you’re telling me your thinking is not better now in conjunction with the chat gbt than it was 3 years ago just working with Google it’s just faster I mean I don’t know is it better that’s not the question the question is Steven Cotler Steven Cutler best-selling author and Peak Performance expert and what does it take for you to be your best when it matters most he is redefining human potential pattern recognition is matching like with like lateral thinking this is our ability to link unlike with unlike we humans are far superior at lateral thinking you tell me that an AI system can’t be as creative as a human being there’s a Revolution going on in our ability to take advantage of our Consciousness and this is before the there’s a the next wave of neurotech as we know that’s BCI that’s brain computer interface it’s a thing now it’s real please keep arms and legs inside the ride at all times
[00:01:00] now that’s a moonshot ladies and gentlemen we’re here today with my dear friend my co-author of abundance Bold and the future is faster than you think and very soon our fourth work together which we’ll talk about very exciting stepen Cotler is a New York Times bestselling author award-winning journalist the executive director of the flow research Collective um one of the world’s leading experts on human performance uh he’s written a number of incredible books The Art of the impossible I love that it’s a great name and as well as stealing fire you got the best names for your books well abundance bold I had some help well hey and then the rise of Superman that’s that’s amazing that was the title that like I had that 10 years before I had the book yeah I just knew I had to write a book with that title because the title was so good it’s and it’s done amazing um you’ve been nominated for three po Sur prises translated into over 50 languages what’s wrong with the other 130 languages out there seriously I mean
[00:02:00] they should really get a clue yeah soon you know what the good news is I’ve been translating into languages I didn’t even know still existed that the funny iar I want to hear your audible book in the click clicking language it’s really true you’re like wow that’s still a language I thought that would away like 20 years ago oh my God uh you’ve appeared in over 110 Publications including academy uh academic journals like Neuroscience biobehavioral reviews and psychophysiology didn’t didn’t that one just hasn’t landed on my doorstep yet and mainstream Publications you would like that psycho Fizz article though it’s interest it’s a weird thing about mindset we can talk about it okay fantastic and you just got published today and we’ll talk about that one too uh but you’ve been in in you know sort of old style media like the New York Times wired Atlantic Monthly Wall Street Journal time and Harvard Business review and along with your wife Joy you run a dog Sanctuary that’s where I first met you you know uh Rancho day
[00:03:02] Chihuahua how many Chihuahua did you have uh at our Peak at one time I think it was 50 something oh my God I could deal with one it’s a hospice care facility we’ve done this work for 18 years and we’ve helped basically 1,200 dogs die wow along the way which um when they’re yapping sometimes I really wish they would any there is that um yeah it’s I mean I will say that when you I know things about grief that you shouldn’t know because it’s such and it’s it’s odd like when you actually have that many laps through the grieving process you start to realize like I think there’s a three-day neurological grief cycle where grief was a mental illness until the 20th century and then they changed it to a psychological condition but I think there’s a three-day G grief cycle where you’re actually crazy like I think that was a legit diagnosis um I’ve wanted to do a lot of work on grief I haven’t done it yet but I will but you will life is long
[00:04:02] uh we’re going to talk about AI we’ll talk about flow we’ll talk about mindsets we’ll talk about uh his research coming up uh you ready yeah let’s do this okay all right fantastic so first of all by the way yeah please keep arms and legs inside the ride at all times uh first of all it’s amazing happy 28 year anniversary thank you uh 28 years do you have a lot of people in your life that you’ve been friends with for 28 years no and I I want to I want to go back to what we were talking about with this uh four days ago which is we were talking about Legacy which is is a is important to you and it’s part of your abundance 360 community and um I think this is true like when I think about what’s impacted my legacy the most if I have a legacy whatever it is it’s it’s my long friendships with creative entrepreneurs without a doubt our friendship my 25 year relationship my editor like that that’s actually the
[00:05:01] B the relationships are the biggest muscle I think in the end yeah um I want to take us back uh it was about when did we publish the Futures faster you think 2020 201 19 2019 it was just before the pandemic like a month before no we were in we were on Fox News you don’t remember this we were on Fox News The Day news leaked out of China that there was a pandemic and do you don’t remember this were odd Fox News and they found out you were a doctor and so they’re asking you all these pandemic questions um we’re trying to talk about the Futures faster than you think but a lot has happened since that we published that and I have a list here like you know we had a pandemic that was that that was a thing uh AI is now a very real thing we’re talking about AI forever uh from from in bold and Futures faster but it’s a thing now it’s real it’s real we’ll talk about that uh my my full self-driving in my Tesla is no longer trying to kill me right it works really well which is by the way knowing
[00:06:00] how you drive probably good thing I mean listen I’m there are many times where it’s like I don’t trust myself uh I’m going to put it on on FSD cuz it’s safer than I am as a driver I’ve ridden with you yeah truth he speaks the truth yeah Starship uh Starship is flying which is amazing amazing amazing yeah um let’s see what else Elon is in the White House sort of yeah I don’t even know what to say there was no predictions on that one um did did Ray even first see that one is that what if no prediction sequence there I I heard yesterday you know this rumor that Jeff Bezos is going to run for president um but that’s a that’s a rumor we’re just starting it right now okay good um and then Bitcoin hits 100,000 yeah pretty amazing yeah uh and we know that not real money well I’m a big Bitcoin believer okay do you only any Bitcoin yes you do okay do you own more no do you want to yeah okay uh and then
[00:07:00] Quantum Computing is sort of materialized that’s the the that’s the one CU I remember like reading I don’t know when David Deutsch’s book on Quantum Computing which is still to this day one of the most confusing books I’ve quum Computing but I want to say it was like the early 90s and I remember maybe I was in grad school just out of grad school and I remember trying to read it and just being so like dazzled by like The Audacity Of The like there’s no way and here we are quantum Computing yeah Hartwood Nan who had Google’s Quantum Labs uh and their Willow uh their Willow chip which has shown with increas with increasing uh cubits uh there is a reduction in error rate and that is that’s amazing wow yeah I mean that’s the that’s the realization and for the first time ever I don’t I don’t know but you and I will be with uh uh with Hart mot in a week’s time yeah we should ask really understand that you know we’re going to be having a conversation on the
[00:08:02] convergence of quantum and Consciousness so uh this is a really weird ass tent transion but uh in neural Dynamics there’s this idea known as the free energy principle it’s essentially the diminishment of uncertainty that the brain is always trying to diminish uncertainty in every situation and one of the questions we’ve been asking a lot and it’s a flow question so the question people have been starting to ask ourselves included is is flow just a human property because it’s a physical systems property too and you see the same Dynamics when you looking at water flowing through pipes and whatever and the question has been is this actually a foundational property of the universe and you could look at if the error rate goes down in Quantum Computing as you add cubits yeah that’s an example of the free energy principle it’s uncertainty being diminished over time and I wonder because the uncertainty principle the free energy principle is a mathematical principle it does it doesn’t have a physical reality but it predicts almost every system in
[00:09:00] the body and like we’ve just extended it today the paper that came out into intuition and flow so it’s really now every system in the body and we’re starting to look at non-physical system everybody Peter here if you’re enjoying this episode please help me get the message of abundance out to the world we’re truly living during the most extraordinary time ever in human history and I want to get this mindset out to everyone please subscribe and follow wherever you get your podcast and turn on notifications so we can let you know when the next episode is being dropped all right back to our episode you know it’s interesting uh the idea that Consciousness is a Quantum phenomenon and that we create Reality by collapsing the the waveform um and until we do that things are in super position so I this is just funny I asked Tony Robbins if he would do a particular project with me and I left him a voice note last night and this morning when I woke up because he does his you know he’s typically up till
[00:10:00] 3: or 4:00 a.m. and I get my voice notes from him at like 3:00 a.m. in the morning um and so this morning we what’s wrong with the Tony Robin’s conference if you can’t stay up all night don’t go and then I I got up at 5: a.m. this morning and I I see his voice note there and I’m like okay the answer to my question is in super position right now oh yeah right and it’s like okay can I Collapse the waveform in the affirmative because it’s it’s there there’s a yes or no in that voice note and it was just a fascinating thought just because you put physics science names on these things doesn’t mean I don’t think you’ve gone completely round the band well hey all you know but what else is new yeah craziness is a good good feature to you’re the guy who but like I’ve learned when when crazy [ __ ] flies out of your mouth believe it cuz 30 years ago you were like no no no we’re going to open the private space Frontier oh all right want to get into the AI of it all um and
[00:11:02] I want to get into it through creativity so you know if I think about your fundamental um abilities what you teach because you teach amazing programs and write amazing books it really is about tapping into creativity INF flow and the question is is AI going to enhance or destroy that and you know I kind of think there’s nothing that AI can’t do in the creative field so I want to have that I want to have that conversation with you I’ve always wanted to um it’s a it’s a first of all it’s a hard question my answer my my my instinctive answer just and I’ll and I’ll back it up with with why I think this might be true my experience with AI has been one I think most people especially creatives right I used see this a lot with whether we’re
[00:12:00] talking about creative entrepreneurs or creative artists um they were told things about AI it’s going to make you more productive it’s going to save you time it’s going to do a bunch of these things and then they start playing with AI even like a large language model and it doesn’t do those things they get disappointed they walk away yet but my point is what it does do is it doesn’t help you do the task more quickly it levels you up too so you can do the task task at a level you can’t normally do so what I see happening is AI seems to be additive on top of creativity and what has always been the case and this is definitely true with large language models so let’s talk about what large language models and writing for a second sure one of the things that’s very difficult with large language models because they work they’re probabilistic so they’re going to the most common the most average the standard is great writing is like 90% of the sentence is exactly what you’d expect and it’s of what chat gbt would come up with but the
[00:13:01] last word in the sentence is going to be something totally unusual really outside of the property field and that’s the one that’s going to land the meaning and the content and elevate it you mean in a when a human writes it when a human writes it like that’s usually how great writing is is like most everything fits your expected pattern and then something breaks the pattern and that’s where when you first of all when you break that pattern the brain notices right so it catches your attention and that’s where meeting comes from large language models are not designed to do that you can loosen the parameters people don’t do this but it’s really fun you can go inside like chat gbt or any of the large language models and tune their accuracy of their predictions so you can get them to be more fanciful or more creative if you want but what it doesn’t tend to do is give you the target asiry of a human with that kind of stuff I love your writing style and um and I think folks should know when we met 28 years ago you were doing a couple of articles on me one for GQ one for Wired and I’ll never forget I’m reading this article that you
[00:14:02] wrote that just got published I think was the GQ article the GQ article and I’m reading and I’m like I literally stopped dead in my tracks as I’m reading and and had an experience I’ve never had which is I stopped and noticed the writing usually when I when I usually when you read something you just read and you take but I like wow that was beautiful and then I read on as like that was beautiful and I was like this guy writes in a way I really love and I remember calling you I assume you remember this and I said Stephen I want to take writing lessons from you and um and that was that was fun was still nowhere near yeah but I want to I want to tell everybody something because this is this is to me the most impressive thing one of the more impressive things about you so I don’t know let’s say I’ve taught 20 friends not many but like 20 friends over the years how to actually really write and really worked with them on it nobody practi pred except you like I
[00:15:00] remember there was a gap between like bold and faster where uh we lost touch for about a year or two and I but I remember when you like came back and we were talking about pitching F you sent me something and I remember reading it I was like holy [ __ ] he’s been practicing like I was so blown away your sentences has gotten so much better and this is the I think that why we’re I think we’re having so much fun writing the new book um is yeah by the way our new book is amazing amazing it’s the it’s the we’ll talk about it later but it’s the follow on uh some 14 years later to abundance the future is better than you think um my working name is age of abundance my working name is we are as Gods yeah so we’re going to figure out which and by the way if you have comments about uh which subtitle which title uh you like put them in the age of abundance or we are as Gods yes um okay anyway uh but or we could arm wrestle for it it’ll take a little
[00:16:01] longer end of the day though uh it’s been a blast writing this book with you and it’s moving so much faster I mean your writing has gotten extraordinarily better I I personally I I I think so much better so much better I there’s I it was the the novel that I just finished right before we started working on our book um it was the first time it was like cuz each of my books is a little bit different written differently mostly cuz I want the challenge like I’ll I’ll write in a particular style and be like okay this is great but if I could get increase the fact density per sentence or whatever it is so everything’s a stretch and sometimes in very radically different directions and then in this last book the novel it all like finally came together I’m 57 years old and finally like all the threads click the waveform collapsed the waveform collapsed and the and what we’re seeing in the new in the new book is that it’s all it’s like 40 years of practice kind of combining and coming together it’s going to be awes it also by the way
