The Art of Manliness - Episode #58： Rise Of Superman And Flow Hacking With Steven Kotler

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00:01:18.580 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Now I'd say in

00:01:24.000 about the past 20 years, extreme sports have become mainstream. So I'm talking skydiving,

00:01:30.620 skateboarding, big wave surfing, base jumping, you got, you name it. And while we often think of

00:01:37.760 these guys who take part in these sports as adrenaline junkies, our guest today, Stephen

00:01:44.000 Kotler, makes the case in his new book, The Rise of Superman, that instead of adrenaline junkies,

00:01:51.140 these extreme athletes are actually flow junkies. Now, a lot of you probably heard of this concept

00:01:56.660 of flow. It's basically a psychological state that we get into whenever we perform at our best and feel

00:02:03.300 at our best. It's like whenever you're in the zone, that is flow. And in The Rise of Superman,

00:02:09.760 Stephen makes the case that these extreme athletes tap into flow to do amazing things, basically push the

00:02:17.880 envelope on human performance. You know, surfing waves that, you know, just huge waves that should,

00:02:22.780 that were never would have been thought of to be surfed, you know, 10 or 20 years ago. Solo climbing

00:02:28.720 rock faces that without ropes that shouldn't be climbed, doing skateboard jumps, they're just insane.

00:02:36.600 So it's all thanks to flow. That's what he makes the case in the book. And what's more,

00:02:40.560 he shows that these extreme athletes can teach us a lot about how to hack or optimize our own flow.

00:02:47.300 So we can improve our performance, whether at work or just improve our well-being in life.

00:02:52.480 Because flow, as research shows, is one of the keys to just sort of happiness, general well-being

00:02:58.940 and flourishing. So it's an interesting, fascinating read, well-researched. And so into the podcast,

00:03:06.440 we're going to talk about flow. We're going to talk about these extreme athletes doing amazing things.

00:03:10.620 And then we're going to talk about what you can do to optimize and hack your flow. So stay tuned.

00:03:21.140 Steve Kotler, welcome to the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:03:23.700 Brett, thanks for having me.

00:03:25.020 All right. So your book is The Rise of Superman, Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance.

00:03:31.340 And it's, in a nutshell, it's about this elusive, mysterious, not so mysterious, psychological concept of flow.

00:03:40.460 And for our listeners who aren't familiar with this concept, can you briefly explain what flow is?

00:03:46.520 Certainly.

00:03:48.720 First of all, let me just put it into historical context, because the word flow is a little flimsy.

00:03:54.400 But what we're talking about here is literally the product of, you know, 150 years of really serious research.

00:04:03.000 One of the most kind of well-researched neuropsychological phenomenons you can think of is what we're talking about with flow.

00:04:10.360 Flow is technically defined as an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best.

00:04:17.720 And most people have some kind of passing familiarity with flow, right?

00:04:22.040 If you've ever lost an afternoon to a great conversation or gotten so sucked into a work project that everything else is forgotten, you've probably tasted the experience.

00:04:32.720 In flow, what happens is our concentration gets so focused, so laser focused, that everything else just falls away.

00:04:40.260 Action and awareness start to merge.

00:04:42.300 Our sense of self, our sense of self-consciousness vanish completely.

00:04:46.000 Time dilates, which means it can slow down, so you get that freeze frame effect like if you've been in a car crash.

00:04:52.120 Or it can speed up, so five hours can pass by in like five minutes.

00:04:56.100 And throughout, all aspects of performance, mental and physical, go through the roof.

00:05:01.300 The reason we call the state flow is because that's the sensation confirmed.

00:05:06.680 In flow, every action, every decision leads effortlessly, fluidly, perfectly to the next.

00:05:12.820 So one way I like to think about flow in shorthand is it's near-perfect decision-making.

00:05:19.180 Hmm.

00:05:19.580 Yeah, that's a perfect way of describing it.

00:05:21.960 And I think, yeah, I think all of us have experienced that one time or another that, yeah, I know I have where, yeah, you're so engrossed in something.

00:05:30.040 You look up and you're like, oh my gosh, like four hours have passed away, but it's only seemed like an hour.

00:05:35.160 Um, so fantastic.

00:05:36.880 Um, so how did you get involved in researching and writing about flow?

00:05:40.420 Um, is this something you've always been interested in?

00:05:43.020 I mean, what, because you not only have this book, but you also have the, the, the flow genome project where you're researching and educating about flow.

00:05:49.280 So how did you get involved with this?

00:05:50.440 Um, so, and in all actuality, I write about flow in West of Jesus.

00:05:55.140 I write about flow in, uh, A Small Furry Prayer.

00:05:58.700 It's, um, it's been a life, it's, it's kind of been a project.

00:06:02.420 But, uh, the story, this, what, what happened was, um, and Rise of Superman is two different kind of tracks coming together.

00:06:09.280 But the, the flow work started when I was 30 years old.

00:06:12.640 I got Lyme disease and I spent the better portion of three years in bed.

00:06:17.400 And for anybody who doesn't know what Lyme disease is, it's kind of the worst flu you've ever had crossed with paranoid schizophrenia.

00:06:24.800 I was totally debilitated.

00:06:26.760 Couldn't walk across the room.

00:06:28.240 Had almost no cognitive function, no short-term memory, no long-term memory.

00:06:32.780 I couldn't read anymore because I couldn't remember what had happened at the beginning of a sentence by the time I got to the end of it.

00:06:38.520 And after three years of this, the doctors had pulled me off drugs.

00:06:42.060 This was very early in Lyme disease history.

00:06:44.520 So, uh, they didn't really know what they were doing yet.

00:06:46.860 And, uh, my stomach lighting started bleeding out and that was it.

00:06:49.700 I was done.

00:06:50.160 There was nothing else anybody could do for me.

