Latest / The Action Catalyst / The Era of Impossible, with Steven Kotler (Neuroscience, Productivity, Biology, Flow)

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The Era of Impossible, with Steven Kotler (Neuroscience, Productivity, Biology, Flow) · The Action Catalyst

• 0:00
  Stephanie Maas: Okay, so I have to ask this is just totally random. It's got nothing to do with
• 0:05
  anything. So on your chair, is that a blanket?
• 0:08
  Steven Kotler: It is a blanket.
• 0:10
  Stephanie Maas: Is it to protect the chair?
• 0:13
  Steven Kotler: It's literally to protect the chair, mainly because my dog. Well, the dog who's
• 0:31
  in the office with me is 120 pounds. He's very big. His claws are significant. And he will at
• 0:40
  least once a day come over, like try to pull me and he destroyed the previous desk chair. So I've
• 0:46
  learned.
• 0:47
  Stephanie Maas: Okay, well, so you want to actually dive into some things?
• 1:00
  Steven Kotler: I'll go wherever you guys want to go.
• 1:02
  Stephanie Maas: Rockin. Okay, one of the things I think's worth noting is in your group of advisors,
• 1:07
  you have 14 advisors on your website, 11 of the 14 are doctors. And a lot of what you focus on is not
• 1:15
  just these concepts, and the research that you've done to prove them, put them into action hone
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  them, whatever is they are backed by this idea of science, medicine.
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  Steven Kotler: Okay. So at the heart of most of my career, as a first journalist than as an author of
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  writing books about these topics. Then, as a neuroscientist leading international team of
• 1:42
  researchers into these topics, the progression has been focused on peak human performance. And by
• 1:49
  peak human performance, I only mean getting our biology to work for us rather than against us.
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  That's all the definition of peak performance is it's getting our biology to work for us rather
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  than against us. And at the heart of that biology at the heart of my work is a state of
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  consciousness, known to researchers as low, you may call it runner's high or being in the zone or
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  you play basketball as being unconscious, you're a jazz musician, you're in the pocket, the lingo is
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  endless. Flow is technically defined as an optimal state of consciousness, a state of consciousness
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  where we feel our best and we perform our best, more specifically refers to any of those moments
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  that we're all familiar with rapt attention, total absorption just gets so focused on the task at
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  hand, so focused on what you're doing that everything else just starts to melt away and
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  disappear. Sense itself self consciousness, the inner critic voice in your head that's always on,
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  it's always telling you, you're too fat, too dumb, too ugly, right? It shuts up. Finally, thank God,
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  time passes strangely, most commonly, just get so sucked into what you're doing that five hours go
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  by, and like five minutes. Occasionally, sometimes it's slow, it'll slow down, you're gonna freeze
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  for impact. And throughout all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go to the
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  roof. So at the flow research collective, what we do is we study, I'll tell you about why this is
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  the answer to like the science questions, the neurobiology of peak human performance, what's
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  going on in the brain and the body when people are performing at their very best, and flow is a big
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  part of that equation. So the reason, there's so many sort of neuroscientists on my board and that
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  sort of stuff, and the reason we do all this work is this psychology of flow, which was very well
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  established over the course of the 20th century, but the end of the 20th century, they were
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  starting to train people using the psychology. And the problem with training from psychology is
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  psychology is very, very individual. Right? It's shaped by nurtured, shaped by nature, and really
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  fundamental things to peak performance. Like, where are you on the introversion extroversion
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  scale, meaning like, if you're super introverted, I can't teach you anything if there are other
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  people around because you're handicapped, right? Those kinds of things, where what are your risk
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  tolerance is like, and what are they like in different situations, right? People have one level
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  of physical risk tolerance and other level of emotional risk tolerance or sexual or
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  intellectual, take your pick, right? Those are very individual psychology is very individual. But
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  if you go one level down, you go to the neurobiology, neurobiology is shaped by evolution
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  and its constant volume. And so if you're looking to make things reliable, and repeatable
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  neurobiology is your tool. I got very lucky in my career, I started as a journalist, and I was
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  interested in interesting performance. I was also interested in neuroscience, it was a language I
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  sort of spoke, and I probably the psychology I always felt like when I was trying to just improve
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  myself as a writer, as an athlete, as a whatever, I was getting so confused, and they're decent
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  things. nitpicking arguments over crazy little details. And I'm like, none of this is practical.
