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Moonshots with Peter Diamandis
Achieve Peak Creativity: Merging Flow States with AI Technology w/ Steven Kotler | EP #151
02:15:42
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- [00:01]
A
You're telling me your thinking is not better now in conjunction with ChatGPT, than it was three years ago?
- [00:07]
B
Just working with Google, it's just faster. I mean, I don't know, is it better?
- [00:11]
A
That's not the question. The question is Steven Kotler. Steven Kotler, best selling author and peak performance expert. What does it take for you to be your best when it matters most? He is redefining human potential. Pattern recognition matching, like with like lateral thinking. This is our ability to link unlike with unlike. We humans are far superior at lateral thinking.
- [00:37]
B
You're telling me that an AI system can't be as creative as a human being?
- [00:41]
A
There's a revolution going on in our ability to take advantage of our consciousness. This is before the next wave of neurotech as we know. That's bci, that's Brain Computer Interface.
- [00:53]
B
It's a thing now. It's real.
- [00:54]
A
Please keep arms and legs inside the ride at all times. Now that's a moonshot.
- [01:01]
B
Ladies and gentlemen, we're here today with my dear friend, my co author of Abundance Bold and the Future is Faster Than youn Think and very soon, our fourth work together which we'll talk about. Very exciting. Stephen Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author, award winning journalist, the executive director of the Flow Research Collective, one of the world's leading experts on human performance. He's written a number of incredible books. The Art of the Impossible, I love that, it's a great name. And as well as Stealing Fire, you got the best names for your books.
- [01:38]
A
Well, Abundance Bold, I had some help.
- [01:41]
B
Well, hey. And then the Rise of Superman. That's amazing.
- [01:45]
A
That was the title that like I had that 10 years before I had the book. Yeah, I just knew I had to write a book with that title because.
- [01:50]
B
The title was so good and it's done. Amazing. You've been nominated for three Pulitzer Prizes, translated into over 50, 50 languages. What's wrong with the other 130 languages out there? Seriously, I mean they should really get a clue soon.
- [02:02]
A
Yeah, you know what the good news is, I've been translated into languages I didn't even know still existed. That's the funny thing.
- [02:09]
B
I want to hear your audible book in the clicking language.
- [02:12]
A
It's really true. You're like, wow, that's still a language. I thought that went away like 20 years ago.
- [02:16]
B
Oh my God. You've appeared in over 110 publications including Academy academic journals like Neuroscience, Biobehavioral Reviews and Psychophysiology. Didn't that one just hasn't landed on my doorstep yet. And mainstream publications.
- [02:32]
A
You would like that psychophys article though. It's a weird thing about mindset. We can talk about it.
- [02:37]
B
Okay, fantastic. And you just got published today. And we'll talk about that one too. But you've been in sort of old style media like the New York Times, Wired, Atlantic Monthly, Wall Street Journal, Time and Harvard Business Review. And along with your wife Joy, you run a dog sanctuary. That's where I first met you. You know, Rancho de Chihuahua. How many Chihuahuas did you have?
- [03:06]
A
At our peak at one time I think it was 50 something.
- [03:10]
B
Oh my God. We've done with one.
- [03:12]
A
It's a hospice care facility. We've done this work for 18 years and we've helped basically 1200 dogs die along the way.
- [03:22]
B
Which when they're yapping, sometimes I really wish they would.
- [03:27]
A
There is that. Yeah, it's. I mean, I will say that when you. I know things about grief that you shouldn't know because it's such. And it's, it's odd. Like when you actually have that many laps through the grieving process, you start to realize like I think there's a three day neurological grief cycle where grief was a mental illness until the 20th century and then they changed it to a psychological condition. But I think there's a three day grief cycle where you're actually crazy. Like I think that was a legit diagnosis. I've wanted to do a lot of work on grief. I haven't done it yet, but I will.
- [04:00]
B
But you will. Life is long. We're going to talk about AI, we'll talk about flow, we'll talk about mindsets, we'll talk about his research coming up. You ready?
- [04:11]
A
Yeah, let's do this.
- [04:11]
B
Okay. All right, fantastic.
- [04:13]
A
So first of all.
- [04:14]
B
Yeah.
- [04:15]
A
Please keep arms and legs inside the ride at all times.
- [04:19]
B
First of all, it's amazing. Happy 28 year anniversary.
- [04:23]
A
Thank you. 28 years.
- [04:25]
B
Do you have a lot of people in your life that you've been friends with for 28 years?
- [04:28]
A
No. And I want to, I want to go back to what we were talking about with this four days ago, which is. We were talking about legacy, which is a, is important to you and as part of your abundance. 360 community. And I think this is true. Like when I think about what's impacted my legacy the most, if I have a legacy, whatever it is, it's. It's my long friendships with creative entrepreneurs, without a doubt, our friendship, my 25 year relationship, my editor, things like that, that's actually. The relationships are the biggest muscle. I think in the end. Yeah.
- [05:06]
B
I want to take us back. It was about. When did we publish the futures faster than you think? 20.
- [05:13]
A
20? 19.
- [05:14]
B
2019. It was just before the pandemic, like a month before.
- [05:16]
A
No, we were in. We were on Fox News. You don't remember this? We were on Fox News the day news leaked out of China that there was a pandemic. And do you remember this? We're on Fox News and they found out you were a doctor, and so they're asking you all these pandemic questions. We're trying to talk about the future faster than you think.
- [05:35]
B
But a lot has happened that we published that. And I have a list here. Like, you know, we had a pandemic. That was. That was the thing. AI is now a very real thing. We're talking about AI forever from. From in bold and futures faster. But it's a thing now. It's real.
- [05:51]
A
It's real.
- [05:51]
B
We'll talk about that. My. My full self driving in my Tesla is no longer trying to kill me.
- [05:58]
A
Right.
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B
It works really well.
- [05:59]
A
Which is, by the way, knowing how you drive, probably. Yeah.
- [06:02]
B
I mean, listen, I. There are many times where it's like I don't trust myself. I'm gonna put it on FSD because it's safer than I am as a driver.
- [06:10]
A
I've ridden with you. Yeah. Truth.
- [06:13]
B
He speaks the truth.
- [06:14]
A
Yeah.
- [06:16]
B
Starship is flying, which is amazing.
- [06:18]
A
Amazing, Amazing.
- [06:19]
B
Yeah. Let's see what else. Elon is in the White House. Sort of.
- [06:23]
A
Yeah. I don't even know what to say.
- [06:25]
B
There was no predictions on that one.
- [06:28]
A
Did Ray even first see that one? Is that in one of his books somewhere?
- [06:31]
B
No prediction sequence there. I heard yesterday this rumor that Jeff Bezos is going to run for president, but that's a rumor. We're just starting it right now. Okay, good. And then Bitcoin hits 100,000. Pretty amazing.
- [06:48]
A
They know that. Not real money.
- [06:50]
B
Well, I'm a big bitcoin believer. Okay. Do you own any bitcoin?
- [06:53]
A
Yes.
- [06:54]
B
You do? Okay. Do you own more?
- [06:56]
A
No.
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B
Do you want it?
- [06:58]
A
Yeah.
- [06:58]
B
Okay. And then quantum computing is sort of materialized.
- [07:03]
A
That's the one. Because I remember, like, reading, I don't know when David Deutsch's book on quantum computing, which is still to this day one of the most confusing books ever written on quantum computing. But I want to say it was like the early 90s. And I remember maybe I was in grad school, just out of grad school, and I remember trying to read it and just being so, like, dazzled by, like, the audacity of, like, there's no way. And here we are, quantum computing.
- [07:28]
B
Yeah. Hartwood Nevin, who heads Google's Quantum Labs and their Willow chip, which has shown with increasing qubits, there is a reduction in error rate. And that's amazing.
- [07:45]
A
Wow.
- [07:45]
B
Yeah. I mean, that's the realization. And for the first time ever.
- [07:50]
A
That's fascinating.
- [07:51]
B
I don't know. But you and I will be with Heartmood in a week's time. Yeah. We should ask and really understand that, you know, we're gonna be having a conversation on the convergence of quantum and consciousness.
- [08:06]
A
So this is a really weird ass tent. Okay. But in neural dynamics, there's this idea known as the free energy principle. It's essentially the diminishment of uncertainty that the brain is always trying to diminish uncertainty in every situation. And one of the questions we've been asking a lot, and it's a flow question. So the question people have been starting to ask, are ourselves included? Is flow just a human property? Because it's a physical systems property too. And you see the same dynamics when you looking at water flowing through pipes and whatever. And the question has been, is this actually a foundational property of the universe? And you could look at if the error rate goes down in quantum computing as you add qubits.
- [08:47]
B
Yeah.
- [08:47]
A
That's an example of the free energy principle. It's uncertainty being diminished over time. And I wonder, because the uncertainty principle, the free energy principle, is a mathematical principle. It does. It doesn't have a physical reality, but it predicts almost every system in the body. And like, we've just extended it today. The paper that came out into intuition and flow. So it's really now every system in the body and we're starting to look at non physical systems.
- [09:10]
B
Everybody. Peter here. If you're enjoying this episode, please help me get the message of abundance out to the world. We're truly living during the most extraordinary time ever in human history. And I want to get this mindset out to everyone. Please subscribe and follow wherever you get your podcasts and turn on notifications so we can let you know when the next episode is being dropped. All right, back to our episode. You know, it's interesting, the idea that consciousness is a quantum phenomenon and that we create reality by collapsing the waveform. And until we do that, things are in superposition. So this is just funny. I had asked Tony Robbins if he would do a particular project with me, and I left him a voice note last night and this morning when I woke up, because he does his. You know, he's typically up till 3 or 4am and I get my voice notes from him at like 3am in the morning. And so this morning I woke up.
- [10:06]
A
What's wrong with the Tony Robbins conference if you can't stay up all night? Don't go.
- [10:10]
B
And then I got up at 5am this morning, and I see his voice note there, and I'm like, okay. And the answer to my question is in superposition right now. Oh, yeah, right. And it's like, okay, can I collapse the waveform in the affirmative? Because it's there. There's a yes or no in that voice note. And it was just a fascinating thought.
- [10:34]
A
Just because you put physics, science names on these things doesn't mean I don't think you've gone completely round the band.
- [10:41]
B
Well, hey, all right.
- [10:43]
A
But what else is new?
- [10:44]
B
Yeah, craziness is a good feature.
- [10:48]
A
You're the guy who. But I've learned when crazy shit flies out of your mouth, believe it. Because 30 years ago you were like, no, no, no. We're going to open the private space frontier.
- [10:59]
B
I want to get into the AI of it all, and I want to get into it through creativity. So if I think about your fundamental abilities, what you teach, because you teach amazing programs and write amazing books, it really is about tapping into creativity in flow. And the question is, is AI going to enhance or destroy that? And, you know, I kind of think there's nothing that AI can't do in the creative field. So I want to have that. I want to have a conversation with you. I've always wanted to.