00:06:51.860 And I was going to kill myself because I was functional 10% of the time.

00:06:55.600 And that was it.

00:06:56.380 All I was ever going to do was be a burden to my friends and my family from that point on.

00:06:59.640 And it was really a question of when and no longer if.

00:07:02.680 And right kind of around the time I had reached that conclusion, a friend of mine chose up at my house.

00:07:07.920 I was living in LA at the time and she demands that we go surfing.

00:07:11.140 And it was, it was a joke.

00:07:12.320 I mean, it was the funniest thing in the world.

00:07:13.940 I, you know, I couldn't surf in years. 0.99

00:07:16.860 I couldn't walk across a room, but she was a pain in the ass and would not leave and would not leave and would not leave. 1.00

00:07:22.060 And finally I was like, you know what? 1.00

00:07:23.080 What the hell?

00:07:23.680 We can go surfing today because what's the worst that can happen?

00:07:26.540 And they literally had to kind of help me to the car.

00:07:29.060 They took me to sunset beach, which if you know anything about surfing, it's the wimpiest beginner wave in the world.

00:07:34.760 It was summer.

00:07:35.700 The tide was out, so the waves were smaller and the tide was low.

00:07:39.760 And they helped me out to the break and they gave me a board the size of a Cadillac.

00:07:43.740 Literally, the bigger the board, the easier it is to catch a wave.

00:07:46.420 The waves were maybe two feet.

00:07:48.260 And 30 seconds later, a wave comes.

00:07:51.420 And I don't know what happened.

00:07:52.840 Muscle memory took over.

00:07:53.900 I'm still not sure.

00:07:55.180 But I spun the board around and I paddled a couple times and I popped up.

00:07:58.560 And I popped up into another dimension.

00:08:00.740 Suddenly, time had slowed down and I had panoramic vision and my senses were incredibly heightened.

00:08:06.360 And the craziest part was I felt great.

00:08:07.840 I mean, I felt fantastic, better than I've ever felt in my life as far as I could tell.

00:08:12.360 And, you know, I'm having this kind of quasi-mystical experience in the waves and it feels so good and so powerful that I catch five more waves, four more waves that day.

00:08:20.460 And five waves just totally, it disassembled me.

00:08:23.240 That was the end of me.

00:08:24.300 They drove me home.

00:08:24.880 They put me in bed.

00:08:26.140 And I couldn't move for two weeks.

00:08:27.960 People had to bring me food because I couldn't actually make it to the kitchen just to make meals.

00:08:31.980 And a couple weeks in, a couple weeks later, the day I could walk again, literally, I went back to the beach and I did it again.

00:08:38.980 And over the course of about six months, I went from about 10% functionality up to about 80% functionality.

00:08:46.560 And the only thing that was happening was I was going surfing and I was having these very quasi-weird mystical experiences in the waves.

00:08:54.420 So my first question was, the hell is going on?

00:08:57.880 I mean, it was, I'm trained as a science writer and, A, I don't have mystical experiences, period.

00:09:03.880 And, B, surfing in these weird states as a cure for a chronic autoimmune condition, none of it made any sense.

00:09:10.920 So originally, it was a class to figure out what the hell is going on with me.

00:09:15.400 And it was emphasized by the fact that Lyme is only fatal if it gets into your brain.

00:09:20.640 And because I was having these quasi-mystical experiences, and that's so out of character for me, I thought I was losing my mind.

00:09:27.440 I thought I was feeling better, perhaps, but it was just the disease going into remission while it worked its way in my brain and I was about to die.

00:09:33.600 So it was, in the beginning, a fairly crucial mission, right?

00:09:37.180 What the hell is going on?

00:09:38.300 And, you know, quickly, just because we won't come back to it later so people know, a couple of funny things about flow states is there's a profound cocktail of neurochemicals that produce this state.

00:09:49.280 All of these neurochemicals boost the immune system, which is important, but really important is they also reset the nervous system.

00:09:56.440 Flow, when you snap into flow, all of the kind of stress hormones, cortisol, norepinephrine, all that stuff, leaves the body.

00:10:04.860 And all these positive, beneficial nervous chemicals come in that are very calming.

00:10:10.040 So it resets the nervous system.

00:10:12.360 And an autoimmune condition is essentially a nervous system gone crazy.

00:10:15.580 So that was what I discovered.

00:10:18.920 It also kind of led directly into research on high performance because, you know, once I started getting better with flow states, I started to realize these states weren't, you know, just making me feel better.

00:10:29.780 They were massively amplifying performance and I wanted to know why.

00:10:33.460 So it was a series of questions based on, you know, that experience.

00:10:36.820 But that's where this comes from.

00:10:37.840 Interesting.

00:10:38.540 That was interesting.

00:10:39.620 You talked about how it resets your nervous system.

00:10:41.340 It sounds a lot like some hallucinogenic and psychodelic drugs were like, it's not, it's not, it's not an understand that all the, like, for example, if you want to talk about LSD or mushrooms or whatever, that's all serotonin.

00:10:59.060 All, you know, you, you snort cocaine.

00:11:01.100 All that happens is the brain releases a bunch of dopamine and blocks its reuptake.

00:11:04.720 You do LSD or ecstasy, by the way, and different pathways, but that's just a serotonin release.

00:11:11.680 So all the neurochemicals, every neurochemical has a drug analog.

00:11:15.520 That's why drugs work basically, right?

00:11:17.740 They, this is, the body has a natural version of the chemical endorphins are the body's natural version of heroin.

00:11:24.760 So flow, interestingly, cocktails a huge amount of these same chemicals that produce psychedelic experiences.

00:11:31.440 So there is, there is a lot, there's a lot there.

00:11:35.280 And for certain, you know, psychedelic research and a lot of, a lot of the stuff that's come out of psychedelic research has really helped us understand the neurochemistry of flow.

