunch, in the bathroom, I'm going to read that app and go, oh, holy crap, there was a consultant in Ireland who helped this little mom-and-pop business that's been around for 200 years stay in business because They simplified their supply chain. Again, that's the weirdness. I would say humans are weird because of this deep social nature. We're gregariously social. We like to just hang out with other humans, whether they're friends or not, we'll make them friends if we can.

Have you seen any of the recent Survival of the Friendliest work? Totally the inversion. It's a new book on evolution called Survival of the Friendliest. I can't remember who wrote it. I was talking to Marc Bekoff about it, the great animal researcher, and he was talking about it. I like Marc. Yeah, I like Marc a lot too. Why did dogs succeed so well? They got very, very friendly. Why did humans succeed so well? And so it's looking at— it's Spencer upside down, right? Spencer was survival of the fittest. And they're like, no, no, no, no, totally wrong. It's actually survival of the friendliest. I was wondering if you'd seen any of that. Stuff, thought about it.

I haven't read the book, but there's kind of a long literature on like how do we sustain cooperative relationships and kind of best algorithm is called generous tit for tat. Yeah. That means you play nice, I play nice, you play nice. And then as I said earlier, God bless game theory. Yeah. But occasionally you're going to defect. If you defect, I can defect once and then I can show that I'm going to try to play nice again. So I think of oxytocin as the biological basis for the golden rule. If you play nice, Stephen, I'm likely to release oxytocin. I'm going to play nice too. Now there's an anti-golden rule, which seems to be driven by testosterone. You play bad, I'm going to play really bad. That's, you know, I just don't want to— as a social creature, I don't want to accept bad behavior because now I lose my reputation as a good social creature. I'm going to enforce those social norms. But even if you think of how many people you've repaired relationships with, like I have. You're like, ah, I can't stand this guy. And after all, like, all right, let's try again. I'm like, okay, all right. So you pissed me off some years ago and now I'm still friends with you again. I don't know why. No, I'm kidding. That's generous tit for tat. So I think that is kind of survival of the friendliest, right? So again, what oxytocin does is motivate us to engage with people we don't generally know. And we're getting, again, we're getting safety signals, trustworthiness signals. There's great value in building those relationships, right? And good things can come, or I can get murdered, right? That's the downside, or hurt or something.

Where are the exact lines that— and I know they overlap, so I know this is an overlapping question, I know that this isn't clean, but endorphins, serotonin, oxytocin, they're all three, they're all related. I mean, I guess you get a little bit of dopamine in there too, but they're all positive, so pro-social chemicals. They all show up. I know endorphins are a little more correlated with maternal bonding, but I also know it shows up in adult friendship. Do we know how that patterns out and why and when, and does it vary individual to individual on which chemicals are dominant in situations, things along those sorts of questions.

That's such a deep question. And I don't have a complete answer for you, but sort of two quick answers. One is we're adapting all the time. So our brain is updating our information. I guess the second— so we can get better at this. So again, we established that we're both introverts. So I probably did this research on social connection because of my own problems. I mean, in retrospect, or interest at least. I wasn't as good a social creature as I should be. So a couple of years ago I turned 50 and I had 4 surprise birthday parties because I started investing in relationships. Like, oh, holy crap, I'm probably not very good at this. So I can train myself to release more oxytocin, like talking to people on elevators. So one is we're all trainable. The second is you're right, there are personality traits slash genes that tend to promote or inhibit oxytocin release. And it's not introvert extrovert, which is interesting. So we found that individuals by personality who are more agreeable and more empathic tend to release more oxytocin for the same stimulus. So these are the warm, friendly people people, right, that naturally just have people around them and enjoy being around the humans. They're not exhausted like us when we're around too many people. And so they just naturally kind of have this connection advantage. And then lastly, you know, your underlying developmental history. As I mentioned, severe abuse, neglect, abandonment can inhibit this response, as can, for example, anxiety disorders. And so people who are quite anxious tend to have inhibited oxytocin release because they're sort of in this fear state. And so stress hormones are pretty effective at inhibiting oxytocin release as is testosterone. So, you know, think of the least empathic people on the planet, young males that all of us used to be, teenage boys. It's all about me, right? I don't really need to connect to people because I'm a little god. Every girl should want to have sex with me and every guy should look up to me.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. Thanks for listening to Flow Research Collective Radio. Before we dive back into our conversation, there's something to consider. It may be that today we are under-challenged. We're drowning in comfort. Now, in his book Antifragile, statistician Nassim Taleb pointed out something that's of key importance. Quote: Undercompensation from the absence of challenge degrades the best of the best. The best horses lose when they compete with slower ones and win against better rivals. Now, put another way, who we could be, or our highest potential, is squandered by safety, coddled by comfort. If you want to train with us at the Flow Research Collective, it will require boldness. But what's life without a little adventure, right? To learn more about how you can get more flow in your life and achieve your professional and personal goals in less time and with more ease, go to getmoreflow.com. If you're a good fit, we'd love to train with you.