[00:17:00] couple things that are worth pointing out here because we’re we’re talking about creativity and we’re both really passionate about Peak Performance Aging in your 50s uh a bunch of cognitive skills turn on for the very first time so it’s cu the two halves of your brain start talking to each other like never before normally they marriage normally they work in opposition sounds like a marriage too nor and but as you around 50 they start talking to each other ided you creativity is what sort of unlocks it but it increases intelligence creativity perspective empathy wisdom which is a measurable psychological trait um so I think part of what I’m part of what we’re seeing is actually the fact that your brain gets better with age I might be self- delusional but I feel like I’m smarter and more capable than I’ve ever been I do too you feel about me yeah yeah I do actually feel that about you oh my God so so here’s my question if I
[00:18:02] were to take your writing um your books and I feed that into uh I’ve tried it feed it into the best language well but the language models have gotten better right you know Gemini 2.0 um and what we’ll be seeing next out of open Ai and out of uh out of the next generational Claud and say okay I want you to notice this uh incredible writing style uh analyze it why it’s different how it’s different there will be a point there’s going to be there’s going to be at which it can and then I’ll say right like that I do believe that AI is going to be able to mimic Steven Cutler’s extraordinary writing style um and I’m just curious how do you feel about that I so I think there’s there’s three points one okay so let’s talk about why I believe and I’ve said this a lot and um
[00:19:03] we’ll talk a lot about the alliance later on but you know my new project which is working with creatives one of the things I want to do is train them up in AI um so they don’t feel threatened so they don’t feel threatened so they don’t lose their jobs so they can continue to build what what I think with AI is it raises the bottom to the middle very easily that’s really true we the data is clearly there it definitely is leveling the playing field and taking your lowest quarter uh percentage operating employees or whatever and bringing them up to standard so what I think is also happening but it’s a lot harder to measure or I haven’t seen anybody try to measure it is in the same way the bottom is being lifted to the middle the top is being lifted far higher and not like far far higher I haven’t seen that data oh no I haven’t seen that data either I don’t think anybody’s looking at it but I guarantee you that’s what’s happening because just give you you’re telling me your thinking
[00:20:00] is not better now in conjunction with chat gbt than it was three years ago just working with Google it’s it’s just faster yes it’s faster I mean I don’t know is it better um I would have to do a lot of Googling to be able to get sort of the the Corpus of knowledge I can get out of uh gemini or or chat GPT um when I ask it a question like help me think about the different dimensions of this or help me understand how I might uh you know uh structure this this so let me let me answer your question from a just a psychological neurobiological perspective C gbt all all the AIS is General they’re pattern recognition system that’s what they are and uh pattern recognition is like with like it’s matching like with like and it’s finding closer flung connections AI is going to be better at than humans already is probably lateral thinking is outside the box thinking it’s the thing that mainly gets amp implified and flow
[00:21:00] this is our ability to link unlike with unlike it’s really far-flung connections between very very different things which it’s which is where Innovation comes from which is where Innovation comes from we humans are far superior at lateral thinking in fact most AIS are literally designed not to do that they’re designed they’re convergent thinkers they’re not Divergent thinkers you can play with it and you can as I said you can get inside Chet jbt and muck around and try to get it to think more laterally and it it it’s it’s like you have to experiment with let me take you let me take you forward right you think that ability is going to come on I listen at the end of the day um if Elon is correct in his extrapolation and you know I disagree with Elon on many things I understand but you know this doesn’t come from just him it comes from a multitude of people and one of the conversations here in 2025 is have we achieved AGI what the hell is Agi in the first place it’s a blurry line but artificial general
[00:22:01] intelligence and then how many generations are we away uh from an iterative improvement that gets us to digital super intelligence so are you telling me that okay maybe let’s say it’s not a billionfold better um or even a millionfold but a thousand times better right you’re telling me that an AI system that is a thousand times better can’t be as creative in every discipline as a human being that’s not the question the answer to that is yes probably the question is is that AI going to be more creative without a human in the chain or with a human in the chain if you put the AI That’s a thousand times smarter than me versus me working with let me let me tell you let me tell you the data just came out so um this is a few months old now i’ I’ve talked about this uh along with selem Ismael on my episode WTF just happened in Tech um there was a study
[00:23:02] done in which an AI chatbot uh a physician on their own was given data to analyze a medical condition or number medical conditions and they hit something like 75% correct when they partnered with an AI chatbot they got like 80% correct but the AI chatbot on its own without the human in the loop was at like 95% correct but that’s again convergent thinking diagnosis it’s not Divergent thinking so yes for sure okay um I one I think that humans in the chain are going to be smarter than just the II alone two it doesn’t even it to me it’s a nonsensical question because creativity is so fundamental to human health and well-being I don’t think we’re going to abandon it everybody is under this idea that like suddenly the technolog is going to show
[00:24:00] up so we’re going to totally change how we’re wired on the it doesn’t work we’re not exactly our neurobiology in particular our hormones our neurotransmitters right which which is an area that you have mastered an understanding of um so I have so many ways to go here one of my biggest concerns I I was up at Stanford giving a talk on this is that if Ai and humanoid robotics make our living so so automatical so easy so automatic and we no longer are challenged where we no longer have difficulties to overcome uh are we able to survive as humans mean certainly with flow with you know flow states have triggers and the most important one is the challenge skills balance right we drop into flow when the challenge whatever task we’re doing is like four or five% greater than our skill set we stretch and that focuses our attention and drives dopamine into the system and blah blah
[00:25:01] blah drives us into flow that’s fundamental hard riding and we can’t like the the data on Flow at this point happiness well-being meaning overall life satisfaction purpose all those things that we’re going to need no matter wasn’t like really one of the things that we’re looking at in the new book right is how do you sustain those things in an autom magical world yeah um I like to me first of all I’m already seeing it like made by humans is like a tag you know what I mean like in fact uh the new novel I thought for a while that I was going to uh publish it as stepen Cotler and friends and with parenthesis under it made by humans just how about St Cotler and human friends and human friends we could do that uh so have we discussed the universe 25 experiment no I don’t know so this was in the 60s in New York uh a well-known psychologist basically builds a um a luxurious
[00:26:00] habitat for rats okay uh you know something that was was massive and you can see the images if you Google Universe 25 and there was going to be as much food as they wanted as much uh nesting space as they wanted as much area to go and they put it they start with four breeding Pairs and they put them in Universe 25 and they started breeding and living loving life and uh you watch as as at the end of this process um they die out the entire population of riots die out because there’s no challenge because there’s no challenge there is and we can go into it more detail we probably will in age of abundance um we are as we are as Gods yes anyway uh and it’s fascinating and I think about that if if all of a sudden as a creative everything you wanted to do was doable
[00:27:02] um by the snap of a finger uh the joy of of writing the joy of art the joy of building a company the joy of whatever uh becomes far less and I’m I’m trying to understand how we deal with that because we all know if you enter a video game and the video game is too hard you give up um if you the video game is too easy you give up it’s got to be just in The Sweet Spot just in that sweet spot five% yeah and I I’m wondering if at the end of the day when there is this incredible digital super intelligence and humanoid Robotics and Automation and we live in what we talked about is a a technological socialism where technolog is taking care of you not the state um whether we revert to Virtual Worlds where always that level of is just the right level so one I like I’ve said for
[00:28:02] a while that the The Singularity I’m paying the most attention to is when VR gets to the point that it can produce the full Suite of a when we can have more pleasurable more exciting more interesting experiences inside the simulation than in reality do we migrate into Virtual Worlds has been the question I’ve been asking for a while and VR of all the texts we’ve been looking at it’s the one that seems to be lagging the most at least um but AI will enable it I agree with that I mean this is this the answer to F’s Paradox uh that’s an interesting question which is you know fous Paradox for those who don’t know is uh the notion of where is all the alien life we should even in a slow replication and travel rate they should be here by now right somebody should contacted us and and and the question of you know there’s a whole bunch of media right now that in fact they have contacted us it’s been the last 50 years since World War I I
[00:29:00] love a recent conversation I had with somebody where we saw a flurry of uh of of UFO sightings when the nuclear bomb was being created right oh wow and now we’re seeing a flurry of UFO sightings sightings when AI is on the exponential rise so are the are the aliens here to make sure we don’t destroy ourselves in these these inflection points in human societ helping us along here have nuclear power here have ai we’re coming for your plan in a second but we don’t have to do the hard work of killing you you guys are going to do it for us um it uh I’m not going to go down that rabbit hole I’m G to avoid that rabbit um I still the so there’s there’s a handful of questions here one is we seem to think and technology is some kind of incredibly Unstoppable Force where we don’t make decisions afterwards like once the it’s out of the
[00:30:00] box and that’s what I’ve said before is and we’re seeing this and we’re doing it right now as a society social media broke the world and it broke the world because it’s a massively addictive technology that was sprung on the world without like we didn’t know it had all the negative effects and blah blah blah um now it’s 20 years later and we’re saying oh no wait a minute maybe it’s not a good idea for her kids to be on social media all the time maybe we need to rethink how we interact with this particular tool I think that’s going to happen with AI I think that’s that’s what happens when we when our technology starts to exceed our cap capacities in that way I think we come to a point where we’re like we’re humans we can make a decision here to not engage I think you’re going to start seeing AI free countries I think you’re going to start seeing technology countries where they’re like no no we’re we’re good with the technology here we’re going to we’re going to stop we’re going to draw the line there I think these kinds of changes are going to start coming so you
[00:31:00] gave me some numbers last night when we were hanging out having dinner uh about the size of the creative economy um and as we’re talking about Ai and creativity could you recount those yeah so so here’s this it’s interesting um if you’re looking like if you’re interested in sort of impacting your bottom line what like which where should you skill up and I would I would Crea a flow would be my answer and so the creative economy omy has uh tripled in size in the past 15 years so that uh and you’re defining creative economy okay so yeah let me let’s back this up so usually when you think about this you think about urban planner and Economist Richard Florida who wrote The Rise of the creative classes and he had two categories of creatives in there there were professional creatives and the super creative core Super Creative core are folks like us they’re creative entrepreneurs creative artists creative writers these people who are venting culture and inventing the future and
[00:32:00] creative professionals are things like you’re a doctor you’re an accountant you’re and you’re trying to bring in novelty and and new techniques and be creative inside the discipline um and those are the two classes when you look at um both of them they both exploded the super creative core had went from like 100 million people to 300 million people it the numbers in America are it’s a trillion dollar economy and it’s interesting because adob state of create study adobe’s done a bunch of really great studies like once every five years they do a global study on creativity they’re phenomenal studies and they’ve started them back in the 2000s their 2016 study they found that creatives and people who use creativity in their work out earn non-c creatives by 13% it’s uh in America it’s a trillion dollar economy globally it’s like a$3 trillion doll economy or 3.2 trillion dollar economy so it’s a big chunk in America it’s like 4.5% of the GDP comes comes out of creativity so it and it’s
[00:33:00] the fastest growing sector and for good reason back in 2010 IBM did a very famous study of CEOs and they wanted to know what’s the quality in the 21st century that will most help a CEO Thrive creativity top the list there was a more recent study couple years ago that looked at the same question they came back with analytical thinking problem solving and creativity and I will tell you that like that redundant because really good cre analytical thinking is creative really good uh problem solving is creative so the whole thing is essentially creativity and creative problem solving so the qu bring you bringing you back to AI then if AI is a creativity enhancing tool um which which can take people who are not part of the creative Community um into the creative ecosystem um the question is is the value in terms of
[00:34:02] earning power in terms of being in business um going to demonetizes the number of creatives that’s an interesting question here let me go back to your AI creativity first of all let me give you creativity is technically defined as the uh creation of Novel and useful ideas and the useful is important because it’s not just enough to have something cool idea in their head you actually have to put it in the world you have to show it to other people you got to so there’s risk Tak taking involved in the creative process also at the end of it when we look at creativity one of the things so we’re going to I I know we’re both interested in this when we look at the progress in AI people are looking at it as if uh it was separate from progress in Consciousness hacking Technologies also on the human side of the equation so it’s not just that we’re augmenting the machines the humans are being augmented if you think about so 20 let’s just talk about flow and creativity so uh my old organization the flow Genome Project did a a big
