When Learning Becomes Procrastination: How Brilliant Minds Delay the Work That Matters

We ran everybody's data through ChatGPT and came up with the 4 biggest issues people faced in this class and turned them into topics for conversation. And so we have Dr. Sarah Sarkis, who's probably, in my opinion, the smartest clinical psychologist in the world right now. Scott Barry Kaufman. So we have 3 different peak performance perspectives. I figured we'd just go in a circle for 3 or 4 topics and then open it up for questions. Does it make sense? So I wanted to start with accountability and freestyling. So topic 1 was accountability, both to self and others. And by freestyling, usually what I meant is people will start in with practice and then very quickly go back to old behaviors. Very quickly go back to tried and true rather than staying with something new. So when we're facing accountability challenges and freestyling challenges, what do you do? And what do you do?

Okay, so first I would say that we're all human and like humans do this. We like try stuff and then we fall out of habit and then we get back in. So first I would be try to be very like neutral about how I interpreted my accountability because I don't want shame to get involved and that will like further derail your motivation to get back in, right? So first is I'm gonna try to be neutral with myself and then the way that I do it is I try to break it down to the smallest increment, the smallest viable increment. I assume it's an energy management issue because if I'm, you know, you have to say like am I passionate about this? If your answer there is no, Move on. You're always gonna face accountability issues, but I would try to get down to seeing it as an energy management issue, and I would try to do the smallest viable dose repetitively, 'cause you need consistency to get that dopamine kind of rolling around in there for some wins, and then I would replicate that. So let's take movement, for example, right? So when I find myself falling out of like my comfortable commitment with movement, I immediately bring it down to doses that feel like just doable. So like 15 minutes versus telling myself it has to be some kind of like grand gesture. I just force myself into the 1% dose that I can repeat consistently. 'Cause you're probably trying to rely on discipline and you could rely on something cheaper, which is consistency. And if you dose it to consistency, you'll often get yourself out of your kind of, call it a rut, even though I'm suspicious it's not always a rut. Sometimes people's expectations are wildly wrong, right? And so all of that could be, helpful.

I love that answer. Yeah, another one that's really common in the literature. I love that answer too. Yeah, another one that's really common, which to me just seems obvious, but really setting up a time where you get to do something hedonistic if you accomplish a certain goal, you know, like, but I'm not, you know, gonna be able to have that ice cream unless I do these 3 chapters and write these 2 chapters, but have other people hold you accountable that you're not eating the ice cream, you know, but But that works for me if I have like a hedonistic goal.

Yeah, that's a great one. Like I actually got through the EPPP license doing that. I would like study for 45 minutes and then give myself a 15-minute reward, like a maximum 15-minute reward. And you can, it sort of like tricks your brain into some feel-good chemicals when you're doing something you kind of don't wanna do.

I tuck it at the end of a really hard task before a break. I'll write for 4 hours, finish the morning writing, and I'll stop.

Don't try to replicate that.

Yeah, but I'll stop at 20 minutes early, and then I'll do the thing that I've been delaying because I've already gotten all the focus from the thing that I'm trained— my brain's trained to focus while writing. I'll cut the writing early, and I'll take the extra focus and put it towards the thing I'm not wanting to do because then I don't have to retrain focus for it.

When I came to your Flow for Writers in 2016, the best— I mean, there was so much, but one of the things that that really stuck with me that I thought, it was like it never dawned on me. You were like, stop riding the train to the station. It's greedy. It's greedy. Get off of the focus and concentration and output train 20 minutes before you hit crash because that's credits in your energetic bank that you can later use strategically in ways that you want to. And, you know, we have a certain amount of energy that we can spend for the things we feel interested in. So that's sort of that philosophy even more tweaked, and I like it.

It's a flow idea also. So usually by the time you notice you're in flow, you're actually coming out. You don't tend to know when dopamine starts getting replaced by serotonin at the tail end of a flow state, tends to be when you pop back into consciousness. It's also when the feelings tend to turn back on, because flow is an emotionally neutral state, because we don't need emotions to guide us if we're performing at our best. So you tend to notice, oh, I'm feeling really good, sort of at a certain point. When that shows up, it's usually your brain telling you you're starting to slip out of the flow state. And if you kill it at that moment, you won't exhaust all your neurochemistry. So the next time you try to get back into flow, it'll get it'll be easier. This is a writing idea that goes way back. It was Hemingway who everybody credits with talking about it first, but he used to quit writing when he was most excited, 'cause there's nothing harder than facing a blank page. So you stop writing when you're most excited, when you come back to it the next day, you get that energy back. But he would literally stop in the middle of a sentence and just like break off for the day. And I just poured it in and started looking at it. All right, good.

