Tami Simon: This program is brought to you by SoundsTrue.com. At SoundsTrue.com, you can find hundreds of downloadable audio learning programs, plus books, music, videos, and online courses and events. At SoundsTrue.com, we think of ourselves as a trusted partner on the spiritual journey, offering diverse, in-depth, and life-changing wisdom. SoundsTrue.com: many voices, one journey. [Music]
You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Steven Kotler. Steven Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning journalist, and the cofounder [and] director of research for the Flow Genome Project. He’s one of the world’s leading experts on high performance. He’s also the author of eight books, including The Rise of Superman, Tomorrowland, Bold, Abundance, and A Small Furry Prayer.
In his most recent book, Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work, he shares how these highly successful groups are harnessing flow states along with rare and controversial altered states of consciousness for higher performance and to solve critical challenges. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Steven and I spoke about how he used flow to bring him back to health after Lyme disease. We also talked about the four phases of flow: struggle, release, the flow state itself, and then recovery, and what is required in each phase of the process. Also, we talked about what Steven calls “the ecstatic spectrum” of experiences, and how ecstatic states are characterized by selflessness, timelessness, egolessness, and richness, and the difference between having an ecstatic experience and growing into the type of person who always has available the perspective that comes with these states.
Finally, we talked about the benefits and dangers of using psychedelics to achieve flow, how flow states can be used for the benefit of others or for self-gain, and Steven’s ultimate motivation behind the Flow Genome Project. Here’s my conversation with Steven Kotler.
Steven, to begin with, for our listeners who are meeting you for the first time, can you share with us a bit about: What is the Flow Genome Project?
Steven Kotler: Sure, that’s a great place to start. The Flow Genome Project—”flow” is probably the best place to start. Flow is an optimal state of consciousness; it’s a peak state where we feel our best and we perform our best. Everybody—you may use different lingo, you may call it runner’s high or being in the zone or being unconscious, the synonyms are endless—but it really talks about those states of total focus, where we get so focused on the task at hand that everything else just disappears. Action and awareness will start to merge, your sense of self will disappear, time passes strangely, it’ll slow down sometimes, you’ll get a freeze-frame effect, maybe you’ve been in a car crash, or more frequently it speeds up, and five hours go by like that. Throughout, all aspects of performance go through the roof.
The Flow Genome Project is a research and training organization. On the research side, I think we’re one of the largest, if not the largest open-source research project into ultimate human performance in the world. What we want to understand is where flow states come from in the brain, in the body, and how we can get more of them. On the training side, we work with everybody from the US Special Forces, professional athletes, Olympic athletes, to companies like Google or Ameritrade, to the general public, and we train people up in flow.
TS: How did you fall in love with flow, so to speak? How did this become so important to you?
SK: Long, medium, or short answer?
TS: I think I’ll go for the short but with heart. Short with heart.
SK: All right. I became a journalist in the early 1990s, that’s where my career started, and I covered action sports. Over the next 10 years, what I was witnessing in action sports was nearly exponential growth in ultimate human performance. In performance where life or limb is on the line—which common sense tells you has got to be the slowest category—we were seeing records getting broken and broken and broken again, and people were doing the impossible right and left. I wanted to know what the hell was going on. I took this question out of action sports into pretty much every domain imaginable, and studied the question of, “What does it take to do the impossible?”
Everywhere I looked, I saw the same thing. I saw people finding ways to access the state of flow, and then using it to really level up performance. In the middle of all of that, I got very very, very sick and spent three years in bed with Lyme disease, and I used flow inadvertently at first. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but it happened to get myself back to health. That was really strange for me. I didn’t know how that happened, so I went on a giant science quest to figure out the neurobiology of that. That’s what took me from subzero back to normal, helping normal people go all the way up to Superman. It all coalesced into the Flow Genome Project, after about 15 years of work.
TS: Let’s talk a little bit about how you feel that flow brought you back to health.
SK: I’m a science guy, so a couple of things and places to start. One: I had Lyme disease, which is an autoimmune condition, and when I say it brought me back from health, a little more of the story might be helpful. I was dragged out to the ocean and forced to go surfing at a time that I could not walk across a room and I was functional about 10 percent of the day. While surfing, I got this very strange altered-state experience. I didn’t know what it was, but it was incredibly compelling. It was the first time in three years that I felt good, and motivated, and excited, and anything, really, other than sick and felt like I was dying.
This was also the point that the doctors didn’t know what else to do with me. They pulled me off medicine. They said, “We don’t know if you’re ever going to get any better.” I started surfing, and suddenly I started feeling a lot better. The only thing that was happening was I was going surfing. I was having these very strange altered-state experiences that I didn’t even at the time know were called flow, I learned afterwards. What I also learned is two things that are key on the healing side. One is [that] there’s a lot of different things in the brain that produce flow, but there’s five very potent neurochemicals that get dumped into the brain.
These are just one of the ways the brain talks to itself and to the body. That’s what as neurochemical is, it’s a signaling molecule. You get five really potent ones that show up in flow. All five boost the immune system. Simultaneously, Lyme and any autoimmune condition is essentially your nervous system gone haywire. As we move into flow, for technical reasons, all the stress hormones get flushed out of your body, and they get replaced by a bunch of these feel-good, positive, immune system boosting neurochemicals. Essentially, the state resets the nervous system. So when you have a nervous system that’s totally gone haywire, which is what Lyme disease is, figuring out where normal is so you can return to baseline. The body is a homeostatic system, but if it doesn’t know where normal is, it can’t get you back there. It’s really fundamental.
