Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 331: Steven Kotler

Episode Date: March 24, 2019

**Steven Kotler**, New York Times best-selling author and expert on the flow state, joins the DTFH! [Click here](https://flowresearchcollective.lpages.co/flow-for-writers/) for details on Steven's Flow for Writers two-day intensive masterclass on the writing process, it'll teach you everything, from how to structure a book to how to supercharge your writing style to the business of writing to the neuroscience of creativity (or how to hack your brain for more creativity). And [click here](https://stevenkotler.samcart.com/products/flowforwritersinterview) to make the interview deposit for Flow for Writers, use discount code "duncandiscount" for $500 off! This episode is brought to you by [Robinhood Financial](http://duncan.robinhood.com/) (get one free stock when you sign up).

We are family. A good time starts with a great wardrobe. Next stop, JCPenney. Family get-togethers to fancy occasions, wedding season two. We do it all in style. Dresses, suiting, and plenty of color to play with. Get fixed up with brands like Liz Claiborne, Worthington, Stafford, and Jay Farrar.

Oh, and thereabouts for kids. Super cute and extra affordable. Check out the latest in-store, and we're never short on options at jcp.com. All dressed up everywhere to go. JCPenney. Greetings to you, oh, beautiful children of the light. It is ID Trussell, and you are listening to the Ducatrussell

family hour podcast. And what a glorious guest we have for you today. Steven Kotler is here with us. He's a New York Times best-selling author. He's written eight enlightening books. I haven't read all of them, but the ones I have read, I Love, in particular, Stealing Fire. He's also an expert on performance.

Peak Experiences and Flow States, and he just finished a wonderful cyberpunk book called Last Tango in Cyber Space. Are you feeling stuck? Got some writer's block? Wondering why, when you were in Chile, someone wearing a Pokemon shirt tongue-kissed you? Then this is the DTFH for you.

Robinhood is an investing app that lets you buy and sell stocks, ETFs, options, and cryptos, all commission-free. While other brokerages charge up to $10 for every trade, Robinhood doesn't charge any commission fees, so you could trade stocks and keep all of your profits. Plus, there's no account minimum deposit needed to get started, so you can start investing at any level. The simple, intuitive design of Robinhood

makes investing easy for newcomers and experts alike. View easy to understand charts and market data and place a trade in just four taps on your smartphone. You can also view stock collections, such as 100 Most Popular. With Robinhood, you can learn how to invest in the market as you build your portfolio, discover new stocks, track your favorite companies,

and get custom notifications for prize movements so you never miss the right moment to invest. Robinhood is giving listeners of the Dunkin' Trussell Family Hour a free stock, like Apple, Ford, or Sprint, to help you build your portfolio. Sign up at dunkin.robinhood.com. I can tell from the look on your face that a sex clown, you've been missing.

I'm not from the circus, baby, but I'm open, and I'm open. If you're tired of fisting, tap your hands, baby. I'm gonna help you find your soul again. And if you're tired of fisting, if you're getting tired, you can always go back to me. Go back to your sex clown. That is, go back to your sex clown by the Pixley Brothers from Utah.

Dear darlings, do you like the Dunkin' Trussell Family Hour podcast, but are you sick of the commercials? All you gotta do is go to patreon.com. Ford slash DTFH, and you will get episodes uninterrupted by the horror of consumerism. Not only that, but you will find a variety of stuff over at the Patreon that is never gonna be on the main feed, including once a month, an hour-long rant.

It's all there for you. All you gotta do is go to patreon.com. Ford slash DTFH. We also have a wonderful shop at dunkin.trussell.com with all kinds of beautiful. This is in that, including a wonderful stop drinking crow's milk bumper sticker. It's all there for you at dunkin.trussell.com,

which, by the way, was created using Squarespace. Want to make a beautiful website in less than an hour? You could do that at squarespace.com. Want to create a nuanced, glorious website of such deep and intense complexity that it puts you on the radar of a secret government organization that comes to your house and offers you millions of dollars just to interview you?

Happen to me. Go no further than Squarespace. They've got everything you need to create a beautiful website. You want to sell your socks online? I know someone who does that. You can do it with a Squarespace website. Want to create a beautiful podcast website? Check out dunkitrussell.com.

I use Squarespace every time I upload an episode of the DTFH. Go to squarespace.com, Ford slash Dunkin, and start your free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code DUNKIN to get 10% off your first order of a website or a domain. Much thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH.

Now, without further ado, everyone, please welcome back to the Dunkin, Trussell, Fabley Hour podcast. One of my favorite humans living on this planet. He just wrote an amazing cyberpunk novel called Last Tango in Cyberspace. He is also a brilliant person who has written many other books that I've enjoyed, including Stealing Fire. You should definitely check that out.

And he's also an expert on flow states. Now, everybody, please welcome to the Dunkin, Trussell, Fabley Hour podcast, the great Steven Kotler. It's the Dunkin, Trussell, Fabley Hour podcast. Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi!

Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi!

Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! I just have to tell you another story first.

Okay. I live in the middle of nowhere. And, as you know, middle of nowhere, technology doesn't work exactly the way it works for most people. So, my Siri, which has a voice activation thing, it took forever for that to actually get set up. And it finally came online last week! I've had my iPhone for five years but, finally, the voice activation software kicks in and

I can have conversations. Cool. And I realized this and I'm like, holy crap, I can ask Siri questions like all over the place. I'm going to be like, hey Siri, no any good jokes. And so, I did this. Yes. Right?

And mind you, at the time I'm doing this, I'm writing this new book with Peter DeMandis, talking about the dangers of AI, questions about like, right, all this stuff is on my consciousness. Hey Siri, no any good jokes? This is what Siri says to me. Bartender says, we don't serve time travelers in here. So a time traveler walks into a bar. Shit, man.

It's fucking with us. I know. That's what I'm saying. The matrix is waking. Yeah, it's really starting to wake up and there's going to be a mischievous period, that's for sure. Oh my god. I was like, oh my god, I am totally being fucked with by a conscious AI.

This is so good. You especially, man. I mean, you've got to be on not just human radars, but on AI radars. You're so out there and what you're talking about is probably somewhat influencing the development of these things, for real. Maybe a little. A little. Okay, well, welcome back to the DTFH, Steven.

Thank you so much. I've been really looking forward to this conversation and here's some flattery real quick. Of all my guests, man, I think about the stuff we've talked about the most, I think. Like you popping in my head all the time. Oh, that's so nice. Thank you. And thank you for writing this book. This is so right up my alley, man.

I knew it was. I knew it would be. Yeah. I totally knew you were going to dig it. So I just want to start off, man, on page 102 of this book, somehow you just tuned in to so many of my favorite things and I was wondering if, do you have the book in front of you? Yeah.

I've got it to 102. So where do you want me to start? It starts with last tango and cyberspace says Lorenzo and then, and then, and then if you don't mind just end on the lion finishes the stands and with that awesome Wadi quote. Got it. All right. This is the first time I've done a reading from last time. The very first reading.

Here we go. Awesome. Page 102. Last tango and cyberspace says Lorenzo. I don't know that phrase. Cyberspace, the noosphere of the internet, William Gibson called it a shared consensual hallucination. Shared being the critical part.

No sharing, no communication, no communication, no cooperation, no cooperation, no empathy. Game over. An AI that makes sharing information impossible as NEM tracker, you should get this. Last tango and cyberspace says lion, the end of something radically new. Copy that. Lion, by the way, is the protagonist. An open air bus passes by the bench. These tourists wearing wireless headphones and VR glasses with opaque lenses.

Their heads point in the same direction, like something out of 1984. The people you called asked lion. Anyone mentioned Moa Dib? Hector quoted from the collected sags of Moa Dib. He did ask lion. Do you remember which one? Give me a sec. I wrote it down in my moleskin.

One of the ones I gave you asked lion, the notebooks were Lorenzo's birthday present last year. Have you become a convert? Completely. First class on the way over to Tokyo, which was a miracle. One of those private rooms and women in short skirts, bringing me drinks and actual waterford. Halfway through my second walker blue, I realized that somebody needs to turn apocalypse now into a blues opera. I filled a whole notebook, a blues opera, the horror, horror blues, grounds, which Moa Dib

sang. I'm still looking. Lion hears pages turning, cigarettes smoking, more pages, got it. This is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. Lion finishes the stanza. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in.

Wow, congratulations that I came through you. Holy shit, man. You covered in that Dune, Moleskine notebooks and William Gibson and made it an apocalypse now. An apocalypse now. It made it all work. It's not just like you're grabbing cool shit. This is really an accomplishment, man.

Cyber, this is great. I wonder if you could tell me what that quote means to you, the person experiencing greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. What does that mean to you? Well, I mean, on a simple level, right? Cultural context matters, right? And in a really simple level, you've just got to know what game you're playing at what particular time, right?