All the best. Let's say I'm listening to this. Well, maybe I'm that sort of teenage boy and I'm a Machiavellian, you know, peak performer wanting to use trust to improve my results, whether it's in business or life or whatever it is. What's the right way to think about that at a broad level? Is the goal to become more trustworthy? Is the goal to do sort of, as you said, and get better socially? I mean, obviously it depends on the individual, but how do you think about taking action around trust to improve one's performance or results in general?

Yeah, I think what's kind of bottom line is that you get what you give. So if you work in service of other people, they're going to be connected to you. You become valuable. This is not new, but this is again the underlying science of oxytocin and the larger brain circuit that it activates. And so, you know, dating, don't be a jerk. But actually, if you're interested in that girl or guy, you know, dig into it. Like, you're a really interesting person. Tell me more about you. At work, intentionally form connections with people around you. Our brains just have to do that. There's no work Paul, there's no at-home Paul, it's just Paul, right? So I want to be generally interested in the people around me. I use the word love for people that I work with all the time. By the way, work with, not who work for me. I love them. I tell them all the time, man, I love you. You just are an amazing human being. And that means I love you as a— in the philia sense, right? It means I love you as a human. Like I always say, you can leave working for me anytime you want. Like, if you get a better job, I'm the first person who's going to be cheering for you. If I leave, I always want to keep you with me. Like I will try to, you know, move the whole group wherever we go, like my lab. I always want you to stay with me because I'm invested in you as a human being. But it also means I can always call people up that have worked with me in the past and say, hey, I got an idea, or I got a person who's looking for a job, or can you talk to me for half an hour, right? And really make sure that you're a good social partner for that. Then lastly, I think it'd be nice to get to flow. So, you know, this kind of neurologic substrates of flow that I don't think we fully understand, but sort of part of that we've captured, which is immersion, is really being fully committed both attentionally but also emotionally in the task you're doing. So I think Rhea's question was also thinking about golf or tennis, whatever. It's that kind of complete absorption into that state where you are reaching a level of enjoyment and perfection because you're not thinking about it. It's just doing. It's almost as if it's happening to you hitting that tennis ball. And we're starting to make progress on that, which I think is fascinating.

Paul, let me ask you a quick question on that. It's sort of related to something you said earlier, but it's also flow. I've been working a little bit with Andrew Huberman, who you know a little bit, and you know this about what happens in the first couple of seconds of flow. And we're not the first group to say this. There are people who've been saying this since the '70s. It does seem like at the front end of maybe not every flow state, but a lot of flow states, you get the fight response, which tends to come with a little bit of testosterone. And when we look at oxytocin, it seems to show up a little later on in the flow state. Is that because the testosterone that you need to sort of like get into the flow state, just tighten your focus on your way in? I don't know how long testosterone actually stays in your system and how that goes up and down and how that works, but does that seem in line with stuff you're looking at at all?

It does. So we're back to this lazy brain again. If I have no stimulus, I'm not going to engage neurologically. If I have too much stimulus, I'm overwhelmed. And so I think this is physiologic arousal. So noradrenaline, testosterone, cortisol, ACTH, epinephrine, just go through the list. And so I need that arousal response. I could get that from other people. I could get that from writing or working on a task by myself. So the arousal precedes the oxytocin response. So oxytocin is a social chemical. So if there's a social component, And that could be at a distance. It could be from a movie. It could be even— we haven't measured this, but I'm guessing from writing. You and I have talked about this, Stephen, about writing, having that kind of getting that flow state. So yeah, the arousal is this inverted U-curve like everything in biology. So I need some arousal before I'm going to pay the metabolic cost to release oxytocin and then get into that relaxed focus, right? Where you have focus, but you're not working hard on it. It's just happening. Stephen, I've talked about this a couple times on the phone, but writing does that where you go back the next day and read it or later that day and you go, "Who wrote this thing? I almost don't recognize it. It sounds like me, but I don't remember writing that thing." So that's the best, right? That's when you've really been in flow. And the neurologic component of that we called immersion. And so that's exactly what you said. It's an arousal response. I've got to be attentive to what's going on around me. Can't be asleep. And then the second is I've got to be really emotionally resonant with this. I have to really care about this. When those two things co-occur, it's a very weird neurologic state because you have this sympathetic arousal.