Herb Benson, who did a lot of this work at Harvard, who worked on the neurobiology of flow and the neurochemistry of flow, did a lot of this mapping. He has argued—I don’t know if I’d go this far—but he has argued that he thinks most so-called cases of spontaneous healing actually have this process at their heart.
TS: OK, because you’re a science guy, I want to ask this: How do you know that it was the surfing and the flow state that was responsible for your healing?
SK: I mean, it’s not a very sexy answer, but the truth of the matter is: my life was destroyed. I had spent three years lying on a couch. I couldn’t actually get off the couch. I was functional an hour a day, so the only thing I was doing different in my life was every—and in the beginning, it was brutal. The first time I went surfing, I was in bed for 14 days afterwards, and on the 15th day, I went back to the ocean and did it again. Those periods of recovery were total; I didn’t move. My point is: I literally didn’t do anything else in my life but surf. That was the only thing that I did for about six months; the only addition to my life was surfing. Mostly I laid on the couch and watched basketball. My short-term memory was so gone I couldn’t read, because I couldn’t remember the end of a sentence by the time I got there, what was at the beginning. I could watch basketball. That was fast enough for me to pay attention to.
TS: So either it was some type of spontaneous remission which we don’t understand, or it was this one different thing you were doing, which was surfing.
SK: Yes, that’s a fair assessment.
TS: Now I’m imagining someone who’s listening or knows someone who’s ill, or they themself have some kind of serious healing challenge in their life, and they’re like, “I want some of that. I could use some of that flow. Surfing’s not my thing—I might drown if I got out there on the board. What do you suggest? How can I access flow for healing?”
SK: Let me preface that by saying: I really try to go out of my way to avoid giving advice. I like to tell people how things work, and then tell them to go out and conduct their own experiment. I also like to point out that flow is different from—this is not self-help. Self-help is a 5 percent boost in performance that’s persistent after three months, that’s a huge win. Flow isn’t like that. If you go by a variety of studies that I can list, we see motivation go up 500 percent, we see creativity [go up] 600 to 700 percent, we see learning rates accelerate 470 percent—these are huge boosts in performance.
Same thing with healing, huge boosts in healing, but it comes at a cost. These are very addictive neurochemicals; you have to have a lot of emotional fortitude to start playing these games. That’s my preface. I always tell people that I’ll answer your question, I’ll give advice, but in my experience, when people conduct the experiments themselves and figure this out for themselves, better things happen. People tend to take my advice, you’re also getting my risk tolerances and my perseverance, both of which are crazy, and people tend to mess up their lives.
All that said, let me answer your question. What we do know is flow states have triggers. There are preconditions that lead to more flow; there’s about 20 of them in total. I’m not going to break them down for you, but what I’m going to say is there are certain really high-flow activities that are great. With Lyme disease, for example, one of the things that worked really, really well for me are long walks—really slow, long walks. By “long,” I mean you want to walk long enough for the voice in your head to get quiet. When that happens, it’s part of your brain—the prefrontal cortex—sort of shutting down, which is something that happens in flow.
It’s a very good way to start to reset the nervous system. Any activity that you love that is not physically taxing is great. If you’re looking for a new one, pick up an artistic hobby. Learn to draw, learn to play guitar—these are high-flow activities for a lot of reasons, and they’re not learning to surf. I’m not saying it’s going to work in the same way. There are certain advantages that action sports have in producing flow, but it’s a place to start.
TS: Hey, I heard a little dog bark.
SK: Yes, so my wife and I run a dog sanctuary. I don’t know if you know that. We run the Rancho de Chihuahua. We do hospice care and special needs care for small dogs with really big problems. I’ve got like 12 dogs around me right now.
TS: I did know that about you, Steven, that you ran a dog hospice and dog sanctuary, and it’s one of the things that made me love you from a distance.
SK: Thank you, that’s sweet of you to say.
TS: You said something very interesting: “Flow comes at a cost.” I get that when you’re referring to these high-intensity sports, and I see some of the snow jumps that I watch at the Olympics and things. But when you talk about taking a long walk—what’s the big cost? I’m on the long walk, so what’s the cost?
SK: No, so a deep flow state—and this is really, again, I’m trying to keep the science at a surface level for you.
TS: Thank you.
SK: These are expensive states for the brain to produce, first of all. They produce a lot of neurochemicals, they take up a lot of energy. Some of it’s very specific, like you need certain vitamins, and certain minerals, and sunlight, and blah blah blah to reproduce some of these neurochemicals. There’s that portion of it. The other portion of it is flow is this enormous high. People rate flow states as the experience on the planet that is most enjoyable.
Now, these neurochemicals that you’re getting are also addictive neurochemicals. You get dopamine. Dopamine is endogenous, meaning it’s internal. We produce it in our brain, in ourselves, a version of external street drugs like cocaine. When people snort cocaine, widely considered to be the most addictive substance on Earth, all that’s happening is dopamine is flooding into the brain, and the brain isn’t able to absorb it quite as fast as it normally does. You’re getting five of these neurochemicals. We get endorphins, these are natural opiates. We’re in the middle of an opiate crisis, and the most common endorphin in the brain is 100 times more powerful than medical morphine.
