Achieve Peak Creativity: Merging Flow States with AI Technology w/ Steven Kotler | EP #151

27:59So one, like I've said for a while that the singularity I'm paying the most attention to is when VR gets to the point that it can produce the full suite of a mudwood, and we can have more pleasurable, more exciting, more interesting experiences inside the simulation than in reality through we migrate into virtual worlds. It has been the question I've been asking for a while, and VR of all the text we've been looking at, it's the one that seems to be lagging the most, at least. But AI will enable it. In the other way, I agree with that. I mean, is this the answer to Fermi's paradox? Oh, that's an interesting question.

28:36Right, which is, you know, Fermi's paradox for those who know is the notion of where is all the alien life. We should even end a slow replication and travel rate. They should be here by now. Right. Somebody should contact us. Yeah. And the question of, you know, there's a whole bunch of media right now that in fact, they have contacted us since the last 50 years, since World War I. I love a recent conversation I had with somebody where we saw a flurry of UFO sightings when the nuclear bomb was being created. And now we're seeing a flurry of UFO sightings when AI is on the exponential rise. So are the the aliens here to make sure we don't destroy ourselves in these these inflection points and even decide helping us along.

29:26Here have nuclear power. Here have AI. We're coming for your plan in a second, but we don't have to do the hard work of killing. You guys are going to do it for us. It uh not going to go down that route. I get to avoid that rabbit hole. I still the so there's there's a handful of questions here. One is We seem to think and technology is some kind of incredibly unstoppable force where we don't make decisions afterwards like once the it's out of the box and that's what I've said before is and we're seeing this we're doing it right now as a society. Social media broke the world and it broke the world because it's massively addictive technology that was sprung on the world without, like we didn't know it had all the negative effects and blah blah blah.

30:20Now it's 20 years later and we're saying, oh no, wait a minute. Maybe it's not a good idea for our kids to be on social media all the time. Maybe we need to rethink how we interact with this particular tool. I think that's going to happen with AI. I think that's what happens when our technology starts to exceed our kept best capacities in that way. I think we come to a point where we're like, we're humans. So we can make a decision here to not engage. I think you're going to start seeing AI -free countries. I think you're going to start seeing technology countries where they're like, no, no, we're good with the technology here.

30:54We're going to stop. We're going to draw the line there. I think these kinds of changes are going to start coming. So you gave me some numbers last night when we were hanging out having dinner about the size of the creative economy. And as we're talking about AI and creativity, could you recount this? Yes. So here's this. It's interesting. If you're interested in impacting your bottom line, which where should you skill up? I would create a flow, would be my answer. The creative economy has tripled in size in the past 15 years. Are you defining creative economy? Yeah, let's back this up. Usually when you think about this, you think about urban planner and economist Richard Florida who wrote the rise of the creative classes.

31:44And he had two categories of creatives in there. There were professional creatives in the super creative core. Super creative core are folks like us. They're creative entrepreneurs, creative artists, creative writers, these people who are inventing culture, inventing the future. And creative professionals are things like you're a doctor, you're an accountant, you're and you're trying to bring in novelty and new techniques and be creative inside the discipline. And those are the two classes. When you look at both of them, they both exploded. The super creative core went from like 100 million people to 300 million people.

32:22The numbers in America are to train dollar economy. And it's interesting because Adobe's on a bunch of really great studies. Like once every five years, they do a global study on creativity. They're phenomenal studies. And they've started them back in the 2000s. In their 2016 study they found that creatives and people who use creativity in their work Out our non -creatives by 13 percent It's in America. It's a trillion dollar economy globally. It's like a three trillion dollar economy of 3 .2 trillion dollar economy So it's a big chunk of America. It's like 4 .5 percent of the GDP comes comes out of creativity So it and it's the fastest growing sector and for good reason back in 2010 and IBM did a very famous study of CEOs.

33:09And they wanted to know what's the quality in the 21st century that will most help a CEO thrive, creativity top the list. There was a more recent study a couple of years ago that looked at the same question they came back with analytical thinking, problem solving and creativity. And I will tell you that like, that's redundant because really good analytical thinking is creative, really good problem solving is creative. So the whole thing is essentially creativity and creative problem solving. So bring it back to AI then. If AI is a creativity enhancing tool, which can take people who are not part of the creative community into the creative ecosystem.

33:56them. The question is, is the value in terms of earning power in terms of being in business, going to demonetize as the number of creatives? That's an interesting question. Here, let me go back to your AI creativity. First of all, let me give it creativity is technically defined as the creation of novel and useful ideas. And the useful is important because it's not just enough to have something cool in their head. You actually have to put it in the world. You have to show it to other people. You got to, so there's risk taking involved in the creative process also at the end of it. When we look at creativity, one of the things, we're going to, I know, we're both interested in this.

34:37When we look at the progress in AI, people are looking at it as if it was separate from progress and consciousness hacking technologies also on the human side of the equation. So it's not just that we're augmenting the machines. The humans are being augmented. If you think about, so let's just talk about flow and creativity. So my old organization, the FloGNum Project, did a big study with CO leaders. We want to know how much more productive they were creative. They were in flow. McKinsey did this really famous study of CO leaders and found they were 500 % more productive in flow. It was like a 10 -year study went around the globe, talked to tons of people, self -apported, so you always got a...

35:20Right. And how long what percentage of their working life are they inflow a small fraction? No, it's an open that's an open question that I'll go down. Let me just get there Creativity we found people on average were 700 % more creative. That's what they reported and we were like got that numbers crazy. So creativity can be broken down. This psychologist named Mumford did it into eight categories problem identification all the way through like solution implementation. And we measured, though, we tried to measure those independently and flow. We found that each of those eight categories increases by 40 to 60%.

35:56So ever breaking it down, which starts to add towards those big numbers. My point when 30 years ago, when the AI conversation started, humans were trying to use psychology to train people into flow. And the classic example I always give is, uh, mehach sent me hide the godfather flow psychology, We wrote a book called Flow & Sports, where we worked with the top sports psychologists and they tried to use the psychology of flow to train up top athletes and they sucked at it. They're bad. Like it's books and print. You can see their hit rate is terrible with the flow research collective with our core flow training, zero to dangerous.

36:31We've pulled. By the way, another name I love there. Zero to dangerous. There's a thousand people in 160 countries, 28 industries have taken that class. On average, we see a 73 .8 % increase in amount time. By the way, you know that 62 .4 % of people make up stats on the spot. I'm not making this data. You can find it on our website and the data. But my point is, if you're 7 % more productive in flow, or more creative in flow, and we've taken it from, we don't know how to train this at all to, oh no, it's reliable, it's repeatable, and that's a 73 % increase in the amount of time spent in flow.

37:12So usually when people come to us, they're like, no, I get into flow maybe once, twice a week, and by the time they're done, it's twice a day. And it's pretty, it's very steady and consistent. And this is like low tech. We haven't even started adding in all the, there's a revolution in what you could call for lack of a better term, cautiousness raising technology, right? We saw the first wave, we're like meditation apps and things like that. The second wave, so for example, I have a new partnership with the Vital Nuro. They make a phenomenal eG headset. And it's a Nuro feedback eG headset. Is that why you shave your hair?

37:47Exactly. So you can fix your science. It's exactly right. But I've been watching this is like Portable EG tech. Like I've been playing with this stuff since the early 2000s and in the early 2000s, like I've got every single portable eG device. So it's that's ever made. I've got a cool display of it. They were terrible. Now they're portable, they work. And one of the reasons we partnered with them is we identified, my lab identified like five or six neural markers for flow, was we transitioned to flow state that nobody'd ever been able to find before. And when this was three years ago, and three years ago, we were like trying to figure out, can we measure this?

38:28Can we blow up? We needed FMRIs and it was half million dollars to do the experiment. Couldn't even do it. They can now measure it with this frickin port three years later. The same signal that we couldn't get it with FMRI, we can now get it here. And you know what you just had Mary Lee Jepsenon, we just interviewed her, talked to her. Her technology takes us farther. So my point is AI is evolving. Humans and our ability, there's a revolution going on and our ability to take advantage of our consciousness. And this is before then there's a the next wave of NeuroTech. as we know, that's BCI, that's brain computer interface, and that takes it to a whole of the level.

39:05So, it's not, humans aren't static in this picture. That's the thing that people forget when they have the AI conversation. They're like, AI is exploding. I'm like, all right, great, but you're 700 % more creative in flow. And that's gone from this great state to something that's reliable. I can imagine having my AI, let's call it Jarvis, for that of a better term. Where did that word come from? I mean, Stephen constantly makes fun of me because and every one of our works. Every one of our bucks, Jarvis has to get it there. I love Jarvis, I mean, I think we're gonna find a way to get Jarvis into we are as God.

39:39Okay, that's great, right after we write the agent abundance. The agent abundance. So maybe let's just call it Jarvis, keep white out, let's fuck it. So this, I can imagine if I have Jarvis on, and I say maximize me in flow, that it will be able to do things as an AI to basically continuously tip me into flow. So all the cool stuff, the most of the cool stuff that, because we're doing a lot of work, we have a humans. My belief is that humans and flow collaborated with each other and AI are gonna own the future. And is this gonna be true 50 years from now, 30 years from now? I don't know, but is it gonna be true for the next 10 to 15 years?

40:20Absolutely. For sure. And I think it would be true for a a lot longer, but I definitely think it's going to be true for this next period. And a lot of what we're doing, we have a fully dedicated research line here. It's all on interface design. How do you, what's the flowiest interface? It's the best way to work with an AI to produce, because one of, give you something that's really wild that never used to happen. So in that challenge, you'll sweet spot. You have to deal with your physical appearance. Just going to leave it alone. Just going to leave it alone. I don't even know what I was saying anymore.

40:55So something that happened, something really wild about AI and flow. I'm so sorry I took you off the game. It was going to be the most insightful thing I've ever said. In fact, I was, it was like solving for pie and you just screwed it up. Sorry, people, I was going to solve for pie here on it. So the question is, you know, you've described the flow state as intensely human, as an intensely human stage. It's well mammalian because it an insects get into flow when birds flogging so it's actually Okay, it's older school fish schooling So go back to the job is I can imagine Jarvis. Oh interface design.