What do you mean by freestyling?

Freestyling is— yeah, I mean, so one of the things, and almost every single person that I worked with did this a couple of times where we would assign something and the whole goal was we're all going to train the same thing together so we can talk about it and we can co-train. Those are the commitments you made to yourself and other people. And I talked to most of you about 2 weeks after we made those first commitments together. And of the things that people were doing, at least 3 or 4 people were like, oh yeah, I tried the Vipassana, but it really wasn't for my thing. And I like this app better. And I went back to the app and I've been using that instead. The app wasn't designed to work synergistically with everything else, but it was what you were very comfortable with. So people, a lot of people went, okay, I just spent a lot of money for this course and I'm in it, but it's 10 days in and now I've returned to my old habit. And nobody in the group actually caught it. Like nobody was like, oh yeah, I probably shouldn't have done that. It was probably like you, it just everybody sort of returned to the medium. So that's what I mean by freestyle.

This is why I love humans. And why I have job security is that we all do this, right? We all eventually show up to who we are, right? So that is awesome. That is exactly why humans are so fascinating, 'cause we will, we have something.

When she says fascinating, she sort of means like a bug under a microscope.

Let's just be honest.

Of which I'm under the microscope too.

There's a great literature looking at the difference between harmonious passion and obsessive passion, but Valoran does. And they find— so there's some nuance here. The extent to which— so having identity can be incredibly powerful and motivating, but it depends how it's integrated with the rest of you. So if you were to tell me to just— if you were to force me to wake up tomorrow and have, I am an athlete, and then I look at myself in the mirror and I know damn well I'm not, it's not going to motivate me. But if I really start to— see some earned progress towards that and then decide, you know, oh, I authentically can integrate that. And it also makes me feel good when I integrate it. It doesn't make me feel obsessive. It makes me feel harmoniously integrated. You know, it feels natural that I'm integrating this into my identity. Then it actually can be a huge motivator, but depends how it's integrated.

In, in Art of Impossible, I talk about the 6 different kinds of grit and how they all sort of need to be trained differently. So some of it is just like standard perseverance is trained, you know what I mean? Like you train perseverance by instead of doing 10 reps at the gym, you do an 11th, right? But like a little bit, a tiny dose, as Sarah said, tiny dose repeatedly. Because what you really want to convince yourself is that you're the kind of person who can do that 11th rep. Right? Like, and, and move that. But grit's interesting in that way because it's, it tends to be fairly skill-specific. So you have to sort of like train each of the grit skills, right? Persistence is very different from training weaknesses, right? Which is a different kind of grit. That's often of the grit skills that tends to, in my experience, you guys might have seen stuff different, that tends to be the hardest one I've seen because it's the most unpleasant, right? Our weaknesses exist for, for real reasons. But also it's the one that as you start to make progress in, it's sort of amazing. But it's always with training week, at least my experience, two steps forward, one step back, right? Because you're always going to slip with that. It's going to take a lot longer.

Yeah.

Which is why I still can't speak French.

I had a student ask me in class the other day a really good question. I was like, I want to ask Steven this question. Because I was talking about dopamine and how it has a motivating force on us. But he's like, well, what do you make of these podcast bros who fetishize hard work? But what's motivating them? Because they don't have the— there's something that some people have where they just, in a sort of masochistic way, love hard work, even when there's not the dopamine pumping through their system. It's easier when you have the dopamine motivating you, but what if you really don't? Like, for most of us, if we're not feeling good going to the gym, it's really gonna be a slog. But then there's a minority group of people where they definitely feel that, but they're like, I'm gonna do it, and then I'm gonna brag on social media about it. So maybe there's a social media—

Yeah, there's a reward. There's a reward.

Yeah, it's the dopamine.

But it's on the other end of recognition.

How can we engineer that for ourselves then?

Yeah. That also tells me that they're much more addicted to the pro-social neurochemicals, right? Like, yeah, if you were to like ask them what drugs they like, I'll bet you're gonna end up with MDMA much more than cocaine, right? You're gonna get— you're gonna end up— yeah, I don't think he's done— yeah, I don't think he's done a lot of drugs. I don't think he's a lot of drugs. He's also— but so with Huberman, this is the other thing, you've been into a skater, he He grew up as a skater, and most skaters are wired for mastery. That's their drug, right? Because skating is about— you will fall. Yeah, to learn any trick, you'll fall 1,000 times before you actually execute it. So mastery tends to be that drug, which is also dopamine, but it's much slower release. Yeah. Stuart Brand, there's a— this I don't understand, but Stuart Brand once made the comment, and I've I think I talked about it with you guys, that the only sustainable happiness is the satisfaction of a job well done. And I think he's kind of right, but I also think the rewards that you get for like after a job well done, like a long project, that kind of, which what really underpins grit, it's dopamine plus, and I don't know what else you're getting. And I don't think people have, like it hasn't been looked at that as far as I can tell, 'cause how do you study long-term success? It's tricky.

