[MUSIC PLAYING]
JASON SILVA: So first of all, thank you all for being here.
My name is Jason Silva.
I'm the host of the TV show "Brain Games"
on the National Geographic Channel.
I'm also the creator of "Shots of Awe"
in partnership with Discovery Digital Networks.
And I'm really honored to be here today with you guys
and with my very dear friend Steven Kotler, who
is a "New York Times" best-selling author,
brilliant thinker, co-founder of the Flow Genome Project,
and just one of my favorite people in the world.
And we've been having these mind jams every time
we hang out here in New York.
We've never recorded it.
So we thought, why don't we get together and put
this on camera, and invite a bunch of people,
and let's talk about creativity, innovation, flow states,
and all that good stuff.
So Steven, what's up?
STEVEN KOTLER: Hey, Jason.
I don't know how I top that intro.
JASON SILVA: Well, that was just to set up
a little bit of context.
But to really get things started,
I'm going to ask you to define flow states.
This is your specialty.
So for those that are not familiar with the concept,
even though we keep hearing about it in the press,
we keep hearing about it in the media-- welcome, welcome.
Have a seat.
Yes.
But flow states are associated with peak human performance,
right?
It's when we seemingly achieve the impossible.
So tell us, what are flow states?
STEVEN KOTLER: So you may know flow
by a lot of other synonyms-- runner's high,
being in the zone.
If you're a basketball player, you call it being unconscious.
If you were a beatnik jazz musician,
you called it being in the pocket.
If you're a stand-up comic, you call it the forever box.
Flow is sort of a technical term.
And it is technically defined as an optimal state
of consciousness, a state of consciousness
where we perform our best and we feel our best.
It refers to those moments of rapt attention and total
absorption, where we get so focused on the task at hand
that everything else disappears.
So your sense of self, your sense of self-consciousness,
they vanish completely.
Time dilates, which is a fancy way of saying it
passes strangely.
So sometimes it speeds up, and five hours
will go by in five minutes.
And occasionally it slows down, and you'll
get that freeze-frame effect-- maybe any of you
have been in a car crash or seen "The Matrix."
And throughout, all aspects of performance--
that's mental and physical-- go through the roof.
And if you want a quick and dirty definition of it,
flow is as close to picture-perfect decision
making as we can possibly get, which is
where the state gets its name.
In the state of flow, every decision,
every action leads seamlessly, fluidly, perfectly,
to the next.
Flow feels flowy.
So it's actually a technical term.
It came out of, actually, one of the largest
psychological studies ever done.
And when they were interviewing people, about it they
kept using this term, flow.
So that's where it came from.
JASON SILVA: So I'm obsessed with flow states.
I've experienced them regularly.
But since I was a little kid, when
I got into this wonderfully inspired headspace--
everything seemed effortless-- but creating a flow state,
eliciting a flow state, catalyzing a flow state,
has always been kind of enigmatic.
It's like peak experience, this haphazard phenomenon that
sometimes emerges and sometimes it doesn't.
But as a control freak, I've always wanted to understand,
what are the precursors for triggering these ecstatic
moments, these highly lucid moments.
And for me it's always been, when
it comes to writing, when it comes to speaking, when
it comes to, as you say, lateral thinking, free association,
connecting the dots in a new way.
And you guys-- you and Jamie Wheal, part of the Flow Genome
Project-- have started to really peek beneath the lid,
so to speak, and figure out what's going on in the brain
when we go into these flow states.
Now, you guys are saying, what I remember
reading is the advances in psychology, neurobiology,
psychopharmacology, and technology, all these four
pillars are advancing so fast, that now all of a sudden,
we get to see what's going on.
We get to stop speaking in woo-woo terms,
and be like, what's happening, and how can we reproduce this,
and how can we benefit from it.
So tell me about these advances and what you guys are
doing with Flow Genome Project.
STEVEN KOTLER: Yeah.
We can actually, believe it or not,
thank George Bush Sr. for this.
1990, declared it the Decade of the Brain.
And money flooded into neuroscience.
And most it was spent on neuroimaging technology.
So we got really, really good at peering inside the brain
and figuring out what's going on.
So for the very first time in history,
we actually are now starting to decode what happens in flow.
And I'll just give you a little bit of the neuroscience,
just so you have some context.
Two main things are important.
From a neuroanatomical level, normally the old idea of what
happened about ultimate performance--and I'm sure
you're all familiar with it-- the 10% brain myth,
the idea that we're only using 10% of our brain.
So ultimate performance, aka flow,
must be the full brain on overdrive.
Turns out we had it exactly backwards.
In flow, parts of the brain are not becoming hyperactive.
They're actually deactivating.
They're shutting down.
The technical term for this is transient-- meaning temporary--
hypo, H-Y-P-O, it's the opposite of hyper,
it means to slow down, to shut down, to deactivate--
frontality, which refers to the prefrontal cortex,
the part of your brain that's right back here.
Prefrontal cortex is your executive function.
It's all of your higher cognitive functions.
It's the part that you most associate with you,
so your sense of morality, your sense of will,
your sense of self, complex decision making.
In flow, that portion of the brain shuts down.
So why does time pass so strangely in flow?
Because time, it turns out, is calculated
all over the prefrontal cortex.
And as parts of it start to wink out,
we can no longer separate past, from present, from future.
We're plunged into what's called the deep now.
Another thing that happens in the prefrontal cortex--
and this is probably the best part--
is when the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex-- and there's
going to be a quiz later.
So I hope you're all taking notes.
When this portion of your brain shuts down,
it does a lot of things.
But one of the most important things it does,
is it's your inner critic.
So that nagging, always-on, defeatist voice
that's in your head that doesn't shut up,
that won't leave you alone, shuts up in flow.
So we experience this profound liberation.
We are literally free of ourselves for the first time.
As a result, creativity goes up, risk-taking
goes up, et cetera, et cetera.
There's also a combination of five
of the most potent neurochemicals
the brain can produce.
These are all performance-enhancing
chemicals.
But they serve a second function,
which is they're all feel-good, pleasure drugs.
And just to give you an idea, one
of the chemicals that shows up in flow
is dopamine, which you guys have probably heard of.
Dopamine-- well, let's back up.
Cocaine is widely considered the most addictive drug on Earth.
All that happens when somebody uses cocaine, is the brain--
JASON SILVA: They get dopamine.
STEVEN KOTLER: They get dopamine.
So you get dopamine.
You get endorphins.
And just endorphins are opiates, natural version
of heroin or morphine, just the one our brain
produces as painkillers.
But the most common endorphin in the brain
is 100 times more powerful than medical morphine.
The combination-- so first of all,
if you wanted to go out onto the street and cocktail
the street drug versions of this state,
you'd end up dead or in a coma.
Would not work.