These are addictive neurochemicals. You have to have some emotional fortitude to do it. Also if you have a tendency towards manic depression and you start putting a lot of dopamine in your system, this can trigger an episode. This is—it’s not for everybody, but it does seem to be consistently there when you see consistent peak performance, and it turns out it’s actually fairly easy to train. That’s what we’ve learned over the past five years since the Flow Genome Project got up and running. We thought it was going to be really hard to train people up in it, and what we’ve learned over the past five years in lots of different studies and experiments and in trainings is that it’s actually remarkably easy to train, but it does take some emotional fortitude.
TS: The key to training flow states is recognizing these 20 or so triggers that you mentioned?
SK: Yes, that is part of it. Flow states—so we used to think they worked like a binary, like a light switch: you’re either in the zone or you’re out of the zone. We now know it’s a four-stage cycle. You have to move through each stage to get back into flow. This is why, for example, you can’t permanently live in flow. In fact, about once a month somebody comes up to me somewhere and says, “Oh my God, you have to study me. I’m amazing. I live in flow.” This happens fairly frequently, and in the beginning, I really didn’t know what to do. Now I just tell the truth and I’m like, “You know, we have a word for that. We call that schizophrenia.”
This is not a state you get to live in, and it’s got a cycle. A couple of the stages on the cycle are very—if flow is the best we get to feel on the planet, the front end of the flow cycle is a struggle phase. It’s very difficult, it’s very challenging. On the back end, there’s a recovery phase. You have to respect the recovery phase as well, otherwise you could wind up getting locked out of flow. Then you have a real problem, because you’re playing with addictive neurochemistry.
TS: Now, I think it would be helpful for our listeners to go into the flow cycle a bit. I found it really helpful learning about it—these four phases. Can you give me an example? You could use yourself as someone who enters flow. How [do] you go through the four-phase cycle in your life?
SK: Let me walk you through what they are first, and then let’s talk about how to move through them, and I’ll give you some examples along the way.
TS: Sure.
SK: First of all, let’s talk a little bit about what is actually happening in flow in the brain. At a really high level, again, flow is what happens when you have consciously learned a skill so well that you can begin to do it automatically. That’s a process called “chunking.” Flow is really what shows up when the brain figures out how to combine four or five chunks at once into one super skill. Think about all the different things you had to learn to do to swing a bat at a ball, for example. You had to learn to anticipate the pitch, you had to time your swing, you had to get strong enough to swing the bat, you had to learn to keep your—all these are separate skills, but there was a time when they all came together and you did it perfectly.
That’s what’s going on in flow. It’s information being processed subconsciously, basically, by the adaptive unconscious at really high speeds. That’s what’s going on. The first stage of the cycle, you’re in a struggle phase. This is a loading phase: you are loading the brain and overloading the brain with information. One of the really interesting things that you find out about high performance and you find out about your emotions is they don’t always mean what we think they mean.
At the front end of this struggle, you have a working memory. This is all the things you can think about at once. It maxes out around seven to nine items. That’s why phone numbers, by the way, have seven digits long, because it perfectly slots into your working memory. But most of us tap out after four ideas, and we’re trying to hold onto more than that, we get frustrated, we get overloaded. Flow front end, the struggle phase, since it’s a loading phase, what you’re literally doing is you’re driving yourself into frustration. You are overloading the brain with information, so frustration comes built in. That’s what I mean a little bit by “you need some emotional fortitude.” You have to understand that when you’re working with flow, you have to get really comfortable with being uncomfortable, because there’s going to be a lot of it.
That’s the front end, and then the next stage in the flow cycle, it’s a release phase. This is literally, you have to take your mind off the problem. There’s lots of different ways to do it. Albert Einstein liked to sail a boat into the middle of Lake Geneva, that was his big hack. Tim Ferriss—my friend Tim Ferriss, the podcaster and the author of The Four-Hour Body and whatnot—he likes long walks for this phase. A lot of people like gardening. A friend of mine, Lee Zlotoff, has run experiments on this, and he’s found that one of the best activities is building models: airplanes, or dinosaurs, or take your pick. But any of these kind of activities.
What you don’t want to do is something really hard and physical that totally exhausts yourself. That’s not the goal. The goal is just to take your mind off the problem. What happens here is literally your conscious mind takes all the stuff you’ve just learned and passes it over to your subconscious. That’s what’s happening during this gap. Once you can let it go, you can move into the third stage, which is the flow cycle itself. It’s at this point you want to deploy the flow triggers, so some of those triggers are things like novelty, complexity, unpredictability, and they’re really easy to pull.
For a writer, for example, one of the things that I use as a writer if I’m stuck and I’ve been stuck for a little while, I’ll take my computer and I’ll just go to a coffee shop. The novelty of the environment is often enough to get things moving, and it drives focus and tends to enhance flow. Complexity, unpredictability—these are other flow triggers that can be deployed here—risk, the list goes on. This is the flow experience, the third stage in the cycle.
