Steven Kotler on The Art of Impossible

0:00Thanks for pressing play. Quote, motivation is what gets you into this game. Learning is what helps you continue to play. Creativity is how you steer. And flow is how you turbo boost results beyond all rational standards and reasonable expectations. That, my friends, is the real art of impossible. End quote. And this is Christopher Lockhead, Folly or Different. On this episode, we have got a legendary guy, an incredible author and thinker. His name is Stephen Kotler. And I will go out on a limb that I don't think is much of a limb. When 2021 is over, people will say his new book, The Art of Impossible, is one of the most important books written this year.

0:49I've been admirer of steven's work for a long time. He wrote a Breakthrough breakout book a while back called the rise of superman, which I highly recommend in his brand new book He breaks down how to make the the impossible a lot more likely and we get into it He is a deeply thoughtful guy His work is based on research, you know, there's a lot of motivational speakers and go for it who who blah blah guys Guys, that's not Steven. He is the real deal. He runs an organization where they focus on helping people make the impossible probable and make it happen. And we crack his book open in a meaningful way.

1:33I would highly recommend that you get out your notepad. And if you're somebody who cares about producing exponential results, I have a suspicion not only are you going to want to read his book, but you're going to want to listen to this episode a couple times. my friends at NetSuite are the number one providers of cloud ERP they are the business system in the cloud that you need check out netsuite.com slash different and if we know one thing we know data matters we are living in the data age and my friends at Splunk are the leaders in data to everything visit splunk.com slash d2e and why not go to lockhead.com l-o-c-h-h-e-a-d dot com and subscribe to our newsletter because we're about to launch a brand new newsletter called category pirates and to the best of our knowledge it is the first uh newsletter on category design and category creation all right now strap yourself in hey ho let's go

2:50Steven, first of all, let me just say to you, when your PR team reached out and I saw your name in my inbox, I thought, thank you, Jesus. And the reason I thought that was, what year did Rise of Superman come out? Remind me. 2013, I want to say. yeah so i got that book i think shortly after it came out i read it read it's probably not the right word soaked in it and at the time i was doing a fair amount of public speaking and i think i might have beat people over the head a little hard with it and you certainly cost me a lot of money because i gifted your book to, I can't, I don't even know how many people.

3:37I just thought Rise of Superman was one of the most extraordinary books. So I just want to start off with thank you for that book. Oh, you're welcome. That's really sweet of you to say. That book meant a lot to me. I could tell, you know, I had, I wasn't an author at that time, but even not having sort of being able to relate to it as an author, as a, just as a reader, you could tell that book was so deeply researched and so much of the chemicals that hopefully we'll talk about today, the positive chemicals that drive us to do various things. It was so obvious that you were, that those chemicals were firing you to write that book, that that book had a meaning to you, that you were what my buddy Eddie Yoon would call a missionary, not a mercenary.

4:19On that one, you know, I had a front row seat at the amazing for 10 years, right? I literally watched my friends do things that had never been done before in the history of the world and weren't supposed to be done. And they were the most unlikely group of care, right? I mean, there was never a group of people you would have bet more against than the very people I, you know, I was watching kind of redefine the limits of human possibility. And so at a certain level at that, that book was a thank you. And for, you know what I mean? My whole life unfolded from trying to figure out how the hell are they doing what they're doing.

4:58And it's, you know, it all started there. So there was a debt of gratitude there, I think. Well, and the other thing, and this is a bit of a side note, but as a skier, as somebody who loves Tahoe, lived in Tahoe, I just adore the fact that you write about Shane McConkie. And one of the greatest things to me about him is, of course, he was a failed Olympian, right? So he said, all right, well, I'm just going to make up skiing in a whole new way. He reinvented what he did. Shouldn't have been called skiing. You know, I, for, for years on my helmet, I had a big sticker that said, thanks Shane, because he gave us fat skis.

5:37Right. And so I love how you write about these misfits. Yeah. So I, I will also, so I remember, um, I knew Shane cause I was living in Tahoe and, you know um and but and i absolutely remember when he first started thinking about water skis as fat skis right when before when he was when he was like well what for snow is frozen water these are the skis that are designed to work on water i'll bet right and that one of the most amazing things it's on video and people watch it all the time and they don't like it just doesn't it doesn't land but when he had this crazy idea so he took a pair of water skis to alaska right and skied you have to like go to alaska and stand on top of one of those lines and go i mean like nobody would ski them with normal skis and the guy skied them on water skis it was just it's still one of the most amazing things ever and he did it almost as a joke right in the movie that it's in it's treated as funny.

6:38And, you know, he's literally saw innovation and bet his life on innovation. How rarely does that actually happen or get captured on film? Like in that way, he literally was like, no, no, no. I know how to make this a better tool and I'm going to bet my life to prove it to you. That's, that's, that's amazing. That doesn't happen often in the history of innovation. Well, and so he's an innovator. He's what I would call a category designer. He created a whole new category of skis. He created a whole new style of skiing that became known as free skiing. Right. I think he was at least partially responsible for the giant explosion in backcountry skiing.

7:20um so i i just i love everything about him and i love how sort of he was like a playful punk rocker like there was a big sort of finger in the air to the industry and to the sport who sort of rejected him but at the same time he was this um cartoony sort of a jokester kind of a character as well it was you know whether it was shane or glenn peck before him a whole like posse of tahoe right like This was the era. The 90s was like if you were in Jackson Hole or Whistler, you were a mountain man and you were very serious. Very, very serious. Those were badass athletes, don't get me wrong. The point was be better and make fun of yourself along the way.

8:06In a sense, that has ruined me forever because that's how I – you know what I mean? Like I, you're not really killing it unless you're sort of making fun of yourself at the same time. And that's sort of, that's Shane's legacy more than anything for sure. Yeah. Yeah. So bless you for writing about Shane McConkie. He's just amazing. So this book, Stephen, you've already written one of the most important books of 2021. There's no question in my mind about it. I literally, I mean, I don't know if you can see my copy here. And, you know, it's like full of this sort of shit all over. I literally want to ask you about like two thirds of the sentences in this book.

8:54Honey, better make lunch. Yeah. Grab us. Can somebody send out for some beers? We may be here for a while. This is an extraordinary piece of work. So can we just dive into it? um first of all most people who write about this topic are full of shit right they they write sort of pop psychology garbage the level of research in this book is is truly extraordinary extraordinary and you've been doing it for a long time now your connection between sports performance performance in business performance in life and the human body and the chemicals in the brain and and psychology and all that stuff interconnected.

9:36I've never seen it. You know, I've written, I've, I've, I've read a lot on flow and things along these lines. Nobody has put this shit together the way you do. So first off the top, let me just thank you for this legendary book. You're totally welcome. Thank you. Thanks for noting. There's 30 years of work in there, right? It's a lifetime's worth of research in neuroscience and psychology. Um, and it took seven years to get it, to be able to make it. It's, you know, I wanted it to be fun, practical and pragmatic for everybody, right? This is the book that everybody has really been sort of after me to write, especially since Rise of Superman.

