Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 442: Steven Kotler- Shortcut Success & Lead a Richer Life by Using the Techniques of Navy SEALs, Silicon Valley Executives & Maverick Scientists

Episode Date: January 23, 2017

Steven Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning journalist and the cofounder/director of research for the Flow Genome Project. He is one of the world’s leading experts on ultimate human performance. In this episode, Sal, Adam and Justin speak to Steven about his newest book, Stealing Fire, and what it takes to get into a flow state where you are "in the zone." During the course of this conversation Steven presents fascinating research and stories and also provides some actionable advice that can take your productivity and satisfaction with life to the next level. This is a must listen episode. You can find Steven Kotler at www.stevenkotler.com and www.flowgenomeproject.com. You can pick up his new book, Stealing Fire, at www.stealingfirebook.com. Order now and receive some special bonuses Get our newest program, Kettlebells 4 Aesthetics (KB4A), which provides full expert workout programming to sculpt and shape your body using kettlebells. Only $7 at www.mindpumpmedia.com! Get MAPS Prime, MAPS Anywhere, MAPS Anabolic, MAPS Performance, MAPS Aesthetic, the Butt Builder Blueprint, the Sexy Athlete Mod AND KB4A (The MAPS Super Bundle) packaged together at a substantial DISCOUNT at www.mindpumpmedia.com. Make EVERY workout better with MAPS Prime, the only pre-workout you need… it is now available at mindpumpmedia.com Have Sal, Adam & Justin personally train you via video instruction on our YouTube channel, Mind Pump TV. Be sure to Subscribe for updates. Get your Kimera Koffee, Mind Pump's first official sponsor, at www.kimerakoffee.com, code "mindpump" for 10% off! Add to the incredible brain enhancing effect of Kimera Koffee with www.brain.fm/mindpump 10 Free sessions! Music for the brain for incredible focus, sleep and naps! Please subscribe, rate and review this show! Each week our favorite reviewers are announced on the show and sent Mind Pump T-shirts!

you're gonna hear us talking to very fascinating individual who talks about the flow state. And what's interesting, I don't know about you guys, but the first thing that popped into my mind when you was talking about the flow state or beings in that zone or Zen state was when we created Maps Prime. 100%.

I remember it because he talks about individual flow state and then there's group flow state. And I remember, man, when we were up in Reno creating Maps Prime, I mean, we've created lots of programs together and there's definitely times where we're in that flow state, but when we made prime, I had never felt that kind of group flow state like I did with prime for that long, like the entire three days that we were there. There's this hyper focus. We were all on the same train of thought.

We were all so much on fire that we lost track of time. I remember we'd look at the clock and be like, holy shit guys, it's five o'clock, we'd better eat something. I mean, it was insane and the result of that is, I have all of our programs, I'm very proud of all of our programs, but the one program I would say is the most revolutionary, the most unique, the most different, the most biggest game changer. Just the biggest game changer is Maps Prime.

There's nothing like it out there. Nobody's even attempted to teach you how to program what you do to prime your body for your workout and how to finish your workout, how to fortify it. Nobody's done this before. It's breakthrough. I've had countless trainers and people in the industry who I respect very highly who say, my God, this is a total game changer.

It's one of those things that you do it the first time and you can tell right away in your workout that you did something that has contributed positively to your progress, to muscle gain, to fat loss, to all those different mobility. I mean, MAPS Prime is the program you can add to any program or any activity. You can use it before you go on a run. You can use it before you go on a run.

You can use it before you go on a meeting, a business meeting, it'll set up your central nervous system. You can use it before you do your workout, of course, before you do a competition to perform better. Maps Prime is that program. You can find it at mindp media dot com if you want to pump your body and expand your mind there's only one place to go might uh... might up with your host

salta stefanow adam shaffer and just an andrews we just got finished talking to steven caughtler uh... who is the author of a new book called stealing fire this gentleman has really studied and understands what it means to be in the flow state. Some people know of it as the zone or Zen. And scientists have actually identified

what happens in the brain when we're in that state and have identified triggers that help us get into that state. And the book's stealing fire is about that, but it's also about how high level, creative individuals, athletes. Navy SEALs, Fortune 500 companies. The tools that they use to get into the flows they including using psychedelic substances

and ultra-states of consciousness, fascinating, fascinating stuff. This is one of my favorite conversations. It's like truly mind-pump. You sit through this and you just listen and it's very fascinating. Now, you can find his book, StealingFireTheBook.com. Which by the way, right now, there's all kinds of cool giveaways.

So I know right now, if you do get it, I know he's got a bunch of cool stuff. I've ordered one. Yep. And he also has a free quiz on his website, flowgenumproject.com. This quiz helps you determine how you can put yourself in the flow state better because people are different and what gets people on that state. It's spelled out from a spell that out for everybody because I know this is, he talks

about this towards the end of the episode and this is some We asked him, you know, hey real quick some good advice. Where does someone start? And this is actually where he directed. He says everybody should go to take this free quiz flow genome project F-L-O-W-G-E-N-O-M-E project calm so without any further ado here. We are talking to Stephen Kotler. First things first, if you could explain what flow state means, what that is, and how you're studying that and why you started studying that. Perfect. Great first question.

So let me just start with kind of what I was studying and why I was studying it. And most of what I've done over the past 30 years is ask the question, how is it that people achieve the impossible? And what I mean by the impossible is literally those paradigm shifting feats where beforehand it can't happen. This is beyond the pale. Not going to happen. And then it takes place. So I've spent my life, whether it's athletes pushing the bounds of kinesthetic possibility

in my book abundance. I looked at innovators, non-dreminaries taking on and possible global challenges, poverty, hunger, those sorts of things. In small furry prayer, I looked at kind of the extreme edge of altruism and empathy. People working on the front lines of animal rescue where there's very, very little credit and there's laws against you. And that sort of thing. Everywhere I turned, every time you saw people doing the impossible, there was one commonality. They had all found a way to change their state of consciousness, to drop into a state known

as flow. And flow is technically defined as an optimal state of consciousness, a state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best. More specifically, more familiarly. And you may know flow by the way you may call it runner's high, being in the zone, being unconscious of you play basketball. And you may know flow by the way you may call it runner's eye being in the zone being unconscious of you play basketball if you're a beat Nick Jazz musician you called it being in the pocket the lingo is sort of endless they were having Maslow called them peak experiences

flow is something of a technical term and it technically means those moments of rapture tension and total absorption when we get so focused on the task in hand that everything else just disappears. So action awareness will start to merge, your sense of self will disappear completely, time dilates, which is a fancy way of saying, hey, it passes strangely, sometimes it will slow down, that freeze frame effect familiar to any of you

is in a car crash crash more frequently speeds up and five hours pass by in five minutes or what happens to all of us when we sit down to write that quick email and we look up an hour later to realize we've written an essay. And throughout all aspects of performance, both mental and physical go through the room. Excellent. I think I feel like breathing has to be one of the like biggest first steps to that, right? I feel like anytime I pay attention to my breathing, that's like the first step I feel like breathing has to be one of the biggest first steps to that, right? I feel like anytime I pay attention to my breathing, that's like the first step.

I feel like the head and that direction. What would you think so? Yeah, it's a really critical point. Let me back into it for a second. I need to drop, give you one more piece of information. So one of the things we've learned, flow science goes back about 150 years. And we have a really good understanding of its psychological components. We're starting to get a picture of its neurobiology, so its mechanism, where does it come from

in the brain. We have a really good understanding of how much does it amplify performance. There's been lots of research on that. So we have numbers on how much it increases learning and creativity and productivity and motivation, things along those lines. And most recently, building on all this work, we've started to figure out that flow states have triggers or preconditions that lead to more flow. And the first thing you need to know about these triggers, the only thing I'm going to tell you is, flow only happens when all of our attention is focused in the right here, right

now, present moment, exactly. So what all these triggers do is they drive attention into the now, into the present moment. Now the golden rule of flow, the most potent of all these triggers, according to me, I check set me high, the University of Chicago psychologist, the sort of big-odd father of flow psychology, is what's known as the Challenge Skills Balance. And it means we pay the most attention when the challenge of the task slightly exceeds our skill set.