41:36That's what we're talking about Yeah, so almost everything oh this is what this is one that I was gonna tell you about so In that challenge kill sweet spot, right? Anxiety is the upper level so if you overload cognitive load right? Your brain can hold seven items at once in working memory, but that's digits. If you go to something like concepts, most people tap out at three or four. This is why I always say amazingly. Amazing. Yeah. Reload to tiny bottle. Yeah. I mean, people don't get the brain takes in. If you go by Marvin's, Immembrance calculations, and they're probably way off to 11 million bits of information from our senses every second.

42:11That's what they count it. Believe it or not. Our bandwidth of human attention is 120 bits. You're using 60 bits of attention to listening to me talk. If we're talking together and there's a faucet dripping, I'm not noticing it. Everybody's tapping that. This is the whole basis of cognitive bias. Yeah. So one of the things that you've noticed, we talked about a second ago, it used to take you with Google to get over. I've got an answer to a question I need as much data as I possibly can get. You could really spend like a couple hours doing your research until you filled up your brain and pushed yourself into anxiety that challenge skills.

42:46Sweet spot with Chats, GBT or any of the AI systems, you can get such accurate information. You can overload cognitive load in five minutes. I've done it where I'm researching something and I'm 10 minutes in and I've literally blown out my brain for most of the day. But then you can go to the LOM and say, can you please pull out the five most important concepts that are through, you know, you can use that as a sorting mechanism. Yes. But going back, I do imagine that Jarvis can do things, changing music, changing difficulties, challenging me that can hit flow triggers, and we'll talk about flow triggers later, that can push me into flow.

43:28Let me read you a quote from Naval, Robin Kant, who's a CEO of Angel List. He recently said in an interview, this whole idea that we can somehow make AI safe is nonsense because creativity by its nature is unbounded. What are your thoughts about becoming AGI, ASI, Wave, and Safety there? Do you have any preconceived notes? That's a good point he's making, by the way. This is the whole example of deep mind with go where it comes up with moves you've never seen before. 27, right? The move that Lee Soto had never seen before. And this notion that in AI in our world, and you know, you and I are the ultimate optimists, but I can imagine AI in our world doing things that has never been seen or conceived of before and then creating some fundamental challenges for us.

44:28I mean, what technology hasn't created fundamental challenges for us? To me, it's... So then this is going back to we're as gods or age of abundance, whatever you want to call it. And I've said this for a really long time. And this is one of the things we're going to look at in that book is, I think we have a last mile problem on the road to abundance. And we've got the technology to raise global standards of living. And we've had it for a while, right? We could do this. Food, water, and health care. It's got to talk to everything. It was a done deal, probably when we were going to go to abundance, if we wanted to apply ourselves.

45:03And definitely now, but we're not applying ourselves. So why is that? We have the technology to literally raise global standards of living, and it's not happening. And it's because we haven't figured out. Well, let's just say it has been happening just not at a fast enough rate. Not at a fast enough rate, exactly. And I think the problem is that we haven't learned how to cooperate at scale. The only time we cooperate at scale globally around problems is if there's a war and the success right there isn't so good or a pandemic. And again, the success right, like we cooperated for what the first month of the pandemic to get us to vaccines and then every sort of splintered off and you know, everyone in their own ways.

45:40I think that's the, and group flow, which is the cooperative version of is, I think going to the basis of that solution or part of that solution, at least a way in to look at the question, and I've maintained this for a while. But when I look at AI, I'm like, what we need to start doing is whatever you say. And we need to have these global conversations. Otherwise, the generation we lose to AI, I think it's gonna be worse than the generation we lose. So it's a media, right? People, this is, by the way, this was back in the 90s when early days of, you know, my field is all there's to its consciousness.

46:15So psychedelic research has always been part of that. And you looked at the drug war and things like that and we I pretty was very much for legalization what the Portugal experiment Sort of that writing was on the wall a while ago people were looking at going God that might be the way What was the Portugal exporter will Portugal has completely decriminalized everything everything is legal in Portugal and their drug problems continues to drop Better than Las Vegas drop and drop and drop and drop so like you know their problems have actually gone away With this happening So Portugal has been a very radical but interesting global experiment in that.

46:53And one of the points I think is we were always worried that if you legalize drugs, you could lose a generation, right? Because there's a generation that hasn't prepared to deal with these super addictive substances that are going to be in their lives. And the same, like with social media, that's another super addictive substance that we were not prepared to deal with. I think we have to start getting a little ahead of these things. I don't think we can just be playing. But you know the human brain. I know the human brain. It deals with the now and the immediate next moment. In which case, I think we're going to have a bumpy next 20 years.

47:28But I can deal with the long term. We can partner and say, what are the long term issues? It's just that, you know, it's interesting. It's an everybody. I mean, most people, when they have sort of dire predictions, it's about this period, right? Maybe that's just because we're naive and we've got a recency bias and we're not thinking too far into the future and we're bad long -term planners or any of those things. Or how do you freestyle from a creative superintelligence? How do you think past that? One of the questions is how do we train up the AIs? I'm fond of Mogadot's work in which he says, listen.

48:07be kind to the AI. It can be kind of, you know, AI is our progeny, right? How we feed it, how we train it, how we educate it is the difference between Clark Kent, you know, I forget his name from, from Krypton, but that young baby landing on earth and becoming Superman because he landed in a good family and was taught values and virtues and, and became a superhero versus landing in a drug den in the Bronx and becoming a super villain. So that AI can go either directions depending upon how it's trained up. Elon said I want to make a train XAI GROC to be maximally curious and maximally truth -seeking, which sounds reasonably...

48:59Sounds really, it sounds really dangerous, like everything that not does. No, I think, no, if you said maxily creative, that would be dangerous. Okay, you'd maximally curious? Maxily curious to gather knowledge about what, I mean, his goal is that if you're sufficiently curious, you're going to determine the truth. You're going to determine the fundamentals. You'll understand first principles what's going on. And matchfully truth -seeking means you're going to learn to avoid the cognitive biases out there. One of the things I'm excited about is the notion that AI could become maximally wise. Have we had this conversation?

49:41Yeah, we have. And I agree with you on that. I think it's really super interesting. And the other question is, and this is the one that like, why can't we use AI to help us steer us so we don't blow ourselves up with the AI? And I think we will eventually, but only when it has become a digital superintelligence. And this was the conversation at the abundance summit last year, which was, would you rather live in a world a decade from now with digital superintelligence, like at a billionfold increased level of intelligence or without that capability. I for one would match rather live in a world where this digital superintelligence at this God -like abilities is there to help us because we humans are still animalistic in all of our nature as we make stupid decisions.

50:37All these cognitive biases, we are short -term thinkers. And a digital superintelligence, almost like in a parental fashion, is there if the head of some large country says, I wanna, you know, says to his AI, let's go destroy that country over there. At some level of wisdom, the AI says, that's a ridiculous thing to do. Why would you want to do that? I'm just going to talk to the other AI, we're going to work out a collaboration. I do think that that is a viable end state. It's the interim stages between now and then that's the greatest concern. How would you train up an AI? Do you have any innocence from your work?

51:30That's an interesting question. I mean, there's azimob's three laws of re -lux, right? There's, you know, maximal kindness. But at the end of the day, kindness in some circumstances means weakness, which could mean, you know, making the wrong decisions that maximize is what was a Spock statement and in Star Trek 4, you know, the good of the one cannot supersede the good of the many. It's like that. Yeah. It's like that. I have to think about it. my Star Trek version. I only see them just so I could talk to you about that. I appreciate that. Yeah, they're remarkably... Training, nobody's asked me the training AI question before.

52:14I'm going to think about that. Because you're training people, you're training meat sacks all the time. All the time. Yeah. So how would you train AI? The interesting question, you're asking essentially like a question about leadership, right? That also, how do you, how can a human lead in a work? Because I mean, I think you're one of the points you made is part of it is we're not just looking at one AI. We're looking at millions of AI's, possibly billions if everybody ends up with their individual AI. Like we ended up with a personal tutor, right? The Neil Stevenson Diamond Age idea that we both love.

52:57Both love. I'm going to talk about an education for a really long time. That AI is going to be with you for your whole life. So, I'm just going to have, you know, my Jarvis, my version of Jarvis. It's really a question of cooperative AI and cooperative humanity. It's not just a singular concept. I still don't have any ideas. Maybe the next novel will be a crack at that. I really think that you should think about that. I'm going to think about that. I'm not kidding. I think maybe maybe the next sci -fi book is going to be around. How do you do that? All right. My next question for you, buddy. How will the development of AI creative capabilities impact research in neuroscience and creativity?

53:40So I'd like you if you don't mind because every time you speak about this, it's like biotech porn. What's going on in the brain? What's the data? So we're going to talk about creativity. So this is really interesting. The difference of one creativity is a trainable skill. So everything I'm talking about, this is a developmental process. As you become more creative, this is what happens in the brain. But I'm going to speak about it as if it was a fixed thing. But I'm not. But by the way, the fact that you're making that statement, I think, is really important. Having a creative mindset. And we'll talk about mindset, right?

54:20Like I am being first of all saying to yourself that you are a creative person Like a lot of people say I'm not creative and they shut it down and Once you shut it down. Yes, you're not creative. Yes, that's really Absolutely, so it's important people to realize that it is it's an innately human skill. We're all born with it Yes, I mean in your opinion about it. I know logically. Yeah, so this is what's wild If you're just looking at sort of male and female, for example, the differences between, and people ask this all the time with flow, are the differences between men and women and flow, and everybody wants those differences to be really great, and they're not.

55:04They're microscopic. Like, if you look at the brains between men and women, men have more inter -hemospheric connectivity and women have more connectivity between the hemispheres. But those are not absolutes and they vary. Brains are creatives. So we have an executive attention network. This allows me to focus on Peter, I'm blocking out all the other distractions, I'm paying attention, that's the executive attention network. I wish my kids would activate that. It doesn't stop fully form until they're 25 it takes a while. It's it's tradable. And then we have the default mode network and which gets a bad route because it's remination lives there, self -referential thinking lives there, but so does creativity.