10:09Like, can you please write a how-to? And okay, if I'm going to do it, I wanted it to be great and compelling and useful. And damn, it's hard to write big ideas and be useful at the same time, I just have to say. It took forever. Well, and to break new ground, right? I mean, you're connecting dots here that I think A few others have. So sort of for me, the first sort of thing that jumps is this conversation that you have with us about neurobiology and peak performance. And if I can just read you right off the front where you're talking about how biology scales, you write, personality doesn't scale, biology scales.

10:56What we mean is in the field of peak performance, too often someone figures out what works for them and then assumes it will work for others. It rarely does. More often, it backfires. And so can you tease out for me a little bit, Stephen, this sort of insight around, you know, personality versus biology as sort of the start point to this discussion around impossible and performance? For sure. The idea is quite simple, right? Right. There are the reason personality doesn't scale. The reason what works for me is probably not going to work for you is that there are really foundational aspects of peak performance.

11:39For example, where are you on the introversion, extroversion scale? Are you shy? Are you outgoing? Right. Or how active are your dopamine receptors? And as a result, how much do you enjoy risk and how much can you confront fear? those things are either biologically hardwired or they're set up in very early childhood by early childhood experience you can change them used to be believed these were traits and they were immutable and they were just locked in we now know you can change them but not quickly five ten years worth of work there's slow change the things you have to really work on for a long period of time those things are there's nothing you can do about those if you try to figure out what works for me and use it to train you, you, if you're not exactly the same kind of person I am with the same personality traits, if this is not going to work.

12:28But underneath that one level down, there is a level of biology, a way the system has been designed to work. And that is the part that we all share, right? The stuff that evolution designed for all of us to share. And that's why the book took so long to research, right? I always say that psychology, as incredibly useful as it has been, is a metaphor. It's a metaphor for the mechanism of neurobiology. So if you can get it back to neurobiology, that's the thing we all share. What I'm joking about - So Steven, I hate to interrupt you, but it's so important. Can you just sort of say what you just said again about the connection to neurobiology and maybe why that discovery, why that insight matters so much here?

13:14Well, neurobiology is mechanism, right? It is the thing, the way our brains work and are designed to work, the big systems in the brain, the goal-directed system, the fears, the emotional system, the stuff, it was evolutionary. There's a saying in evolutionary science, which is evolution is conservative by design. So when something works, it gets reused again and again and again and again. And the simple example is we process information of the brain with neurochemicals, dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, things like that. So do trees. Trees process information with the same neurochemicals that exist in humans.

13:54All life shares things that work, right? This is why when they say you share 25 % of your DNA with lettuce, it's the same principle. This is the same reason why. So if you can get move things back to the neurobiology, how the brain and the body actually are working, that's common between all of us. Or if I were to put it, you know, when I'm joking about this, I'm like, look, flow is the state of optimal performance. We're all hardwired for flow. It's a built in part of being human. But if I were to teach people, right, I run the flow research collective, we train 1000 people a month in flow. If I was training people in what worked for me, we would be all skiing through the trees at 40 miles an hour listening to the Wu-Tang Clan because that's what works for me.

14:41Right. Can I listen to the Ramones, Stephen? Is that OK? By the way, I'm a youth punk fan, as you know. And it's just that I found that hip hop works better for skiing than than punk. Punk works for downhill mountain biking, I've discovered. But skiing has got to be hip hop. I can't explain it. This is to see this is why what works for me is not going to work for you. My point. Exactly. Yeah. So that's that's sort of that's the basic thesis in the book. And, you know, everybody in peak performance learns this the hard way as a general rule, meaning most people learn a little bit about peak performance and they start wanting to help their friends.

15:22And mostly they start wanting to tell their friends how to live their lives. and in my case when I did that before I learned that personality doesn't scale I had a I was writing for psychology today I had a national bestsellers out on the topic like I had some weight behind my and I like I was a disaster in my friends lives like I put two people in the hospital literally because their risk tolerances were nowhere near what mine was I nearly caused a divorce my best friend in the world didn't speak to me for five years and another really dear friend has still not spoken to me again. But other than that, you're an awesome guy to hang out with.

15:56Is that what you're telling me? I'm an awesome guy to hang out with. Yeah, it was a disaster in other people's lives when I like with, you know what I mean with that stuff. And it was because I had come up in this world where guys like Shane McConkie were the normal. I was a journalist in my line of work. If you didn't nearly die once every three months, you weren't doing your job. And a lot of the guys I was the men and women I was writing about were people like Chris Dahmer or Shane McConkie. And if they didn't die once a month, they weren't doing their jobs. I just thought this is this was ever my risk tolerances were so crazy.

16:27Of course, I caused a disaster in people's lives. How long have you been friends with Laird Hamilton? Since I was 27 years old. Yeah. That guy's not trying to do anything crazy to kill himself, is he? He would say no, he's not. But I can see why other people feel differently. Yes. I remember this is a total diversion, but I like to chase rabbits down zebra holes. I remember he wrote a book years ago, and I can't remember the title. It was sort of Laird's Insights on Life kind of a book. And one of the things that he said was pay special attention to what things are called because they're probably called that for a reason.

17:08And I'll never forget the first time I went to Fiji surfing. And there's a famous wave there called Cloud Break, which I am nowhere near qualified to surf. There is a picture of me surfing it on a very small day, but I don't surf it when it's real. Anyway, long story way longer. The inside of Cloud Break is called shish kebabs. and ever since i i read that in his book whether it's surfing or on a ski hill you know that you see these runs that are called like if you live if you i live in the country and if you live in the country you he's so right and you totally get this right things are named what they actually are it's it's super literal super literal right when uh when uh when they call jaws jaws the wave there's a reason, right?

17:56And it's funny because my wife and I run a dog sanctuary and we spend a lot of time in the backcountry with our dogs and we always are naming shit to give each other directions. Oh yeah, you go to the big thumb looking thing and then you take a left and sure enough some of them are like coyote death rage and things where bad things have happened. Yeah. Yeah. I thought it was such a simple but powerful insight, but I digress. So part of what you're teaching us with this book, and I sort of say this as a sort of a to bounce it off you, is that a big part of why we do what we do, a big part of our experience of life, our experience of ourselves and others is a function of the chemicals in our brain.

18:46and the things that we do to sort of reinforce the production of, I don't know if this is right, you'll tell me, the good chemicals versus the bad chemicals. But that performance, having a happy life, and then, of course, achieving impossible things, be they small I or big I impossible things, are tied to the sort of chemical cocktail that's cooking in our head. Well, for sure, when you're talking about things like motivation, which is a catch-all term, right, for a bunch of stuff, or flow, neurochemicals are a huge part of it. Obviously, when you're talking about brain activity, you're talking about neurochemistry, neuroelectricity, right, the brainwaves, neural anatomy, where things are taking place in networks, very rarely things take place in one spot.

19:36So there's, right, those are all the four things, but neurochemicals, when it comes to reward chemicals, and you're totally, they're called reward chemicals. These are chemicals that reward behavior that helped us survive. And so a lot of, when I say a lot of peak performance, most of peak performance is getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. We're built to tackle certain kinds of challenges in certain ways. And we've got a lot of chemistry to back us up. And the whole point of that, let's take that out of metaphor and into something a little more concrete. So let's just start with a motivation for a second to make this concrete.