Some of the drugs would actually cancel themselves out.
Your brain does it perfectly.
Which means flow is the most addictive state on Earth.
We will go extraordinarily far out of our way
to get more of it-- as Jason, I'm sure, will attest.
JASON SILVA: Yeah.
Well, one of the things that's blown
my mind about the attention that flow has gotten recently
in the media is that it's given it a language.
It's given us an ability to describe the ineffable ecstasy
of being in that zone, being in that pocket--
whether it's the jazz musician when he is improvising
and he literally transcends himself, the basketball player
achieving the impossible, the snowboarder,
the elite athletes pushing beyond the limits of the sport.
Something is happening in this moment.
And I remember there was some science recently
where they scanned the brains of rappers.
And they had them freestyle lyrics, which
means completely improvised.
And then, of course, they had them recite memorized lyrics.
And what they said is exactly that.
The lateral prefrontal cortex, the inner critic,
the self-editing, goes away.
Or as your partner, Jamie Wheal, says, your inner Woody Allen.
That self-crippling self-doubt, that self-consciousness,
that so often acts as paralysis for us--
to be free from that is such ecstasy.
And so what I'm curious about is how do you take this and make
this mainstream?
Because yes, it is all about us getting high and entering
these flow states.
But then what do we do with these flow states,
when we say we achieve the impossible?
You give a lot lectures, corporate talks
all over the world because apparently people doing
business are 10 times more productive when
they achieve flow.
So it's like, can you grab this high that artists are using,
that athletes are using, and bring it into the workplace,
and bring it into these new spaces
so that we can essentially upgrade society.
I mean, this is an ambitious idea,
but this is what you guys are doing at Flow Genome, right?
STEVEN KOTLER: It is kind of what we're doing.
And they're not 10 times-- so McKinsey did a 10-year study.
And they found top executives in flow
are five times more productive.
So it's 500% more productive.
It means you could go to work on Monday,
spend Monday in a flow state, take Tuesday
through Friday off, and get as much done
as your steady-state peers.
That's how much of an amplification in performance
you're actually talking about.
What we now know is-- and it's interesting.
So for a really long time, studying flow
was problematic because how do you know if somebody
was in a flow state?
You had to give them a subjective questionnaire.
And it's flimsy science.
And it's extremely well-validated questionnaire.
There's about 50 years' worth of research.
But what started happening in the past 25 years
is, for reasons I'll get to in a second, action adventure sport
athletes-- snowboarders, skiers, surfers,
whatnot-- they got better at reliably
and repeatedly reproducing the state of flow than anybody
else pretty much in the history of the world.
As a result, we've seen near-exponential growth
in ultimate human performance in action adventure sports.
So incredible things have happened in the past 25 years.
More impossible feats had been done than ever before.
From a research perspective, they gave us
something we've never had before, which
is at the upper level of competition,
these men and women are performing at--
if they're not in flow, they're going home in a body bag.
Or they're going to the hospital.
So suddenly, our research subjects,
if they lived through the experience,
we knew they were in flow.
And having this as a backdrop, a data set to work with,
has allowed us to work backwards.
We now know there are 17 triggers, 17 pre-conditions
that lead to more flow.
And we also know there's something called the flow
cycle, a four-stage process the state moves through,
which is sort of the map of the territory.
You combine these things, like we do at the Flow Genome
Project-- and this isn't, I mean there's
lots of different people out there
teaching flow and whatnot.
But I'll just give you our numbers.
We've taught-- I don't even know how many people--
thousands of people at this point.
On average, when people come through our courses--
six-week course, by the way, not even a hard course.
The homework's a little strange.
But it's a six-week course.
People are reporting a fivefold, so a 500%, increase in flow,
a 500% increase in creativity, and a 300% increase
in self-confidence.
And the last one, by the way, self-confidence--
we had no idea that it was going to happen.
It was just something that emerged out of the data.
We were really shocked by it.
But yes, the state is entirely trainable.
And as we get better at our neuroscience,
it's going to get more and more trainable.
JASON SILVA: So eventually we'll get to the point
that we can literally be able to press a button
and get into our highest state, so to speak.
STEVEN KOTLER: You can do it already.
I mean, so one of the ways they induce flow artificially
now is transcranial magnetic stimulation.
They literally shoot a big neuromagnetic pulse
through the brain.
They knock out the prefrontal cortex,
inducing artificial flow, kicking people into flow.
DARPA did this.
They took a group of snipers and they trained them up in flow
by knocking out the prefrontal cortex.
They found they learned 200% to 500% faster than normal.
They redid the study with novice, nonmilitary archers,
riflemen, and pistol shooters-- three different categories.
They found the time it takes to go from novice to expert
can be cut in half by flow.
So yes, there is already a button for it.
JASON SILVA: Which is wonderful.
So besides it being a wonderfully
smart and productive technique to assimilate and to learn,
there's also its connection fundamentally
to the human condition.
Jamie Wheal had a wonderful TEDx Talk
called-- your partner-- from "Altered States
to Altered Traits" and this idea of hacking the flow state.
He said most of us, while we recognize these flow states,
we get hooked on the state instead of raising the stage.
So we go there.
But then when we come back into ourselves Monday morning again
and it's like, what the fuck, right?
STEVEN KOTLER: Right.
JASON SILVA: And part of the thing that he was talking about
is that if you think of our self systems,
the way that our homeostasis right now,
we're like a colander.
And we're full of holes.
And no matter how much flow we pour in, we're draining.
So you have to be constantly pouring it in
to achieve any kind of equilibrium.
But then he talks about the idea of turning our colander
into a chalice so that we could literally make flow the default
condition.
Now, technology is advancing exponentially.
We have new construction kits for our reality.
You explore this in abundance in "Bold" and your new book
"Tomorrowland."
Can you speculate about how we might raise the stage,
reverse-engineer ourselves, creating a default flow state?
STEVEN KOTLER: It's an interesting question.
One thing for sure, there's no such thing as a permanent flow
state.
JASON SILVA: Bummer.
STEVEN KOTLER: The neurochemicals
that produce flow are in short supply.
So once you burn through them, and you
can burn through some of them in 20-- dopamine
and norepinephrine will burn out of your brain
in about 20 minutes.
Takes a little while to replenish them.
So there's no-- occasionally people
will come up to me like, I live in a permanent flow state.
And I'm like, yeah.
We have a word for that.
We call it schizophrenia.
JASON SILVA: Right.
STEVEN KOTLER: So you don't get to live in a permanent flow
state.
You can cycle through it.
And you can shorten the distance between cycles very,
very quickly.
So you can move through it.
There's a lot ninjutsu to there.
But I mean, what does it mean for society
if the 500% more productivity, if you just-- I'm
going to throw out some other numbers.
And they seem really, really wonky.
And we don't have enough time to go
into them because they're huge.