You get a valence and arousal basically?

Yes, exactly. It's not that I'm stepping on the brake and the gas at the same time, it's that I have nice switching, right? So I have enough arousal, but now I'm actually so relaxed I don't have to work hard at this thing anymore. So we've seen this in athletes, for example. So that's the classic example with the athletes.

Let me ask you a quick question. And we know this in flow. You were just sort of talking about this. You get, for example, you get sympathetic and parasympathetic activation at the same time, right, for fine-tuning, right? That's what you want for fine-tuning. Is oxytocin doing that with something else in the system for fine-tuning? It seems to be.

So I think at the level of the brain centrally, it seems to be dopamine. Right. It might also be noradrenaline. It is very difficult to assess this.

We've talked about this as well. How do you parse it out?

Yeah. In the peripheral nervous system, we actually see it with this kind of fast-acting arousal chemical, ACTH, long name, kind of the precursor for releasing cortisol. And so we can see that effect on the heart. We can see it in the sweats in the palm. And so, you know, there are ways to assess this fairly rapidly and ensure that it's happening. But yeah, I think it's a dopamine to oxytocin response. Again, I need the arousal first. I need some reason to be in this thing. And I think what's great about Flow Collective, honestly, just to kind of give you guys a plug, is to train people to be able to enter that state. That's the golden ticket. I want to be able to get in this state rapidly and stay in it for quite a while if possible.

I was thinking about you earlier today. I was talking to Anil Seth earlier today. Paul and I have been secretly thinking about some flow research for a long time. And Paul had the really great idea of introducing a behavioral component. And one of the things we were talking about is time dilation shows up in flow. So we can just literally ask people, how long do you think this lasted? So Anil, turns out, did that experiment unbeknownst to me, published it in Nature. I had no idea. He wasn't doing it around flow, but he was looking at— he wanted to know the foundational question, is time, is our perception of time, related to our processing of information, right? The more information we're processing, the slower things go. So he was just doing really cool work. We were showing people either like a pastoral scene, a busy city street, or a third scene, and he was using machine learning algorithms to code the amount of information in the scene. And then he was correlating with how long people said it would last. It was the exact same thing you and I were thinking about doing. Didn't have a flow layer to it, But it was, I was thinking about you today. I was like, oh wow, somebody else had that really good idea. The name of the paper, since you're now looking at for it, is Activity and Perceptual Classification Networks as a Basis for Human Subjective Time Perception.

Oh, that's great. I just wrote it down on a little pad of paper. Yeah, that's fabulous. He's a smart guy and a very nice guy.

Yeah. Oh yeah, I actually mentioned the two, so I know you know him. So weird.

Thank you for doing that. Yeah, it's so weird. First of all, we all sort of know each other for whatever reason. I think the subjective experience is super valuable. And that's what we can sort of control in a way, right? Is am I feeling like I'm in so sucked in this experience, I'm in flow? If I am, my performance will be high. But the second part is what's the underlying neuroscience of that, that I'm semi-consciously maybe manipulating. And I think that tells us about when this is available. So for example, when we're available to do this, when we were able to do this, Tiredness. Remember, this is a metabolically costly state. If I'm super tired and I haven't slept, it's going to be harder to be in flow. But arousal, a deadline, oh, that's a good motivator. So you have to think about the underlying environment that you're in that can help you reach that flow state.

Paul and Stephen, I'd love to get both of your input on this. How do you think about trust and oxytocin in the context of group flow and Keith Sawyer's research on group flow and the group flow triggers?

That's a great question.

I was actually going to ask Paul the exact same thing earlier. So that's awesome, Rian. I'll let— he's much smarter than I am, so I'll let him answer first.

Oh, no, you go. I don't know. You've studied it much more than I have.