I also wonder about— I'm fascinated with neurochemical interactions. I know you are as well. I think dopamine and testosterone is a fascinating combination.

Or vasopressin.

Yeah, for sure. It leads to some very unique effects where you— yeah, there's like a motivation to dominate.

Dominate, for sure.

Mixed in with— yeah, but anyway.

Yeah, and to repeat, right, to over and over again.

What is mastery? Mastery is dominating. Yeah, master is dominating, not a person, not a person, but dominance and the process, control.

Well, control, yeah, but control is the— I mean, control tends to be the ultimate high anyways, right? One of the reasons flow feels so good is that sense of control, and control immediately, like at a level of ethology, is safety and security. So, right, control is really about safety and security more than anything else. All right, we're gonna move forward. Overcommitment and overschedule. Oh, Whit, for this group? I think this is everybody in this room except for Sandra, who may be overcommitted to travel right now, right? Like, yeah, a room full of overachievers. Scott, Sarah, how do you deal with it? So I know you got a lot to say, you go. Look at you, you're all excited.

Yeah, the overscheduling is like the, it's like the death of, we're not sovereign on the overscheduling, right? So all that real estate is just eaten up doing things that aren't moving you toward the thing you're focused on. So one of the things is do a ruthless meetings audit. That's like one of the first things that I'll have people do. And there's like 3 categories that I want you to look at. One is like meetings that you— somebody else leads, right? So on those ones, like high, hard goal, agenda, all the things that will help that time not be squandered, because time is the only thing that's always running out on us. We can have more money, more travel, more everything, but time that it's gone when it's gone. So first is like those meetings have to be run with a strategic priority to engineer flow and peak performance in your workplace, right, and in your life. Second is cut every meeting by 10 minutes and don't schedule that 10 minutes. You will accumulate— by the way, now that the meeting's being run tighter, you have those 10 minutes. 10 minutes. You will accumulate by the end of the day an amount of time that you can both use as micro-breaks to feedback the debt of exertion in flow. It's very expensive to be in flow. You have to pay that back. That's why the fourth cycle is recovery. So you can do all kinds of— there's super interesting stuff on micro-breaks. So that's the second one. And the third one is that you are going to tell everybody that you're taking, you're cutting these meetings short, why you're cutting it short, and you're gonna ask that they not schedule anything else in those minutes that they get back. And then you're gonna do things that help your body, literally your body, have a better access to peak performance or flow. So like that scheduling thing, you should be able to clear significant real estate. Then we go, oh, see, number 1, when we start freestyling again, right? And then start over, do it again, start again. Like, okay, assume you're gonna regress to your mean and then start again 'cause it's that real estate of time. Time and energy is the equation that we're trying to get back and that's not easy in busy lives. Thank you.

You're welcome. Scott?

Well, that was just great and I don't have much to add from a practical viewpoint, just philosophical viewpoint. When we talk about flow, overcommitment is really one of the greatest enemies of flow. Simplicity is the greatest thing you can do for focus and just the way our consciousness works, the way working memory works, the more you can just clear out of your working memory Even to— if I could give any practical advice, it would be unload as much stuff as possible onto paper or out of— get it out of your head before you start engaging in a task that you want to get into flow to. Spend all the preparatory work before the flow, you know, period. Just getting whatever crap is in your head, your concern, even just like journaling about your mother, is she gonna call me today, and then this and that. Whatever, I don't know where I got that example, but I'm just saying like—

Stay off my mom. Why can't you talk about my mom?

No, I'm sorry, I was talking about my mom. But this guy, he got in mafia mode all of a sudden. Have you ever seen Stephen in mafia mode? It's cute, it's cute. Yeah, but I do, you know, just get unloading as much as you can. Just think of it from a working memory perspective, like as a cognitive scientist. Simplicity and this like I have this one thing and this one thing only that I'm gonna focus on for the next hour is the most conducive thing you can do for flow.

I guess I would just say one more thing that these are tactical and practical and they're very helpful. Encased inside of us is a psychology. So you're often gonna find that inside the crime scene of overcommitments, you're gonna find all kinds of psychological tendencies that you have, and those tentacles run deep. They're not surface-based. That's why we keep repeating them. So when you find those, when you are aware that, oh, oh, it's me, oh, I'm the problem here, when your fingerprints keep showing up that way, you can tackle that psychologically, and it's really worthwhile because it amplifies the behavioral things you'll do, like getting your schedule to look civilized.