[00:35:03] study with uh CEO leaders we wanted to know how much more productive they or creative they were in flow McKenzie had did this really famous study of CEO leaders and found they were 500% more productive inflow it was like a 10e study went around the globe talk to tons of people self-reported so you always got to like bring and how long what percentage of their working life are they in flow a small fraction no it’s it’s an open that’s an open question that I’ll hold on let me just let me get there uh creativity we found people on average were 700% more creative that’s what they reported and we were like God that number is crazy so creativity can be broken down this psychologist named Mumford did it into eight categories problem identification all the way through like solution implementation and we measured though we tried to measure those independently in flow we found that each of those eight categories increases by 40 to 60% so every breaking it down and which starts to add towards those big numbers my point when 30 years
[00:36:03] ago when the AI conversation started humans were trying to use psychology to train people into flow and the classic example I always give is uh Mii chent meh High The Godfather flow psychology wrote a book called flow and sports where he worked with a top uh sports psychologist and they tried to use the psychology of flow to train up top athletes and they sucked at it they’re bad like it’s I mean books and print you can see their hit rate is terrible with the flow research Collective with our core flow training zero to dangerous we’ put by the way another name I love Z to dangerous 15,000 people in 160 countries 28 Industries have taken that class on average we see a 73.8% increase in by the way you know that 62.4% of people make up stats on the spot on the spot I’m not making the stat up um you can find it on our website and the data um but uh my point is if you’re 700% more productive in in flow or more creative in flow and we’ve
[00:37:01] taken it from we don’t know how to train this at all to oh no it’s reliable it’s repeatable and that’s a 73% increase in the amount of time spent in flow so usually when people come to us they’re like no I get into flow maybe once twice a week and by the time they’re done it’s twice a day and it’s pretty it’s pretty steady and consistent that and and this is like lowy we haven’t even started adding in all the there’s a Revolution and what you could call for lack of a better term Consciousness raising technology right we saw the first wave we like meditation apps and things like that uh the second wave so for example I have a new partnership with vital nuro they make a phenomenal EG headset and it’s a neuro feedback e is that why you shave your hair like exactly it’s exactly right um but I’ve been watching this is like portable EEG Tech like I’ve been Ling with this stuff since the early 2000s and in the early 2000s like I’ve got
[00:38:01] every single portable EG device that’s ever made I’ve got a cool display of it um they were terrible now they’re portable they work and one of the reasons we partnered with them is we identified uh my lab identified like five or six neural markers for flow was we transitioned to Flow State that nobody had ever been able to find before and when this was three years ago and three years ago we were like trying to figure out can we measure me this can we you know blah blah blah we needed fmis and it was half million dollars to do the experiment we couldn’t even do it they can now measure it with this freaking Port three years later and the same signal that we couldn’t get it with fmri we can now get it here and you know what you just had Mary Lee Jepson on we’ve just interviewed her talked to her her technology takes us further so my point is AI is evolving humans and our ability there’s a Revolution going on in our ability to take advantage of our consciousness this is before the there’s a the next wave of neurotech as we know
[00:39:02] that’s BCI that’s brain computer interface and that takes it to a whole other level so it’s not humans aren’t static in this picture that’s the thing that people forget when they have the AI conversation they’re like AI is exploding I’m like all right great but you’re 700% more creative in flow and that’s gone from this rare state to something that’s reliable I can imagine uh having my AI let’s call it Jarvis for lack of a better where did that word come from I don’t know Stephen constantly makes fun of me because in every one of our books every one of our books J has I love Jarvis I mean I think we’re gonna I’ll find a way to get Jarvis into we are as Gods okay that’s great right after we write age of abundance age of abundance um so uh maybe let’s just call it Jarvis 2.0 let [ __ ] it uh so listen I I can imagine if I have Jarvis on yeah um and I say maximize me in flow that it will be able to do things as an AI to basically
[00:40:00] continuously tip me into flow oh so all the cool stuff the most of the cool stuff that because we’re doing a lot of work we have um a humans I my belief is that humans and flow collaborating with each other and AI are going to own the future and is this going to be true 50 years from now 30 years from now I don’t know but is it going to be true for the next 10 to 15 years absolutely for sure um and I think it’ll be true for a lot longer but I definitely think it’s going to be true for this next period period and a lot of what we’re doing we have a fully dedicated research line here it’s all on interface design how do you what’s the flowi interface what’s the best way to work with an AI to produ because one I’ll give you something that’s really wild that never used to happen so in that challenge skills Sweet Spot have to do with your physical appearance or just gonna leave it alone just gonna leave it alone I don’t even know what I was saying anymore so something that happened something really wild about Ai and
[00:41:00] flow oh I’m so sorry I took you off the game it was going to be the most insightful thing I’ve ever said in fact I was it was like solving for pie and you just screwed it up sorry people I was going to solve for pie here and it we so the question is you know you’ve described the Flow State as intensely human um as an intensely human stage it’s well Mamon because and insects get into flow when birds flocking so it’s actually uh it’s older School fish schooling back to Jarvis I can imagine Jarvis is oh interface design that’s what we’re talking about yeah so almost everything oh this is this is one that I was going to tell you about so and that challenge skill sweet spot right anxiety is the upper level so if you overload cognitive load right your brain can hold seven items at once in working memory but that’s digits if you go to something like Concepts most people tap out at three or four right this is why I always say which is amazingly amazing to tiny
[00:42:01] bottle I mean people don’t get the the brain takes in if you go by Marvin Zimmerman’s calculations and they’re probably way off it’s 11 million bits of information from our senses every second that’s what they they count it believe it or not our bandwidth of human attention is 120 bits yeah you’re using 60 bits of attention to listen to me talk if we’re talking together and there’s a faucet dripping I’m not noticing it everybody’s tapped out this is the whole basis of cognitive bias yeah so one of the things that you’ve noticed we talked about it a second ago it used to take you with Google right to get to over I want I’ve got an answer to a question I need I need as much data as I possibly can get you could really spend like a couple hours doing your research until you filled up your brain and like pushed yourself into anxiety that challenge skill sweet spot with chat gbt or any of the AI systems you can get such accurate information you can overload cognitive load in five minutes yeah like and I’ve it where I’m researching something and I’m 10 minutes
[00:43:00] in and I’ve literally like blown out my brain for most of the day but then you can go to the llm and say can you please pull out the five most important Concepts that are through you know you can use that as a sorting mechanism yes um but going back I I do imagine that Jarvis can do things changing music uh changing uh difficulties challenging me that can hit flow triggers and we’ll talk about flow triggers later that that can push me into a flow let me read you a quote from Naval renant who’s a CEO of angelist he recently said in an interview this whole idea that we can somehow make AI safe is nonsense because creativity by its nature is unbounded um what are your thoughts about the coming AGI you know ASI wave and safety there do you have any preconceived no that’s a good that’s a good point he’s making by the way um I mean this this is the whole example
[00:44:01] of Deep Mind with go right where it comes up with moves you’ve never seen before 27 right that was the the move that Lee SEL had never seen before and and this notion that in uh in AI in our world and you know you and I are the ultimate optimists but I can imagine AI in our world doing things that has never been seen or conceived of before and creating some fundamental challenges for us for sure I mean what technology hasn’t created fundamental challenges for us um I to me it’s um so and this is going back to we are as gods or age of abundance whatever you want to call it and I’ve said this for a really long time and this is one of the things we’re going to look at in that book is I think we have a last mile problem on the road to abundance and it’s we’ve got the technology to raise Global standards of living and we’ve had it for a while right we could we could do this it was a done deal probably when we
[00:45:01] wrote abundance if we wanted to apply ourselves and definitely now but we’re not applying ourselves so what what why is that we have the technology to literally raise Global standards of living and it’s not happening and it’s because we haven’t figured out well let’s just say it has been happening just not at a fast enough rate not at a fast enough rate exactly and I think the problem is that we haven’t learned how to cooperate at scale the only time we cooperate at scale globally around problems is if there’s a war and the success right there Isn’t So Good or a pandemic and again the success right like we cooperated for the what the first month of the pandemic to get us to vaccines and then everybody sort of splint it off and you know everyone in their own ways um I think that’s the and group flow which is the Cooperative version of is I think going to the basis of that solution or part of that solution or at least a way in to look at the question and I’ve maintained this for a while but when I look at AI I’m like what we need to start doing is whatever he saying we need to have these Global conversations otherwise the
[00:46:00] generation we lose to AI I think it’s going to be worse than the generation we lose to social social media right it’s people this this is by the way this was back in the 90s when early days of you know I my field is Alter States Of Consciousness so psychedelic research has always been part of that and you looked at the drug war and things like that and we everybody was very much for legalization what the Portugal experiment sort of that writing was on the wall a while ago people were looking at and going God that might be the way and what was the Portugal exp Portugal Portugal has completely decriminalized everything everything is legal in Portugal and their drug problem continues drop better than Las Vegas drop and drop and drop and drop so like you know their problems actually gone away with this happening um so it Portugal’s been a very like radical but interesting Global experiment in that and um one of the one of the points I think is we were always worried that if you legalize drugs you could lose a
[00:47:00] generation right because there’s a generation that hasn’t prepared to like deal with these super addictive substances that are going to be in their lives suddenly the same like with social media that’s another Super addictive substance that we were not prepared to deal with I think AI like I I think we have to start getting a little ahead of these things I don’t think we can speak plank from behind but you know the human brain it deals with the now and the immediate next moment in which case I think we’re going to have a bumpy next 20 years but AI can deal with the long-term we can partner and say what are the long-term issues it’s just that you know it’s the TR yeah isn’t everybody I mean we’re most people when they have sort of dire predictions it’s about this period right maybe that’s just because we’re naive and we’ve got a recency bias and we’re not thinking too far into the future and we’re bad long-term planners any of those things um or you know how do you freestyle from a creative super intelligence like how do you think pass that so one of the questions is how do
[00:48:01] we how how do we train up the AI you know I’m fond of MOA Do’s work in which he says listen be kind to the AI be kind yeah AI is our progyny right how we feed it how we train it how we educate it is the difference between Clark Kent you know uh I forget his name from from Crypton but that young baby landing on Earth and becoming Superman because he landed in a good family was taught values and virtues and and became a superhero versus Landing in a drug Den in the Bronx and becoming a super villain right so that AI can go either directions depending upon how it’s trained up you know Elon said I want to make uh train xai grock to be maximally curious and maximally Truth seeking which sounds reasonably um sounds reibly dangerous like
[00:49:01] everything in does no no I think no if you said maximally creative that would be dangerous okay you maximally curious maximally curious um to gather knowledge about what I mean his goal is that if you’re sufficiently curious you’re going to determine uh the truth you’re going to determine um the fundamentals you’ll understand uh first principles what’s going on and maximally Truth seeking means you’re going to learn to avoid the cognitive biases out there you know one of the things I’m I’m excited about is the notion that AI could become maximally wise have we had this conversation yeah we have and I agree with you on that I think it’s really super interesting I like the other question is and this is the one that like why can’t we use AI to help us steer us so we don’t blow ourselves up with the AI and I think we will
[00:50:00] eventually but only when it has becomes a digital super intelligence and this was the conversation at the abundance Summit last year which was would you rather live in a world a decade from now with digital super intelligence like at a billionfold increased level of intelligence or without that capability I for one would much rather live in a world where this digital super intelligence at this Godlike abilities is there to help us because we humans are still animalistic in all of our Natures we make stupid decisions all these cognitive biases you know we are we are short-term thinkers and a digital super intelligence almost like in a parental fashion is there if you know if the head of some large country says I want to you know says to his AI let’s go destroy that country over there um at some level of wisdom
[00:51:02] the AI says that’s a ridiculous thing to do uh why would you want to do that you know I’m just going to talk to the other Ai and we’re going to work out a collaboration um and I do think that that is a a viable end State it’s the interim stages between now and then that’s the of the greatest concern um how would you train up an AI do you have any sense from your work that’s an interesting question I mean there’s as a mob’s three laws of robotics right there’s you know maximal kindness but at the end of the day kindness in some circumstances means weakness which could mean you know making the wrong decisions that maximizes what was Spock’s statement in in Star Trek for you know the good of the one cannot supersede the good of of the many like that all yeah said the good it all um I have to think back to