So here's the other thing I want to— this is the place I want to start, which is slightly different, but I was looking very closely at what people mean by psychological safety, specifically in organizational context. And I was looking at how it relates to what Keith said were the 10 group flow triggers. And there's a couple of them that aren't really represented in what we mean by psychological safety. But a lot of what I look at when I read the psychological safety stuff, I'm like, these are group flow triggers. They don't seem to be any different. And by the way, they don't seem any different from kind of foundational oxytocin triggers. These are ways of cultivating Trust, in a sense, the one question I would have— and I'm going to shut up. I want you to answer this question. But the one question I do have is, do you see— is there evidence of group flow in low-trust organizations? And when does it show up in a low-trust situation is something I would wonder. Like, for example, people playing streetball, basketball on the street, right? You're coming together with strangers, often in urban environments and unsafe settings. You don't even know the people you're playing with. Which teams are more likely to produce flow and which aren't? Not that we're going to be able to perform this experiment, but I wonder about questions like those sorts of things, like in those high-stress situations. Because if you talk to the Navy SEALs, which I know you've done and things like that, those teams train together so— I mean, there's so much training there. You don't see it randomly. When it shows up randomly, I'm curious about that. But we're getting away from the topic of Keith Sawyer's work in group flow, and I want to kick it back to you.

Yeah, I don't think we have great evidence for this. We just have— my lab's done just a couple of studies on this. And it's usually actually fairly high stress, so really pushing that inverted U-curve hard. So now we're kind of in survival stress, and we've got to all solve this problem. So I'm certainly a big believer in not letting a good crisis go to waste. It's a great time to repair relationships, great time to just hunker down and get the work done. And so yeah, you learn a lot about people under stress. Right. So, and then after a while, you know, they're great, I think, flow triggers, or else you just can't stand them and you got to get away from them. So anyway, I think that's what we've seen, but it's really hard in experimental setting to push people to that extreme. Ethically, there's issues there. So for high-trust organizations, it's easy, like the SEALs, like, you know, we've done work at Herman Miller and Zappos, these companies that are, they cultivate trust. Intentionally. And then they can turn it on, turn it off. And by the way, in those, just like with the SEALs, when the stress is over, they dissipate that stress rapidly physiologically. So we measure them during work, but also as they stop working and it just disappears. So anyway, it's fun to do. So we did, you may know this, Stephen, or maybe we talked about it, but I've done experiments on myself on tandem skydiving. So one parachute, two guys, right? You got to trust your life to somebody. And I'm a tall person, so all the tall people are unstable because their center of gravity is high. So I had kind of moderate fear of heights just because, you know, if I'm walking across an overpass, you know, that railing is like at my hips. So if I trip, I could just go over. So anyway, first time I went, scared out of my mind. And I took my blood before and after. My stress hormones were up 400%, oxytocin up, I don't know, 10, 12%. Yeah, it was like— but then it cured my fear of heights immediately. I think I was 45 when I did this, cleared my fear of heights. I mean, I've done it a bunch of times for TV shows and take my blood before and after, and that was like pure joy. Like, I just want to get out. Let me skydive. It's super fun. So that's that kind of acclimation. But at first, I was over— kind of so stressed, so very tired.

Isn't that when your body goes— I love that feeling when your body goes, oh my God, I'm falling. I know this feeling, right? The feeling that like falling goes from this thing you never ever do to this thing, you're like, oh my God, I'm falling through the air and I'm familiar with this and I can be calm because I've done this before and I didn't die. It's a very strange thing to learn when you repeatedly jump out of things or off of things.

But it's sort of beautiful, right? I love it. You can't keep an old dog a new trick, right? It's possible.

So Paul, a number of years back, I think it was around 2011, you talked about social media potentially increasing oxytocin levels. I'm curious as to whether that's still the thinking. Obviously, a lot of anecdotal evidence is that people can feel disconnected after using social media or just with it in general. Can you give us a little bit of an update on the research there?

Not real update. We did a small study on this and looked at texting versus posting on social media versus video conferencing versus in-person. And then it scaled exactly the way you would think. In-person has the biggest bandwidth. And then video conferencing, not quite as good. And then it goes down, but it's modulated by the strength of that experience. So just to give you a funny anecdote to illustrate this, we recreate this experiment for a South Korean TV program at my lab in California. So we just put like the producers and the sound guys in the experiment and we're taking blood, measuring oxytocin before and after, blah, blah, blah, get the results, average. And then I looked and there was one outlier, which is this I don't know, 22-year-old production assistant guy in our study. And so I like emailed the producers. I'm like, average is fine. Whether this guy's in or not, we have a nice result. Good for your TV show. By the way, I'm just curious about what this guy was doing because he was like 100% increase in oxytocin, which is pretty rare unless you're having sex or really, you know, in love with somebody. And I said, I'm just, just kind of wondering. So they checked with him and he was posting to his girlfriend's Facebook page. Okay. So, so it's strength of connection, right? So it's not just the mode of connection, it's the strength of connection. So again, from what I said earlier, I'm guessing early in the relationship, right? Wasn't his girlfriend for 5 years and he was so young and had to be early. So he was crazy in love with her and probably posted sweet little things on Facebook. By the way, they post, we let them use all these media in private because we didn't want to inhibit what they would normally do. So I don't, I don't know what he was posting. But yeah, so connect to people around you. Higher bandwidth is better. And when safe, touching, hugging people, all good.