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  I don't know what to do with this. And when I got into the neurobiology and figured out you could
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  train from it, it really worked. And we, you know, at the flow research collective, teamed up with
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  folks at Stanford and USC, and UCLA and et cetera, et cetera, and study that neurobiology that stuff
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  and then we use it to train people in 103. Ready countries, which are intensive 1000s of people
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  every month. And this is everything from like just individuals, right? Soccer moms and soccer, dads
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  and insurance brokers and you know, podcasters, and take your pick all the way to professional
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  athletes, members, Special Forces, and then companies or with like Facebook or center
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  audience, blah, blah. The point I'm trying to make is wildly diverse group of people. It's an intense
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  training, you go through with it like a PhD psychologist, as a coach, we see us a 70 80%
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  increase in flow on the back end. And the reason I'm telling you all this stuff is the reason you
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  see so many doctors The reason the neurobiology matters so much as we want this liable and
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  repeating over anyone, anywhere. That's the benefit of all the science. And we're also really
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  big fans of the collective of what I like to call cognitive literacy. If you are interested in V
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  performance, understand what's going on in your brain in your body, when you're actually
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  performing at your best. You're just I'm just arming you with information, right? Like, it's
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  really important to us. And you can actually, it's also fun to teach people neuroscience, because
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  most people think neuroscience is an incredibly difficult thing that they're never going to be
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  able to learn and it's scary and all that stuff. And so it's very empowering to people not only
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  like when you start, you know, hey, this is how your brain works. And people start getting it
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  using neuroscience, this thing that they didn't think they could learn to actually massively
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  improve their performance on a day to day basis. It's a very sort of empowering to watch people go,
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  Oh, my God, I can learn something like this. And I can use it. And I can, you know, impact by day to
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  day life. It's cool. When I came into flow signs, my goal was to put it on a hard science footing.
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  This is what I wanted to do with my life. Because I came in as a journalist, I didn't specialize
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  when I first started looking at the puzzle. And people were having trouble solving. And I was
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  like, that's because the answers are in all these different disciplines. And scientists don't talk
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  to one another. They're like everybody else, they're balkanized in their disciplines, and
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  people don't actually realize how like even neuroscience how balkanized it is into like tiny
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  micro disciplines, and they don't talk to each other, they talk to journalists, who talk to
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  everybody, or, you know, now in our approach, we take a very multidisciplinary approach to
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  neuroscience for this very reason, because I want people from all these different disciplines, so
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  people who don't think like me, people who have wildly outside perspectives, who can, you know,
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  come hammer on my ideas, our ideas, and our research and all that stuff. So long answer.
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  Stephanie Maas: You commented on something in there, I think is super true. You mentioned the
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  idea of this biology, neuroscience. You know, some people just have fears around it. I think a lot of
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  it's intimidation, you know, it just seems so foreign. It's almost like it's so language. So
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  specifically, when you talk about, hey, getting our biology to work for us, not against us, can
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  you put some legs under that table for me.
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  Steven Kotler: Let me give you a bunch of really simple examples. So flow states have triggers,
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  preconditions that lead in more flow, you will more flow in your life triggers or your toolkit,
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  there are 26 known triggers, there are probably way more, that's just what we've discovered. So
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  far, they all have one thing calm, flow can only show up when all of our attention is in the right
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  here, the right now on the task at hand. That's what all the triggers do. They were a bunch of
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  different ways neurobiologically, but they drive our attention into the now on to the task at hand.
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  So this tells you that one of the first triggers the most obvious trigger is complete
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  concentration. So when we train this, some of how we teach people about concentration is manicuring.