And what's the right note and what's the wrong note? Let's totally take it out of out of this context and let's just talk about it in comedy in a way that like we can deflate it of all. So Dave Chappelle, I'm just thinking about his, the three Netflix specials, the second one where he comes out and says, tells that joke and says, you know, I've got this barrel of punchlines I write down and I grab one out and I read it and I decide that I'm going to integrate it into night show. So the one I grabbed today says, and I punch her on the pussy, right?

Yes. Which is the most insane. And then I punched her on the, I mean, like, how do you even say that out loud? Let alone get away with it. Yeah. David Chappelle, and he knows the myth that he's in. He's both David Chappelle and he's David Chappelle inside the myth of David Chappelle, which has different outrageousness bounds than most other people's myths.

So Dave Chappelle can do that, right? If I go up on stage and I try to tell it, he punched her in a posting joke, right? Like, I'm in the wrong myth. Yeah, that is certain. Like it's just like, so that's a really like small, weird, you know, not a grandiose level. But I think, you know, one of the things a lot of people talk these days a lot about like, you hear these terms like cultural architecture as if you could steer culture if that was even possible.

And I don't, I'm not actually sure that's possible, right? Like, I'm much more of a Darwinianist. I think there's too much complexity and randomness in the system that you can even steer. And like, it doesn't go that way. But I do think that the people who have showed up and managed to make some level of significant, magnificent change, a Gandhi, a Martin Luther King, you know, though that that level of impact, they knew exactly how to play the game. And what they what they figured out is the Rostas did this.

There's a lot of Rastafarian stuff in last tango and cyberspace, right? Yeah. And one of the questions, one of the reasons is I'm interested in the question of how beliefs and religions get assembled and the Rastafarian faith was built in plain sight over the past hundred years where most religions were constructed out of sites. You can't even see them. The Rastas, you've got to sort of watch it. But like their their faith was a reaction to the worst kind of socio political

classism in Jamaica, right? They were at the bottom economic period in a very stratified class society where there was no way to get there was no way they were going to claim power from anyone. Right. So what did they do? They inverted the whole thing and they said, we're going to make garbage sacred. We're going to take the very everything you've rejected. Yeah.

And we're going to turn that into heaven and say everything else is Babylon. Yeah. That was the myth they were in, right? They played a very, they knew exactly what game they were playing and how to win. And it worked, right? They not only did that faith lift tons of people out of poverty, it actually managed to help split apart shape Jamaica's class consciousness. It launched the punk movement.

It launched the hip hop movement. It shaped so much global culture, but it started with somebody playing inside a very specific myth is what I was thinking. Whoa, OK, that's cool. Wow. Yeah. And this, this one of the things I love about this is that it happens. This is not bullshit.

Like this is one of the things our species definitely does. It's from time to time. A bubble emerges that changes everything, at least in, you know, it could either globally change everything or certainly in countries, there's, I don't know, every country has these people who shifted it permanently. And so I love that because we are, that implies that in the same way, prior to the discovery of electricity, there was still electricity. And similarly, in this very moment, we're always just teetering on the edge of

another one of these people popping up, and except now they're going to pop up with the amplification of technology. You know, when the Buddha gained realization, think how long it took for that meme spread. Yeah. And that to me is the these two things. This is like the, um, an electrical cord dangling over a puddle of water. It's that we're all in the water and it's just a matter of time before that son

of a bitch drops. And when I got a vision, ever been in a bus and no breaks. Yes, man. Everyone in a bus and no breaks, but I'll tell you, somebody's going to start driving the bus and, and, and we, we all know that's coming. And so we, you know, you hear this like over and over and over again, every religion. You've got the matriarch. You've got the second coming of Christ.

You've got in every world religion. There's this, it's coming. Another thing's coming. Somebody's coming down the pipes and it's like, sure, what, what was that? Maybe they were smoking DMT out in the desert. Maybe it's just, you know, the babbling of people from the antiquated dusty past. But this same story is being told by technologists by it's the book you're writing right now, which is somebody's coming.

You better get ready. Well, yeah, I mean, you know, so this was something we poked at in stealing fire and this is really common, right? Like people start having in altered states of consciousness because the part of your brain that calculates time, right? That separates past from present and future and prefrontal cortex is shut down. Right. So everything you're plunged into the eternal present, the deep now,

this is the psychological term, but it has this feeling of immediacy, right? So this is a problem for, say creatives, because a compositor will get into flow and they'll have a vision of an opera and they'll think, oh, this is amazing. I'll be able to scratch it down and be done in a couple of weeks and it'll come back to reality. It takes fucking 10 years to write, right? Or it's Wagner's the ring cycle that takes 40 years to write a damn thing. Kind of thing.

So that is one problem for creatives, but it happens all the time with apocalyptic cults, people get in and they, they see something is coming and they think it means right now. And suddenly you're Daniel Pinchbeck writing a, Daniel is a smart guy, friend of mine, great writer. And then he wrote 2012 because he did a bunch of drugs in the jungle and violated rule one, which is don't do a bunch of drugs in the jungle and decide the world is coming to an end because it's probably not, right?

Like bad idea. Didn't work so well for Terrence McKenner. Didn't work so well for Daniel Pinchbeck. And it's not working. It's not going to work well for the Silicon Valley dudes who are doing drugs at Burning Man going, oh my God, the AI apocalypse is not going to, no, probably not, not so much. Well, it is.

Yeah. You're talking about that rule is Robert Anton Wilson's rule, which is maintain agnosticism. You cannot get pulled in to the siren song of the, who, whichever it is, the DMT elf style, a wasca goddess or whoever over there is telling you, get ready, strap it. Cause if you do your, it's embarrassed. It's innately embarrassed.

I mean, like, I, you know, I, I just tell people, and this is, this is a rule with flow. And I mean, you know this from, from comedy, I'm sure. Don't trust the dopamine, right? Don't trust the dopamine. Don't like, when you're high as a kite, right? You're in a deep flow state. Like I tell people, don't go shopping in a flow state because you'll buy

everything because it looks good. Yeah. Don't start, right? Don't trust the mega millennia that comes with these states of consciousness. It's built in like the ego goes away and when it comes back, it comes back ferocious. And it wants to say, oh my God, you're the only motherfucker who's ever had a vision. You're the one who's right.

Yeah. Not everybody. You're really like, what are the odds? Yeah, the odds are zero. Uh, the odds are you're having a manic episode and it's time to like get some help and that's okay. I know plenty of people, to me, the manic episode that comes from these things, it's like, some people get embarrassed by, I have more than a few friends have

gone in there, come back with a big message, very excited about it. And then, you know, that they were able to cool their brain down a little bit. Now they're fine, but it's just good to recognize that the, the odds of you being picked to transmit some, you're not more deep. All right. Just forget it. It's a relief by the way. And also, uh, that being said, though, um, we're all more deep.

And this is a story that a Ramdas tells, which I love, which is his brother got committed. He was put in a mental asylum and, uh, Ramdas went to visit his brother's after he got him back from India. This is beard Ramdas with the, you know, he was doing the whole like, um, aesthetic wandering, uh, Indian saint character. And he, his brother, they found him in an apartment surrounded by senior citizen women who all thought he was Jesus and he had convinced them that he

was Jesus. And so he said to Ramdas, look at you, you dress like Jesus. Do you have a beard like Jesus? Why are you out there and I'm in here? And Ramdas said, well, the reason you're in here and I'm out there is because you think you're the only Jesus. And I think everybody's Jesus. That's the difference.

That's pretty good. It's cool. It's cool. That's good. And I have heard, you know, I don't normally hear a Ramdas story you like. You're like, Oh, wow, I really like this one. He's great.

You got to listen to more stories. There's some good ones, but there's another story. It's not a Ramdas story. And I think it could be an urban myth because it's so incredibly unethical. But supposedly they took a bunch of people having this messianic fantasy that they're Jesus and put them together in a room to see what happens. If you get five people, you think they're Jesus in the same room with other Jesuses.

I read about that. No, they, this, I don't know who did this. I remember this experiment and they didn't, they couldn't believe it. They, I used to argue with one another, right? They couldn't, nobody would give up the throne, basically. Everybody else is the imposter Jesus. They're all the devil. I'm the real Jesus.

This is a bunch of bullshit. And so this to me is the wait a minute, this is great reality television. Why hasn't the show been made? Because it's this I watch this. I would watch. I mean, I've never seen reality television show. I don't know, but like this, like I'm the real Messiah. Oh, God, ten Messiahs in a house and see what happens.