On the back end of the flow experience, as I pointed out, there’s the recovery phase. These are expensive stages to produce, so you need some downtime on the back end. You need a good night’s sleep, proper nutrition, that sort of stuff. I think in recovery, there’s one other thing that I think is important, which is I always say it’s like the hangover rule is what has to apply in recovery. Because you’re going to be out of focus, you’re not going to be able to perform at your best. For peak performers, for top performers, this makes people crazy. They fight it and they get frustrated with it.
I always say that when you’re in recovery, you have to apply the hangover rule. Anybody who’s been drunk more than three or four times knows that when you’re hungover, your brain is going to tell you all kinds of nasty stuff about yourself. This is when you’re dumb, you’re a failure, you’ll never get it done, you’re fat, you’re ugly, whatever. But if you’ve been hungover two or three times, you just know. You’re like, “OK, great. I have all those things today, but who cares? I’m going to watch football because I’m hungover, and I’ll deal with all that stuff tomorrow.” That’s what you do. You have to do the same thing on the back end of a flow state. There’s a lot of self-forgiveness required, because you’re not going to be at your best.
TS: Is there any research on how much recovery time is needed, depending on how much exertion was involved?
SK: It’s a great, great, great, fantastic question, and the answer is: we don’t have a clue. Some of it is very individual; there’s nature/nurture things. Some of it is what actually got depleted the most along the way by the task at hand, on top of the flow state. There’s all kinds of different—what have you been eating, how much have you been sleeping ahead of time, those kinds of things. In really extreme cases, like with the Navy SEALs, for example, when they come back from deployment, they’re so depleted that their testosterone counts are essentially those of a 13-year-old girl. Sometimes you have actual hormonal problems, you’re way whacked out of balance.
People on the other end of a startup, really high-flow environment (startups are really high-flow environments), but once that baby launches, people crash. By the way, the interesting thing—just to point this out because I think it’s super useful to know—if anybody’s listening and they run companies or manage teams, one of the problems we see all the times in places of employment, we see it’s phenomenally common in sales: people will go out in sales and they’ll have quotas to meet. They’ll have a really high-flow quarter where they just blow through their quotas, really get into flow, everything is really clicking, they’ve mastered the new product, they really understand what they’re selling, they really believe in it.
All those things are lined up, and they’re in a lot of flow. They come back at the end of the quarter and the boss looks at their numbers and goes, “Oh my God, this is fantastic. This is great. This is awesome. Now do it again in half the time, and we’re going to double your quotas.” That’s really common. The bar keeps getting moved. That’s fine, that’s good. You want that increasing challenge, that’s a very important flow trigger. Flow most often shows up when we’re at the edge of our challenge threshold, what’s called the “challenge/skills balance,” when the challenge of the task at hand slightly exceeds our skillset tends to drive a lot of focus and drive a lot of flow.
The challenge is good within reason. The problem is: after a really high-flow period, you need to recover, otherwise you’re not going to be able to get back into flow. You won’t have the energy to fight your way through struggle, and struggle can last a while sometimes. Struggle, like on the front end of a book—this is when I’m doing my research, when I’m doing my interviews, when I’m trying to figure out what style I want to write in, where I don’t quite know where I’m going. Every day I may be only trying to write 500 words, but they’re a fight because I don’t know what I’m doing yet. That’s struggle.
TS: One of the quotes I pulled out from your work that I thought was really interesting is that “flow is always about greater and greater challenges.” I thought that’s really interesting, because I’ve noticed that in my own life that after a period of recovery, I need a greater challenge. I can’t just go back and do the same thing.
SK: Well, that’s because you’re a badass.
TS: Yes.
SK: And you’re doing it right. They call the challenge/skills balance the golden rule of flow. It’s worth breaking down, just take an extra second to break it down emotionally, because it’s easy to understand that way. Emotionally, this sweet spot sits near but not on the midpoint between boredom and anxiety. Boredom, hey, not enough stimulation. I’m not paying enough attention to the task at hand; it’s dry flow. Anxiety, whoa, way too much stimulation. I’m paying way too much attention, and it’ll block flow. In between is that sweet spot. You need that sweet spot on a daily basis to drive flow on a daily basis. As you just pointed out, you also need it as you come through a big goal—you’ve got to increase the goal.
I always tell people that when I start a book, I always have two challenges. The first is the challenge that everybody can see in the end, which is: I want to tell you some stuff, and I’d like to do it in a way that is engaging, and compelling, and makes you think and go “wow” and do some stuff, and I’ve got content. Then there’s another challenge, which is with Stealing Fire, I knew I had to add what I thought of as “Stephen Pinker’s sentence density” to my normal writing to be able to tell you everything I needed to tell you. That was really challenging to do in a way that it kept the writing engaging and compelling.
When I wrote Bold, which I cowrote with Peter Diamandis, it was a totally different one. I wanted to see if I could write a business book that didn’t suck, because every business book I’ve ever read is just terrible. They’re boring, they’re confusing, they make up their own language, the science is not right there, and the stories are not good. There are a couple exceptions, but I just wanted to see what I could do. So there’s always that kind of challenge too, and I think that’s really important.
TS: OK, I want to ask you a strange question here, Steven. You said people come up to you and say, “I’m always in flow,” and you say, “No, I don’t think so, unless you’re schizophrenic.” Well I meet people who have been meditating for a long time, or on the spiritual path for a long time, and it’s clear that their goal is to always be in some type of flow. They may not be defining it the same way you are here, as this four-part process that relates to performance, I think they’re talking about it more as—
SK: Yes, we’re talking about what my friend Nicole Bradford talks about as the difference between “peak” and “permanent,” right?