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  The environment, part of our biology is that we have a salience detection system, when novelty
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  shows up in the world, we notice it, right, this kept us alive. The problem is, we have cell phones
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  that are literally designed to abuse this, right. They've been built, designed to resemble slot
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  machines and how they try to get your attention. They use novelty to try to get your attention. We
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  are not more powerful than this is hardwired biology, we're not going to win that fight. So we
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  teach people to practice distraction management, turn everything off ahead of time, right? Manicure
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  the space because you're not your biology is going to win, you're not going to win this war, you
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  literally are not going to win this war. How long should you completely concentrate on the task at
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  hand? There's another question, right? And there's an actual precise answer to this. You gotta start
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  by starting right. If you can get 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, it's fine. And let me
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  emphasize something here. When we talk about flow is peak performance. One of the things that goes
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  through the roof is productivity. And we know this so McKinsey giant business consultancy went around
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  the globe, they spent 10 years trying to figure out how much more productive executives are in
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  flow than out of flow, on average was 500% more productive. So this means you get to work on
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  Mondays, but Monday in a flow state to Tuesday through Friday off, you get as much done as your
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  steady state peers two days a week in flow old days, which is difficult, but you're 1,000% more
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  productive than the competition's huge boost in productivity, okay. So you will get time back for
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  your life by I've manicuring a space for complete concentration. I'm asking you for time, we're all
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  busy, right? Everybody is busy, you're gonna end up being so productive in this time that you'll
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  end up with getting time back. But research shows that you want 90 minutes to 110 minutes for
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  complete concentration. Why 90 To 110 minutes? Well, it turns out, as I said, you want to start
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  by starting, you get 10, if you can get 20. But the brain has a built in focusing slot, that's
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  nine out of 10 minutes long. Well, that's weird. No, it's not. Why because we know we go through
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  sleep cycles, sleeping cycles, they're 90 to 110 minutes long, that's a REM cycle, that's a full
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  sleep cycle, just like we have a sleep cycle, we have a focus wake alert cycle, it's the same line.
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  So it turns out that as you train yourself to kind of focus and Biller, it's very easy to build up to
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  this 19 or 20 minutes, you have to get longer, there's all kinds of stuff you have to kind of
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  sort of do to extend beyond that. But to learn how to focus that long, it sort of built in. So these
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  are just simple flow examples of getting our biology work for us, rather than against us.
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  Another one is you want to start your work session, your complete concentration session. And
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  of course, with your circadian rhythms. This is a no Duff for most people. But like, I wake up at
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  four o'clock in the morning, that's when my brain does its best work. I'm married to a night owl,
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  we're all a little bit different. And if you can, if your job permits it, you want to start your
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  work session in accordance with your circadian rhythms, practicing distraction management on the
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  front end, and with this 90 minute slot.
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  Stephanie Maas: Fantastic examples and super relevant, which brings me to another thought. And
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  I think based on your tenure in this industry, it seems like please correct me if I'm wrong, it
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  seems like in the beginning, there was so much of this studied around especially athletes, you know,
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  really getting them to get to the next level. And then I would say over the last 30 years, maybe...
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  Steven Kotler: It was athletes, and it was artists, and the fault lies with both myself and
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  were probably the two great popularizers of flow ideas. And Mike checks me I started out as an
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  studying rock climbers in his initial study group, and he dancers and artists. And so that got into
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  the literature. And then I made it worse because I wrote it on about athletes and flow. And when we
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  heard about it the most, it was also, like Jimmie Johnson in the 90s co opted chicks and the idea to
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  bring the Dallas Cowboys a couple of Super Bowl victories and got a lot of attention. A couple
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  other things happen in sports. So like, it got the attention. But you're absolutely right. In fact,
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  if you go back to the early research on flow, early research, who gets the most flow? In the
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  early research, there were two things that showed up. One most common flow state on Earth is reading
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  period. So reading is the most conflict in earth. And let me give it let me take it a second one
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  because this is even crazier. Is it going to the bathroom? No. Flow examples, these will say, like
