Steven Kotler and Flow Research Collective Help You Tap Into the Science of Peak Performance

Pamela Bardhi: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Underdog podcast. Today I have an incredible guest.

Steven Kotler: Scary. I would have never taken the bet, like, just crazy. Like, I can somehow, out of nowhere, do $2 million worth of sales this year for your company. Just so I could find a way to, like, feed my family. It was like a crazy bet. Growing up in Cleveland as just an underdog kind of locale, it’s a blue collar studio town. The underdog story. That, and sort of, like, the answer to your question is, from the time I was four, I wanted to be a writer. My grandmother was a bad poet. When I say poet, I mean she wrote what would be the equivalent of Hallmark cards. But when you’re four years old and you don’t know, grandma’s a poet. And so I wrote my first poem at age four.

From that point on, I always wanted to be a writer. But growing up in Cleveland, which is a blue color steel mill town, and I was like a punk rock kidde. It was, like, trying to become. Wanting to be a writer was like wanting to become an elf. Like, there was no. I always say that I spent my career studying people who pulled off the impossible. And I define the impossible as, like, there’s no, like, especially small I impossible. There’s no clear path between where you are and where you want to be. Statistically, there’s really crappy odds of success. Right. It’s always a sort of underdog pursuit when you’re going after these impossible challenges. Trying to become a writer out of Cleveland was exactly that.

What was interesting and what always sort of, like, stayed in my mind is as, like, a punk rocker. There were, like, 2000 weirdos in Ohio. This is back in, you know, I’m old, so this is obviously back in the 1840s. There’s like, you know, 2000, 2500 weirdos, punk rockers. And by weirdos in Ohio, it’s like, in LA and New York and Boston. You guys had the luxury of, like, you could be weirdos in varieties, you could be a thing in Cleveland. Like, if you were a communist, if you were gay, if you were a punk, if you were a hippie. There were a million people who wanted to beat you to death. So you banded together, and we all ended up on this little street called Coventry.

Five blocks long, as exactly. Coffee shop like, alternative bookstore, head shop, record rendezvous, which was the punk rock records. It was that street. If you would have polled the universe and said out of all of Ohio, who is least likely to succeed? Like, who was really? They would have pointed at us, all of us, like these 2000 people. And don’t get me wrong, there was a lot of risk taking. There was a lot of drug addiction, there was a lot of stuff. A lot of people didn’t make it out of that community. But what I want to also say is this tiny little community of, like, a thousand underdogs. 2000 underdogs, I came out of it. Emmy award winning filmmaker Howard Schaq came out of it.

The comic book artist Harry Peekar came out of it. Nine inch nails came out of it. Sepultura filter outfits, I can literally keep listing major martial artists. Like, I can talk on and on and on. What I saw up close there is, what happens is, if you take underdogs or creatives. And they band together to try to do something different, and they support each other in that way. It was my first sort of lesson in what is actually entrepreneurship, because most entrepreneurship comes out of punk rock. They invented the do it yourself, right, It was a do it yourself movement.

The first magazine I worked for to give me a start in journalism, I started, I had dreadlocks down here. Nobody was going to give me a job. Me and my friends were outcasts. We had to start our own stuff. I recently did a talk on stage with John Barbados, the fashion designer, about the history of punk and entrepreneurship. Talking about all these same things, about how we had to invent everything. So that answers your question of what I wanted to be, as a kid. And tells you a little bit of an underdog story to give it context. I’ll stop there.

Pamela Bardhi: I love that. That is so killer, I didn’t realize that background. Oh, my gosh, that, is so cool. It brings me back to this. And have you heard of Doctor Bruce Lipton?

Steven Kotler: Stanford. He was at Stanford, yeah.

Pamela Bardhi: And so he talks about epigenetics, that your DNA structure is affected by your physical environment.

Steven Kotler: He does talk about epigenetics in that.

Pamela Bardhi: Way, which is super cool. And it’s like, to have those roots where you did explains a lot about where you are today, which I think.

Steven Kotler: Is absolutely amazing because it’s the Underdog podcast. And as a guy from Cleveland, I also have to say this to the two listeners out there who care. Go browns.

Stephen King’s career in peak performance started in the nineties

Speaking of underdogs, I love that.

Pamela Bardhi: Absolutely. But, yeah, when you were mentioning that, I’m like, man. Because that whole creative spirit, that underdog spirit and all that. It was fostered in that community that you grew up in. Which I think is super, super cool, where you lived, you know, for a great period of time, which is amazing.

Steven Kotler: I saw it again. So my career in peak performance studio peak performance started in the nineties. And, I was a journalist, and I covered a lot of different things, but I covered. I was really geeked on neuroscience at the time. Neuroscience in the early 1990s went through this transition. If you go pre 1990s, like, it’s really dry, it’s really boring, what is this cluster of neurons doing? What are we calling it? In the nineties? You suddenly go, what’s an emotion? What’s consciousness, what’s an altered state of consciousness, what’s flow, what’s right? All this stuff is suddenly we’ve got the tools to talk about it for the first time. People are having these conversations, and I’m deeply involved in all these. Simultaneously, I’m living in a place called Squaw Valley, Palisades town now.

And it’s the hub of sort of the, what is then the extreme movement of skiing and snowboarding in those sports. It’s an action sports mecca, and I’m a skier. I’m in this community, I’m covering this community, I’m fascinated by action sports. If you know anything about action sports in the 1990s, it’s talked about as the era of impossible. More things that we thought were impossible that human beings could not do, got done than ever before. That alone was startling, and from a journalist performance perspective, I was just like, well, how is this happening? How do these people keep doing the impossible over and over and over again? I can give you a bunch of examples, but let’s not go down that rabbit hole. Let me get to my point, which is, if you know anything about peak performance, especially in the nineties. 