You want to stretch, but not snap. So, if I was putting this emotionally, I'd say, hey, Flow is near, not on, but near the midpoint between board and the hey, there's not enough stimulation here, I don't give a fuck. Can I swear? Absolutely. We encourage you. Okay, and Anxiety which is whoa way too much stimulation. I'm freaking out right in between as this sweet spot known as the flow channel So here's the thing That sweet spot is at the edge of our comfort zone, right? You're beyond our comfort zone. You're pushing

comfort zone, right? You're beyond our comfort zone. You're pushing slightly, which means you have a very thin threshold for more anxiety, right? Too much anxiety. Your brain is going to start producing too much cortisol in North Africa now for this stress hormones and it will block your entrance into flow. What is the easiest way to down-regulate your nervous system to calm down respiration. Always respiration. And in fact, I mean, really simply, if you double the length of your exhale, so if your inhale is five seconds and you're inhaling down your diaphragm and then your exhale is ten seconds, after you've to pay three to seven rounds, depending on your physiology and how freaked out you actually are. Your stress response is going to start to melt away for the very simple reason that your

brain goes, fuck man, that's a long-est tale. You must be calm. Okay, I guess you're calm. So we'll calm you down. We don't need to burn all this energy making all these stress chemicals right now. It seems like an interesting feedback loop where feeling a certain way then feeds into the way you behave, which then feeds into how you feel.

And if you interrupt any of those mechanisms or hack them, if you will, you can kind of direct where you're gonna be in terms of being in flow or being out of flow. I've been in, I can remember a few times where I would consider myself having been in that, in that zone. And there was a couple times when I was in that zone. And then I become aware that I was in that zone and started thinking about the fact that I was in that zone and it took me out of it. Yeah, so let me tell you two things because you've probably been in flow a ton more than you realize and Let me let and then I'll kind of walk you through why you get kicked out of flow by realizing you're in flow

the first thing is Flow is a spectrum experience. So there are Seven psychological characteristics associated with flow loss loss of self-consciousness, timelessness, a sense of control over the situation, even though the situation often feels out of control, etc. Except for there's seven of these. You can be in a state of micro-flow when a couple of them show up. You've got uninterrupted concentration and so a merger of action or awareness.

That's micro-flow is you're sitting at your desk, you're doing work, you're writing something, you get really absorbed in what you're doing, your sense of having a body, you're having to take a piss, it just goes away, right? And your action awareness start to mark you really focused, that's microflow. On the far extreme is macroflow,

which is when all these preconditions show up at once, and it's such a powerful and strange experience that researchers for the first fifty-sixty years that we were studying flow states from the 1870s to the 1950s They thought they were looking at mystical experiences. That's William James who did some of the foundational work on this that Harvard Psychologist lumped flow in with his category of mystical experiences. And it was only when Abraham Maslow was making a study of success, and he found the same thing I found. He found that in every successful person he could meet, that all found a way to ship their consciousness and drop into flow. Albert Einstein famously

used to row a boat into the middle of Lake Geneva and stare at the clouds. That was his gateway, right? There was all these different people who used to have different ways in. But everybody he was studying Maslow, I mean, was nautious. So for the first time, they went, hey, maybe this isn't mystical. Maybe he has nothing to do with gods or deities

or religions or anything else like that. And maybe it's psychology and physiology physiology and that was a big shift. There's a spectrum experience right so you've probably experienced macro flow a couple of times but micro flow most people drop into it a couple times a day while they're at work without even noticing. So the question I have is it sounds, flow sounds like a very individual thing. However, I feel like I've experienced it with groups, I mean, with the gentlemen in the room here with me. When we go off and create new programs, there's been a few times where I feel like we're all

in that same zone where I experience those, some of those characteristics where it feels like there's time distortion. Is this, can this happen on a group level as well? Yeah, so it's a great question and you're absolutely right. There is individual flow, me in a flow state, right? So athlete, tennis player, whatever. And then there is group flow, which is a group dropping into flow together.

And a lot of us have had this experience, right? If you've ever taken part in a great brainstorming session, right, where the ideas are building on each other and really flying, and you walk out going, oh my god, how did that happen? That's flow. If you've ever been to a concert and sort of got caught up in the music, right?

Lost in the crowd, lost in the band. Feel like you're one with the music, right? Lost in the crowd, lost in the band. Feel like you're one with one with the musicians, group flow. If you've seen a fourth-order comeback in football, when it, you know, snow longer looks like football, it starts to look like ballet because everybody is just in the right place at the right time. Often happens, I think, when Aaron Rogers plays, but besides, of course you would say that when I'm a cowboy fan, you dick. Oh, sorry. I'm sorry. Well, insult the injury there.

Yeah, that was, that one's stung, man. But you know what, though, being even a cowboy fan, you've got to give respect to that game for sure, man. Oh, yeah. For sure. So, yeah, so there is group flow. Interestingly, I'll tell you something crazy. So I have a new book coming out, Stealing Fire,

and the story that opens it is a story about dev groups, what more commonly known as seal team sex, the kind of most elite of all the Navy seal teams, and it's a, and we spent a little bit of time getting to work with the seals, which I just have to say right off the bat, there is nothing actually nerve wracking about that at all. We have lots in common.

I'm a guy who puts words together on a straight line and there are people who have real life encounters with super villains and they need X-ray vision and the league tall building. So, a whole lot in common. Yeah. But the point I actually wanna make is, it turns out, the craziest thing about spending

time with the SEALS and SEALT-HIMSX is that we actually have a tremendous amount of overlap. And what we learned is that the Navy SEALS, and especially SEALT-HIMSX, are one of the most expensive pieces of warfighter equipment we have. It costs about $25,000 to turn Johnny on the block into a combat ready US Marine. SEALS cost a lot more. Just to get through kind of basic training buds and into the teams, it's about a half a million dollars worth of training.

To make it all the way to SEAL Team Six, we've got three and a half million dollars invested into each SEAL. Holy shit. Huge expense of so, so when they talk about, you know, the story we tell, there were 25 guys on the team. It's an $85 million machine. So the question, the obvious question is what the hell are taxpayers getting for their money? And that's interesting.

How many signs do you love to start? Once you get past an incredible level of physical fitness that they all share, which is just through the roof and exceptional, and essentially you know, what is essentially basic skills acquisitions, all this stuff they need to know how to do to do their jobs. Every single thing we think of as seal training is a giant filtration system that is weeding out those candidates who cannot flip a switch, that's their term for it, flip a switch, and drop into group flow. And the reason is, when you're in group flow, you get absolute symbiosis, you get a high-mind team performing and want. Situational awareness goes through this happens, by the way, for neurobiological reasons.

When you are in flow, information processing and the brand goes through the roof. For a bunch of reasons, we take in more information per second. We combine connections between that information and older ideas, or pattern recognition, far more quickly, and we can act on it far more quickly. What that amounts to is massive amounts of situational awareness. They can act and move as one. It was interesting. They told us the hardest thing about being a Navy SEAL isn't knowing when to shoot. It's when knowing not to shoot.

Because when they, especially in the hostile rescue situations, they're running into rooms where there are bad guys who want to kill them. Right. And people they absolutely cannot shoot, right? And these are rooms are dark, hostile, way behind enemy lines, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And the level of situational awareness, because all it takes, right? All it takes is one person sort of dropping out and panicking.

And then it could be an international incident, or they could fail on their mission. Take your pick. So the ability to flip the switch, they literally said it was the secret to being a seal. And the interesting thing, by the way, is, of course, it's not just the seals. Most of the Fortune 100 companies that we work with Google, you know, Facebook, these kinds of organizations, Groupflow is also, I mean, they're doing group innovation,

right? That's what's going on there. And we know from the original research and the group flow is done by a guy named Keith Sawyer at the University of North Carolina. He's spent 15 years videotaping and analyzing Second City Television, the improv theater group, the kind of Fedmosta Saturnat Live. Looking for when does this group of people drop into flow together?