00:11:45.360 Because for a long time, those were the only people working on these neurochemicals.

00:11:49.540 Hmm.

00:11:49.860 All right.

00:11:50.260 So your experience with surfing, um, I think led to you, led you to where you sort of the backdrop of your book and studying flow.

00:11:57.780 Because you focus on, which surprised me, a, kind of a weird subset of athletics is sort of the extreme athletes.

00:12:04.080 We're talking like surfing, like big wave surfers.

00:12:06.560 We're talking skydivers, base jumpers.

00:12:08.780 There's another story that, that folds in here.

00:12:11.300 And, and, and, and there's a reason I focused on extreme athletes.

00:12:15.260 All right.

00:12:16.520 First, I guess the best place to start would be just like, tell me what the premise of Rise of Superman is, right?

00:12:21.760 Sure.

00:12:21.980 Yeah, do it.

00:12:22.500 So the core idea at the heart of Rise of Superman, this is sort of where all this came from.

00:12:30.760 And why, why did I choose this population is if you look at action and adventure sports, all the surfing, skiing, snowboarding, skateboarding, skydiving, et cetera.

00:12:41.560 So as a data set, right, you snip out, snip out the glamour and the gnar, what you see over the past generation is nearly exponential growth in ultimate human performance.

00:12:51.860 And that's performance when life or limb is on the line, which should be the slowest growing category.

00:12:57.960 Now, sports performance, it's slow, it's steady, it's governed by the laws of evolution.

00:13:02.940 You plot it on a graph, you get a linear curve.

00:13:05.320 So at no point in history do you see performance quintuple in a decade, but that is exactly what's been going on in action and adventure sports.

00:13:13.380 For example, surfing.

00:13:15.040 Here's a thousand-year-old sport, and from 400 AD to 1996, the biggest wave anybody has ever surfed is 25 feet.

00:13:22.580 Today, it's over 100 feet.

00:13:24.840 Snowboarding, 1990, the biggest gap anybody had ever jumped is the Baker Road Gap.

00:13:29.000 It was 40 feet end-to-end.

00:13:30.880 These days, it's over 230 feet long.

00:13:33.580 That's not normal at all.

00:13:36.580 That's incredibly radical.

00:13:38.220 So the question of the Heart of the Rise of Superman is what the hell is going on?

00:13:41.860 And the answer is that these athletes have become the very best flow hackers in the history of the world.

00:13:49.300 They have figured out how to produce this state absolutely reliably, and they have to because at the level they're performing, if they're not in flow, they're going to end up dead or in the hospital.

00:13:58.880 So the premise of the Heart of the Rise of Superman is we can look at these extreme athletes and use them as case studies, and if we can kind of decode what these guys are doing to produce so much flow in their lives, then we can apply that information across all domains in society.

00:14:14.680 So that's the core idea, and that's why I chose to focus on the action sport athletes.

00:14:20.700 And, you know, I saw all this firsthand just because I came up as a journalist covering a lot of action sports, so I spent years of my career chasing pro athletes around mountains and, you know, breaking almost 100 bones along the way.

00:14:33.640 But I kept seeing absolutely amazing things where you'd be like, oh, my God, that's impossible.

00:14:38.400 They're defying the laws of physics.

00:14:40.060 I've never seen anything like that.

00:14:42.040 This has got to be the end of it.

00:14:43.060 There's no way, you know, this is the limit.

00:14:44.880 We've hit the limit.

00:14:45.580 There's no way it can progress more.

00:14:47.200 And we would talk about this.

00:14:48.260 The journalists who covered this stuff, we kept talking about how there's no way this can keep going.

00:14:52.680 And every year it just kept going and going and going until finally, you know, I decided that I had to look under the hood and, you know, sure enough, found flow again.

00:15:01.080 So I guess it makes sense that these guys would need flow or would be, I guess, practitioners of flow because, like, yeah, time dilation would come in handy when you're trying to figure out, you know, what's the next step?

00:15:15.620 Because if one false move could kill you, right?

00:15:19.040 Absolutely.

00:15:19.700 And we've got, you know, Dean Potter, I'll tell you a story from Rise.

00:15:24.760 Dean Potter, one of the world's greatest climbers and base jumpers, was in Mexico, and he was base jumping into the cellar of Swallows with this giant, I think it's 1,500 feet, open air pit.

00:15:36.420 And on his last base jump, something went wrong, and his chute partially opened.

00:15:42.640 Then it collapsed over his head.

00:15:45.160 So he was 300 feet, 500 feet off the deck, goes to open his parachute, it partially opens, it spins him into a wall, the chute drops over his head.

00:15:54.840 Right before it drops, time has slowed down so much, he has time to see an orange rope that they had hung from the side of the wall 300 feet off the deck where a photographer was taking photos.

00:16:04.920 And he grabbed the rope and managed to hang on him, stop himself, he stopped himself six feet above the ground.

00:16:11.560 But the only reason it took place was because time was so slowed down.

00:16:15.400 The whole story is a lot longer, and there's many parts I'm leaving out.

00:16:18.920 But without that time dilation, you're absolutely correct.

00:16:21.220 None of it is possible.

00:16:22.800 Yeah, I mean, that was one of the stories that really stuck out to me.

00:16:25.280 I mean, yeah, there's so many examples.

00:16:27.400 The ones that really were compelling to me was like the solo climbing, people climbing these mountains that shouldn't be climbed.

00:16:34.920 At all, but they're doing it by themselves, no ropes at all.

00:16:39.360 And here's the question, what compels these guys or people to do these things?

00:16:43.740 I mean, is it because they want that feeling of flow or is it just wanting to do it because it's there?

00:16:50.120 I mean, what is it that's driving these guys?