55:49You see the networking and the fault mode network. It's where your brain goes when it's mind wandering, daydreaming, when you're not living in the now. When you're not living in the now, when your brain's taking you somewhere, and remination is when the instead of like your brain taking you into creativity, It just thinks about that shitty thing your wife said to you and you just played over an offer That's all developed one network normally most brains these networks work in opposition Can you shut down the default? Sure meditation. That's one that I mean among other things like that's one of the main things you're doing They work in opposition so as executive attention goes up right you're focused you're no longer daydreaming Well, I'll notice so you start draped your mean you're not focused that go up and down this way and And it's actually the salience network, which is, if I do this, what's that sound?

56:35That's the salience network. It's switches between the two. That's what does it? So in the brains of creatives, normally this is opposition, they work together. So literally these networks are co -activated. All of them? No, the default mode network and the executive attention, they're co -activated. And the salience network, which is the hinge in creatives, this is what really happens is it gets extra flexible. So you can flop back and forth and back and forth. So you can go from fully focused to thinking about an idea and wildly fully focused. I can see that. That's sort of what happens like when you're writing, right?

57:11Part of the process of learning how to write is this process of learning to toggle between. I need to be focused putting the words in a sentence and, oh no, I got to come up with the next line, right? And it's this back and forth in the brain. and it gets very, very flexible in the brains of creatives. And flow tends to enhance this communication. It shuts down non -relevant structures, but even the default mode network, which really gets turned off and flow, except for the part of it that's used in creativity. So we see really stark differences in the brains of creatives versus non -creatives.

57:48I mean, in a really big way. It's almost like the changes in a creative brain are, I don't know if I can make this statement across the board. It may not be a blank statement, but like, somebody who's been addicted to Coke for your drugs for 20 years versus the creative brain. Know that creative brain actually has more difference than that. Like it's really profound and you can see it. You can see it on FMRIs and you can see it on EEG's, network analysis is a brain. Super interesting. And can you go into a little bit of dopamine and the neurotransmitter? Yes, the next side of this is the neurotransmitters that are involved in it.

58:26And dopamine and norepinephrine, which are shown up, arise at the front and no flow state. These are all pleasure drugs. And both dopamine and norepinephrine are focusing chemicals. Norepinephrine is just adrenaline in the brain, right? Nore adrenaline is what they call it in Europe. We call it norepinephrine. It's essentially adrenaline in the brain. But both these are reward chemicals, but the cool thing they do from a creative perspective is they hide and focus and excitement and attention You know when they're in your system you can't not pay attention to something, right? Like you see something amazing.

58:58You see something a demonstration that's fascinating You hear something. I mean when I'm writing when you're right when I'm writing a cliffhanger story We talk when I teach writing we talk about nor up and effort and closes right like That's what like get you get you the page exactly or And dopamine is the same thing, but you get tend to get dopamine from surprise instead of excitement. But the point is that both of those neurochemicals, this is interesting. Flow, creativity is a flow trigger. When you link ideas together, pattern recognition, the brain releases dopamine, a little bit of north, and a lot of dopamine.

59:34It's fast. I can remember moments in time where, like, when I was in class, and the teachers trying and it teach me something. There's a moment where you don't get it and you're lost. And a moment you go, oh, that's what's going on. And that's that aha moment. Like my colleagues John Coyneus and Mark Beaman map the aha moment. Like we know exactly where it is, how it happens. And it's really, we'll talk a lot about my favorite part of the brand, the anterior, sing a cortex in a second because that's where a lot of this is living. But anyway, we have a big one right here. I do. So glad you noticed.

1:00:16Once again, you killed me. So don't be an upper -reference. So don't be an upper -reference. So by the way, don't mean everybody's had this experience. You do a cross -erpulsar, so it's Sudoca. That little rush of pleasure you get when an answer is right. So that's what is driving video game addictions. Right. So check this out. because this is another example you know, like if you've ever done crossword puzzles. You don't tend to just get one answer at a time, you usually come in flurries, like you get two or three and around why is that? It's because when you get an answer right, the brain puts dubmin into your system.

1:00:49Dubmin, Titan's focus does all that other stuff, it enhances signal the noise ratios. So we find more signal in the noise, we notice more patterns. Why are we more creative and flow? One of the main reasons is because dubmin and norap and nephron both have massively amplified pattern recognition. Now, obviously, you take this too high and you get conspiracy theorists and extreme paranoia. It's the same knob, right? It goes from creativity all the way up into conspiracy theories are just linking really disparate ideas together and really creating and rationalizing them. I mean, that's what the brain does.

1:01:30It's a meaning -making machine. It will take all kinds of crazy stuff. Well, but that's the point with the conspiracy theories. It's not only a meaning -making machine, when we understand meaning, we feel safer. The brain is trying to come like linked together those really important points. It's really important. Always the work, I always say humans are really simple toys at a really basic level. Approach, avoid, valiance and arousal. Those four knobs control like those are the four knobs that control your life. Yeah. Other neurochemicals in creativity, and NANDEMI, same psychoactive that's in marijuana, it's in the endocannabinoid system, which is sort of a second immune system, a stress response system that massively amplifies lateral thinking.

1:02:17The other thing that happens, especially if you're talking about flow in creativity, our sense of self turns off and flow. It's a, we've talked about this before, but it's the same reason time passes strangely in flow. Both time and our sense of self are network effects. There are a bunch of different parts, most of the prefrontal cortex, sometimes other stuff is working, and in flow, the brain performs efficiency exchange. It wants as much energy as it can have for focus and attention, so it shuts down non -critical structures and repurposes the energy. Huge portions of your prefrontal cortex go down in flow.

1:02:55And as a result, we lose our ability to track time. So past, present and future get pushed together into what Poet to talk about is, you know, the eternal now, right? Yes. The moment the deep now is a cycle. I had that experience. I remember I was speaking somewhere and I was asked, except brainlessly to speak about singularity or technology or whatever it was. And I remember I got the mic and had no idea what I was going to say. And I went into a flow state and I was like observing myself, saying things that I really liked. And it was a strangest experience. It was a strange experience. It was like, that was an anchor for me of what a flow state is.

1:03:43Every time in public speaking, right, as long as flow experience doesn't earth, do you If you have a good speech, do you have any idea what you set on stage? I'll get to the end of this speech and I'll be like, my Don. What? You know what I mean? It's fairly common because speaking is really flowy. It's got a lot of flow triggers built in. I've done it a lot. So at this point, I don't stress about it. You go on stage and whatever materializes materializes. And it's funny. And my favorite part is at the end of giving a PowerPoint keynote is the Q &A. Oh yeah. Right, because these questions are coming at me and I've heard like almost every question asked, but when a new question comes, it's so exciting.

1:04:29It is exciting. And I have to pull together like this data point and this data point and it come up and it's like, that was a pretty good answer. Now I got to tell you something. It's because the flow stuff I've done this for so long. I can, if you ask me to speak for 20 minutes, I know what question they're going to I'm just gonna, my first question, my second one, if you asked me for 40 minutes, I know the first question, the second question, because it's just like everybody wants to know the next bit of information. I've done the 60 minute version of the talk, so I know, you know, in the 90 minute version and it's really funny how that happens, but I'm always excited.

1:05:01That's the great stuff when somebody, you know, asks you something, kicks your head sideways, and you're like, wow, I have no idea. Like my friend Peter asked me how I was gonna train an AI today. I don't know. But you're gonna figure it out. I'm gonna figure it out. Yeah, it was about 13 years ago I had my two kids, my two boys, and I remember at that moment in time I made a decision to double down on my health. Without question, I wanted to see their kids, their grandkids, and really, you know, during this extraordinary time where the space frontier and AI and crypto is all exploding, it was like the most exciting time ever to be alive.

1:05:36And I made a decision to double down on my health. And I've done that in three key areas. The first is going every year for a found upload. You know, a found is one of the most advanced diagnostics in therapeutics companies. I go there, upload myself, digitize myself about 200 gigabytes of data that the AI system is able to look at, to catch disease at inception. You know, look for any cardiovascular and you cancer, neurodegenerative disease, and you metabolic disease. These things are all going on all the time and you can prevent them if you can find them at inception. So super important. So found is one of my keys.

1:06:15I make it available to the CEOs of all my companies, my family members, because I help this in you wealth. But beyond that, we are a collection of 40 trillion human cells and another 100 trillion bacterial cells, fungi, a viarite and we don't understand how that impacts us. And so I use a company in a product called Viom. And Viom has a technology called Metatranscriptomics. It was actually developed in New Mexico at the same place where the nuclear bomb was developed as a biodefense weapon. And their technology is able to help you understand what's going on in your body to understand which bacteria are producing which proteins and as a consequence of that, what foods are your super foods that are best feed to eat?

1:07:08Or what food should you avoid? Right? What's going on in your oral microbiome? So I use their testing to understand my foods, understand my medicines, understand my supplements, and biome really helps me understand from a biological and data standpoint, what's best for me? And then finally, feeling good, being intelligent, moving well is critical, but looking good when you look yourself in the mirror, saying, you know, I feel great about life is so important, right? And so a product I use every day twice a day is called one skin, developed by four incredible PhD women that found this 10 amino acid peptide that's able to zap senile cells in your skin and really help you stay youthful in your look and appearance.

1:07:58So for me these are three technologies I love and I use all the time. I'll have my team link to those in the show notes down below. Please check them out. Anyway I hope you enjoyed that now back to the episode. What should entrepreneurs be focused on in this new AI -driven landscape to ensure they developed the right skills, how do you think about that? I mean, you're teaching a group of different entrepreneurs. We're so, um, and I'm, I'm blending a bunch of things together. Also, I, I, like, I'm using AI also to teach people how to like work with bias and mindset and framing, um, also woven into that program.

1:08:41Um, to me, it's all a couple together, but we can get into that. I just, I don't know. Before we forget, we forgot about the ASE, what do you call it, singular cortex. The interior is singular cortex. Okay, let's go there. I want to understand your favorite part of your brain. Let's go there. So, the ACC is really interesting because it's the part of your brain that does pattern recognition versus lateral thinking. So it decides you're facing a problem. Is it going to be super creative and come up with this wild solution or is it going to me safe, tried and true and the lever is actually anxiety.