When can you see creativity jump? When does things really start to move and sing? And, you know, so A, we now know that group flow has 10 triggers. And organizations that are really good at it, build their organization around these triggers. In fact, the best example I can give you, and I write about this in my book, Bold, Skunk Works, which is sort of the greatest innovation accelerator in the past 100 years in business. And there's secret innovation laboratories inside of companies, separate from companies, pioneered by Lockheed Martin back in the 40s to help us win the war and build fighter planes faster than anybody had ever had before.

And now he's used by everybody Walmart, Nordstrom, Apple. Steve Jobs famously, I was talking to John Scully about this and he was talking about when Steve Jobs went off to build the Macintosh, the first Mac. Like John Scully wasn't even allowed in the building. Like he broke it, took out his own scunkworks, little building, small team, famously said, you know, it's much better to be a pirate than join the Navy. He was talking about running a skunkworks, and one of the reasons skunk is so effective is, and there are rules for real-day skunkworks.

Kelly Johnson, the engineer who created them established them back in the 40s, and all of them are group load triggers. It's really amazing what he managed to do, but he's sort of laid down this framework that we've now used for a hundred years worth of top innovation. Think about what's coming out at Google X, they're scumworks where you get Google Glass and AI and autonomous cars. This level of paradigm-shifting innovation,

and it's because scumworks and general are packed with group flow triggers. So the team is dropping to group load, you get massively heightened creativity. Research shows that in flow, creativity, because pattern recognition spiked so much, creativity can go up 400 to 700%, so that it's a tremendous spike in creative problems all that.

Well, that's night and day, that's a huge difference. And now, you know, we had a conversation with my co-hosts recently because what we do when we create new programs is we book a house somewhere far away. We drive to this place. It's usually a two hour, a two to four hour drive. There's things we do in the car with our conversations and taking notes. There's rituals that we do when we get to the house. We lock ourselves in the house and we create programs. And more recently, the place that we were supposed to go to was, it was impossible to get to. There was a big storm.

And so we were feverishly trying to find another location. And a friend of mine says, well, why don't you guys just stay around here? Why do you guys have to go somewhere else? In a dawn on me that we had created this ritual, and it was part of our creative process and part of that flow process. And it makes me think of baseball players with their lucky shirts or what a fighter will do for the week before it's fired or the day before it's fired.

And are these rituals that we create for ourselves to help us get into the state? Are these also considered triggers that you've identified? They're not triggers as much as a lot of the rituals are soothing mechanisms. Okay. Let me give you just an example from the seals because one of the cool things about this is really stuff we get into in stealing fire. All this stuff is now, you know, we're talking about states of consciousness, but now we have a lot of technology that can help us steer in that direction. So when this seals train in the kill house, for example, they are wired

up with enough biometrics that their leaders, their commanders, can track 50 different data points at once, from EEG, brain waves waves a galvanic skin response take your pick and really first of I use this to steer them towards flow So we're seeing you know, we're seeing a lot of that as as well Amplifying this and somehow in the middle of this statement. I lost your question What was your question? So my question was you know the things that we do to set ourselves up So my question was, you know, the things that we do to set ourselves up. Yeah, the rituals, I'm so sorry. No problem.

So what we see with the seals is you would think the kill house, right? You're going into fight bad guys and rescue hostages. When they step in the door, most people have a fight or flight response, right? Stress hormone spike, activated prefrontal cortex goes through the root, brain waves and high beta. The seals, everything calms down massively. They get very, very, very calm in that situation. Now, is that because of all the training, right?

They have trained themselves, and that's part of what like, buds is all about, right? As you go through these high stress and teach you how to type the... The people that it happens easiest for them, or do they actually train, and they just like, sort of... So, like, not only do they train, let let me let's go back to where we started the conversation. The seals deploy a mindfulness technique known as box breathing. Are you familiar with it? No, no. Okay, so it's called box breathing because there are four sides to it. They form a box. You inhale for five seconds, you hold for five

seconds, you exhale for five seconds, you hold for five seconds, and then you go to six seconds, seven seconds, eight seconds. So here's the thing, and you can try this right now if you want. If you exhale all the air out of your lungs and then hold your breath, your brain is going to panic very quickly, it happens really fast. And it will trigger the fight or flight response. These guys literally train

daily with mindfulness meditation training techniques to if you do rock-spreeding, we practice it, it down regulates the fight or flight response. Over time you are training yourself to focus through it, not respond to it, you're deep patterning. So they have a multi-million dollar mind gym, gust you up with all the latest gizmos that you could possibly imagine to help them do this stuff better as well. And so to get back to all those rituals, what are we seeing? What is that? A lot of it. Think about the challenge skills balance, right? You want to do everything you possibly can to keep yourself

as low anxiety as you possibly can. You don't want it too low, right? You want to do everything you possibly can to keep yourself as low anxiety as you possibly can. You don't want it too low, right? You want to be fired up for the game, but you need to keep, because otherwise performance is just going to short circuit. So a lot of those rituals are about self-suiting. Now, that said, a lot of those rituals are also about focus and attention, right? And one of the things that can be done to help people get into flow is you can kind of create your own pre-game ritual. And there's ways to do it. I think Josh Wateskin, one of the Tim Beras podcast talks about his techniques. I, for mine, I discovered, for example, I'm a big skier.

And I, you know, in my early part of my career, I chased professional athletes around mountains for five years and broke a ton of bones along the way, because I am obviously not a professional athlete. But I started to realize that, you know, even these days, before I go to ski, a hard slope, something really challenging, and I'm like, no, it's a consequence. So I screw up. If I'm fired up for it, if I really like it, I do certain things. Even before I started to realize that a hundred feet before the chairlift kind of comes to the top of the hill, I will start shaking loose my hips and wiggling my hips to loosen

up that part of my body to a way I push off from the chair left to certain things I do as I approach the run. So I have taken all those things which I do and will drop me right into where I need to be for a deep flow state in a high-conquence environment. And now I use them, a version of them before I go into meetings, before I give talks, before I go meet with companies, or meet with clients. So I've got the same kind of focusing my little ritual that I took from one environment, moved it into another environment, and use it to, because it drops me into flow very

quickly. It seems to me, because I know anxiety, lots of people get triggered with anxiety, with things they're unfamiliar with, or new situations, and it feels like those ritualistic practices are familiar. It's like I'm putting myself in semi-familiar situation, and so it's gonna reduce my anxiety, because this is what I do before a big game, but before a situation like this.

It's a double-edged sword, because now all the complexity and unpredictability are flow triggers. All of them spike dopamine in the brain. It's a focusing pleasure chemical among other things and they help drive attention to the present moment. They help drive us into flow. One of the easiest ways to seek flow is to put yourself in a novel, complex and unpredictable environment or companies that want to do this kind of create famously Zappos, right?

Where he's building the downtown Vegas project. Ad has designed his corporate offices to maximize random collisions between people who work for him because it increases novelty, complexity, unpredictability, and it drives people into flow. That said, fine line, right? Sure. Earlier in this conversation, you sort of alluded to emotional management. And it's really key. Flow, like there's a lot of upside, big upside.

500% boost in productivity, creativity, 4% to 7% learning. US military discovered learning spikes, 4% to 70% big ups. These are huge numbers. So much bigger than anything positive psychology can get you. That said, there's a downside. These are the neural chemistry that underpin flow is very, very, very addictive. Risk taking goes up over time as you continue

to have more flow in your life. There's a dark side to this. This is for adults in a sense. When people come to us at the flow, you know, this is for adults, in a sense. When people come to us, the plug, you know, Brian, you want to take one of our advanced classes, you're going to get a letter from us. This is, hey, look, if you've got psychological issues, get them fixed, because we'll only make them worse. You can, you can, you refer to flow as in another state of consciousness, has it been observed, you know, with metrics like imaging?