The formula is essentially, have the right coaches, have the right parents. Epigenetics, as you pointed out, get in the right culture, some fricking money, right? You better, like, walk this straight and narrow, and this is how you become a pro athlete, is 10,000 hours. Then I’m living in Tahoe. With, literally, the people who are shaping the action sports industries, who are doing the impossible. Who are the best in the world, and everybody I knew came from broken homes. Big, shitty child. I was in Tahoe because it was a punk rock community, right? It was a community of people who couldn’t pay bills. So they figured out they could do crazy things in front of the camera. And, oh, my God, you could pay your rent like, miracle, right? There was tremendous amounts of risk taking, substance abuse.

Nobody had any education, very little money. If you put those things together, as anybody knows in the community, what happens? People die younger, they go to jail. They don’t reinvent what’s possible for the human species. That’s what I was seeing. So I saw it first in Cleveland with these creatives who everybody would have bet against. And it produces 30 different culture shaping artists and. Right, and then I see it with action sport athletes, and these are all the people like the action we were. This was the community that built the action sport industry. Like, it was this, like, tiny little punk rock subculture that is now a trillion dollar giant.

It came out of entrepreneurship and the flow, and, like, it was all the same thing over and over and over again. That was sort of the beginning of my career in paid performance. I was like, what are these athletes doing? How is this working? It’s very similar to what I saw in Cleveland with the creatives, just that the medium is different. But if the results are sort of the same, they’re outsized, they’re weird. They don’t make any sense. You would have bet against these people for sure, just like you would bet against us in Cleveland. And yet here’s a trillion dollar industry nobody saw coming.

Pamela Bardhi: That’s amazing, I absolutely love that, Stephen, I mean, well, just. It makes you wonder. And I was at this point in, like, 2020 when I had my biggest year, and I’m like, man, like what? I know what motivates me, but, like, I, what is it that made me get here, right? That human performance piece and like that. How do you watch these individuals? That’s the whole reason I started this podcast, because I was like, super. I was like, I was keen on understanding, like, what is that factor? What are those common denominators? Like, what makes somebody successful, what are the different elements?

And, like, it’s crazy because you were mentioning, like, you know, in the creative world. It’s like, you know, no limitation because it almost feels like you have nothing to lose. Some of the most successful people I’ve ever met in my life, like, they’re. They’re of that mindset that they’re like, nothing is going to stop me. I’ve been through X, Y, and Z, so I’m just going to get wherever I want to get to. They have this, like, mental resilience that’s unreal, and then there’s layers upon layers and upon layers of patterns. That, I’ve noticed in interviewing is that I’m almost at 300 episodes now, which is crazy. So I’m curious to see what your research and your experience and what that’s shown. But it’s just fascinating to find these common threads.

Flow is the world’s largest neuroscience based peak performance research and training company

Steven Kotler: Trey. So, at the flow research collective, this is a great place to start this conversation. We are, I think, the world’s largest neuroscience based peak performance research and training company. Why would you care? Neuroscience based, what is peak performance? Like, what do these words mean? You said flow earlier, and, like, you really were the world’s largest applied, performance neuroscience trait, right? What, any of these words frickin mean and who cares? And I always want to start with, like, one where you were taught you started. Which is, I think this is a very common experience. I think, was mine as a kid, is why I turned to neuroscience in the first place. I wasn’t born with an instruction banger.

Like, I sort of was born with this little voice inside me that said, hey, dude, I think you can be great, right? But, like, I wasn’t a good learner, I wasn’t the best looking guy in the room, I wasn’t the best. I was at none of those things, I had none of those real advantages. And I saw people who were. Had the, and I was like, whoa, that dude can run really fast, he’s really big. You know what I mean? He’s really funny, he’s really handsome, like, what’s my edge? I gotta figure this out, and I was really mad, like, where’s the frickin instruction manual? Why are we not born with a manual? So it turns out we are, and this is crazy. Let me walk in backwards from this giant mistake we made over the course of the 20th century.

Simply because we didn’t know any better. We actually did know any better. In 1890, William James, godfather of psychology, says, hey, I think optimal performance. Human beings, at their very best, and we’re talking physical best, emotional best, and cognitive best. All of it has to do with our neurobiology. Like, if we can get our nervous system to work for us rather than against us, this is the secret. Turns out he was totally right. But it took us a hundred years, we did a hundred year detour around this idea. And, the mistakes of the 20th century are very simple. The collective, we like to say, personality doesn’t scale, biology scales. What we mean is that the biggest problem in coaches and a lot of psychologists, no disrespect, is they figure out coaches. Figure out what worked for them.

Then they teach it to you. Psychologists find a model they like. This is the model that they relate to, and then they teach it to you. In both cases, the problem is that personality is for all that, like, you started with epigenetics. Epigenetics, genetics, nature, nurture. Like, there are a million things. I have to train you, totally different, based on where your risk tolerances are. And where are you on the introversion, extroversion scale? Right? Are you neurodivergent? These are like, I train you differently, we start at radically different places. We can get to the same place, but I have to train you radically differently. Neuroscience. Neurobiology scales why evolution shaped our brains this way, this is the basic architecture.