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  I meet people on you know about airports, they're like, oh, yeah, the executive director, the flow
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  research collective, we're obviously an organization of plumbers. So okay, bad joke is
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  side. Second most common flow said in this early research, I don't know if it's still true. So
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  there's two versions of the flow, there's individual flow me and a flow state you and a flow
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  state or this group flow, it's a shared collective virtual flow state could be interpersonal flow to
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  people lost in a great conversation, group flow to flow fourth quarter comeback in basketball, or
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  football, or a great rock concert band is totally comes together, or Communitas. This is flow, it
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  scales huge when you go to a rock concert, and everybody merges with the music near all clapping
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  and sank. And that's Communitas. Right? It's float scale. So the most common besides reading is
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  interpersonal flow to middle managers in an office environment, have a conversation at work, they get
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  so sucked into the conversation that a couple hours go by. So neither of those examples, as you
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  can imagine, involve artists or athletes. And it was so hard until we got a language around into
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  that all the neurobiology until all this stuff came up. You know, whose flow mystical experience
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  was. I mean, that was the first question. I looked at it my very first book on flow. I was talking to
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  surfers, and they kept saying yeah, every time I'm in a tube, I become one with the ocean. I just one
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  with the ocean, which like, that just sounds like a wild ass Misool experience. And today we can
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  talk about these things out loud. Go back to the 80s and 90s and try talking about like, among
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  serious people, right? You're just gonna get laughed out of the room. But Dr. Andrew Newberg,
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  my first mentor had just done the very first brain imaging to image Tibetan Buddhists and Franciscan
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  nuns during ecstatic meditation when they felt the nones would feel one with Jesus and the Buddhists
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  were one with the universe. And I called him because I saw his research I registration was
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  like, dude, am I what we're seeing with the surfers in this like state that I think we're
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  calling flow is that the same thing is going on? And he to his amazing credit, said, Well, I don't
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  know, but it sure sounds similar. So let's find out together. And that was my sort of gateway. It
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  wasn't just that I was curious about this and I was working on this stuff he was that one of the
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  best neuroscientists in the world said, I don't know. But that's a good question. And I'll help
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  you figure it out. And so that was sort of how all this started. But it was really in the beginning,
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  it was really complicated to try to be looking at mystical experiences, are we looking at biological
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  experiences, or the psychological of what's going on? Not all these were questions that were have
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  been answered over the past 30 years, but 30 years ago, when I got started, we didn't have a clue. As
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  to scientists, we spent the 90s. With a whole community of people, we had to prove that
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  spiritual experiences were good for people before anybody would take this seriously. So there's all
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  these studies that go back to the 90s that discovered religious affiliation produces health
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  and longevity. And you know, now we know why and where that comes from, and everything else. But
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  literally, like there's tons of studies where you had to in the 90s, you act before anybody size
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  would take it seriously had to prove that like spirituality, mysticism, immune flow was good for
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  people before you even take it seriously. So it's been a long, slow kind of process.
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  Stephanie Maas: But I think what is so great, though, yes, but your process to it, and the way
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  you've done your research, legitimizes it. And I think that's where you get this buy in? I mean,
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  one, I think human curiosity, people start looking for it.
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  Steven Kotler: It was also really important to me, you can't do peak performance without flow you
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  cannot like, so if you're at the top of your field, I don't care what your field is, if your
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  top 30%, for example, you're doing this stuff, like I've spent my career around the world with
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  the most exceptional, extraordinary people who've done the impossible, right? That was my focus as a
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  journalist, is those moments in time where impossible game possible? How did it happen? Flow
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  is always part of the equation. So I bet all these people who have done the extraordinary, none of
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  them, not any of them started out extraordinary. Scary. I like you and me. They're average people,
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  what they figured out is how their biology work. And they did it over and over and over and over
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  again. And across the boards across the boards. This is true with every everybody I've met. And I
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  say that I went out of my way, for three and a half decades to meet the most extraordinary people
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  on the planet. It was my job. And so I did it for a living for a really long time. Who are you? What