Can you look at FM the right? If you want to talk about flow in the brain, you're talking about three things. You're always talking about neural anatomy, where something is taking place. That's what imaging gets you. Neuroelectricity and neural chemistry, which are the two ways the brain sends signals back and forth. Neural anatomy, where flow is taking place, this is work Charles Lim at Johns Hopkins, did it.

He started, some of the earliest work was done on jazz musicians, the difference between dropping into flow and improving versus playing standards, then we did it with rappers. And now it's been done a lot. And so for example, we talked about, hey, your sense of self disappears and time passes strangely. Why does that happen? What the imaging studies told us is that activity in the prefrontal cortex, this is the part of your brain that houses your higher cognitive function,

since it's self, sense of morality, sense of will, complex decision making, et cetera, the activates and flow shuts off. It's technically an efficiency exchange. The brain has a fixed energy budget. And so in flow, we need a ton of energy for attention. So the brain puts more energy towards attention and shuts down non-critical errors. What we call our sense of self is essentially a network of activity located in the prefrontal cortex. Like any

network, you start shutting off nodes. Whole thing comes offline. So this is one of the reasons we perform so much better in flow is when the self disappears, your inner critic goes along for the ride, so that nagging the fetus to always on voice in your head, your inner Woody Allen, Woody shuts up in flow. And we experience this as a liberation, as freedom we are getting out of our own way. Same thing with time. Time, this is David Eagleman's research at Stanford, who's a great friend.

Man, it's done brilliant work on this, but time is also localized in the prefrontal cortex. So as parts of it start to shut down, we can no longer perform the calculation. Past and present and future become one. You've plunged into the deep now. So imaging tells us you get deactivation of the prefrontal cortex. You also see brain waves drop from agitated beta down to the kind of meditative theta or an alpha waves. And you see five potent neurochemicals, norapidnappin, dopamine, serotonin, and and and amdemine,

and endorphins, possibly oxytocin, of his group flow, all flood our system. These are pleasure producing performance and enhancein chemicals. Why is flow considered the most pleasurable state on earth? Because these are the five most potent pleasure drugs the brain can produce and flows the only time to get all five at once.

So I have a question for you then. What is your thought on things like micro dosing to help you get in this state? So, it's a great question. And you're leading me right to where I wanted to go next, which is a lot of what we've been talking about is work that I wrote about in Rise of Superman, which is my big book on flow that I've written about flow, and I think five books, but that was my big book on flow. The question you just asked drops us into the new book, Stealing Fire. When we were working on sort of decoding the science of flow, flow is obviously one non-ordinary state of consciousness. There's a lot of them, right?

There's a big long list of altered states. 100 years ago, William James used this term mystical experiences to be a catch-all for everything from meditative and contemplative states, mystical states like out-of-body experiences or trans states, speaking in tongues, to flow states, awe, and psychedelics, and he used to be called of all mystical experiences.

And it's a hundred years later, and we fractured all these things through our sort of modern love of precision taxonomy into all these different categories. But what the imaging work has taught us and what the new research literally done over the past ten years have taught us is that under the hood All of those experiences share massive amounts of overlap. So This means like think about meditation flow in psychedelics for the past hundred years if you were chasing flow You were probably an artist or an athlete if you were meditating You were a seeker or a saint and if you're doing psychedelics, you were a hippie or a raver, right? And these groups didn't really talk to each other, didn't really know each other, were very disparate groups, and it turns out, under the hood, same thing is going on.

God, I love the way you put that. Right? So the normal biology is the same, and by the way, the feelings are the same, right? In all non-ordinary states and consciousness, that whole list of states I was just talking about, we see the self disappears. We get a sense of timelessness. We get a sense of effortlessness, which is that huge spike in motivation, right? Like the experience feels so good,

it's so intrinsically rewarding, that we feel like we're being propelled to do it, right? It's no longer toil and struggle. Struggle, we're being propelled into it. And the last thing that happens is we tap into a state of information and richness. And that comes because we are trading conscious processing, or subconscious processing. Conscious mind is a really powerful tool.

No question about it, but it's a really limited tool. We can only think about seven things at once, that the holding capacity, the conscious mind, or to put it in bits, we can only process about 120 bits at once, and you're using 60 bits to listen to me talk. So when we both start talking at once, your listeners are maxed out, right? That's it. That's the bandwidth of consciousness. And thought moves it about, conscious thought moves it about 100, 100 miles an hour. When we trade processing in non-ordinary states, flow, awe, you know, psychedelic states, whatever, the adaptive unconscious takes over, there is no limit. It can handle 400 billion bits of information a second is the current

estimate. It moves its speed of up to a hundred thousand miles per hour. Hold on a second. How was that even measured or possible that the unconscious is doing? Okay, so I am not going to answer that question. Well, okay, the first estimate was made by a guy named Marvin Zimmerman and what he did was he calculated how many bits of data each of our senses acquire per second. He came out with 11 million. 400 billion was a calculation done by Torney Anderson in one of the greatest books ever written called the user illusion. This guy is sort of the Carl Sagan of Norway. And the user illusion is the best book ever and he breaks through, he breaks down how the entire calculation was done. But he started with Marvin Zimmerman's number and he's worked up. There's been other ways to do it at MIT recently, they calculated, I think,

how much information the vision system is calculating. So they work forward from our senses or backwards from our senses. Oh, I see. This is a short answer, I guess. I see. So it's all this. And by the way, let's be clear. Let's be clear. Everybody I've talked to about the question. That's, of course, that's the question you're going to have. That's the same question.

Everybody I've talked to about this says, hey man, that 400 billion a second may be the wrong number, but the scale of going 400 billion down to 2,000 or down to 160 depending on whose math you put, that is whose math you put that is correct everybody agrees that is correct so the numbers may be a little bit off point is it's a crazy fucking difference that's the real reality right you so and so think about this with flow if let's say let's go the top number of how much information we process a second, which the upper estimate is 2000 bits. In flow, we take in more information per second. That may only be an extra 150 bits, who the hell knows, right? We haven't measured that yet. But if you're always operating on 2000 bits and suddenly for a brief window,

you get an access to 150 more bits. That's a lot more information. You can do a lot more with it. So is it safe to say then that because the prefrontal cortex, the executive functioning part of the brain, or I've heard people refer to it as the part of the brain that makes us human, if you will, although I feel like that's super inaccurate, reducing activity there allows us just to act and react upon information that we're processing

at much, much higher levels because if we try to be, you know, super conscious about what we're processing, we can't, we can't possibly comprehend on that. We don't have the bandwidth, and so, probably the best way to approach this is a Robin Card Harris who is a neuroscientist at Appearance College in London last year to the very first imaging studies of LSD and they noticed two things the first thing we've already talked about which is the network that makes up your prefrontal cortex that houses your sense of self totally disintegrates.

They also found the second thing is literally the mechanism beneath the so-called mind expansion you get from psychedelics, right? The drug psychedelic means mind manifesting. We now know where that's coming from. It actually turns out to be a dead-on accurate term. What happens, and this doesn't just happen in psychedelic states, happens in flow states, happens during all happens during meditative states, if you practice long enough, and you can sort of narrow-hack your way,

write Dave Aspery's, bio-hack and crowd, know the narrow-hack and crowd, you can do this with trans-cranial magnetic stimulation too. You can knock out the free-pronged cortex. But the other thing they're seeing is far-flung connections in the brain. So parts of the brain that are never, ever, ever communicating with one another strike up conversations.