And the cool part is, that’s 80% of the puzzle, the 20% of the puzzle that doesn’t scale. That’s very individual. Neuroscience allows us to be precise, so we have tools that work for everyone. People, like, ask how, like, we train people in 152 countries, in 28 industries. I mean, everybody. When we, the companies we work with, we’ve worked with, stretch from, like, manufacturing companies. Like Audi to the San Francisco police department, the Air Force, the Navy Seals, professional athletes, Bob’s used furniture. The largest used furniture company in America, solar energy companies, meta accenture, Bain capital. These are wildly divergent industries. So why would anybody’s voodoo work for all of these people? Huge diversity, like, it shouldn’t. This is what neuroscience gives us.

This is why, sort of, I locked in because I got super curious about this thing in the 1990s. And it started out as a journalist, and then it became as a book writer, and now we. I run a research lab, and I regularly write papers with the biggest neuroscientists in the world. We publish them in top neuroscience journals. So I’ve gotten to do this at every level of scale and really look at it. It’s great because it works for everybody, so this is why we care about neuroscience, right? That’s sort of like that frame peak performance. I define for you, this is nothing more than getting our biology to work for us rather than against us.

At the center of the biology is this optimal state of consciousness we know as flow. Being in the zone, runner’s heights. When you get so focused on the task at hand, everything else just melts away and disappears. All aspects of performance go through the roof. This is how evolution hardwired, human beings repeat the performance. There were always challenges. Where are the new resources? How do we run away from the saber-toothed tiger? Oh, my God. I want to mate with this woman. These are all, like, challenges we, our ancestors, had to solve. And we created peak performance states to do it.

Flow, that’s the tool that comes hardwired into all of us

Flow, that’s, the tool that comes hardwired into all of us. Most people think of flow as this, like, rare occurrence like that. Maybe they’ve been in it a handful of times. They remember what it was like, but it’s rare. It’s not rare if you’re trained. From neurobiology, we get an eight week digital training. Consistently a 70% to 80% increase in flow. The last thousand customers we trained, it was 73.74% increase in flow, I believe. This is after tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of. I think I’ve trained over a million people at this point, it’s a lot of people, right? So this stuff is really reliable. We can get, we can use, this to really optimize our performance. And it’s available to anyone to put the emphasis on it.

That’s what happened in these communities. My punk rock community, art community, flows. At the center of what artists do for a living is what athletes rely upon to do their jobs. It’s what all of us rely upon to do our jobs. But there, artists and athletes are very aware of it, and that’s exactly when the impossible becomes possible. You have to see, flow because it’s optimal performance. So this is like, it’s tautological, like, whenever people do this. And that was like, as a journalist, my question wasn’t like, are you doing this flow thing? It was, holy shit, you just did the impossible. How the hell did you do that? Everybody would be like, I don’t know. I was in this altered state where every decision, every action flowed seamlessly, perfectly, effortlessly from the last.

That’s actually the textbook definition of, that’s where the term comes from. We went around the world for 40 years asking people about optimal performance, when are you at your best? How do you feel your best? They would say the same thing, oh, I’m in this weird altered state. Time slows down sometimes, or it speeds up and my sense of self disappears. And suddenly, really common on stage or leading a great board meeting. Suddenly creative ideas are bouncing around the room, and nobody’s arguing, and you’re in a flow state. Together, we have these experiences all the time. We can harness them, and that’s what I’ve been lucky enough to get to spend my life figuring out.

Steven: This is why neuroscience really matters

That’s the other thing I wanted to say. There’s the last thing and then I’ll shut up. But you raised this point earlier, and it’s so true, which is, this is why neuroscience really matters. You talked about biohacking, and if you think about the menu of options, right? You want to be better, right? You’ve got a frickin what do you start with? Is it mindfulness? Should you be doing breathwork? Is it cold plunges? Do you need to spend hundreds of year on stem cells? What is it, do I need to go live in a polygamist society? And Patrick Tontrack, where the hell do I start? Right?

And this is what’s amazing, is the neurobiology answers that question. We know exactly what, that’s what my book, the art of impossible, is, we literally have the full roadmap. We know this is where you start. This is where you go now, it’s literally a full blueprint at this point, which is incredible. That’s where, in 100 years, that’s where science has gone from. Like, what the hell do we do next? And where do I start to? We’ve got a blueprint. The problem is, like, people are entrepreneurial, so they can’t really say, oh, there’s a blueprint. It’s our neurobiology. Because I’m selling you clothes, plunges, or I’m selling you mindfulness.

Flow happens to be the big tent because it’s optimal performance. And everything sort of sits inside that. But even that, like, when we talk about, for example, peak performance as, categories from following the blueprint. There’s motivation categories like goal setting and grit, which is intrinsic, and extrinsic motivators. These sit under this heading of motivation, there’s a bunch of creativity tools, there’s a bunch of learning tools. There’s a bunch of flow tools that’s sort of the full suite. When you say peak performance for humans, if you’re not talking about physical performance, absolutely.

Pamela Bardhi: Well, there’s so many things, Steven, that you mentioned that I’m like, man, it stuff fascinates me. And it’s so funny because I was literally on the phone with a friend of mine earlier. I was mentioning to him, I’m like, man, I think if you want to help, like, you know these things inherently right now. But I think that if you went into neuroscience, you would just, like, 100 x what you’re doing at the highest level. Because, like you said, this operating manual, it’s like, some of us are intuitive and have had it for a long time. Like, with that little voice that you mentioned earlier. You’ve had that little voice that, hey, dude, you’re going to be great. We all have that, and then we feel like we need, like, always, like, external validation. Where is that operating manual?

Steven Kotler: Right?

Pamela Bardhi: Like, where is that operating manual? You’re absolutely right. That neuroscience really explains all of that, it’s literally biology. It is science. I remember I took NLP, I think, four years ago, and so. And that stuff, you know, neuro linguistics, programming, just like, getting into the world of neuroscience is fascinating to me. It’s absolutely fascinating, it’s like how I’m projecting something onto you. You may not process it the same way as what I’m thinking. It’s just like when you’re thinking of your mind as a processor, it’s like the coolest thing ever.