1:09:18The more anxiety in your system, the more you want the safe, secure, tried and true. This is why I always tell people for hiring, you always hire two people. You hire the person they are normally, the person they are when they're afraid and they're radically different people. It's because of the ACC. And I always, in hiring, I try to, like, there's always a trial period if you want to come working with me and I will stress you out in that trial period in such a way because I want to see how you're going to be when you're scared and you're failing because we're going to be in that situation. I'm an entrepreneur.

1:09:54Shit's going to go wrong. You're not going to need you to be able to be at your creative best and stay calm and do all that stuff for years. I like to hire action sport athletes, professional action sport athletes for this very reason because they're used to staying very calm in making good decisions in extreme situations. Same thing with hiring out of the military. Get the same thing. Going back to, so a lot of folks who are listening or watching us right now are entrepreneurs, and I think there's no entrepreneur on the planet that isn't diving deep into AI right now, in some way, shape or form, right?

1:10:31It may just be. I've seen three, I've seen three trends. I see the trend with like a lot of creators who just, they're just like, fuck this. I want nothing to do with it. They were told it was gonna make them more productive or what blah, blah, blah, blah. And they tried it, it didn't work the way. They thought and they've walked away. There's a second group. And this is, and this is, I fit into this category. And it's one of the reasons I'm creating the alliance is to solve this problem for myself also is, I like to really get great with my tools. So when I taught myself how to draw for the first year and a half, I'd just drew in charcoal.

1:11:07Then I added in ink, like black ink. And it's now, right? It's now like four years in or five years in the top. I know. So like I did the same thing with AI. I'm really great with Chechi BT and some of the large language models. I'm okay with some of the drawing programs, But like you get into the audio and the video stuff and I suck. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I've got, I have all the tools I'm good at. And then there's people like you know our front of my canyick who, like every new AI tool that comes out, my kids figured out, how do you use it? How do you monetize it? How do you, you know, use it to problem solve for you?

1:11:45How do you blend it with other AI's? That's what I think. It's a gap, right? Because the more we get towards a super intelligent AI, you're just going to have one system. Now you have a whole bunch of different tools you have to learn. And it's a little more complicated. And this is, for my mind, where the curiosity mindset comes in. Look, that's exactly what I was about to say. My experience with all of it, my advice. And this is what I was told to do. And I came to AI through all this stuff. I came in as a scientist. We've been using machine learning and a whole bunch of stuff in flow research for 20 years now.

1:12:23So I came in thinking how do we use machine learning, how do we use AI to help us do better science and then move it into other things. But I think you have to, people are so intimidated or so they've made up their mind that they forget that the simplest thing to do is this is what somebody told to me, they were like they don't go this, they play with the fucking system. Just get on the system, it's free, play. Yes, ask the system to teach you how to use the system and I just the same approach one of the coolest thing one of the reasons I like teaching myself to draw I think everybody So one micro dosing with creativity between tasks.

1:13:02What do you micro dose with? Mic with creativity, so I will I'll be focused on my block right and then I've got a meeting and I've got a Five -minute block. Yeah, if you're in flow You don't want your prefrontal cortex to turn my block on right? So what do you need to avoid anything emotional anything that'll get your ego fired up because the ego lives right there so all social media is is no good because it's probably gonna get a rise out of you or do something and mess with that system So there's limited things a lot of people like low grade physical activity and sometimes I'll do that I'll go for a walk or things like that But I like like a ten minute drawing thing or or whatever and What I love and this is the project take with AI is is no, no people don't run this experiment and it's fascinating.

1:13:47If you do something 10 minutes a day, just 10 minutes a day, but you do it for a year, you're gonna get excellent. You'll steal it from me. It's the coolest thing in the world to like, I've watched it. So what would you do with what would you do for 10 minutes a day that you haven't been doing right now? The next once I get my drawn to sort of where it wants, I've got, I've already got a piano in my office and that's the next one, is I'm going to move in to teaching myself how to play music. And yes, I know, pretty soon the AI is going to be able to do it for me in everything else, but I still believe that by training up my skills and training up my consciousness raising skills at the same time, me working with AI is going to be better than without.

1:14:32Like the combination, the combinations are doing better. And I still think like what you've been asking is, hey, Steven, I'm really, really fucking and smart, and I cooperate with AI. What point is the AI going to replace me, right? And what point is the AI going to be better than just peter in the AI together, or Steven in the AI together? And I'm hoping the answer is not in our lifetime. That is not hoping the answer. Ooh, I have a hard time believing it. I have a hard time believing it too. I think AI, the challenges we humans have, all these cognitive biases, we have a limited font of knowledge, we bias the output that in AI.

1:15:09I want to talk about this for a second. We do all those things, but people don't understand that, so it's back into creativity for a sector. Creativity is a recombinant or a process, right? The brain takes a novel information, it connects it to older ideas, it bursts into the start of the line of new. So we already talked about the fact that you're taking 11 million bits a second, but you're only like getting 120 bits and we talked about the negativity bias. That means nine negative bits of information for every one positive bit that gets through. And most of the negative stuff is older patterns.

1:15:44It's other, it's fierce, right? We're scared of it because we've seen it before and it's gone wrong. So it's not new information. It's not the stuff that feeds creativity, right? One of the reasons that I like a gratitude practice is so helpful is it'll tune it down to like five or six negative bits for every positive bit that gets through. So it basically jubbles your novelty input. But if you want to mess around with those things, people don't realize this. Yes, biases unconscious. Our frames are often unconscious, though you can make them conscious. And mindset from a lot of people, it's unconscious and less somebody like you or me has made it conscious for them, right?

1:16:25So, but people don't realize these are nobs. They're tuning knobs. You can control the novelty, the information you're taking in. by messing with bias and framing and not what I would remind people of is listen, our brains are large language models. They're neural nets. Yes. And how do you train a neural net by showing it repeated data after data after data so that the connections that are made reflect the data. And if, you know, let's talk about mindsets, you know, I talk about an abundance mindset, an exponential mindset, a moonshot mindset, you know, a longevity mindset, gratitude mindset, curiosity mindset, the ones that I care about, and a purpose driven mindset, most of all.

1:17:12And I think about the notion that people can train those mindsets by selectively choosing who they hang out with, what they read, what they listen to, what they watch. All of that is data coming into your 100 billion neurons, 100 trillion synaptic connections that is forming the neural connections. And that's massively powerful. It's jumping to mindsets for a moment. And I want to just talk about something you and I have discussed a lot, which is basically the notion that we have a default negative fear and scarcity. By the way, ACC, it's part of the brand we were talking about before. Yes. This is exactly where like the scarcity mindset is gonna do its most damage because literally by having the scarcity mindset You're telling your brain Give me logical give me safe give me secure give me some of this work a million times before That's what you're saying to your brain.

1:18:15You're basically keeping your brain and hunter gatherer mode It doesn't matter that you're living in the 21st century if that scarcity mindset that fear -based mindset that you're keeping your brain. How does the ACC relate to the amygdala? It's connected. So it directly, the amygdala is the next connection down, basically. And for those, you don't know, the amygdala is an almond -sized piece of the brain. Two of them. So everything you see here and feel, all the data you collect goes. The amygdala, it's your early warning center. We talked about that in abundance. So, we've got a challenge which is people quickly fall into a doom mindset around AI.

1:19:00Yeah, and by the way, like the curiosity Mossett is your cure here, because like, until you play with it, it's scary. Once you start playing with it, you're like, oh wow, I see how this is working. I see how this is augmenting what I can do. I see the things that were frustrating me earlier. I don't think those frustrations have yet gone away, but you start figuring out what the system is good at, what it's not, good at, how it, you know, what it can do, what it can't do. I mean, I was laughing about the conversation I had with your wife last night, where you're talking about like, how do you get one of these drawing programs to render a person far in the distance?

1:19:38Yeah. And, you know, there's a lot of like really basic stuff like that that still doesn't work. And really ask your question. That's okay, but let's talk about the mindset side of the equation here because I think the point you just made that you can tune your mindset is I want everybody to get that message. Well, I think of my mindset. So I want to back up because this is almost funny. So like a lot of my nine set knowledge came out of I don't I want to say it was in faster when we were writing faster together. The full name is Futures faster. Futures faster than you think. We were writing that by the way, I'm still pissed that the publisher had his change the name from conversion.

1:20:18Convergence. Say she had been convergence. I mean, it was a abundance bold convergence. ABC's. Yeah, I like. I'm like, I'm like, just, I'm like, you still, so I don't want the publisher to drive the name of our next work. No, of course not. Is that okay? By the way, whatever power you think you have in the world, publish a book and find out how little it really is. But so five years ago, six years ago, when we started having the mindset, I think this was around the time people were talking about a bunch of different mindsets. I thought it was bullshit. I was like, okay, I know there's a growth mindset and a fixed mindset and there's like, you can see neurobiological differences between the two and I kind of figured the scarcity mindset was going to be a hyperactive amygdala and an unactive ACC, because that made sense, but I didn't think these other things.

1:21:10Turns out they're all real. They're neurological phenomenon. I was wrong. You were totally right. Let me say that again. I was wrong. You were totally right. We could open the episode with that. You should, because what is this the first time in 30 years? But that these mindsets exist and they can train and control their neurological phenomenon. and you can train them and it's like as you like thinking it's information coming in connecting it to older ideas we've already about talking about training at the pattern recognition system. Like you're literally if you the thing that I always point out to people is if you don't learn to play your brain your brain is going to play you.

1:21:53Right like you can't it's one way or the other or either you're gonna be kind of driving or it's gonna do the driving. And I like, left tip my own device is it's bad up here. As a general, it's bad up here. Like one of the reasons I got into the flow work and all the work I do is because under normal conditions, not safe. And how much have you listened to Eckertolley's work at Power of Now? And so, I mean, I know it and all of it. You have to remember that I was living in Monastery's and I've been meditating since 1986. I'm happy to forget about you. I know. I still have. In fact, by the way, I tell you a funny story about meditation.