Just out of curiosity, have you ever looked at different social media, Twitter versus Facebook versus Snapchat, take your pick? I'm just curious about— I mean, I'm sure it's going to vary person to person. There's going to be individual variations and whatever. But I wonder if there's any patterns inherent in the medium themselves, if the medium is the message at a neurochemical level.

It's a great, great Marshall McLuhan play. Yeah, I don't— we haven't looked at it, so I don't have any information, but the variation is enormous. And so again, I think that's where we come back to compassion. Maybe I don't realize that Rion's having a bad day. He's just kind of jerky to me. So I think we all, you know, we very rapidly go to the fundamental attribution error and go, well, he's a bad person. Oh no, he's been nice to me for the last 3 years, but today he's a jerk, so now he's a bad person. No, he's probably just having a bad day. So I think if we think about the underlying neurochemical basis for kind of good and bad behavior, if you will, then there's a lot of inhibitors to oxytocin, to serotonin that may have nothing to do with me at all. I'm just getting the brunt of that. So I think really understanding that the brain is adapting all the time and we, the conscious person— I don't know how I said that. Anyway, our conscious senses, we just don't know. Right? I'm just being a jerk today. So think about the poor people we all live with, our romantic partners, our families, our friends, who have to put up with us sometimes having bad days. And that's when you love somebody, that you put up with crap from them because you realize they're not a bad person, just occasionally have bad days.

In the way that GABA works as a brake on dopamine, in a sense, back and forth, is there a counter to oxytocin at all?

Yeah, it seems to be either high levels of stress hormones. So really epinephrine is a very big break. So again, I can have lots— oxytocin's active in the brain for about 20 minutes once it's released. I can shut that down by hitting you with epinephrine. I can like, here's a guy with a knife. Oh wow, is that fast? Oh yes, fast. Oh wow, okay, cool. And the second is testosterone. Testosterone is actually, as you know, Stephen, a pretty slow, impotent molecule, but there's a high-octane version of it with a long name, abbreviated DHT. And DHT you can synthesize really rapidly from the testosterone in your bloodstream. So same thing, when that guy with the knife comes at me, I'll have an epinephrine response, I'll have a DHT response from testosterone, particularly if I'm male, I'll have a big aggressive response. You know, we've talked about this many times, but like when you've been in fights, like in a bar and someone, you know, well, epinephrine, testosterone, right? You're just gonna turn it on. If you have a good brain, hopefully like all of us, Hopefully you try to walk away and say, hey, sorry, I knocked your beer over, happy to buy you a new one. You know, I don't want my face all cut up, I'm too pretty, so I, you know, can't afford any more scars.

By the way, I just want to point out that there are like two 6'5" guys on the podcast and me. I'm the guy walking away, they're the guys walking in. Let me just point that out.

Paul, can you talk a little bit about The idea that oxytocin can also promote antisocial responses like envy or schadenfreude or gloating, or the role at least that it can play there.