I think Dan Sullivan has a phrase, I might have said it to some of you guys, if you're always putting out fires, you might be an arsonist.

The arsonist.

It's great. Yeah, it's a really good phrase. And the thing I've noticed with over-scheduling, and I saw it a lot sort of in this group. People are really good about it until they start getting a lot of flow. And when you start getting into flow, right, productivity goes through the roof and people will be like, oh my God, I'm so productive, and they'll overschedule. And then, you know, life gets in the way and knocks you out of flow, and suddenly you've got a schedule that would be fine if you were in flow all day long, but if you're not in flow you're going to not be able to get through it. So I always— I like to keep extra time in my schedule just in case shit is going to go wrong, right? Because it's sooner or later, it's— I mean, it's very rare that any of us get through a day, let alone a week, without some big fire.

Entropy. Yeah.

Gravity always wins. It's called a rule. It's called a rule. There's an ego boost that comes from hard work, right? For me, for sure, for sure, it was one of the first things, like when I was sort of building my ego and wasn't good at a lot of things. The fact that I could work hard was something that I could build on, right? I could build my sense of self on top of that identity got built out of I may be bad at everything, but I'm just not gonna fucking quit, and I'm just gonna keep going. So I think—

And you made it.

Right, but you made it, but you get to a certain point where like what got you there isn't what you need anymore.

So have you chilled on that significantly now? Like what's the arc of the trajectory?

Me? Yeah, I haven't.

He told me 4 years ago he was gonna take a break to take a year off of writing a book. And he published 6. So now I tell him, I'm like, this is your— you have a condition. It's good. But—

How do we treat the condition?

Yeah, so I was gonna say too that you were saying it is good for the world. But, you know, it's like, oh, and you made it. But, you know, everything costs something. You will find there are an endless array of both Typically it's an unconscious drive that is pulling people. And the really wild thing about our best attributes is that when you flip it over, it's our worst quality. So you can't take a sledgehammer to it. Like, you have to work with a scalpel. You have to work within the bounds of your own psychology. So you will find stuff stuff there that is a recurring pattern for you. I'd look for themes, themes in your life, emotional themes that keep coming up. That's what I'd be listening for. Um, in your own process, I would pay attention to where you feel stagnant or that you're here again, like this kind of feeling of repetition. And there's data there for you. Scott gave a great hint that like that loose journaling You know, we want to get down to where like the unconscious and intuition and like all of that is percolating. And you'll find your patterns. They emerge. And once you— the unconscious is one direction. Like when it's unconscious, it's completely unconscious. Once it's conscious, it can't be unconscious again. You can deny it. You can forget it. You can numb it. You can move it away in all kinds of ways. You can compartmentalize it. but it is conscious now. You are working around a conscious realization of like, huh. And that's powerful. And it moves in stages, like in increments over time. And I'm vague because I don't know you, but that process unfolds for humans agnostically to the— yeah.

I also think we underestimate the extent to which emotions take up residence in our working memory. So I think journaling can also be a really good tool for processing emotions in a way so it's not such a big burden on your mental load. It's just very hard to get in a flow state if you're mentally—

Burdened. That's a good way. Emotionally burdened with your thoughts.

Since working memory, most people tap out at 4 concepts. Do you think on an emotional—

Tap out? I like the way you put that. Like he's wrestling.

Do you think emotions take up more space than a concept?

Yeah. Me too. Yeah.

Yeah. I haven't seen anybody—

Because of their resonance. Because of the intensity.

Okay, so I'm a humanistic psychologist, so I look at it from like a role of, what is your daimonic? I think it takes over the whole person. It's not just does it take up more, it takes up all of you. If you're in a state of anger because someone else has a different political opinion than you, that becomes who you are in that moment, and it's all of your working memory. It's like all that you care about. It's like, you know—

It hijacks the system.

Oh, great way of putting it.

Yeah, yeah.

We don't wanna get, I mean, hijacking is terrible for flow, right?

It's both norepinephrine, right? Full curiosity, excitement, anxiety— it's all norepinephrine. So it's really about how much, how much norepinephrine is in your system and how you're framing it.

How do you frame it? How do you cognitively decide to—

yeah, the context.

And most of norepinephrine, by the way, this is important, it's mostly bottom-up, right? So it's mostly an automatic thing that you You can't touch. Yeah, the stronger the fear, the harder it is to sort of reframe because there's less ability to get in there because it's so bottom-up.