- [11:37]
A
Um. It's a, It's a. First of all, it's a hard question. My answer, my, my, my instinctive answer. Just. And I'll. And I'll back it up with. With why I think this might be true. My experience with AI has been one. I think most people, especially creatives. Right. I used to this a lot with whether we're talking about creative entrepreneurs or creative artists, um, they were told things about AI. It's going to make you more productive. It's going to save you time. It's going to do a bunch of these things and then they start playing with AI even like a large language model, and it doesn't do those things. And they get disappointed, they walk away yet. But my point is, what it does do is it doesn't help you do the task more quickly. It levels you up to. So you can do the task at a level you can't normally do. So what I see happening is AI seems to be additive on top of creativity. And what has always been the case, and this is definitely true with large language models. So let's talk about large language models and writing for a second.
- [12:44]
B
Sure.
- [12:44]
A
One of the things that's very difficult with large language models because they're probabilistic, so they're going to the most common, the most average. The standard is great writing is like 90% of the sentence is exactly what you'd expect. And it's sort of what ChatGPT would come up with. But. But the last word in the sentence is going to be something totally unusual, really, outside of the probability field. And that's the one that's going to land the meaning and the content and elevate it.
- [13:11]
B
You mean in a. When a human writes it, When a.
- [13:13]
A
Human rights it, like that's usually how great writing is. Is like most everything fits your expected pattern and then something breaks the pattern. And that's where. When you. First of all, when you break that pattern, the brain notices. Right. So it catches your attention. And that's where meaning comes from. Large language models are not designed to do that. You can loosen the parameters. People don't do this, but it's really fun. You can go ins like ChatGPT or any of the large language models and tune their accuracy of their predictions so you can get them to be more fanciful or more creative if you want. But what it doesn't tend to do is give you the target accuracy of a human with that kind of stuff.
- [13:48]
B
I love your writing style and, and I think folks should know when we met 28 years ago, you were doing a couple of articles on me. One for gq, one for Wired. And I'll never forget, I'm reading this article that you wrote that just got published, I think was the GQ article.
- [14:05]
A
It was the GQ article.
- [14:07]
B
And I'm reading and I'm like, I literally stopped dead in my tracks as I'm reading and had an experience I'd never had, which is I stopped and noticed the writing. Usually when you read something you just read and you take. But I was like, wow, that was beautiful. And then I read on. It's like, that was beautiful. And I was like, this guy writes in a way I really love. And I remember calling you, I assume you remember this. And I said, stephen, I want to take writing lessons from you. And that was when I was still nowhere near.
- [14:43]
A
Yeah. But I want to tell everybody something because this is to me, the most impressive thing, one of the more impressive things about you. So I don't know, let's say I've taught 20 friends, not many, but like 20 friends over the years, how to actually really write and really work with them on it. Nobody practiced except you. Like, I remember there was a gap between like Bold and Faster, where we lost touch for about a year or two. And I. But I remember when you like came back and we were talking about pitching fest, you sent me something and I remember reading it and I was like, holy shit, he's been practicing. Like, I was so blown away. Your sentences have gotten so much better. And this is the. I think the why we're. I think we're having so much fun writing the new book is.
- [15:27]
B
Yeah. By the way, our new book is amazing.
- [15:30]
A
Amazing.
- [15:30]
B
It's the. It's the. We'll talk about later, but it's the follow on some 14 years later to Abundance, the Future Is Better Than youn Think. Um, my working name is Age of Abundance.
- [15:43]
A
My working name is We Are As Gods.
- [15:44]
B
Yeah. So we're going to figure out which. And by the way, if you have comments about which subtitle, which title you like, put them in the Age of.
- [15:52]
A
Abundance or We Are As Gods.
- [15:54]
B
Yes. Okay. Anyway.
- [15:58]
A
Or we could arm wrestle for you.
- [16:00]
B
It'll take a little longer. End of the day though, it's been a blast writing this book with you and it's moving so much faster. I mean, your writing has gotten extraordinarily better, personally.
- [16:15]
A
So much better. So much better. It was the novel that I just finished right before we started working on our book. It was the first time. It was like. Because each of my books is a little bit different, written differently mostly because I want the challenge. Like I'll. I'll write in a particular style and be like, okay, this is great, but if I could get. Increase the fact density per sentence or whatever it is. So everything's a stretch and sometimes in very radically different directions. And then in this last book, the novel, it all like finally came together. I'm 57 years old. And finally like all the threads click.
- [16:48]
B
The waveform collapsed.
- [16:49]
A
The waveform collapsed. And the. And what we're seeing in the new book is that it's all. It's like 40 years of practice kind of combining and coming together.
- [16:58]
B
It's going to be awesome.
- [16:59]
A
It also, by the way, couple things that are worth pointing out here because we're talking about creativity and we're both really passionate about peak performance, aging in your 50s. A bunch of cognitive skills turn on for the very first time. So it's because the two halves of your brain start talking to each other like never before.
- [17:20]
B
Normally sounds like a marriage.
- [17:22]
A
Normally they work in opposition. Sounds like a marriage too. Nor and as you around 50 they start talking to each other provided you creativity is what sort of unlocks it, but it increases intelligence, creativity, perspective, empathy, wisdom, which is a measurable psychological trait. So I think part of what I'm. Part of what we're seeing is actually the fact that the brain gets better with age.
- [17:47]
B
Might be self delusional, but I feel like I'm smarter and more capable than I've ever been.
- [17:52]
A
I do too.
- [17:53]
B
You feel about me?
- [17:54]
A
Yeah. Yeah, I do actually feel that about you. Oh my God.
- [18:00]
B
So here's my question. If I were to take your writing your books and I feed that into.
- [18:08]
A
I've tried it.
- [18:10]
B
Feed it into the best language model. Well, but the language models have gotten better, right?
- [18:15]
A
Much better.
- [18:16]
B
You know, Gemini 2.0 and what we'll be seeing next out of OpenAI and out of out of the next generation of Claude and say okay, I want you to notice this incredible writing style. Analyze it. Why it's different, how it's different. There will be a point there's going to be at which it can and then I'll say write like that. I do believe that AI is going to be able to mimic Steven Kotler's extraordinary writing style. And so I'm just curious, how do you feel about that?
- [18:54]
A
So I think there's three points. One. Okay, so let's talk about why I believe and I've said this a lot and we'll talk a lot about the alliance later on. But you know, my new project which is working with creatives, one of the things I want to do is train them in a in AI so they don't feel threatened. So they don't feel threatened, so they don't lose their jobs so they can continue to build. What what I think with AI is it raises the bottom to the middle very easily. That's really we.
- [19:25]
B
The data is clearly there.
- [19:26]
A
Clearly.
- [19:27]
B
It definitely is leveling the playing field and taking your lowest quarter percentage operating employees or whatever and bringing them up to standard.
- [19:37]
A
So what I think is also happening but it's a lot harder to measure or I haven't seen anybody try to measure it is in the same way the bottom is being lifted to the middle, the top is being lifted far higher and like far, far higher.
- [19:51]
B
I haven't seen that data.
- [19:52]
A
Oh, I know I haven't seen that data either. I don't think anybody's looking at it, but I guarantee you that's what's happening, because I'll just give you. You're telling me your thinking is not better now, in conjunction with ChatGPT, than it was three years ago? Just working with Google, it's just faster.
- [20:08]
B
Yes, it's faster. I mean, I don't know, is it better? I would have to do a lot of Googling to be able to get sort of the, the corpus of knowledge I can get out of Gemini or ChatGPT when I ask it a question like, help me think about the different dimensions of this, or help me understand how I might, you know, structure this, this.
- [20:34]
A
So let me, let me answer your question from a. Just a psychological, neurobiological perspective. ChatGPT, all, all the AIs is general. They're pattern recognition systems. Sure. That's what they are. And pattern recognition is like. With like. It's matching like with like, and it's finding closer flung connections AI is going.
- [20:51]
B
To be better at.
- [20:52]
A
The humans already is probably lateral thinking is outside the box thinking. It's the thing that most mainly gets amplified in flow. This is our ability to link unlike. With unlike, it's really far flung connections between very, very different things.
- [21:08]
B
Which is where innovation comes from.
- [21:10]
A
Which is where innovation comes from.
- [21:11]
B
Yeah.
- [21:12]
A
We humans are far superior at lateral thinking. In fact, most AIs are literally designed not to do that. They're designed, they're convergent thinkers, they're not divergent thinkers. You can play with it and you can, as I said, you can get inside ChatGPT and muck around and try to get it to think more laterally. And it's like you have to experiment with.
- [21:34]
B
Let me do it, let me take you forward. Right.
- [21:36]
A
You think that ability is going to come?
- [21:37]
B
I think. Listen, at the end of the day, if Elon is correct in his extrapolation.
- [21:44]
A
You know I disagree with you on many things.
- [21:47]
B
I understand. But, you know, this doesn't come from just him. It comes from a multitude of people. And one of the conversations here in 2025 is, have we achieved AGI? What the hell is AGI? In the first place, it's a blurry line. But artificial general intelligence? And then how many generations are we away from an iterative improvement that gets us to digital superintelligence? So are you telling me that, okay, maybe let's say it's not a billion fold better or even a million fold, but a thousand times better. Right. You're telling me that an AI system that is a thousand times better can't be as creative in every discipline as a human being?
- [22:32]
A
That's not the question. The answer to that is yes. Okay, probably the question is, is that AI going to be more creative without a human in the chain or with a human in the chain? If you put the AI that's a thousand times smarter than me versus me working with.
- [22:49]
B
Let me, let me tell you, let me tell you. The data just came out. So this is a few months old now. I've talked about this along with Salim Ismail on my episode WTF Just Happened. In tech, there was a study done in which an AI chatbot, a physician on their own was given data to analyze a medical condition or a number of medical conditions, and they hit something like 75% correct. When they partnered with an AI chatbot, they got like 80% correct. But the AI chatbot on its own without the human in the loop was at like 95% correct.
- [23:29]
A
But that's again, convergent thinking diagnosis. It's not divergent thinking. So yes, for sure. Okay, I. One, I think that humans in the chain are going to be smarter than just the I alone. Two, it doesn't even. To me, it's a nonsensical question. Because creativity is so fundamental to human health and well being. I don't think we're going to abandon it. Every is under this idea that, like, suddenly the technology is going to show up, so we're going to totally change how we're wired on the. It doesn't work.
- [24:05]
B
No, no. We're not exactly our neurobiology, in particular our hormones, our neurotransmitters, which is an area that you have mastered an understanding of. So I have so many ways to go here. One of my biggest concerns, I was up at Stanford giving a talk on this, is that if AI and humanoid robotics make our living so automatical, so easy, so automatic, and we no longer are challenged when we no longer have difficulties to overcome. Are we able to survive as humans?
- [24:43]
A
Certainly with flow with, you know, flow states have triggers. And the most important one is the challenge. Skills balance, right? We drop into flow when the challenge of whatever task we're doing is like 4 or 5% greater than our skill set. We stretch and that focuses our attention and drives dopamine in the system and blah, blah, blah, drives us into flow. That's fundamental hardwiring. And we count like the data flow at this point. Happiness, well, being, meaning overall life satisfaction, purpose, all those things that we're Going to need no matter what. Like really, one of the things that we're looking at in the new book. Right. Is how do you sustain those things in an automagical world? Yeah. I like to me, first of all, I'm already seeing it like made by humans is like a tag, you know what I mean? Like, in fact, the new novel, I thought for a while that I was going to publish it as Steven Kotler and Friends and with parentheses under it made by Humans.