TS: Yes.
SK: It’s the difference between—flow is a peak experience, by definition temporary, but here’s where things get interesting. Let’s just take it out of the mystical for a second.
TS: Sure.
SK: We’re going to get to questions about enlightenment, and satori, and things like that, but let’s just start in psychology and adult development theory. One of the things we know from adult development theory, which was pioneered at Harvard, is that adults, like kids, go through stages of development. Kids go through the terrible twos, and the teens, and whatever. The difference is [with] adults it’s not automatic; you actually have to do the work. Kids do it automatically. Adults actually have to strive for it. But what happens on each side—each step up the chain in adult development—is you gain more perspective. You gain a wider perspective. You gain the traits known as wisdom, it’s empathy, it’s the ability to look at issues and problems from multiple perspectives at once. Those sorts of things happen. Compassion happens along the way.
There is research done by [Inaudible], other people, that take this all the way up to enlightenment as the top stage in this adult development. We go through standard states of development, and then they have some extraordinary ones that lead towards what people talk about as enlightenment. It does seem, through massive amounts of research that’s now being run by Jeffrey Sachs and a bunch of other people, that enlightenment does reflect something real. There’s a “there” there. When people talk about it, they’re actually—neurobiologically, they’re talking about something that you can see in the data.
What it seems like you see in the data is not a permanent flow state. What you’ve seen in the data is the permanent ability to hold onto the perspective that you gain in flow. Flow is a massive change in perspective. Our sense of self tends to go away, time disappears, so we’re in a “deep now” state of consciousness, and our sense of self expands. It’s very common to feel one with nature, one with the universe, one with everything in flow as in mystical experiences. Then we understand why; there’s neurobiology underneath it. We get where it comes from, we get why it happens, we understand why it happens in flow. But that affords you a very wide perspective, really good for problem-solving, among everything else, really good for keeping yourself calm as well.
That seems to be part of that. The ability to permanently tap into that perspective, it’s sort of always on, seems to be one of the signatures of enlightenment. It also seems that the other signature is that you can move very—you have a lot of control over your states of consciousness, and you can shift very quickly between them.
TS: OK, so if I get this right, what you’re saying is someone who is “enlightened” has the capacity to tap into the flow state whenever they need it or want it, but they’re not always in the flow state?
SK: OK. You’re almost—they can gain the same perspective, the same wide open, super-empathetic, seeing things from all sides perspective that shows up in flow. That seems to be what they can hold onto. Can they hold onto the actual feelings that show up in flow? I don’t know. There’s a lot more work to be done. If I were to put it neurobiologically, it seems like flow is three things: it takes place in a certain part of the brain, that’s neuroanatomy, neurochemistry and neuroelectricity, which are the two ways the brain talks to itself. It seems like they can shift their brain waves and futz with their neuroanatomy. The neurochemistry is an open question: Can you create that on demand? There’s a lot more work to be done to figure that out, but it’s interesting.
The other thing that I wanted to point out is one of the things that shows up in the research as well is [that] the more access you have to peak experience, to flow states, the faster you seem to be able to move up the adult development chain. One thing, the peak experiences seem to accelerate the path to some kind of permanent shift in consciousness. There is an open question: Is there such a thing as an enlightened experience where you can have this shift all at once? A lot of people say “yes,” I say, “I don’t know.” I have not seen anything that convinces me that it’s real.
The other thing that is worth pointing out is nobody knows if this is a really great thing or not. Because one of the things that happens in flow is because the prefrontal cortex shuts down, a certain level of long-term planning and a certain level of logical, rational decision-making, some of your morality, some of your willpower goes away. Those are elements that are removed from consciousness during flow. And your inner critic, so risk-taking goes up in flow, other things like that happen in flow. You wouldn’t want to be in it all the time.
Let me give you a concrete example of how I use the flow state itself, and the recovery phase, and the fact that you can’t be in flow permanently to my advantage, which is: I like to have big writing sessions where I’m deep in flow, where ideas are bouncing all over the place, but my pattern recognition system is all jacked up. So a lot of those ideas are great, the best ideas I could ever come up with. Some of them are crap, there are things you don’t ever want to do in a flow state. Don’t go shopping. Everything is going to look good on you. You’re going to come home, you’re going to be out of the flow state, you’re going to look in the mirror and you’re going to go, “I spent money on what?”
It’s bad for long-term decision making; you can be more impulsive in flow. You tend to make more right decisions, but you tend to make more right decisions in domains [where] you have a lot of expertise, if that makes sense.
TS: It does. Now you mentioned these four characteristics: selflessness, timelessness, effortlessness, and I don’t know if you mentioned richness, but it’s in your work that this—
SK: Information richness.
TS: Yes.
SK: That’s a little more Stealing Fire take on this stuff. What it is: there’s a whole chain of experiences, we call them all the experiences that are “north of happy.” They’re the upper possibility space of human experience. This is flow states, or awe, or psychedelic experiences, or meditative states, or trance states, or out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences, and so forth. That whole range of experience, what’s known as the “ecstatic spectrum,” they have—in how any of these experiences make you feel, they share four things in common.