Creativity in flow, 500% to 700% amplified.
Motivation goes up a similar level.
Learning goes up a similar level.
So think about what this means for education.
There's studies done on college.
If we can get kids through college in three years,
the savings and the amount of money
that comes into the economy is significant.
How do you accelerate learning that way?
We know how.
Flow will already do it.
We know that flow massively increases the immune system.
It boosts the immune system and resets the nervous system.
Herb Benson at Harvard has said he
thinks that flow is responsible for most
cases of so-called spontaneous healing.
He thinks it's actually the neurobiology of flow that's
underneath it.
That may be overstepping the case, as far as I'm concerned.
But it's still intriguing and worth pursuing.
So health care, education, technology, on, and on, and on.
What it does is it puts society into hyperdrive,
or at least I think it does.
JASON SILVA: I love this.
So I want to connect this back to the idea of technology,
because you write a lot about technology.
And we've bonded around our shared love of new construction
kits for our reality.
But OK, so we live during disruptive times.
We live during exponential times.
Everything is changing.
Nobody really understands why until they
understand exponential change.
Ray Kurzweil from Google explains, we think linearly.
Our brains evolved in a linear and local world.
But we live in a world now that is exponential.
And the best example is 30 linear steps gets you to 30;
30 exponential steps gets you to a billion.
Now, what does this mean?
It means that the smartphone in your pocket today
is a million times cheaper, a million times smaller,
a thousand times more powerful than what
used to be a $60 million supercomputer that
was half a building in size 40 years ago.
It means a young kid in the savannas of Africa
with a smartphone has better communications
technology than the US president had 25 years ago.
So new tools for new realities, new possibilities.
Now, you co-wrote "Abundance," bestselling book
with Peter Diamandis.
You just released "Bold."
And now you're releasing "Tomorrowland," where science
fiction becomes science fact.
So talk to me.
Muse with me a little bit about this idea of these new brain
scaffoldings that we're creating and how
they're ushering in new possibility
spaces for ourselves.
And then tell me if you think there's
a connection between whether we can leverage these flow states,
if these new tools require new minds in order
to build the future we want to build.
STEVEN KOTLER: It's interesting.
The thing that's interesting to me
about, and that I focus on in "Tomorrowland,"
is the next step out.
Yes, we all know that science fiction
is becoming science fact.
And that's everywhere.
The random fact of the week-- 50% of your body can now be
replaced by bionics--
JASON SILVA: Amazing.
STEVEN KOTLER: which is insane.
What's really interesting to me about all this stuff
is, for example, bionics.
Not only do we have bionic limbs for replacement parts
and things like that for paraplegics and quadriplegics.
But we're starting to get exoskeletons, so
strap-on braces.
There are now ankle braces and knee braces, bionic ankle
braces and knee braces for the elderly.
And they put energy back into the system.
Our brain evolved in such a way that getting old
was something that happened.
There was nothing we could do about it.
And the number one complaint about getting old
is a loss of mobility.
So we now have technology that is taking that away here today.
And it's only getting better, because as Jason pointed out,
these are all on exponential growth curves.
So what's interesting to me about the transformation
of science fiction to science fact
is less about the whiz-bang technologies,
and more about the fact that we're
starting to fuck with really deep evolutionarily adaptive
systems.
We're starting to really poke into what
it means to be human at a really, really, really
deep level.
And it's going to start getting interesting.
Because a lot of the things-- it's
not even our belief systems.
It's the things that our belief systems are built on.
JASON SILVA: It's the substrate.
STEVEN KOTLER: Exactly.
That's exactly true.
JASON SILVA: It's a great line about Edward O. Wilson, where
he says, we have decommissioned natural selection.
And now we must look deep within ourselves
to decide what we wish to become.
I mean, we've already changed the physical,
the external, world.
If you look at a city, what is that?
Congealed intent, as McKenna would say,
congealed imagination.
If you look at the topography of Manhattan,
that's shaped more by mind, and agency, and will,
and technology than it is by geology.
So the mind has already trumped matter in so many ways.
But it's like, now we're experiencing a recursion,
because now we're folding the mind in on itself to start
to play with biology itself.
So biotechnology, mastering the information processes
of biology, rewriting our genome.
Having invented the gods, we can turn into them.
STEVEN KOTLER: And the one-- I'll
give you one example if we want to talk about really
crazy technology, mind uploading, the idea that we
can store ourselves in silicon, upload
our brains into computers.
And it sounds absolutely crazy, sounds like make-believe.
People are working on it today.
And it's actually a multi-part system.
And a couple of the parts, like the playback mechanism,
we have already.
The VR devices that are at Facebook, the next generation
of Oculus can play it back.
We've already got things that we can
plant in the brain that can record basically all
the inputs of all your senses.
So nobody quite knows what it is that constructs a life.
But pretty soon, if we go by Ray Kurzweil's numbers--
and maybe you can, and maybe you can't-- but his numbers,
by 2045, we'll be able to simulate a brain inside
a computer.
Which means we'll be able to store ourselves in a computer.
So the interesting question to me
is, think about how much blood has
been spilled in the past hundred years in the name of religion.
Think about how much religion uses
the threat of the hereafter to steer morality and shape
behavior.
But what happens to theological morality
in the face of technological immortality?
And it sounds like a crazy question,
but it's a question we're going to actually have
to deal with this century.
JASON SILVA: I mean, it's no joke.
I mean, Larry Page from Google is
funding Calico, the California life extension company.
Craig Venter created the first artificial life form.
And when they asked him, are you worried
about playing God, he said, who's playing?
I mean, there are legitimately brilliant,
smart, accomplished people invested in this stuff.
And the fact-- I mean, what is it?
It was Freeman Dyson that says in the very near future,
a new generation of artists will write genomes with the fluency
that Blake and Byron wrote verses.
So if you think of technology as a conduit to new possibilities,
new modes of human expression, new modes of human agency-- so
the technology of the oil painting
allowed van Gogh to emerge.
The technology of the musical instrument
allowed Beethoven's genius.
What are we going to make with biology?
What are our artists going to "imagineer"
with the canvas of life?
STEVEN KOTLER: And it sounds crazy, by the way.
What he's saying sounds crazy.
But synthetic biology-- which essentially
treats genetic code like computer code-- it
allows us to write life from scratch.
Right now, it's new fuels, new foods, new medicines.
But a guy named Andrew Hessel-- who's
a friend of ours, who's at Autodesk,
he's a distinguished researcher at Autodesk--
is literally building a DNA typewriter,
meaning it's a user-friendly interface
for synthetic biology.
So if you imagine what happened to the web,
the web had been around for 20 years.
Nobody but computer scientists and the military
are using it, because there was no way to get on.
You had to be a computer scientist
if you wanted to play.