- [25:41]
B
Just how about Steve Kotler and Human Friends?
- [25:44]
A
And Human Friends. We could do that.
- [25:47]
B
So have we discussed the Universe 25 experiment?
- [25:50]
A
No.
- [25:51]
B
So this was in the 60s in New York. A well known psychologist basically builds a. A luxurious habitat for rats. Okay. You know, something that was, was massive. And you can see the images if you Google Universe 25. And there was going to be as much food as they wanted, as much nesting space as they wanted, as much area to go. And they put it. They start with four breeding pairs and they put them in universe 25 and they started breeding and living loving life. And you watch as at the end of this process, they die out. The entire population of riots die out.
- [26:39]
A
Because there's no challenge.
- [26:40]
B
Because there's no challenge. There is. And we can go into it in more detail. We probably will. In Age of Abundance.
- [26:49]
A
We are as.
- [26:50]
B
We are as gods. Yes. Anyway. And it's fascinating and I think about that if all of a sudden, as a creative, everything you wanted to do was doable by the snap of a finger, the joy of writing, the joy of art, the joy of building a company, the joy of whatever becomes far less. And I'm trying to understand how we deal with that because we all know if you enter a video game and the video game is too hard, you give up. If the video game is too easy, you give up.
- [27:31]
A
It's got to be just right in the sweet spot.
- [27:33]
B
Just in that sweet spot.
- [27:34]
A
Four, 5%.
- [27:35]
B
Yeah. And I'm wondering if at the end of the day, when there is this incredible digital superintelligence and humanoid robotics and automation and we live in what we talked about as a technological socialism, where technology is taking care of you, not the state, whether we revert to virtual worlds, where always that level of challenge is just the right level.
- [28:00]
A
So one, like I've said for a while, that the con, the singularity I'm paying the most attention to is when VR gets to the point that it can produce the full suite of when we can have more pleasurable, more exciting, more interesting experiences inside the simulation than in Reality. Do we migrate into virtual worlds? Has been the question I've been asking for a while. And VR, of all the texts we've been looking at, it's the one that seems to be lagging the most at least.
- [28:30]
B
But AI will enable it.
- [28:32]
A
I agree with that.
- [28:33]
B
I mean this, is this the answer to Fermi's paradox?
- [28:36]
A
That's an interesting.
- [28:37]
B
Which is, you know, Fermi's paradox, for those who don't know, is the notion of where is all the alien life? We should, even in a slow replication and travel rate they should be here by now.
- [28:48]
A
Right. Somebody should contact us.
- [28:50]
B
And the question of, you know, there's a whole bunch of media right now that in fact they have contacted us in the last 50 years since World War I. I love a recent conversation I had with somebody where we saw a flurry of, of, of UFO sightings when the nuclear bomb was being created. Right? And now we're seeing a flurry of UFO items sightings when AI is on the exponential. So are the, are the aliens here to make sure we don't destroy ourselves in these, these inflection points in human.
- [29:25]
A
Society helping us along here have nuclear power here have AI we're coming for your planet 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 not going to go down that rabbit hole. I'm going to avoid that rabbit hole. I still. 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 and we're doing it right now as a society. Social media broke the world and it broke the world because it's massively addicted addictive technology that was sprung on the world without like, we didn't know it had all the negative effects and blah, blah, blah. Now 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, that's what happens when we, when our technology starts to exceed our best capacities in that way. I think we come to a point where we're like, we're humans, 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. We're going to stop, we're going to draw the line there. I think these kinds of changes are going to start coming.
- [31:00]
B
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?
- [31:11]
A
Yeah. So here's this. It's interesting if you're looking like, if you're interested in sort of impacting your bottom line, what like which where should you skill up? And I would, I would create a flow would be my answer. And so the creative economy has tripled in size in the past 15 years.
- [31:33]
B
So that are you defining creative economy.
- [31:35]
A
Okay, so yeah, let me, let's back this up. So usually when you think about this, you think about urban planner and economist Richard Florida who wrote the Rise of the Creative Classes. And he had two categories of creatives in there. There were professional creatives and 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. The numbers in America are it's a trillion dollar economy. And it's interesting because Adobe State of Create study. Adobe's done 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 two their 2016 study they found that creatives and people who use creativity in their work out earn non creators by 13%. It's in America, it's a trillion dollar economy. Globally it's like a $3 trillion economy or $3.2 trillion economy. So it's a big chunk in America. It's like 4.5% of the GDP comes comes out of creativity. So and it's the fastest growing sector and for good reason. Back in 2010 IBM did a very famous study of CEOs and 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 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.
- [33:38]
B
So bringing 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, the question is, is the value in terms of earning power, in terms of being in business going to demonetize? Is the number of creatives?
- [34:08]
A
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 idea in their head. You actually have to put it in the world. You have to show it to other people. You gotta. 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. So we're gonna. I know we're both interested in this. When we look at the progress in AI, people are looking at it as if it was separate from progress in 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 20, let's just talk about flow and creativity. So my old organization, the Flow Genome project did a big study with CEO leaders. We want to know how much more productive they are creative they were in flow. McKinsey did this really famous study of CEO 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 reported. So you always got to like and.
- [35:21]
B
How long, what percentage of their working life are they inflow? A small fraction.
- [35:26]
A
No, it's a, it's an open, that's an open question that I'll. Hold on, let me just, let me get there. Creativity. We found people on average were 700% more creative. That's what they reported. And we were like God, that number is 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 in flow. And we found that each of those eight categories increases by 40 to 60% so 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 Miha Csikszentmihalyi, the godfather of flow psychology, wrote a book called Flow in Sports where he worked with a 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. I mean books in print, you can see their hit rate is terrible. With the flow research collective with our core flow training, zero to dangerous.
- [36:31]
B
We by the way, another name 15,000.
- [36:35]
A
People in 160 countries, 28 industries have taken that class.
- [36:39]
B
Yeah.
- [36:40]
A
On average we see a 73.8% increase in.
- [36:44]
B
By the way, you know that 62.4% of people make up stats.
- [36:47]
A
Exactly.
- [36:48]
B
On the spot.
- [36:48]
A
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. So 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 pretty steady and consistent. That 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, consciousness raising technology. Right. We saw the first wave were like meditation apps and things like that. The second wave. So for example, I have a new partnership with Vital Neuro. They make a phenomenal EEG headset and it's a neurofeedback.
- [37:46]
B
Is that why you shave your hair?
- [37:50]
A
Exactly. It's exactly right. But I've been watching. This is like portable EEG 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 EEG device 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 neuromarkers for flow was we transitioned a flow state that Nobody had 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? Can we, you know, blah, blah. We needed fmris, and it was half a million dollars to do the experiment. We couldn't even do it. They can now measure it with this freaking porta three years later. And the same signal that we couldn't get at with fmri, we can now get it here. And you know what? You just had Mary Lou Jepsen on. We've 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 in 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 other. So 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 7% more creative in flow. And that's gone from this rare state to something that's reliable.
- [39:21]
B
I can imagine having my AI, let's call it Jarvis, for lack of a better term.
- [39:28]
A
Where did that word come from?
- [39:30]
B
Steven constantly makes fun of me because in every one of our books, JARVIS has appeared. I love, I love jarvis.
- [39:36]
A
I mean, I think we're going to find a way to get JARVIS into We Are as Gods.
- [39:40]
B
Okay, that's great. Right after we write Age of Abundance.
- [39:44]
A
So maybe let's just call it Jarvis 2.0.
- [39:49]
B
So listen, 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.
- [40:03]
A
Oh. 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 in flow collaborating with each other and AI are going to own the future. And is this going to be true 50 years from now, 30 years from now? I don't know. But is it going to be true for the next 10 to 15 years? Absolutely, for sure. And I think it'll be true for 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. What's the best way to work with an AI to produce? Because one. I'll give you something that's really wild. That never used to happen. So in that challenge skills sweet spot.
- [40:47]
B
Have to do with your physical appearance.
- [40:51]
A
Just gonna leave it alone. Just gonna leave it alone. I don't even know what I was saying anymore.
- [40:56]
B
So something that happened. Something really wild about AI and flow. Oh, I'm so sorry I took you off the game.
- [41:05]
A
It was going to be the most insightful thing I've ever said. In fact, I was. It was like solving for PI and you just screwed it up. Sorry, people. I was going to solve for PI here and it.
- [41:13]
B
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.
- [41:24]
A
And insects get into flow when birds flock it. So it's actually.
- [41:29]
B
Okay.
- [41:29]
A
It's older school fish schooling.
- [41:31]
B
So going back to Jarvis. I can imagine Jarvis.
- [41:35]
A
Oh, interface design. That's what we're talking about. Yeah. So almost everything. Oh, this is. This is one that I was going to tell you about. So in that challenge, skill 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. Right. This is why I always.
- [41:59]
B
Amazingly amazing.
- [42:01]
A
It's a tiny bottle.
- [42:02]
B
Yeah.
- [42:02]
A
I mean, people don't get the. The brain takes in. If you go by Marvin Zimmerman's calculations, and they're probably way off, it's 11 million bits of information from our senses every second. That's what they. They counted. Believe it or not, our bandwidth of human attention is 120 bits.
- [42:19]
B
Yeah.
- [42:19]
A
You're using 60 bits of attention to listen to me talk. If we're talking together and there's a.
- [42:23]
B
Faucet dripping, I'm not noticing it.
- [42:25]
A
Everybody's.
- [42:25]
B
This is. This is the whole basis of cognitive bias.
- [42:27]
A
Yeah. So one of the things that you've noticed. We talked about it a second ago. It used to take you with Google, right. To get to over. Yeah, I want. I've got an answer to a question. I need. 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 like pushed yourself into anxiety. That challenge skills sweet spot. With ChatGPT or any of the AI systems, you can get such accurate information, you can overload cognitive load in five minutes. Yeah, like, and I've done it where I'm researching something and I'm 10 minutes in and I've literally like blown out my brain for most of the day.
- [43:03]
B
But then you can go to the LLM and say, can you please pull out the five most important concepts that are, you know, you can use that as a sorting mechanism.
- [43:11]
A
Yes.
- [43:13]
B
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. Let me read you a quote from Naval ravikant, who's the CEO of AngelList. 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 the coming AGI, you know, asi wave and safety there? Do you have any.
- [43:55]
A
That's preconceived notion. That's a good, that's a good point he's making, by the way.
- [44:00]
B
I mean, this is the whole example of DeepMind with go right. Where it comes up with moves you've never seen before.
- [44:06]
A
27. Right. That was the move that Lee Sotl had never seen before.
- [44:11]
B
And this notion that in AI in our world, and 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 creating some fundamental challenges for us.