America's top Jesus, ten Jesuses enter one Jesus come out. It's the real Jesus. They have to do like contests, you know, walking on water, the classics, you know. But raising the dead, raising the dead. That's one of the problems is like one of the one of them actually can raise the fucking dead. But but the dead is they're still sick or something. Like, you know what I mean? They get raised the dead, but they're still sick from rotting.

The the. So but this to me is like when I think about like the sort of like perceived problem. Like one of the problems right now is that we're experiencing something that's being called radicalization, which is that, you know, people are getting sucked into various like reality tunnels on the interwebs. And and then the people are giving or in these reality tunnels are all distorted and warped and weird. And so then these people start getting the real sense that they need to be a hero.

They need to be Jesus. They need to save the world. And so then these heroes go out and they do, you know, we just saw what fucking happens, you know, these people who think of themselves as as as doing something that had to be done. When, in fact, they just got pulled into a sick echo chamber with sort of exponentially amplified distortions of truth that led to them freaking the fuck out. And so to me, this is the problem is that we have yet to realize that we're all we if we're going to if we're going to do this, it needs to be more of a decentralized,

my silly old Jesus, so to speak, you know, a sum total game where we're all sort of converging together. Rhizomal Jesus. What's that? Rhizomal Jesus. Can you tell me that's the in the old days? I'd be like, I'd nod my head like I knew. Rhizomes are the the the structures that fungi networks put out. Oh, so they're the you use the mycelium, right? So I just went one level.

I went down into the biology of the mycelium. You're right. It's a rhizome, not mycelium. The mycelium is not. Yeah, we need a rhizomal Jesus. And that's that's. And when you and when you think about it, that's to me. If there is going to be another of these things that pops up, it's going to be a collective. Because, I mean, on I'm a little bit of a conspiracy theorist, and I imagine that if somebody did appear that was clearly too charismatic and somehow antithetical to

whatever system is being supported by, you know, folks who have a vested interest in keeping it going, that person is not going to they're not going to last that long. They're going to be shut down pretty quick, I would think. It's an interesting I mean, it's an interesting question. How do you how do you keep that stuff down? And what when it can go global so fast? I what's what's interesting to me, there's two side. There's two things that I think one is on the.

Proscriptive side on like what's the problem? I think one of the problems and I and it's sort of like the difference between kind of punk culture in the 90s, which was really like never beat your chest and millennial culture, millennial culture, they like I so the flow research collective, like the first rule is have a passion and purpose and keep it to your damn self. Cool. And I like I like I'm not like I'm not interested in millennial culture seems to

like think somehow if you've got a passion or a purpose like everything lead with it. My name is Stacy and I'm here because I want to save the world. Yeah. And I come from a generation like like we care about execution, what have you actually done? Right. And it's very easy to once you because sort of I have this passion, I have this purpose and then I do this drug and that combination together tends to produce that reaction when

your value system is not the lip service you pay to your passion, but the actual thing you do in the frickin world that's what matters. It tends to like, you know, the ego gets checked by the actual action that's required. So I think like one thing is sort of worth pointing that out. And by the way, the other thing is just in general high performance goal setting theory, like there's really good evidence that says if you set high hard goals and you'd like to accomplish them, keep them to yourself because the minute you say it out loud, your brain, you actually get dopamine from saying the like high hard goal that you want to accomplish

out loud. So your brain goes, Oh, you've already gotten the reward for accomplishing the thing that you were trying to do. So you have less motivation to do it. So like, first of all, if you actually mean your passion and purpose, keep it to your damn self because you have a better chance of actually getting their basic psychology, high performance theory, like not the other thing is like, I think it tends to produce this kind of megalomania when you couple this, this passion and purpose value that millennial

culture seems to have and it's spread everywhere, like spread in business. I get into business meetings. I'll get on the phone with somebody and they'll be like, my name is Michael and I'm a lawyer and I came out of Harvard and blah, blah, blah. And my passion is, and I'm like, the fuck are you telling me your passion for? Like I'm trying to do business with you. Like you're a fucking lawyer. I'm trying to hire you to a contract.

I don't care what your fucking passion is. I care if you can execute a goddamn contract. Fuck you, right? I mean, like, I have to listen to this. Kill me now. Yeah. The word's so passion. Why are you calling it up?

Don't even call it a passion. Come up with another word for it. Like not a passion. Do the thing after you're done doing the thing. I'm going to pay the fucking attention. Yeah, like. Yeah, that's cool. No, see, first, I think you have to discover relativity.

Then you get to brag about discovering relativity. That's just sort of the way I was taught. Well, yeah, well, this is. And this is like that you were taught, right? And the problem is this. People have people really can feel their potential, I think. Well, I agree with you. You could you could feel it in you and it's real.

And you know, it's real, even though you might be looking around at your life and it's just a wreck. You could feel this thing in you and you know, holy shit, I could do this. The problem is the birthing process of getting that feeling out of you and into the world in a way that's consistent and creates some kind of change that is quantifiable is can be a very long, painful, difficult, lonely process and fucking boring, too.

This isn't a montage. This isn't like the movie where they play the pop music and the thing it's done. This is boring. It's like it's a grind sometimes. It's so funny. I was I was having a discussion. I don't remember where I was, but somebody asked me. I've got a class out right now called the habit of ferocity.

And it's not about it's every I call it everything but the flow. And it sort of emerged out of this realization that peak performers do a bunch of stuff, motivation, grit, primarily stuff, intuitively, that sort of like most other people don't do. And somebody wanted to know, what is peak performance? Actually, what does it look like? And I was like, what is it? It looks like a checklist.

Looks like you wake up in the morning, you got 10 things to do and you get it all done and you're proud. You gave every one you gave your best to. And then it looks like the same thing the next day and the next day and the next day. And the difference is that's what it looks like for years. Yeah, in a row. Like that's what peak perform.

That's what best of the best looks like. It looks like a damn checklist where at the end of the day, you're like, did it again? Everything on my checklist is checked off and tomorrow you do it again. And tomorrow, that's what it looks like. I mean, the things on the checklist may be sexier. You know what I mean? It may not be mop the floor.

It may be, you know, create a robot AI or, you know, they may be sexier things. Yeah, it's just a fricking checklist. That's not this. Yeah. And it's not real. That's to me. Yeah, I do. But I think I had to sort of like give up a lot of conditioning.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Totally. Like, no, that was like one of the one of the hardest realizations for me. And they say this is one of the realizations you sort of make in your late 20s. Like there's an adult development transition stage between 27 and 30, where one of the things you realize is like, your life is going to be nothing more or less than what you make of it.

Yeah, like you are actually driving the bus. And if you don't decide to like sit down and actually take responsibility for all of it and work hard, like it's not going to happen for nobody. The fairytale doesn't happen every now and again. You end up with Brad Pitt's abs in Thelma and Louise. Like it happens, right? But it turns out even Brad Pitt, like he was like, even he was smart enough to go. Okay, look, I got great abs.

So I got the part, but then I fucking busted my ass at that part and kept like worked really hard after, right? The great abs may get you a break. You may get your, you may get a lucky break once or twice, but it's all about can you execute and execution is, can you do the checklist today? Can you do it tomorrow? Can you do it the day after that? Can you do it when you're hungover and you're tired and you're fighting

with your girlfriend? Can you do it when you have a broken arm? Yeah. Can you do it when you're in the hospital? Can you do it after they've stolen your favorite teddy bear? Right? Like that's, that's what matters, right? Yeah, that's how you do it.

That's how we know. But here's the thing, judge a tree by its fruit, as our Lord said, you have produced so much good stuff. It's not like you're spitting out crap, man. It's like you have your prolific and you're just blasting. Oh, I guess I'll just write a legendary fucking cyberpunk sci-fi now. What? And you liked it, by the way.

You liked it, huh? What the fuck? No, but this is to me like the, I don't know, you know, it's like a lot of people who have a system that they claim can put a person, like an upshift a person's life. It's a weird thing when you look at what they've produced and you realize like, yeah, they wrote some books, but all the books are on the system of upshifting a life. You know what I mean? What else did you do?

Where's the other stuff in there? Not that that's not enough. But man, you've like, this is so cool, you know, because it's like this is just by the way, this is so, you know, my first book is a novel. Now, you know, I do remember you telling me that, but I am not familiar with that one. It's so nobody's familiar with it. And so it has a, it was a bestseller and it has a very like devoted cult following. But let's be totally forthright.

Not as here. It's not a very good book. I did not have control of my craft. It was a big idea. It's really cool. There's great stuff in it. It's not a great book. And then I wrote two more books that are sitting in drawers.

Two novels. And then I went, okay, you know what? I don't have the skill. I don't have the craft. I don't have the, I can't do this. And I switched to nonfiction, wrote nonfiction for eight books. And so like when I came back to last tango, A was was something to prove, right? Cause I had sort of gotten my, I hadn't been able to do this thing, right?