They form alliances. They lay down new pathways. So what we call an idea is nothing other than a bunch of neurons scattered out throughout the brain could form a crystallizing a new network, laying out a connection between them. It's pattern recognition. So we get access when we're in these states, we have a built-in pattern recognition system. That's essentially what neurons do at a really basic level. The database searched by the pattern recognition system expands. Well, in fact, that's exactly what we were talking earlier about anxiety. The problem with anxiety is it shrinks the size of the database, the pattern recognition system searches. So

if you look at the brand, somebody who's really anxious or somebody who has OCD, you see roughly the same thing. Tight clusters of neurons with energy moving in circles around them. You can't get free of it. Interesting leg. So here's where things get really interesting and kind of crazy and important, I think. Because I think what's really important now is that we have to start, I think, cognitive literacy, understanding what's going on, how you're wired, how you're built, and how

you can use that information massively, improve performance is critical. And what we're seeing, what we've seen, what scientists have found is that pretty much every species of mammal on earth and some birds have found ways to alter their consciousness, to drop out, to change the channel on normal waking consciousness, and drug use ramp it in the natural world. You have dogs who lick hallucinogenic toes in their bathrooms will seek out eyeball gain in incredibly potent psychedelic. Jaguars will search for Iowaska. Goats will galbomagic mushrooms. The list goes on and on dolphins get high on pufferfish toxin. The list is really thorough. In fact it's so thorough that UCA's L.A.

Psychopharmacologist Ron O'Neal who did a lot of this foundation or argued, and a lot of people agree with him, that the urge to get out of our heads, the urge towards intoxication, is found in every organism, it is a biological imperative, a fundamental driver that is actually as powerful as our drive for food, water, and sex. Wow, really? Wow, that's fascinating. That's fascinating. It's a question. It's, of course, what, and sex. Wow, really? Wow, that's interesting. It's interesting. It's interesting. It's interesting.

It's interesting. It's interesting. It's interesting. It's interesting. Wow. Really? Wow. That's interesting. It's interesting.

It's interesting. It's interesting. Wow. It's interesting. Wow. It's interesting. Wow. It's interesting. Wow.

It's interesting. Wow. It's interesting. Wow. It's that they all got drunk and flew into cars. That happens more often than you know. So in nature, as in humans, bad shit happens sometimes. So why, what's so important, and what's so important is that every animal gets stuck in ruts. And when you're stuck in a rut, the brain is anxious and you're not getting any new ideas You're just going in circles literally neuronally

so they think of intoxication is a deep patterning instrument it breaks us out of our rut It makes new connections between far from neurons. It's the foundation of innovation far from, no, it's the foundation of innovation, right? If you're facing scarcity in the natural world, you have two options. You can fight your neighbor for more resources, or you can make new resources from scratch. Those are your options, right? Making new resources from scratch, covering up with tool use. Any of these things require big leaps. That seems to be exactly what we get from not ordinary states of consciousness. What's interesting is you're saying how it seems to be like something that is necessary for animals and humans. And you actually, it's funny, make me think about, have two children, and you witness children seeking out altered states of consciousness through the time.

All the time, spending circles, they hyperventilate, they roll down hills. Yeah. Very, very wild. Wow, I've never even thought of that. That's crazy. You think about that when you just, and all of us did that at one point in our lives,

we got on a little, little, little spares, wills, spun the shit out of ourselves, or all of us at one point have rolled down a hill like that. No, are you ever upside down? You ever see a kid just hang upside down and just look at things? Are you eat paint chips? All right, let me let me blow your mind. So you bring it. As we were writing, so stealing fire emerged out of our research and flow, right? We're running

all over the country, we're training people up and flow and everywhere we go, doesn't matter if it's the seals or Google or you know Wall Street, like everywhere we are, doesn't matter if it's the seals or Google or Wall Street, like everywhere we are, people are coming up to us going, man, this flow stuff is cool. We love it. We're going to incorporate it starting right now, but our whole team last week and was at the silent Bepostum Meditation Week, where we met Wall Street traders who were zapping their brains with electrodes to change the channel unconsciousness. We met whole teams of engineers at Fortune 100 companies, microdosing for creativity on

a regular basis, on and on and on. And what we started to realize is holy crap, this is everywhere, this is, you know, and this unites all these disparate groups of people who would never write like the Navy Seals, Wall Street traders, soccer moms of yoga practices, Silicon Valley execs going on meditation retreats. They don't have anything in common. They have no idea, but they're all trying to do the same thing. Once we realized that, and once we had the neurobiology flow working as a sort of a

resetta stone for all these other states of consciousness, we said, okay, this looks huge. How can we quantify it? Can we put some frickin' numbers around it, right? Like, it feels big. I wanted, you know, I'm a research guy. I like, I don't want to just say, hey man, it looks like there's a revolution going on.

Give me some numbers or something, right? I want some data. So we decided to calculate what we call the Altered States economy. How much money people spend on an annual basis of the world trying to change the channel on normal consciousness? Not, so this is not specifically all positive, right? We're not.

Oh, yeah, as I say, are we counting alcohol, marijuana? Half-feeing, too, or just... We started, we were just saying, I gotta get out of my head anyway I can. So we, and we looked at goods and services and entertainment and social media. And this is going to be a big number. And we were so conservative because as you pointed out social media is a big number. If you, I mean, the neurochemistry of what happens, you know, how much associated media is addictive where we're seeking out state change, right? The

dopamine high you get, right? When people are getting up, first thing in the morning, before they take good morning to their spouse, they're getting out of bed, you're checking social media, you're doing it because you want to feel better and you want to change the channel a little bit, right even that we only took 10% of the total number and still As conservatives we can be a our figure is four trillion dollars a year What trillion dollars a year is one-sixteenth the global economy bigger than the GDP of Russia It's bigger than the GDP of India There's roughly the size of Germany's GDP here 25% of the U.S. economy. Wow

And we are suspending that every now-no, no, this tells us a couple of crazy things. One, it tells us we really need to start telling the truth about how critically important these states are to us. Thank you. The second thing we need to start doing is starting companies, man, because there's $4 trillion worth of opportunity to be out there. That's insane. Right, and the crazy thing is, and we document this in-stealing buyer, is there are four emerging forces, technology, psychology, neurobiology, and pharmacology, all four of these have become

information sciences in the past decade. They're now accelerating exponentially because they've sort of strapped themselves to the back of Moore's law, and they're getting more and more potent, more importantly, and this is equally critical, we know that there's a whole list of so-called 21st century skills. These are all the things we need in the 21st century and we're really bad at training our people up in them. So these are things like high speed decision making, creative problem solving, cooperation, collaboration,

the list sort of goes as a situational awareness. And the reason we suck at these things is because we keep trying to train up skills and what we need to be doing is training up states of mind Non-ordinary states of consciousness are the tools that evolution gave us to solve specific types of problems great and problem solving high-speed decision-making situation law and a collaboration cooperation those are states of consciousness much more than skills and So we like not only we have to start telling them through the And so we, like not only are we just

starting to throw the ball over the states, like the things that we need to thrive in this century, and I would say the things that we need desperately to solve the challenges that are in front of us, are things we cannot get at the old way. Just, we have to change how we think. And it's interesting because it sounds like you're saying, we have such an incredible capacity,

but what we need to do is work on our ability to be in a state where we can just start to work with that capacity. Yeah, I mean, you have to like, think about it this way. 300 years ago, Frank Schenleidman, Renee DeCarte says, I think that's where I am, and he puts rational cogget cognition

at the pinnacle of human achievement. And it's an amazing innovation, right? Suddenly, science replaces superstition. He kicks off the French enlightenment. We've got revolution's political, technological, and we end up where we are today. But the problem is, no one built an off switch for all that extended capacity. And we hit the end of what it's useful for. And we now have to start in realizing that we have all these other capacities that we're

built for, we're hardwired for, right? Flow is ubiquitous, shows up in any one, anywhere, provided certain initial conditions are met. And more importantly, now that we know that, hey, psychedelics, off flow, meditation, and conflict, they're all the same roughly, we can mix and match our approaches in ways never before possible. And we can blend things together. And let me just give you one crazy Navy seal example of that. So I talked about their mind gym, their multi-million dollar

extravagance where they're training people up in state change and using it. So in the mind gym, one of the things that we discovered were isolation float tanks. Sam Khan, John Lilly, designed back in the 60s that the movie Allterge States was about. And once Lilly started doing ketamine and LSD research inside of float tanks, they became hippy kyriosides. Seals are using them and they've gussied them up with neurofeedback and biofeedback and sound and light, and they find that using float tanks, A,

they can help their guys recover after missions, much, much more quickly, quickly, right? Like turning off this up. One of the things that happens as we move in these states, all of your stress hormones, cortisol, and lower up at that happens as we move into these states all of you have stress hormones Cortisol, Norupidaphyrd, and adrenaline, they're flushed out of your system So it resets the nervous system as we move into these states. So really good for recovery more importantly They have discovered they can accelerate learning inside these flow pods