00:16:53.140 Well, first of all, I mean, there's two answers here.

00:16:57.680 Part of it is, you know, there's a lot of, you know, there's just normal human stuff that goes into, you know, into that level of drive, right?

00:17:07.700 That said, the experience of flow is so powerful.

00:17:15.180 The neurochemicals are just neurochemically and more things go on in the brain during flow that are also incredibly enticing, but just neurochemically.

00:17:22.660 These are the five most potent feel-good reward chemicals the brain can produce.

00:17:26.620 And there's no other time when the brain produces all five at once, especially in these high concentrations, which is why psychologists talk about flow as the source code of intrinsic motivation.

00:17:39.940 Once an experience starts producing flow, it essentially becomes the most addictive experience on earth.

00:17:45.700 And, you know, we've all, for example, seen this in action, in action sports, surfers are guys who are not known as the most reliable group of people in the history of the world.

00:17:58.540 Yet, it's got, if it's overhead glassy tubes, they're up at four o'clock in the morning at the beach in clammy cold wetsuits out there, you know, like clockwork, no matter what.

00:18:09.880 You are drawn to it.

00:18:11.220 Once something produces flow, they call it autotelic, which means an end in itself.

00:18:16.140 It means people seek out the state, often at great, great, great personal cost.

00:18:21.640 What is amazing about flow, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who did a lot of foundational research into flow, he talks about this.

00:18:27.860 Unlike other addictions that lead backwards, flow, because it always involves challenging skills and mastering of new skills and taking things to a new level, it leads forward.

00:18:38.940 So it's literally an addiction to a better version of yourself.

00:18:42.620 The other thing that is worth talking about here is the more neurochemicals that show up during experience, the better chance that experience is retained for later.

00:18:54.860 So flow massively amplifies learning, right?

00:18:57.860 In studies run by DARPA, it's 230 to 500 percent in military snipers.

00:19:04.020 And that's just one example.

00:19:05.100 There's a lot of other data from a lot of other kind of learning situations.

00:19:08.160 Always flow shows up and massively optimizes learning.

00:19:11.060 So not only are you kind of addicted to this better version of yourself and super motivated to get more flow, you're also learning at a massively amplified rate along the way.

00:19:21.300 So when we talk about flow being an addiction that leads forward, it's kind of a significant statement.

00:19:26.720 There's a question.

00:19:28.720 Is there a genetic component to flow?

00:19:31.200 Because what I mean by it is I have no desire to base jump or I have no desire to take part in these action sports.

00:19:36.980 But it seems like there's certain people who are just drawn to that naturally.

00:19:39.800 They love that.

00:19:41.200 I'm not like that.

00:19:42.720 So I'm curious with your research, have you found that there's some people who can experience flow or tap into it more easily than others?

00:19:50.060 So let's look under the hood a little bit because you kind of lit on a really important and kind of common misconception about flow.

00:20:00.500 So flow is, you know, we're talking about it with these extreme athletes, right?

00:20:05.420 But flow, when Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi did his original research, she conducted what is now one of the largest global studies ever.

00:20:12.980 Flow is ubiquitous.

00:20:14.000 It shows up everywhere, every person on earth.

00:20:16.740 In his original research, he found it everywhere from, like, Detroit assembly line workers to Navajo sheep herders to elderly Korean women, Japanese teenage motorcycle gang members, neurosurgeons from New York.

00:20:28.860 It goes on and on and on.

00:20:30.300 So flow shows up everywhere.

00:20:33.060 There are, we have now identified 15 triggers that bring on the state.

00:20:38.820 These are preconditions that lead to more flow.

00:20:41.760 Risk is one of those triggers.

00:20:44.060 But here's the really important point.

00:20:46.220 It's not just physical risk.

00:20:48.960 You do need risk because risk triggers the release of dopamine, and you need dopamine to slide yourself into flow.

00:20:55.080 But you can replace the physical risk with emotional risk, creative risk, intellectual risk.

00:21:00.660 And it's totally different for everybody.

00:21:02.860 For, you know, Ian Walsh, big wave surfer, he's got to paddle into a 50-foot wave for it to catch his attention.

00:21:08.560 But for the shy guy, all they've got to do is cross the room to talk to the pretty girl, and that's enough.

00:21:14.560 So it's totally situational.

00:21:16.440 And there are 14 other triggers that have absolutely nothing to do with risk.

00:21:21.420 But risk is a great way.

00:21:24.080 And the reason is really simple, right?

00:21:26.360 Flow follows focus.

00:21:27.500 It's massively heightened attention.

00:21:29.080 So anything that grabs and holds your attention is going to drive you into flow.

00:21:33.900 Risk just happens to be a great one for that.

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00:22:35.200 And now back to the show.

00:22:36.760 Well, here's another question.

00:22:37.980 Since we're a podcast geared primarily towards guys, I mean, generally, do the way men and women tap into flow, do they differ or are they pretty much the same?

00:22:48.420 So I know you have to speak in generalities with this sort of thing, but I mean, I'm just curious in your research.

00:22:55.180 I mean, you're asking really great questions.

00:22:58.020 The answer is we don't really know.

00:23:01.520 There is some information either way in terms of men and women.

00:23:04.940 And there are also – you talked about, you know, is there a genetic makeup for flow?

00:23:10.220 You asked that question.

00:23:11.200 It's all kind of the same question.

00:23:12.660 Who's wired for what?

00:23:13.680 Sure.

00:23:13.880 What I can tell you is there are radical different on-ramps.

00:23:18.440 For example, creatives.

00:23:19.700 Myself as a writer, I can ride writing right into a flow.

00:23:22.940 There is an altruism-based flow state known as helper's high discovered by Alan Lukes, the founder of Big Brother's Big Sister.

00:23:29.600 So you can ride altruism literally into a flow state.