So I really wanted to get it right. And I also, um, you know, I wanted to write a fun cyberpunk thriller, Neil Gaiman, William Gibson kind of, cause those dudes weren't like, most of them stopped writing them, right? Gibson was writing, but he would get a book every five years. And which is too slow for me. I like his chip too much. And the other guys, Stevenson went into hard science fiction.

He's a hundred years in the future. He's an outer space, Neil Gaiman wrote Neverwhere, which was sort of on the straddle line and now he's doing straight up fantasy. And like, I'm not interested in Norse God science fiction and I'm not interested in a 300 years from now in a galaxy far, far away. I'm curious, but like, I, like I was always, what I liked about those guys is they gave me a look at the world five years from now, seven years from now. Like, what am I living into?

And, you know, Blade Runner was an incredibly useful movie for my entire generation, cause it let us know what we were living into in it. And right. And we're still living into that though. I always point out that the Blade Runner Blade Runner was set in 2019. So I don't think LA is going to look like Blade Runner LA, but I think Tokyo might actually look like Blade Runner LA. Well, I'll take the flying fucking cars.

I'll tell you that, man, you can't get around LA anymore. It's done. It's over. I just try to find, by the way, I was, that's opening chapter of the new book. I'm writing with Peter Diamandis is set at the Uber flying car conference. Uber flying car, autonomous taxis in LA by 2023. Thank God. Thank God.

It's, it's crazy. I can now, I can get, I get, I'm not allowed, damn it. I have to keep saying this. I'm not allowed to talk about it. I can get to work. It's like, you know, I can get to work not like eight miles away from my house on my bike faster than in my car. And that's nuts to me.

That's insane that I can do that. That's crazy. I mean, I, I left LA. I, the other reason, well, the main reason I was in LA was the surfing. And when I started to realize that like, I took the wrong turn or went at the wrong hour and I was like, I could, it could take me four hours to get home from Malibu. And I was just like, I can't like, this is not okay. Like this, nobody should live like this.

All that time, man. All that time is just getting sucked up. And the other, the other thing is this, like there's in the field of positive psychology, we've advanced to the point that like, there's certain things we can say for sure. Like we've, the data is in, we're solid on this. And one of them is one of the biggest hits you quality life takes this traffic. There's no coming, like there's reams of data that says we don't do well with being stuck in traffic.

It's not good for us. Yeah. And there's no, your podcasts, right? Or audio books are the best fix. Anybody's gotten for it. And it's a, it's a good fix, right? If you're stuck in traffic, those are fantastic. Yeah.

I love it because it means that I've got this great LA market for audio books. This is fantastic. God bless gridlock. I appreciate it. Yeah. But no, I mean, like, you know, it's just, it's a quality of life hit. No shit, man. And, and, but, and this is the, and yeah, you can, you could sit in your car and

listen to audio books, which I used to do, but it's not, it's like you're stuck in a metal bubble surrounded by miserable people, all varying degrees of awareness that something seems to have gone completely off kilter in our culture. That this is even happening. Most of them know I didn't need to go to where I went. I could have done it at my house. Why did I go there? It's like, we're doing that thing.

Like, um, in the dawn, this is a very weird reference, dawn of the dead. There, all the zombies are wandering through the shopping mall. Some of them are like trying to play hockey. Some of them are, you know, it's not, it's obviously not about zombies, that movie. It's about consumer culture and the hypnotic trance. A lot of us have gotten into, but one of them was looking at the zombies, one of the survivors and it's like, they've gone to, they, they're just doing what they were familiar with.

And it seems like historically something happened where we had to go to offices. We had to be together. There was no phone. There was no way to instantly communicate like this. And so we all gathered together in these fucking offices. And then we do shit that we could have done at home. And the price of that is, of, I guess, inhaling each other's goddamn pheromones is that the fucking ice caps are melting because we want to

breathe each other's farts. We want to breathe each other's post lunch farts in these offices. So it's a, it's a little bit of a mess. And this is why I'm encouraged by the advancements that are happening in technology. And I wonder if you could tell me which, and I don't want to turn you into Nostradamus here, but in this book, which of these technologies do you think we're the most likely to see first without giving

the interest to everything in last tango. Um, and I say this in the acknowledge, which is the very end either exists in a lab or right now. So everything in the book is actually real at some level with the exception of there's a pharmacological compound at the center of the book. That's the only one that stretches the bounds, but everything else. In fact, some of the stuff I made up, uh, for example, uh, there's a, uh, the one scene, there's, there's a character flying on an airplane

and there's a VR app where the camera's mounted on the hood of the airplane. And you can write what, so from between the time I wrote that, and now that already exists. So like three or four of the things that I put in there came into the one that's the weirdest and the one that is coming and doesn't yet, it's in the book. So, uh, is the face reading aquarium where it's like it's in certain foreign countries, as you enter the country, you walk through a tube, that's an aquarium. Right.

And what they're doing is they're using computer face reading and they're face reading you and you can't, when you have lots of things, life, life, things to pay attention to, you can't mask your facial expressions. So that it's literally, they're using life as a anti-lying detection mechanism and they're building these. Yeah. So that technology, that's real. Those will start showing up at airports over the next five years.

You're going to walk through like aquarium tunnels so the computers can read your face accurately. That is fucking nuts. So wait, yeah, that's kind of fun. When you have a bunch of like variables out there, you have to pay attention to and you have a lie simultaneously. The lie likes flickers out. Yeah.

You have to, your, your attention gets distracted, right? Because you're, so one of the things it's sort of everywhere in the book is, uh, we come with all these built in proof of life detectors, right? The, the first thing any organization wants to know is like, are you alive? Are you dead? Right? That's the first thing any, when you encounter anything in the world, it's, are you alive?

Are you dead? The next question is, if you're alive, right? Are you like me or not like me? Cause if you're like me, I may want to fuck you, right? And if you're not like me, I may want to run away from you or I may want to kill you and eat you. Okay. Like those are the choices, right?

So, but the first thing we have to do is are you alive or you're not alive? So we have all these things that are built in automatic proof of life detectors that happen automatically. And we don't even think about it. And the example, the easy example from technology is when it goes wrong. So in robotics, there's something called the uncalate value. Yes. If you have a robot, right?

That it is almost, but not quite human. That almost, but not quite brings up a sense of disgust in us. We don't like it's too close and not quite. So we have a reaction. We're detecting a fake. It's a proof of life detector. But one of the things that happened in the book to me, uh, and the opening scene takes place in, uh, the United wing of the new Newark airport.

And I flew into Newark one night. It was like Friday night at like 1130, 12 o'clock at night. And I got off the plane and the airport felt like there was a party going on. It was like filled with people and energy. And what was it? And I realized as I walked off the plane into it, that it wasn't, it was actually Friday night, 1130, but everything blinked and scrolled and was liquid and moved and movement tricks the proof of life detector.

And so I got tricked into believing that this airport was actually filled with people and alive and going on. And it wasn't. It was just designed to do that. Right. It's designed to make me feel the sensation of life. Even when life's not there. Right.

And so think about, this is in last hangout, uh, we, we think about, we do this sometimes with like, think about a party, right? When everybody leaves and goes home and you're, you're left. If you manage to stay sober, um, that empty house has a sense. It gives off a sensation. Absence of life feels like something. Yeah. Absence of life, right?

There's sensations. We know what those sensations are. We don't have, right? With sad, it feels like you can feel the, right? Like, so there's something that we're, I think what it is, is our mirror and our on systems. When there's life around, we're always mirroring. And when it, when there's nothing to mirror, we notice this lack of things to

mirror. That's what I think, I think that's the biology under. That's the biology I play with in the book. Um, but I think there's like, so one of the questions, like where, where this gets weird is people always talk about the line is going to be, when does an AI wake up? Yeah, maybe, maybe that's an interesting line, but there's going to become a point where we no longer the series story.

I start told you where I can't tell, well, you can't tell, is it awake? Is it not awake? Right. Which is a different thing than is it awake? Right. But like where we can no longer tell when the cars are autonomous and they're making decisions, there's a point at which you're like, I don't, I don't know. Anymore.

And I don't know anymore. We've never lived in a world where the things we make could become conscious. That's not happened before other than by sex, right? The only way we can make something that wakes up is through sex. Every other way does, it doesn't wake up. And that's going to start to change in terms of how it feels, the texture of reality, the fabric is going to shift in weird ways. And that's one of the things I'm trying to get at in last hang on cyberspace is

that the feeling, I'll give you an example from your own life. And you, so if you, maybe, maybe you're, maybe the error is wrong, but like the world felt one way before the internet showed up. That's right. Right. It was much more localized. It was smaller. And suddenly the internet happens, which is, this is where William Gibson's

cyberspace, the term comes from. He's talking about not the actual web of connections between people. He's talking about the mental feeling of suddenly, oh my God, I'm now connected to the world in a way that I've never been before. And that connection has a feeling. The phenomenological texture of reality is different post internet than it was pre internet because when they're connected, right? That's going to shift again in like five years, right?