So seals have to speak foreign languages. They give you to apply to five different theaters over the course of any year And they're deep covered. They're behind enemy lines. They need to be able to understand what the enemy is saying. They write. They really have to be fluent. And the best they could do was six months of immersive language training to get guys ready. And that was with the best students. If it was using the float tanks and the neural feedback to prompt them into kind of a perfect receptive state where the pre-broad cortex is downregulated and you know learning accelerated and they're learning foreign languages in six weeks. Oh Shit. Oh my god. That's a massive massive boost. Yeah, so so the

your point of Holy crap. We're capable of so much more than we know Yes, absolutely. Now let's let's let's let's deflate the balloon a little bit So I just want to say this is not the first time in history Somebody has said hey man not ordinary states of consciousness. They might be really good for us They might be able to unlock all these things Right, we've heard this tune before and as a general role Not so good doesn't work out so well. Sixties Kenkisi sneaks LSD out of a stamp of research lab and all kinds of tight-eyed help rate

Sexual revolution of the 70s. So we now know that sex and actually kinky sex works better. There's actual data. Perfect. It produces really powerful flow states. All of their consciousness, very hard to tell the difference. You're that whiny? You know, what's going on in your brain when you're approaching orgasm and what's going on in your brain and flow? They look pretty damn similar, same neurobiology, same thing where they say psychedelics.

Like, very similar states of consciousness Stay discovered this back in the 70s right sexual revelations gonna lead all kinds of wonderful stuff And what do we get on the back end higher rates of marital dissatisfaction than ever before and spiking rates of divorce. Oh, wow so These things go wrong And they go wrong for a lot of different reasons and the thing we're hoping for. Well, wait a second, wait a second. Maybe it doesn't go wrong.

Maybe it's just helping these people realize they're in a fucked up relationship. I mean, could it be that? Could we argue? I'll give you that. Could we argue that? That's a boris rate. So are you telling me that, oh, I don don't know how many couples are married in America, but

51% of us are making wrong decisions. I mean like I you know what I mean like I don't know. I mean, maybe we are you know what I mean? It's hard to say. Well, I think I mean, and I mean we're all of us in here are you know 35 years old or older So I think I think it took me almost 30 years to really find myself. And I think the average person gets married before 30. So I think it would explain a lot that when you get, by the way, no, I waited till I was 40. Oh, see, brilliant man. And no argue, I mean, like honest to God, like I really, like, I don't understand what people

are possibly doing getting married. So, y'all, I don't understand what people are possibly doing getting married so young. I don't get it at all. And, you know, I think how most people approach relationships is acidized. So don't receive. Now that's where I'm going with this 50%. I mean, if you, I would think that a getting into this point of flow, maybe is helping people realize, like learning about themselves, learning about about their partner where they're connecting some dots That they weren't able to do when they were 22 years old and unable to connect well. I would argue I would give you that But we want a flow for couples course. Thank you. Um, that's very popular and one of their you're right by the way, right? You could very easily go holy crap. This is not the relationship I signed up for

right you can very easily go holy crap this is not the relationship i signed up for uh... and bail mhm or you can you know use these states what happens as we move into flow is all the narrow comicals that show up are social bonding chemicals right why is sex so bonding because you get all these feel good drugs nor up in effort in the dopamine that's romantic love and orphans bondins, Bond, and Mother to Child, Oxy Toast was the trust chemical.

And Saratone are pro-social chemicals that make you calm or less fearful of other people in their ideas, right? Nan, to my, makes you more open to other people. Very big boost. So like, for example, when you go, a company goes to do a rope scores together, it's not about a rope scores.

It's, can you use the high-risk environment to trigger flow, group flow, and bomb the team together, and, you know, quickly, you can do the same things in relationships, right? You can, yes, I mean, my point is, like, just, you know, leaving this earlier discussion, these states can be used and deployed skillfully to really tie people together and bring us together. I'm not saying everybody's in the right relationship. A lot of people are probably in the wrong relationship and get out, stop wasting your time. But, you know, for people who are on the fence, close good medicine.

Yeah, well, it feels like to me what happened with the with that sexual revolution is you had some people Who got into flow state and started seeing things and then you had a lot of other people who just had different expectations because of what they heard And that caused a lot of problems There's also a pendulum swing, you know that goes along here where you find a tool. Look, you could give LSD to 10 random people and some of them are going to get great experiences and there's going to be some of them that have a horrible experience. And I think it's a tool just like anything else. And I think getting it, so I think sometimes the pen, and it doesn't necessarily mean we're going to progress and move forward because it's what people do with it

It can be a tool. My I have a question about the use of psychedelics and how You know it's showing that it's putting people in these flow states Do we have because I know it's been very very difficult to study psychedelics Since the 60s. I mean we've categorized've categorized them as schedule one and it's almost impossible to study them unless you're studying them for negative effects. Do we have measurable metrics showing improved creativity, productivity? Yeah, and I mean, we've got them going all the way back to the 60s. So, a couple things.

First thing you need to know is before that research got shut down, a thousand studies, peer reviewed published studies have been done. We don't have a thousand study, depression perhaps, you know what I mean, like it's a big number. It's my point. A lot of that research has been rekindled. We've got, you know, great stuff on healing trauma, phenomenal stuff on healing trauma, phenomenal stuff on healing trauma. At this point, treating addiction, we're starting to get a lot of stuff. The upper stuff, can we boost our skills?

Harder to research, right? Harder to get funding. James Badaman, who did research on microdosing back in the 60s, did research. He found, did a crazy study, we covered this in stealing fire, we brought together teams of engineers at the Institute for Advanced Study in Menlo Park, California, all of whom were high level executives from surrounding Silicon Valley companies who had been struggling for at least, I want to say, it's three months to solve

a highly technical problem in their field. And it was a micro-dusting experiment. Half the group got masculine, the other half got LSDA. Cross the boards, they saw like 200 percent spike in creativity and self-reported. So that's not exactly measurable. And the list of breakthroughs that came out of that meeting, a new design for an orgate, a new kind of solar panel, a new model for the electron.

Like really amazing breakthroughs came out of it. Since then, the research went underground, it disappeared, but microdosing has come back and fadaman has been doing more extensive research. I think he's interviewed 400 people who are micdosing on a regular basis at this point. And all of them are reporting heightened pattern recognition and crease creative problem solving. So we don't have exact numbers, but we got a lot of people saying, yes, and there's research on flow. or I'm talking about like some creativity,

that was done in the 60s, so it just generally, interviews with artists and things like that. And it's sort of an anecdotal database, but it's very thick at this point. So there's a tremendous amount of work. It is, by the way, incredibly difficult to measure creativity.

So I'll give you one example. One of the reasons we know flow can enhance creativity is some work that was done in Australia, the University of Sydney, where they took 43 people, gave them the nine dot problem, connect nine dots with four lines about lifting your pencil from the paper in 10 minutes. And, you know, 95% of people cannot solve that problem. Most people get it wrong, and this study nobody got it. They then used transcranial magnetic stimulation to introduce a weak magnetic pulse

through the prefrontal cortex, knock it out, sort of heightened activity in the right brain, more than the left brain. And they, it used to say 20 to 40 minute artificial flow state and then they within a new study group and this time 40% of the people solved the problem in record time. Wow, that's so that's huge, right? That's like actual measurable. There you go standard standard metric and an incredible performance, right? So we're starting to get that kind of information

Out of this so it's getting much much more rigorous. It's also the other thing that's having the psychedelic is really neat I think is there is outside of established resource research. There's a huge open source source research going on. So for example You may be familiar with this, but DMT, one of the most potent psychedelics on Earth, produces very, very strange experiences, totally other worldly, unlike any other psychedelic, and really powerful experiences. So there's now the hyperspace lexicon of the DMT nexus where you can, it's a case studies. These were my experiences.