There have been hundreds of lists over the years of what these things have in common, and usually the lists are either augmented by the religious tradition that’s developing the lists, so the Buddhists have a version of this versus Catholics. Sometimes depending on where you are in history. So if you go back to the ’60s, there were a lot of rebirthing prenatal things, because that was in the consciousness at the time. It was a big part of the “woo,” and so it showed up in a lot of descriptions of altered states. If you get rid of all the traditions and just boil it down to: What are the four things you can be sure of across the traditions, without any of the trappings? Just so you can look at it objectively a little bit.
The first thing is selflessness. When we are in these states, the portion of our brain, prefrontal cortex, that produces our sense of self shuts down. It’s part of that efficiency exchange the brain performs to put you into flow, and as a result, our inner critic—that nagging, always-on voice in our head—goes away. Emotionally, we experience this as liberation or freedom. We’re actually getting out of our own way. Creativity goes up, risk-taking goes up, we feel really good, productivity goes through the roof as a result of our sense of self going away.
This same thing happens to time, so the second quality is timelessness. Time is also calculated all over the prefrontal cortex. Parts of it wink out. You can’t perform the calculation; you can’t separate past from present from future, so you’re plunged into this deep now, this perpetual present. This also has a really big impact on mood and performance, because if you think about most of our fears, it’s either crappy stuff that happened in the past that you’d like to avoid happening in the present, or it’s scary stuff that could happen in the future that you’d like to avoid from the present. When you lose past and future, you lose a lot of your anxiety. I said earlier that flow helps reset the nervous system; all these experiences do this, and that’s the reason why.
The next thing is the sense of effortlessness. In these states, you get all those addictive neurochemicals I talked about. This produces what the Taoists talked about as “effortless effort.” You’re certainly working hard, you’re usually pushing things to the edge of your skill set in these states, but it feels like you’re being propelled by a force that is greater than yourself. I always say one of my books I was lucky enough to write in a flow state, the second half of it in a two-week stretch. It was an amazing experience. When I was done, I was like, “Who the hell wrote that book?” That’s what it feels like, and so that’s the effortlessness of it.
The last part is that these states are incredibly information-rich. If I was to explain it scientifically, I’d say, “Look, every step in the brain’s information processing chain, from data acquisition through salience, and pattern recognition, and lateral thinking into action is surrounded by the neurochemicals that show up in these states and amplified. You take in more information per second; you process it faster. What this means is, in real-world, simple terms: you are massively more creative. Creativity spikes. We just did a study on this, because we knew creativity spiked in flow from a lot of other studies, and we wanted to know: What exactly do we mean by creativity? When we say spikes in flow 700 percent—the hell spikes.
Idea generation goes up, pattern recognition, which is our ability to link ideas together, goes up, complex problem solving goes up. We took a look at really every step in the creative chain is all amplified in flow and in these states of consciousness. That’s the information richness on the back end, and you put it all together. It’s not hard to understand that way. People thought they were looking at flow as if it was a mystical experience. Until the 1950s, we didn’t actually realize that this was not a mystical experience because it was so powerful.
TS: OK, Steven, I want to make sure I ask you these two questions that I think are challenging that came up for me in immersing myself in your work. The first is: my own personal knowledge of these four characteristics that you just described comes from being a meditator and spending a lot of time at meditation retreats. I noticed in your work, you talk about different methods of tapping into selflessness, timelessness, effortlessness, and this information richness, and you throw out, “Well, hook yourself up to a computer and do neurofeedback, or go on shamanic journeys, or take psychedelics,” and all these different ways you can explore them, as if the outcomes are potentially equal in these different activities.
I thought, “Huh, I wonder if that’s really true, if somebody going on an ayahuasca journey is going to come back as changed, maybe more changed, maybe less changed. These experiences, how [do] they turn into actual characterological or real growth and development in a person? That’s my question for you.
SK: Those are great questions. At the end of Stealing Fire in the last chapter, we talk about hedonic calendaring—which is like scheduling state shift into your life—and how to do it and how to work with these practices. There are times when you want a peak experience. There are a lot of different gateways into peak experiences. If you want a really strong, powerful experience, you can go on a 10-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat. You come back different. You’ve had that experience, I’m expecting.
TS: Sure, sure, yes.
SK: You come back different. You can go heli-skiing, where you’re skiing some really steep stuff in deep powder, really high-flow, high-risk environment. Or you can use a powerful dose of a psychedelic, that’s possible. Let me give you some science here; let me put it to you in better terms. This is my favorite experiment that we talk about in Stealing Fire, and it’s directly on healing. About 15 years ago, Michael Mithoefer and Rick Doblin started looking at MDMA, the psychoactive, the psychedelic at the heart of ecstasy. They wanted to know: could you treat PTSD with ecstasy.
They have since run so many trials it’s absurd, and what they found is: one to two MDMA therapy sessions—so this is MDMA coupled to therapy, talk therapy during the session—was enough to either totally cure or significantly, significantly reduce the symptoms of PTSD. Most of the time it’s totally cured. It’s been, since the original experiment, it’s been seven or eight years at this point, so we know that persists over time. That was great, and this is why the FDA is fast-tracking MDMA for the treatment of PTSD. It’s going to be available, it’s already in Schedule III trials, and they fast-tracked it in Schedule III. So it’ll be on the market by 2021, because they believe it’s so important. We know the psychedelic works for PTSD.