1:22:35I had been meditating for 20 years, 25 years. Friends of mine built a neural marketing company. They were doing movie trailers and they bought an FMRI. They bought a three -chiff FRI. I was done in San Diego and I went and they had done a bunch of work with meditating getting monks and Buddhist monks and Francisco Nanzan and things like that. And I made them put me in the FMRI to brain image me while I was making some of this. Two of us like two of us. So sure I was doing it wrong. So sure I was like, I don't know, I've been doing this for 20 years and like nothing, I mean like, I can, yes, I can focus and I can chat for eight hours a time and I can sit in the full lotus for a couple hours a time and whatever.

1:23:15But like, where are the fireworks that ever, and I was so sure I was doing it wrong. Like I got out of the air. I noticed even your braid, like you showed it to me. My brain looked exactly like long -term months because I've been meditating that for almost 20 years. The hair do looks like a hard new. Also, a long way to be equation. Yeah, so I, like, I turns out I'm doing it right. Oh, congratulations. Yeah, so I mean, when I came to like all that stuff with Eckertolli and whatever, I was like, well, yeah, I mean, okay, yeah, you're just saying the same thing. People have been saying for a very long time.

1:23:44What I, what is really exciting to me now, though, is, And people don't even think about this. When I started this work in the 90s, there were a bunch of us. Rick Doblin was founded, Matt was advocating for psychedelics, Richard Davidson, Dan Goldman, and I was the University of Wisconsin, Richard Wisconsin, starting in on meditation. My mentor, Dr. Andrew Newberg was looking at like stranger spiritual and mystic experiences, speaking in tongues. And we're all interested in an author's taste consciousness, different things in the brain from different angles. And you couldn't even do this research.

1:24:19Like you couldn't get funding. We had to prove, I was just talking about this with Andy Newberg. We had to spend like 1990 to 1996, almost everybody in this field. We had to prove that religion was good for you. All right. That was literally the, it was the wedge issue. Everything we're looking at in the consciousness revolution, nobody remembers this. But after Skinner, you couldn't talk about consciousness at all. You couldn't even bring it up out loud. We were conscious. We were gonna be within a couple of weeks. Was the, he was the first person who stand up and talk about it out loud and you could do it because he partnered with CREC, who invented the, you know, discovered DNA.

1:24:58And you couldn't, because of that, you couldn't mess with him. So that was sort of, that was the wedge assumed to consciousness, but it was spirituality is good for you. We had to prove that spirituality was good for you. It was health benefits. Right, Kept, because people who go to church, there's pro -social neurochemistry. Maybe there's stuff from spirituality, but there's a bunch of stuff. And we had to prove that was good for you. And then scientists were like, oh, okay, religion's good for you. We can fund this now, the national Institute of Health, something that got involved in all that stuff.

1:25:28That was our wedge issue. It was the dump. Literally, the whole field's put like six years trying to prove that this stuff was good for you just so we get funding to do the kind of the basic research that we wanted to really do, which is, oh no, meditation is good for you and flow is good for you. Psychedelics are really useful tools for treating X, Y and Z. Do you remember that movie Altered States? Sure. I love that. So John Lilly, that was the John Lilly story. Are you done catamine in a sensory deprivation take? Yes, no, I haven't. But I mean, don't you want to? Yes, very much so. We should do that.

1:26:04You know, he nearly drowned doing that. His wife had to bring revive him at one point because he didn't go so well. But yes, I would love to do that. We'll put straps in place. I just, we need minders. But yes, like we're going to get a float tank and we're going to try catamene and a float tank and redo. And when we went to do, would you do catamene there? Well, that's what John Lillie was doing. That all their states were actually based on catamene. He was doing catamene. And I think the reason is duration, right? Because DMT, it might be a more interesting experience, but it's really gonna be fast.

1:26:38And Ketamine at least you get, you know, a good IV push, you can get 90 minutes of weirdness. All right. You have to, by the way, this is Peter and Steven on a National podcast making a plan. You were the first person ever to speak to me about DMT and I was just so fascinated. You told me about basically people on a DMT journey going and experiencing alien original Rick's costumes. That was Rick's original work, which is the University of Mexico, when he was doing interview us. Yeah, it was it was continued. It was IV. It was IV DMT. It wasn't they weren't getting like was this the God molecule?

1:27:22It was the God molecule. Yeah, I wrote that. No, the God molecule was V mat 2. V mat 2 is the was the God gene. No, maybe the God molecule is DMT right V mat 2 is the God gene. People who have V mat the V mat 2 gene turns out this was this was another thing that came out. Same era the 1990s things we had to prove to do the work we're doing. Dean Hammer, who's the NIH, found V -Map 2, which is a gene that codes for Norepinephrine, Dubmin, and I want to say serotonin, but I may, the third one may be wrong. But anyways, all the molecules that show up in your system when you're having spiritual experiences, this sort of experience is flow states, all that stuff.

1:28:00There's a very specific, so we call it the God gene, who is also the guy. So people who have this gene are more likely to have, they are more likely to have spiritual experiences because they produce more dopamine, nor epinephrine, and I want to say it's serotonin. So they have higher baseline neurochemical levels, and they have more deeper spiritual mystical altered states experiences. That's interesting. But the God molecule that was Rick, and he was doing, and the alien stuff was interesting, right? Because they were in a hospital. And they, instead of getting like the machine elves and the sort of the things that are much more standard in the DMT literature, they were people were literally like seeing gray man and having experiments performed on them.

1:28:42And it was sort of a horrific, like you read about the original work of the hospital, you're like, well, it tells you everything you need to know about setting, setting, right? But like, setting matters a lot. A lot. I wanna go into cognitive biases for a moment because I think it's really important. And then work into your most recent work. We wrote about this and you introduced me to cognitive biases is first. And this is your cognitive biases. This is your bias against Steven. No, I learned about cognitive biases would back in 2010 we started writing about it. Yeah, yeah. And they're really incredibly important for people to realize.

1:29:24And that we, you know, the brain, as you said, is day -loved by information and our ability to process that information is through a very thin straw. And so our brains evolved these heuristics, these shortcuts. And there's like a familiarity bias, like, you know. Well common sense. I mean, the most right common sense is when it works, right? That's a not a cognitive bias, but that's a heuristic for how do you process a fuckload of information really, really quickly and make an intelligence decision. If it works, it's called common sense. When your decision doesn't work, it was your confirmation bias.

1:29:57So your recency bias, or if you go to Wikipedia at this point, or the DSM, there's like 500. Oh yeah, we can be crazy crazy. And say a list. Really weird names. But the ones that are, people should realize is there is a recency bias. Like you hear our podcast conversation now, we say something that perhaps contradicts something you heard a month ago or a year ago, you're likely to believe what we are telling you now. Or there's a familiarity bias, which is when someone looks like you, dresses like you, speaks like you, you're tending to give higher value to that person. And then there's this negativity bias, which is the crisis news network, that your value negative information far more than positive information.

1:30:41And these are, they're dangerous in one regard because they can trick you into making really stupid decisions. Yeah, I mean, racism, massage, all these things are essentially the same version. And these are biases, right? And it's the same sort of information processing issue. The thing, I wanna back up one step, which is a day that we talked about before, because it's just so important to me, which is you are not, you don't have to be the victim of your brain. These are all, like yes, you have all these biases, but you can train them down significantly. and by the way, one of the, we both of us do this all the time.

1:31:28One of the best uses of AI at this point is help me see past my bias. Oh my god. What am I not looking at? I can't wait for AI to, you know, again, if you think about Jarvis as the example where it's on your body, in your body, it's around you all the time. It is your constant coach, right? And you can eventually turn on and say, you know, Jarvis, turn on cognitive biosolert. And it will have heard everything you've ever seen. You're going to give, I think personally, you're going to give your AI permission to read all your emails, listen to your conversations. Why should you? One of the biggest problems with the AI systems right now is their memories are...

1:32:11But we've gotten to... We've gotten to long -context memories. We're there now. We're there now. Okay, and so you'll be able... you will hear a piece of data and start making a decision and your AI will say to you, listen, your cognitive biases are driving in this direction, but in reality, you heard this and this and this. Let's talk about it. Yeah, I think, again, that's why I'm training people. I mean, I'm training creativity with AI. I just want to skill creatives, so they're no longer scared. and these are the tools and some of the whizz -bang stuff that where you can do, like it's really easy to get out of the hood on Chatchee BT at the front end and like tune field, nobody does that, but it's a really simple dashboard and there's a lot of power there, especially for these kinds of things.

1:33:02But I think that's a really, it's huge, it's also frames, which are what, you know, their frames are very local. And, you know, the, the, the, the, that are more durational and frames are essentially like, when you're building up your abundance mindset, right? How do you do that is by reframing moment by moment basis constantly for the abundant framing. Eventually when it becomes a little more unconscious, we call it a mindset, right? And when it becomes totally deep, it becomes a bias for, we don't have a word for positive biases, but that's, it's really like, it starts as a frame that's fully conscious and goes all the way I mean, a quick example is when you're looking for a parking spot and You have to block you have to you have to park like three blocks away You can be pissed about that or you can flip it and say oh, I get some free exercise.

1:33:59I get part of my 10 ,000 steps I mean that's that judo move is is really so here's something here's this crazy experiment They did it Harvard and they wanted to know What was more effective against anxiety mindfulness breathwork or reframing? And they did a study where they found literally like because anxiety and curiosity and excitement are the same neurochemical. They're all in the weapon effort, right? A little bit of curiosity, a little bit more is excitement, too much is anxiety, right? None is boredom, right? I'm not curious, I'm not interested, right? That's literally, it's a spectrum.

1:34:42And a lot of people don't realize that that anxiety, when you feel anxiety, it's much easier to turn anxiety into excitement than it is to get rid of it. Really? So this was the experiment that I did in Harvard. When you're feeling anxious, this was the experiment. They had people say, I'm excited, I am excited, I am excited. I'm literally. Three times out loud and it was more affected than seven minutes of breath work and meditation. and reducing stress levels. I'm getting you to say, that's just something crazy. This is the wild one you want to talk about, like, misogyny and culture and weird stuff.

1:35:16So they did this experiment about 15 years ago, and they found that women in the study group who were over 40 had no idea what anxiety excitement felt like, because women were not supposed to get too excited and feel too much emotions. So they had repressed excitement so much. They didn't actually realize that when they did this study, so there was this whole training for women now that like has to separate anxiety from excitement and be like these are the same. Like they feel the same. It's okay to be excited. It's okay to be excited. Yeah, it's wild. So the point there is culture can come in so heavily.