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  did you do? How did you do it? I started to realize I was like, Well, wait a minute, these
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  people are just like us. So I want I want flow, I want to bring it into the mainstream. I want
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  everybody to have access to this. Because a world where we're all performing at our best. The other
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  thing they said of this is when we're in flow state automatically expands empathy and
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  environmental awareness. We could talk about why that happens if you want, but so do I really care
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  if insurance broker number 99 are salesman or saleswoman number 237 is really better at their
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  job? Not a ton. But do I really think the world is better place if they're more empathetic and wise
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  and environmentally aware? Yes. So like, my trade is like, every wants flow, you can have it I want
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  a more apathetic, environmentally aware, wise world. And so to me, like my desire to break into
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  the mainstream is not about performance, it was more about but the mainstream also, I'm interested
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  in what people can do, right? Like, these are just ordinary people who did extraordinary things in
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  their life over and over and over, because they understood how flow work and how to get into this
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  state, and how to utilize the properties, some of the other components of peak performance. So I'm
• 18:41
  always interested in that when I meet people, I'm always like, Okay, well, what's possible in your
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  life? What could you what might you be able to do? So flow makes us 500% more productive, it doubles
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  learning rates to soldiers in flow. This is studies done by the US Department of Defense,
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  learn to enter 40 to 500% faster than normal creativity, we did some of this work that it's not
• 19:02
  Harvard University is Sydney, spikes 400 to 700%. Depending on how you're measuring that you've got
• 19:07
  to stop and ask yourself, like, what kind of impossible challenges aren't you going after? What
• 19:13
  would you go after, if you could be 500% more productive if you cut learning times and a half or
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  600%, more creative? And innovative? Those are huge numbers. I think that that's those are real
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  questions. So just scientifically accurate questions that we add. That's what the science,
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  performance is possible for all of us. So those are the questions that you have to sort of start
• 19:33
  to ask yourself that I'm real to you or to me, it's really exciting and fun. And when I said when
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  I said I wanted to smuggle this stuff into the mainstream, I want empathy. I want environmental
• 19:43
  awareness. I want wisdom, but I also want to see what everybody can do with this stuff. I mean,
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  really tired of meeting people who are dead before they're dead, really bugs me. I always tell people
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  like look, aging is sort of a fact of life old is a mindset and for biologic reasons that mindset
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  sets up in October. Want ease, and it has a massive impact on performance and our ability to
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  access flow on all this stuff. And so anything that I can do to explode those ideas and make us
• 20:10
  make people understand how much more they're actually capable of, to me, that's good. That's
• 20:15
  fun. I like that.
• 20:15
  Stephanie Maas: Yeah. Do you mind I want to give you my dad's phone number, would you give him a
• 20:19
  call and talk to him about this age as a mindset, guess what he's getting for Christmas, your book?
• 20:25
  I just want to comment on one thing, and there's something I think that is so human to what you
• 20:29
  just said, because I heard in the beginning some of your journey of how and why and this and that,
• 20:35
  but it's such an incredibly lovely side to you. Yes, you do want to see what people are capable
• 20:42
  of. But I want to see more empathy and environmental awareness to me. And I think to a
• 20:48
  lot of us, that's your why then that's lovely.
• 20:52
  Steven Kotler: Well, that's I animals have always been my wife, my wife and I run a dog sanctuary to
• 20:56
  hospice care for dogs now for 20 years.
• 20:58
  Stephanie Maas: But you obviously care about humans, too. Yeah. I'm pretty introverted. And I'm
• 21:04
  like, I did you make a living off trying to make people better?
• 21:10
  Steven Kotler: No, and I do I do. I, I don't like people as much as people think. All right. I don't
• 21:15
  I don't I like animals much more than I like people I'm really open about that. I find it very
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  difficult to convince people that like, ecosystems are more important than their needs, which is a
• 21:26
  lot of the job. But if I can get you into flow, the states sort of start to do that automatically.
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  That's easier. This sales job or out environmental awareness is too hard. It's too big of a lift,
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  I've been tried for 40 years, you should end up shouting at the rain. So I've sticky This is the
• 21:41
  backdoor.
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  Stephanie Maas: But that's great. By making people better. You get your end goal
• 21:45
  Steven Kotler: By making people better, they become better, right? Like, you want peak
• 21:49
  performance. That's cool. I want to see what you do with the peak performance. Because if I'm just
• 21:54
  training you up in flows, you can like sell more widgets in your you know, widget sale light, like,
• 21:59
  okay, really, I mean, like, I'm interested in like, not blow my frickin mind when I started
• 22:04
  this. The other thing that's really important here, Stephanie. So when I started out my career,
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  I was interested in neuroscience, I was interested in peak performance, I started an action sports,
• 22:15
  right. And I was living in these communities. And this was during the 90s, the 90s, and action
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  sports and surfing, skiing, rock climbing, snowboarding, all of it, it's talked about as like
• 22:25
  the era of possible more impossible feats got accomplished stuff that never been done before. We
• 22:30
  didn't think it was ever gonna be done than ever before. But I was in these communities. I was
• 22:35
  seeing it firsthand, talking to them, flow was always in the mix of like how they did it, right.