- [44:29]
A
I mean, what technology hasn't created fundamental challenges for us? To me, it's so. And this is going back to we are 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 it's. We've got the technology to raise global standards of living and we've had it for a while. Right. We could, we could do this.
- [44:57]
B
Food, water, energy, health care, education.
- [44:59]
A
Like it was a done deal probably when we wrote abundance, if we wanted to apply ourselves and 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.
- [45:14]
B
Well, let's just say it has been happening, just not at a fast enough rate.
- [45:18]
A
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 rate there isn't so good or a pandemic. And again, the success rate, like we cooperated for the, what, the first month of the pandemic to get us to vaccines and then everybody sort of splintered off and you know, everyone in their own way is. So I 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're saying, we need to have these global conversations. Otherwise the generation we lose to AI, I think it's going to be worse than the generation we lose to social media. Right. It's people. This, this is. By the way, this was back in the 90s when early days of, you know, I would. My field is altered states of consciousness. So psychedelic research has always been part of that. And you looked at the drug war and things like that and we, everybody was very much for legalization. What the Portugal experiment, sort of that writing was on the wall a while ago. People were looking and going, God, that might be the way.
- [46:30]
B
What was the Portugal experiment?
- [46:32]
A
Portugal has completely decriminalized everything. Everything is legal in Portugal. And their drug problem continues better than.
- [46:39]
B
Better than Las Vegas.
- [46:40]
A
Drop and drop and drop and drop. So like, you know, their problems have actually gone away with this happening. So Portugal's been a very like, radical but interesting global experiment in that. And one of the, 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 like, deal with these super addictive substances that are going to be in their lives suddenly the same like with social media. That's another super addictive substance that we were not prepared to deal with. I think AI like, I think we have to start getting a little ahead of these things. I don't think we can be playing.
- [47:20]
B
But you know, the human brain, it deals with the now and the immediate.
- [47:25]
A
Next moment, in which case I think we're going to have a bumpy next 20 years.
- [47:29]
B
But 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 the tragedy.
- [47:37]
A
Yeah. Isn't everybody. I mean, most people, when they have sort of dire predictions, it's about this period, Right. And 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, any of those things. Or, you know, how do you freestyle from a creative super intelligence? Like how do you think past that?
- [48:00]
B
So one of the questions is, how do we, how, how do we train up the AIs? You know, I'm fond of Mo Gadot's work in which he says, listen, be.
- [48:07]
A
Kind to the AI.
- [48:08]
B
Be kind, yeah. AI is our progeny, right? How we feed it, how we train it, how we educate it is the difference between Clark Kent and, 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. Right? So that AI can go either directions depending upon how it's trained up. You know, Elon said, I want to make train Xai Grok to be maximally curious and maximally truth seeking, which sounds reasonably.
- [49:00]
A
Sounds reasonably dangerous, like everything in the world.
- [49:03]
B
No, I think, no, if you said maximally creative, that would be dangerous.
- [49:06]
A
Okay. Maximally curious.
- [49:08]
B
I'm actually 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 maximally 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?
- [49:41]
A
Yeah, we have and I agree with you on that. I think it's really super interesting. I like. 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?
- [49:59]
B
And I think we will eventually, but only when it has becomes 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 billion fold increased level of intelligence or without that capability? I for one would much rather live in a world where this digital superintelligence at this godlike abilities is there to help us because we humans are still animalistic in all of our natures. We make stupid Decisions, all 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 want to. 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 and 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 of the greatest concern. How would you train up an AI? Do you have any sense from your.
- [51:31]
A
That's an interesting question.
- [51:32]
B
I mean there's Asimov's three laws of robotics, there's maximal kindness, but at the end of the day, kindness in some circumstances means weakness, which could mean making the wrong decisions that maximizes. What was Spock's statement in Star Trek 4? The good of the one cannot supersede the good of the many.
- [51:56]
A
All the.
- [51:57]
B
Yeah.
- [52:00]
A
I have to think back to my Star Trek board. I only see them just so I could talk to you about that.
- [52:05]
B
I appreciate that.
- [52:07]
A
Yeah. They're, they're remarkably. The training. Nobody's asked me the training AI question before. I'm going to think about that because.
- [52:15]
B
You'Re training people, you're training, you know, meat sacks all the time.
- [52:19]
A
All the time.
- [52:20]
B
Yeah, yeah. So how would you try, Would you train and AI?
- [52:24]
A
The interesting question is, I mean you're asking essentially like a question about leadership, right? That also, how do you. How can a human lead in a world? Because I mean, I think you're. One of the points you made is, is part of it is we're not just looking at one AI, we're looking at millions of AIs, possibly, you know, billions. If everybody ends up with their individual AI, like if we end up with a personal tutor. Right. The Neil Stevenson diamond age idea that we, we both love, both love and talked about in education for a really long time. That AI is going to be with you for your whole life. So everybody's going to have, you know.
- [53:06]
B
My Jarvis, my version.
- [53:07]
A
Your version of Jarvis. So it's really a question of like cooperative AI and cooperative humanity. It's not just a singular concept. I don't think. I still don't have any, any ideas. Maybe the next novel will be a crack at that.
- [53:22]
B
I really think that, that you should think about that.
- [53:24]
A
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?
- [53:30]
B
All right, my next question for you, buddy. How will the development of AI creative capabilities impact research, neuroscience and creativity? So I'd like you, if you don't mind, because every time you, you speak about this, it's like, it's like biotech porn. What's going on in the brain? The dance of the neural.
- [53:55]
A
Talk about creativity. So this is really interesting, the difference. So one, creativity is a trainable skill. So everything I'm talking about, like 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. It's a lot.
- [54:13]
B
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 mindsets, right? Like I am being, first of all saying to yourself that you're 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 now, you're not creative yet.
- [54:35]
A
Absolutely.
- [54:37]
B
So it's important people to realize that.
- [54:38]
A
It is, it's an innately human skill. We're all born with it. And I mean. And you'll hear about it. 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. They're microscopic. Like if you look at the brains between men and women, men have more interhemispheric connectivity and women have more connectivity between the hemispheres. But those are not absolutes. And they can, they could. They vary. Brains are creatives. So we have an executive attention network. This allows me to. I'm focusing on Peter. I'm blocking out all the other distractions. I'm paying attention. That's the executive attention network.
- [55:30]
B
I wish my kids would activate that.
- [55:32]
A
It doesn't stop fully formed until they're 25. It takes a while. It's tradable. And then we have the default mode network and. Which gets a bad rap because it's rumination lives there. Self referential thinking lives there. But so does creativity.
- [55:50]
B
Say the network name again.
- [55:51]
A
Default mode network. It's where your brain goes when it's mind wandering, daydreaming mode imagination.
- [55:56]
B
When you're not living in the now.
- [55:57]
A
When you're not living in the now when you're, when your brain's taking you somewhere. And rumination 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 and over. That's all. Default mode network. Normally most brains, these networks work in opposition.
- [56:13]
B
Can you shut down default?
- [56:15]
A
Sure. Meditation. That's one. 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. We all know this. So you start dreaming and you're not focused. They go up and down this way and it's actually the, the salience network, which is if I do this and you. What's that sound? That's the Salience network. It switches between the two. That's it, 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, 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. Right, Sort of.
- [57:08]
B
I can see that.
- [57:09]
A
That's sort of what happens like when you're writing, right? Part of the process of learning how to write is this process of learning to toggle between I need to be focused, putting the word 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 in 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 in a really, in a really big way. It's almost like the changes in a creative brainer. I don't know if I can make this statement across the board, may not be a blanket statement, but like somebody who's been addicted to coke for your drugs for 20 years versus the creative brain. No, the creative brain actually has more difference than that. Like it's really, it's really profound. And you can see it, you can see it on fmris and you can. You can see it on eeg. Network analysis of the brain. Super interesting.
- [58:18]
B
And can you go into a little bit about dopamine and.
- [58:22]
A
Yes.
- [58:23]
B
Neurotransmitters.
- [58:23]
A
Yeah. The next side of this is the neurotransmitters that are involved in it. And dopamine and norepinephrine, which are show up, arise at the front end of a flow state. These are all pleasure drugs. And both dopamine and norepinephrine are focusing chemicals. Norepinephrine is just. It's adrenaline in the brain. Right. Noradrenaline is what they call it in Europe. We call it norepinephrine. It's essentially adrenaline in the brain. But both of these are reward chemicals. But the cool thing they do from a creative perspective is they heighten focus and excitement and attention. You know, when they're in your system, you can't not pay attention to something. Right.
- [58:56]
B
Like, you see something amazing, you see something. A demonstration. That's fascinating. You hear something.
- [59:02]
A
When I'm writing. When you're right. When I'm writing a cliffhanger story. We taught. When I teach writing, we talk about norepinephrine. Closes. Right. Like, that's what, like, gets you the page. Exactly. Or. And dopamine is the same thing, but you could tend to get dopamine from surprise instead of excitement. And. But the point is that both of those neurochemicals. This is so. This is interesting. Flow. Creativity is a flow trigger when you link ideas together. Pattern recognition, the brain releases dopamine, a little bit of Nora from a lot of dopamine.
- [59:34]
B
It's fascinating. I can remember moments in time where, like if when I was in class and the teacher is trying to 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.
- [59:50]
A
That's that aha moment. Like my. My colleagues John Koinos and Mark. 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 brain, the anterior cingulate cortex, in a second. Because that's where a lot of this is living.
- [60:07]
B
But anyways, you have a big one, don't you?
- [60:09]
A
I do. So glad you noticed. Once again, you killed me.
- [60:18]
B
So talk about dopamine and norepinephrine.
- [60:20]
A
So dopamine and norepinephrine. So by the way, the dopamine effort's had this experience. You do a crosshair puzzle, a sudoku wouldn't. That little rush of pleasure you get when an answer is right.
- [60:30]
B
So I mean that's, that's what is driving video game addictions, right?
- [60:35]
A
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. Usually they come in flurries. Like you get two or three in a row. Why is that? It's because when you get an answer right, the brain puts dopamine into your system. Dopamine times 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 in flow? One of the main reasons is because dopamine and norepinephrine both have massively amplified pattern recognition. Now obviously you get this, you take this too high and you get conspiracy theorists and extreme paranoia. It's the same. It's the same knob, right? It goes from creativity all the way up into. Conspiracy theories are just linking really disparate ideas together in really creative ways and rationalizing them. And rationalizing them.
- [61:29]
B
I mean, I mean that's what the brain does. It's a meaning making machine. It will take all kinds of crazy stuff.
- [61:35]
A
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 link together those.
- [61:44]
B
That's a really important point there.
- [61:46]
A
Really important. We're 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.
- [61:59]
B
Yeah.
- [62:01]
A
Other neurochemicals in creativity, Anandamide, Same psychoactive that's in marijuana. It's in the endocannabinoid system, right? Which is a sort of a second immune system and a stress response system that massively amplifies lateral thinking. The other thing that happens, especially if you're talking about flow in creativity, our sense of self turns off in flow. 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 an 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, and as a result, we lose our ability to track time. So past, present and future get pushed together into what poets talk about as, you know, the eternal now. Right. The moment. The deep now is psychological.