Marc Andreessen comes along in 1993.
He creates Mosaic, which becomes Netscape.
And we have 26 websites online in 1993, 10,000 the next year,
and a million the year after.
Andrew's creating a DNA typewriter,
which is a user-friendly interface
for synthetic biology.
So this idea that artists are going to be programming life
and creating in life is probably five to 10 years away, longest.
This is, it's here now.
And I have no idea what comes next.
What I do think-- and I've said this before.
It's always been, especially with these [? edge ?]
technologies, there's always subculture
that drives it forward.
And there's this-- I call it the rebel instinct.
Each generation seems to outdo the next generation.
So we did weird hair.
And then we did weird clothes.
And then we did body piercings and some low-grade tattoos.
And then we started doing body modifications.
And now we're doing biohacking, the cutting edge.
People are inserting technology into their body.
So I think what we're going to see
is the punk rockers of the future with cat eyes, and cat
tails, and angel-- there's already a guy.
"Harper's" did that story about the guy
who's trying to build angel wings that are surgically
implanted.
This is what's coming.
So I do think it's going to be a punk rock
ethos that drives this forward.
JASON SILVA: Now I want to ask you about this idea of-- see,
I think this stuff is astonishing.
I think if you pay attention to what's happening-- well,
if you pay attention to anything-- as Darwin used
to say, "Attention, if sudden and close,
graduates into surprise; and this into astonishment;
and this into stupefied amazement."
And yet most of us don't pay attention to this stuff.
Most of us go through our day, kind of busy, kind of bored,
kind of waiting for the next hit of some kind of ecstasy.
But I mean, we don't lose sleep over these transformations.
We are not in a permanent state of astonishment.
Can you tell me about the brain chemistry
of why we are walking around half asleep most of the time,
instead of marveling at these new possibilities that
are emerging, that are going to fundamentally
be changing humanity?
Why isn't this on the front page of everything, every day?
I mean, I know you write about this for "Forbes."
I know you're seeing more and more of it.
But it's not everywhere the way it should be.
I mean, why isn't everybody talking about this
all the time?
STEVEN KOTLER: That's a real question?
JASON SILVA: Honestly.
Yes.
STEVEN KOTLER: Well, I don't know, actually.
I wonder that myself.
JASON SILVA: But don't you think that there is an urgency
here, the self determination of the species being at stake.
We should be setting up playgrounds
for new evolutionary paradigms to be experimented with.
STEVEN KOTLER: If you want a biological answer,
it's the amygdala, which is the part of your brain
that generates fear.
And so consciousness explained very, very simply,
the brain takes in a whole lot of information.
And there's a bunch of filters.
And the filters are in front of what
is pattern recognition and future prediction.
That's all that's going on at a really deep level--
information coming in, grabbed by
the senses, bunch of filters.
And then we're looking for patterns.
And then we're making predictions
into the future based on those patterns.
That's essentially what your brain is doing at all times.
The first filter everything hits is your amygdala.
It's where all information goes.
Why?
Because the amygdala governs fight or flight,
safety and security.
So fear--
JASON SILVA: Gets our attention.
STEVEN KOTLER: It gets-- but it's the first filter
anybody puts up.
It's the very first thing anything that scares you,
and all our cognitive biases exist to narrow reality.
If you look at what the cognitive biases do,
they're information processing shortcuts.
All biases are like processing shortcuts gone wrong,
because we take in so much information.
They've done calculations, on average--
and if you go by the old numbers,
it's 11 million bits of information a second.
If you go by the new numbers, it's
400 billion bits of information a second.
Whatever the case--
JASON SILVA: It's what's coming in.
STEVEN KOTLER: --the brain-- what's coming in.
The brain is massively overwhelmed.
Your working memory can hold about 40 bits of information
at once.
That's all you can hold in your head,
and you've got 400 billion bits coming in.
So almost everything that we think of as reality
is not reality, obviously.
It just gets thrown out.
And the first thing that's throwing it out
is anything you're scared of.
So why is this not on the front page?
Because all this stuff is scary.
It can go horribly wrong.
We were talking about what's great with synthetic biology
and what artists are going to produce.
I wrote an article for "The Atlantic"
not too long ago about customizable bioweapons that
can target individual people-- meaning I could now assassinate
the president using synthetic biology,
and he's going to think he got a cold.
And it's only targeting the president.
And it's doable today.
So this stuff gets scary fast.
JASON SILVA: But see, that does get very scary fast.
But when the answer-- yes.
But the answer that I found Kurzweil
has given, that I found very compelling,
is he said, well, that's always been the case.
Technology has always been a double-edged sword.
Fire can cook our foods or burn our enemies.
Perhaps the most powerful information technology
that's ever been created is the alphabet.
And the alphabet can be used to compose
beautiful Shakespearean sonnets that expand our interior world.
But the alphabet can also be used
to move people to kill each other, and kill the other,
and so on and so forth.
So it's like, these tools extend our will.
But they can extend our will in any direction.
So yes, it's up to us to make sure we
use these things wisely.
But that's always been the case.
And we haven't destroyed ourselves thus far.
So I think we have a pretty good track record.
Also, if you look at the work of Steven Pinker,
he says the world has been getting
less violent for the last couple decades.
The world is less violent now than it's ever been,
contrary to the doom and gloom things we see in the media.
So do you think that there's hope
that, in spite of these new tools being more dangerous,
we somehow will have the conscience
to not destroy ourselves?
STEVEN KOTLER: I don't know if we're not
going to destroy ourselves.
I will-- to pull it back to flow states, one of the things
that we know about flow-- and a lot of this
has to do with all the neurochemicals
that show up in flow.
Besides all the performance enhancement
and their addictive nature, they're
all social bonding chemicals.
So if flow is one of these technologies that's
going to drive us into the future--
all of the social bonding chemicals, all
the norepinephrine and dopamine which show up in flow,
that's romantic love.
Endorphins, that's maternal love.
Anandamide is that same kind of psychoactive chemical
that's in marijuana, makes you open to new ideas,
and love your friends.
JASON SILVA: We love that.
STEVEN KOTLER: So these are really potent social bonding
chemicals.
The point is that flow expands empathy.
And a lot of these new technologies
seem to be able play with that.
We can expand empathy.
You were talking about the difference
between states and stages.
JASON SILVA: Absolutely.
I mean, when you start talking about empathy,
I get excited, because there's a great line from "Interstellar"
that talked about how empathy rarely extends
beyond our line of sight.
And one of the things that our new technologies do
is extend our line of sight.
I mean, if you think virtual reality,
that potentially is an engine of empathy.
You put somebody inside of a virtual space,
place them in a Syrian refugee camp, you extend their empathy.
A lot more difficult to ignore.
So you think the combination of these external technology,
and potentially these flow states
and this internal technologies could
allow us to create a more empathetic species--
could actually create a shift that scales?