1:35:53You know what I mean? And tilt your tilt your brain that you literally can't even recognize a core emotion. That's crazy. Crazy. But you're, let's try to flow and your work. The flow research collective is really just blowing up. You've trained tens of thousands of people and you've been at some of the biggest companies like Google. You're just at Google. Can you speak to that a little bit? I think I can't speak to Google because I think I signed a NDA. So what do you do when you're training these? It's always so you can get really whizz bang about a lot of stuff and there's there's a million different It's here, but it's very as far as flow training is concerned.

1:36:36I always say there's like Five or six what I call the peak performance basics These are like this is all the stuff we know you got to sleep seven eight hours of night flows high energy state For example, you need that you have to and do you by the way? Yeah, I always sleep seven What time what time do you go to sleep? What time do you wake up? I go to sleep somewhere between eight and nine and I wake up, somewhere between three and four. Okay. Every day. I mean, do the map. That's barely seven hours. Yeah, that's about seven and a half is what I usually come in at. Yeah. I'm probably seven. Did you always go to sleep at that time as you know?

1:37:10No, but I always woke up early. Yeah. So, but I think that's an important point. I wrote about that in longevity guidebook. It's like the only way to maintain a sleep schedule is when you go to sleep. because your body is likely to wake up at the same time. But when I was in college, graduate school, medical school, I would do my best work at 1am to am and it switched. And it switched. Yeah, it flipped for me. Yeah, it mine. I was probably the same thing, though I was also good in the morning. I was also good late at night too. Right? There's gaps in between. One of the things I always tell people, and this is really important and it's really hard in the modern work environment.

1:37:53There are extreme locks, you and I are extreme locks. We get up early, that's when our brain is most awake and most alert. Most people are on the normal work schedule. Like most people's brains start to wake up around eight o 'clock in their peak concentrations is between nine and 10, 10, 30. And then there are night owls. I'm married to a night owl. So like, you know, it's really fun. Like when joy, what time is joy? I go to sleep. Well, she's working on a book. She'll start writing at like four o 'clock in the afternoon, go to four in the morning, and she'll go to sleep when I'm waking up. Yeah, which is complicated.

1:38:32I'll leave it that complicated. So we're talking about the seven things. Yeah, so you know, you can, well, I was gonna say is you can't fight your circadian rhythms. Like you wanna try to work in accordance with your circadian rhythms and the people who get screwed in the modern world that way, the night elves. Right? Like the world isn't built for them at all. So you have to basically you have to tune your nervous system every day. Right? And I always tell people if you have five minutes to a gratitude list, right? If you have six minutes, read a novel. If you have seven minutes, do breath, seven to 11, do breath work.

1:39:1211 to 15 or so 20, go for a walk in nature. If you've got 20, get some exercise, 20 minutes or 40 minutes, get some exercise or take a long sauna. Like there's literally like we have a full list of like, these are the ways to reboot your nervous system and reboot your brain and everybody wants to say, oh, I'm too busy. And I will tell people that like depending on your anxiety level, so if you worked at the Flouries, it's collective during COVID, right? We were a high performance organization, training people in high performance, and I wanted my team at their best. But it was COVID and whoever was, it was basically in the beginning, when it was scared and I said, look, if you're going to keep your job at the Flouries, it's collective, you have to do three of these a day, minimum, three things to tune up your nervous system a day because everyone was so stressed.

1:40:01So I was making sure of it. but you have to do that every day. Yeah, I really don't know how things will be at a button in 360, this March along with you. And she'll be speaking about the work she's doing and helping employees with these small micro nudges through the day, including gratitude. Yeah. So. But anyways, so there's a bunch of that stuff. And then the other things we would try and just to answer your question, There's 28 known flow triggers, preconditions that lead to more flow. There are 12 on the individual side and 16 or so on the group flow side. There's a lot overlap between the triggers, but what do I train people in?

1:40:44These are the 28 flow triggers. And then the only other thing that really matters is flow is not a binary. It's not, I'm in the zone or I'm out of the zone, it's actually a four -stage cycle. So you don't get to live in a permanent flow state because it doesn't work that way in the brain. It's a cycle. And some of the stages are very unfloy, but you have to move through the complete cycle. So I teach people this cycle because that's the map of the territory. Oh, this is where I am. This is where I have to go next. This is where I have to go next. Do you actually think about that? Oh, yeah. You think about it.

1:41:12Oh, I am. This is where I am. Well, I also, so flow is followed or X, let me do it quickly. And the front end of a flow state is a struggle phase. Flow is unconscious, right? It's what happens when you've loaded your brain up with a bunch of information. and can put it together in a new way and like put it all together. So I always

1:41:34You have to still on board that stuff consciously, right? And that's the struggle phase You're throwing shit on my piece of paper, right? Struggle is always followed by a release phase you have to take your mind out the problem because you've been loading the conscious brain It's you've overloaded it and turns out in struggle and this is work that came out of the University of Michigan Again, Carlene C for its lab, really great work. She found that the more frustrated you get, like when you're overloading your brain, the more frustrated you get the closer you are to actual real solution and flow.

1:42:06So frustration is actually really good in that situation. Beals really bad, but it needs to be followed by a release activity. A release activity is a low grade physical activity works best to take your mind out of the problem. And when I say low grade, I don't mean go get a hard workout, a walk in nature drawing, right? It works really, really well. So the way my schedule is, I wake up at four, I start writing and I write 738. If you and I talk, we use it in the morning. Is that right from 4am to 738? In the minute I'm done writing, I take my dog for a hike. Why? Because if I'm in struggle, I wanna follow by release.

1:42:48If I was in flow while I was writing on the back end into a flow state, flows a high energy state, it's got a built in recovery period. So you have to recover on the back end. So if I was in flow while I was riding, great, a walk in nature is a phenomenal recovery activity. It's also phenomenal, really, activity. So a lot of, I always say that like, ultimately end with flow stuff, especially with like top performance. First of all, flow is how everybody performs their best. It's like, this is how humans are hardwired, this is what optimal performance looks like. So most people, if you're in the top 20 % of your field, 30 % you're good at this.

1:43:22Anyways, I'm not gonna come in and totally reboot your life. What I, with my goal is, if I do my job right, I'm gonna find two or three things that you should start doing, two or three things you should stop doing, and then two or three things that I wanna rearrange your schedule. So you'll do, you're doing the right thing, but probably at the wrong time for your neurobiology. This is what's so great about what we've learned over the past 20 years is, this is what's an art of impossible is. We have a complete map of cognitive peak performance in the brain now. We know what it is. We know the order of the sequence.

1:43:54The data is getting really, really robust for training these things. I want to mention something that you taught me years ago, which I want to pass along to everybody listening, which is the greatest writers in the world complete a single finished page per day. About a page a day. I've thought about that a thousand times. to me was the unlocking so I could you just let me tell you the story is amazing so I was in grad school at Hopkins and I got to study under Stephen Dixon he's in a name a lot of people don't know but he he very distinguished writer won the national book award as don't allow us up but at the time I don't know if it's still true but at the time he was the most published fiction author in history and check off had the record before him and like 250 things.

1:44:46Stephen had published 650 short stories, novels, books, I like it was the massive productivity. On top of that, he taught it Hopkins so he wasn't writing full -time, he was teaching and he had a very, very, very sick wife. He was a wheelchair, she needed a tremendous amount of care. And I remember thinking like, like how the hell did this guy? Like he's got a full -time job and he's got a really sick wife and he's not rich so he's not, he doesn't have full -time care, he's doing the work. And the hell is he so productive and I asked him. He said, it's really simple. I write a page a day and I edit what I wrote the day before and if you do that 365 days a year, you've written a book and I was like, oh, okay, you know.

1:45:32And so from that point on, I write, I mean, I write 500 when I'm starting a book, it's 500 words a day, which is about a little more over a page. I'll bump it up to like seven or eight hundred words in the middle because it's easier and you know more what you're doing. At the end of the book it's about a thousand words a day, but like I published 16 books, probably, I mean, this was a bunch of years ago, but they tried to add up something like five million published words. And there's an equal amount of unpublished words, right? So like, And it's that formula. Right, so like, and I love that. And I think about that.

1:46:12So when I wake up in the morning, where my mind is the clearest and I've got the most energy, the first thing I do when I wake up, and I typically wake up before my alarm, is I do a gratitude practice. It's like, thank you for the amazing day ahead of what I can do in this world. And then I get, then I focus on what am I excited about today? What's the big thing? And this morning, it was like spending this time with you and having an awesome conversation and sharing your wisdom with the world. And it's that those golden hours in the early earliest. And it's, you know, the other, there's another thing.

1:46:50Let me ask you this, what do you find when we're working on a book and you're waking up and you're writing and you're focused on that? But are you happy throughout the day? Then if you're not. Probably because I feel like I've made a significant I'm a accomplishment junkie. And so when I feel like I've won the day in the first two hours, Ron. But the other thing I think is also that's equally important that people don't realize, I like to go from bed to desk in under five minutes. And the reason is, when you wake up, so flow, if we're talking about networks, brainwaves, Flow takes place on the border between alpha and theta.

1:47:34Alpha is daydreaming mode. Theta is REM sleep or focus. And some of the alpha theta borderline, by the way, that aha moment. So that always takes place inside a gamma wave. Gamma is coupled to theta. So if the brain can't get to theta, you can't have an aha insight. So one of the reasons you have more aha insights in flow is because it purchase you on the edge and that in that that state you're on the edge of a high insight. You're ready to have a breakthrough. But um

1:48:11the alpha theta borderline you wake up in alpha. The brain wakes up in alpha. So as soon as it gets awake alert excited that's high baited. It's hard to move back down to theta it's a much slower wave but if you go like bed to desk and immediately drop into flow, focus your attention and start working on something and get sucked in. It's easier to drop into flow that way and I find it's not just that I'm I used to think it was just the goal stuff like a very goal -oriented and if I win my day that's huge, but it's also if I tame my brain right out the gate, teach it to focus, don't let it run wild.