- [63:07]
B
I had that experience. I remember I. I was speaking somewhere and I was asked extemporaneously 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 the strangest experience. It was like that was an anchor for me of what a flow state.
- [63:43]
A
Sounded like every time. Public speaking. Right. Is one of those flow experiences on Earth. Do you ever. If you have a good speech, do you have any idea what you said on stage? Like, I'll get to the end of the speech and I'll be like, am I done? What? Just what. You know what I mean. And it's fairly. It's fairly common because, you know, speaking is really flowy. It's got a lot of flow triggers built in. I've done it a lot. So, like, you know, I. At this point, I don't. I don't.
- [64:11]
B
Yeah, I don't stress about it. You go on stage and whatever materializes, materializes. And it's funny, you know, my favorite part is at the end of giving a PowerPoint keynote is the Q and 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.
- [64:28]
A
Oh, it's so exciting.
- [64:29]
B
It is exciting. And I have to pull together, like, this data point and this data point and come up and it's like. That was a pretty good answer.
- [64:37]
A
No, 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. Yes, I know what question. They're good. It's going to be my first question, my second one. If you ask 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.
- [64:54]
B
Yeah.
- [64:54]
A
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. That's the great stuff. When somebody, you know, asks you something that kicks your head sideways and you're like, wow, I have no idea. Like, my friend Peter asked me how I was going to train an AI today.
- [65:10]
B
I don't know, but you're going to figure it out.
- [65:12]
A
I'm going to figure it out, yeah.
- [65:13]
B
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 during this extraordinary time where the space frontier and AI and crypto is all exploding, it was like the most exciting time ever to see be alive. And 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 Fountain upload. You know, Fountain is one of the most advanced diagnostics and 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, any cancer, neurodegenerative disease, any 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 Fountain is one of my keys. I make that available to the CEOs of all my companies, my family members, because health is a new wealth. But beyond that, we are a collection of 40 trillion human cells and about another 100 trillion bacterial cells, fungi, viri, and we don't understand how that impacts us. And so I use a company and a product called Viome. Viome has a technology called Metatranscriptomics. It was actually developed in New Mexico, 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 superfoods that are best for you to eat, or what foods 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 Viome really helps me understand from a biological and data standpoint what's best for me. And then finally, you know, 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 10amino acid peptide that's able to zap senile cells in your skin and really help you stay youthful in your look and appearance. So for me, these are three technologies I love and I use all the time. I'll have my team linked to those in the show. Notes down below. Please check them out. Anyway, hope you enjoyed that. Now back to the episode. What should entrepreneurs be focused on in this new AI driven landscape to ensure they develop the right skills? How do you think about that? I mean, you're teaching a group of different entrepreneurs.
- [68:25]
A
We're so, 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 also woven into that program because to me it's all coupled together. But we can get into that. I just, I don't think before we.
- [68:47]
B
Forget, we forgot about the interior, the asc. What do you call it? Singular cortex.
- [68:54]
A
Oh, the interior. Singular cortex.
- [68:56]
B
Okay.
- [68:56]
A
Yeah, let's go there.
- [68:57]
B
I want to understand your favorite part of your brain.
- [68:59]
A
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. Problem. Is it going to be super creative and come up with this wild solution or is it going to give me safe, tried and true and the lever is actually anxiety. The 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. And it's because of the ACC and I always, in hiring, I try to like in. There's always a trial period if you want to come work 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. Shit'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, in extreme situations. Same thing with hiring out of the military. You get the same thing. Yeah.
- [70:17]
B
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.
- [70:31]
A
Right.
- [70:31]
B
It may just be.
- [70:32]
A
I'm seeing three. I see three trends. I see the trend with like, a lot of creatives were just. They're just like, fudge this. I want nothing to do with it. It. They were told it was going to make them more productive or 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'm like, 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 just drew in charcoal. Then I added in ink, like black ink. And it's now. Right. It's now like four years at the top here. I know. So, like, I do the same thing with AI. I'm really great with ChatGPT and some of the large language models.
- [71:21]
B
Yeah.
- [71:22]
A
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, right. I've got a handful of tools I'm good at. And then there's people like, you know, our friend Mike Koenig, who like every new AI tool that comes out, Mike has figured out, how do you use it, how do you monetize it, how do you use it to problem solve for you, how do you blend with other AIs? That's what I think. It's a gap. Right. Because the more we get towards like 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. It's a little more complicated.
- [72:01]
B
This is for my mind, where the creativity and the. I'm sorry, the curiosity mindset comes.
- [72:07]
A
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. I didn't come 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. So I came in thinking, how do we use machine learning? How do we use AI to help us do better science? And then moved 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, like they don't go prompt this. Play with the system.
- [72:46]
B
Yeah.
- [72:46]
A
Just get on the system. It's free play.
- [72:49]
B
Yes. Ask the system to teach you, to.
- [72:52]
A
Teach you how to use the system. And I just the same approach. One of the coolest things. One of the reasons I like teaching myself to draw, I think everybody. So one microdosing with creativity between tasks.
- [73:03]
B
What do you microdose with?
- [73:04]
A
With creativity. So I will, I'll be focused on my book. Right. And then I've got a meeting and I've got a five minute block.
- [73:11]
B
Yeah.
- [73:12]
A
If you're in flow, you don't want your prefrontal cortex to come back on.
- [73:16]
B
Right.
- [73:17]
A
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 going to 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 10 minute drawing thing or whatever. And what I love, and this is the approach I take with AI is no, no, people don't run this experiment. And it's fascinating. If you do something 10 minutes a day, just 10 minutes a day, but you do it for a year, you're going to get excellent. You'll still. It's amazing. It's the coolest thing in the world to like I've watched.
- [73:59]
B
So what would you do with. What would you do for 10 minutes a day that you haven't been doing right now?
- [74:04]
A
The next, once I get my drawing 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 into teaching myself how to play music. And yes, I know pretty soon the AI is going to be able to do it for me and 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 like the combination. The combinations are going to be better. And I, I still think like what you've been asking is, hey, Stephen, I'm really, really smart and I cooperate with AI at what point is the AI going to replace me? Right? At what point is The AI going to be better than just Peter and the AI together or Stephen and the AI together? And I'm hoping the answer is not in our lifetime. That's what I'm hoping the answer is.
- [74:56]
B
Oh, I have a hard time believing.
- [74:58]
A
I have a hard time believing it too.
- [74:59]
B
I think AI the challenge is we humans have all these cognitive biases. We have a limited font of knowledge. We bias the output that an AI.
- [75:10]
A
I want to talk about this for half a second. We do all those things, but people don't understand that. So let's back into creativity for a second.
- [75:19]
B
Sure.
- [75:19]
A
Creativity is a recombinant or process. Right. The brain takes a novel information, connects it to all older ideas. It bursts something startlingly new. So we already talked about the fact that you got, you're taking an 11 million bits a second, but you're only like getting 120 bits. And we've 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. It'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 they'll tune it down to like five or six negative bits for every positive bit that gets through. So it basically doubles your novelty input. But those, if you want to mess around with those things. People don't realize this. Yes. Bias is unconscious. Our frames are often unconscious, though. You can make them conscious and mindset from a lot of people, it's unconscious unless somebody like you or me has made it conscious for them. Right. So. But people don't realize these are knobs. They're tuning knobs.
- [76:29]
B
Yes.
- [76:30]
A
You can control the novelty, the information you're taking in by messing with bias and framing.
- [76:37]
B
And what I remind people of is listen, our brains are large language models. They're neural nets.
- [76:43]
A
Yes.
- [76:44]
B
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. I talk about an abundance mindset, an exponential mindset, a moonshot mindset, a longevity mindset, gratitude mindset, curiosity mindset are the ones that I care about. And a purpose driven mindset most of all. And 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. So let's jump into 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.
- [77:54]
A
By the way, acc, it's part of the brain we were talking about before.
- [77:57]
B
Yes.
- [77:57]
A
This is exactly where like the scarcity mindset is going to 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 something that's worked a million times before. That's what you're saying to your brain. You're basically keeping your brain in hunter gatherer mode. It doesn't matter that you're living in the 21st century, if that scarcity mindset, that fear based mindset you're keeping your brain.
- [78:26]
B
How does the ACC relate to the amygdala?
- [78:29]
A
It's direct, it's connected. So the amygdala is the next connection down basically.
- [78:36]
B
And for those who don't know, the amygdala is an almond sized piece of the brain. You have two of them. Yeah. That everything you see, hear and feel, all the data you collect goes to 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.
- [79:00]
A
Yeah. And by the way, like the curiosity monster 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. 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 can't do. I mean, I was laughing about the conversation I had with your wife last night. You're talking about like, how do you get one of these drawing programs to render a person far in the distance?
- [79:38]
B
Yeah.
- [79:39]
A
And you know, there's a lot of like really basic stuff like that that still doesn't work. And really answer your question, it's okay.
- [79:47]
B
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. That message. Well, how do you think about mindset?
- [79:57]
A
So I wanna back up because this is almost funny. So like a lot of my nineset knowledge came out of. I don't. I want to say it was in Faster. When we were writing Faster together, you.
- [80:10]
B
Had the full name is Futures Faster Futures.
- [80:12]
A
Faster than you think. Yeah, we were writing that.
- [80:14]
B
By the way, I'm still pissed that the publisher had us change the name from Convergence.
- [80:18]
A
Convergence. It should have been Convergence.
- [80:20]
B
I mean it was Abundance. Bold convergence, the ABCs.
- [80:24]
A
Yeah, I with you. I'm like just. I'm with you.
- [80:27]
B
So I don't want the publisher to drive the name of our next book. Okay.
- [80:33]
A
By the way, whatever power you think you have in the world, publish a book and find out how little it really is.
- [80:41]
B
But.
- [80:44]
A
The. So five years ago, six years ago, when we started having the mindset thing, I. This was around the time people were talking about a bunch of different mindsets. I thought it was. 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 you know, a on active acc, because that made sense. But I didn't think these other things, turns out they're all real. Like they're. They're neurological phenomenon. I was wrong. You were totally right. Let me say that again. I was wrong. You were totally right.
- [81:19]
B
We could open the episode with that.
- [81:21]
A
You should, because, I mean, what is this, the first time in 30 years.
- [81:25]
B
But that these mindsets exist and that.
- [81:27]
A
You can try and you can reel their neurobiological 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 of 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. Right? Like you can't. It's one way or the other. Either you're going to be kind of driving or it's. It's gonna do the driving. And I like, left to my own devices, it's bad up here. As a general rule, 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.
- [82:15]
B
And how much have you listened to Eckhart Tolle's work at the Power of Now?
- [82:20]
A
And so I mean I've, I know it and all of it. You have to remember that I was living in monasteries and I've been meditating since 1986.
- [82:31]
B
Have you figured out yet?