20:22The big deal about one of the big deals about peak performance, and one of the reasons my book is possible is there aren't that many levers to work with. If you think about sort of what the toolkit, right, you have focus, what you pay attention to or what you ignore and you have your actions and if you can pay if you put focus and action on the same thing over and over and over again you get a habit and that's essentially the foundational toolkit for peak performance it's just that simple and the interesting thing is action if you're learning something if you're doing something there are ways to do it more efficiently there's craft tips and techniques and things along those lines but as a general rule the thing is the thing.

21:08And like, if you're going to go bowling, I don't care how good you are in the world, you're still going to have to go bowling, right? It's the energy. So where, where's the big lever that you can reach for? It's focus and attention. So what's the big deal about let's internal motivators. Curiosity is our first internal motivator, our first basic motivator. What is curiosity? Neurochemically, it's a little bit of dopamine, a little bit of norepinephrine. These are both pleasure chemicals. They reinforce when they're in our system. We're excited. We're interested. The thing that's in front of us has our attention.

21:44Think about how much energy you spend paying attention to something you're not into versus something you're a little bit curious about. The big deal about motivation is it gives you focus for free. So you get one half of the performance equation basically for free without having to burn all this energy. and think about the brain for a second, it's a huge energy hog. It's 2 % of your mass. It uses 25 % of your energy at rest. So when you're actually engaged in something, it's more than that. And a lot of that is going to, what am I focusing on? What am I tuning out? So if we get focus for free, it's a big deal from a performance standpoint.

22:24So motivation gives us focus for free. motivation and when we're with intrinsic motivation so curiosity passion purpose autonomy which is the desire to like steer your own ship and mastery which is a desire to get better and better than things we do um they they're designed a to work in a specific sequence but all of them give us focus for free think about so passion is a lot in literally if you start with the neurochemicals that we were talking about dopamine norepinephrine and you crank up the crank and you get a whole lot more of them you get passion romantic love think about the first time you fell in love how much attention you were paying to that other person it was right you couldn't stop thinking about them that's all for free not hard work the whole point about human biology and human performance in the system is you get farther faster with less work that's the real point like why do you want to do this because you're built to go this way and you know the the way i always explain it i'm like look we are hardwired for extraordinary and which is one of the surprising things about being human that most people don't realize and to take it a step farther not going big is actually bad for us and that's a that's an equally important point here if you look at like what are we talking about we've been talking about motivation let's stay right there intrinsic motivation curiosity passion purpose autonomy mastery.

23:53And then by the way, when you get all those things right, you get a lot more flow. That's not important here. Depression, which is at an epidemic proportion and anxiety epidemic proportion, somebody is killing themselves once every 12 seconds in the world today. It's like these are, we've never seen anything like it. And there are eight known causes of depression, major causes well accepted, widely agreed upon. Two of them are the one that gets all the run. One is genetics. I can't make enough serotonin. I can't make enough happy drugs. The other is severe trauma. And yet, as a general rule, genetics alone can't cause depression.

24:31We know this. It's never more than 50 % of the equation. And trauma, the vast majority of the time when we encounter traumatic events, it leads to post-traumatic growth. It's a good thing, not a bad thing. It's hard during the moment, but it leads someplace good. The other six major causes of depression, they're all things about getting our biology wrong or our motivation wrong. For example, lack of meaningful work is one of the largest causes of depression in the world. What does that mean? Actually, in the real world, it's work that I'm not curious about, that I'm not passionate about, that isn't aligned my values and purpose, that I don't have the autonomy to pursue in the way that I want to pursue.

25:12that does not offer me the opportunity for skills mastery and does not produce flow. That is literally what we're talking about by lack of meaningful work. And it's literally not using your biology the way it's been designed to be used. So we're built to go big and not going big is bad for us. And that's the like, yeah, we get focused for free and all like, yes, there's a lot there. but you dig one level deeper. It's this shocking idea that's very true. And it's right there in the data. And we don't often talk about it out loud. That was great. And it comes pounding through in your book. And I know it comes shining through in your book that way because it comes out of you that way.

25:57There's so much to pop the hood on here. So the first time I, I don't know if I heard you say it on your podcast or in the book, But the first time I heard it from you, that not going big is bad for us. I thought about my own life and I thought about many of the lives around me. And I don't know that I've ever heard anybody quite say it that way, the way you did. And of course, you have this research-based brain science context that all of these insights you have sit inside of. So this is not some mumbo jumbo from some self-help, you know, charlatan. Anyway, long story longer, Stephen. When I heard you say it, I thought, holy shit, is that ever right?

26:48But I've been dying to spend time with you to ask you, okay, so pop the hood on that some more for me, please. Why is that true? This is the easiest way because this is something everybody's going to get immediately. think about all the stuff in your own life that really made a difference in your life really like wow this is the thing and it changed a lot of stuff and it's the thing that i'm proud of right the four or five or six things i've been asking people this question out loud for 30 years and not once has anybody been like i've gotten a oh i won the lotto or i got lucky it's never what it's never the lucky things, the easy things that people tell you.

27:31It's the, oh my God, I had to pay my way through college and it was totally impossible. I didn't know how I was going to do it. I couldn't believe it. I had to work so goddamn hard, right? They had my experience in grad school. I worked three jobs to get through grad school, right? This is like, you know, that's when you're doing that. It's an insane thing to try to do. I mean, it doesn't feel like it's at all possible. And you know, you, you sweat, I didn't sleep for four years or something like that. Right. Everybody says that over and over and over again. So one, we know this intuitively about ourselves.

28:05They don't, they don't say it's the day my parents gave me the $250 million inheritance. They don't say that. Nobody ever says that, right? Nobody, you never get the, I got lucky story. You've got the, um, and even, you know, it's funny because I've talked to people about their marriages and nobody very i mean people say oh yeah i had a random thing i showed up at a party right right and but if you dig deeper into that it's never the like they're not proud of the like oh i you know i've managed to pick up a girl or a guy at a party they're proud of the fact that they spent 10 years fighting the hard fight of staying together as a couple Right.

28:46Marriages are impossibly difficult things to do to do well and to do right. And that's what people are actually proud of is, you know, that we stuck together and stayed together and worked through all this stuff for 10 years. It's not that I showed up at the party and got lucky. It's the like, you know, it's the actual thing. And we all know this. It's the stuff we've we value. And I you know, your internal signals are a really good signal to you. it like what's going on right like we're wired to work a certain way and the body lets us know when we're doing it the right way yeah it the the reward systems are are palpable i also want to sort of um in in rise of superman you you went here and of course you go back here intrinsic extrinsic and clearly there's a satisfaction with the intrinsic that is that feels at least to me i I only know my own experience.

29:41You're the master in terms of studying this stuff. The intrinsic things, the things that you do, not because anybody pays you or because there's any reward. You know, it's like for me, surfing is a great example. Nobody. And I mean, fucking nobody, Stephen, watches me surf. Nobody. Maybe a buddy in the water. If he or she is not on a wave, sure. But like, that's it. My mother doesn't want to watch me surf. like nobody never mind pay me to do it or any of that and and the same would be true for skiing and you know what it's like i don't have to tell you when you go have a great ski day and powder in the trees even one run you can be stoked for a week so there's a special nature to the intrinsic however as human beings we tend to need validation and so there's also something powerful about the extrinsic, but I see some negatives potentially with the extrinsic that I don't see with the intrinsic.