Well, and this is something I was gonna say, which you're getting to, which is that because that norepinephrine narrows the options we can see, the options are out there, we just can't come up with them. I often think that if you, go neck down to relieve the, so try not to solve like a thing that's up here with a thing that's up here. So I often think like that's why breathwork, movement, change of scene, like literally getting up and doing something can often, not just with anger, but in general when you are up here, you often have to disrupt it from a neck-down solution, I find like just anecdotally, people get better results with that to get unstuck.

All right, we're gonna move on to the next one, which was a bunch of people, and we're all geeks up here, so I think we've fallen prey to this as well, where research becomes a form of procrastination. Like how do you know when you've learned enough about the thing thing that you're researching to do something with it. I have a whole system that I sort of developed as a journalist. My first— well, for me, I look for two things. One, I look for— I always like to peer— this was a thing I got to do as a journalist, so I could talk, reach out to experts, and I always felt I knew enough when experts were telling me I was asking good questions, which meant I could think inside the subject. I was thinking properly inside the subject. So that was always sort of like the first thought that once smart people started saying, no, these are really good questions, I felt like I had learned enough to like turn it into an article, to write about it, right? That sort of thing. That was one of the things I really looked for. I was wondering. What about you guys?

I have a basic philosophy about procrastination that it's like the original nootropic. You know, it's like driving urgency, right? So anytime you're engaging in something that's avoidant like that, what you're probably trying to do energetically is get the nootropic that is urgency, which makes us then, right? So procrastination as a philosophy philosophy is a great boneyard to go looking around at, you know, where you are delaying starting because you're looking for a cheaper, low-hanging source of motivation, okay? And that's in the urgency, okay? But it burns dirty, right? So it takes a lot from us. On the back end of it, you have to pay back this debt from procrastination that isn't actually worth the time you got between wanting to start and starting, right? So that's just like a basic philosophy about procrastination, but the overindulging in research, like just needing constant analysis, what's the phrase? Analysis paralysis.

Paralysis.

Yeah, yeah. I think if you start to see it as another form of, trying to delay, delay, delay. You can move through it. And then the other thing, which sounds trite, but just start. Like again, minimal viable dose, whatever it is. You're probably up against something about I'm not ready, I'm not perfect, it's not perfect, I don't know what I'm doing. And all of those things to some degree are true and will be even when you know what you're doing. And think you have a plan and all of that. So it's like a— it's a fight for control. And if you untangle it that way, often you'll tire of yourself and you'll start.

You know, this may be more writing specific, but one of the things I see a lot, people don't want to start writing a thing until they really fully know the thing. And in my experience as a writer, and maybe this is a writer's experience, but in my experience, How I come to know a thing is I write about a thing, right? So very rarely at the front end of a big writing project can I actually know the thing that I'm, like, I don't exactly, I know enough. I know enough to ask the right questions.

The next 15 minutes are pretty clear, right? It's like, oh, okay, I can write for these next 25 minutes about this. And then you get to that 25 minutes and you go, I think I have 25 more minutes in me now. So you go by those minimal, viable doses. And also, like, again, there's this fallacy of being ready. You just aren't really ever going to be fully ready.

I'm always ready. What are you talking about?

Okay, okay, that got sexual fast. But anyway, we're glad to hear that. So I'm just We really underestimate the value of emergence. And when we, for me, getting into a flow state happens organically once I jump in. It never happens like beforehand. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like I jump in, I was like clunky, there's a clunky sentence, there's another clunky sentence. But then, oh, that stimulated something that I never would have known was gonna be stimulated before. So being open to the unknown And also separating— this is very like something I've learned from mentalism, just seeing the world differently. There's not— it's an artificial separation that there's research and then there's not research. Once you like it, usually the thing is not as scary as it seems. But then also once you jump in, all sorts of other things are teaching you things.

They emerge.

You never knew.

That's why you use that word. Yeah, exactly.

Does that make sense?

Yes, the diving in. And so the more you can cognitively remind yourself with procrastination of all forms, even if it looks like productivity on the surface, which it's not, if you just keep reminding yourself that you're likely trying to take an energetic hack and it's gonna cost you more in the end. If it had a spreadsheet, you would never invest in that. But it just doesn't have dollars and cents attached to it, so we squander that energetic time do like it's endless, which it's not.

Also, have you guys ever jumped out of a plane before?

No.

No.

But the first time, was it— how nerve-wracking was it?

I'm not the sample population on this. It was— but I'm terrified of heights, so it was hard. But, uh, bungee jumping was a lot harder.