Like reality didn't feel the way it did 20 years ago and it shifted. But like technology is moving so quickly, that's going to shift again in five years and then in four years and then in three years. So we're going to go through these phases where the way life feels, what sort of like gives us our concrete anchor to reality sense is going to start shifting faster and faster and faster. And this, I think if there is a redemption for the people who got pulled into the fucking 2012 thing, this is it.

Because what do you know? The prediction for Quexacuato returning in 2012, it was actually pretty good when you consider the fact that the universe we're existing in now, as you just described it, is at least subjectively completely different from the one when I used to have to memorize friends, phone numbers in Hendersonville, North Carolina, pre internet. And this world that we're in now is so very different. You could almost say that old world died.

It was, it's gone. It was sort of liquefied, got restructured, however you want to put it. And that's the world that we're living in now. And this is another thing that happens to our species is that our shared realities dramatically shift from time to time throughout history. But usually in between these shifts, we have a long time to get used to it, to integrate long periods of stability. Yeah.

Long periods of stability punctuated equilibrium, right? To use the evolutionary term. Okay. Long periods of stability, big, big, big unstable period. Long periods of stability. No. And so Rick Kurzweil has said, and head of engineering at Google, right, runs their AI department and wrote the singularity is near and has been very

good at predicting patterns in the future. And what he has said is we're going to experience 20,000 years worth of technological change over the next hundred years. Yes. So to put that in context, it means we're going to go birth of agriculture to the industrial revolution twice in 86 years. Now, he could be off by a factor of a thousand and it's still going to be faster than anything we've ever possibly experienced.

Yes. And the reality shifts, like the reality tunnels to use Wilson's word, that we're going to experience just over the course of our lifetime. If you get another 30, 40, 50 years out of this game are going to be massive, right? Like our life totally changed in and around the mid 90s in a way that, you know, I, like I try to explain to people before the internet culture was disseminated in this thing called magazines.

Like now you think that this thing at the airport that you've seen, you're supposed to read them on the plane. If you're bored, right? Yes, you can't get your phone to work. No, no, it turns out those used to be the major engine for disseminating culture. I remember when interview magazine showed up in Ohio and interview magazine was this magazine that was created by like all of the, it came out of like Andy Warhol and the kitchen crowd.

And it was like New York's arts culture from the 70s and 80s. And it like made it to Cleveland, Ohio, where I was. And it was like our first glimpse of like, Oh my God, there's this other thing out there in the world that they're doing that sort of resonates with what we're doing. And it was that, the idea that magazines were once the dissent for a long period of time, they were the once the disseminator of cutting edge culture. It's so such a weird thing for people to wrap their heads around.

Fuck, Matt, I, you just brought back the memory of the time at this gas station. They got a magazine rack in Fletcher, North Carolina, and it had all these fucking skater magazines and you could get, and it was like, and first time you saw a thrasher or something like that. And you were like, Holy crap, there are other dudes like me. Yeah. Yeah. There's, yes, yes.

And that, that was almost like, it's like a little mini cultural UFO landing and the ripples that would happen in the micro system of high schools, just based on the sudden availability of this new cultural sort of representation of what people are doing in other places. It really creates these micro changes that are, that lead to big things. And yeah, so now we're getting that all the time. And now, but in what's happening is it's, there's fragmentation, wouldn't you say? There's some kind of like schisming that seems to be happening, which is we're

getting these like cultures that are forming, uh, that are based in the, in cyberspace, but that are so vastly different from each other. And then those cultures are splitting and those are splitting and those are splitting. One of the things, so at the heart of last tag, right? Is this idea of poly tribes, right? Like, and it's a poly, the idea here is, and the first one I ever saw, it's on the first page of the book. I talk about the Pokemon subculture and you probably actually thought I was joking.

You probably didn't realize this was a real thing. So the Pokemon subculture existed for a tiny little window in, uh, the early 2000s in chili and very conservative Southern Catholic, Catholic chili. And it was the first global mashup subculture. So what happened or at the internet made subculture visible. So suddenly, instead of like culture coming in through magazines and whatnot, every subculture was visible. So you started to get mix and match subcultures.

So the Pokemon subculture blended Japanese guy room makeup with West coast hip hop gear, East coast emo style haircuts. They had these Brit punk sneer attitudes, crazy bisexual tendencies. And they rebelled by wet kissing strangers on the street. I thought you made that up. What? No, it's totally true. And the government freaked out and they basically stomped out this subculture

very quickly. They sort of got like white supremacists pissed off at them and stomp them out. It's the one of the first times I've ever seen a government actually extinguish a subculture. They found it so threatening. They, like they buried it very, very quickly. That's not, but I was still, I was down there. I was doing a story.

Uh, I was doing a magazine article. Uh, I wanted to see, you know, there's a lot of environmental stuff. And last time I obviously cared deeply about that stuff. And I wanted to see climate change for myself. So I want to see the icebergs melting, right? And the in Patagonia. And you found out the earth's flat and it's not really happening. You know, you could say a good flatter.

I had a flat earth joke for you. Hold on, hold on. I got, I had it for a second. It was funny. Somebody told this to me last week. No, it's not coming to me. I got nothing. Sorry.

I tried, you know, it'll, it'll pop up later in the conversation. I'll be, oh, that's the joke. So you went to see that. I'm sorry for interjecting a dumb flat earth joke. You went to see the, then I went to see, I wanted to go see what I wanted to actually go see what climate chains look like up close. I wanted to, I wanted to feel it. I'm going to see if I could feel it.

But while I was down there in Koyake, this like town right at the edge of Patagonia, I was bumping into this Pokemon subculture. And I was like, oh my God, like remote Southern Chile, you're, you're, you're literally like as far down on the earth as you can possibly get. And you've got crazy mix and match subculture where they're pulling out of like all the major cities and they're, it's this mashup thing. And we're going to get more and more of that. And the reason it's interesting to me is if you, you know, historically.

Innovation never happens in the center of the system, right? In nature, you call it niche creation. We move innovation to the edge. Um, a forest fire burns down, you know, a forest and then you can have, it's creates a new niche and then you'll get niche creation. Um, in culture, we call it subculture. In businesses, businesses don't innovate in the center of business. Okay.

They innovate in skunk works, right? Because the center of anything is built for stability. You can't, it's really hard to innovate in the center of anything. It's built for stability and security. And right culture goes to the edges. So if you want to track where culture is going, right? Even though, as I said earlier, it's Darwinian, there's no way to make prediction. Sure.

You can at least see where the trend lines are going and intersecting. And you want to look at subculture because that's where culture is innovating. That's what's happening. So you're seeing now in subculture, right? These crazy mashup cultures. And now we're talking me and you were talking about the Pokemon culture. And it's crazy. Yeah.

It's this weird thing, right? But you got to start realizing that this is going to be the mainstream, right? These kinds of mashup subcultures are going to start becoming what happens in the mainstream. We're going to get globally mashed up mainstream culture for the very first time in history soon, right? Like we're moving in that direction. And that's interesting.

Well, it's also, I'll tell you this, this is one, one of the things that's really interesting about it is that we know this is a field. Basically, you're talking about a field of data that is kind of difficult to collect. I've heard like big fashion companies will go into these subcultures on purpose to try to like figure out what the, what trends are happening so they can plan their next seasons or the season's coming. But, you know, when you consider the, I don't know if you listen to I don't know if you listen to Sebado.

Do you ever listen to Sebado? You ever listen to any lo-fi, Daniel Johnston? Like this is what, this is my, that's like one of my great musical inspirations. But this movement happened in somebody's like mom's house, you know, as they were like, like slowly unraveling, but their music made its way out there. And like not, it's Sebado, Lou Barlow, this stuff was happening in front of four tracks in Boston, in like the shadows, you know, and you couldn't gather that data at the time, but now with the tracking that's happening, just by looking

at people's searches, you have a deeper way into these subcultures than ever before, meaning that there is a way to harvest data and literally like theoretically, not literally, theoretically, with, you could harvest these, these fields of data and perhaps an AI could construct a fairly accurate prediction of how these various subcultures are going to mix together to form these poly tribes. And to me, that's wonderful, but also a little, a little spooky, right? Spooky, because what did you tell, what you just said happened to me, what sounds like pretty much, I mean, I don't want to get a wet kiss necessarily from, from

somebody, but on the other hand, it's not going to be the worst day ever. It's a bit interesting, you got to, you got to give them, you give them, got to give them credit for creativity, right? Because every generation tries to out rebel the previous generation. And the bar's pretty high at this point. Like what do you, that you've gone from like long hair and weird clothes to tattoos, body modification, right? And now we're starting to see implants, technological implants in counterculture.