[00:52:00] my Star Trek for I only see them just so I can talk to you about I appreciate that um yeah the they’re they’re remarkably the training nobody’s asked me the training AI question before I’m going to think about that you’re training people you’re training you know uh meat sacks all the time all the time yeah yeah so how would you how would you train an AI the the interesting question is I mean you’re asking essentially like a question about leadership right that also how do you how can a human lead in a world because I mean I think you’re one of the points you made is uh is part of it is we’re not just looking at one AI we’re looking at millions of AIS possibly you know billions if everybody ends up with their individual AI like if we end up with a personal tutor right the Neil Stevenson Diamond age idea that we we both love yeah both love I’ve talked about in education for a really long time that AI
[00:53:02] is going to be with you for your whole life so everybody’s going to have you know my Jarvis my version of J your version of Jarvis so um it’s really a question of like Cooperative Ai and Cooperative Humanity it’s not just a singular concept I don’t think I still don’t have any any ideas um maybe the next novel will be a crack at that one I I really think that that you should think about that I’m going to think about that I’m not kidding I think maybe uh maybe the next sci-fi book is going to be around how do you do that all right my next question for you buddy um how will the development of AI creative capabilities impact research in neuroscience and creativity so I’d like you if you don’t mind because I every time you you speak about this it’s like uh it’s like biotech porn um what’s going on in the brain what’s the dance of the neurochem talk about creativity um so this is really interesting the difference so one
[00:54:01] creativity is a trainable skill so everything I’m talking about like this is a developmental process as you become more creative this is what happens in the brain but I’m going to speak about it as if it was a fixed thing but I’m not it’s a but by the way the fact that you’re making that statement I think is really important having a creative mindset and we’ll talk about mindsets right like I am being first of all saying to yourself that you’re a creative person like a lot of people say I’m not creative and they shut it down and once you shut it down yes you’re not cre creative absolutely so it’s important people to realize that it is it’s an innately human skill we’re all born with it and I mean and you’ll hear about it neurobiologically yeah so this is what’s Wild um if you’re just looking at sort of male and female for example the differences between and this people ask this all the time with flow are the differences between men and women and flow are and everybody wants those
[00:55:01] differences to be really great and they’re not they’re microscopic like if you look at the brains between men and women men have more interhemispheric connectivity and women have more connectivity between the hemispheres um but those are not absolutes and they can they could they vary brains are creatives so we have an executive attention Network this allows me to I’m focusing on Peter I’m blocking in out all the other distractions I’m paying attention that’s the executive attention Network I wish my kids would activate that it doesn’t stop fully formed until they’re 25 it takes a while it’s it’s tradable um and then we have the default mode Network and uh which gets a bad R because it’s rumination lives there self-referential thinking lives there but so does creativity and you say the network name again default mode Network it’s where your brain goes when it’s mind wandering daydreaming mode imagin living in the now when you’re not living in the now when your when your brain’s taking you somewhere and rumination is
[00:56:00] when the instead of like your brain taking you into creativity it just think about that shitty thing your wife said to you and it you just play it over and over that’s all defa mode Network normally most brains these networks work in opposition can you shut down the default sure meditation that’s one I mean among other things like that’s one of the main things you’re doing um they work in opposition so as executive attention goes up right you’re focused you’re no longer daydreaming we all so you start mean you’re not focused they go up and down this way and it’s actually the the sence network which is if I do this and you what’s that sound that’s the sence network it switches between the two that’s that’s what does it so in the brains of creatives normally this this is opposition they work together so literally these networks are co-activated all of them no the default mode Network and the executive attention they’re co-activated and the sence network which is the hinge in creative is this is what really really happens is it gets extra flexible
[00:57:00] so you can flop back and forth and back and forth so you can go from fully focused to thinking about an idea and wildly fully focused right I see I can see that that’s sort of what happens like when you’re writing right part of the process of learning how to write is this process of learning to toggle between I need to be focused putting the words in a sentence and oh no I got to come up with the next line right and it’s this back and forth in the brain and it gets very very flexible in the brains of creatives and flow tends to enhance this communication it shuts down nonrelevant structures but even the default mode Network which really gets turned off and flow except for the part of it that’s used in creativity so um we see really Stark differences in the brains of creatives versus non-c creatives um in a really in a really big way it’s almost like the changes in a creative brain are I don’t know if I can make this statement across the board might not be a blanket statement but like somebody who’s been addicted to Coke for or drugs for 20 years versus
[00:58:02] the creative brain no the creative brain actually has more difference than that like it’s really uh it’s really profound and you can see it you can see it on fmis and you can you can see it on EEG network analysis of the brain um super interesting and um can you go into a little bit about dopamine and and the neurotransmitters the next side of this is the neurotransmitters that are involved in it and um dubine and norepinephrine which are show up Arise at the front end of a flow State these are all pleasure drugs and both doine and norepinephrine are focusing chemicals norepinephrine is just it’s adrenaline in the brain right noradrenaline is what they call it in Europe we call it norepinephrine it’s essentially adrenaline in the brain um but both these are reward chemicals but the cool thing they do from a creative perspective is they hide and focus and excitement and attention you know when they’re in your system you can’t not pay attention to something right you see something amazing you see something a demonstration that’s
[00:59:00] fascinating you hear something makes when I’m wri when you’re WR when I’m writing a a cliffhanger Story We T when I teach writing we talk about norepinephrine closes um right like that’s what like that’s what gets you page exactly or um and dopamine is the same thing but you get tend to get dopamine from Surprise instead of excitement and but the point is that both of those neurochemicals this is so this is interesting flow creativity is flow trigger when you link ideas together pattern recognition the brain releases dopamine little bit of nor a lot of dopamine it’s fasc I can remember moments in time where like if when I was in class and the teacher is trying to teach me something there’s a moment where you don’t get it and you’re lost and a moment you go oh that’s what’s going on and that that’s that aha moment like uh my uh my colleagues John Coos and Mark Mark bman map the aha moment like we know exactly where it is how it happens
[01:00:00] um and it’s really we’re we’ll talk a lot about my favorite part of the brand the anterior singing cortex in a second because that’s where a lot of this is living but anyway you have a big one don’t you I do so glad you noticed um once again you killed me so dopamine so dop up andron with so by the way the dop every’s had this experience you a cross puzzle Sudoku would that little rush of pleasure you get when an answers right so I mean that’s that’s what is driving video game addictions right so check this out because this is another example you know like if you’ve ever done cross puzzles you don’t tend to just get one answer at a time you usually they come in flurries like you get two or three in a row why is that it’s because when you get an answer right the brand puts dop me into your system DOP mean Titan Focus does all that other stuff it enhances signal the noise ratios so we find more signal than the noise we notice more patterns why are we more creative in
[01:01:00] flow one of the main reasons is because dopamine and norepinephrine both have massively Amplified pattern recognition now obviously you get this you take this too high and you get conspiracy theorists and extreme paranoia it’s the same it’s the same knob right it goes from creativity all the way up into conspiracy theories are just linking really disparate ideas together in really creative ways and rationalizing them and rationalizing them it I mean I mean that’s what the brain does it’s a meaning making machine it will take all kind crazy stuff well but that’s the point with the conspiracy theories it’s not only a meaning making machine when we understand meaning we feel safer the brain is trying to come like link together those really important point there it’s really important we’re always the we’re I always say humans are really simple toys at a really basic level approach avoid Vance and arousal those four knobs can control like those are the four knobs that control your life yeah uh other neurochemicals uh in
[01:02:03] creativity anandamide same psychoactive that’s in marijuana um it’s in the endoc canabo system right which is a sort of a second immune system and a stress response system um that massively amplifies lateral thinking the other thing that happens especially if you’re talking about flow in creativity um our sense of self turns off and flow it’s a uh we’ve talked about this before but it’s the same reason time passes strangely in flow both time and our sense of self are network effects there are a bunch of different parts most of the prefrontal cortex sometimes other stuff is working and in flow the brain performs an efficiency exchange it wants as much energy as it can have for focus and attention so it shuts down non-critical structures and repurposes the energy huge portions of your prefrontal cortex go down in flow and as a result we lose our ability to track time so past present and future get
[01:03:00] pushed together into what poets talk about as you know the Eternal now right the moment the Deep now is psychological I had that experience I remember I I was speaking somewhere and I was asked extemporaneously to speak about Singularity or technology or whatever it was and I remember I got the mic and had no idea I was going to say and I went into a flow State and I was like observing myself saying things that I really liked and it was it was the strangest experience strange experience it was it was like I that was an anchor for me of what a flow State felt like every every time me public speaking right is one of those flowy experiences on Earth do you ever if you have a good speech do you have any idea what you said on stage like I’ll get to the end of the speech and I’ll be like am I done what the what just what you know what I mean and it’s fairly it’s fairly common
[01:04:01] cuz you know speaking is really flowy it’s got lot of flow triggers built in I’ve done it a lot so like you know I at this point I don’t I don’t yeah I don’t stress about it you go on stage and see whatever materializes materializes you know my favorite part is at the end of giving a PowerPoint keynote is a Q&A oh yeah right because these questions are coming at me and I’ve heard like almost every question asked but when a new question comes oh it’s so exciting it is exciting and I have to I have to pull together like this data point and this data point and come up and it’s like that was a pretty good answer no I got to tell you something it’s because the flow stuff I’ve done this for so long I can if you ask me to speak for 20 minutes yes I know what question they’re is going to be my first question my second if you ask me for 40 minutes I know the first question the second question cuz it’s just like everybody wants to know the next bit of information I’ve done the 60-minute version of the so I know you know in the 90-minute version and it’s really funny how that happens but I’m
[01:05:00] always excited that’s the great stuff when somebody you know asks you something that kicks your head sideways and you’re like wow I have no idea like my friend Peter asked me how I was going to train an AI today I don’t know but you’re going to figure it out I’m going to figure it out yeah it about 13 years ago I had my two kids my two boys and I remember at that moment in time I made a decision to double down on my health uh without question I wanted to see their kids their grand grand kids and really you know during this extraordinary time where the space Frontier and Ai and crypto is all exploding it was like the most exciting time ever to be alive and I made a decision to double down on my health and I’ve done that in three key areas the first is going every year for a fountain upload you know Fountain is one of the most advanced Diagnostics in Therapeutics companies I go there upload myself digitize myself about 200 gabt of data that the AI system is able to look at to catch disease at Inception you know look
[01:06:01] for any cardiovascular any cancer any neurod degenerative disease any metabolic disease these things are all going on all the time and you can prevent them if you can find them at Inception so super important so Fountain is one of my keys I make that available to the CEOs of all my companies my family members cuz you know health is in New Wealth uh but beyond that uh we are a collect of 40 trillion human cells and about another 100 trillion bacterial cells fungi V and we you know don’t understand how that impacts us and so I use a company and a product called viome and viome uh has a technology called metatranscriptomics it was actually developed uh in New Mexico the same place where the nuclear bomb was developed as a biod defense weapon and their technology is able to help you understand what’s going on in your body to understand which bacteria are
[01:07:01] producing which proteins and as a consequence of that what foods are your superfoods that are best for you to eat or what foods should you avoid right what’s going on in your oral microbiome so I use their testing to understand my Foods understand my medicines understand my supplements and viome really helps me understand from a biological and data standpoint what’s best for me and then finally you know feeling good being intelligent moving well is critical but looking good when you look yourself in the mirror saying you know I feel great about life is so important right and so a product I use every day twice a day is called one skin developed by four incredible PhD women that found this 10 amino acid peptide it’s able to zap scile cells in your skin and really help you stay youthful in your look and appearance so for me these are three