A bunch of years later, at Camp Pendleton, they went, “OK, so we want the same result, but we don’t want to have to use a psychedelic.” So they replaced MDMA with surfing, a very high-flow activity, high-risk sport. They took over a thousand soldiers with PTSD, and they coupled surfing with talk therapy. It’s the exact same protocol used with the other one, except MDMA is replaced by surfing, and they found that five weeks on average of surfing and talk therapy was enough to produce the exact same result—either totally cured the PTSD or significant reduction in symptoms.
A couple years later, they went, “OK, that’s really cool. Let’s try meditation.” They did the same thing. I want to say they used TM [Transcendental Meditation], so I think they used a mantra meditation. I want to say that—it was definitely a focus meditation, and I think it was TM, I think it was a mantra meditation. They got the same results in four weeks of 20 minutes a day [in] meditation. You have four different ways of achieving the goal [with] slightly different time scales, depending on your individual risk profile—and right now, if you want to use MDMA, your willingness to break the law—but producing the same result.
We see the same thing, same data, with creativity and lower-grade impacts, so microdosing psychedelics instead of the big heroic dose they use for that. You’ll see the same thing, you’ll see microdosing will produce amplified creativity, and you’ll see the same thing with Vipassana, open-senses meditation will work the same way. Flow, like if you go skiing a couple times a week, that sort of thing will amplify—you can get the same effects for on the positive side of the scale, depending on how you want to dip in and how you’re wired.
Now, different things also have other benefits. Focus meditation improves a bunch of different things cognitively and really works to reduce stress. Vipassana meditation doesn’t really help with focus, but it amplifies creativity. What is really interesting now, and the answer to your question, which I think is really cool, is now we know there are a bunch of different ways to go A to B that all produce really positive results, and they’re totally individual. You can pick and choose based on who you are and how you want to live in the world, and if you want to amplify your progress, there are a lot of tools for that too.
TS: OK, I’m going to confess a deep question that I have. As a responsible podcaster, I want to share the great news of the discoveries around MDMA, and I’m also concerned about that drug or any other type of psychedelic being misused and causing harm. I’m concerned about that. What are your thoughts?
SK: I think those are real concerns. So let’s talk about what we know for sure. We know that the risk profile in psychedelics is extremely low with one big exception. If you have mental illness in your family, significant mental illness—schizophrenia or manic depression at a really high level—marijuana, MDMA, psilocybin, LSD, and probably DMT, though I’m not sure, if you were going to become schizophrenic at some point in your life anyways, and you used these substances, you will get there faster. [That] absolutely happens. That is a real concern. There’s no way around that with those substances.
Other than that, we know they’re not addictive, and they have massive, massive, massive therapeutic benefit with a lot of our most intractable conditions. The FDA isn’t just looking at MDMA for PTSD, they’re now looking at it for anxiety and depression. The news is good, and it better be, because the best thing we’ve got right now are SSRIs. They barely work, and mostly they blunt people’s lives. The substances we have at our fingertips right now aren’t very good. The psychedelics are a much, much more robust and interesting toolkit.
We’re also seeing this stuff sweeping high performance. When we were researching Rise of Superman, we met entire teams of engineers at major Silicon Valley companies, major Hollywood companies, major New York Wall Street brokerages who were microdosing on a regular basis at work to enhance performance. This is happening now globally. I think you owe it to your audience to talk about it. It’s really important, it’s really important work, but it’s really important to talk about it out loud and up front.
Rick Doblin, who led this charge from his post as director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Research, the man who really—along with a couple other organizations—who really worked hard to get this through, he was always really disparaging of what happened in the ’60s and Tim Leary. He said, “Tim Leary was all about ego, and revolution, and ‘tune in, turn on, drop out’ kind of stuff.” He was like, “The way I want to do this right now is that I want to ‘turn on, tune in, go to a bake sale.’” These are the best psychological tools we have available to us, and they deserve to be used responsibly by the mainstream, but you have to use them responsibly.
It’s like flow. This is adult stuff, it speeds our path along adult development. The way I frame it to talk about it is: so-called 21st-century skills. These are the skills that we need to thrive in this century that we’re very, very bad at training people up at. This is creativity, this is cooperation, this is collaboration, these kinds of complex problem-solving challenges—all these are critical skills for the 21st century. The research shows we’re terrible at training them, and the reason is quite simply: we keep trying to train up skills, and we need to be training up states of mind. Changing our consciousness is literally how evolution built the brain to solve these problems, and we haven’t been paying attention to that for a really long time.
Now we have better science and we can go at this more responsibly, but it’s still—nobody can do the work. You have to do your pushups for you, and you have to do it responsibly with some emotional control. This is not the party that it should have been in the ’60s.
TS: OK, so here’s the other sort of challenging question, if you will. I noticed this whole emphasis on high performance, that as I read more and more and started feeling into it, I was really, “Oh, you know that’s what I think is giving me a slight case of the hives here.” It’s using all of this deep connection, selflessness, timelessness, the richness of experience, so that I can personally perform better, and that that’s, you could say, a personal ego agenda. I want to make more money, so great, I’m going to use flow states to make more money, flow states so I can succeed, et cetera et cetera.