So like the cyborg movement is starting to happen a little bit with that stuff. So like it's hard to rebel, wet kissing strangers on the streets. I give them proppers. I'm like, okay, that like, I can see how that would freak the fuck up. It's cool. It's cool. It's awful. It's cool.

I'll tell you the, to me, the thing that is nerve wracking about it is not that. So what they, I don't, I don't care about being tracked. I've given up any sense of privacy. I'm mostly not any sense. I still shut the windows, but the, the fact that that subculture got snuffed out by the state or wherever the fuck they were, like that shows you one of the dangers, which is that if we could track these emergent forms, these potentially cultural, culturally shifting tides and we don't want one to show up because it's

like, oh shit, look at that. That's, that's like, we've got it. So that's, that's an interesting, that's really interesting. It's called, there's a name. I just saw this New York time. I think it was the New York times. This lady got into one of these Russian troll farms because she was curious about how they work.

So she's got into one where everyone's sitting at the computers making memes and shit. And one of the things they do is when there's an idea they don't like, they just like, they're named for a squelching or something where they would just go to these, whenever that idea pops up, they throw up memes that reflect the state's ideas, but cool, that made cool, made accessible. And then it's designed to sort of like snuff out a little, a fire that's about to start.

And so that's a new kind of war that's happening, which is like, when these little forest fires start breaking out in various cultures that could potentially threaten the power structure of the culture, then infiltrators pretending to be the subculture that they're wanting to stop, go in and snuff it out or shit disturbed to shut it down. So this is like, it's crazy. That's, that's way more frightening than anything I wrote about it last time. Go baby.

Wow. That's, uh, that's really creepy. Um, and it does, uh, where it's going to get interesting, right? Is this is just the first wave, right? You're seeing, right? The, this is the internet's allowed a new kind of rebellion and oh, they figured out how to control it from within. And it's just going to be another arms race, which is interesting, right?

Cause it's a, the arms race that we have played out in culture, as you pointed out, it's been very slow moving. Now we're playing very, very quickly. I mean, like the ways that this is going to go wrong, or like it's just unfathomable. It's just good. Well, we, you know, this is the, um, this is the, I think one of the subcultures that is the most interesting to me is that maybe Jaren Lanier subculture, which is the folks who've turned their phones off and who are out in the, like who have,

who have created these sort of technological technology free enclaves, these little vacuums of technology within which we don't know what they're doing, untrackable, un, unseedable, you know, because it's like, you know, one of the principles in psychology that corporations love is that people remember the fact, but forget where the fact came from. So if you're scanning through Twitter and you see a fact, you'll forget it. You got it from Twitter. And if it's stuck in your brain, so to speak, you might find yourself walking

down the street, having a conversation and you'll sneeze that data bit out. And it got planted in your head by somebody who unintentionally wanted to create that, a spread of that data going out there, which is why we don't know what seeds are getting stuck in the furry little carapace of our brains. What little data seeds are stuck in there that we're planning in other people's brains. And some people are like, it's, we just don't know. So we're not going to go through the place where we risked being

contaminated by bad data. Um, anyway, I always think about that. So I always, when I, when I, when I train writers, especially people who are writing books, everybody, you really want your book to be the ball. I wrote the book that changed the war. And I always tell people, I'm like, look, I've gone through that 10 times. You always, you think it's going to be the book and you want it to be. And it feels right.

And don't listen to the dopamine, but my moral is I'm like, look, unless we're talking about your favorite three books, if I were to throw out a book, you've read chances are all you're going to remember are one to three facts and how it made you feel. That's all like in the end, right? Like in the end, even with somebody, if somebody, I always say, if somebody comes up to me and they're like, Steven, blah, blah, blah is my favorite book. Like what they're really saying to me is instead of remembering three facts

from your book and how it made me feel, I remember seven or 12. Like that's really what they're saying, right? Which is right. I mean, if you think about it, like when you say, this is my favorite movie, what do you really mean? If you mean, I can tell you what it's about. Um, I can probably recite 12 to 15 lines and I know how it makes you feel. Yeah.

That's what you're saying. Books, like it's this, it's it really like sort of bad. It's just to shrink your ego around. Like the impact your art is actually having. Oh, what a relief. Thank you for that liberation, man. What a relief. That's it's because it's a fucking prison.

Like what like people who are trying to do that and your ego creeps in. And yeah, sure as shit, you're like, I want to write, you know, I don't know. When you start, for me, it's like it's it's it's like you would call it insanity, which is that I would, I'll sit down and try to write something and I'll look at it and I'll think, well, this is no Hemingway and then I'll give it up. It's like, what the fuck? My ego is like, wants me to be Hemingway. One of the great writers to ever live.

It's like seriously, but I mean, I like that and you can't. I mean, you could give Hemingway a go. You just got to like, I don't know, you know, edit it 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100 times and then we can start moving you in that general direction. Now, listen, I know you got to go. It's it's 12, 13 right now. I don't know what your schedule is like and I've kept you. I got I got it.

I got it. I don't have anything for a little bit so we can keep talking. Okay, I'm with you. Okay. Wonderful. This is my very I was just talking to another friend of my friend, Mark Dwight, um, and I who also is a podcast and my two favorite podcasts are you and Mark because you're the only your guys who are kind of got the same kind of

punk rock, weirdo backers. I get to just be totally me. Thank you. That means a lot to me. Thank you very much. I, uh, and, um, I want to, I do want to spend the last little bit of time, uh, using your brain to, if possible, to sort of, um, get into this, this world of writing, because, um, selfishly, you know, I do, I'm, we're, I'm constantly

working on a book and I'm constantly quitting working. You're Los Angeles, right? Yes. Are you in town the second week in July? Yeah, I can already say that I am for sure. My next flow for writers is in LA in July. Okay. And it's a two day.

It's a two day. You come as my guest. Oh my God. Thank you, man. My God. What is the date I'm putting it in right now? Tell me the date again, please. I got it.

Second week of July. That is the second week. And hold on. Let me just get 13th and 14th. I got it. I'm putting it in right now. Great. Yeah.

Okay. That's awesome. Well, then that, that I will definitely be there. So there's your problem. And by the way, send you the URL, uh, give all your, any of your listeners have writing aspirations. They want a two day deep dive. We'll give them 500 bucks off.

Oh, awesome. I'll send you the link and you can put it out when you put this out. Cool, man. Let me just say this cause, um, I just, I want to put this out there. Not that you care, Steven, but that was not, this was spontaneous friends. It wasn't some pre-planned weird thing. Uh, that's awesome. Oh yeah.

By the way, yeah, this was totally. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Secretly, we connived how I could sell more tickets to flow for writers. We were talking about this backstage and. No, man, this is badass. And thank you very much.

That is a huge and beautiful gift. And I will definitely like, I mean, I, you know, we could, there's a discussion we could have after that class cause everything I'm going to tell you it's, you're going to get in two days. Um, uh, yeah, you'll like it. You'll have a lot of fun. The other funny thing that I think is that you had, you just said, like, you know, I tell students, don't get it out of your head that you're going to write the book

or the big thing. And then you did it. Ha, you wrote it, man. You made a fucking great cyberpunk book. And I'll tell you, people try to imitate this style and they can't fucking do it. Because if you're going to write this kind of book, you can't just sit down and make up snazzy catchphrases. You know, you can't like pretend that you have your finger deep in the subcultures

that are happening around the planet right now. You actually have to know what's happening in a creepy way so that the book feels almost like you're reading something you're not supposed to be reading. Like it's dead. That's the punk rock aspect of it, which is like, wait a minute. This shit is like real, real. So like, you know, for me, the fact that you didn't, one, I, I, when I was, when I was reading, when I was starting it, I thought, oh yeah, I know this was inspired

in the airport because he travels a bunch and I know this must have just popped into his head in the airport. So I got that. But then when I got. Oh, actually, I'll tell you this. No, the story is funnier. I get it was airports when I told you that story where I was just like, oh, so there's an environmental message, right?

And the year. So I wrote a book called a small furry prayer, but the relationship between humans and animals. And it had an environmental message at its heart, sort of. And, uh, it didn't, the book was, did very well, but I always felt like the only people who read it were already animal geeks and environmentalists. Like it's spread a little bit, but it was basically, I was preaching to the choir. So I was, I had said to myself, how do I solve this problem?