[01:08:01] Technologies I love and I use all the time uh I’ll have my team linked to those in the show notes down below please check them out anyway hope you enjoyed that now back to the episode what should entrepreneurs be focused on in this new Aid Driven Landscape to ensure they develop the right skills how do you think about that I mean you’re teaching a group of different entrepreneurs uh we’re so um and I’m I’m blending a bunch of things together also I I like I’m using AI also to teach people how to like work with bias and mindset and framing um also woven into that program um because to me it’s all coupled together but we can get into that I just I don’t think before we forget we forgot about the interior the ASC um what do you call it singular singulate cortex oh the interior singulate cortex okay yeah let’s go there I want to understand your favorite part of your brain let’s go there so the ACC is really interesting
[01:09:02] because it’s the part of your brain that does pattern recognition versus lateral thinking so it decides you’re facing a problem is it going to be super creative and come up with this wild solution or is it going to give me safe tried and true and the lever is actually anxiety the more anxiety in your system safe the more you want the safe secure tried and true this is why I always tell people uh for hiring you always hire two people you hire the person they are normally and the person they are when they’re afraid and they’re radically different people and it’s because of the ACC and I always in hiring I try to like in there’s always a trial period if you want to come work with me and I will stress you out in that trial period in such a way because I want to see how you’re going to be when you’re scared and you’re failing um cuz you’re we’re going to be in that situation I’m an entrepreneur shit’s going to go wrong you’re not going to need you to be able to be at your creative best and stay calm and do all that stuff for years I
[01:10:01] like to hire action sport athletes Prof professional acction sport athletes um for this very reason because they’re used to staying very calm in making good decision in in extreme situations same thing with hiring out of the military get the same thing yeah um going back to so a lot of folks who are listening or watching us right now are entrepreneurs and I think there’s no entrepreneur on the planet that isn’t diving deep into AI right now in some way shape or form right it may just be I’m seeing three I’ve see three Trends I see the trend with like a lot of creatives were just they’re just like [ __ ] this I want nothing to do with it it they were told it was going to make them more productive or blah blah blah and they tried it it didn’t work their way they thought and they’ve walked away there’s a second group um and this is uh and this is I fit into this category and it’s one of the reasons I’m creating the alliance is to solve this problem for myself also is I’m like I like to really
[01:11:01] get great with my tools so when I taught myself how to draw for the first year and a half I just drew in charcoal then I added in ink like black ink and it’s now right it’s now like four years I know so like I do the same thing with AI I’m really great with ch gbt and some of the large language models I’m okay with some of the drawing programs but you get into the audio and the video stuff and I suck I mean I’m I’m right I’ve got a handful of tools I’m good at and and then there’s people like you know our friend uh Mike kanic who like every new AI tool that comes out Mike has figured out how do you use it how do you monetize it how do you you know use it to problem solve for you how do you blend with other AIS that’s what I think um it’s a gap right because the more we get towards like a super intelligent AI you’re just going to have one system now you have a whole bunch of different tools you have to learn and it’s it’s a little more complicated and this is for
[01:12:01] my mind where the creativity and I’m sorry the Curiosity mindset comes in that’s yeah I was exactly what I was about to say my experience with all of it my advice and this is what I was told to do and I came to I didn’t come to AI through all this stuff I came in as a scientist we’ve been using machine learning and a whole bunch of stuff in flow research for 20 years now um so I came in thinking how do we use machine learning how do we use AI to help us do better science and then moved it into other things but I think you have to people are so intimidated or so they’ve made up their mind that they forget that the simplest thing to do is this is what somebody told to me they were like they don’t go prompt this play with the [ __ ] system just get on the system it’s free play yes ask the system to teach you to teach you how to use the system and I just the same approach one of the coolest one of the reasons I like teaching myself to draw I think everybody so one micro doing with
[01:13:00] creativity between tasks is what do you micro do with M with creativity so I will I’ll be focused on my book right and then I’ve got a meeting and I’ve got a five minute block yeah if you’re in flow you don’t want your prefrontal cortex to turn back on right so what do you need to avoid anything emotional anything that’ll get your ego fired up because the ego lives right there so all social media is is no good cuz it’s probably going to get a rise out of you or do something and mess with that system so there’s limited things a lot of people like low-grade physical activity and sometimes I’ll do that I’ll go for a walk or things like that but I like like a 10-minute drawing thing or or or whatever and what I love and this is the approach I take with AI is no no people don’t run this experiment and it’s fascinating if you do something 10 minutes a day just 10 minutes a day but you do it for a year you’re going to get excellent you’re you’ll still it’s amazing it’s the coolest thing in the world to like I’ve watched so what would you do with what would you do for
[01:14:00] 10 minutes a day that you haven’t been doing right now uh the next once I get my drawing to sort of where it wants I’ve got I’ve already got a piano in my office and that’s the next one is I’m going to move into teaching myself how to play music um and yes I know pretty soon the AI is going to be able to do it for me and everything else but I still believe that by training up my skills and training up my Consciousness raising skills at the same time me working with AI is going to be better than without like the the combination the combination is going to be better and I I still think like what you’ve been asking is Hey Stephen I’m really really [ __ ] smart and I cooperate with AI at what point is the AI going to replace me right at what point is the AI going to be better than just Peter and the AI together stepen and the AI together and I’m hoping the answer is not in our lifetime that’s what I’m hoping the answer is oo I have a hard time believing I have a hard time believing it too I think a the challenge is we
[01:15:01] humans have all these cognitive biases we have a limited font of knowledge we bias the output um that an AI I want to talk about this for half a second we do all those things but people don’t understand that so let’s back into creativity for a second sure creativity is a combinatory process right the brain takes a novel information connects it to older is it burs something Starling new so we already talked about the fact that you got you’re taking 11 million bits a second but you’re only like getting 120 bits and we’ve talked about the negativity bias that means nine negative bits of information for every one positive bit that gets through and most of the negative stuff is older patterns it’s other it’s Fierce right we’re scared of it because we’ve seen it before and it’s gone wrong so it’s not new information it’s not the stuff that feeds creativity right one of the reasons that I like a gratitude ractice is so helpful is it’ll tune it down to like five or six negative bits for every
[01:16:00] positive bit that gets through so it basically doubles your novelty input um but those if you want to mess around with those things people don’t realize this yes bias is unconscious our frames are often unconscious though you can make them conscious and um mindset from a lot of people it’s unconscious unless somebody like you or me has made it conscious for them right right so but people don’t realize these are knobs these are tuning knobs you can control the novelty the information you’re taking in by messing with bias and Framing and mind what I remind people of is listen our brains are large language models they’re neural Nets yes and how do you train a neuronet by showing it repeated data after data after data so that the connections that are made um reflect the data and uh if you know let’s talk about mindsets you know I talk about an abundance mindset an exponential mindset
[01:17:01] a moonshop mindset you know a a a longevity mindset gratitude mindset curiosity mindset are the ones that I care about and a purpose-driven mindset most of all and I think about the notion that people can train those mindsets by selectively choosing who they hang out with what they read what they listen to what they watch all of that is data coming into your 100 billion neurons 100 trillion synaptic connections that is forming the neural connections um and that’s massively powerful um it’s jump into mindsets for a moment um and I want to just talk about something you and I have discussed a lot which is uh uh basically U the notion that we have a default negative uh fear and scarcity Mind by the way ACC this part of the brain we were talking about before yes this is exactly where like the scarcity mindset
[01:18:01] is going to do its most damage because literally by having the scarcity mindset you’re telling your brain give me logical give me safe give me secure give me something that’s worked a million times before that’s what you’re saying to your brain you’re basically keeping your brain in hunter gatherer mode it doesn’t matter that you’re living in the 21st century if that scarcity mindset that fear-based mindset you’re keeping your brain how does the ACC relate to the amydala um it’s direct it’s it’s connected so it it it directly F it’s it’s the amigdala is the next connection down basically and but and for those who don’t know the amigdala is an almond siiz piece of the brain two of them two of yeah that everything you see hear and feel all the data you collect goes to the magdala it’s your early warning center we talked about that in abundance so we’ve got a challenge which is people quickly fall fall into a doom mindset around AI yeah and it by the way I like the
[01:19:01] Curiosity monster is your cure here because like until you play with it it’s scary once you start playing with it you’re like oh wow I see how this is working I see how this is augmenting what I can do I see the things that were frustrating me earlier I don’t think those frustrations have yet gone away but you start figuring out what the system is good at what it’s not good at how it you know what it can do what it can’t do I mean I was laughing about the conversation I had with your wife last night where we were talking about like how do you get one of these drawing programs to render a person far in the distance yeah um and you know there’s a lot of like really basic stuff like that that still doesn’t work um I didn’t really answer your question it’s okay but let’s talk about the mindset side of the equation here because uh I think the point you just made that you can tune your mindset is I want everybody to get that that message well think so I want to want want to back up because this is almost funny so like a
[01:20:02] lot of my net knowledge came out of I don’t I I want to say it was in faster when we were writing faster together um you had the full name is future is faster future is faster than you think when we were writing that by the way I’m still pissed that the publisher had us changed the name from convergence convergence should have been convergence I mean it was AB abundance bold convergence the ABCs with just I’m with you still so I don’t want the publisher to drive the name of our next book no of course not of course not okay by the way whatever power you think you have in the world publish a book and find out how little it really is but uh the so five years ago six years ago when we started having the the mindset uh thing I this was around the time people were talking about a bunch of different mindsets I thought it was [ __ ] I was like okay I know there’s a growth mindset and a fixed mindset and there’s like neur you can see neurobiological differences between the
[01:21:00] two and I kind of figured the scarcity mindset was going to be a hyperactive amydala and a a you know a unactive ACC because that made sense but I didn’t think these other things turns out they’re all real like they’re they’re neurological phenomenon I was wrong you were totally right let me say that again I was wrong you were totally right we could open the episode with that way think you should because I mean what is this the first time in 30 years uh um but that these mindsets exist and you can real their neurobiological phenomenon and you can train them and it’s like as you like thinking it’s information coming in connecting it to older ideas we’ve already about talking about training up the pattern recognition system like you’re literally if you the thing that I always point out to people is if you don’t learn to play your brain your brain’s going to play you right like you can’t it’s one way or the other either you’re going to be kind of driving or it’s it’s going to do the
[01:22:00] driving and I like left to my own devices it’s bad up here as a general rule it’s bad up here like one of the reason I got into the flow work and all the work I do is because under normal conditions not safe and um how much Have you listened to ea to’s uh work of The Power of Now and so I mean I’ve I know it and all of it you have to remember that I was living in monasteries and I’ve been meditating since 1986 daily have you figured out yet um no I still have like in fact by tell funny story about meditation I had been meditating for 20 years okay 25 years friends of mine uh built a neurom marketing company uh they were doing movie trailers and they bought an fmri they bought a three Chi f it was down in San Diego and I went and they had done a bunch of work with meditating monks and Budd buddh monks and Franciscan nuns and things like that and I made them put me in the fmri to brain image me while I
[01:23:00] was Med so sure I was doing it wrong so I was like I don’t know I’ve been doing this for 20 years and like nothing I mean like like oh I mean I can yes I can focus and I can chat for eight hours a time and I can sit in the full Lotus for a couple hours a time and whatever but like where are the fireworks that every and I was so sure I was doing it wrong like I got out of that like no Stephen you brain like he showed it to me my brain looked exactly like long-term monks cuzz I’ve been meditating that point5 years hair looks like the hair also part of the equation yeah so I like it turns out I’m doing it right oh congratulations yeah so I mean when I came to like all that stuff with eer toia and whatever I was like well yeah I mean okay yeah you’re just saying the same thing people have been saying for a very long time what I what is really exciting to me now though is and people don’t even think about this when I started this work in the 90s there were a bunch of us Rick doblin was who founded was advocating for psychedelics Richie Davidson uh and Dan Goldman uh and I was at the University Wisconsin
[01:24:00] Richie was at University wiconsin uh with starting in on meditation my mentor Dr Andrew Newberg was looking at like stranger spiritual and mystical experiences speaking in tongues and that we were all interested in Altered States Consciousness different things in the brain from different angles and you couldn’t even do this research like you could like you couldn’t get funding we had to prove we I was just talking about this with Andy Newberg we had to spend like 1990 to 1996 almost everybody in this field we had to prove that religion was good for you what that was literally the F the it was the W that was the wedge issue everything we’re looking at in the Consciousness Revolution nobody remembers this but after Skinner you couldn’t talk about Consciousness at all you couldn’t even bring it up out loud Kristoff who were going to be within a couple of a couple of weeks was the I he he was the first person to stand up and talk about it out loud and he could do it because he partnered with cra who invented the you know discovered DNA and you couldn’t because of that you couldn’t mess with him so that was sort