Right. So this is complex. So those studies are based on synthetic oxytocin infusion. So I'm going to sledgehammer you with this neurochemical. And then, as we've established before, oxytocin makes you more empathic, more open to suggestibility. So those studies, primarily done in Netherlands by Carsten de Drew and some collaborators, basically prime people to behave badly. Those are the bad people, we're the good people. And then if you're more empathic because if you've been given oxytocin, you're going to respond to that experimental prime more strongly. So certainly we find in-group behavior, almost always in-group bias. So we actually did a study published last year in which— so that's synthetic oxytocin, I'm sledgehammering you. We asked, does your brain own oxytocin system mediate in-group bias or does it diminish it. So we actually measured blood draws before and after 400 people in randomly formed groups and groups are previously formed. We had them do tasks relative to their group. So these are soldiers marching, these were religious people singing or praying, this was people playing, you know, a board game. So all just sort of things that people normally do, measure the change in oxytocin. For the people who had a change in oxytocin that was positive, increased oxytocin, then we had these share the money tasks with in-group and out-group people. No difference. Once you've released oxytocin, absent a scary stimulus to shut that down, actually, we released— we eliminated that out-group bias completely with endogenous oxytocin. So again, I think we have to be careful of literature. It's really easy. And since we published this protocol in 2005 of synthetic oxytocin infusion up the nose into the brain, zillions of people have published work. But if I'm drugging you, I need to know that that brain system utilizing oxytocin is active in that task. Otherwise, I'm just drugging you. I could give you methamphetamine and have you do something and then tell a bullshit story about dopamine, right? So again, I think, you know, what we started doing in the early 2000s was ask, what does oxytocin do naturally? And then to show causation, I can infuse the oxytocin and see if I can then change that behavior. But it'd be like giving you cocaine or methamphetamine and say, oh, that makes you a compulsive gambler. Not really. Your brain's own dopamine actually seldom does that without some kind of trauma or genetic disorder, right? So it just doesn't normally function that way. So potentially, all right? So we studied rookie players years ago. By the way, best blood draws ever. I'm a phlebotomist, but I don't take blood all the time. So, you know, those guys have veins like pipes. I could take blood blindfolded. It's juicy. Yeah. So we measured oxycodone before and after they warmed up before a match. And another neurochemical. So we saw increases in testosterone, in cortisol, in oxytocin. So think of rugby, right? I have to have in-group cooperation, out-group aggression. So all those things are changing as these guys are warming up. They're getting ready to go hard. But at the same time, I don't want to beat the crap out of my own player, right? So think of the ballet your brain has to do to modulate that. It's very sensitive. So again, I can push on one of those neurochemical levers more strongly and get some of that behavior. So it's very difficult to get proactive aggression if I push on testosterone. I have to create, you know, supra-physiologic doses to get people to just be in a rage. It's the kind of the roid rage from weightlifters who have used steroids. It's hard to do. You've really got to push that lever so hard. It's the same with oxytocin. I can push on that lever, and if I'm sledgehammering you with that drug, I can do it. But your brain's own oxytocin, Doesn't seem, as far as we can tell, it doesn't seem to do it. And even if I sledgehammer you with oxytocin infusion in the next study out of Israel a couple of years ago, and I don't give you that negative prime, I just have in-group, out-group, I see no difference between that behavior and placebo. So it's the prime important there.

Yeah. It's a susceptibility thing, huh? We mentioned this earlier.

We can be a little bit gullible, right? So we are sucked in like with the con men because we have this innate social nature and we're biased towards cooperation. So we should put a check on that. Stephen, when I was working on my first book, I had a blog on Psychology Today, and I would get 1,000 reads. Anyway, I had one blog that got, last I looked, 250,000 reads. It was called How to Run a Con. Just people out of the world, district attorneys and individuals talking about how to run a con.

When you were at Psychology Today, it was like me, you, Scott Barry Kaufman. There were like, you know what I mean? There were like 20 of us who were the original Psychology Today bloggers. Contributors, yes. I think a lot of us are still working together.

10, 15 years later. Right. So again, I think we're all interested in that because we realize, oh crap, I could be vulnerable. But if I'm not vulnerable, I'm not going to connect. I don't get the benefit from relationships. So it's that balance.

On the rugby topic there, Paul, I don't know if you're familiar with the haka, the New Zealand All Blacks pregame ritual. It's pretty epic. Is that what's happening neurobiologically there?

I'm sure. Yeah, I'm actually sure. So again, it's interesting that oxytocin plays in that, right? Because they still got to bond to those guys and suffering, you know, just like the SEALs, just like even basic training, suffering is a great way to build those bonds more rapidly. So here's an example for all the single folks out there. On your first date with that person that you're crazy about, do something really exciting, ride a roller coaster, go for a helicopter ride, go skydiving, and that'll be like, you know, 5 dates, right? Because you're going to have this shared experience that's kind of scary, releases these neurochemicals for arousal, but also for oxytocin. So now I'm going to feel really close to you. And depending on what your goals are with this person, you know, things could advance much more rapidly than if you just, you know, go to a movie.

By the way, I tell people the exact same advice on the back end of that same situation. If you're trying to get over heartbreak, go skydiving. Oh yeah, for sure. Like, exactly. It's like a new memory. Just washes it right out. Yeah, I know.

And that's the interesting thing too. It's actually— we did some experiments. It's actually easy to wash out your brain, right? Anything that's really cognitively totally engaging like flow, it just creates new memories, new pathways in. Absolutely. Meditation. So yeah.