30:38But I want to hear how you think about both and sort of how they come together in all of this. Extrinsic motivators, stuff outside ourselves, money, sex, fame. These are incredibly potent motivators. We're wired to want them, right? We started with the idea that evolution, so you have to we're shaped by evolution evolution is predominantly shaped by scarcity of resources so when you talk about human motivation right you're talking about anything we're motivated to do anything that helps us get more resources now mates are a resource money so resource the reason that we're attracted to fame is not the fame itself it's because fame comes with money and sex, right?

31:25Which are resources. But what the research shows, this is not my work. This is Daniel Kahneman's work. And what Danny's work shows is that extrinsic motivators are very powerful. But if your interest is in peak human performance, they only work up to a certain point, which is we've paid and we have earned enough money for basic resources and we have a little leftover for fun. In fact, if you go into companies and they try to motivate employees, you can motivate employees with money up to about$75 ,000,$80 ,000 a year in an American economy. And this was about 10 years ago when you did it. So maybe those numbers are a little off, but then if you really want to increase productivity or performance or worker engagement or any of that stuff, you have to give them intrinsic motivators.

32:10You have to give them work they're curious about, work that aligns with passion and purpose, work that they can pursue with autonomy and work where there's a chance for mastery to get better and better at the things they're doing and work that produces flow that's how you motivate employees from that point on you can't use the externals anymore this isn't to say that like look i made over 75 000 a year and didn't change the fact that i still wanted a house and i was motivated to go right like yes of course there that stuff is there but from a peak performance perspective once and you just got to think about that from an evolutionary perspective right you didn't external stuff drove us until we got it right and we could feed ourselves we could feed our family we could store a little for the winter like right and then oh we've got our food what do we really need well we really need another hunting ground so i'm curious about what's over that hill or i'm passionate enough to go explore to find more resources for my tribe right like literally those were hardwired from an evolutionary like way back millions of years ago that's when this blueprint got laid down and it's still in us right we have uh local and linear brains in a global and exponential world so a lot of the systems that could you just say that again steven yeah it's a so we have local and linear brains the broad the human brain evolved in an environment that was local, meaning everything we dealt with was about a day's walk away.

33:44And linear, meaning the rate of change was really slow. So your great-great-grandfather's life and his great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter's life, they were roughly the same. Not much change between centuries, right? Today, we live in a world that's global, right? It happens in China. We hear about it in America. Seconds later, our computers hear about it. Milliseconds later, exponential, meaning forget about the difference between great-grandpa and great-granddaughter. like this week to next month to month, right? Crazy, incredible things can happen very, very quickly. And the human brain was not, we didn't evolve to process things at this speed or this scale.

34:23So biologically, we're not tuned to iPhones. No, it's actually one of the problems that a lot of people have. This is not actually in this book, but it's in a bunch of a couple of my other books. So here's a crazy thing. Back when the era, the brain evolved, every threat we dealt with was like a tiger in the bush. It was an immediate threat. So the tiger is either in the bush and it's chasing you or it's gone and you're safe. Today, we live in a world filled with probabilistic threats. The economy might nosedive. Terrorists might attack. A new pandemic might show up and be worse that right like all those things and the problem is the brain literally doesn't turn off until the danger is gone completely it's hardwired not to shut off the threat signal until the day and probabilistic dangers are never gone completely so one of the reasons we have record levels of anxiety in society right now is that we're living in a world with a lot of probabilistic dangers.

35:24And so you now have to take active steps to calm down your nervous system because it won't shut down on its own because it will always find something to scare it. And is a, excuse my ignorance of biology, is cortisol one of the things that's firing here in a way that it didn't used to? Is that an example of what's happening? Yeah. Cortisol is a stress hormone. It gets locked. Yeah. We were producing too much cortisol and too much norepinephrine. I said, curiosity is norepinephrine? It is a little bit, a little bit more, you get passion. I crank it up even more, you get anxiety and terror and panic.

36:00So it's the same system. In fact, it's so much the same system that certain mammals, cows, for example, cannot feel curiosity and anxiety at the same time. So when they're doing like animal welfare stuff, right, in barnyards, say they're bringing the cows into a barn to get them to get a medical treatment, for example, which is, and they got to put them all together and put them into a holding pen, they scares the animals a lot. And they don't want to stress the animals out. So they find that if they put something up that makes them curious, that it will de-stress them. Most humans can feel curiosity and anxiety at the same time.

36:38But it's very easy. In the book, I talk about reframing, cognitive reframing. That is a technique for turning anxiety into excitement, because it's the same, it's the same chemical and it's very easy to do again an example of getting a biology to work for you rather than against you we you know we're plagued by anxiety and yet we're hardwired to turn anxiety into excitement very very easily just with the right tools and is that how we can turn a pandemic into an opportunity and and and have that not be sort of whipped cream on dog shit that if we change our mindset about something yeah i mean we we did i mean you know I, I, this is the other half of my work, which is more on technology than human capability, but we have turned the pandemic into the most astounding opportunity.

37:26We haven't, it hasn't come home to a roost yet. What people don't get, there are over 120 different cures, vaccines, et cetera, in, in the pipeline now, you know, coming online, average time to cure vaccine is five years. Average cost,$10 billion, billion dollars. Take your pick, depending on whose numbers you're going by the fact that we have 120 of them and like nothing like this has ever happened in the history of the world and is also the stuff that's just downstream because we had to make huge advances in ai huge advances all kinds of things to get those vaccines so that's vaccines are where we are now but this is all going to flood into health care for example and then what's just downstream from drug discovery food discovery all same technologies So like there's all these industries where I've been speaking to leaders of industry and I'm like, you don't get it.

38:18Like, yes, this 2020 was an absolute ass kicking. We all got our ass kicked in 2020. It was it was it's been it's been very, very difficult for everybody. But like we can come roaring back in ways that people aren't anticipating because they're not seeing what's just downstream from all the stuff that we've had to figure out. So I'm actually really excited about where it's going, where it's going. Yes. And I want to circle back and maybe connect a dot and see if I'm connecting it the way you might. If you take a look at the impossible way in which this new vaccine was developed and it's now the other thing I find almost equally fascinating, Stephen, is the way it's being rolled out.

39:03it's the greatest product rollout in history it's it's it's the greatest logistical challenge in history the health care industry and how it's having to adapt and change like it so to me the rollout of it and making it work for all of us in the world is is almost as equally as fascinating how we got there with the vaccine itself but all that said you know i've heard you talk about and write about roger banister breaking the four minute mile and how everybody said that was physically impossible for the human body and i don't have the stat off the top of my head maybe you do but after he did that the year after how many people did it yeah it's so you're talking about the banister effect right yeah it took the you got to take it a step farther because it took forever for ban it like if you look at mile times they drop a second a decade basically for like the 70 years leading up to 1954 i think 1954 is the right i think i got the year right see the 53 or 54 um and uh then banister does it and three weeks later somebody beats his record and three months later somebody beats that record within five years a teenager's done it and the question you just like how the hell is that possible right the physical challenge hasn't changed it took us 70 years to get that fast for one person to get that fast and suddenly you know you had half a dozen and this is known as the banister effect and the dramatic way to say it is we have to believe the impossible as possible before it becomes possible for us and what it really is is an incredibly tight coupling sort of between the visual system and the way the human brain is dominated by vision 30 of the neurons in your brain are about vision and around physiology.