00:23:33.580 They used to, by the way, think this was only hands-on, you know, volunteer for the Peace Corps, work in a soup kitchen kind of altruism.

00:23:39.700 But now they've shown that it shows up even if you do something like bid at a charity auction.

00:23:44.800 That can be a nut.

00:23:45.680 So computer coders code their ways into flow.

00:23:50.160 Flow is so prevalent in video gaming that flow theory is the number one theory for explaining kind of the lure of the joystick.

00:23:57.320 So it shows up everywhere.

00:23:59.120 People like to get in different ways.

00:24:01.280 My wife and I co-run a dog sanctuary here in New Mexico.

00:24:07.140 She – one of the reasons we do it is because my wife only gets in the flow states through altruism, and that's how she gets access to it. 1.00

00:24:13.540 You know, I like – you know, I like both altruism and creativity and, you know, high-risk sport.

00:24:18.940 I like it, you know, hurling my body down mountains at high speeds when I can.

00:24:23.840 So, you know, to me, you know, it's all three, but it really – it varies very much individually.

00:24:29.920 We have a flow diagnostic at the Flow Genome Project that we use kind of to help people determine what avenues they're best suited for riding into flow.

00:24:38.760 But it really differs.

00:24:39.920 And it probably differs by the sexes, and we just haven't looked deep enough under that hood yet.

00:24:45.740 Yeah, that would be interesting to look into there.

00:24:48.520 So, okay, it seems like these athletes, these extreme athletes, they sort of – they stumbled on to flow.

00:24:53.940 I mean, I guess a lot of them didn't have like a language for it.

00:24:56.480 But now with these advances we've made in cognitive and neuroscience, we're fashioning tools to help people tap into flow or trigger flow more easily or more effectively.

00:25:10.080 How is that – I mean, what sort of things are going on there to like help athletes?

00:25:14.700 I know the military is interested in this as well.

00:25:17.360 What are they doing to, I guess, help soldiers?

00:25:21.540 Besides the neurochemicals that we talked about, right, let's talk about what else happens in flow.

00:25:27.280 So, one of the other things that happens to the brain in flow is your brainwaves.

00:25:31.360 The brain communicates two different ways, neuroelectricity, which is brainwaves, and neurochemistry, which is what we talked about.

00:25:37.840 The other thing you need to talk about is neuroanatomy, which is where things happen in the brain because that matters too because the brain is specialized location-wise.

00:25:45.780 So, we talked about neurochemistry.

00:25:48.020 The brainwave, the baseline brainwave state for flow is on the borderline between alpha-theta.

00:25:53.520 So, one of the things that people are doing is using very simple neurofeedback training to drive people to alpha-theta.

00:26:01.480 And what has happened is these – what's great is it used to be if you wanted EEG devices, it meant going into somebody's office, having them, you know, basically tape these wet sensors to your scalp, hundreds of them. 0.98

00:26:15.220 It was a huge pain in the ass, and you couldn't do it.

00:26:17.080 But now they've gotten to the point that they have kind of dry, portable, Bluetooth-enabled EEG sensors that can – coming out – I believe, actually, they're probably out. 0.97

00:26:27.580 There's a new technology called BrainSport, and it's a dry sensor that's wireless, and it looks sort of like a crown if there was a crown in Star Trek.

00:26:37.600 It's really a cool-looking device.

00:26:39.340 But it's a portable, wireless brain training device that helps you train your brainwaves that, you know, you can use that – use neurofeedback to drive people towards EEG.

00:26:48.760 What we're doing at the Flow Genome Project is kind of taking – we're creating what we're calling Flow Dojos,

00:26:54.320 and these are dedicated flow science research and training facilities, and we're taking kind of advantage of all this stuff, all these flow triggers.

00:27:02.540 So, for example, we have a device – we have a 20-foot giant looping swing.

00:27:07.880 So, you literally – you stand on what looks like a snowboard.

00:27:12.040 Your feet are strapped, and your hands are on this thing.

00:27:14.800 You can be spinning upside down, 20 feet off the deck, pulling three-and-a-half Gs on the bottom.

00:27:19.380 These pull the risk triggers from the novelty triggers from the other flow triggers that high-risk athletes get a lot of without any danger.

00:27:26.880 On top of that, the entire device is aligned in LED lights, and you're wearing the brain spore technology I was just talking about.

00:27:34.600 So, you can literally – while you're pulling all these kind of extreme triggers without the danger,

00:27:39.980 you are also simultaneously using neural feedback to guide yourself towards flow.

00:27:45.160 So, we're sort of rigging the game by putting as many flow triggers as we can into the experience and giving you access to this cutting-edge technology.

00:27:53.420 Another thing they're doing is flow – in flow, the large portions of the prefrontal cortex turn off.

00:28:01.120 I know this sounds weird.

00:28:02.300 People think that, you know, flow must be the – all avenues of the brain fire and all at once.

00:28:07.220 It turns out most of the prefrontal cortex, which houses your executive function, your morality, your will,

00:28:12.060 your ability to do complex thinking, that's all there.

00:28:15.160 It turns off in flow.

00:28:16.480 Essentially, your conscious mind turns off.

00:28:18.360 Your subconscious, which is much, much, much faster and more energy efficient,

00:28:22.780 takes over where a lot of the performance boosts come from.

00:28:27.300 And one of the other things, when we talk about that DARPA study, right, the military,

00:28:32.060 one of the things they're doing is they're using transcranial magnetic stimulation.

00:28:35.600 They're basically shooting a big magnetic pulse into people's brains,

00:28:38.060 and it knocks out their prefrontal cortex and induces flow, a low-grade flow state.

00:28:44.020 And, you know, and then they're training people from that point forward.

00:28:47.520 That's nice.

00:28:48.100 I mean, it sounds like Star Trek stuff.