How do I sort of get the same ideas out, but to a wide audience? And I had been thinking about that on and off for a couple of six months or whatever, true story. Peter, abundance comes out. Peter Diamandis, my co-author on abundance and I are doing radio tours. We're in New York. We're in, uh, Bob Hariri, one of the pioneers of stem cells. We're in his penthouse fricking apartment.

Peters and one or a mom and the other, we've got phones and we're literally doing a radio interview every 15 minutes from like four o'clock in the morning till like eight o'clock at night, right? And like five o'clock, I am like losing my fucking mind. I can't take it. And I actually, I'm like, if I don't get outside and smoke a joint and get stoned, like I have to, like something, right? I got to like, I got to do, I can't know enough, enough sales and marketing

Steven for one day ever. And so I run outside and it's, it's raining and I'm literally like smoking a joint, walking down the street, uh, in the rain. And I, an image pops into my head of a human head, a human head on mounted on a plaque of head, a mid animal heads, right? On a, on a taxidermy wall, right? And there's a human head amid all the animal heads. Now you'll know from reading the book that that's the opening scene in the

book, that's essentially the opening scene in the book, right? That's the Paganist has that encounter. So literally I saw that. I knew it was the answer to my question. Like whatever the way to communicate the animal thing, this is the answer. I had no idea what the story was. It took me eight years to figure out how that goddamn head got on the wall. And the answer is last hang on cyberspace.

This is the answer. Right. I had the question. I got the answer and I was like, okay, well, that's the answer. But like what, like, what do I do with it? It took eight years to figure out how did that head get on the wall? And the answer is what is the story? Wow, weird story.

That is bad ass. And this is something, you know, I read a lot about the writing process. And that's sad. I wish I wrote as much as I read about the writing process. But, you know, Stephen King, he talks about like the dark tower, you know, how that came to him in an airplane and he sketched it out. And then you just looked at it. I was like, oh, put it in a drawer.

And then down the line, it spawns this whole series. And I guess that's part of it, right? Is having the guts to write down that stuff. Because some people that, that I, that vision might bubble into their minds and they're like, wow, I must be going nuts. I think it's also that people are very impatient with that stuff, meaning like the vision, the idea, whatever it is comes to them and it comes and it feels really strong, right?

The intuition, which is sort of like, I spent a lot of time working on intuition and looking at the neuroscience of it. And like, how does the goal directed system work over time, right? How do I get a glimpse of something as an artist that doesn't turn into a real thing 10 years out? And I think the current, the important thing is to know that like the thing that you got, the vision that you got, it's just, you've got to do the work. You have to keep feeding it over and you can't put a time frame on it.

And we know this from lots of creativity, research and intuition, research that some of these things, you don't want to put a time frame around it. You just want to keep feeding it a little bit at a time and a little bit of time and you just sort of come back to it because the way the brain puzzle solves through those problems, you can't condense it and it doesn't work well if you put a time horizon. How do you sync that up with the concept of setting goals? Well, I have book projects lined up that go out five or six years, right?

And five or six years out, I'm like, okay, I have, I may have a topic or I may have, oh, I want to write a book about intuition and neuroscience and whatever. And all I do is just, I'm just reading and researching. So every third book or fifth book is something that might fit in there. And I'm just feeding my pattern recognitions. This is going to be a little bit of information over time slowly because that's how the brain does this kind of puzzle solving. So there's a, this is really cool.

There's a special, when your brain has a problem, it can't yet solve. It holds that problem in a special holding cells, unlike other memory. Other memory can get splintered off and you may not get access to it for years and years and years. But if it's an unsolved problem, the brain has it in a special holding cell where all the connections to all potential solutions are really right at the surface, which means if you'd ever discover anything that you've all had the experience where you're reading something and the information clicks in with

something you learned a while ago and you're like, oh my God, it's the thing that answers the thing, right? That's because that stuff is held in a special holding cell in the brain. So you can do that, right? There's actual, there's an actual, I'm going to screw the name up. They have a, they have a specific name for that process. I'm going to screw up what it is, but the point is if you know that's how the brain works, you want to feed it.

You want to feed your curiosities slowly and consistently over long periods of time and let them, you know what I mean? Give them the space to become real ideas. I think what the problem that most people have, especially creatives, is they, they want the big idea, but they're unwilling to do the actual research and have the patience, right? Last hangover in cyberspace. I knew I wanted to write another novel 20 years ago.

I knew I wanted to write a book that solved this puzzle. That was 2011 when I saw that, right? When that, or 2000, yeah, 2012, excuse me, when I saw that, right? It's 2018. It was five and a half years that I was just sort of like feeding it little bits of information and saying, okay, let's take this a little bit farther and a little bit farther and a little bit farther and not trying to solve it all at once and not trying to rush it into existence.

I mean, but also the advantage of having a long career, right? Like a lot of people, this is another thing that artists, like this is along with the, oh my God, this is the best book I've ever written. Anybody who's ever, right? That syndrome, right, is like, that's not, honestly, the goal. Like the goal isn't to write one book or do one comedy special or record one CD. Like it's to have a career, right? So one thing is going to have to lead to the next is going to have to lead to the

next is going to, like you're going to need stuff at every bit of the way, right? The creative lives that impressed me now are guys like Stuart Brand or Brian Eno or guys who have reinvented themselves at a really high level, six, seven, eight, nine times, right? And they're still doing great work, incredibly powerful work. Um, and they've, you know, that's what it takes to have a full creative career. And that's what I'm really interested in. Wow.

I don't like who the fuck wants to be a one hit runner? Nobody. I know back when I was a journalist, we always used to every now and again, especially, uh, some of the magazines, some of the magazines I was writing at an LA, we were always curious, we'd go back and hang out with rock stars who were no longer rock stars, like a lot of the hair band guys who like, they were like packing stadiums in the eighties. And by like the late nineties, they were like house painters, right?

They like it at all. They lost everything and they were fucking house painters. And I was fascinated by like, what must it feel like to like, there's 25,000 people and women are throwing their panties at you to like, no, now you're like, you got an apartment and you're paying the houses for a living. And like that to me, um, and I'm not even talking about the like adulation, the fame part, that's ultimately uninteresting as, as you know, but like the not being able to be creative for a living, that like, that's got a really

frickin heart, um, to me. How does that happen? I'm sorry to like, this is the thing though. To me, it's like, okay, this is, I've thought about this. I've thought about it. I've thought if the apocalypse comes and there's nothing but like, you know, shit, water and rubble everywhere, I'm still going to try to make stuff. You know, right?

How do you stop? Like, I don't, that's the, to me, I don't know how to. Yeah. I don't know how to stop either. And I always like, you know, that to me, like I was talking to somebody else, asked me this question the other day and I explained, I was like, you got to understand that like, I'm a creative. So like what I care about is the next creative project.

Like what happens when a book comes out, what, what people's reaction to it? Like I care in that I want it to be good because it allows me to do the next thing. It makes doing the next thing easier. Yeah. But honest to God, like once my editor is like, okay, you're good. We're done. We're going to, we're going to press like, okay. Now, like I've got a checklist that is PR that I have to put into place,

but like I'm done. I'm already on to the next, like I don't care. Yeah. The thing I wanted to do, like people always come up to me and they're like, oh my God, your book changed my life. Thanks. And I'm like, shut up. I was like, you got to remember, I'm writing this book to save my life.

The fact that it happened to save your life, that's totally incidental to me. That was not what I was like, that's not what I'm doing. It's great. And I appreciate it. And I'm glad. But like I write this stuff because I'm trying to save my life. That's whose life I'm trying to save with the art, not yours. Man, I love talking to you, Stephen.

You are a really, really, really inspirational person. Whether you like it or not, and you are changing. You know, I don't like it. I know you don't. And I've been, you know, a lot of my favorite creators, they are like that. And it's, it could be a little frustrating until you realize why. Because like, you know, some people, some people who are like legendary musicians that I have been lucky enough to chat with.

The moment I start doing that fucking thing of like, you're a musical, they, you just, they tune out. They don't want to hear it. They don't care. They literally don't care. They can't care. And that's, I like that. I honestly think it's the same thing that I just talked about.

It's that, so I'll tell you a true story. The one time somebody came up to me, I'll never forget this. I was in Italy at a business conference at like the world business forum or something. And I was doing a book signing and it was one of those really weird, I didn't even know I had fans in Italy. Like I didn't even know anybody, like maybe my books have been translated. But like I'm doing a reading and they're like 500 people who have lined up for me to sign books.

And I'm like, I don't need like, I, none of it's making any sense to me. My head's having a really hard time. And there's this girl like teenager at the back of the line. And I see it, she's crying. And I see her getting closer and she's crying and closer. And I'm like, oh God, like this is weird enough. And what the fuck? And she gets up to me and I'm like, all right, why are you crying?