40:54So you literally have to be able to imagine yourself physically doing the thing that you can't before your brain can start to put it together and how you can, you can do it. It has to do with learning and a whole bunch of things. And it's neat. And that's another reason, you know, I wrote a book called The Art of Impossible. I, you know, we are not only are we, are we hardwired to go big, you have to believe, you know what I mean? Most people, the reason most people don't chase their dreams is because they don't know they can catch them it's just that simple right like that there's nothing fancy around that like we don't go after stuff that feels like it's going to be a mount everest and an impossible mount everest for us and um that's actually kind of backwards to how the system is designed to work so a ton there steven but to go back for a sec to um the c19 uh vaccines so do you are you saying it sounds like you are yeah i got two for you on that yeah this is the banister effect is now going to happen with vaccines and potentially other various kinds of medical technologies and research is that was that what we're going to see now do you think i i'm so yes on the vaccine so a couple things on this front just because it's might as well give people some actual good news about this stuff because we've had such an ass kicking of a year the truth of the matter is most pandemics and i'm not talking about like if we get aerosolized ebola like that's a different nightmare right but like let's worst case scenarios aside from a technology don't tell me about that i got enough cortisol going right now steve no literally from a technological standpoint pandemics are actually a very like we are this is a danger that we are facing that is going to last 10 to 15 years and then it's a gone from the earth and what i mean by that is every ed end of the medical treatment train is being invented we've got whole companies making biosnivers they sniff the air these are real they exist david sinclair's lab at harvard is making them if you want to look that up already they sniff the air so you can put them anywhere in public you walk by they sniff the air as you walk by.

43:10And if they detect anything strange, it immediately gets uploaded to a diagnostic AI in the cloud, they will analyze the DNA of the virus, the bacteria, anything foreign that was detected. If it's a new pathogen, they will automatically start hunting for and making cures. Like before we've even before anybody, a human being has even been alerted to the fact that there could be a problem, you could already have cures started. And on and on and on and on my point is that where technology is right now we can sort of surround these kinds of problems in a decade the one that i'm really excited banister effect wise is that we saw for the first time really since the 90s we came up against climate change we all stayed home for two months and we dented climate change it wasn't a huge dent but this was this impossible challenge and said, no, we haven't had a freaking win.

44:06Unless you're tracking the solar industry, unless you're tracking key, key indicators, you don't think there's any good news against climate change, let alone a banister effect. And yet in two months, we shut it down and we made an actual dent in climate change. It was the first time an entire generation, because the last time this happened was the ozone hole in the 90s, right? When we detected the ozone hole and we phased out hydrofluorocarbons and we closed it basically took 20 years but you know it's pretty much gone at this point and that's why we don't have freon anymore is that right yeah that's exactly right and by the way and i'm glad we did it but a air conditioner in your car that had freon in it that got your ass cold fast on the hottest day the new shit isn't as effective but I'll take the environment, but I digress.

45:00Okay. You're right. The cars are not as cold as they used to be. I'll take it. I'm not complaining. I just, Freon was awesome for the application. It had horrible implications, but I like things like rain and snow and I don't, you know, I don't know. Animals. I like the ocean being where it's supposed to be. Exactly. But I hear you. Okay. I knocked us off track, But what you're saying is you think we're 15 years away from essentially a grouping of technologies coming together. That means that viruses are gone. It's not that they're gone. But it does mean that I think this kind of pandemic is a lot like and we're a lot less vulnerable when we get blockchain underneath all aspects of our supply chain.

45:52Also, a lot of the problems that we're seeing, right, that's what I mean, you're watching the rollout of these global rollouts. These are whole brand new logistics, supply chains like all this stuff is a reinvention of the possible. And, you know, in my last book, The Future is Faster Than You Think, we talk about every aspect of the medical treatment train from diagnostics on the front end to drug discovery on the back is being completely reinvented and democratized, right? Demonetized. The money is coming out of it. It's getting cheaper, more affordable to everybody globally. Democratized. This stuff is going everywhere.

46:30And, you know, the classic example is surgical robots, really fancy, cool technology. I had hernia surgery a couple of years ago. It was performed by a DaVinci robot, right? Because it's very cutting edge, less wounding, blah, blah, blah. And there are now surgical robots, you know, in most major Western theaters. But this year, Johnson & Johnson teamed up with Alphabet, Google's parent company, and they created Verb Surgical to democratize surgical robotics globally. And they're, you know, they've already got products in the market. I think actually Johnson & Johnson bought out Alphabet and took the company back a little while ago, I think I saw.

47:04But my point is, even that stuff is we're seeing being reinvented. So if you think about something simple that certainly I can relate to, knowing that, you know, the plane flies itself for a lot of the flight and during critical moments, particularly, of course, takeoff and landing, the pilot and co-pilot are engaged. changed um but um the plane essentially flies itself and my understanding is even today with takeoffs and landings it's not like it was as recently as 15 or 20 years ago there's more technology inside of that and of course we're get people are trying to get us to autonomous vehicles and blah blah blah and so are we at a point steven where you think a surgeon when she's you know doing a procedure some meaningful part of that procedure won't be actually done by her she'll be essentially, I don't know, supervising a robot.

47:57Well, that's already what, I mean, that's essentially what's going on. The Da Vinci surgical robot, there's a surgeon, right? But their motions are mediated by robots because the robots are much more precise. I don't think it's going to be the kick the doctors out of the hospital. Like I know people are really scared about technological unemployment and things along those lines, but the data is pretty overwhelming that the biggest leverage is always human and AI working together. It's never just AI robot alone. It doesn't. In fact, BMW is a great story. They got inspired by Tesla, both Tesla and BMW, totally robotic factories, few people if possible and productivity tanked in both cases.

48:40And they had to reintroduce humans back into the equation. And then it was human AI together. That seems to give us the most value right now. Well, and you know, that whole thing about bless him, Andrew Yang and the robots and AI are going to take over and we need a universal basic income because nobody's going to have any jobs and all this stuff. I just look at it and go, I don't know. You look back on history, the Luddites are always wrong. From the first creation of a tool by a human being through to now, human beings create tools. And when they do, life on the planet for human beings generally gets a lot better.

49:23I agree with that. I agree with that completely. So there's sort of a couple of key areas here that you, you fuse together in the book, motivation, learning, creativity, and flow. And then you bring us through them and sort of bring it, bring it all together. So why are those the sort of the, the pillars or the anchors for both the research and then the insights in the book? So it starts with a really simple yet sort of complicated question that I was looking at. Starts with flow, right? And what is flow good for? Scientists, we've spent 30 years trying to figure out what does flow is optimal performance and what gets optimized.