00:28:50.880 Oh, yeah.

00:28:51.440 I mean, you've got to understand that, like, I started working on flow pretty seriously full-time in the, you know,

00:29:00.260 in and around, I would say, 99.

00:29:03.860 And all of this stuff was, it was fantasy land.

00:29:06.720 We sort of had some ideas what a couple of the neurochemicals were.

00:29:09.980 We had no idea about these changes.

00:29:12.640 Transient hyperfrontality is what the deactivation of the prefrontal cortex is called.

00:29:16.500 We didn't know about that.

00:29:17.500 We didn't know what the right brain was for flow.

00:29:19.260 None of this stuff, all this stuff has happened literally in 15 years,

00:29:23.240 and we've been looking under the hood of flow.

00:29:25.560 The research dates back to 1871.

00:29:28.300 Some of the very earliest experiments ever run in experimental psychology

00:29:32.000 were run looking for this optimal state of performance.

00:29:35.760 So we've been, it's 150 years, and it's only in the past 10 years, really,

00:29:39.860 that we've been able to look under the hood and go, oh, my God.

00:29:42.640 And, you know, the Star Trek stuff from today is going to get even crazier tomorrow

00:29:47.660 because all these technologies are on exponential growth curves.

00:29:51.700 So, I mean, I can see how this stuff would be very useful for athletes,

00:29:54.260 but, like, what about just average people?

00:29:56.060 Because, I mean, you make the argument in the book, the bold claim,

00:29:58.120 this is going to turn us into superhumans, like tapping and hacking flow.

00:30:01.040 I mean, but, like, for just Joe Blow, he works at a, you know, desk job.

00:30:04.480 I mean, what's the benefit of, like, tapping into this technology?

00:30:07.140 Well, I mean, for Joe Blow, who works at a desk job, according to McKinsey, right,

00:30:12.460 the biggest business researchers around, they did a 10-year study

00:30:16.640 and found top executives in flow report being five times more productive than out of flow.

00:30:23.200 So that's not a 5% increase.

00:30:24.820 That's a 500% increase.

00:30:26.440 It means you could take, spend Monday at work in flow,

00:30:30.340 take the rest of the week off, and get as much done as your steady state peers.

00:30:34.440 So that's one of the things that's in the offing.

00:30:38.780 You're talking about massively accelerated motivation.

00:30:42.180 Think about, right now, the amount of people who sign up for gym memberships and never use them.

00:30:50.700 There's whole, you know, enterprise models built on the fact that people buy memberships in January to health clubs,

00:30:56.940 and 70% of them are gone by February, right?

00:31:00.100 Because the only drivers we're tapping into there are guilt and vanity,

00:31:04.780 and they're lousy motivational drivers.

00:31:06.940 So flow gives you access to intrinsic motivation.

00:31:10.120 You can't help doing the things that produce flow.

00:31:14.100 So this means it shortens the path to mastery.

00:31:17.440 And it doesn't matter if it's athletics, if it's business, if it's being a creative.

00:31:22.120 Whatever your interest is, if you can learn to get into flow states, you can shorten the path to mastery.

00:31:28.700 In any workplace, it's massively amplified productivity.

00:31:33.500 In study after study, flow also significantly enhances creativity.

00:31:38.500 It does this for a lot of different reasons.

00:31:41.340 The neurochemicals that show up in flow, not only do they enhance focus and tighten attention,

00:31:46.340 but they amplify pattern recognition, your ability to link ideas together.

00:31:50.980 And it also kind of expands the size of the database searched by the brain's pattern recognition system,

00:31:56.060 so you have access to more far-flung ideas.

00:31:58.580 It significantly jacks up creativity.

00:32:01.720 We don't really have hard numbers, and we have weird studies.

00:32:04.760 Like an Australian team of Australian researchers recently gave 40 people a really difficult brain problem,

00:32:13.420 brain teaser problem.

00:32:14.440 Nobody could solve the problem.

00:32:15.780 Then they induced flow artificially using transcranial magnetic stimulation, like we talked about before,

00:32:21.320 and 23 people could solve the problem.

00:32:24.500 In preliminary surveys run by the Flow Genome Project, more of a organization,

00:32:29.140 most people report, and this is really preliminary, so I'm hesitant to say it out loud,

00:32:33.400 but the average we're hearing is a 700% increase in creativity.

00:32:37.240 People, on average, say they're seven times more creative in flow than out of flow.

00:32:41.320 At Harvard, Teresa Amable figured out that people are not only more creative in flow,

00:32:47.940 but they're more creative the day after flow, which suggests that flow not only makes you more creative in the moment,

00:32:53.960 but it may make you more creative over the long haul.

00:32:56.540 It may actually train the brain up on creativity, which is one of those incredibly rare, hard things.

00:33:02.480 Everybody these days believes creativity is probably the most important quality in business in the 21st century.

00:33:08.260 It's at the top of the 21st century skills that we want our kids to learn in school that are fundamental for surviving in the center,

00:33:15.080 but we don't really know how to teach creativity very well,

00:33:17.860 but we do know how to create a state that massively amplifies your creativity

00:33:21.740 and teaches you how to be more creative over the long haul.

00:33:24.600 I could go on and on and on.

00:33:26.180 We've talked about health benefits.

00:33:28.000 We've talked about learning, creativity, and motivation,

00:33:34.160 and this is really kind of the beginning of the conversation.

00:33:38.740 You have to remember that this is literally the secret to optimal performance, right?

00:33:43.840 That's why it has that name and that's why they talk about it that way.

00:33:46.960 So if anything you can think of doing better, you can do better in flow.

00:33:49.820 I think more importantly, for the last thing I'm going to say,

00:33:54.800 when Csikszentmihalyi did his original research,

00:33:58.460 he discovered literally, and this has been extremely well validated for 30 years,

00:34:03.760 that the happiest people on earth are the people who have the most flow in their lives.