Because you become a lot more mindful of what comes out of here when you realize all the different things. You’re like, well, what’s, what’s he picking up, what’s he not picking up? What’s it, you know, like, you just become a lot more aware. It brings this, like, state of awareness. Like you said, that cheat code to that flow. That’s something I’ve seen in my world across the most successful individuals. It’s like they have, they get into this flow state, which is amazing. And so I’d love to dive into that wherever you want to take it.

Steven says flow can help boost productivity and reduce stress

Steven Kotler: Stephen, let me back up once, because I want to, I’ll answer your question. But first I want to comment on something you said, because it’s so important. Which is, this is very clearly what I’ve discovered in my research. And what we’ve discovered in our research is, I always say, the flow usage collective, we don’t have a vertical. Right? We actually have a horizontal, we work with. As a general rule, people who are the top 30% of their profession. Why? Because if you’re in the top 30%, right, of, what it is that you do for a living. You have to be doing this stuff. You’re already using flow, you’re already doing some of the motivation stuff, you just don’t actually know. There’s an order, a sequence, and a reason and things to pay attention to and things not to do, right?

So people come to us, I always think people come to us. They come to us because they’re top 30% and they come top 5%. That’s usually, you know, in all walks of life we end up working with. But it’s because, you know, our mission is really flow for the many. And it’s really to bring this everywhere, but, people who are in the top 34%, this is natural. Other than you, I have to, like, if you don’t know Stephen Collie, you don’t know my name, right? I got to tell you what this flow thing is. Oh, wait, it’s optimal performance, right? It’s when you feel your best, you perform your best, and I got to explain it. And I guess, oh, there’s this thing called peak performance, too, and you can add more of it.

Oh, by the way, there’s a thing called the flow research collective, and we’re the best at it in the world. It’s just, it’s a complicated message, so it’s easier when people are doing this intuitively. The answer to your question, what are people doing? What have we learned? This is where stuff gets really, really cool, and this is the difference between neurobiology and psychology. Over the past 20 years, we’ve basically been able to figure out where the flow is coming from in the brain. And what’s doing it. There’s a lot of different neuroscience I could talk about. I won’t go there. What I’ll have to go to is the next. Also figured out that flow states have triggers, free conditions that lead to more flow. So if you want more flow. Right. More optimal performance in your life.

I should also mention, by the way, flow optimizes everything. Productivity. McKinsey was measuring productivity is 500% above baseline. University of Sydney and Australia did a study on flow and creativity, 700% above baseline. Department of Defense finds learning goes is 240% to 400% above baseline. These are big numbers. But more importantly, on the positive psychology tip, flow under brings happiness. And well being and meaning and overall life satisfaction. We’ve known this for a long time, so we’ve known the happiest people on earth have the most flow experiences. We know that flow is our favorite experience in the world.

But what is really new, and this is really important. Because this has happened in the past couple years, we’ve learned the inverse. Flow is so good for us, it should prevent some of the negatives. Also, this is what we’ve figured out. So, my lab figured out flow will block PTSD. My friend Korina Pfeiffer’s lab figured out that flow blocks burnout. And then in this giant study that just got published in nature translational psychology. That is my dog drinking in the background. He’s huge. It sounds obscene. I don’t know how to get him to stop I’d have to, like, throw things at him. He’s the size of a polar bear, so we’re just gonna have to live through it, I apologize.

Pamela Bardhi: He’s in flow, but.

Steven Kotler: Okay. Let me keep telling you this cause it’s exciting, they did this. It was a giant. The gold standard, if you want to look at things like depression and anxiety and those kinds of conditions, is twin studies. They looked at a 10,000 sample twin study, and they found that flow is neuroprotective. Against depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and cardiac related stress conditions.

I’ve just told you that this one tool that comes hardwired into you. Is prophylactic and preventative against the seven largest mental health conditions on earth. PTSD alone is a trillion dollar global problem. Depression. Just the cost to business alone. Forget the cost of our personal lives and everything else. The cost of business alone is a trillion dollars a year. And so flow is the only. There’s no pill, there’s no protocol, it solves all these problems, and once flow does that.

Flow follows focus, so all the triggers drive attention into the present moment

So when we talk about, like, emotional optimal performance, it’s pretty optimal. You know what I mean? It’s a big lift. These flow triggers are your toolkit, both for, like, elevated productivity and learning and creativity and fast twitch muscle response. And all that stuff, but for serious mental health, so, simply put, flow follows focus, this is obvious. We know this. The state only shows up when all of our attention is, the right here, right now, on the task at hand. That’s when you really get sucked into what you’re doing, so there are 28 flow triggers. They come in two varieties, because flow comes in two varieties, there’s individual flow. Me in a flow state, or you in a flow state, there’s group flow. This is a team performing at their best could be interpersonal flow.

Me and you, Pam and Steven talking, and we get so sucked into the conversation. You know, we’re supposed to be off the podcast in 20 minutes, but, like, 2 hours later, we’re still rocking. Right? That’s group flow, that’s interpersonal flow. Happens all the time at work, by the way, right? One of those common flow states on earth between middle managers who start talking at work. And they get so sucked in that they lose an hour. This is really common. Anyways, flow states have triggers, individual triggers, group triggers, and they all do the same thing. Flow follows focus. So all the triggers drive attention into the present moment, they do it a bunch of different ways. They can pump up the neurochemical dopamine or norepinephrine. These are like focusing chemicals, they’re excitement and attention.