50:08And the list is really weird the list is motivation productivity it flow accelerates amplifies learning it massively increases all aspects of creative problem solving um it increases empathy environmental awareness on the physical side it's strength stamina fast twitch muscle response and it doesn't pain couple other things in there that also uh that also go up empathy environmental awareness couple other things and the question you got to ask is what the hell like why would one state of consciousness right optimize what are these things and the answer we gave it earlier is we are shaped by evolution evolution the principal driver for evolution is scarcity scarcity of resources and so when resources are scarce you have two options you can fight over dwindling resources or you can get quick creative get collaborative get cooperative and make new resources right and so what gets optimized by flow everything we need to fight or flee right to of that side of the equation everything we need to get exploratory get innovative get cooperative get crazy make new resources that's the toolkit so when you're talking about human peak performance that's the suite and it is literally all those skills and the way i always explain it is it's from a common sense point of view it's easy to understand motivation gets us into the game right that's where the book starts it then goes into goals because once you're in the game you have to where am i going oh yeah you need goals right and there's three levels of goals that you've got to set and then once you've got goals you need grit why because motivation is not always going to be there it's going to run out right so then you need grit and then you need learning because it allows you to continue to play and finally especially if you're going for after high hard challenges like impossible stuff you need creativity to steer right like if you're trying to go after any high hard challenge where there's no obvious way to get from point a to point b creativity is how you steer and then flow it's how you turbo boost the entire thing right that's the entire toolkit that's like literally that's human being performance because that's That's what evolution is optimized for.

52:27So that's everything we have to work with. And they're all designed to work together in an order in a system, which is the cool news. And as you lay that out, that quote unquote system in the book, essentially, and this is what I love, and this maybe is what you wanted to teach us about biology scales and personality doesn't, what you're teaching here is essentially how to do things, how to think about things in a way that fires the appropriate set of chemical reactions that reinforces my biology, that drives me to the direction of producing small I and potentially big I impossible things. Did I get that close to right or what did I miss?

53:14Am I connecting the dots, Stephen? I mean, yeah, for sure. Like, let me give you a really classic example. So flow is a huge neurochemical dump. You get all five or six of the brain's major pleasure chemicals, dopamine. It's the mother load, is it not? It's the mother load. So let's talk about learning for a second. So what is learning, right? Learning is literally the more neurochemicals that show up during the experience, the better chance that experience will move from short-term holding into long-term storage, right curiosity when you have a little bit of norepinephrine and a little bit of dopamine you're it's actually the ready conditions for learning when your brain wants to learn whenever we encounter a salient stimuli anything novel oh the first thing that happens is the brain releases a little bit of norepinephrine why because maybe you want to remember that for later happens automatically you're not trying to remember the thing your brain is doing it automatically the more neurochemicals the better that happens so you get the memory for free so to speak memory for free is my point it's exactly right flow is a 240 this is the department of defense's numbers on studies they were running but soldiers in flow were learning 240 faster than normal skills acquisition that's pretty amazing and all of it here's the key part they're still doing like if you take a dude in flow and you take somebody out of flow and you teach them out to shoot a handgun, they're doing the same amount of work.

54:44The work is not changing. The person in flow is going to learn it 240 times percent faster just based on their neurochemistry. You're still going to have to do the same thing, right? So like one way or another, but if you can figure out how do I do this in flow, you're going to only have to learn it once. it's it's such a great set of insights the other interesting thing to me about flow is i'll speak from my own experience i disappear for myself in flow in other words everybody does diminishment of self is one of the core characteristics of the experience and and it's this transcending of self thing is really power like i think about you know you can be in flow reading a book i was in flow reading your book i mean i was every sentence going holy fuck ask him about that and that's unbelievable and underlining and writing and you know and so when you engage with something that you're curious about and as a young man i learned it was okay to write in books and as a dyslexic that changed everything for me because a book is a thing i play with now not some you know uh sacred thing in a library anyway bottom line is i disappear reading your book now it's it's it you disappear differently skiing in pow or riding a great wave but it's they're very similar components same components to it and that's why it works ceases being work right and and school learning which may sound like a bummer to some when it feels a lot more like play it the whole thing goes away and so this whole notion of flow, most of our lives are not oriented around it though.

56:31Our workplaces aren't set up to create flow and some of our family lives and homes aren't set up for it. It's like, I know this is a huge part of your life's work, but the thing I've been dying to ask you about the flow component is so much is now known about it. And yet so few people seem to understand any of this stuff. Well, it's, I mean, it's interesting because, you know, we had a really hard time training a bit in flow up until around 2000 and well, 2005, six or because people were still trying to train people from the psychology. And as I said, when we started, it's metaphor. It's not, it wasn't like, it's very hard to train flow from the psychology.

57:14Once you get to the neurobiology, you know, we train about a thousand people a month and we measure flow pre and post with the standard psychometric instruments and we see on average a 70 to 80 percent boost in flow it is really trainable from the neurobiology that said a lot of corporations a lot of organizations are built on principles from an earlier century right and we are starting to see more flow principles get adopted into the workplace for sure um at a higher and higher level. And I see this because I know which organizations my company is working with and who we're training. And I can tell you it is, you know, it's way more mainstream.

58:00You know what I mean? Like when I first wrote Rise of Superman, the military called very quickly, the marketing teams called the advertising marketers. They saw the advantage right away in the military and Wall Street. Those were the three groups of people I talked to almost immediately. Athletes came in sort of next. But now, I mean, it is not unusual that this week I spoke to a group of Red Bull athletes, big surprise there. And I also spoke to a bank, one of the major big five banks in the world and talk to a senior leadership team there that's what is the difference now banks are like the most conservative business organization you could possibly imagine right and they're interested in this stuff now so you're seeing it but you are right we um there's a lot of stuff we've done wrong from a flow perspective and there's a lot left to learn i always say that if you're working on individual performance we're good once you get to organizational performance we started out with the idea that biology scales right that's an individual thing what is the biology of an organization that's interesting now people in the flow research collective i'm thinking uh one of the very talented psychologists that i work with clara sarah um she likes to say that complexity science gives us the biology of an organization and she may be very right i think she probably is but what does that actually look like and how does that work and can we train from it it's a little trickier which is not to say that we can't train up organizations it's that what i've found is that every organization is kind of individual and you have to work with them a little bit more hands-on to figure out exactly what is going to work with their biology it's a little, it's a little, I don't think it's a, you know, with, with art impossible, it's almost like one size fits all with that, the stuff that's in there.

59:58And that's true for all the individuals in our organization, but it gets a little complicated when they start working together. So if I was, um, you know, a CEO or a head of HR or even a department head, uh, of a business. And I said, Hey, Steven, you know, I just read your book, art of the impossible. And I want to create a culture where people access these ideas more such that there are more people working in flow more often and so that we as an organization can get busy on a lot more small eye impossibles and hopefully lead up to a couple of big eye impossibles over time this is a no yes the answer is yes that's you get that call you get that email i get that we get that call all the time we put to put organizations through zero to dangerous which is our flagship uh kind of flow peak performance training and it it's deadly effective but you're talking about so let's simple example um any company that has an open office plan simple example we know flow demands complete concentration and if it's group flow it demands complete concentration from the group so in either case, you need to be able to wall yourself off or wall the team off from the rest of the organization.