STEVEN KOTLER: Look at the-- you've got to--
I disagree with the "Interstellar" line,
for example.
Because what religion is, basically,
is a way to extend empathy beyond clan and kin.
That's what it was.
You go back 500 years.
If I wasn't related to you, if you didn't live in my village,
you were other.
And I wanted to fight you and kill you.
Religion allowed us to extend that.
Suddenly, oh, wow.
He's a Christian?
I'm a Christian.
OK, we don't have to kill each other.
So we've seen what these-- we've also
seen them backfire, of course.
But we've seen technology, language, massively
extend empathy before.
This is a much more visceral version of it.
I mean, I don't think it's everybody on ecstasy.
But it definitely opens you up.
And you're closer to it.
So I think there's a lot of hope.
But I also think the thing about exponential technology
at this point is it does put the power of God
into the hands of individuals.
And that's what's different today.
JASON SILVA: Promethean-- stealing fire from the gods.
Well, tease the name of your next book.
STEVEN KOTLER: "Stealing Fire."
JASON SILVA: OK.
So it was originally-- we had a whole conversation
about this idea of mapping the highest
possible states of human consciousness,
mapping our ecstasies, creating a kind of cartography
of ecstatic states.
And so can you talk a little bit about "Stealing Fire,"
flow states, and how these emerging technologies are
allowing us to basically get higher than we've ever gotten;
to explore new spaces of ecstatic
rapture; the neurobiology of mystical experience;
and so on and so forth.
Hacking nirvana.
Beyond flow.
Hacking nirvana.
STEVEN KOTLER: Well, so the idea that-- Jason's
talking about a book that I'm writing now
with my partner on the Flow Genome Project, Jamie Wheal.
And it's called "Stealing Fire."
And the core idea is there's a whole swatch
of experiences-- psychedelic experiences, drug experiences,
flow states, so-called mystical experiences, et cetera, et
cetera.
And when you start adding them together and looking at them,
first of all what you find is, from
a neurobiological perspective, very, very, very similar.
For example, meditative states and flow.
In flow, the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex goes off.
We talked about that.
But another portion your brain, called
the medial orbital prefrontal cortex--
which is creative self-expression-- goes crazy,
becomes really hyperactive.
Because flow, creativity, goes through the roof,
this portion of the brain gets really hyperactive.
In meditative states, because you
don't need creative decision making,
that portion of the brain shuts off.
Other things turn up.
When you look at it, it's basically
a set of knobs and levers.
We're turning down certain things.
We're turning up certain things.
We're turning on certain things, turning off.
But it's a set category.
And what we're discovering, really in the past 100 years,
and much more in the past 25 years,
is there's-- I call it an upper possibility space of human
experience that has almost been completely off the map.
And by upper, I mean north of happiness.
Things start at happiness, and they get weird.
JASON SILVA: Right.
STEVEN KOTLER: But there's a whole huge space up there
that we haven't inhabited.
And when people tripped into it, we thought they were crazy.
We burned them at stakes for a long time,
or we called them drug addicts.
And we wrote them off and banished them, whatever.
All this stuff is being opened up.
And more interestingly, it's being
opened up technologically.
And it seems like when things get opened up technologically,
we're less afraid of them.
Michael Persinger creates the God Helmet.
He basically puts in on, it shoots electromagnetic fields
into your right temporal lobe.
We know right temporal lobe epilepsy,
when this part of the brain gets excited,
we have out-of-body experiences.
We have near-death experiences.
By the way, the same part of your brain
gets very excited in dreaming.
So we have this experience every night.
But we can now stimulate this with technology.
Doesn't work all the time.
Doesn't work for everybody.
But we're getting better and better at it.
And people are-- we might be hesitant about taking a drug,
or we write it off.
But if it's technologically mediated,
we're a lot more comfortable with it.
JASON SILVA: A lot more open to it.
STEVEN KOTLER: It's allowing us to open up
this really crazy space that we don't really understand.
JASON SILVA: Yeah.
Well, I mean, it captures my imagination,
especially when you say north of happiness.
Because I mean, what is the self-help movement,
the happiness movement, billion-dollar industries.
People trying to figure out new metrics for happiness
because it turns out that getting everything you want
is not going to make you happy.
And that experiences, for example,
are more valuable than things when
it comes to longer-form satisfaction and satiation.
But we are an existential species.
We are an agitated species.
With our minds, we can ponder the infinite.
Now I'm channeling Ernest Becker.
We can ponder the infinite, yet we're
housed in heart pumping, breath gasping, decaying bodies.
So our greatest ecstasies are haunted,
are shadowed by the fact that they are temporary,
that we are finite-- no matter how many times we get
the goosebumps and are moved to tears
by beautiful art, or beautiful ecstasy, or beautiful rhapsody.
So my question for you-- when you're
talking about north of happiness,
technological mediation, I'm reminded
of David Pearce's work, "The Hedonistic Imperative."
Are you familiar with David Pearce?
He's a transhumanist philosopher that
believes that we are going to institute a paradise
engineering, as he calls it, where
we're going to be using new biotechnologies
and nanotechnologies to shift our hedonic treadmill
and to literally neuroengineer gradients
of bliss that will make even our greatest ecstasies today pale.
He calls them our Darwinian, old-school ecstasies
compared to what we're going to create.
Where do you stand on that idea, not just
in terms of the science, but in terms of the poet in you?
Does this excite you, this idea of creating spaces
so much more north of happy, and what that's going to be like?
STEVEN KOTLER: So we have something called an hedonic set
point.
An hedonic set point basically means
that somewhere between ages six and 12, the amount of happiness
and sadness you're going to feel in life is pretty much set.
It's why you feel the same emotionally at 10, at 20,
at 30, at 40.
It's roughly the same bandwidth of emotion.
It's because we have these things called emotional set
points.
And they get locked down.
I'm less interested in the super-ecstatic.
I just think it's interesting.
But it's very bizarre.
And I have no idea what comes from that.
But what happens if we can just shift everybody
and we're 3% happier?
And that's really, really possible.
For example, we know-- mass amounts of research
back this up-- that the people who
have the most flow in their lives, it's often
said that people with the most flow in their lives
are the happiest people on Earth.
And it's actually a misnomer.
Happiness is a temporary condition.
People with the most flow in their lives
score off the charts on life satisfaction
and well being tests.
So it's meaning and it's overall possibility.
JASON SILVA: Beyond happiness.
STEVEN KOTLER: Right, it's beyond happiness.
So we know flow, repeated exposure to flow,
can shift your emotional set point.
It's one of the only things that can actually shift this.
So that's where it starts to get interesting.
Because we know this is possible.
We know this is doable.
So what happens if we move an entire society a couple degrees
up that ladder?