When they’re in our systems, you just, like, focus on the thing that’s in front of you. Or they lower cognitive load, which is all the crap you’re trying to think about at any one time. This is why you want to clean your office. If you’re, like, overwhelmed, you start by cleaning your office. It lowers cognitive load. You liberate some ram, you get some space around you to maneuver the flow triggers. Do some version of one to all three of these things. That’s how they all work. And psychological triggers with big neurobiological impacts. So I’ll give you simple examples. Let’s really speak into your audience as a guy who’s been involved in or launched 16 different companies along the way. Entrepreneurs are flow junkies. There’s nothing flowier than entrepreneurship and business. A startup going towards launch is the textbook definition of group flow in action.

If it’s going to be a good launch, it’s amazing. In fact, flow is a very addictive state, and I always tease. I’ve been involved in 16 launches. My partner in prime, Peter Diamandis, who I’ve written four books with, founded the xprize Singularity University, and 27 other companies. I always tease them. I’m like, you know, this is like a flow addiction, right? You keep calling it, you know, entrepreneurship, we can call it whatever we want. But, like, flow is underpinned by the most addictive pleasure chemicals on earth that you get. It’s a huge high. And so serial entrepreneurs, this is often the problem, because as companies stabilize, they get less flowy. They don’t have to. We do a lot of work with organizations to really prevent that and recapture flow. So you can continue to innovate and massively up level productivity.

Most startups are high flow engines, and then by the time you’re a mid market company. That sort of died out and everybody’s lost their soul. We see where we are today, which is like, massive amounts of 70% of workers are quietly quitting. Or actively quitting, or 80%, depending on, if you like, gallups numbers this year or last, or things like that. But the other 20% we never talk about, but those are the people who have high flow jobs. They show up early, they stay late, they’re dreamworkers, they love what they do, they’re super passionate. And we see it. We just often don’t realize it’s a state of consciousness that is actually underpinning employee retention. Because it’s a weird idea even in the 21st century.

Pamela Bardhi: I love that, Stephen.

Steven Kotler: Oh, my gosh.

Pamela Bardhi: There’s so much to unpack there, like flow state. Like, you’re mentioning interpersonal flow state, and I’m a serial entrepreneur as well. So as you were talking, I was like, whoa. I know that, like, that feeling that you just get lost in time. Time and space doesn’t really exist, you’re just so in the zone, you’re so present, you’re in the moment. Then all of a sudden, you look at your, like, you look at the phone. You’re like, what time is it? Oh, my God, I don’t even know, because you’re just like. And you feel it throughout, like, your whole body, it’s like these endorphins that release. I’m like, I don’t quite know how to explain it, so I love that. You know, we could put a name to it, which is flow state.

Steven Kotler: Yeah, I can also, so it was funny. And flow, to peel back some of the mystery. So, one thing that happens in flow is the prefrontal cortex part of your brain that’s right back here shuts down. It’s really quiet. A couple parts of it are really active, but most of it gets really, really quiet. There’s a fancy technical term for it, but really it’s an efficiency exchange. The brain wants to maximize energy for focus, so it shuts down anything that’s not critical. It repurposes the energy so you can pay attention to the thing that you’re doing.

Flow helps us get out of our own way, Stephen says

You just mentioned time passing strangely, why does time pass so strangely in flow? Because all the brain’s time peaking machinery is right here, and it’s a network. When the nodes of the network go down, we lose the ability to separate past from present, from future. We’re plunged into the deep. Now, why does your sense of self, your inner critic, that nagging, always on to feed his voice. Our head gets really quiet. And flow, what? Creativity spikes 7% above baseline. Innovation. Why? Because the nagging critic who’s always shouting down your neat ideas has shut up for ten minutes. And you finally can hear yourself thinking. Get at your own ideas, and creativity spikes as a result, why?

Sense of self, inner critic, network in the prefrontal cortex, network collapses. That our sense of self, that nagging voice, goes away. So this is like The Neurobiology, liberating us from our own neurobiology. It’s literally, flow helps us get out of our own way. That’s the coolest thing about optimal performance, is, in a sense, not only are we all hardwired for it. It’s a little bit of an odd default state because we will naturally move in that direction. We trip over ourselves all the time. I feel like a lot of my job is just to help my friends not trip over themselves. Somebody had to teach me, and I think this is, like, there’s a ram das quote I love. Which is all we are, is walking each other home, and, yeah, right. Like, okay, that’s what we’re doing. Yeah, I’m down with that.

Pamela Bardhi: That’s one of my most favorite quotes of all time. And it just brings so much, like, everything that you think is so important or, like, the way just everything. You know, the problems that everyone talks about and all that just puts everything into perspective. Right. For a second there, where it’s like we’re all here to walk each other home. It’s like we’re all interconnected through consciousness, that’s a whole nother conversation, but it’s like we’re all connected here.

It’s just, I remember the first time hearing that. It just brought me back to just so much more compassion and, like, love. And being able to be in the present so much more by understanding that and not being defensive or whatever. I think in everything that you’re saying, Stephen. I’m sure the audience is thinking the same thing, it’s like, oh, this magical flow state. Okay, how do we access that? Are there?

Steven Kotler: Answer that question. Because I got off on an entrepreneurship tangent.

Entrepreneurship harnessing flow triggers to cooperate better with AI

Let’s talk about why entrepreneurship is so flowy. So, dopamine, we talk about. Everybody knows what dopamine is these days. And, incredibly powerful focusing and energizing and motivating chemical risk, novelty, complexity, unpredictability, and pattern recognition, which underpins creativity. When we link ideas together. These are all flow triggers. All of them produce dopamine, they’re all packed in the action sports world, which I saw in the nineties. They’re all packed in the art world that I saw in the eighties. And they’re all packed in the entrepreneurship world where I live today. We make our living with novelty, unpredictability, complexity, and risk.