Oh, I think—

because skydiving, you had somebody on you, right? No, I— oh, you I jumped. Yeah, I jumped when I was 17 years old. They made us— you used to have to climb out the door of the plane and hold onto the wing and balance on a little step. It was really sort of nuts what you had to do, but you also had no choice because you can't get back in a door, you'll crash the plane. So they were like, "Look, if you don't jump, we're going to have to kick you off the wing." So we were motivated. Wow. I think there's also, I mean, I think you procrastinate for two reasons, right? You, either the task is too hard, so you need to chunk it down to that minimal viable thing, or it's too boring, right? There's a lot of stuff we procrastinate because it's too boring. We want that sense of urgency because it's easier to get into flow with. You can avoid that by simply making the task harder early on. I think I, this is storytelling flow for writers, but when I was coming up as a journalist, I was super poor and I had to write, you know, like 50, 60, 70 articles at once just to, like, you know, pay my bills and make sure I had enough. It was. And they— but and not all of them were fun. Like a lot of this stuff, you know, you could call me, I would write anything. Like I just wanted to get paid. And oftentimes I used to do this for Wired a lot. I do a lot of the Wired front of the book. Magazine, like the short 500-word articles, but they would require massive amounts of research to get crunched down. And I would, would often do something— Wired was very— had very specific rules for how to write for Wired. And I would do something like try to write a Wired article in the style of Charles Dickens because the challenge went through the roof. But suddenly it was like a fun creative challenge. And yeah, I was writing a story on Data Cave, and it wasn't particularly interesting. But now I was actually trying to write a story like Charles Dickens about data caves and then sneak it past my editor. So I got a lot of really funny articles like in print where I'm like, yeah, that was me trying to write like Flaubert.

You like hacked the fun, the like fun, the play system.

Yeah, I used to play.

Yeah. To get ahead of—

Also challenge. You created constraints.

Yes. Constraints.

My friend, David Epstein's writing a whole book on the value of constraints for creativity.

Yeah.

Oh, it's so good.

Yes.

So this book Rise Above is my attempt to really talk about what we can do so we can have more of an internal locus of control over our lives and not feel like other people are writing our story. So in that regard, I do think, I do differ from, I got into an argument with Robert Sapolsky on my podcast. You can watch that. I also have had—

Vystikhov's?

Vociferous debates, no, vociferous debates. I love the word vociferous. I've had that with Sam Harris as well, and we had a whole two-part series, and where I do think there is a will and a free will worth wanting in us being able to create ourselves. So some of it maybe does bring in a little existential philosophy. Yes, of course genes influence and create constraints, but these guys are way, not these guys, but like Sapolsky and they're way too deterministic, way too deterministic.

By the way, it's unlimited, right? And just how much the, like the unconscious is our solution to neuroefficiency. It was like, oh, you only have this much like critical hardware bandwidth. We still have this thing called the unconscious where it's endless, an endless reservoir, and you can pull from it. And its relationship with intuition is so valuable because intuition is, best we can tell, like this unconscious data recognition. It's like it's sifting through millions of pieces of data and then pushing it up before you can even have a conscious thought. So it's a fascinating relationship of which both Scott and Stephen have studied and written about. And Stephen's really looking at intuition in a meaningful way. And it's really super, super interesting.

One of the things that's interesting here is, so, The orbital prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that mostly does intuition. It's sort of the oldest portion of the prefrontal cortex. Intuition, if we're correct, it's proto-consciousness. Once you have agency and memory and a couple other systems, you can start to develop consciousness. Agency, in a sense, is proto-consciousness, basically. Agency plus the ability to make decisions. And learn from them. You have to be able to learn from them. That's the loop that gets you there. But it's interesting what the OFC is sort of optimized for. And I don't know if this is all intuition, but it's really what we see is coherence. So it finds coherence or incoherence. So oftentimes intuition is always a pathfinding system, right? It's directional, and what it's looking for is coherence versus incoherence. It evolved out of literally map-making machinery. The reason the OFC is tied to the hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex, that's sort of your intuition circuit. The hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex, which are memory, everything's about memory, that memory evolved for map-making. Where's the ripe fruit tree? Where's the cave with the saber-toothed tiger? —right? Like, that's what it evolved for. So literally what we call intuition is a map-making system. It's the brain saying, "This way next," or "Don't go this way." That's the pattern recognition part that we're experiencing.

It's the mapping. And it's a probabilistic map-making system. Yes. Which is mentalism.

My research— well, my whole PhD PhD dissertation. Oh, I don't know why I said the word whole. Dude, you're like the only one. I know, but that's great. Uh, it's a 2-volume set. Um, that 2 volumes, it's a lot. It's a big comedy goal. It's a beast. It's a beast.