00:34:08.540 So if you're looking for reason alone, life satisfaction is a pretty good one.

00:34:14.880 Very interesting.

00:34:15.500 As you were talking about that, I started thinking about sort of second-order effects

00:34:18.580 of people tapping in and wanting to hack their flow, so to speak.

00:34:23.000 I mean, it seems like a lot of this technology and resources are going to be available to,

00:34:28.180 I don't know how it explains, but people who have the means to afford it, right?

00:34:32.240 Have they talked about that sort of like the socioeconomic implications of hacking flow?

00:34:39.580 Because I can see a lot of like parents, like wealthy parents, like getting their kids into like a flow dojo.

00:34:44.360 And like they're just these like already, you know, these kids who are already pretty bright

00:34:48.280 become even more bright and more optimal, while parents who couldn't afford that sort of thing,

00:34:54.580 their kids aren't doing as well.

00:34:56.480 Is that a problem or is the technology going to become so widely available that won't be a problem?

00:35:03.860 Well, let's, so let's go back to the question of flow triggers first, because you're talking

00:35:10.420 about technological hacks and that's fine.

00:35:12.460 All that stuff's great, right?

00:35:14.080 But the 15 flow triggers, you've got three psychological, three environmental, 10 social,

00:35:20.420 and one creative.

00:35:21.720 These are, you know, anybody who wants to buy a copy or rise of Superman, which you can get

00:35:26.180 the ebook for $5.99, right?

00:35:28.600 Um, you can, you can get a free slide share that breaks down all 15 of these traits that's

00:35:34.220 available to anybody, right?

00:35:36.320 So, you know, first and foremost, the secrets aren't that secret, right?

00:35:42.540 They're, they're out.

00:35:43.460 And even any, any, can we do this thing?

00:35:45.120 Action adventure sport athletes.

00:35:46.820 I mean, I don't know how much time you spent in ski towns or surf towns or whatever.

00:35:50.040 These are not wealthy people, right?

00:35:52.300 They found a way to become the best at hacking flow because they basically built their lives

00:35:58.200 around these flow triggers.

00:35:59.420 Anybody can do that.

00:36:00.700 That doesn't take any money.

00:36:02.320 The access to the technology, will it speed the course?

00:36:05.900 Yes.

00:36:06.480 But all this stuff is on exponential price performance curves.

00:36:10.520 So to begin with, it's not super expensive right now, but it's radically coming down in

00:36:15.840 price pretty soon.

00:36:17.740 We're looking at the Flow Genome Project, for example, to create an app that does all

00:36:22.200 of this.

00:36:22.500 It's not anywhere close in the pipeline, but five years from now, seven years from now, when

00:36:28.100 the research gets to the level that that's possible, this means it's going to be available

00:36:31.460 for $1.99 on your phone, right?

00:36:33.680 Yeah.

00:36:33.940 So there is, I mean, the gap you're talking about is real.

00:36:37.840 You're talking about a real phenomenon.

00:36:39.620 But even just to digress for half a second, because in abundance, we, you know, dealt with

00:36:44.220 the same issue with biomedical technology.

00:36:48.360 Biomedicine as a whole, biotechnology as a whole is advancing at five times the speed of

00:36:52.700 Moore's Law, right?

00:36:53.620 So Moore's Law says that every 18 months, the number of, you know, transistors on an

00:36:57.540 integrated circuit doubles for the same price.

00:37:01.020 That's really fast.

00:37:02.340 Biotechnology is five times faster.

00:37:05.000 So what the, I hope, I hope that, yeah, there is going to be a period of time where this stuff

00:37:13.120 is more available to people with money.

00:37:15.640 Um, but I think it is going to be very short.

00:37:19.520 I sure hope it is.

00:37:20.820 I mean, our goal at the Flow Genome Project is literally to try to open source flow state

00:37:25.660 research.

00:37:26.280 We have come very, very far, but until we have an accurate map of how the psychology lays

00:37:31.220 onto the neurobiology, onto the physiology, um, what we call a heat map of flow, we're not

00:37:36.060 going to know the best way for everybody to get into a flow state.

00:37:38.580 So one of the things we're doing at the Flow Genome Project is we're turning this quest

00:37:42.560 for ultimate human performance into a giant open source citizen science project.

00:37:47.420 Anybody can come run experiments under, you know, essentially under our camp and, you know,

00:37:52.960 and move this forward.

00:37:54.580 So we're doing the exact opposite with the, our, the Flow Genome Project is sort of set up

00:38:00.260 specifically to, you know, hack this stuff for everybody and give it away for free.

00:38:05.400 So hopefully what you're talking about isn't a real issue.

00:38:09.160 Very cool.

00:38:09.580 Well, there's so much more we could talk about, but I know our time is short.

00:38:13.160 So last question, I always like to end off with, uh, just, uh, just asking the, the person

00:38:18.120 I'm talking to is sort of like a quick how to, like what people can take away from this

00:38:22.260 and start implementing their lives today.

00:38:23.440 So guys are listening to this podcast.

00:38:25.280 They're thinking, this is awesome.

00:38:26.760 I want to learn how to learn faster.

00:38:29.180 I want to experience that happiness.

00:38:30.760 What can guys do today to start taking advantage of the benefits of flow?

00:38:36.160 So we, we kind of broke down the flow triggers.

00:38:39.040 Um, and I, I'd rather, I mean, what I'd rather say is read Rise of Superman and figure out

00:38:43.900 those flow triggers and let me leave people with something that most people don't know.

00:38:47.660 And I think it's the single most important thing I can teach people about hacking flow.

00:38:51.780 The information that most people find most useful over kind of 15 years of presenting

00:38:55.780 this to people, this is the one thing that seems to make the most difference.