And she looks at me and she's 17, 18. And she was like, you got me through high school. And for the very first time, because writers got me through high school. So that's the first time anybody's come up and said something to me where I felt it, right? Where I was like, oh my, I know what that feels like. So normally when you come up to me and, you know, when you say anything like that, it's what, you know, like I'm, I'm really incredibly grateful that you got something out of the book.

But like what you got out, you brought to the book. Like I wrote it, you did something else with it. And that's the thing you're reacting to. So the, we were a good combination and it helped you. And that's great. But like the thing you're talking about doesn't, it's not really my thing. I did my thing. It was to save my life.

You took what I did. You added a whole bunch of your stuff into it and it saved your life. And that's cool. But it's not, I didn't do that. And don't give me credit for that. That was as much you as me. And if it wasn't my book, it would probably be some other book that did that thing. And I'm, I'm sure, I'm pretty sure of that.

But this was a girl who said something to me where I was like, fuck, I know that feeling. So it resonated. And I think the problem is that if it doesn't resonate, like if you don't happen to hit that one chord, it, you know, the artist is already onto the next thing. And they don't want to, and it's a trap. As you know, like I remember West of Jesus, which my second book, I really, when I was done writing that book, I was like, Oh my God, this is the best book I've ever written.

I'm never going to write anything this good. I had that problem. And you know what it created? Fucking writer's block. It took me like eight months to get my next book going. Yes. The last one was so good. How could I write it?

Right. It's a fucking disaster. So Steven's rule is I start writing the next project the two weeks before the last project ends. So I will start, I'm working on a book right now with Peter Diamandis. I will start my next book two weeks before the one with Peter is done. Yes. So I can already be into the next thing by the time I finish this one and long before it comes out. Do you like Chogium Trump or Rinpoche?

Do you read his work at all? Chogium type. Okay. You're going to love this guy, Chogium Trump. But he's amazing. And his whole theory is based on this and it infuriates some people because the guy who I study meditation with, I went to him and I was like, man, I had a transcended experience meditating. And he's like, really?

Well, tell me about it. What was it? And then he, you know, it's this process of deconstructing the experience to the point where you realize, oh yeah, that was bullshit. That was nothing. But every time I've been sitting to meditate, that experience has been pulling me because I want to replicate it, duplicate it, make it happen again. And so the advice, yeah, and it's like, it's one of the traps.

And so you see this with artists, which is that they're like, I could never redo that thing I did. And the reason that they're stuck is because they're subscribing to a concept of the continuity of self. They think they're the same person they were when they wrote that. All right, but that's the other problem, right? Yeah. That person's long gone. It's dead.

That person's dead. Whoever you are now needs to be writing or creating from where you are now, not writing from the voice of a person who's been annihilated. That's why, by the way, Duncan, I've got two novels sitting in drawers. Like each of them needs an edit. But I don't even know who the dude was who wrote those books, let alone trying to find them. You know what I mean? Like at a certain point, you just, you got to walk.

You're totally right. And that's the difference between it. There's nothing fixed about the self. And to me, that's the difference between a Jedi and a Sith. If you want to use Star Wars, like terminology, or you could Alistair Crowley called the Black Lodge, which is in magic, the people who turn into like dark sorcerers. And what that really looks like in the real world is just like people who use NLP to trick women into fucking them or whatever.

Like that kind of like self-centered like use of like technology to like, you know, without it to dehumanize people. But hold on. Hold on. Are you saying that we're not supposed to use the NLP to fuck women? You got to tell them first. As long as you let them know you're using neurolinguistic. Do you know what the rules were?

I've been married forever. I don't get to do this stuff anymore. But I just want to know where right and wrong is just in case. Okay. Okay. You got to hear you there. Do whatever you want. Do as thou wilt, as Crowley said.

But there is a Black Lodge. I get your point on all those things. And you are not in that because I've noticed in my experience with comedians and artists that if you want to create an imaginary binary, you could say there is a group of artists who feel that they are responsible for what's coming out of them. They are what's coming out of them. And when people come to them and say, you changed my life, they go, yes, I know I did.

I know I changed your life. That's right. And these people are the ones who become the cult leaders. They're the ones who become the center of some sad vortex of sycophants who are imagining that this is the conduit through which life and art flows. And the sorcerer in the middle of that is projecting that. And this produces centralization and lots of problems. So it's awesome to hear that you're not one of those.

This is always, they're authors. They're going to go unnamed. But if their first book and their eighth book or fifth book sound the same, I know they're in it for something other than the craft. They found something that works and it's making them money. And maybe they're in it for the ideas. Maybe the craft itself doesn't matter. And they're actually just, the writing is a way to explore the ideas.

That's, maybe that's fine. But as a general rule, I want to see a style evolve. Right? I want to see a comedian, a musician. Sometimes it's better. Sometimes it's worse. Neil Young had a shocking pink rockabilly phase in the middle of his career. It was okay.

But you know what I mean? Like a lot of people do that stuff. But I want to see that the art is evolving, not because when you see it's like, when they're trying the same thing over and over and over again, they're listening to the dopamine. Those are the people are, yes, I changed your life. Right? Like, and I have to do that again and again.

No, I'd rather roll the dice. I'd rather, right? This is written in a radically different style than anything I've ever written. Right? It's a new, it's a new thing. And I think like, I mean, who knows, maybe this style will particularly work. And I'm going to write the same book over and over and again, 10 times. And there are other authors.

Yeah. No, that's not true. I think all of my favorite authors, even if like they're just thriller writers, John Samford, who's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who became a novelist, started out writing these like horrific slasher serial killer things because they sold a lot. But once he figured out what he was doing, he invented some of the most interesting characters in mystery. And, you know, and has flesh and has really grown.

Those are careers I look at and go, that's interesting. Because you're continuing to grow as an artist and for and take chances and scare yourself and do something like that's really interesting. Because if you, if you, if you, where you get where I'm interested in seeing is like, there's so much wisdom that you get as you get older, right? Yes. But we lock people in and suddenly you've got Mick Jagger and he's trying to do Mick Jagger at age 75.

And it just looks like a 75 year old dude in tight pants. And you're like, what's this? And you can't sing it. Do something different. Reinvent yourself. Right. Tom Leitz did. Right.

His music got harder and more complicated and weirder the older. That's right. This is, I'm sorry to do this to you. You just changed my life. This is one of the most liberating chats I've had, man. And you accidentally just that the prison cell in my brain with the unsolved problem. It just opened up. So now I'm having to trust the dopamine.

Thank you so much, Stephen for this. And I cannot wait for that, that workshop. And, and please tell my, tell the folks listening where they can, how they can connect with you now. Stephen Cautler.com is the easiest place. W, W, W, S, T, E, V, E, N, K, O, T, L, E, R. Dot com. You can get a last tango cyberspace comes out when in May, in May,

and you can pre-order it anywhere and you should pre-order 17, 18, 19 copies really. Cause nothing says happy July 4th or Merry Christmas or happy Easter. Or what else do we, what's coming up? I need something. Ah, spring equinox just, oh, bicycle day, bicycle day when they discovered LSD. What LSD? Happy bicycle day. Nothing says happy bicycle day like last tango cyberspace.

So, you know, she buy copies for everybody you know. That's right. In fact, strangers. She should buy copies for slaves. Let me be cheesy here though, for real. This is the, this is a very good book. And as you could tell, Stephen is an amazing person. And if you do these pre-orders, it actually, it makes a difference in the way the

publishers treat the book I heard, right? It does make a big difference. Oh, it does. And by the way, we'll get you a link for this too. It hasn't launched yet. I don't know what, but we are doing a really kind of cool pre-order campaign where we're giving away nothing super fancy, but I did an hour long conversation with Peter Diamandis on future technology, all the future tech in last tango.

We sort of went category by category and talked about what's real, where it's going. And you'll get that. You'll also get a three hour, two to three hour. I don't know how long we're going to do it podcast. So I've worked with the same editor for 25 years. Cool. And so we're going to just do it. We're going to have a two hour discussion about the writing of last tango and mostly

about the writing process and the book writing process and all that stuff we were talking about. So um, pre-order the book, we'll get you a link so we can hook people up with that and they can get some free goodies as well. Thank you so much, Stephen. I really appreciate it. Brother, thank you. So fun. That was Stephen Kotler, everybody.

All the links you need to find. Mr. Kotler are going to be at dugotrussel.com, including the links to get those awesome discounts he mentioned on the show. If you like the podcast, please don't forget to like us and subscribe and subscribe to the idea that there is an infinite ocean of love surrounding you at all times and that you don't need to worry about ever running out. I'll see you next week. Until then, Hare Krishna.

Oh, and much thanks to Squarespace and Robin Hood for sponsoring this episode. I'll see you next time.