On top of it, passion and purpose are flow triggers, because when we’re passionate, pay more attention. When we have purpose, we pay more attention. So I have literally just given you the eight starter conditions for entrepreneurship in the 21st century. Flow is built into all of them. I will tell you if you can couple that with an AI layer these days, because we do a lot of. We have a dedicated flow and AI research lab. As a neuro guy, I can tell you that most of the. Like, we’re not hooking our brains up to the net anytime soon. That’s not true, I wish it was true, but, we’re not going to actually be able to download the Internet.

And I could, like, I could tell you why in like, 30 seconds. You’d be like, oh, I get it. But, we believe that at least for the next ten to 15 years, business is going to be dominated by humans and flow. Collaborating with AI, that’s the most leverage we can get. There’s a very specific way to do it. I sort of think about the future. Entrepreneurship is harnessing flow triggers and learning to use them to cooperate better with AI. That’s your future going forward in business for the next 1020 years, I think.

Pamela Bardhi: I love that you said that for many reasons, because some of you replace us. And I’m like, no, I think we’re going to just utilize it as a tool. What’s going to be replaced is humans that utilize AI, not AI. Replacing humans.

Steven Kotler: Yeah. You know, Peter Diamandis and myself are just now writing our fourth book on technology and what’s going on. This is one of the core things that we’re talking about. So there has, now every single technology that’s supposed to take in our jobs, has created more jobs, then it’s removed. And this is going back over 200 years. The data is overwhelming. AI is not going to be any different. What it does mean is we’re going to have to be able to reskill very quickly. We did this when the Internet showed up in the nineties in my lifetime. I very clearly remember the first time. It was like, dude, you might need a website, and I was like, wait, a what? I need a what? Right. Like, I mean, what?

Or, you know, SEO or any of these terms that like, you know, we now throw around. There was a big shift in the world before and after, and it happened again with social media. And we’re just seeing it again, we’re going to have to reskill quickly. That’s one of the reasons flow matters so much, because it’s amplified learning. I mean, there’s a bunch of other stuff we know out there that can help us with learning. There’s like, this is the vital neural headset that I’ve been testing for my friends at vital Neuro this week. That’s a really cool EEG. The tech’s getting whiz bang mandy, and we can use it to drive flow and cooperate with AI. We’re just not going to get to hook our brains up to the net anytime soon. Elon, I’m sorry, I wish it was true. It’s just not.

Pamela Bardhi: Not yet, at least. You know, I think that’s probably in the future. No, but I mean, this absolutely fascinates me because there’s so many. Well, there’s so many, like yoga, for example. They talk about flow state, and so, like all the major religions, they talk about flow state. When you’re in prayer. And all of that, and there’s just, like, so many different perspectives that people have about flow state.

Steven Kotler: We talk about this all the time, I do, a business partner in Utah. Been in and around Utah forever. Among Mormons, in the latter day Saint community, for example, or when I go to the southern Baptist communities. They have a totally different word for flow, they call it the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost feeling is at the center of both of those faiths. I always tell people in those communities, I’m like, look, I work in how I don’t do wise. Like, I’m not saying, like, there is or there isn’t. I’m just saying, if there is this God, God seems to work through this biology, which is what I study. If there’s not a God, then we still have the biology, if there’s a God, it seems to function through this biology. Because we’ve all renamed flow.

All the wisdom traditions have a name for flow, right? In Christianity, it’s often the Holy Ghost or the Holy Ghost feeling in every. Tibetan Buddhism has their own version, you know, every religion, the yoga traditions. And I’ve, I did. I’ve done ashtanga yoga for 25, 30 years now. I did ashtanga yoga back when, like, I was the only man in the yoga class forever, right? For a really long time, and I did it, by the way. Laird Hamilton, the big wave surfer, sat me down, I kept breaking bones. I’d broken a lot of bones trying to chase these athletes around mountains. He was like, you’ve got strength, you’ve got stamina, but you can’t stretch. You got to learn how to, you got to stretch. Otherwise you’re going to keep breaking. So I jumped into yoga, and he was right, it was phenomenal for that.

Pamela Bardhi: I mean, it’s just one of those, because when I hear flow state, I’ve heard it in so many different realms. Like you were saying, and everyone has different reference points and what they talk about. So I’m like, man.

Steven Kotler: I’m like, you know that?

One work usually produces micro flow. Macro flow is the other end of the experience

So let me mention one other thing, because this is likely to be useful, because this is so critical for. Especially because you have so many entrepreneurs, meaning you’re going to have people who, if the companies succeed. Are going to be in positions of power to shape culture in their companies. This is really fundamentally important, so one work usually produces micro flow. It’s a low grade flow, so you sit down to write that email to your colleague. Supposed to take two minutes. You end up, you write an essay, it takes an hour, you don’t know what happened at the time. And it’s like, it’s, really good, but really common flow state at work kind of stuff that’s called micro flow. Macro flow is the other end of the experience, it’s often confused with mystical experience. 

Time will slow down, you can have out of body experiences, things like that. We understand the biology of all that stuff now, but like, it was really, flow is classified. As we just talked about, as like, a mystical experience for a very long time. Micro flow is much more common at work. So csikszentmihaly, the godfather of flow psychology, ran an experiment back in the sixties where he blocked micro flow for two days in subjects. Blocked, just blocked across the boards. And it’s literally instant burnout. It’s like you read the reports from this study, it’s like descriptions of the worst version of the modern workplace world. I’m really, really paranoid, I can’t trust my colleagues, I don’t have the energy to do anything. My productivity is failing, I’m scared. All that. It’s these crazy things from blocking microflo.