[01:25:01] of that was the wedge issue into Consciousness but it was spirituality is good for you we had to prove that spirituality was good for you it was health benefits right kept because people who go to church there’s pro-social neurochemistry there maybe there’s stuff from spirituality but there’s a bunch of stuff and we had to prove that was good for you and then scientists were like oh okay religion is good for you we can fund this now the National Institute of Health suddenly got involved in all that stuff this that was our wedge issue it was the the dumb we literally the whole field spent like six years trying to prove that this stuff was good for you just so we could get funding to do the kind of the basic research that we wanted to really do which is oh no meditation is good for you and flow is good for you and psychedelics are really useful tools for treating X Y and Z do you remember that movie Altered States sure love that so I I that was the John ly story done camine in a in a sensory deprivation take no I haven’t but I mean don’t you want to yes
[01:26:01] very much so very much so John you know he nearly drowned doing that his wife had to bring him revive him at one point because he it didn’t go so well but yes I would love to do that we’ll put straps in place I just we need minders but yes like we’re going to get a float tank and we’re going to try camine in a float tank and redo and when we wake up would you do would you do ketamine there or that’s what John ly was doing that altered stes was actually based on ketamine he was doing ketamine um and I think the reason is uh is duration right because D DMT it might be a more interesting experience but it’s really going to be fast and K I mean at least you get you know a n with an a good IV push you can get 90 minutes of weirdness all right um by the way this is Peter and Stephen on a national podcast making plan you were the first person ever to speak to me about DMT um and I was just so fascinated you
[01:27:00] you told me about basically people on a DMT Journey going and experiencing alien yeah it was the original Rick gosman’s that was Rick’s original work which the University of Mexico um when he was doing interus yeah it was it was continuous IV continuous IV DMT and it wasn’t they weren’t getting like was this the god molecule it was the god molecule I read no the god molecule was uh um vmat 2 vmat 2 that is the oh that was the god Gene no maybe the god molecule is DMT right vmat 2 is the god Gene people who have V the vmat 2 Gene turns out this was uh this was another thing that came out same era the 199s things we had to prove to do the work we’re doing Dean Hammer who’s the NIH found vmat 2 which is a which is a gene that codes for norepinephrine dopamine and I want to say serotonin but I may the third one may be wrong but anyways all the molecules that show up in your system when you’re having spiritual experiences mytical experiences flow States all that stuff there’s a very
[01:28:01] specific so he called it the god Gene he was also the guy wait wait so so people who have this Gene are more likely to have they are more likely to have spiritual experiences because they produce more dopamine norepinephrine and I want to say it’s serotonin so they have higher Baseline neurochemical levels um and they have more deeper spiritual mystical Altered States experiences fascinating um but the god molecule that was Rick and he was doing and they the alien stuff was interesting right because it was they were in a hospital and they instead of getting like the machine Elves and the sort of the things that are much more standard in the DMT literature they were people were literally like seeing gray man and having you know experiments performed on them and it was sort of a horrific like you read about the original work in the hospital you’re like well it tells you everything you need to know about setting setting right but setting it matters a lot a lot I want to go into cognitive biases for a moment because I think it’s it’s really important and then and then work into your most recent
[01:29:01] work um we wrote about this and you introduced me to cognitive biases uh first these are your cognitive biases this is your bias against Stephen no this no I learned about cognitive biases when back in 2010 we started writing abundance AB yeah yeah um and they’re really incredibly important for people to realize and that we you know the brain as you said is deluged by information and our ability to process the information is through a very thin straw and so our brains evolved these heris discs these shortcuts right and there’s like a familiarity bias like you know well common sense I mean that’s the most right common sense is when it works right that’s that’s not a cognitive bias but that’s a Uris for how do you process a fuckload of information really really quickly and make an intelligence decision if it works it’s called common sense when your decision doesn’t work it was your confirmation bias or your recency bias or there’s if you go to Wikipedia at this point or the DSM
[01:30:01] there’s like 500 600 crazy it’s crazy really weird names but the ones that are people should realize is there is a recency bias like you hear our podcast conversation now we say something that perhaps contradicts something you heard a month ago or a year ago you’re likely to believe what we are telling you now um or there’s a familiarity bias which is when someone looks like you dresses like you speaks like you you’re tending to give higher value to that person and then there’s this negativity bias which is the crisis News Network you know that you’re you value negative information far more than positive information and and these are um they’re dangerous in one regard because they can trick you into making really stupid decisions yeah I mean racism massage all these things are essentially the same version these are biases right and it’s the same sort of information processing
[01:31:02] uh issue it the thing I want to back up one step to idea that we talked about before because it’s just so important to me which is you are not you don’t have to be the victim of your brain these are all like yes you have all these biases but you can train them down significantly and um and by the way one of the we both of us do this all the time one of the best uses of AI at this point is help me see past my biases what am I not looking at I can’t wait for for AI to you know again if you think about Jarvis uh as the example where it’s on your body in your body it’s around you all the time it is your your constant coach right and you can eventually turn on and say you know Jarvis uh turn on cognitive bias alert and it will have heard everything you’ve ever seen you’re going to give I
[01:32:00] think personally you’re going to give your AI permission to read all your emails listen to your conversations well one of the big one of the biggest problems with the AI systems right now is their memories aren’t but we’ve gotten we’ve gotten to Long context memories we’re there now we’re there now okay and so you’ll be able you know you will hear a piece of data um and start making a decision and your AI able to say to you listen your cognitive biases are driving you in this direction but in reality you heard this and this and this let’s talk about it yeah I think again like it’s that’s um it’s why I’m training people you like we’re TR I’m training creativity with AI I just want to skill creatives up so they’re no longer scared and these are the these are the tools and some of the whizbang stuff that where you can do like it’s really easy to get under the hood on chat gbt at the front end and like tune fil Nobody Does that but it’s really it’s a really simple dashboard and there’s a lot of power there
[01:33:00] especially for for these kinds of things but I I think that’s a really um it’s huge it’s also um frames which are what you know they’re very frames are very local um and uh you know the the the CL the framing isn’t is mindsets are are more durational and frames are essentially like when you’re building up your abundance mindset right do you do that is by reframing yes Moment by moment basis constantly for the Abundant frame and eventually when it becomes a little more unconscious we call it a mindset right and when it becomes totally deep it becomes a bias or you we don’t have a we don’t have a word for positive biases but that’s it’s really like it starts to the frame that’s fully conscious and goes all the way to quick example is when you’re looking for a parking spot and you have to PL you have to you have to park like three blocks away you can be pissed about that or you can flip it and say oh I get some free exercise I get part of my 10,000 steps
[01:34:01] um I mean that’s that Judo move is is really so here’s something here’s this crazy experiment uh they did at Harvard and they wanted to know what was more effective against anxiety mindfulness breath work or reframing and uh they did a study where they found literally like because anxiety and curiosity and excitement are the same neurochemical they’re all norepinephrine right a little bit is curiosity a little bit more is excitement too much is anxiety right none is boredom right I’m not curious I’m not interested right that’s literally it’s a spectrum and a lot of people don’t realize that that anxiet when you feel anxiety it’s much easier to turn anxiety into excitement than it is to get rid of it really yeah so this was the experiment they did in Harvard when you’re feeling anxious this was the experiment they had people say I’m excited I excited I
[01:35:01] excited three times out loud and it was more effective than seven minutes of breath work and meditation reducing stress level something crazy this is this is the wild one you want to talk about like misogyny and culture and like weird stuff so this they did this experiment about 15 years ago and they found that women in the study group who were over 40 had had no idea what an excitement felt like cuz women were not supposed to get too excited and feel too much emotions so they had repressed excitement so much they didn’t actually realize that when they did this study so there was this whole training for women now that like has to separate anxiety from excitement and be like these are the same like they feel the same but they okay to be excited yeah it’s wild so the point there is culture can come in so heavily you know what I mean and tilt your tilt your brain that you literally can’t even recognize a core emotion that’s crazy crazy buy uh your
[01:36:02] let’s turn to flow and your work uh the flow research Collective is really just blown up you’ve you’ve trained tens of thousands of people uh and you’ve been at some of the biggest companies like Google you’re just at Google um can you can you speak to that a little bit um I think I can’t speak to Google because I think I signed an NDA okay so what do you what do you do when you’re training these uh it’s it’s always so you can get really whizbang about a lot of stuff and there’s there’s a million different things here but it’s very as far as flow training is concerned I always say there’s like five or six what I call the Peak Performance Basics these are like this is all the stuff we know you got to sleep seven eight hours a night flows a high energy state for example so you need that you have to and do you by the way yeah I always sleep 7 what time what time do you go to sleep what time do you wake up I go to sleep somewhere between 8 and 9 and I wake up somewhere between 3 and 4 okay every day me do the math that’s barely seven hours
[01:37:01] yeah that’s about seven and a seven and a half is what I usually come in at um probably seven did you always go to sleep at that time or as you no but I always woke up early so by the way I think that’s an important point I wrote about that in longevity guide book it’s like the only way to maintain a sleep schedule is when you go to sleep cuz your body is likely to wake up at at the same time but when I was in when I was in college graduate school medical school I would do my best work at 1:00 a.m. 2 a.m. and and it switched and it switched yeah it flipped for me yeah it mine I was yeah I was I was probably the same thing though I was also good in the morning I was also good I’m good late at night too right there’s there there’s gaps in between one of the things I always tell people and this is really important it’s really hard in the modern work environment there are extreme locks you and I are extreme locks we get up early that’s when our brain is most awake and most alert most people are on
[01:38:01] the normal work schedule like most people’s brains start to wake up around 8:00 and their Peak concentrations is between 9 and 10 10:30 um and uh then there are night ows I’m married to a night Al so like you know it’s really fun like when Joy what time do Joy go to sleep well if she’s working on a book she’ll start writing at like 4:00 in the afternoon and go to 4 in the morning and she’ll go to sleep when I’m waking up um yeah which is uh complicated I’ll leave it that complicated um the uh so we were talking about the seven things so you began so there you know you well I was going to say is you can’t fight your circadian rhythms like you want to try to work in accordance with your circadian rhythms and the people who get screwed in the modern world that way or the night El right like the The World Isn’t built for them at all um so uh you have you have to basically you have to tune your nervous system every day right and I always tell people if you have five
[01:39:01] minutes do a gratitude list right if you have six minutes read a novel if you have seven minutes do breath 7 to 11 do breath work 11 to 15 or so 20 go for a walk in nature if you’ve got 20 get some ex 20 minutes or or 40 minutes get some exercise um or take a long sauna or like there’s literally like we have a full list of like these are the ways to reboot your nervous system and reboot your brain and everybody wants to say oh I’m too busy and I will tell people that like depending on your anxiety level so if you worked at the flow research Collective during covid right we were a high performance organization training people in high performance and I wanted my team at their best but it was Co and every was it was especially in the beginning every was scared and I said look if you’re going to keep your job at the FL Collective you have to do three of these a day minimum three things to tune up your nervous system a day cuz everybody was so stressed yeah um so I
[01:40:02] was making sure of it but like you you have to do that every day yeah Ariana Huffington will be at abundance 360 uh this March along with you um and uh she’ll be speaking about the work she’s doing and helping employees uh with these small micro nudges through the day including gratitude yeah so but anyway so there’s a bunch of that stuff and then the other things you would train just to answer your question there’s 28 known flow triggers preconditions that lead to more flow there are 12 on the individual side and 16 or so on the group Flow side there there’s a lot of overlap between the triggers but what do I train people in these are the 28 flow triggers and then the only other thing that really matters is flow is not a binary it’s not I’m in the zone or I’m out of the Zone it’s actually a four-stage cycle so you don’t get to live in a permanent Flow State because it doesn’t work that way in the brain it’s a cycle and um some of the stages are very
[01:41:05] unflower oh this is where I am this is where I have to go next this is where I have to go next do you actually think about that oh yeah you think about this is where I am and this is where all the time well I I also so flow is followed or let me do it quickly on the front end of a flow state is a struggle phas unconscious right it’s what happens when you’ve loaded your brain up with a bunch of information and can put it together in a new way and like put it all together so I always uh you have to still on board that stuff consciously right and that’s the struggle phase you’re like throwing [ __ ] on a piece of paper right struggle is always followed by a release phase you have to take your mind off the problem because you’ve been loading the conscious brain it’s you’ve overloaded it and it turns out in struggle and this is work that came out of the uh University of Michigan um Kleen seer’s lab really great work she found that the more frustrated you get like when you’re