SK: We always say flow is neutral, absolutely neutral. The first two groups of people who reached out to me in the Flow Genome Project when Rise of Superman came out was the military and the marketers, because both of them saw an immediate advantage for that kind of level. Here’s the couple things I want to say that maybe [will] change how you feel a little bit.
One of the things that we know about these experiences is if you do a little bit of the work along the way—you have to do the work, there’s still ways to do this all selfishly for sure, but if you do a little bit of work and personal growth and development along the way—the more of these experiences you tend to have, you tend to get more empathetic, more compassionate, perception expands, you start to live in a bigger world than just you. That’s interesting in and of itself. The second point is: at the Flow Genome Project, if you scratch under the hood and sit down and talk to Jamie and myself about why we started this, I wrote a book called Abundance with Peter Diamandis.
Abundance is a book that says, “Hey, there are a bunch of accelerating forces right now that allow us for the very first time in history to solve grand global challenges. Individuals in small teams of people can now go after things like poverty, energy scarcity, our healthcare crisis, women’s rights—take your pick—water crisis.” When we started the Flow Genome Project, we were really clear. It’s great that everybody in the world likes this information. That’s fantastic, that’s great—it benefits everybody. What we cared about is taking the best of the best and training them up.
We want to train people up so they can be at their best, so they can tackle grand challenges, because we do think that the challenges we now face at a planetary level are critical: the threats to biodiversity, global warming. I think of it as “abundance or bust.” We have the potential to solve all these challenges. It’s without a doubt going to require the greatest cooperative effort in history, and it’s going to require more than that. It’s not just everybody working together, it’s everybody at their very best working together. Flow is how we are hardwired for high performance. It is the biology of high performance. It shows up in everyone, anywhere, provided certain initial conditions are met. This is how we have to go about tackling these challenges. If that to you sounds selfish, OK, you got me.
TS: It doesn’t sound selfish if we’re tackling the most important problems that face humanity in a collaborative way. It sounds intelligent.
SK: Yes. To me, that’s the game I want to play. That’s why I’m interested in the flow research. I do a handful of things on this planet. I try to advance flow research for this very purpose, I try to make the world a better place for animals, and I try to write books that can move the needle for people.
TS: OK, we’re going to end on talking about making the world a better place for animals because, Steven, I’m a big dog lover. Here at Sounds True, we have about 120 humans and 25 dogs in the office at any given time, and I’d just love to know a little bit: How did you come to realize that you love animals so much, and do you think that they contribute to the flow cycle for you in some way?
SK: Long, medium, or short?
TS: I always like short with heart.
SK: All right, short with heart. I’ve always loved animals. I’ve been crazy about them. When I was a journalist, I used to go profoundly out of my way, spend two years figuring out a way to go to Africa to hang out with primatologists who were hanging out with monkeys. I went really far out of my way to do this stuff. When I met my wife, and I realized that I could be doing more of this at home, that was a big deal for me. Some of it was: I have a job that has narcissism built in. I write books; I spend 10 hours a day in my own head. When I’m done being in my own head, I go upstairs and I don’t stop thinking about it, so I’m in my own head some more, and then I go on a book tour and I talk about myself for three months.
It tends to produce jerks, and I’d seen this in friends of mine and whatever, so service is really important to me. I wanted it to be a component of my life because I thought it would help me stay humble along the way. I wanted to do what I wanted to do in the world, and I knew it was going to require a certain level of public exposure, and I just didn’t want to become a jerk along the way. I thought, “Wow, I love animals, and I can bring the service into my house and do this on a daily basis, and be a little uncomfortable all the time and to remind myself?” I thought that was awesome.
We wanted to do it; we wanted to work on the front lines. So we moved to the second-poorest county in America with one of the highest instances of animal cruelty, and we took on all the stuff that nobody likes to do: hospice care, special needs care. We worked with small dogs because Chihuahuas are the second-most euthanized animal in America, but they are really—they don’t get a lot of funding, they’re not as cute as other animals, and nobody wants to really work with them. We wanted to do all that stuff, so we built Rancho de Chihuahua around that, and absolutely the dogs get me into flow.
Rather than taking up a lot of airtime, look for my last name, “Kotler,” and search for the Five Dog Workout. Outside Television sent a crew over here five, six years ago when I wrote A Small Furry Prayer, my book about all this stuff, and they filmed the Five Dog Workout. We use flow as part of our healing protocol with our dogs, so we put the dogs into flow. It’s actually in cohabitating with dogs that we think flow developed. We think that’s where it came from, from an evolutionary perspective.
TS: Wow.
SK: It showed up for different reasons, but the thing that drove it forward was our cohabitation with dogs, and this is all stuff that you’ll find in A Small Furry Prayer if you’re interested in any of it.
TS: I’m very interested, and I will read that. Hey Steven, thanks for being so brilliant and not becoming a jerk on the way. Thank you, thank you so much.
SK: I do what I can.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Steven Kotler. He’s cofounder and director of research for the Flow Genome Project, author of The Rise of Superman and the book Stealing Fire. Thank you so much for your good work and for inspiring me, thank you.
SK: My pleasure, thanks for having me.
TS: SoundsTrue.com: many voices, one journey. Thanks for being with us.