That's interesting to me.
JASON SILVA: That's a happy place to be.
STEVEN KOTLER: Well, it means a whole lot less fear.
So that first filter we were talking about gets damped down.
And then the possibility space gets really interesting.
JASON SILVA: Wow.
That gets me very happy, bro.
STEVEN KOTLER: I'm so glad.
JASON SILVA: So can we talk a little bit about your work?
People say that people who live in their flow state
kind of build their whole lives around it.
You live in a dog sanctuary that you
created, which I think is one of the most amazing things ever.
Because you're this amazingly gifted writer, writing
all these New York bestsellers, but you
live with all these dogs.
Can you tell me a little bit about what you discovered
about animals, and how that gets you into your flow state,
a little bit?
STEVEN KOTLER: Well, a couple of things.
JASON SILVA: I'm in awe of that aspect of your life.
STEVEN KOTLER: I run a animal sanctuary called Rancho de
Chihuahua.
And we deal with hospice care and special needs care
for really sick small dogs.
And really, really sick.
Most of our animals show up to us,
they come directly from vets often,
with a month to live, two months to live, that kind of thing.
Flow is at the heart of our healing methodology.
And as I said earlier, it boosts the immune system.
It resets the [INAUDIBLE] system.
Our animals live for a really long time.
So we actually do put these-- we were talking about,
is flow trainable?
We put our dogs in the flow all the time.
It's actually not hard.
By the way, we don't know if it's all animals that
are hard-wired for flow.
We know it's dogs.
And we know at some point down the mammalian chain,
it probably cuts off.
And we don't know where.
But we absolutely know dogs can get into flow.
What else do you want me to talk about?
JASON SILVA: No, no.
I just wanted you to talk about that.
But I also want to bring up the subject, just
because usually when I'm in a flow state,
I'm usually very quickly marveling at something,
because I'm a very curious person.
So I'm always like, I want to get into a flow state
and see a movie.
I want to get into a flow state and go
for a walk in some beautiful spot,
maybe like Big Sur or whatever.
And there was this great book by Allison Griffiths called
"Shivers Down Your Spine."
It talked about cinema, Gothic cathedrals,
and the immersive view.
And so she was talking about external technologies
that we use to trigger these states of rapture,
states of awe.
And she said Gothic cathedrals are designed in a certain way
to put you in touch with the sublime, to hack your brain,
and put you in awe right away.
The modern incarnation of that, the IMAX Theater.
She says you go into an IMAX Theater, and right off the bat,
the space is already doing something to your perception.
It's already doing something to your mood.
And there's been a lot of recent science
about this emotion of awe.
That it turns out that experiences that stretch
your perceptual boundaries force you to create
new maps of the world.
And in assimilating these new experiences,
you experience this cognitive ecstasy, this awe.
And after the moment passes, you're
left with increased feelings, residual feelings,
of heightened creativity, heightened well being,
heightened satisfaction-- which is already wonderful.
And additionally, these experiences of awe
are anti-inflammatory.
So they're also good for you.
So what is your take on this side emotion of awe
and where it fits in with flow?
STEVEN KOTLER: Yeah.
What we know about awe, actually,
is-- so one of the triggers for flow, one of the things
that will drive us into flow is what's technically
called a rich environment.
Which is a fancy way of saying lots of novelty,
lots of complexity, lots of unpredictability.
Complexity is what triggers awe.
So when you stare up at the night sky,
and you see a billion galaxies, and you cannot process it,
your conscious mind literally cannot process it.
So what happens in flow is we trade conscious processing
for subconscious processing.
Flow is the only time we actually
get to watch the subconscious mind work.
And the reason it's such a weird state,
conscious thought travels about 150 miles an hour.
Subconscious thought, 2,000 to 5,000 miles an hour.
So it's hyperspeed decision making.
Awe is the front edge of a flow state.
So when you look up at the night sky,
and you get sucked in, and time dilation,
everything freezes for a minute.
That's actually the front end of the flow state.
And so we know from-- this is Teresa Amabile's work
at Harvard.
She figured out that the height in creativity that shows up
in flow actually outlasts the flow state by a day,
by two days.
It suggests-- and this is really incredible.
One thing we know-- and the best example of this is something
called the Red Bull Creativity Project.
Red Bull, the energy drink company,
teamed up with MIT and TED.
And they did the largest study of creativity ever done.
They looked at everything.
They learned two things.
One, creativity is fundamental to society-- big surprise.
Two, we can't teach anybody how to more creative.
We suck at it.
So what Teresa Amabile discovered at Harvard
is flow actually trains the brain up
to be more creative over the long haul.
It extends for a couple of days.
What we're seeing in awe is it extending
for a couple of hours.
It's a small-scale flow state, basically.
JASON SILVA: Wonderful.
Well, we've got five more minutes
for the official talk portion.
And then we'd love to open it up to questions from you guys.
So if you want to start thinking about some questions.
Do you have a question?
STEVEN KOTLER: I want to actually turn the question
you asked me back on you.
Which is-- because you've been thinking about this a lot
and talking about this a lot.
But what do you think this means?
If we can start producing these states,
if we can start opening up this so-called ecstatic space--
and by the way, if we use the word "ecstasy,"
I'm not talking about the club drug.
I'm talking about-- the Greek root for ecstasy is "ekstasis."
It means to get out of your head.
And just--
JASON SILVA: Be beside ourselves.
STEVEN KOTLER: To be beside ourselves.
And by the way, we did a research study
at the Flow Genome Project.
We wanted to see how much money people spend
getting out of their head.
So we basically added up all the things
people do to get out of their heads.
And we did it in the most conservative possible way
we could have done the math.
It's $10 trillion a year.
One sixth of the global economy is
what we spend getting out of our heads,
and getting out of ourselves.
That's what we spend.
JASON SILVA: The altered states economy.
STEVEN KOTLER: The altered states economy, exactly.
It's one sixth of the global economy.
JASON SILVA: Yeah, which I think is wonderful.
Because when we get out of our heads, not
to bring up psychedelic language, but
we dissolve boundaries.
We dissolve boundaries of thought.
We dissolve patterns in our thinking.
We see the world in a new way.
We get something akin to the astronaut overview effect.
We see the gestalt from a different angle.
So I feel like it makes us less rigid people,
more compassionate people, more tolerant people.
Only good comes from getting out of our heads, I find.
I find it to be a wonderfully romantic release
to get rid of yourself for a little while,
and to find that there's something there afterwards.
STEVEN KOTLER: I think the only problem
with it is it's massively addictive.
You can pretty easily go down the rabbit hole
of I want my brain to be turned off all the time
and you don't come back.
JASON SILVA: But what about taking lessons
from that other space and then having integration?