00:38:58.540 Most people think flow is a binary, like a light switch.

00:39:03.080 You're either in flow or you're not.

00:39:05.180 Turns out that's not the case at all.

00:39:07.200 It's actually one stage in a four stage cycle.

00:39:10.940 And if you know how this cycle works, essentially, um, you can, it, you can maximize the amount

00:39:21.020 of time you spend in flow and you can get through the really long, hard, dark periods between

00:39:26.320 flow states faster.

00:39:27.420 And I think it's the most important thing I can teach people.

00:39:29.220 So the first stage of the flow state is known as struggle.

00:39:33.380 This is a loading phase.

00:39:35.080 Flow happens when everything comes together perfectly in that perfect moment where all

00:39:39.000 the skills come together into that new skill.

00:39:41.580 So you still have to learn the skills.

00:39:43.040 You have to still, if I'm a writer, the struggle phase means I am reading, I am researching,

00:39:47.780 I'm interviewing people.

00:39:48.980 I'm trying to figure out the structure of my books and my articles.

00:39:51.720 If I'm an athlete, I'm learning a new skill.

00:39:53.960 It's all the grind and you just have to put it in.

00:39:56.920 There's no substitute for it.

00:39:59.220 You also have to know that flow on the cusp of flow, it feels very unflowy, right?

00:40:06.680 Struggle feels, it's called struggle for a reason.

00:40:08.820 It's not pleasant.

00:40:09.580 It doesn't feel like flow.

00:40:10.740 It feels like absolute exasperation.

00:40:12.500 You're essentially taking your brain to the point at which it feels like it's about to

00:40:16.020 explode when it's totally overloaded.

00:40:18.440 Then you have to take your mind off the problem.

00:40:20.700 The second stage of the flow cycle is known as release.

00:40:23.200 So you put in all this time to learn the new skill.

00:40:25.740 Then it's totally take your mind off the problem.

00:40:27.540 Go for a walk, build it.

00:40:29.220 Paper airplane models.

00:40:31.100 Whatever you can do to take your mind completely off the subject, forget about it completely.

00:40:36.220 What you're really doing is giving your brain the space to shift from conscious processing

00:40:41.420 to subconscious processing to pass the problem over.

00:40:44.600 If you keep thinking about the problem, you can't let it go and it won't move.

00:40:48.440 That release triggers the flow state itself.

00:40:51.600 This is the important thing.

00:40:54.060 On the backside of the flow state, flow is a massive release of neurochemicals.

00:40:58.520 You feel like Superman, right?

00:41:00.180 You're on top of the world.

00:41:01.560 You're unstoppable.

00:41:02.840 And then it goes away.

00:41:04.220 And you feel worse than normal.

00:41:06.160 There is a big crash after a flow state.

00:41:08.740 The high is gone.

00:41:09.860 Don't feel like Superman.

00:41:10.760 All the brain's pleasure chemicals, you've kind of exhausted them.

00:41:13.980 The brain needs to take time to build them up again.

00:41:17.120 So this state, it's really, honestly, the most important thing is to stay calm and to

00:41:22.700 kind of ignore it.

00:41:23.660 I call it the hangover rule.

00:41:24.980 You sort of like, when you're hungover, you ignore all the negative thoughts in your brain

00:41:28.180 because you know you're hungover.

00:41:29.600 And then tomorrow, you're going to feel fine.

00:41:31.260 And you should just wait.

00:41:33.140 Same thing here.

00:41:34.720 And this is so critical because what's happening in this phase, this fourth phase, that's where

00:41:39.020 memory learning and consolidation is taking place.

00:41:41.020 And if you get freaked out and stressed out there, you block neurobiologically, you block

00:41:45.800 the learning.

00:41:46.980 And worst of all, if you get stressed out of this spot, you can't, you have to move from

00:41:52.460 this phase back into struggle to restart the whole cycle again and to get back into flow.

00:41:57.020 And if you're gripped because you're not in flow anymore and you want to get back there

00:42:00.420 and you've just had this huge high and it's all gone and you're very depressed, you are

00:42:04.480 not going to be up for the serious fight into struggle.

00:42:07.700 So understanding that it's a cycle, understanding where you are in the process is kind of the

00:42:14.340 greatest thing I can tell anybody is trying to hack flow.

00:42:18.440 Very good.

00:42:18.680 Well, Stephen, this has been a fascinating discussion.

00:42:20.820 Thank you so much for your time.

00:42:22.560 Thank you so much.

00:42:23.460 This was really fun.

00:42:24.600 Our guest today was Stephen Kotler.

00:42:26.040 Stephen is the author of the book, The Rise of Superman, Decoding the Signs of Ultimate Human

00:42:30.360 Performance.

00:42:31.500 And right now it's on pre-sale on amazon.com.

00:42:34.640 The book launches on March 4th.

00:42:36.860 And if you go to riseofsuperman.com forward slash rise dash rewards, you'll find a bunch

00:42:45.660 of promotional bonuses that Stephen's offering to people who buy the book.

00:42:50.860 So if you buy one book, you get $65 worth of free bonuses, which include exclusive access

00:42:56.760 to some videos that he's produced at the Flow Genome Project, as well as access to his

00:43:02.200 flow diagnostic tool.

00:43:03.800 And if you buy more than one, more than three books, there's different levels.

00:43:09.060 So check it out.

00:43:10.120 Great stuff.

00:43:11.820 And yeah, it's a great read.

00:43:14.040 Definitely recommend it.

00:43:14.860 Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:43:20.500 For more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at

00:43:24.160 artofmanliness.com.

00:43:25.900 And until next time, stay manly.

The Art of Manliness - April 04, 2014

Episode #58： Rise Of Superman And Flow Hacking With Steven Kotler

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