We hear so much about trauma, right? We hear the opposite end of the spectrum and we hear people say it's laid in so deep and yet the evidence is pretty consistent that you can overwrite that stuff pretty quickly.

Yeah. I think the term of art now is post-traumatic growth, right? You know, trauma. I think Jocko Willink, who's a former Navy SEAL, talks about embracing the suck, right? You got to get through the suck and you should embrace it as an opportunity to kind of change those patterns in your brain. And again, your lazy brain just wants to stick with those habits you've always had. So pick the patterns, do something new, grow.

So obviously we're talking about trust in the context of groups and individuals. People use the phrase or the term, I should say, trust a lot with reference to the idea of faith a little more, let's say having trust in the fact that everything's going to work out, or having trust in, you know, a process or something like that. Is there neurobiological similarity between trust in that faith context and trust in the context that we've been talking about?

We investigated that. We tried every way possible to induce kind of a sense of awe or transcendence to people from helmets that block out all your sensory input, people will hallucinate, to James Earl Jones reading Bible passages in the voice of God, mountain sunsets. It seems very difficult to get people into these states. So I think, again, this is where I think some training into getting yourself into flow is very important. Yeah, we don't seem to be able to replicate those enough to have confidence, but it doesn't seem to be an oxytocin effect. I think it's much more maybe dopamine. Maybe some of their neurochemicals.

It's just a semantic similarity, basically.

I think it is, yeah.

What management approaches are outdated when it comes to the science of trust and high-performing organizations? And just as a wrapping question off the back of that, what are some of the absolute kind of don't-dos with respect to trust based on your research?

Let's do the don't-dos 'cause they're so much fun. I think this is all the old, you know, Jack Welch, rest in peace, Jack Welch 1.0. So, you know, when he retired from running GE, he became a much different person. And I have a quote in my book, Trust Factor, from him saying, you know, Management 2.0 is all about trust. But when he was Neutron Jack, you know, he was famous for yelling at people. You know, fear is a very great— it's a good short-term motivator, but it's a very poor long-term motivator, right? So we acclimate to fear pretty quickly, like skydiving. But oxytocin doesn't seem to have that acclimation effect. The more I release oxytocin, the more I tend to release it. I become biased towards being a better connector, a better human, a better teammate. So, you know, focus on the teamwork, the trust side. As I mentioned, dominance displays. If you're the leader of a group, sit in the back of the room in a meeting. Yeah. Oh, that, that famous Amy Cuddy stuff that didn't work out on power poses.

So anyway, I don't know about— did you see the meta-analysis? Amy did a really good meta-analysis of all the work that's been done on it. I think there's— the evidence is tilting in her favor again.

Oh, is it again? Oh yeah, yeah.

In fact, I was, I was just communicating with Amy about a study. She didn't do the study, somebody else did. It was really, really good cooperative study. But I like— I, I think things are coming back in her direction. I think it did. I think there's enough stuff that is holding up. Interesting.

Okay. So I withdraw my— I liked Amy too. So yeah. Okay. Anyway, so the bad things: dominance displays, high levels of stress. As a leader, I want to push you into that kind of peak of that U-curve. I don't want people to be happy at work. So I've worked for years at Zappos as a consultant, and Tony Hsieh is an amazing guy, but he was always about happy workers are productive workers. The evidence is the other direction. When you're productive, you're satisfied. Oh, I did something important today, right? It's like when you run that extra mile or whatever you're doing working out. Like, oh man, I killed it today. I'm going to have a great day. So it's giving people challenges, allowing them to grow. And as I said, make mistakes and give them a sense of satisfaction. If it's happiness—

I always tell people that happiness is empty calories. Oh, perfect. It's empty calories. I always— because the easiest thing when I talk about this, the easiest thing I can always say is just think about everything in your life that you're actually proud of? Was any of it given to you? Nobody, right? If you ask me, what are you proud of? What have you done? What have you accomplished? What makes you really— what gives your life meaning? Those kinds of important questions, you never ever hear the— even if it's true, you never hear the, I won the lottery and then they gave me $10 million. That's not the stories you hear. You hear the, I wanted to learn how to tie my shoes, so I whatever it is, right? It's always the thing that you worked really hard and overcame or had to— you never ever hear the like, oh yeah, I just, I came home and there was a new car in my driveway. It doesn't work that way. We don't like it when it's just given to us. We like to earn it.