There's a lot of stuff in the literature
now, in the science, in the news,
about psychedelic psychotherapy--
so giving PTSD patients some MDMA
and compressing 10 years of normal psychotherapy
into six hours.
The kind of ontological shift that
can be triggered by these technologies of inner space
and what that can lead us to.
Michael Pollan's article in "The New Yorker"
recently was saying, maybe what we
can do is not just talk about how
we can help people that are pathologically
suffering from PTSD.
But what about taking those insights
and applying them for people that are OK,
so making well people better.
Could we use psychedelic therapies
for people that would identify as not being traumatized.
STEVEN KOTLER: If you go back to-- I
don't know what you guys know about psychedelic research.
But before Nixon shut it all down, thousands of studies
were done.
And most of them-- a lot of them were done on addiction.
Psychedelics turn out to be very, very good
for fighting addiction.
But they're also, most of them were done on creativity.
Which is why Steve Jobs said, LSD
is one of the three great things I've done in my life.
I think you have to be fairly repressed for LSD
to be that great of an experience for you,
but OK, whatever.
It's Steve Jobs for you.
He was.
But it definitely opens up a whole new level of possibility.
If you go back-- you mentioned the PTSD MDMA studies.
If you guys actually look at those studies,
they're astounding.
They looked at war veterans-- Iraq and Afghanistan-- people
with really serious PTSD.
And they looked at sexual trauma victims and child abuse
victims.
And they were finding that they could overwrite the PTSD in one
to two sessions.
So 20 years of therapy doesn't work.
All the drugs we've got on the market don't work.
But two MDMA sessions seem to work really fast.
JASON SILVA: There you go.
No surprise there, actually.
Cool, guys.
Well, we'd love to turn it over to some questions from you.
This has been really fun.
But I feel like you guys could probably catalyze some offshoot
conversation.
WOMAN 1: Two questions.
The first was when you were talking about flow,
and you said, we have this interesting opportunity
to study extreme sports.
And the ones that are really flowing
are the ones that are successful.
And yet, the ones that aren't flowing go to the hospital
or die.
But you said when you're in flow,
you can have higher risk taking.
So is it possible they're in flow, but they just are risky,
and therefore they have an accident?
STEVEN KOTLER: Certainly you have that.
Scot Schmidt, who was one of the early extreme skiers,
said flow makes you feel like Superman up
until the moment you're not.
Which is very, very true.
And certainly in the shit happens
category, stuff happens.
You can be in a flow state.
You can be flying down the hill on a mountain bike
and hit a rock.
And you put yourself in the hospital.
I broke 84 bones that way, literally.
So yes, there is some of that.
And risk-taking definitely goes [INAUDIBLE].
There's a study that just actually came out
of Germany that showed that people, every time-- risk
is one of the things that focus attention.
It drives you into flow.
It's a really great flow trigger.
And it also drives dopamine in the brain,
which is a focusing chemical, among everything else it does.
So all this stuff is really great to drive you into flow.
But over your lifetime, absolutely you
will take greater and greater risks,
and greater and greater risks, and greater and greater risks.
So that will definitely happen.
Usually what happens with the younger action
sport athletes is they have Kodak courage.
They're getting by on youth, and balls, and adrenalin.
And it will only get you so far.
Usually what happens with flow, because it's
a much calmer space, people tend to make better decisions
as a general rule.
You obviously can still kill yourself in flow states.
But as a general rule, people make better decisions.
JASON SILVA: So it would be a better-informed risk
if you were to take the risk.
STEVEN KOTLER: It's a better informed risk, yeah.
WOMAN 1: My second question was, I just
spent the weekend in an art of dying conference.
And they do use psilocybin to ease anxiety
at the end of life.
So in terms of the flow, or training people with flow,
do you think that it would limit the fear of death?
And also, is it possible to be in the flow in later years?
I mean, obviously you can die at any age.
But is there any--
STEVEN KOTLER: There's no age.
So what we know about flow is it's ubiquitous.
It shows up in anyone, anywhere, provided
certain initial conditions are met.
So there's no age limits on flow whatsoever.
We also know-- so what psilocybin
does is it creates a sense of oneness with everything.
Where that sense comes from, actually,
is transient hypofrontality.
So there's a part of your brain, the right parietal lobe,
that is what separate-- generates a barrier
between self and others.
So it exists so I can walk around this room
and not bump into furniture.
So if I have a stroke or brain damage
to this part of my brain, I can't sit down
on a couch, because I don't know where my leg ends
and the couch begins.
So during intense concentration--
like shows up in meditation, or flow,
or things like this-- part of the brain shuts down.
And we can no longer separate self from other.
And that point, you're convinced--
because there's no other data available--
that you are one with everything.
The same thing is going on if you're using psilocybin or LSD.
It's the same mechanism.
All the roads lead to Rome.
It doesn't matter how you get in.
So in terms of using flow to combat end-of-life anxiety?
Absolutely.
Absolutely, it would work very, very well.
It might be interesting to couple it
with psilocybin or some of those other therapies.
WOMAN 1: Right.
Because the people that are doing the research in this,
it's not like the psilocybin is giving you anything.
What it is, it's activating what you already are capable of.
JASON SILVA: Well, I think what Rich Doyle says
is that psychedelics, they don't really have an effect per se.
But they're nonspecific amplifiers of consciousness.
So what really sculpts the psychedelic trip
is your set and your setting.
So the setting is the place that you've
pre-configured, that you've architected,
where the trip is going to unfold.
And of course, the set is what you're
bringing to that-- your predispositions,
your fears, your anxieties, your intention,
what you want to resolve, what you want to probe and explore.
And what you come to perceive in those moments,
according to the work of Rich Doyle, who I adore,
is that you come to perceive, first
of all, the feedback loops between
your creative and linguistic choices and your consciousness.
In other words, once the trip starts,
you realize just how much where you are
is determining your subjective experience.
If you're in a mystical, beautiful park in Big Sur,
you start to feel mystical, beautiful sensations.
But you're feeling those already unconsciously just
by being there.
But the trip, in amplifying and bringing forth
that subconscious feeling, all of a sudden the theater
of the moment is informed by the stage that you're in.
So if you're in that beautiful place,
it's already coloring the trip towards beautiful spaces.
If you pre-configure music-- there's
an article by Timothy Leary written
in the '60s called "Programming the Psychedelic Experience."
Which was all about the idea that if you could successfully
pattern and pre-configure the input signals that
were coming in when a person is in a highly
suggestible psychedelic state, you could script the journey.
You could literally outline and steer
awareness and subjectivity.
So you could create your own compressed version of a Joseph
Campbell hero's journey.
You could take the psilocybin, depart from the ordinary,
go down the rabbit hole, learn new things about yourself,
see the world in a new way, have cathartic realizations,
and make the return.
And holy moly, talk about compressing a journey
into a journey.