This guy wasn't fucking around. He's like, no, no, I'm just gonna— I'll do 4 times the work just to prove how smart I am. Well, no, no, put me in special ed.

Fuck you. In case anybody wondered if Spike That could get you far.

But they're not wrong, they're not wrong. But the dissertation is about unconscious intelligence. That's what my PhD dissertation was about. And I argued the field of human intelligence research for 100 years have ignored the power of unconscious intelligence. You know, you give IQ tests and you ask them to do conscious reasoning. And I was able to show that people who were off, even like the highest IQ in the world people, could come up with conscious patterns when I gave them unconscious patterns to solve crickets. So you could have the highest IQ in the world and I give them some of my implicit learning tasks and they can't learn that at all. So some people call it tacit knowledge, some people call it— but it's probabilistic learning is what it is. So our unconscious is far more greater at being able to do that and being able to know when in your life you should rely on your probabilistic learning system that we all have through evolution, or try to deliberately, consciously reason through it. Being able to know when to do which is what I argue is intelligence. That does—

how does ADHD affect intuition? Intuition?

Oh, that's what a great question, right?

Right. That's really interesting.

You guys are asking such a great question. I'm super curious.

How did you select this Interviews. Interviews. Were there interviews? Yeah, yeah.

Old school style. Yeah, they were really bizarre.

That's how you get this group.

They were really bizarre.

Skewed that way.

Well, I've studied ADD. ADHD is not the same as ADD, right? We have those. But I've studied the brain network called the default mode brain network, which I call the imagination network. That's my reframing of it, the imagination network. And I find that people who score high in ADHD traits tend to have an overactive imagination network that they just can't suppress in normal life. But often researchers, like meditation researchers, view that as a bad thing. And I've been really critical of meditation researchers because they're all like zombies in my opinion. And my argument is that like, yeah, okay, if you wanna be a zombie, then get rid of your imagination network. Yeah, you can just be in the moment every second of your life. I'm in the moment, I'm in the moment. But like, you're also boring, you know? So like what we want you to be, if you wanna actually have a rich life, you know, we bring in the imagination network, which can be on call at any moment and is able to make a connection with something, you know, like you said 42 and I was like, oh, 68. My imagination network is always on call, on call. And people with ADHD have a more on-call imagination brain network. And I think that can help them with their intuition. Does that make sense?

I think that, 100%, and I think something you're saying is so valuable for people to hear because it repurposes what, it's even in the title of the air quotes disorder deficit. And actually what I love that you're saying, 'cause it's true, is that there's a whole benefit side of it that is this, it's available and on call. It's available to be called upon. And I think, I hope that something that he's saying that isn't getting lost is that you can sort of practice this skill. You can practice. Meditation can be helpful. It can be. Don't get me wrong. Don't misquote me. No, you're just saying the research around what you do with the default mode network is—

If you read, there's a big hate, there's a lot of hate against the default, the imagination network in the meditation and the psilocybin LSD, you know. So Paul Allen wrote his book on his journey and the last chapter was defeating the villain, which was the default mode network. He said, I went to the brain scan And after all my years of work, we found that I had a completely silent imagination network. And that was considered the greatest thing of his book. And I've been a vehement disagreer that he's viewing that in the right way.

I mean, the subtitle for that book should be Psychedelics for Vegetarians. Why? Or herbivores. I think it's Psychedelics for Herbivores, because literally never has a guy spent so much time. Like, it's, it's like Woody Allen does mushrooms. The guy spends so— I like, I did mushrooms the first time when I was 11 or 10, right? The guy spent so much fucking time trying to like, what should I do? What should I not do? Should I do it?

Should I not? You said that in front of a shrink. 11. We won't talk about it now, but we will later. I'm flagging that for follow-up. —I need that for follow-up.

So funny. But I will tell you, like, so this is a weird story. I had an intuition about the neurobiology of flow, which I actually put into print in West of Jesus in 1996. I wrote down in that book what I thought was going to be the neurobiology of flow, and it's a guess. It's totally, we don't, like two-thirds of it is a guess, we don't even know it. And I don't, at this point, I don't even know a whole lot about neuroscience. I'm really early in my career. And when we published the first few seconds of Flow, a friend of mine called me and said, you know, I've read this already. And I was like, what are you talking about? And she said, you know, you wrote this in West of Jesus 30 years ago. And I totally had forgotten that I had done that, and I opened up the book and I was like, holy shit, I spent 30 years proving what I wrote down Like without having any idea. I— if you— should we not get into it? Yeah, I mean, it was— it's basically like the exact same thing that we proved in the first few seconds of Flow is what is in West of Jesus.