1:01:18If you have an open office plan, you have an office plan that will block flow. So what do you do in that case? Well, we work all those, everybody makes these isolated pod phone booth things right now. So you have to import a bunch of those into your, it's not like the fixes are, there's not, you know what I mean? It's not hard to change up some of the office furniture for it's just that we um in our attempts to kind of do things more collaboratively we've sort of gotten away from how our biology is designed to work a little bit isn't that interesting so we've i mean the open office thing really came about in the mid to later 90s with the dot-com bubble and so we've now been living over 25 years ish plus or minus in a work environment where none of us can concentrate and get any fucking thing done because we're not in flow is that what you just told me basically yeah i mean yeah honest to god um and i honestly think little carols those office cubicles as long as you can hear other like if there's other people and you can you know what i mean i don't even think those are properly designed um no i think uh i think we'll be i mean office redesign is a really exciting thing right now anyways in a post-covid world Because, you know, I'm in conversations where everybody sort of knows that at the center of like bio sniffers, we work and flow science is the office of tomorrow.

1:02:49Right. That when you put those things together, when you have a pandemic proof kind of co-working space that is designed for a high flow environment for teams of all sizes, from individual up to group, that's going to be the future of work for sure. of office design. And I've been in the past six months, a bunch of those discussions with, you know, really top level real estate people. It's super interesting to watch. You know, some people are getting their ass kicked in commercial real estate, of course, but a whole other segment is now like, okay, we can now take this as an opportunity to reinvent commercial real estate, which hasn't seen a major reinvention in a long time.

1:03:28So that's kind of need. So again, you know, what looks like a disaster and maybe is a disaster then turns into an opportunity. I agree with that. To create a more human flow oriented, therefore more creative, more innovative, more productive, more personally satisfying work environment. Because I don't know, did anybody like those cubes? Does anybody like that? Nobody likes those cubes. Nobody fucking likes that. Yeah. Now I want to circle back to the beginning of the book where you're talking about sort of human nature and the biology and scarcity versus I can, I make a decision to fight over scarcity, or I make a decision to collaborate, innovate and create abundance.

1:04:14Could you sort of pop the hood a little more for me, Stephen, on that insight? Well, I, so it's, it's essentially this, I mean, it's the same thing we talked about already, which is that, you know, evolution shaped us, shaped human beings to react to scarcity. And you can either fight or flee, right? Those are your choices to avoid becoming somebody else's resources or to fight over dwindling resources. Or you get creative, get cooperative and band together and make new resources. And almost everything we talk about human performance is meant to solve those problems. And so, you know, it strikes me that entrepreneurs, innovators of various types whether it's you know Shane McConkie or Pablo Picasso as an artist the dot I connect and I want to check this out with you is that people who are creators are in that mindset of we can we can create abundance that this idea that there are only so many bananas in the world and we got to fight over we're a bunch of monkeys fighting over bananas as opposed to, well, I understand, you know, I'm not an idiot and I get basics of Adam Smith and economics and soybeans and, you know, commodities and shit.

1:05:27But at the same time, look around. I mean, human beings create abundance all the time. And so I guess my question is, are people whose mindset is more scarcity oriented, can they be taught to have more of a creation innovation and therefore abundance mindset so you're asking from a real like from the way i would think about that question is twofold one is creativity of trainable skill and the answer is yes um it was no much in the way that flow wasn't a trainable skill creativity is really fucking hard to train if you're trying to come from the psychology right i need you to think differently what you need me to um right but when you're coming from the neurobiology and you realize that wait creativity isn't actually necessarily a skill set it's more of a state of consciousness literally it's a way of the brain processing information etc etc and there's ways to amplify that that's very trainable and the second half of that question is is optimism trainable right and that answer is also yes right it's also in the book as well like if you're interested in optimism, the data is really clear.

1:06:39Daily gratitude practice. Quickest way to get optimistic is daily gratitude practice. Because all you're doing is pointing out to the brain, the good things that are already real in your life, right? Your brain's got a great bullshit detector, which is why affirmations don't work. But gratitude works because when you wake up and you're like, I am so happy and grateful that this morning I woke up and I'm alive and I can, you know, use my mouth hole to form words, right? Well, those things are true, right? So your brain goes, oh, well, it's better than better than you thought. And it starts tilting your negativity bias, you start taking in more positive information.

1:07:19So those are very, very, very trainable skills. And when it comes to these questions of abundance, I think as a general, most people are pretty smart and they just haven't like it's hard. Dave Foster Wallace brilliantly said, sometimes the most obvious and important realities are the hardest to see or talk about. And, you know, for, you know, an example is this is my smartphone. There's a million dollars worth of 1980s technology in here that I get for free. Most people don't realize it. They don't go, Oh, wow. I don't need an encyclopedia anymore. I don't need a music player, a stereo. Do you remember how I've been looking at your wall of music behind you?

1:08:04I'm sure you used to have a bang and all sin system. That was probably a good 10 to$15 ,000 in subwoofers and woofers and all the right blah, blah. And now you've got a fucking smartphone and maybe a pair of earplugs. It's so funny. You're saying this just the other night. um it was you know past past uh sundown and my wife carrie says oh you know could you go um could you go get the mail and uh we're on a flag lot so we have a long driveway and i was like yeah you know where's a flashlight she's like just use your phone exactly we used to and i had this little moment like you're describing which is like holy fuck this thing does everything when peter de abandis and i wrote abundance we uh this was so this was 2011 we did a calculation then that showed there was a million and a half dollars worth of 1980s technology in your smartphone and this was nine years ago right and you know imagine what's we've gone from like nine years ago we had kind of mediocre kodak cameras in our smartphones now we've got house of lots right the better better than anything else in the world is the camera in your phone at this point or the the movie cameras people when i i grew up a lot of my friends were filmmakers in the 90s in the 80s in the 90s and they came out of film school and um and a lot of them were documentary filmmakers came out of the stanford program because i was in california at the time and uh oh my god film was so expensive like he was these guys they would work so unbelievably hard for the opportunity to like steal scraps like people would work on i remember we were i worked on uh beverly hills cop three i just got out of grad school and i needed a job and a bunch of friends of mine were working on beverly hills cops three and they were literally like getting film scraps from right the the ends of the film that weren't being used and people were saving them so they could shoot on them which was insane i know and you know a couple nights ago we had some uh friends over for a physically distant outside uh dinner and um we lit a fire and i took my iphone and you can shoot the fire in slow-mo video on your fucking phone anyways now i i have a crazy dot i want to see if this connects so i'm i'm going through this the whole thing about scarcity and abundance and I love this whole thread it's it's a very it's a very powerful I set ideas for me and as I'm reading I sort of have this aha is Stephen describing crime that is to say if I'm a person who lives in a scarcity world I become a taker and if I'm a person who lives in a world of abundance i become a creator is that am i insane am i connecting any dot here you know first of all i try to stay in my lane crime is a sociological cultural phenomenon you're you're literally outside of of where my levels of expertise go and i don't try not to stretch that far into culture stuff because that's not i'm not an expert on that stuff and other people are but what i will say is that i grew up around a lot of outlaw types shall we say and usually they're if people are turning to crime it's because they don't they don't see any other options right i'm not i have i've met very you know sort of few people who went in that direction because they thought they had choices uh usually it's because people don't have choices.