1:48:50With that brain. Yeah, no, I mean to me it's like to me it's the two it's the two together and if I can be a little creative in the writing Like that's the rest it's over a perfect amazing. Yeah amazing Yeah, you have done an amazing job. I'll call it your moonshot of putting flow on the the world's conversation I mean, I will say We have we are now writing the textbook myself my chief science officer another neuroscientist for the field of applied performance neuroscience which is essentially the field that, you know, me and a couple of bunch of other people. There was no conversations around this.

1:49:26None of this. It didn't exist. So to me, like, the moonshot, I always said my goal was to put flow science in a heart of flow research in a heart science footing. Like, I wanted to bring it into the realm of neurobiology and make it really, really real. I didn't actually realize I was going to end up inventing a field. Right. Like, that was a weird one. But it wasn't just me. It was a bunch of us who were thinking about all of their states' consciousness as tools for performance and you know it, uh, good to go back to the psychophysed paper because here's a weird one for mindset but this is also in the field.

1:50:02So the psychophysed paper released today? No, this is a year ago but this is just a great example of applied performance neuroscience and the weird stuff we're discovering. So we were looking, we weren't, it wasn't a flow, flow so it was a mindset study and we wanted to know people who love exercise, what does it look like in their brain versus people who hate exercise? Right? And we discovered that people who love exercise literally process, exercise and all the information in a totally different part of the brain than people who don't like exercise. And I shifted myself. Well, that's what that was the point I was trying to make.

1:50:42is it turns out it works like a mindset and you can shift it and you get so we looked at that. I linked exercise to longevity and that's what shifted for you. But I remember back, well at least in like 2007 to that, I remember coming to LA and going for runs with you on the beach. But this is different now. Now you love it and you're into it. you know, five days a week in the gym with weights and it's part of who I know you establish this is who I am and I'm this because I'm going to win that that arm wrestle we're going to continue that arm wrestle after the rest of our lives. But this is who I am and my longevity mindset fuels that desire for exercise.

1:51:31You know, I will say that longevity mindset you've done such a spectacular their job with it. I just remember I was I think it was a Joe Polish event. I think I was at his 100k last 100k event and Dan Sullivan was there and he was talking about living to I think his number is 150 150 150 for you. 154 right? Is that right? Yeah, and I was like this is Peter This is Peter rotting Dan's brain. No, but it's really um I've the long -learned mindset. I'm interested to see if there's actual neurobiotic under the underneath it. Like I'd be curious to like, is it, does it work as a frame or is it actually producing like?

1:52:12Yeah, the information processing. But let's talk about your next project. The Alliance. The Alliance. Yeah, I want to hear about it. So what is it offering? Why are you excited about it? So high level. Let me just start the beginning because you asked me this question earlier and I didn't answer it. We trained, you know, because there are games of people at this point. And at the top tech companies around. Yeah, I mean, like just meta, essential, outy, Google, bank capital, you know, on, on, on, on, on, uh, intense, a thousand of people with those events. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and, uh, one of the things, but predominantly knowledge workers, right?

1:52:53Like if you're at any of those companies, performing knowledge, performing knowledge workers, and then I have a, another class that this is sort of like, just a passion class, where I've done flow for writers. Once a year for 10 years, I train up writers how to use flow to write better. I took the private version. You took the private version. What I started to notice, and it was more accidental, is if we got super creatives in zero to dangerous, it didn't quite work as well. It worked, but it wasn't like the explosions we would get for normal people. If I had knowledge workers in flow for writers, it didn't work as well.

1:53:31It started me thinking about this is the stuff we were talking about, how the creative brain is different, how you train peak performance in creatives versus non -creatives is actually almost exactly backwards. So that was the first insight is, whoa, how you train creatives is different. The second insight was, I think of myself, you know, first and foremost as a creative and most of most of the people I know in the world, you could be a creative entrepreneur, you could be creative scientists, creative technologists, creative innovator, creative artist, whatever, but they're all in this category.

1:54:07And I started to realize that like both myself and every friend I had, almost every conversation, it was the same conversations. We were all facing overlapping, like five overlapping challenges. And I was incredibly well suited to help people with some of them. So one, there was just one of the biggest differences between professional, between creatives and other people and knowledge workers is, and this is really important. In Finalis workers flow is essentially a luxury. It's great to have. You will be way more productive. You will have way more meaning. Your life will be more fulfilling, happier, less illness, et cetera, et cetera, but you're not gonna get fired if you can't get into flow.

1:54:48You won't lose your job. For people who are top creatives, If you're a creative entrepreneur and you're running, running a company, if you're an artist, writing a book or any of that stuff, if you can't get into flow, you can't do your job. At all, period. So full stop and I was, that was interesting to me. So like being able to train the alliance, let me back up and tell you what it is. It's in place. Eight month, it's a combination of like a 21st century think tank and a mastermind for the super creative core. So this is an eight month program that you put people put people through Just doing all digitally on zoom.

1:55:26No, no, no, no, no, this is yeah, so this is it's exact opposite It's not I'm not even doing it inside the flow research collective because it's literally The exact opposite of everything the flow research collective was created to do it's which was a high ticket digital trainings blah blah for predominantly knowledge workers. This is um And live events so people have been wanting to I've been more time hanging out with me for years. I've heard this and I'm an introvert and like, I have to do it with super creatives because I mean, this is rare for us unfortunately. It is rare for me. We're on the phone every morning.

1:56:00It's hard to get me into the world. So it is. So no, there's three live events. You kick off with a two day live, there's a two day live training in the middle and there's a close. And then there's six, six week training cycles. And I kick each one off with like a two hour content that window and then that's over zoom, that's over zoom. Now, what's the size of the group? 100 people, that's specific for a reason. Okay. One, so there's a certain amount of cross training and cross -pollination of ideas that's amazing. The second reason, I mean, I always say, you know, you want that cross -pollination with creators.

1:56:40I always, the example I always give to people is actually you, which is, you know, We've gone back so far that like my friend Peter helped unlock the space frontier, right? Like it was a crazy freaking idea. And then it was a breakthrough, right? The same thing we're always talking about the day before something's a true breakthrough to crazy idea. It's a crazy idea and you had a legit true crazy idea. It was like a lot of the action sport athletes I knew back in the 90s. Also who were doing impossible things. And I had friends. My friends were actually people who were pulling off the impossible.

1:57:11And the truth of the matter is like, by the time the ex -price was won. Because the right once it was won eight years later and the writing was on the wall, that this was the, like private space was real. This was gonna happen. Jeff, that was the righty found out. It was your moment. Blue origin was right. Blue origin was there, Richard was, and you were like, fuck, this is real. Yeah. And so my level of what I think is possible in the world is absurd. Because my friend Peter helped unlock the space frontier. My other friends, the athletes, literally redefine what was possible for human species.

1:57:45So I came into the world was this really warped like expectation for what I could do in the world because my friends work the same way. That to me is it's the it's that's a cross pollination that's not really ideas. It's a cross pollination of like aspirations and what you can't really get that. But a hundred people I want I've been involved, I've helped birth five or six major subcultures. I was in Seattle, the birth of the Grange movement. I was in San Francisco, the birth of the internet. I was in Cleveland, Chicago, Illinois, the birth of like industrial music when that a whole movement started up.

1:58:20A bunch of these in Santa Fe at the beginning of the new age. Inside these huge culture shifting communities, but at the center, it's like a hundred people across the world. Every time I've been in one of these things. It's about a hundred people. I think it's a really important point. It's not giant. It's not. It's always a core. Even if you're looking at something like the internet, which sounds obscure. Or crypto -currents. Crypto -cute point, right? All of these things started with a very small group of radical thinkers who gravitated together. And yeah. Yeah, no one. I mean, you know, I call them the benign conspiracies.

1:58:54It is exactly how I think about it. It's exactly that's exactly what they were in. So I started to realize there was, in looking at all these sub -cultures that I was involved in the birth of. I was like, you know, it's always about a hundred people. So, right. That was that was one thing. I didn't want to go too big because I wanted it to be intimate, but I didn't want it to go too small because I wanted so I wanted I wanted that vibrancy and that cross -pollination of ideas. And I also wanted you know this. Like, people think about the like the lone creative inventor. I don't it doesn't work that way.

1:59:25Creativity is a cooperative sport. Yeah. Even if you're a totally like them, I write books. There's nothing more, I'm going to do this alone, but I don't do it alone. I've got an editor I work with twice a week. I've got a bunch of people at the publishing house I'm going to be working with. Then there's going to be the marketing team and the PR team and the social media team. These are collective, collaborative efforts and you need a bunch of people involved, all creative projects are like that. So what I wanted to do is I wanted to really lift up the super creative core. So I've a bunch of these challenges, train them up and fly.

1:59:55I'll talk about some of the other human stuff. but the hundred people was for the cross -pollination of ideas and to get enough people in sort of every category that there was always going to be one or two bodies in every category. Can you give me some some category examples? Well, so let's just talk about faculty, for example. My faculty at this point stretches from like Jody Levy who's the head of summit series and is a great experienced designer, Ivy Ross who's that had a designer at Google, she's a hard -goods designer and a tech designer all the way to like Scott Barry Coppin, who's the world's leading expert on creativity and transpersonal psychology.

2:00:36So like there you've got like you know three different disciplines, but I mean I like you know we've got musicians, AI people, filmmakers, writers, tons of different entrepreneurs and tech readers in 17, 20 different disciplines and things like that. But I also, the thing I really want to talk about, because this is the one that creatives get immediately, is I started to realize that everybody I knew creativity is so lonely. It's fucking lonely. It's a, you're a weirdo to begin with. So you came up weird. You took whatever made you weird and you turned it into your profession. You just honed it, but I would say that another word for world's leading expert is nobody around to talk to about this stuff you care about the most.

2:01:26I mean, back to think about early days of space. And when you and I were first meeting to talk about the experts, you take that conversation almost any place, they're just laughing at you. You can't have a conversation. There's only an hour. I can do it. Yes. So I started to realize, and the other thing about creatives, every creative I know, it's not just that the jobs are isolating because they are, you spend a lot of time alone, but you're very isolated in your head, right? You can be in a room filled with people, but if you're a super creative core, you can totally lost your thoughts and walled off from everybody.