- [82:32]
A
No, I still haven't. Like, in fact, by the way, I'll tell you a funny story about meditation. I had been meditating for 20 years, 25 years. Friends of mine built a neuromarketing company. They were doing movie trailers and they bought an fmri, they bought a three chip fmri, it was done in San Diego and I went and they had done a bunch of work with meditating monks and Buddhist monks and Franciscan nuns, not things like that. And I made them put me in the FMRI to brain image me while I was meditating. So sure I was doing it wrong. So I was like, I don't know, I've been doing this for 20 years and like nothing, I mean, like, like, I mean 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 of time and whatever, but like where are the fireworks? That and I was so sure I was doing it wrong. Like I got out of it. He's like, no, Steven, you braid. Like he showed it to me. My brain looked exactly like long term monks because I'd been meditating that point. The hairdo looks like the hairdo also.
- [83:30]
B
Yeah, part of the equation.
- [83:31]
A
Yeah. So I like it turns out I'm doing it right.
- [83:34]
B
Oh, congratulations.
- [83:35]
A
Yeah, so I mean when I came to like all that stuff with Eckhart Tolle 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. What 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, who founded maps, was advocating for psychedelics. Richie Davidson and Dan Goldman. And I was at the University of Constantinople. She was at the University of Wisconsin. Starting in on meditation, my mentor, Dr. Andrew Newberg was looking at like stranger spiritual and mystical experiences, speaking in tongues. And we were all interested in altered states of consciousness. Different things in the brain from different angles. And you couldn't even do this research. Like you could, like you couldn't get funding. We had to prove we. 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. That was literally the first. It was the wet. That 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're going to be within a couple of, A couple of weeks was the. He. He was the first person to stand up and talk about it out loud. And he could do it because he partnered with Crick who invented the, you know, discovered DNA. And you couldn't. Because of that, you couldn't mess with him. So that was sort of, that was the wedge issue into 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 suddenly got involved in all that stuff. This, that was our winch issue. It was the dumb. We literally, the whole field spent like six years trying to prove that this stuff was good for you just so we could 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 and psychedelics are really useful tools for treating X, Y and Z.
- [85:49]
B
Do you remember that movie Altered States?
- [85:51]
A
Sure.
- [85:52]
B
Love that. Sure. So I, John Lilly.
- [85:55]
A
That was the John Lilly story. Have you ever done ketamine in a, in a sensory deprivation ticket? No, I haven't.
- [86:00]
B
But I mean, don't you want to.
- [86:01]
A
Yes, very much. So very much. John, we should do that. You know, he nearly drown doing that. His wife had to bring him, revive him at one point because he. It didn't go so well. But yes, I would love to do that.
- [86:12]
B
We'll put straps in place.
- [86:13]
A
I just. We need minders. But yes, like we're going to get a float tank and we're going to try ketamine in a float tank and redo.
- [86:19]
B
And when we do, would you do ketamine there or.
- [86:22]
A
That's what John Lilly was doing that Altered States was actually based on ketamine. He was doing ketamine. And I think the reason is, is duration. Right. Because dmt, it might be a more interesting experience, but it's really got to be fast. And ketamine, at least you get, you know, a night with a good IV push, you can get 90 minutes of weirdness.
- [86:45]
B
All right.
- [86:48]
A
By the way, this is Peter and Stephen on a national podcast making a plan.
- [86:53]
B
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.
- [87:07]
A
Yeah, it was the original Rick Stossman's. That was. Rick's original work is the University of New Mexico, when he was doing Intervenous.
- [87:16]
B
Yeah, it was. It was continuous iv.
- [87:17]
A
Continuous IV dmt. And it wasn't. They weren't getting like, was this the God molecule? It was the God model.
- [87:24]
B
Yeah, I read that book.
- [87:24]
A
No, the God molecule was VMAT2. VMAT, that is the. Oh, that was the God gene. No, maybe the God molecule is DMT. Right. VMAT2 is the God gene. People who have VMAT, the VMAT2 gene. Turns out this was. This was another thing that. That came out same era, the 1990s, things we had to prove to do the work we're doing. Dean Hammer, who's at the NIH, found VMAT 2, which is A. Which is a gene that codes for norepinephrine, dopamine, and I want to say serotonin, but I may. The third one may be wrong, but it was all the molecules that show up in your system when you're having spiritual experiences, mystical experiences, flow states, all that stuff. There's a very specific. So he called it the God gene. He was also the guy.
- [88:05]
B
Wait, so. So people who have this gene are more likely to have.
- [88:09]
A
They are more likely to have spiritual experiences because they produce more dopamine, norepinephrine, 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.
- [88:23]
B
Fascinating.
- [88:25]
A
But the God molecule, that was Rick and he was doing. And the alien stuff was interesting, right? Because it was. They were in a hospital and they. Instead of getting like the machine out 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, you know, experiments performed on them, and it was sort of a horrific. Like, you read about the original work in the hospital, you're like, well, it tells you everything you need to know about setting. Setting. Right.
- [88:50]
B
But, like, setting it matters a lot.
- [88:52]
A
A lot.
- [88:53]
B
I want to go into cognitive biases for a moment, because I think it's. It's really important. And then. And then work into your most recent work. We wrote about this, and you introduced me to cognitive biases first.
- [89:08]
A
Peter, these are your cognitive biases. This is your bias against Stephen.
- [89:13]
B
No, no, I learned about cognitive biases when back in 2010 we started writing Abundance.
- [89:18]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [89:19]
B
And they're really incredibly important for people to realize. And that we, you know, the brain, as you said, is deluged 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.
- [89:42]
A
I mean, that's the most. Right. Common sense is when it works. Right. That's. That's 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 or your recency bias. Or there's. If you go to Wikipedia at this point or the DSM, there's like 500.
- [90:04]
B
Yeah, Wikipedia is crazy. It's crazy. Really weird names. But the ones that 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. 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. You know, that you value negative information far more than positive information. And these are. They're dangerous in one regard because they can trick you into making really stupid decisions.
- [90:51]
A
Yeah, I mean, racism, massage, all these things are essentially the same version. These are biases. Right. And it's the same sort of information processing issue. It. The thing, I want to back up one step to the idea 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, and by the way, one of the. We both of us do this all the time. One of the best uses of AI at this point is help me see past my biases. Oh, my God, what am I not looking at?
- [91:36]
B
I can't wait for, 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 and you can eventually turn on and say jarvis, turn on cognitive bias alert. 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, watch what you're doing.
- [92:07]
A
One of the biggest problems with the AI systems right now is their memories aren't.
- [92:11]
B
But we've gotten, we've gotten to long context memories or there now.
- [92:15]
A
We're there now.
- [92:16]
B
Okay. And so you'll be able, you know, you will hear a piece of data and start making a decision and your AI will be able to 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.
- [92:36]
A
Yeah. Again, like it's, that's, it's why I'm training people. Yeah. Like we're, I'm training creativity with AI. I just want to skill creatives up so they're no longer scared. And these are the, these are the tools and some of the whiz bang stuff that, where you can do like it's really easy to get under the hood on chat GBT at the front end and like tune fill. Nobody does that. But it's really, it's a really simple dashboard and there's a lot of power there especially for these kinds of things. But I, 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 framing isn't, is Mindsets 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.
- [93:26]
B
Yes.
- [93:27]
A
Moment by moment basis constantly through the abundance frame and eventually when it becomes a little more unconscious when we call it a mindset. Right. And when it becomes totally deep, it becomes a bias for, you know, we don't have a, we don't have a word for positive biases. But that's, it's really like it starts at the frame that's fully conscious and goes all the way to, I mean.
- [93:47]
B
A quick example is when you're looking for a parking spot and you have to pluck, 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. I get part of my 10,000 step. I mean, that's. That judo move is. Is really.
- [94:06]
A
So here's something. Here's this crazy experiment they did at Harvard, and they wanted to know what was more effective against anxiety, mindfulness, breath work, 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 norepinephrine. Right. A little bit is 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. And 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, yeah, so this was the experiment, Harvard, when you're feeling anxious, the. This was the experiment. They had people say, I'm excited. I am excited. I am excited. Literally three times out loud. And it was more effective than seven minutes of breath, work, and meditation, reducing stress. Something crazy. This is. This is the wild. When you want to talk about, like, misogyny and culture and, like, weird stuff. So this. 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.
- [95:44]
B
And it's okay to be excited.
- [95:45]
A
It's okay to be excited. Yeah, it's. That's wild. So the point there is culture can come in so heavily. You know what I mean? And tilt your. Tilt your brain, that you literally can't even recognize a core emotion.
- [95:59]
B
That's crazy. Crazy, buddy. You're. Let's turn to flow. And your work, the flow Research collective, is really just blown up. You've. 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?
- [96:20]
A
I think I can't speak to Google because I think I signed it on the NDA.
- [96:23]
B
Okay, so what do you do when you're training these?
- [96:27]
A
It's. It's always so you can get really whiz bang about a lot of stuff. And there's. There's a million different things here, but it's very. As far as flow training is concerned, I 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 a night flows a high energy state, for example. So you need that. You have to.
- [96:48]
B
And do you, by the way?
- [96:49]
A
Yeah, I always sleep seven.
- [96:50]
B
What time. What time do you go to sleep? What time do you wake up?
- [96:53]
A
I go to sleep somewhere between 8 and 9 and I wake up somewhere between 3 and 4.
- [96:58]
B
Okay.
- [96:59]
A
Every day.
- [96:59]
B
I mean, do the math. That's barely seven hours.
- [97:01]
A
Yeah, that's about seven and a. Seven and a half is what I usually come in at. I'm probably seven.
- [97:06]
B
Did you always go to sleep at that time?
- [97:09]
A
As you know, but I always woke up early, so.
- [97:13]
B
By the way, 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. When I was in college, graduate school, medical school, I would do my best work at 1:00am, 2:00am and.
- [97:33]
A
And it switched.
- [97:34]
B
And it switched. Yeah, it flipped for me.
- [97:36]
A
Yeah, it. Mine. I was. Yeah, I was. I was probably the same thing though. I was also good in the morning. I was also good. I'm good late at night too. Right. There's. There's gaps in between. One of the things I always tell people, and this is really important, it's really hard. In the modern work environment, there 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 8 o' clock and their peak concentrations is between 9 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 was.
- [98:18]
B
What time is Joy go to sleep?
- [98:19]
A
Well, if she's working on a book, she'll start writing at like 4 o' clock in the afternoon and go to 4 in the morning. And she'll go to sleep when I'm waking up. Yeah. Which is complicated.
- [98:33]
B
I'll leave it that complicated.
- [98:35]
A
The.
- [98:36]
B
So we're talking about the seven things. So you began.
- [98:38]
A
Yeah. So there, you know, you can. Well, I Was going to say is you can't fight your circadian rhythms. Like, you want to try to work in accordance with your circadian rhythms. And the people who get screwed in the modern world that way are the night elves. Right. Like, the world isn't built for them, for them at all. So you have, you have to, basically you have to tune your nervous system every day. Right. And I always tell people, if you have five minutes, do 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 11 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. Or 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 Flow Research 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 wherever we was, it was especially in the beginning, everybody was scared. And I said, look, if you're going to keep your job at the Flow Research Collective, you have to do three of these a day, minimum three things to tune up your nervous system a day. Because everybody was so stressed.