This is what I learned. These are what I saw. These are the revelations I have. And you can mix and match and see, are you all one off and use that a unique experience or another couple hundred thousand people have the same experience. We're getting these kinds of open source research projects into everything. There's a great database for near-death experiences. So all these formerly anomalous, weird, hard-to-study experiences, we're now getting open source databases that are giving

a toehold into this objective. Well, I tell you what, and I know this is going to irritate some of the scientists that may be listening, but I really, really enjoy it. It seems to be happening more and more today than it did even 15, 20 years ago. I really enjoy it when ancient wisdom and hippies and scientists all sound the fucking same. You're talking about losing, you know, activity in the prefrontal cortex

where we have our sense of self and hippies have been saying for a long time, drop acid and dissolve your ego or lose yourself and mystics have been saying similar things as well. And it seems like perhaps that ancient wisdom, there's a lot more to it than we like to admit. You know, all I can say on that is neuro theology, the study of spiritual experience in the brain was essentially a field that got founded by a guy named

Andy Newberg, a University of Pennsylvania in 1997, when he figured out why we feel one with everything, right? Which in 1996, you logged into a strengths office, you say, Doc, I feel one with everything, right? Which in 1996, you logged into a strengths office, you say, Doc, I feel one with everything. You're going to the loony bed. 1997, Andy Newberg does brain imaging studies at the bed of Buddhist Francis can nons and goes, holy crap, there's a part of our brain

that helps us separate self from others. So when we walk through a crowded room, we don't bump into people. People who have brain damage to this porch of the brain, they can't sit on a couch because they don't quite know where their leg ends and the couch begins. In intense moments of concentration, flow, meditative states, some psychedelic states, this portion of the brain, which is sort of the right brow to love, it goes quiet. So when it shuts down, it's another one of these efficiency exchanges. When it shuts down, we can no longer separate self from other.

Holy crap, the brain has to decide you're one with everything in this particular moment in time. Since that discovery, 1997, pretty much every spiritual experience you can think of has been decoded. Trans states, speaking intons, flow states, psychedelic states, meditators, other whole list, all states. We now have looked at so many of the different kinds of prayer versus singing versus chanting versus really, really detailed imaging studies at this point. And two things are happening. The first is we are now figuring out

not just how are these happening, but we're really devices that can recreate them. So for example, in complicitity Judaism, you can have the double gang or experience where there's this ancient tradition where you can use this complicated system of visualization and meditation and certain kinds of boopin and whatever. The end result is you produce a double of yourself. You see yourself and you can ask yourself questions and get answers.

And it's this crazy mystical effect that only the cobalistic Jews seem to have figured out. Shahar Arzhi, head of the Neurosycheiatric lab in Jerusalem, and he were University in Jerusalem, figures out that, hey, wait a minute, there's a party of brain called the temporal parietal junction. It seems to integrate a lot of different information to come up with among other things body position in space. Where am I right now? And if you screw up incoming signals, like if you have epilepsy to this portion of your brain,

one of the things that can happen is you can see your own double. And so he does an FMRI study of a little girl named Miriam who is seeing her double. She's growing up in a Jewish or medical community. They think she's a saint. He scans her brain, finds out she's got temporal lobe, she's got epilepsy. She's on medication, she's fine. But the cool thing is, he says, hey, wait a minute, I think I could take Abraham Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Abel Ab You know, the most common spiritual experience unity that shows up in every religion every spiritual tradition decoded that to one of the rarest and not only is it one of the rarest we can now produce it in me and use that we can have this sensation. particular state of consciousness, whether you call it flow, meditation, psychedelic, or when you're on a psychedelic,

it's almost like a different operating system of our brain, and it seems like because of modern society and the way we operate now, and the way we work and how distracted we are, that we've almost forgotten to take advantage and use the other operating system which has great value. So two things. One, you're totally right, and there's actually language for it.

Monophasic versus polyphasic. A monophasic society is a society like ours that values one channel of consciousness, rational waking thought. Polyphasic than societies were pretty much every society at Earth, and you go back 500 years ago. And in these societies, dreams have meaning, intuition has meaning, visions can have meaning,

they've made room for non-ordinary states of consciousness. And we have become monophasic over the past 300 years. And we've milked it for all that's worth it. It's a fantastic approach, but we've reached the end of it. We talk about it as making the switch from OS operating system to UI, a user interface, right? The operating system, if you think of your ego, yourself, your rational mind, as your operating system,

it's everything. But if you think about states of consciousness as different user interfaces to be deployed at different times, you have a much closer model of how or why it's work and a much better interface for the world. That's the other thing is just take some mild to moderate depression, right? Very common ailment. And right now, what do we try to do? We essentially rely on talk therapy. We try to talk our way out of it. The self is a tar baby.

You can't solve problems of the self, like talking more about the self. You just make the problems worse You see this with PTSD talk therapy for PTSD and trenches the trauma worse does not help And we see this with general therapy I think with the exception of cognitive behavior therapy most talk therapy doesn't work much better than placebo For this very reason, but what else do we know about depression? Well, you can use exercise, right? Exercise for 20 minutes. You're going to introduce to exercise induced transient and hyperfrontality. You're going to tire the prefrontal cortex

out. It's going to quiet down. And you're going to those stress warm-ums, your source of your anxiety, are going to get flushed out of your system, and you're going to reset. We don't think this way, right? We don't go for a walk in the sunshine and get more vitamin D. We don't think about our, we just solve, and we try to solve every problem by thinking, but the research consistently shows we've reached the end of our psychological tether. I mean, just look at the stats right now. The number of Americans on antidepressants depending on whose counts one and four to one and eight depending on whose numbers you trust incidents of suicide everyone ages 10 to 68 are

At 30 years high highs and climbing still right Of any indication of our mental health or society, our national mood is disastrous. And the reason is time to rethink all that thinking. It's almost, it makes me realize with all this new information on these things of consciousness and their impact on our mental, even physical well-being gosh how irresponsible of our you know political leaders to make it almost impossible to study You know these these all you know

psychedelics or altered states of consciousness for treatment flow, even, I mean, like the reason the flow gene brought genome project exists and it's outside of academia is because I spent 10 years trying to get academics to do it and they couldn't get funding. They benched the candidates that, dude, we can't do this inside of academia. The doors closed, do it outside of academia and we'll back you. That's where the flow genome project came from, my organization. So yes, the research has been closed. That said, thanks to like friends of mine, Rick Dovelyn runs maps. I mean, we really are making significant inroads.

And while there are a lot of government agencies that are not playing fair, I got to give a shout out to the FDA. In the 90s, the FDA said, you know what, we're going to do our job. We are just going to evaluate medicines, never mind what everybody else is doing. And they started approving psychedelic research. And I, you know, what I've said is, we've basically re-done all the studies that we're done in the 60s. Everything we learn back then, we've proved to ourselves, are true.

That's the work that's been done. But with Robin Carter and Harris, for example, last year in Visualizing LSD, that's new. That hasn't been done before. There's work, Scott Barry Kaufman at the University of Pennsylvania is doing stuff on flow that has not been done before, right? This stuff has really rebooted in a lot of it. You can blame the government if you want to and for certain, you know, one of the things we talk about in the book in Stephen Fyre is if there's a $4 trillion underground revolution

in hacking consciousness and verb performance, what the fuck is in front page news? Why are we not talking about this, you know, everywhere we go, what the fuck is in front page news? Why are we not talking about this everywhere we go? And the answer is most of those conversations take place beyond the pale of polite society. And we use that metaphor beyond the pale, and we think there are three sort of pickets in the pale. And one is the pale of the state. And the thing. And one is the pale of the state. And the thing you got to understand is we

have always had state sanctioned states of consciousness. These are states of consciousness that support our society, support our agenda. Think about, so, interesting story in the book. David Knot was Britain's number one drugs are. He was their top drug researcher, you know, biggest government post. And five years ago, a woman walks into his office and she's hit her head, horseback riding. And she's got severe brain damage. She has totally changed, lost her job.