• 22:40
  But he was these people. So if you know anything at all about peak performance, or how do you raise
• 22:45
  a good kid, right, forget the right what matters. Well, Mom matters, nature inviter good
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  environment, the right schools, the right blood, all that stuff matters. And yet everybody I knew
• 22:55
  these acts were athletes like that in the communities I was in. They came from broken homes,
• 23:00
  they had bad childhoods, they have very little money, it very little education, there's a lot of
• 23:05
  risk taking these communities, there's much substance abuse. And normally you put those things
• 23:10
  together in a community, people die young go to jail, they do not reinvent what's possible for the
• 23:16
  human species. And that's what I was seeing a fraud an in person all the time. So when I say
• 23:21
  that anybody can use flow to do the extraordinary. I'm not like talking about I'm talking about the
• 23:26
  people who started so far. You know what I mean? before they ever you hear a lot about people
• 23:31
  talking about how people started second base with third base, these people were starting so far
• 23:36
  beyond what before hopefully, it was a miracle that they even got an app that and yet it was
• 23:41
  these people who reinvented what was possible for our species. And that was what really caught me.
• 23:46
  In fact, actually, what I've discovered over time is, you know, who has a really tough time with
• 23:51
  peak performance. It's not people who are really, really poor people who don't have a lot of
• 23:56
  education or people who you know, all that stuff. It's folks who had a really easy time in high
• 24:01
  school. If you were really popular if you were naturally smart, or naturally athletic and
• 24:06
  naturally, really pretty in high school was really easy for you. And you didn't actually have to
• 24:11
  learn how to be ready. And like all how to regulate your emotions and do all that stuff.
• 24:16
  Those are the people that are very hard to train in peak performance. Actually, it turns out that
• 24:21
  the more you got your ass kicked earlier on, it's almost it works for you later in life a lot.
• 24:26
  Stephanie Maas: Okay, now I'm gonna have to have you talk to my high school senior. We literally
• 24:31
  were just having the conversation yesterday. That Don't worry, high school sucks. It sucks for most
• 24:36
  people. It's okay. It gets better than this life gets better.
• 24:39
  Steven Kotler: One other thing I wanted to tell you since you have a high school senior because
• 24:43
  this is something nobody tells kids nobody tells anybody. It's so important. So flow states have
• 24:48
  cycles. They're not a binary it's not in the zone out of zones, a four stage cycle and you got to
• 24:53
  move all the way through all four stages to get back into flow. You can't live in a flow state
• 24:58
  there's no permanent always on flow state because the cycle, the front end Have a flow state is
• 25:03
  called struggle. It is a loading phase, you are learning you are loading and overloading the brain
• 25:08
  with information. And here's a couple things that we don't tell our children that are really
• 25:13
  important one, when you're in this struggle phase and this loading phase, frustration is literally
• 25:18
  built into how it works. You will get frustrated by design, you're going to we have working memory
• 25:23
  it holds about four cusps wants to struggle properly, you have to overload it, you're
• 25:27
  literally going to be frustrated. And most people and most kids are taught that frustration is a
• 25:32
  sign that you're doing something wrong. Stop. This is failure. This is an in peak performance
• 25:37
  actually signing, moving in the right direction, you're exactly where you need to be, doesn't feel
• 25:42
  any better. But literally, this is how it's supposed to feel. And we don't teach that to kids.
• 25:47
  And so they get these bad feelings that they think that doing something wrong and being kids. They're
• 25:52
  self conscious, they're like it starts right it does all that other stuff, right? So you end up
• 25:57
  with this spiral off of this negative feeling. And that negative feeling is actually a positive
• 26:02
  feeling. It's a sign that you're moving in the right direction, because it helps us reframe
• 26:07
  frustration. And it turns out, the more we struggle, the more frustrated we are, the better
• 26:11
  chance we actually have of solving the problem in the end and learning the thing we're trying to
• 26:16
  learn the more frustrated, the better. I've what I like to tell people is like take it to the point
• 26:22
  that your head's about to explode in them walk away and just know that that feeling of my head's
• 26:26
  gonna explode. I feel like a failure and it's actually a sign that you're doing exactly what you
• 26:31
  want to do.
• 26:32
  Stephanie Maas: Okay, I know you really are trying too hard to fight this. You're pretty much a humanitarian
• 26:37
  Steven Kotler: Shut up.
• 26:40
  Stephanie Maas: Did you just tell me to shut up?
• 26:43
  Steven Kotler: I said out loud.
• 26:45
  Stephanie Maas: Don't tell anybody, edit this immediately.