[01:42:01] overloading your brain the more frustrated you get the closer you are to actual a real solution and flow so frustration is actually really good in that situation you know it feels really bad but it needs to be followed by a release activity a release activity is a lowgrade physical activity works best to take your mind out the problem and when I say low grade I don’t mean go get a hard workout a walk in nature drunk right um works really really well so the way my schedule is I wake up at 4: I start writing and I write 7:38 um if you and I talk we used 738 in the morning I’ll write from 4:00 a.m. to 7:38 o00 and the minute I’m done writing I take my dog for a hike why because I’ve if I’m in struggle I want to follow by release if I was in flow while I was writing on the back end of a flow State flow’s a high energy State you this it’s got a built-in recovery period so you have to recover on the back end so if I was inflow while I was writing great a walk-in nature is a phenomenal recovery
[01:43:01] activity it’s also phenomenal re Rel activity so a lot of I always say that like ultimately in the end with flow stuff especially with like top performers first of all flow is how everybody performs at their best it’s like this is how humans are hardwired this is what Optimal Performance looks like so most people if you’re in the top 20% of your field top 30% of your you’ve been good you’re good at this anyways I’m not going to come in and totally reboot your life what I with my goal is if I do my job right I’m going to find two or three things that you should start doing two or three things you should stop doing and then two or three things that I want to rearrange your schedule so you’ll do you’re doing the right thing but probably at the wrong time for your neurology this is what’s so great about what we’ve learned over the past 20 years is this is what’s an art of impossible is we have a complete map of cognitive Peak Performance in the brain now we know what it is we know the order of the sequence with like it the data is getting really really robust for training these things I want to just uh mention something that you taught me
[01:44:02] years ago which I want to pass along to everybody listening which is the the greatest writers in the world complete a single finished page per day about a page a day i’ I’ve thought about that a thousand times to was the unlocking so you just for those who are perspect let me tell you the story story is amazing so I was in grad school at Hopkins and I got to study under Steven Dixon he’s a name a lot of people don’t know but he um a very distinguished writer won the national uh book award has done a lot of stuff but at the time I don’t know if it’s still true but at the time he was the most published fiction author in history and COV had the record before him at like 250 things Steven had published 650 short stories novels books like it was the mass massive productivity on top of that he taught at Hopkins so he wasn’t right wasn’t writing fulltime he was teaching and he had a very very very
[01:45:01] sick wife she was in a wheelchair she needed a tremendous amount of care yeah and I remember thinking like how the hell this guy like he’s got a full-time job and he’s got a really sick wife and he’s not rich so he’s not doesn’t have full-time care he’s doing the work how the hell is he so productive and I asked him he said it’s really simple I write a page a day and I edit what I wrote the day before and if you do that 365 days a year you’ve written a book and I was like oh okay you know and so from that point on um I write I mean I write 500 when I’m starting a book it’s 500 Words a day which is about little over a page um I’ll bump it up to like seven or 800 words in the middle because it’s it’s easier and you know more what you’re doing at the end of the book it’s about a thousand words a day but like I published 16 books yeah probably I mean they it this was a bunch of years ago but it they tried to add up something like five million published
[01:46:01] words um was was um and there’s an equal amount of unpublished words right so like um and it’s it’s that formula right so like and I love that and I think about that so when I wake up in the morning where my mind is the clearest and I’ve got the most energy you know the first thing I do when I wake up um and I typically wake up before my alarm is I do a gratitude practice yep it’s like you know you thank you for the amazing day ahead what I can do in this world uh and then I get then I focus on what am I excited about today like what’s like what’s the big thing and this morning it was like spending this time with you and having an awesome conversation and sharing your wisdom with the world and uh it’s that those golden hours in the early earliest and it’s you know well the other there’s another thing let me ask you this question do you find when working on a book and you’re waking up and you’re and you’re writing and you’re focused on that are you happier throughout the day
[01:47:00] than if you’re not uh probably because I feel like I’ve made a significant uh I’m I’m a accomplishment junkie right and so when I feel like I’ve like won the day in the first two hours W but the other thing I think is also that’s equally important that people don’t realize I like to go from bed to desk in under five minutes and the reason is when you wake up so flow if we’re talking about networks brain waves flow takes place on the border between Alpha and Theta Alpha is daydreaming mode Theta is REM sleep or Focus um and uh so the alpha Theta border line by the way that aha moment so that’s always takes place inside a gamma wave gamma is coupled to Theta so you if the brain can’t get to Theta you can’t have an aha Insight so one of the reasons you have more aha insights in flow is because it purchased you on the
[01:48:00] edge in in that data State you’re on the edge of aha insight you’re ready to have a breakthrough but um the alpha Theta borderline uh you wake up in Alpha your brain wakes up in Alpha so as soon as it gets awake alert excited that’s high beta it’s a hard to move back down to to Theta it’s a much slower wave but if you go like bed to desk and immediately drop into flow Focus your attention and start working on something get sucked in it’s easier to drop into flow that way and I find it’s not just that I’m I I used to think it was just the goal stuff like I’m very goal oriented and if I win my day that’s huge but it’s also if I tame my brain right out the gate teach it to focus and don’t let it run wild whip that brain yeah no I mean to me it’s like to me it’s it’s the two it’s the two together and if I can be a little creative in the writing like that’s the res for a
[01:49:00] perfect day amazing amazing you you have done an amazing job I’ll call it your moonshot of putting flow on the the world’s conversation I I will say we have we are now writing the textbook myself my chief science officer and another neuroscientist for the field of Applied performance Neuroscience which is essentially the field that you you know me and a couple a bunch of other people there was no conversations around this none of this it not it didn’t exist so to me like the moonshot I always said my goal was to put flow science in a hard or flow research in a hard science footing like I wanted to bring it into the realm of neurobiology and make it really really real um I didn’t actually realize I was going to end up inventing a field right like that was that was a weird one but but it was it wasn’t just me it was a bunch of us who were thinking about Al States Of Consciousness as tools for performance and You Know It uh get the I want to go back to the psycho Fizz paper because here’s a weird one for mindset but this
[01:50:01] is also R field so this the EOP fist paper released today no this is a year a year ago but I I this is just a great example of Applied performance neuroscience and the weird stuff we’re discovering so we were looking we weren’t this wasn’t a flow flow study it was a mindset study and we wanted to know people who love exercise um what does it look like in their brain versus people who hate exercise and right and we discovered that people who love exercise literally process exercise and all the information in a totally different part of the brain than people who don’t like exercise and I shifted myself well that’s my that was the point I was trying to make is it turns out it works like a mindset and you can shift it and you could so we looked at that I I linked exercise to longevity mhm and what shifted for you I mean you were always but I mean I I remember back well at least in like 20078 like I remember coming to LA and
[01:51:01] going for runs with you on the beach but but this is different now you’re now you love it and you’re into it I’m you know five days a week in the gym with weights and uh it’s part of who I you know you establish this is who I am MH and I’m this because and I’m going to I’m going to win that that arm wrestle we’re going to continue that arm wrestle after for the rest of our uh but this is who I am and uh my longevity mindset fuels that desire for exercise you know I will say the longevity mindset you’ve done such a spectacular job with it I just remember I was I think it was at a Joe polish event I think I was at at his 100K uh last 100K event and Dan Sullivan was there and he was talking about living the I think his number is 154 15 154 yes 154 right is that is that right and I I was like this is Peter this is Peter rotting Dan’s brain no uh but uh it’s really
[01:52:00] um the long livity mindset um I’m interested to see if there’s actual neurobiology underneath it like I’d be be curious to like is it a does it work as a frame or is it actually producing like yeah information but let’s talk about your your next project the alliance the alliance yeah I want to hear hear about it so so what is it what is it offering why are you excited about it so high level let me just start at the beginning because you asked me this question earlier and I didn’t answer it we train you know gazillions of people at this point and I’ve the top tech companies around the world yeah I mean like just meta enture Audi Google ban capital on you know on and on um uh and tens of thousands of people at those events yeah yeah um and uh one of the things and but predominantly knowledge workers right like if you’re at any of those compies High performing knowledge workers and then I have another class I this is sort of like
[01:53:01] just a passion class where I’ve done flow for writers once a year for 10 years I train up writers how to use flow to write better and I I took the private version took the private version right and uh what I started to notice and it was more accidental is if we got super creatives in zero to dangerous didn’t quite work as well it worked but but it wasn’t like the explosions we would get for normal people and if I had knowledge workers and Flo writers it didn’t work as well and it was like and it started me thinking about this is the stuff we were talking about how the creative brain is different how you train Peak Performance in creatives versus non-c creatives is actually almost exactly backwards um so that was the F the first Insight is wo how you train creatives is is different and the second Insight was um I think of myself you know first and foremost as a creative and most of most of the people I know in the world um you
[01:54:00] could be a creative entrepreneur you could be creative scientist creative technologist creative innovator creative artist whatever but they’re all in this category and I started to realize that like both myself and every friend I had almost every conversation it was the same conversations we were all facing overlapping like five overlapping challenges and I was in incredibly well suited to help people with some of them so one there was just the one of the biggest differences between professional between creatives and other people and knowledge workers is and this is really important in for knowledge workers flow is essentially a luxury it’s great to have you will be way more productive you will have way more meaning your life will be more fulfilling happier less illness etc etc but you’re not going to get fired you can’t get into flow you won’t lose your job for people who are top creatives if you’re a creative entrepreneur and you’re running running a company if you’re an artist writing a book any of that stuff if you can’t get into flow you can’t do your job at all
[01:55:01] period like it’s not so full stop and I and I was that was interesting to me so like being able to train the alliance let me back up and tell you what it is it’s an eight-month It’s a combination of like a 21st century than tank and a mastermind we’re for the super creative core so this is an eight-month program that you put people through put people through uh we’re just all digitally on Zoom or no it no this is the so this is It’s the exact opposite it’s not I’m not even do it inside the flow research Collective because it’s literally the exact opposite of everything the flow research Collective was created to do it’s which was high ticket digital trainings blah blah blah for predominantly knowledge workers this is um and Live Events so people have been wanting to SP more time hanging out with me for years I’ve heard this and I’m an inter and like I have to do it with super creatives cuz I mean this is this is rare for us unfortunately together we’re on the we’re on the phone every morning hard to
[01:56:00] get me into the world so it is um so no there there’s three Live Events you kick off with a two-day live there’s a two-day live training in the middle and there’s there’s a close and then there’s uh six six week training cycles and I kick each one off with like a 2hour Content window and then that’s over Zoom that’s over Zoom what’s the size of the group 100 people specific for a reason one so there’s a certain amount of cross trining and cross-pollination of ideas that’s amazing the second reason I mean I always say you know you want that cross-pollination with creatives I always the example I always give to people is actually you which is you know we’ve gone back so far that like my friend Peter unlocked helped unlock the space Frontier right like it was a crazy freaking idea and then it was a breakthrough right the same thing we’re always talking about the day before something a TR a breakthrough it’s a crazy idea it’s a crazy idea and you had a legit true crazy idea it was
[01:57:02] like a lot of the action sport athletes I knew back in the ’90s also who were doing impossible things I had friends my friends were actually people who were pulling off the impossible and the truth of the matter is like by the time the xprize was one cuz the right once it was W eight years later and the writing was on the wall that this was the like private space was real this was going to happen Jeff had already found blue origin was right blue origin was there Richard was and you were like [ __ ] this is real yeah and so my level of what I think is possible in the world is absurd because my friend Peter helped unlock the space Frontier and my other friends the athletes literally redefined what was possible for human human species so I came into the world was this really warped like expectation for what I could do in the world cuz my friends were this same way and that to me is it’s the it’s that’s a cross-pollination that’s not really ideas it’s a cross-pollination of