- [100:01]
B
Yeah.
- [100:02]
A
So I was making sure of it. But like, you, you have to do that every day.
- [100:06]
B
Yeah. Ariana Huffington will be at Abundance360 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.
- [100:24]
A
Yeah. So, but anyway, so there's a bunch of that stuff. And then the other things you would train. 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 of overlap between the triggers. But what do I train people in? These 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 unflowy, but you have to move through the complete cycle. So, 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.
- [101:09]
B
Do you actually think about that?
- [101:11]
A
Oh yeah.
- [101:12]
B
You think about this is where I am and this is where all the time.
- [101:14]
A
Well, I, I also. So flow is followed, or let me do it quickly. On the front end of a flow state is a struggle face. Flow's unconscious, right? It's what happens when you've loaded your brain up with a bunch of information and can put it together and a new way and like put it all together. So I always. You have to still onboard that stuff consciously, right. And that's the struggle phase you're throwing.
- [101:40]
B
On a piece of paper, right?
- [101:41]
A
Struggle is always followed by a release phase. You have to take your mind off the problem because you've been loading the conscious brain. It's. You've overloaded it and it turns out in struggle. And this is work that came out of the University of Michigan, Carlene Seifert's 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. So frustration is actually really good in that situation. You know, it feels 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 off the problem. And when I say low grade, I don't mean go get a hard workout. A walk in nature. Drawing, right. Works really, really well. So the way my schedule is, I wake up at four, I start writing and I write 7:38. If you and I talk, we 7:38 in the morning. Seven is I'll write from 4:00am to 7:38 o' clock in the minute I'm done writing, I take my dog for a hike. Why? Because I've. If I'm in struggle, I want to follow up by release. If I was in flow while I was riding on the back end of a flow state, Flow's 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 inflow while I was riding, great. A walk in nature is a phenomenal recovery activity. It's also phenomenal activity. So a lot of I always say that like ultimately end with flow stuff, especially with like top performers. First of all, flow is how Everybody performs at 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, top 30%, you've been good, you're good at this. Anyways, I'm not going to come in and totally reboot your life. What I with my goal is if I do my job right, I'm going to 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 want to 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 with like the data is getting really, really robust for training these things.
- [103:59]
B
I want to just mention something that you taught me years ago, which I want to pass along to everybody listening, which is the. The greatest writers in the world complete a single finished page per day, about.
- [104:14]
A
A page a day.
- [104:16]
B
I've thought about that a thousand times.
- [104:18]
A
To me, it was the unlocking. So I could you just, just for those who are, let me tell you the story because the story's amazing. So I was in grad school at Hopkins and I got to study under Stephen Dixon. He's a name a lot of people don't know, but he, a very distinguished writer, won the National Book Award, has done a lot of stuff, 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 Chekhov had the record before him at like 250 things. Stephen had published 650 short stories, novels, books. Like it was the massive productivity. On top of that, he taught at Hopkins. So he wasn't right, wasn't writing full time, he was teaching. And he had a very, very, very sick wife. She was in a wheelchair. She needed a tremendous amount of care.
- [105:05]
B
Yeah.
- [105:06]
A
And I remember thinking 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, doesn't have full time care. He's doing the work. How 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, and 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 over a page. I'll bump it up to like 7 or 800 words in the middle because it's. 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. Yeah, probably. I mean, this was a bunch of years ago, but they tried to add up something like 5 million published words was. Was. And there's an equal amount of unpublished words, right? So like. And it's. It's that formula, right? So like.
- [106:10]
B
And I love that. And I think about that. So when I wake up in the morning, where my mind is the clearest and I've got the most energy, you know, 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, you know, thank you for the amazing day ahead, what I can do in this world. And then I get. Then I focus on what am I excited about today? Like, what's. Like 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.
- [106:49]
A
Well, the other. There's another thing. Let me ask you this question. Do you find. When we're working on a book and you waking up and you're. And you're writing and you're focused on that, are you happier throughout the day than if you're not?
- [107:02]
B
Probably because I feel like I've made a significant. I'm a accomplishment junkie, right. And so when I feel like I've like one the day in the first two hours.
- [107:17]
A
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. Alpha's daydreaming mode. Theta is REM sleep or focus. And suddenly alpha, theta, borderline, by the way, that aha moment. So that's always takes place inside a gamma wave. Gamma is coupled to theta. So you, 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 and flow is because it purchased you on the edge. In the, in that theta state, you're on the edge of aha insight, you're ready to have a breakthrough. But the alpha theta borderline, you wake up in alpha, your brain wakes up in alpha. So as soon as it gets awake, alert, excited, that's high beta, 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, get sucked in. It's easier to drop into flow that way. And I find it's not just that I'm, I, I used to think it was just the goal stuff. Like I'm 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 and teach it to focus and don't let it run wild.
- [108:50]
B
Whip that brain.
- [108:51]
A
Yeah. No, I mean to me it's like to me it's the, the two. It's the two together. And if I can be a little creative in the writing, like that's the.
- [108:59]
B
Recipe for a perfect day. Amazing. Amazing. You have done an amazing job. I'll call it your moonshot of putting flow on the. The world's conversation.
- [109:11]
A
I will say we have, we are now writing the textbook. Myself, my chief science officer, and another neuroscientist for the field of applied performance neuroscience, which is essentially the field that, you know, me and a couple, a.
- [109:24]
B
Bunch of other people, there was no conversations around this.
- [109:26]
A
None of this. It didn't exist. So to me, like the moonshot, I always said my goal was to put flow science on a hard or flow research in a hard 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, that was a weird one. But. But it was, it wasn't just me. It was a bunch of us who were thinking about altered states of consciousness as tools for performance. And you know, it. Get the word. I want to go back to the psycho fizz paper because here's a weird one for mindset, but this is also a field.
- [110:03]
B
So the psychophyse paper released today.
- [110:05]
A
No, this is a Year, a year ago. But I, this is just a great example of applied performance neuroscience and the weird stuff we're discovering. So we were looking, we weren't. This wasn't a float 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 And. 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.
- [110:39]
B
And I've shifted myself.
- [110:40]
A
Well, that's what that was. The point I was trying to make is it turns out it works like a mindset and you can shift it and you could. So we looked at that, that I.
- [110:49]
B
I linked exercise to longevity and that's.
- [110:53]
A
What shifted for you. I mean you were always. But I mean I, I remember back well at least in like 2007, 2008, like I remember coming to LA and going for runs with you on the beach.
- [111:04]
B
But, but this is different now you're.
- [111:06]
A
Now you love it and you're into.
- [111:07]
B
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.
- [111:22]
A
After for the rest of our lives.
- [111:24]
B
But this is who I am and my longevity mindset fuels that desire for exercise.
- [111:31]
A
You know, I will say that longevity mindset, you've done such a spectacular job with it. I just remember I was, I think it was at 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. I think his number is 154.
- [111:48]
B
150. 154, yeah.
- [111:49]
A
154, right? Is that right? Is that right?
- [111:51]
B
Yeah.
- [111:51]
A
And I, I was like, this is Peter, this is Peter rotting Dan's brain. No, but it's really the longevity mindset. I'm interested to see if there's actual neurobiology underneath it. Like I be curious to like is it, does it work as a frame or is it actually producing like. Yeah, information processing.
- [112:15]
B
But let's talk about your, your next project, the Alliance. The Alliance, Yeah. I want to hear, hear about it. So, so what is it? What is it offering? Why are you excited about it so high level?
- [112:27]
A
Let me just start at the beginning because you asked me this question earlier and I didn't answer. We trained, you know, Gazillions of people at this point and at the top.
- [112:34]
B
Tech companies around ever.
- [112:35]
A
Yeah, I mean like just Meta, Accenture, Audi, Google, Bain Capital, on, you know, on and on.
- [112:46]
B
And tens of thousands of people at those events.
- [112:49]
A
Yeah, yeah. And one of the things, but predominantly knowledge workers. Right. Like if you're at any of those companies.
- [112:55]
B
High performing knowledge.
- [112:56]
A
High performing knowledge workers. And then I have another class, 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.
- [113:07]
B
And I took the private version.
- [113:09]
A
You took the private version. Right. And what I started to notice, and it was more accidental, is if we got super creatives in zero to dangerous didn't quite work as well. It worked, but it wasn't like the explosions we would get from normal people. And if I had knowledge workers in FLOVA writers, it didn't work as well. And it was like it 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, 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 scientist, creative technologist, creative innovator, creative artist, whatever, but they're all in this category. And 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 phenomena 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, etc. Etc. But you're not going to to get fired. If you can't get into flow, you 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, any of that stuff, if you can't get into flow, you can't do your job at all, period. Like it's not so full stop. And I, 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 eight month month. It's a combination of like a 21st century think tank and a mastermind. We're for the super creative core.
- [115:21]
B
So this is an eight month program that you put people through.
- [115:23]
A
People through.
- [115:24]
B
We're just starting all digitally on zoom.
- [115:27]
A
No, this is the. So this is, it's the exact opposite. It's not, I'm not even doing 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 high ticket digital trainings, blah blah for predominantly knowledge workers. This is. And live events. So people have been wanting to bit 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.
- [115:55]
B
Is, this is rare for us. Unfortunately. We're on the phone. We're on the phone every morning.
- [116:00]
A
Hard to get me into the world. So it is. So no there's, 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. 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 window and then that's over zoom. That's over zoom.
- [116:22]
B
Now what's the size of the group here?
- [116:24]
A
100 people specific for a reason. 1. 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 creatives. I 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 unlocked 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 breakthrough. It's a crazy, 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. I had friends, my friends were actually people who were pulling off the impossible. And the truth of the matter is like by the time the X Prize was won because the right. Once it was won eight years later and the writing was on the wall that this was. The private space was real, this was going to happen.
- [117:24]
B
Jeff had already found Blue Origin was.
- [117:27]
A
Right, Blue Origin was there. Richard was. And you were like, this is real.
- [117:30]
B
Yeah.
- [117:31]
A
And so my level of what I think is possible in the world is absurd because my friend Peter helped unlock the space frontier and my other friends, the athletes, literally redefined what was possible for human, human species. So I came into the world with this really warped, like expectation for what I could do in the world because my friends were the same way on 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. 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 at the birth of the grunge movement. I was in San Francisco at the birth of the Internet. I was in Cleveland, in Chicago and Illinois at the birth of like industrial music, when that whole movement started up. Bunch of these in Santa Fe at the beginning of the new age into these huge culture shifting communities. But at the center, it's like a hundred people across the boards. Every time I've been in, in one of these things, it's about 100 people.
- [118:34]
B
It's a really important point.
- [118:35]
A
It's, it's not, it's, it's not giant.
- [118:37]
B
It's not, it's always.
- [118:39]
A
Even if you're looking at something like the Internet, which sounds absurd, or cryptocurrency, bitcoin.
- [118:44]
B
Right. All of these things started with a very small group, radical thinkers who gravitated together and.