1:11:50And so that's my two cents on that one. But I do think there is, you know, there is something to be said for an abundance mindset, there's something to be said for the idea, you know, that there's enough to go around for everybody, which is not to say that, you know, it's always a competition. I say this in the book, when I talk about kind of long, the secret to long haul creativity. I don't think people, the world is a lot more competitive than I think most people are, are realize one way or the other. I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. I I'm a fan of competition. I like it. I think it brings out really great stuff in people.

1:12:33But I get that it's not everybody. It's not everybody's cup of tea, but I do think there's enough to go around. And I, you know, I don't personally, um, I'd much rather work with people with an abundance mindset than a scarcity mindset. Um, it just, it produces better results and less, and less legal problems down the line. Yeah. Well, and the, the old, uh, 25 % of something is a lot better than a hundred percent of nothing. There's wisdom in that. Maybe I'll wrap with this one. Um, the, the minute in the book, you describe this work as you say, and now you're playing the infinite game. This game of making the impossible happen.

1:13:22This game of truly high performance. And so tell me a little bit about why the infinite game. Yeah, it's not, I mean, it's obviously not my term. It's James Kars, philosopher James Kars' famous term. And he said, look, there are two kinds of games we play here on earth. You have finite games, which are things like politics, love, and war. This is from game theory. And a finite game is a game where there are clearly defined rules, a bounded field of play, and winners and losers. Right? Like, you know, at a football game, who won, who lost. You know, in an election, who won, who lost. These are finite games.

1:14:00Infinite games are love is an infinite game. Creativity is an infinite game. The goal of an infinite game is not to win or lose. It's to keep on playing. The rules keep changing. There's no bounded field of play. And the point I was making is that peak performance is an infinite game. You can't win it. But I will say I think peak performance is an unusual infinite game because you can actually lose. And the only way you lose is by not playing. right but not and and and what by not trying to go big whatever that is for you that's what i really think and i think you know it's a it's a much because when i say peak performance is an infinite game like how do you win right and and and what is peak performance for you today is gonna you know you're gonna grow peak performance is about using your skills to the utmost again and again and again so you keep getting better and better and better and better so it's an endlessly moving target as well.

1:15:02So that's what I mean by those ideas. But I, you know, ultimately it's, there is no more fun game in the world than what am I actually capable of, right? That's the most fun game we can play in this world is what am I actually capable of? Or the only game we actually like more is what are you and me together actually capable of, right? That's the, that's the one game we probably like a little more than what am I capable of? It's what we are capable of together. That's a little more fun for a lot of people to play. I'm an introvert and I fucking hate people. So like, I like to play the other one, but everybody else seems to like each other and that's just fine.

1:15:47Steven, you're amazing. It's an absolute thrill to not just meet you, but to get this time with you. this book, The Art of the Impossible, is an absolutely legendary piece of work. I think it's going to be one of the most important books in probably a decade. And I have a sense of what it takes to write a heartfelt book like this and a massively researched book like this. So I know this was an incredible amount of work and a real labor of love. And I'm just leading up to telling you, thank you for writing this legendary book, Stephen. you're welcome and i will uh i will all the people i drove fucking crazy along the way like my wife i've just passed it along and be like look a lot of people are saying thank you um for putting up with steven while he wrote that book well what's your wife's name steven joy joy joy well please thank joy for me tell her i appreciate uh her lending you to us yeah and whatever whatever you did whatever grievances she may have.

1:16:54I apologize to her for you. That's going to go over really well. Honey, I was on this podcast. Thanks, man. I appreciate your interest. Thank you so much. It was really fun getting out with you. Thank you, brother. And come back anytime. You're amazing. Thank you, man. Thank you, Stephen. Well, there he is, the legendary Stephen Kotler, his brand new book is coming out right now. And I highly suggest you pick up a copy. Now, in times like these, being flexible and adaptable is critical to surviving and thriving. And that's where my friends at Oracle NetSuite come in. You see, with NetSuite, the flexibility is built in.

1:17:38You can scale up, scale down, God forbid, spin off, change, adopt new business models, adopt new digital channels, whatever you need to do. NetSuite's flexibility lets you do it all quickly and easily. There's a reason 63 % of recent tech IPOs run NetSuite. Visit netsuite.com slash different today for your free product tour. That's netsuite.com slash different. And speaking of legendary businesses, I believe there's no such thing as a legendary business today that isn't a digital business. And over the last year or so, the need to accelerate digital transformation has accelerated. And that's where my friends at Splunk come in.

1:18:25You see, Splunk is the leader in data to everything. Splunk lets you build a more resilient organization, accelerate your cloud-driven transformation, exceed customer expectations and a lot more. As a matter of fact, Domino's turned to Splunk to reposition itself as, an e-commerce company that happens to sell pizza. And the global pizza chain shifted its focus to digital channels and emerging technologies without surrendering the personal touch that goes into every Domino's pizza. With Splunk, you can thrive in the data age too. Visit That's splunk.com slash D to E. That's splunk.com slash D, the number two, the letter E.

1:19:06All right. We would like to thank the legendary Stephen Kotler. What a conversation and what a book. The Art of Impossible, A Peak Performance Primer is out now. Also, we'd like to thank Ann Valentino and Alyssa Fortunato for helping to make this episode happen. Thank you so much, ladies. My friends at OneLifeFullyLived.org are the nonprofit helping you dream, plan, and live your best life. And One Life has been making a difference in underserved communities for 10 years now. If you want to make a difference, check out OneLifeFullyLived.org. My friends at Bottleneck.Online are the first dedicated distant assistant.

1:19:45They've been physically distancing before that was a thing. So if you need a legendary assistant who's nowhere near you, check out Bottleneck.Online today. My friends at Autranet have been building legendary B2B websites in Silicon Valley for over 20 years. Check out atre.net today. And I would also like to encourage you to think about the concept of justice deposits. What a justice deposit is, is moving money from where you bank today to a black-owned bank. You see, banks only can lend money if they have deposits. So when you move 5%, 10%, 20%, or 100 % of your money to black-owned banks, they now have more to lend to our black sisters and brothers.

1:20:30So if you believe in fair access to capital, why not consider moving some of your cash deposits to a black-owned bank in a justice deposit? All right. I need to remind you that today's information is provided to you solely for informational purposes. And this oddcast is the sole property of the Lockhead Oddcast Network. If you got any value out of it, please share it. All right. Do remain perturbed. We are produced and edited by the GOAT, the greatest of all time, Jason DeFilippo. Check out his podcast, Grumpy Old Geeks. They've been on a tear lately. Sarah Knox and Jamie Jay do technical execution and build Lockhead.com.

1:21:07Show notes by Diane Gervasio. Remember to spread podcasts, not viruses. Remember the passing lane is the passing lane. Get out of the left-hand lane. Prius drivers, I'm talking to you. Listen to the Tragically Hip. Remember that comedian Kathleen Madigan was right. She's got some specials out there on Netflix. She's hysterical. Thank you, Candy Dandy. She keeps all the trains running on time. Love you, Mom and Dad. And hey, Colin, this odd cast really ties the room together, doesn't it? Today, our deepest apologies go to Carson Sweet, CEO of Cloud Passage. Sorry, Carsey. We just ran out of time for you.

1:21:41That's it, my friends. Please stay safe, stay healthy, take good care of each other. Of course, stay legendary. And until we're together again, follow your different.