And after we were together in Brazil, I went to Southern Brazil and did a 3-hour lecture on the neuroscience of happiness. And I said, if it's just this physiologic state, take heroin or cocaine or, you know, How's that work out for people who do that? Yeah, not so well, right? So you can't cheat the system, right? It's gotta be, it's gotta be a process. You gotta earn it. Yeah. So anyway, but you can create an organization in which people can do that. They can, if you will, level up, right? Like, holy crap, I'm doing more now. And I think from a leadership perspective, sometimes you need to push people to do that. Hey, you know what? It's time for you to take on more responsibility. You've been here, you've been killing it. Here's a project I want you to lead. And at least in my academic lab and my company, we move that around, right? If we're not making progress and someone's running a project, we just swap them out. Again, like the Google thing, add some chaos. So, you know what, Stephen, you know, we're missing milestones? No problem. I'm going to have you move to this other group, and then Rayyan's going to pick up leading this project, and we'll see if we can hit these milestones. So I think from a leadership perspective, it's really kind of a servant leader model. If you're a leader, You've really got to empower those individuals who are on the front lines creating value to be successful and support them. So I love the 5-minute stand-up daily huddle. Let's just get together for 5 minutes this morning. If you're standing, in the old days when we saw each other, if you're standing, you're not going to BS around, even though I said, you know, a little bit of chitchat's fine. What we're seeing virtually, by the way, in meetings, there's a little evidence for this from Accenture, that because those meetings by video conference are just kind of less engaging, less immersive in my language, is doing more meetings but shorter. So in my company, we used to do a 1-hour morning meeting, too exhausting, right? So now we do half an hour in the morning and we do another half an hour in the afternoon. Actually, it's much more effective. Um, that's, again, from a leadership perspective, checking in. I'm a big believer in not having an office, just moving around. I'm a helper dude. My job is to make sure you guys are not getting stuck. If I I'll get you unstuck if you are. That's my job.

Final question for you, Paul. Maybe it relates is the research genie question that we love to ask, which is basically if you could click your fingers and instantly answer any scientific question, what would that question be? You know, I have to—

I'm stalling a little bit for time, but I've had the great privilege of, you know, for 25 years having an academic lab and a lot of freedom. Sometimes with resources, sometimes without them, to actually ask a lot of questions. I know, Stephen, you've had the same privilege too of putting together people to ask really interesting questions. It's going to sound so weird to you guys, but I think the most interesting question I don't understand well is the question of love. I think it's so weird that we tolerate people to live with us. Like even animals, we've done a fair amount of work with animals and relationship with dogs and cats and monkeys. And it's such a weird thing that you feel like this is the most important thing in your life. People who die, our parents, and we still love them. What's that about, right? Is that a fantasy? Is that a— I mean, I know there's a physiologic mechanism there, but, you know, why is 98% of the songs on the radio about love? You know, I think that it's a very, very deep fundamental question, a part of human nature. And I think what's interesting from the work we've done is empathy, trust, oxytocin, they're all in the same pathway of love. And number 3, love is all there is. Paul, that's such a warm and heartfelt, deep sentiment.

I love the fact that you come on, you're so open, you're honest. I appreciate that.

Paul, where can people find out more? You want to quickly mention your books and your work so people can dive deeper with you?

Best place is getimmersion.com or pauljazak.com. Find out everything I'm doing, download free papers, send me hate mail, whatever you like.

Yeah. And if you guys haven't read Trust Factor, Paul's book, it's fantastic. Great, great, great, great, great read. I think it's one of those kind of foundational neuroscience books that everybody talks about for the past 20 years. So good job on that also.

Thanks, Tom Paul.

This is epic. Thank you, guys. It was super fun. That's so nice to see you both.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. It feels good to pummel your to-do list and free up more space in your life. On the subject of punching things, meet Krista Stryker. She's an amateur boxer, journalist, entrepreneur, and world-renowned fitness expert. Here's what she had to say about training with us at the Flow Research Collective. Quote: Before learning about flow, I felt like life was just kind of happening to me. I felt there was no real control over it. Why sometimes I have good days and sometimes I have bad days. After completing Zero to Dangerous, my life is a lot more intentional now. Being in flow has helped me to complete my second book as a writer and prepare for my next fight as an amateur boxer, and I can't thank the Flow Research Collective enough for it. That's epic to hear, Krista. We're super stoked that you shared that with us. And if you're listening in and you want to take back control of your time, your work, and your mind, Go to getmoreflow.com. We'd love to work with you to achieve your boldest goals in less time and with more ease. Again, just go to getmoreflow.com to get started.

All the best.

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