She's even a band from her local pub. She's gotten so unreasonable. And this surprise is David Nott. He goes, wow, I see a lot of rain damage. It's usually drug overdose. This woman fell off a horse. I didn't think horseback riding was particularly dangerous. He works the numbers. How often is horseback riding dangerous? He discovered that horseback riding hurts somebody or kills somebody one out of 350 times people go riding. He then, he's been at this point, his job is to assess various drugs for their category

of harm. And at that point, rave culture is sweeping England. Ecstasy is being called public enemy number one, and everybody's terrified of it, and he looks at the numbers. He goes holy crap. One person out of 10,000 gets injured or dies on ecstasy, an MDMA. Horseback riding is orders of magnitude more dangerous than ecstasy. And he publishes the results and the country goes nuts. Of course, I mean, people don't realize that the war on drugs was not a war on drugs.

It was a war on the counter culture. We know this for a fact that we made those laws, not because we were afraid of the drugs, but so we could have a reason to throw these protesting, you know, counter culture in jails. And now we have a tool to be able to do it. And of course, you know, it's very hard to do certain things when everybody feels like we're all one. You know what I mean? It's very difficult to create enemies and it's very difficult to hide behind certain things when people are going, hold on a second. Why are we doing these crazy things? And why do we, why do we have these stupid laws? And why are we all fighting each other? It's just, it's very threatening to, to some of the fabric of or organized, if you will, government.

You've got to look at. So what not ended up doing is kind of classifying all the different drugs of abuse. What's most harmful, what's least harmful, right? Comes over the top 20 lists. And if you look at the list, if you're rating harmful drugs, alcohol is number one, tobacco's top five, and the drugs that we're talking about, LSD, MDMA, mushrooms, there's 17, 18, and 20 respectively, but we have outlawed those drugs, and we have literally woven alcohol and caffeine and nicotine into the fabric of our society. And the reason is, if you've got a market economy, a capitalist economy, what do you need?

You need people to work as hard as they can for as long as they can, and then be able to depress very quickly and get up and do it again. So what do you want? You want sanctions, stimulant breaks, the coffee break, and the smoke break during the day to pump people up. And then you need the booze break at night to calm them back down and help them reset so they can do it again in the morning. So we have inscribed those states, their state, sanctioned states of consciousness. We support them with our legislation. We support them socially. We believe in them. This isn't necessarily, you know, it's never

about harm, right? It's not often not. That is you pointed out with a counter-culture. If you go back through drug policy, you'll see 50, 60, 70 percent of the time when we make a drug law, we're making, we're passing a law that's actually about race, right? Marijuana was because we didn't want white women going to have sex with Mexicans. OPM was we didn't want white women going to have sex with China men. Cocaine was we didn't want white women going to have sex with Black men. That's, I mean, like go back to the original laws. In fact, the Atlantic did this great crazy article about, it was one of the guys, Nixon Cabinet, and he was in the room when the laws got passed, basically.

And he said, said look this was never about you know drugs this was about who were the groups who were acting up blacks and the counterculture hippies how do we get it them heroin psychedelics that's how we can put the most people in jail that's what they did so I got I got to switch a gear on real quick, because I'll be mad if I didn't ask you this. And I know this isn't exactly your field, but what do you think about the, what we're finding recently about the gut being connected to the brain and its effect? Oh, it's a great question. A, not only it is a little outside of my field, but we actually spend a bunch of time on it

in stealing fire. And the reason is all the research we're seeing on exercise, right? Exercise being incredibly good for us. One of the main reasons is, right, we have a side that sort of treats us like heads on sticks. But as you know, it's not just the gut. Like we are a whole brain system. The whole body is our brain. There are as many neurons in your gut and heart as there are in your brain. 90% of the body's serotonin is produced in the gut. There's a whole gut brain down there and flow, by the way. Flow has a deep embodiment trigger.

You need multiple, when you can engage multiple senses at once, right? When you're moving, it drives attention to now. It drives flow is one of the ways to get more flow in your life. And certainly if a lot of this is about the key bangs, I need low, and things like that, you need exercise for all that. And what's really interesting is we're starting to get into, there's all kinds of history of dancing our way into trances and things along those using the body to alter consciousness. And people have tried to study it, ish over the years. But it is, you know, dance therapy is the only place they're really doing it

seriously now. And I don't know enough about dance therapy, what I've seen, some of it's great, and some of it, I don't know what I'm looking at, it's seen a very new age, you know me, but we're starting to ask really interesting questions, not just about, you know, oh my god, we've got this gut brain, but oh my god, we can tune it with state's econtistists. Wow. So it's a, they feed each each other they back and forth. Yeah, we are a whole brain system. And you know, one of the, I mean, look, the greatest research on it, right, the most successful at least is Amy Cuddy's work out of Harvard with power posing.

Right? Amy Cuddy figured out that standing like the Wonder Woman for two weeks, two minutes with hands on hips and, you know, chest broad, taking up a lot of space, you know, pumps you full of testosterone. So we can change our states by changing our bodies. I'm doing that. Well, that's how we start every seminar, right? We do our little power pose before we go over.

Hands over head, chest high. Yeah. But, you know, what tips, what quick tips could you give some of our listeners? We have a lot of listeners who are obviously very into fitness, competitive athletes, and we have a lot of entrepreneurs that listen to our show. What tips can you give them that they can do to improve their odds or be able to get into a flow state easier? Yeah, so the easiest place to start, if you go to the flowgenomeproject.com, our website,

there's a free flow profile on the main page. Anybody can take it to tradeology. It says if you're this kind of person, you're likely to find the most flow in these directions. Oh, that's very cool. That's really cool. And it's huge. It's 50,000 people have taken it. So it's a robust, rigorous piece of research at this point.

And if you want to take it farther, if you go to my website, Steven call there.com. There are 20 flow triggers. And there's a, you sign up, my email and there's letter, you're gonna get a free PDF that breaks them down. Break them down. Or I think I, you know, you search by name

and I've done a bunch of big things on the flow triggers as well. There's a bunch of video out there if you don't want to download a PDF. So start with the flow profile and then, you know, what the best at the world do for more flow in their lives is they build their lives around those triggers. So those are the two easiest places to start, you know, in terms of flow. And, you know, more specifically, honest to God, if you don't have a daily mindfulness practice, at this point, or respiration training thing,

what are you doing? Like, why are you not doing that? It's, you know, the evidence on every level from its impact on mood. Four days of meditation, 20 minutes a day, is enough to accelerate learning, increase creative solving, problem solving, and heightened cognition. It starts impact, active your mood not long after that. Start with the simplest, non-ordinary state.

Work from there. Excellent. Excellent advice. Thanks for letting us talk to you. This has been great. Guys, thanks for doing what you do. I, anybody who's, you know, just talking about these things out loud in public with other people, it's wonderful. Like, I really appreciate it. Yeah, it's what you guys do. Definitely our mission. I mean, it's we're trying to bring people like yourself more to the forefront. It blows my mind that not more people know about this information and that's a lot of what we try to do is get people like yourself out there That being said Steven why don't you list off all the places or plugs?

And you know you kind of went over a couple of them right there I want to make sure if there's anything else that you want us to Yeah, the all the the Steven caller.com, low genome project that is common, the most important one right now is StealingFireBook.com. The pre-style campaign that we are running for Stealing Fire is super, like tons of good days. And for anybody who is actually really serious about just getting more of this stuff in their life, that's an amazing goody package. Very cool. Excellent.

Awesome. Thank you so much, guys. It was fun chatting with you. Yep, thank you, Steve. Thank you. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at Mind Pump Media.com.

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