The modern company, the modern workplace is literally designed to block microflow. Distraction management is the most important thing you can do to amplify flow in your life. Complete concentration of a task at hand. That means turning off cell phones and email. And when we go into companies, it is not unusual for employees to have eleven different communication streams. Hitting them at every moment of the day and vying for their attention, like, why are we miserable? Well, if you need complete concentration for micro flow, and you need micro flow for both happiness and to prevent. Like, severe burnout we’ve created in environments. If you’ve got an open office plan and eleven channels of communication. You literally have, you’ve created a living hell for yourself and your employees. If you’ve got a procedure that says employees must respond to texts within 15 minutes or 30 minutes.

Emails within the hour, which I know a lot of companies have rules like that. It’s a disaster, and on and on and on. Like, I always want to walk into companies, and I always, like, unless they make me change into my slide deck. I have a slide that says, if you can’t hang a sign in your door that says, fuck off, I’m flowing. You can’t do this, like, it’s. I’m not choking, and we’ve created these office environments where they’re literally designed to do that. And, like, it’s the craziest thing in the world. We are five. McKinsey did a global study of leaders in flow, business leaders in flow. They found on average, they were 500% more productive. 500% more productive than normal. That means you go to work on a Monday, spend money in a flow state. Take Tuesday through Friday off.

Steven: It’s a good time to be an entrepreneur

Pamela Bardhi: So you mentioned Sir Richard Branson. I was on his island a few months ago at necker, and we hung out with him a lot, actually. And I, like, he mentioned that, and I’m like, you know, after his 06:00 a.m. bike ride. Which, by the way, he beat all of our asses on.

Steven Kotler: The whole island is. I mean, we wrote about necker and stealing fire, right? The whole island is designed to produce flow from the freaking lemurs. Go hang out with the lemurs. Ride the rope swings, go serve to the bike ride. You want to swim to another island? Richard will race you and beat. You’re absolutely right.

Pamela Bardhi: But, like, it blew my mind because it’s like he did that 06:00 a.m. thing. Then he went into flow, and he mentioned, he goes back, you know, he has breakfast. Then he goes for, like, 2 hours, and he’s like. And then the rest of the day, because I would see him out. I’m like, how does he not have like a thousand things to do? He’s like, well, he’s like, I bring in the best of the best, he’s like, and I spend. And then he mentioned flow state when I was at necker. So it’s so funny right when you said that, I was like, whoa.

Steven Kotler: I always think I want to add something to that. So like I was listening to Tim Cook recently was talking about Apple and he said, we are running the executive team at Apple. And you’re, I mean, you’re talking like, I don’t eat billions and trillions worth of dollars under management. There’s seven people, it shrunk down to seven people in flow working with AI. That’s the leverage we can now have in business that you can steer Apple with seven people in flow with AI. It’s really cool, for the people who are willing to do the work to master these things. It’s a cool future, it’s a really neat future for entrepreneurs, it’s a good time to be an entrepreneur.

Pamela Bardhi: That flow state.

Steven Kotler: Yeah.

Pamela Bardhi: Ah. I mean, I feel like I’m in flow state right now talking about flow state. It’s like, it’s so magical.

Steven Kotler: I love, and my work here is done, I love that.

Pamela Bardhi: I love that.

Steven Kotler: Stephen.

Pamela Bardhi: Oh my goodness.

What would your older self tell your younger self based on what you know

And this is I’ll kind of revert back to the question. Because this one is my favorite and I always save the best for last. So I’m curious to see what you’re going to say about this. See if any of the research is going to get thrown in here or really what you would tell yourself. But what would your older self tell your younger self based on what you know?

Steven Kotler: Now that’s a good question. It depends on where you sort of want to like, interject. One of the things that would have been really useful to know early on is that there are no shortcuts. They’re like the word we talk about flow hacking, but like hacking is, we don’t mean shortcuts. And so there’s this idea in the biohacking community or in the entrepreneurship community, also in tech pros. All these communities where they really think there’s a shortcut somewhere. The problem is that trying to find a shortcut is actually the long cut. You’re delaying progress rather than. Right. That’s the one thing about, like, the neurobiology, following the neurobiology and studying peak performance for 30 years. Student people really, who have done the impossible with this stuff in every domain.

It’s always the same, it’s always like there’s just a daily to do list well set. You know what I mean? And it’s about getting up, executing everything on a do list. Do it again and again and again and again, over and over, and flow works the same way, right? Like peak performance. If you understand how this stuff works, it works like compound interest. So it’s a tiny little bit. But you keep it up for a couple of years and suddenly you’re seeing exponential results. That’s how all this stuff works. And I wish somebody, that’s how learning works, I wish I could have figured that out earlier. I would have saved myself sort of probably five to ten years, sort of wandering around and being frustrated myself.

Pamela Bardhi: Without the instruction manual that you were looking for from the very beginning. Yeah, absolutely. No, Stephen, I mean this. Oh, man, honestly, when it comes to flow state and all things neuroscience, I was like. I could talk about this stuff all day and it’s just so fascinating. Like, like, all the different research that comes out and what’s new. I’m so mind blown by all of this. And one of the biggest takeaways. I mean, understanding how that flow state and the distraction piece, I think, was a big eye opener for me. Because it’s like we want to be turned on.