[01:58:00] like aspirations and what you can’t really get that but a 100 people um I want I’ve been involved I’ve helped birth five or six major subcultures I was in Seattle at the birth of the grung movement I was in San Francisco at the birth of the internet I was in uh Cleveland and Chicago and Illinois at the birth of like Industrial Music when that whole movement started bunch of these in Santa Fe at the begin of the new age inste these huge culture shifting communities but at the center it’s like a hundred people across the boards every time I’ve been in in one of these things it’s about 100 I it’s a really important point it’s it’s it’s not giant it’s not even if you’re looking at something like the internet which sounds absurd or cryptocurrencies or Bitcoin right all of these things started with a very small group of radical thinkers who gravitated together and uh yeah yeah no and I you know I I call him the benign conspiracies that’s exactly how I think about it it’s exactly that’s exactly right but so I started to realize there was in looking at all these subcultures
[01:59:01] that I was involved in the birth of I was like you know it’s always about a hundred people so right that that was that was one thing I didn’t want to go too big because I wanted it to be intimate but I didn’t want it to go too small because I wanted so I want I wanted that vibrancy and that cross pollination of ideas and I also wanted you know this like people think about like the lone creative inventor I don’t it doesn’t work that way creativity is a Cooperative sport yeah even if you’re a totally like the I write books there’s nothing more I’m going to do this alone but I don’t do it alone I’ve got an editor I work with twice a week I’ve got a bunch of people at the publishing house I’m going to end up working with then there’s going to be the marketing team and the pr team and the social media team these are collective collaborative efforts and you need a bunch of people involved all creative projects are like that so what I wanted to do is I wanted to really lift up the super creative core Sol have a bunch of these challenges train them up and flow I’ll talk about some of the other human stuff but the 100 people was for the cross-pollination of ideas and
[02:00:01] to get enough people in sort of every category that there was always going to be one or two bodies in every category creat give me some give me some category examples um well I so uh let’s just talk about faculty for example um my faculty at this point stretches from like Jody Levy who’s the head of Summit Series and is a great experienced designer Ivy Ross who’s the head of design at Google she’s a hard Goods designer and a tech designer all the way to like Scott Barry coffin who’s the world’s leading expert on creativity uh and transpersonal psychology so like there you’ve got like you know three and three different disciplines um but I mean I like you know we’ve got musicians AI people filmmakers writers tons of different entrepreneurs and Tech entrepreneurs and 17 20 different disciplines and things like that but I also the thing I really want to talk about because this is the one that creatives get immediately is I started to realize that
[02:01:01] everybody I knew creativity is so lonely it’s [ ] lonely it’s a you’re a weirdo to begin with so you came up weird you took whatever made you weird and you turned it into your profession you just honed it but I would say that like you know another word for like world’s leading expert is nobody around to talk to about the stuff you care about the most right I mean back think about like early days of the spa of of of space and like when you and I were first meeting to talk about the EXP [ ] you take that conversation almost any place they’re just laughing at you you can’t have a conversation only that can do it yes so I started to realize and the other thing about creatives every creative I know it’s not just that the jobs are isolating because they are you spend a lot of time alone but you’re very in your head right you could be in a room filled with people but if you’re a Super Creative Car you could be totally lost in your thoughts and walled off from everybody and everybody I knew
[02:02:03] literally everybody I knew this level of like deep loneliness was sort of under it was in everything and I it’s loneliness impacts creativity it impacts intelligence it it it’s not it sounds like the alliance is an incubator it’s I mean it it’s among we haven’t been or a studio of some type it’s I mean I think it’s going to be a combination of a of a of a writer studio and artist studio and incubator all I think all those things it’s um it’s training creatives up in flow and training them up in the neurobiology of creativity a lot of the stuff we’re talking about like these are tools you can use them I’m training them up in AI for all the reasons we’ve been talking about I want to solve the loneliness problem I also want to give people a space to come finish a masterpiece so this is the thing that hangs up so many creative like could be this is the dream company I want to start this is the book I want to finish this is the movie I want to make whatever everybody’s got that that
[02:03:00] thing and you and I were both so goal oriented you know when you have an unfinished Masterpiece hanging over you y it’s like an albatross it is it’s it’s also your guilty pleasure and you’re trying to steal time to do it uh and having having a community that keeps you accountable right is so critically so critical not only keeps you accountable because I like it’s I think creatives get derailed at a couple of places it’s it’s both that keeps cible this is the hundred people because there’s also you know I always tell this to writers and you know this like writing the book you’re only halfway through the process of actually like putting that book into the world and like you’ve just spent like five years and you think you’ve just rid like run the like the marath marathon and then you get to this point you’re like oh [ __ ] it’s a triathlon I’ve got two more of these cuz then you the editing which is going to be you finish the book now youve got an year-long editing it’s the polishing polishing and then you’ve got the launch and what happens with creatives is and
[02:04:02] by the way if you’re interested in writing a book one of the things to realize is your publisher does almost nothing for you nothing nothing they yeah they they don’t like I the reason I have a personal editor yeah is because feedback immediate feedback is a flow trigger yeah and so I always tell companies like if you’re running a company with like quarterly reviews or annual reviews you’re a [ __ ] because like you’re driving your employees out of flow I realized with writing my publisher when I had like the best editors I’ve ever had at publishing houses and they don’t often exist that much anymore I’ve got a couple of good ones now but uh if they read one of my books three times along the way right like that’s huge if I can get three readings of a book that’s huge I need feedback almost daily like definitely a couple times a week I used to like chat gbt makes it a little bit easier because while I don’t like it to write my copy it’s really says nice things about like
[02:05:00] hey how’s this version oh this version is excellent It’s strong for this reason I do that all the time I do that all the time I use I use it to give you like Wonder you like it so much feedack ego boost it’s an ego boost um so no what I was was going to say is I wanted to uh first of all you know train up their brains and everything else so the actual creative portion of it was solid but I also noticed that how many people have you seen who have like they finished a book but they can’t get through the editing or they’ve got through the editing but they have no clue how do you publish it how do you promote it how do you build a marketing campaign so I was like if I can get enough bodies in there there are a couple people in every seat around that process you’re not going to get as derailed so when’s the First Alliance we’re going to launch in June this is the uh I think you’re going to break the new I think you’re going to break the news to the world cuz we haven’t even told uh the but You’ started bringing people in we’ve started bringing people in we’re building it it’s it’s I I’m so excited I know when
[02:06:02] you told me about it at first like wow oh yeah I mean you know it was funny I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday who’s uh he’s one of those guys with a B in front of his name right for for billions one of those guys I was so talking to him yesterday about it and be in front of his bank account be in front of his bank account and he was like he’s like are you kidding you’re going cuz as soon as I what happens usually when I talk about to creatives it’s like a It’s the funniest thing in the world I say oh you I’m going to train you up in flow it’s you know and first of all they then they light up and then I usually just talk about loneliness and everybody’s done like it’s done they’re like I’m in I sign me up he was like are you freaking kidding he’s like I probably lose $5 million a year to loneliness to the days that I lose cuz I’m not at my best cuz there’s like I’m dealing with just emotional stuff he’s like if I average it out you know he obviously makes a lot of money so he’s dealing in bigger sums and maybe was most other people but I
[02:07:01] was like he’s like Jesus Christ like forget about this thing paying for itself and he’s like that’s only one of your features I was like yeah I like I sort of think about it that myself let me put it in a different context every this is definitely true of artists I don’t know if it’s as true about entrepreneurs but I think it is cuz freaking every book I write about entrepreneurship talks about the emotion heal of Entrepreneurship and it’s funny I just read secrets of Sand Hill Road which is old right like we that was early thousands I want to say and it’s got a whole chapter on the insanity and the emotional upheaval and the loneliness of Entrepreneurship yeah and I was like this is at least 25 years old but I talk about it with creatives and they’re so instantly like oh my God we’re going to solve that oh please do people come in on their own or do they bring a team with them depends we’ve we’ve seen both we’ve also seen um some of the bigger organizations are um using it as like an education program staff so they’re like okay I’ve got cuz you know $330,000 it’s a lot of if if but if you
[02:08:02] don’t control your your upper income and you can’t like yes I know if I TR you up in creativity you’re going to make at least 133% more and I know we like we know that from that kind of stuff but what if you can’t affect that so big companies are coming in saying dude I got art directors and I got designers and I’ve got even publicists and things like that where they’re right in their whatever and my scientists and so they’re actually coming in saying oh no we’ve got a budget and we’re going to call this continuing education and we’re going to send like six of our top team people makes it makes a ton of sense I mean the you’re you’re training up your most critical asset in like in creativity which is this skill that at least for the next 10 to 15 years until the AI get and we don’t know but I’m more optimistic than you are by the way this is the first time in history where I am more optimistic than Peter I’m usually this bastard who has to ground our books in reality cuz Peter’s the Wildey boy from freecloud well I’m I’m the I’m I’m optimistic about AI crushing
[02:09:00] our creativity uh so so where do people I just I just wanted to take myself and sell it on the open market well they’d be buyers they’ be buyers uh let’s not go there um so where do people go and uh find out about wwwf flow alliance.com Co doco doco flow alliance. Co and uh where else do they find you on the internet you get Steven cutler.net face I haven’t heard that before that’s great you you got the X in there but that’s okay um Ina Google I’ll have to that’ll be next time when I come back I’ll have a better one oh brother I love you I love you so fun yeah you know it’s I love the fact when you you text me in the morning and say you ready for a reading with Stephen um and that’s my one of my
[02:10:01] favorite moments I also I I get to just say this out loud just because one of the things that I think is really amazing is I think this happened to both of us like a couple years ago where we like woke up and we were like holy [ __ ] we’ve been friends for almost three decades this is really really really special and like carot water it’s like we’ve got very tender with how we how we treat each other from like when we first came together and like it was just like the war of ideas over every sentence I have I had to I’ve had to talk you into books yes you have yeah our first book abundance I tried to write a book with you about space first which was a a fail failed attempt failed attempt um and then uh but abundance I mean you didn’t have to talk me into abundance because I was looking at the environmental side of it I was worried it was going to be too un no you you were you were like I have other things I’m working well no I was I had to like I had to like disrupt I was working and I never went I was working
[02:11:00] on a uh Richard Granger who’s at Dartmouth he’s a neuroscientist I was we were going to co-write a book um I’m really glad we didn’t I would have gotten my I wasn’t smart enough yet about I hadn’t educated myself enough uh I would have gotten my asking there were like three other projects and yeah we you came in and I no you were you you were the lowest ranking one in the beginning but like you rapidly climbed up there but it was really like when you presented the ideas to me because I had been looking it hadn’t been you were really sweeping I mean I was obviously I’d been a tech science writer for 20 years at that point so it wasn’t I was ignorant about it but my I care about plants animals and ecosystems yeah so I was like how do we apply technology to plants animals and ecosystem how do we use technology to save plants animals and ecosystems and you were really especially then uh really focused on the X prise using technology to help Humanity right so I thought like when you came in I was like holy crap we’ve got we got we each
[02:12:02] got half of the puzzle um and you had the good overarching Tech framework I had a little bit of the the science and the psychology and the cognitive all that stuff it was really I mean it was it was an incredibly fortuitous partnership because we each of us like had two each of us had components of this that we absolutely had to bring together and then it took me about a year to get you on board with our latest book oh longer I think I think I think it’s I think you’ve been working on for two to three years on this one are you happy we were doing it I’m so happy this book is so f as I as I said like yet not only well one cuz it’s you have to understand though it’s still m i mean the the new book just so people know in abundance we made the argument that hey exponential techology gives us the chance to raise Global standards of living forever man and child on planet yeah and man did they were there naysayers right like that was the hardest argument to make out loud and even I mean Christ the the
[02:13:01] you you open TED and that guy who followed you right like they follow they could even they they couldn’t even put you on the stage a Ted and let you talk they had to like have a counter argument immediately afterwards right and now it’s 20 15 years later the most astounding thing to me is how like H the amount of like when you talk about basic sers of living going up and up I mean it’s it’s the data is sort of astounding it ising shocking and and nobody realizes it nobody realiz we are the we are the Frog boiling in the proverbial water it’s yeah it’s the it’s the craziest by the way just uh so folks know this is a book that will come out in 2026 2026 probably at abundance 360 if March 2026 and so don’t looking for it right now but if you want an early copy I’m bribable WWF flow alliance. SL
[02:14:02] bribes uh in all serious uh good luck on on Flow Alliance thank you sir and the alliance um I know it is something which uh can level up people in extraordinary fashion yeah thank you sir yeah and uh love our conversations excited to see you again we’re going to see each other in two weeks all right and as I as I end every conversation every morning uh I love you buddy I love you buddy [Music]