2:01:59And everybody, I knew, literally everybody I knew, this level of like deep loneliness was sort of under it was in everything and it's loneliness impacts creativity it impacts intelligence it's not great sounds like the Alliance is an incubator it's i mean it's it's among i'm we haven't been around for a long studio of some time it's i mean i think it's going to be a combination of a of a writer's doing an artist studio in incubator all i think all those things it's um it's training creatives up in flow and training them up in the neurobiology of creativity a lot of stuff we're talking about. Like these are tools.

2:02:38You can use them. I'm training them up in AI for all the reasons we've been talking about. I want to solve the loneliness problem. I also want to give people a space to come finish a masterpiece. So this is the thing that hangs up so many creatives. It's like, it could be. This is the dream company I want to start. This is the book I want to finish. This is the movie I want to make whatever. Every's got that thing and you and I were both so goal oriented. You know when you have an unfinished masterpiece hanging over you, Yeah, it's like an albatross. It is also your guilty pleasure and you're trying to steal time to do it And having having a community that keeps you accountable, right?

2:03:18Is so critical critical. Yeah, not only keeps you accountable because I like it's I think creators get derailed at a couple of places It's it's both the keeps from credible. This is the hundred people because there's also You know, I always tell this to writers and you know this like writing the book, you're only halfway through the process of actually like putting that book into the world and like you've just spent like five years and you think you've just wouldn't like run the like the marathon and then you get to this point you're like oh shit it's a triathlon I've got two more of these because then you've got the editing which is going to be you finished the book now you got a year -long editing it's the polishing polishing and then you've got the launch yeah and what happens with creators is and by the way if you're interested in writing a book, one of the things to realize is your publisher does almost nothing for you.

2:04:08Nothing. Nothing. Yeah. They don't, like, the reason I have a personal editor is because feedback, immediate feedback is a flow trigger. And so I always tell companies, like if you're running your company with like quarterly reviews or annual reviews, you're a moron. Yeah. Just like you're driving your employees out of flow. I realized with writing, my publisher, when I had like the best editors I've ever had publishing houses and they don't often exist that much anymore. I've got a couple of good ones now. But if they read one of my books three times along the way, right? Like that's huge. If I get and get three readings of a book, that's huge.

2:04:46I need feedback almost daily. Like definitely a couple of times a week. I used to like chat GPD makes it a little bit easier because while I don't like it to write my copy, it's really says nice things about it. Like, hey, this version, oh this version is excellent. It's strong for this reason. I did that all the time. I do that all the time. I use it to keep him playing. No, what do you like? It's so much. Feedback, yeah. It's the go -based. So, no, what I was going to say is I wanted to, first of all, you know, train up their brains and everything else. So, the actual creative portion of it was solid.

2:05:21but I also noticed that how many people have you seen who have like they finished a book, but they can't get through the editing or they've got through the editing, but they have no clue. How do you publish it? How do you promote it? How do you build a marketing campaign? So I was like, if I can get enough bodies in there, there are a couple people in every seat around that process. You're not going to get as derailed. So when's the first line? We're going to launch in June. This is the... I think you're gonna break the new, I think you're gonna break the news to the world because we haven't even told.

2:05:54But you've started bringing people in. We have started bringing people in, we're building it. It's, I'm so excited. I know, when you told me about it first, I was like, wow, yeah. I mean, you know, I was funny. I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday

2:06:11who's one of those guys with a B in front of his name, right? For billions. Oh, okay. One of those guys. I was talking to him yesterday about it and be in front of his bank account Yeah, be in front of his bank account and he was like he's like are you kidding? You're going because it's like what happens Usually when I talk about to creatives. It's like it. It's the funniest thing in the world. I say oh You're gonna train you up and flow. It's you know and the first one they then they light up and then I usually just talk about loneliness And it ever he's done like it's done. They're like I'm in I was signing me up.

2:06:42Yeah, he was like like, are you freaking kidding? He's like, I probably lose $5 million a year to loneliness to the days that I lose because I'm not at my best because there's like, I'm dealing with just emotional stuff. He's like, if I averaged out, you know, he obviously makes a lot of money. So he's dealing with bigger sums than maybe most other people. But I was like, he's like, Jesus Christ, like forget about this thing paying for itself. And he's like, that's only one of your features. I was like, yeah, I like, I sort of think about it that myself. Let me put it in a different context. every, this is definitely true of artists.

2:07:14I don't know if it's as true about entrepreneurs, but I think it is because freaking every book I write about entrepreneurship talks about the emotional evil of entrepreneurship and it's funny, I just read Secrets of Sandhill Road, which is old, right? Like we that was early thousands I want to say. And it's got a whole chapter on the insanity and the emotional upheaval and loneliness of entrepreneurship. And I was like, this is at least 25 years old, but I talk about it with Gritos and they're so So instantly like, oh my God, we're going to solve that. Oh, please. Do people come in on their own?

2:07:46Or do they bring a team with them? Depends. We've seen both. We've also seen some of the bigger organizations are using this like an education program. That's interesting. So they're like, OK, I've got, because you know, 30 ,000, it's a lot of, but if you don't control your upper income and you can't like, yes, I know. If I train you up in creativity, you're going to make at least 13 % more. And I know we like we know that from that kind of stuff, but what if you can't affect that so big companies are coming in saying, dude I got our directors and I got designers and I've got even Publis and things like that where they're writing in there whatever and my scientists and so they're actually coming in saying Oh, no, we've got a budget and we're gonna call this continuing education and we're gonna send like six of our team people makes It makes a ton of sense.

2:08:32I mean that you're you're training up your most critical asset in like in creativity which is the skill that at least for the next 10 to 15 years until the AI is get and we don't know but I'm more optimistic than you are. By the way, this is the first time in history where I am more optimistic than Peter. I'm usually the cynical bastard who has to ground our books in reality because Peter's the wild -eyed boy from Freyclout. Wait, I'm optimistic about AI crushing our creativity.

2:09:04So where do people... I just wanted to take my cell and sell it on the open market. Well, it'd be buyers. There we are. That's not going there. So where do people go and find out about clients? www .flowaliance .co .co Flowaliance .co And where else do they find you on the internet? You can stevencottler .com, flowresearchcollective .com. Um, you're at Stephen Kotler on the Instagram, go tweet face. That before that's great. You forgot the X in there, but that's okay. Um, do you? Yeah, tweet face, we insta goog. I'll have to watch the next time when I come back. I'll have a better one. Uh, brother, I love you.

2:09:52Uh, you, I'm so fun. Yeah, you know, it's it. I love the fact that when you, you text me in the morning and say, you're ready for reading with Stephen. Um, and that's my one of my favorite moments. I also, I get to just say this out loud just because one of the things that I think is really amazing is I think this happened to both of us like a couple years ago where we like woke up and we were like, holy shit, we've been friends for almost three decades. This is really, really, really special and like, carrot water is like we've got very tender with how we treat each other. From like when we first came together and like it was just like the war of ideas over every sentence.

2:10:29I had to talk you into books. Yes, you have. Yes, you have. Yes, you have. First book of abundance. I tried to write a book with you about space first, which was a failed attempt. Yeah, failed attempt. And then. But abundance, I mean, you didn't have to talk me into abundance because I was looking at the environmental side of it. Yeah, you were, I was worried it was going to be. Two on ground. You know, you were, you were like, I have other things I'm working. No, I was, I had to like, I had to like, disrupt your part. I was working and I never went I was working on a Richard Granger who's in Dartmouth.

2:11:02He's a neuroscientist I was we were gonna curate a book. I'm really glad we didn't I would have gotten my I wasn't Smart enough yet about I hadn't educated myself enough I would have gotten my asking there were like three other projects and yeah, we you came in and I know you were you were You were the lowest riking one in the beginning like you rapidly climbing there anybody was really like like when you presented the ideas to me, because I had been looking, it hadn't been, you were really sweeping. I mean, I was, obviously, I'd been a tech science writer for 20 years at that point, so it wasn't, I was ignorant about it, but I care about plant -sanimalist ecosystems.

2:11:39So I was like, how do we apply technology to plant -sanimalist ecosystems? How do we use technology to say plant -sanimalist ecosystems? And you were really, especially then, really focused on the X Prize using technology to help humanity. So I thought like when you came in, I was like, holy crap, we've got, we each got half of the puzzle. And you had the good overarching tech framework. I had a little bit of the science and the psychology and the cognitive by all that stuff. It was really, I mean, it was an incredibly fortuitous partnership because each of us like had two, each of us had components of this that we absolutely had to bring together.

2:12:19And then it took me about a year to get you on board with our latest book. Oh, longer. I think I think it's I think it's I think you've been working on for two to three years on this one. Are you happy we were doing it? I'm so happy. This book is so well as I as I said like yet not only it well won because it's you have to understand though. It's still my I mean the new book just so people know in abundance we made the argument that hey, The exponential technology gives us the chance to raise global standards of living for ever -man, woman, child and planet. And man, if they were their naysayers, right?

2:12:55Like, that was the hardest argument to make out loud. And even, I mean, Christ, you opened Ted and that guy who followed you, right? They called the doomsayer. They called you, what do you want on the stage of Ted and let you talk? They had to, like, have a counter -argument immediately afterwards, right? And now it's 20, 15 years later, the most astounding thing to me is how the amount of when you talk about basic stairs of living going up and up. I mean, it's been insane. The data is sort of astounding. It is astounding. And nobody realized that. And nobody realized that. Nobody realized that.

2:13:36We are the frog boiling in the proverbial world. It's the crazy stuff. So, by the way, just so folks know this is a book they'll come out in 2026. 2026 probably had abundance 360. Yeah, hard march 2026 and so don't go looking for it right now. Well, if you want an early copy, I'm bribeable.

2:13:57www .flowaliance .co. Forwardslash bribes. In all serious good luck on on the flow alliance. Thank you, sir. on the alliance. I know it is something which can level up people in extraordinary fashion. Yeah, thank you, sir. Yeah, and love our conversations. Excited to see you again. We're gonna see each other in two weeks. It's a pleasure. It's a pleasure. And every conversation, every morning, I love you, buddy. I love you, buddy.