Scott said we do all these things to like sort of forget it, like to avoid that hunch in the rational mind. And also when we think about energy, that's really expensive in that spreadsheet on that energetic budget. The fuel you burn trying to avoid things you know or feel or are in that intuitive realm, they are not free. They are expensive. So the more you can cut weight on the useless burning of fuel that you're doing and test the experiment sooner, test and have the hunch and then verify is what Stephen said, that's how you'll optimize our energy. It's an inch by inch.

The autism spectrum is an interesting one because people on the autism spectrum see things concretely when everyone else sees a lot of fat around stuff. They can see, but also schizophrenia. I don't know if we can— can we count schizophrenia as a form of neurodiversity? But there's some really cool research where we've seen that people who are prone to psychosis don't fall prey to some illusions, like legit illusions that have top-bottom-up processing. Most people see something. The people with schizophrenic mind don't see it. They see it as it is, not as everyone else is seeing it. And yeah, there's a real— I used to teach this in my cognitive psychology class. There's this illusion of like a dragon that looks three-dimensional But it's not, but most people see it. But people who have schizophrenia, they actually see the reality. So there's fun little reversals in that, 'cause we always view people with schizophrenia as being, oh, you're crazy, you don't see reality. But there are certain situations where they have an advantage in not seeing the world in the same way as other people see it. And autism has some interesting examples as well. And I make that joke, yeah, 'cause I've done a lot of work on the link between mental illness and creativity, and I do, like when I give talks, I'm like, if you scan the brain of people we put in mental institutions and the crazy people, you actually find no difference. So I make that joke, but then I say there's nuance there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's nuance there. And there's no difference in the imagination brain network, but there is a difference when you look at interactions between different brain networks and you find that people who we don't put in the mental institutions, the main defining difference between them is that they're able to dip their toe into the sea of madness, but they're tethered to the beach. So they can come back. That's the difference, whereas those we put in mental institutions, they don't come back. But these people still have a mind open enough to go there, Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, so there's this— I think I talked about it, this group. It's a really weird finding in the longevity research that openness to experience, like they were looking at correlations between Big Five personality traits and mortality and they wanted to know, is there any, is there any correlation anywhere? Right. And the only thing they found is that a year to 2 years before you die, openness to experience plummets. So about a year before we die, we lose our openness to experience. I don't know. My question to you was the relationship between latent inhibition and openness to experience. Is there any— oh no, they're correlated. Yeah, but is there correlation between latent inhibition and longevity? Oh wow, okay, that's a great question.

No one's ever looked at that.

Okay, I was just wondering, like, this problem, um, which a bunch of you ran into, right? Where like you started getting into flow a lot and you started committing to a bunch of stuff and then life got hard or life happened or somebody got sick or et cetera, et cetera. And then you're massively overcommitted and it ends up leading to disaster. And my point is the disaster slows you down so much more than just like instead of doing 10 things every day, you do 9 or 8.5, just knowing that at some point, usually within a week or two, life is gonna happen and you're gonna actually need that extra space to deal with the crisis. So what I'm trying to do is actually allow you to do more and not get derailed. What a lot of us, a lot of us who work like that, and myself included, right, will overcommit, overcommit, overcommit, and then get really derailed, whether you get sick or blah, blah, blah happens, and then you're going to lose 2, 3 days, a weekend, or whatever. And that's what I'm trying to avoid, right? A lot of the way I think about things is little changes bit by bit by bit that end up paying off much bigger. So like, it feels like you're doing less when you're doing 9 things every day instead 10, but when shit goes wrong, that having that extra space built into your calendar is actually gonna save your butt. And when you come through a long project or a long career after you've done one thing for a really long time— for me, like, after I finish a long book, there's a period, there's a recharge, right? Like, there's nothing I can really do. It's— or after a long project where it's gonna take a a year or two to like read enough new stuff and fill the tank up again before I have anything else to say. And it doesn't change the fact that it sucks on the inside and I feel totally unproductive and I'm not doing anything. And oh God, all I'm doing is just like watching talks with people I'm a little interested in or reading books. It doesn't feel like work until it all adds up into Oh, now I'm writing a book. That's what I would— I get it now. So, and honestly, I don't think there's a fix for it other than I think at some point in your life you have to like be just willing to be uncomfortable for longer than you would normally be. Just once again, to sort of get there. All right. Scott Barry Kaufman, ladies and gentlemen.

Thank you, buddy. Yeah, thanks. It was a real, real honor to be here. Thank you.