But that’s actually kind of like counteracting what you’re trying to, it’s like counteracting exactly what you’re trying to do. You’re actually doing the opposite, right so that was, that was incredible. So many nuggets that you’ve dropped throughout this entire interview, my friend. It’s absolutely magical. Just like I’m, mind blown. I’m mind blown. And I’m so grateful for you and honored to hear, like, your perspective on all this. Hearing your story is absolutely tremendous as well. I love your background and just everything. Everything, I very much enjoyed everything.

Flow Research Collective is about to launch a subscription model for performance coaching

And now, in your world, what’s happening in the next few months? Like, what’s what you got? You mentioned you’re working on a fourth book.

Steven Kotler: Well, no, I’m working on this, I’m finishing book 15. The book we’re talking about, the Peter Diamandis book, is book 16. I’m finishing a novel in logic. What’s new? What is really exciting that I guess I can tease here, flowresearchcollective.com is where you’ll find us online. So, a bunch of different levels. We’ve got a brand new performance neuroscience coaching certification, which is really cool. For coaches who really want to do this that we’ve been doing. We are about to have, for the very first time. Our trainings have been, they’re expensive, they’re high end, they’re expensive. And that’s awesome, and I love it. But we’ve never been able to for, like, my mission was always like, let’s train everybody.

One of the reasons is one of the cool things that happens in flow is it expands. It automatically expands empathy and environmental awareness, which is our ability to see, perceive, and care about the natural world. And I’m a very big environmental advocate. I’m a big animal rights advocate. My wife and I have done hospice care for animals and dogs for 20 years. We’ve operated sanctuaries and things like that, so that stuff really matters. So I really, when I get to train people on flow, they want performance, and that’s cool. What I want is empathy and environmental awareness, and that’s what I get because it happens automatically. It’s great for, like, companies that are trying to build really inclusive companies because it happens automatically.

With flow training, you get empathy, you get perspective, you get that kind of stuff. You get psychological safety, it’s cool that way. But, we are now about to do a subscription model. It’s going to launch, the end of September, early October, and literally there’ll be some initial starter fee. Then I want to keep it. It’ll be somewhere 300 or 400 dollars a month. Because I want the world’s best performance training to be available for less than what it costs to go to a shrink. Like, people go to shrinks four times a month. Talk therapy doesn’t work very well, and it’s like $400 a session to go to a good shrink. And I was like, okay, fine, let’s make this thing available.

Incredible level, so we can really move the needle for people. We’ll just like, yeah, it’ll be like, less than the cost of a visit to a shrink. So that’s really freaking exciting for anybody who’s a writer, I do, a. The end of October, we’re mid October. We’re doing flow for writers, it’s the next flow for writers, which is a really. I think I probably helped put more books on the New York Times bestseller list. Anybody else’s trading writers? And I only do it occasionally, but it’s a, really, like, it’s this, really crazy. It’s a three day boot camp, it’s just a crazy writing class.

Steven Friedman: If you’re geeked on flow stuff, check out flow radio

So that all that is coming, and the last thing I want to talk about is, man. If you’re geeked on this flow stuff, check out flow radio, which is our podcast. It’s top, top ten iTunes science podcast, top blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it’s really fun and it’s really practical, and if you’re. You got to be a little bit of a neuro geek. I didn’t lose you when I started talking about some of the narrow science. If you were geeked on it, come hang out with us. Peak performance nerds.

Pamela Bardhi: Oh, my goodness. Steven, you are magical. I love all the new initiatives you guys have coming out, and the podcast, too. That’s amazing stuff. I’ve got to listen in for myself. To be honest, I am totally a neuro geek when it comes to all this stuff. I’m always fascinated by learning.

Steven Kotler: Yeah, check out flow radio. You’ll like it a lot. there’s. The cool thing about flow science is when I started this, there were, like, 50 people in the field. Now there are 10,000, right? Like, there’s so many papers come out each year at this point. It’s really cool. So I get to, like, bring these people on and talk to them. But, you know, it’s the most amazing stuff in the world. Because there’s a whole bunch of people who are like, okay, we come with a playbook. We come with. There’s a rule book, and these are the people that are devoted to, like, decoding the rulebook. And I get to hang out and pick their brains. It’s a crazy world, the magical world.

Pamela Bardhi: I love that world. Oh, my goodness, Steven, thank you so much. And we were definitely in flow state during this interview, my friend, because I’m just like, tune me in. This is magical, oh, my goodness.

Steven Kotler: No.

Pamela Bardhi: I’m so, so, so grateful for you and just all the nuggets you’ve dropped throughout this entire interview. I love your story, I love what you’re working on in your initiatives, and, like, it’s just, oh, man. I’m just so excited to follow along and geek out with you on all of this stuff. Watch people get into flow state and then be able to access and live a life of purpose and passion. And, you know, it just unlocks everything in your world, it just makes everything better. You know, you being in flow state, helps positively affect someone else and so on and so forth. Essentially to raise the vibration in this universe. So I love this, Steven. Thank you so, so, so, so much for being here today, I’m super honored and grateful, my friend.

Steven Kotler: My pleasure. Thank you for your interest. I really appreciate it. Have yourself a great afternoon.

Pamela Bardhi: You as well.

Steven Kotler: Take care.

Pamela Bardhi: Thank you.

Underdog is a weekly podcast from Meet With Pamala

So that’s it for today’s episode of Underdog. Catch us next week. Always dropping on Thursdays. And remember, if you’re interested in real estate or want to learn how to create more money and magic in your life. Check out meetwithpamala.com and let’s chat. Sending you so much love.

Steven Kotler: All we know is all the time barking like some underdogs on the dogs.