- [118:51]
A
Yeah, yeah. No, and I mean, you know, I.
- [118:53]
B
Call them the benign conspiracies.
- [118:55]
A
It is exactly how I think about it. It's exactly, that's exactly right. But so I started to realize there was, in looking at all these subcultures that I was involved in the birth of. I was like, you know, it's always about 100 people. So. Right. That, 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 that vibrancy and that cross pollination of ideas. And I also wanted, you know, this like people think about like the lone creative inventor. I don't. It doesn't work that way. Creativity is a cooperative sport.
- [119:27]
B
Yeah.
- [119:27]
A
Even if you're a totally like the. I write books, there's nothing more. I'm gonna 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 gonna end up 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, solve a bunch of these challenges, train them up and flow. I'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.
- [120:09]
B
Give me some, give me some category examples.
- [120:12]
A
Well, I. 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, Susan is a great experience designer. Ivy Ross who's the head of design at Google, she's a hard goods designer and a tech designer all the way to like Scott Barry Kaufman who's the world's leading expert on creativity and transpersonal psychology. So like there you've got like you know, three, three different disciplines. But I mean I like, you know, we've got musicians, AI people, filmmakers, writers, tons of different entrepreneurs and tech entrepreneurs and 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 always say that like, you know another word for like world's leading expert is nobody around to talk to about the stuff you care about the most. Right. I mean back think about like early days of the spa of space and like when you and I were first meeting to talk about the X rays. You take that conversation almost any place. They're just laughing at you. You can't have a conversation.
- [121:40]
B
This is only NASA can do it. Yes.
- [121:41]
A
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 could be in a room filled with people. But if you're a super creative core, you could be totally Lost in your thoughts and walled off from everybody. And 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.
- [122:16]
B
It sounds like the alliance is an incubator.
- [122:19]
A
It's. I mean it could, it's among.
- [122:21]
B
We haven't been around long, a studio of some type.
- [122:24]
A
It's. I mean, I think it's going to be a combination of a, of a, of a writer, student, artist, studio and incubator. All. I think all those things, it's, it's training creatives up in flow, in training them up in the neurobiology of creativity. A lot of stuff we're talking about, like these are tools, you 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 is they're like, it could be. This is the dream company. I want to start the book, I want to finish. This is the movie. I want to make. Whatever. Everybody's got that, that thing. And you and I were both so goal oriented. You know when you have an unfinished masterpiece hanging over you.
- [123:06]
B
Yeah.
- [123:07]
A
It's like an albatross.
- [123:08]
B
It is, it's. It's also your guilty pleasure and you're trying to steal time to do it. And having, having a community that keeps you accountable.
- [123:17]
A
Right.
- [123:18]
B
Is so critical.
- [123:19]
A
So critical. Not only keeps you accountable because I like, it's. I think creatives get derailed at a couple of places. It's, it's both that keeps them cuddle. 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. 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 finish the book now you've got a year long editing. It's the polishing, polishing. And then you've got the launch.
- [123:59]
B
Yeah.
- [123:59]
A
And what happens with creatives is.
- [124:02]
B
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.
- [124:08]
A
Nothing. Nothing. Yeah. They don't like. The reason I have a personal editor.
- [124:12]
B
Yeah.
- [124:13]
A
Is because feedback, immediate feedback is a flow trigger.
- [124:15]
B
Yeah.
- [124:16]
A
And so I always tell companies, like, if you're running a company with like quarterly reviews or annual reviews, you're a moron because, 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 at 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 can get three readings of a book, that's huge. I need feedback almost daily. Like, definitely a couple times a week. I used to like ChatGPT. Makes it a little bit easier because while I don't like it to write my copy. It's really says nice things about like, hey, how's this version? Oh, this version. Version is excellent. It's strong. For this reason. I do that all the time. I do that all the time. I use. I use it to give people.
- [125:09]
B
No wonder you like it so much Feedback.
- [125:10]
A
Yeah. So no, what I was. 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. But 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.
- [125:44]
B
So when's the first alliance we're going to launch?
- [125:47]
A
In June. This is the. I think you're going to break the news. I think you're going to break the news to the world because we haven't even told.
- [125:55]
B
But you've started bringing people in.
- [125:56]
A
We have started bringing people in. We're building it. It's. It's. I. I'm so excited.
- [126:01]
B
I know when you told me about it first, I'm like, wow.
- [126:04]
A
Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, it was funny. I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday who's. He'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.
- [126:20]
B
And be in front of his bank account.
- [126:22]
A
Yeah, be in front of his bank account. And he was like. He's like, are you kidding? You're going. Because as soon as I. 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 know, I'm going to train you up in flow. It's, you know, and first of all, they. Then they light up. And then I usually just talk about loneliness. And everybody's done. Like, it's done. They're like, I'm in. I signed me up. He was 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 average it out, you know, he obviously makes a lot of money, so he's dealing in bigger sums and maybe most other people, but I was like, it'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. I 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 upheaval 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 the loneliness of entrepreneurship.
- [127:36]
B
Yeah.
- [127:36]
A
And I was like, this is at least 25 years old, but I talk about it with creatives, and they're so instantly like, oh, my God, we're going to solve that. Oh, please.
- [127:45]
B
Do people come in on their own or do they bring a team with them?
- [127:47]
A
Depends. We've. We've seen both. We've also seen some of the bigger organizations are using it as, like, an education program.
- [127:55]
B
That's interesting.
- [127:56]
A
So they're like, okay, I've got. Because, you know, $30,000. It's a lot of.
- [128:01]
B
If you.
- [128:02]
A
If. But if you don't control your. 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 art directors, I got designers and I've got even publicists and things like that where they're writing in their whatever and my scientists. And so they're actually coming in and saying, oh no, we've got a budget and we're going to call this continuing education and we're going to send like six of our top team people.
- [128:31]
B
Makes it makes a ton of sense. I mean you're training up your most.
- [128:36]
A
Critical asset in like in creativity, which is this skill that at least for the next 10 to 15 years until the AIs 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 this cynical bastard who has to ground our books in reality because Peter's the wild eyed boy from freecloud.
- [128:57]
B
Oh no, I'm optimistic about AI crushing our creativity. So, so where do people.
- [129:06]
A
I just, I just wanted to take my soul and sell it on the open market.
- [129:09]
B
Well, they'd be buyers. Let's not go there. So where do people go and find.
- [129:17]
A
Out about www.flowalliance.co.co.co FlowAlliance Co and where.
- [129:27]
B
Else do they find you on the Internet?
- [129:29]
A
You get stevencottler.com, flowresearch collective.com Steven Cotler on the Instagle tweet face.
- [129:38]
B
I haven't heard that before. That's great if you got the X in there, but that's okay.
- [129:46]
A
Insta Google. I'll have to work. That'll be next time. When I come back I'll have a better one.
- [129:52]
B
Brother, I love you.
- [129:53]
A
I love you.
- [129:54]
B
I'm so.
- [129:54]
A
This is so fun.
- [129:55]
B
Yeah, you know, it's. I love the fact when you, you text me in the morning and say, you ready for a reading with Stephen. And that's my, one of my favorite moments.
- [130:03]
A
I also, I get this, 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 care and water. It's like we've gotten very tender with how we, how we treat each other from like when we first, first came together and like it was just like the war of ideas over every sentence.
- [130:29]
B
I have, I had to, I've had to Talk you into books.
- [130:32]
A
Yes. You have.
- [130:33]
B
Yeah. Your first book, Abundance. I tried to write a book with you about space first, which was a failed. A failed attempt. Failed attempt and then.
- [130:42]
A
But abundance, I mean, you didn't have to talk me into Abundance because I was looking at the environmental side of it. I was worried it was going to be too ungrounded, you know, you, you.
- [130:52]
B
Were, you were like, I have other things. I'm working.
- [130:55]
A
Well, no, I was, I was like.
- [130:57]
B
I had to like disrupt. No, you did.
- [130:58]
A
I was working and I never went. I was working on a Richard Granger who's at Dartmouth. He's a neuroscientist. I was. We were gonna co. Write 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 got my asking. There were like three other projects and yeah, we. You came in and I know you were, you, you were the lowest ranking one in the beginning, but like, you rapidly climbed up there. But it was really 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, sure, for 20 years at that point. So it wasn't. I was ignorant about it, but my. I care about plants, animals and ecosystems.
- [131:39]
B
Yeah.
- [131:40]
A
So I was like, how do we apply technology to plants, animals and ecosystem? How do we use technology to say plants, animals and ecosystems? And you were really, especially then, really focused on the X prize, using technology to help humanity. Right. 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. All that stuff. It was really, I mean, it was, it was an incredibly fortuitous partnership because we, each of us like had two. Each of us had components of this that we absolutely had to bring together.
- [132:20]
B
And then it took me about a year to get you on board with our latest book.
- [132:25]
A
Oh, longer. I think, I think, I think it's. I think you've been working on for two to three years on this one.
- [132:30]
B
Are you happy we were doing it?
- [132:31]
A
I'm so happy. This book is so fun. As I, as I said, like, yet not only. Well, one. Because it's. You have to understand, though, it's still my. I mean, the, the new book. Just so people know in abundance. We made the argument that, hey, exponential Technology gives us the chance to raise global standards of living for every man, woman, and child on the planet.
- [132:52]
B
Yeah.
- [132:53]
A
And man did. There were their naysayers, right? Like, that was the hardest argument to make out loud. And even. I mean, Christ, the. You. You open TAD and that guy who followed you, right? Like, they found they couldn't even. They couldn't even put you on the stage at 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, like, the amount of, like, when you talk about basic standards of living going up and up and, I mean, it's. It's.
- [133:30]
B
It's been insane.
- [133:30]
A
Data's sort of stuff. Astounding. It is astounding.
- [133:34]
B
And.
- [133:34]
A
And nobody realizes.
- [133:35]
B
And nobody realizes. We are the. We are the frog boiling in the proverbial water.
- [133:39]
A
It's. Yeah, it's the. It's the craziest.
- [133:41]
B
By the way, just so folks know, this is a book that will come out in 2026.
- [133:46]
A
2026. Probably at abundance 360.
- [133:48]
B
Yeah. March 2026. And so don't go looking for it.
- [133:52]
A
Right now, but if you want an early copy, I'm bribable. Www.flowalliance.co Bribes.
- [134:04]
B
In all serious good luck on on Flow Alliance.
- [134:07]
A
Thank you, sir.
- [134:08]
B
On the Alliance. I know it is something which can level up people in extraordinary fashion.
- [134:16]
A
Yeah. Thank you, sir.
- [134:17]
B
Yeah. And love our conversations. Excited to see you again. We're gonna see each other in two weeks.
- [134:21]
A
I'm so excited.
- [134:22]
B
Two weeks. Yeah.
- [134:23]
A
Twice in a month.
- [134:23]
B
All right. And as I end every conversation every morning, I love you, buddy.
- [134:28]
A
I love you, buddy. Trip planner by Expedia. You were made to outdo your holiday, your hammocking, and your pooling. We were made to help organize the competition. Expedia made to travel.