But I think this is really fascinating.
You can tell I'm very passionate about this.
STEVEN KOTLER: Jason Silva, ladies and gentlemen.
JASON SILVA: No, no.
But there's a lot to do here.
But really, the key idea is that consciousness
is a collaborative act between subject and object.
And it becomes even more so a collaborative act
between subject and object when you are in a psychedelically
addled state.
You realize that mind, that awareness,
is a co-production between self and world.
It's all about these feedback loops
that you just come to witness and you come to see.
So that can either be a frightening bummer
if you're in the wrong set and setting,
or can be nirvana in the right set and setting.
STEVEN KOTLER: What Jason said.
I don't know how to follow that.
JASON SILVA: OK, we've got a couple more minutes.
Any?
Yes.
WOMAN 2: So is there any way that those really negative
feelings that you associate with the frontal lobe
can actually stimulate a state of flow?
Because I had a moment of terrible fear and anxiety,
like crippling, and I gave the best talk of my life.
STEVEN KOTLER: Oh, yeah.
WOMAN 2: And then the next week, I was really meditative.
And I gave a really boring talk.
STEVEN KOTLER: Oh, yeah.
So I said earlier, there's a flow cycle.
The first part of the cycle is known as struggle.
And it is-- your prefrontal cortex may go away in flow.
This is all prefrontal cortex.
Struggle is called struggle for a reason.
It is really unpleasant.
It is a learning phase.
It is a loading phase.
You are loading and overloading the brain with information.
I often found when I was a-- I made my living as a journalist
for 20, 25 years.
And I always found the best stories,
I wanted a flow state experience.
But I would find that I had to be really--
the trip had to scare me.
The journey had to scare me.
That night before, I wasn't sleeping
for weeks, because I was going off to the Himalayas
to go chase whatever.
I would really work myself into a state, a really negative
state, so that even a little bit of a positive experience
could kick me into flow.
It didn't take much at that point,
because I had freaked myself out so much ahead of time.
So yeah.
Both Jason and myself will tell you we're both flow junkies.
And we're both totally neurotic.
And a lot of the reason I think I got into this
is because it's bad up here.
I've got to do a lot to get out of here
under normal conditions.
JASON SILVA: I agree.
Very neurotic.
And not only that, but I'm obsessed
with Ernest Becker, who wrote the book "The Denial of Death,"
because I'm extremely haunted by the idea of transience
and mortality.
And I can vouch for the fact that when I'm in a flow state,
it's the only time when bliss rules.
There's no thoughts about, oh, this
is all going to end one day.
So why even be excited, because it's all temporary, anyway.
And everything dissolves into nothing.
But when I'm in a flow state, and I'm
watching an amazing movie or I'm listening to beautiful music,
or I'm being blown away by the ideas
that somebody's sharing-- holy shit.
I'm in the eternal now.
And death doesn't exist.
MAN 1: Yeah.
I'm curious.
How are these flow states-- you talk about extreme sports.
I've been a surfer for 30 years.
In the last 10 years, the shit that's been happening,
you can't even believe it.
And is it epigenetics through YouTube?
Or is it-- people are getting into these flow states.
And you see somebody do something.
It's like that Laird Hamilton photo
that came on "Surfer" magazine.
I mean, literally, just everyone was, what the hell?
And five years later, everybody's doing it.
And I see it over and over again.
And it just fascinates me.
STEVEN KOTLER: That was one of the-- one of the reasons
that I got interested in this field is
from for my early career as a journalist,
I chased action sport athletes around mountains
for five, six years.
And obviously, I'm not an action sport athlete.
So I broke a lot of bones along the way.
And I would have these year-long injuries,
where I'd have 65 hairline fractures in my leg
and I didn't move for a year.
And I would come back to the sport a year later.
And it was like 30 years of evolution in a year.
And my first question was, what the hell's going on?
How is this even possible?
So what actually happened in action sports, a lot of it
was-- so creativity is a flow trigger.
Creativity is amplified by flow.
But the actual pattern recognition
when you link ideas together, you
get a tiny squirt of dopamine.
We've all had this experience.
You've done a crossword puzzle.
You get an answer right.
That little rush of pleasure you get afterwards,
that's dopamine.
Dopamine also tunes signal-to-noise ratios,
meaning it allows us to see more patterns.
So the reason you get one crossword answer right,
and then you get a couple in a row right,
it's because dopamine is helping you see more patterns.
Creativity-- and it happened because of snowboarding.
Snowboarding was a banned sport.
So people started hiking their snowboards
to the top of the mountains.
If you're hiking your snowboard to the top of a mountain,
you don't want to be the fastest person to the bottom,
because you just spent four hours getting to the top.
And that's stupid.
So instead, it became the most creative way down
is the winner.
And there's not just one winner.
Everybody can win.
So this was adopted.
It was free riding in snowboarding.
It became free skiing, and free surfing,
and on, and on, and on.
And it became about creativity.
And that in combination with the risk and the other factors
just started driving so much flow.
But the other thing that happened, in 1986
we invented the VCR.
And it sounds really funny.
But try to learn a dynamic action sports move
from a static magazine photo.
It sucks.
It's really hard to do.
But with the invention of the VCR,
by 1986, I think it was 50% of American homes had
a VCR in it by that point.
And suddenly, especially for skaters, they
were the first to notice it.
You could pause and rewind.
And it became this training manual.
So technology, coupled with flow,
created this massive feedback loop that
led us to where we are today.
MAN 1: Yeah.
I'm old enough to grow up with the magazines.
And I had a pivotal moment where I
was trying to learn how to do an off the lip when
I was young and [INAUDIBLE] top of the wave.
And I saw so many pictures.
And I would hit, and I would stop.
And a friend said, you're stopping with the picture
as it flows--
STEVEN KOTLER: That's awesome.
MAN 1: And I was like, [INAUDIBLE].
STEVEN KOTLER: That's pretty funny.
MAN 1: And then five years later, everybody's
learning it through the whole motion
that we didn't have back then.
STEVEN KOTLER: That's funny.
Yeah, I was talking to Ian Walsh,
who's another great surfer.
And he was talking about this.
And he says, by the time he goes home--
he lives 10 minutes from Jaws.
But by the time he's home from Jaws,
somebody has uploaded the footage of his session
onto YouTube.
And he can start doing video playback review
as soon as he gets home because of where the technology is.
JASON SILVA: Any other questions?
Yeah.
MAN 2: Are either of you, during this talk,
were either of you in a flow state?
And if so, how'd you get there?
And if not, why not?
JASON SILVA: Interesting.
We both do a lot of speaking all the time.
And I was talking to him about this earlier.
Sometimes the focusing that happens
when you are in front of people--
which means I don't feel entitled to people's time
at all.
So my brain, right off the bat, is getting really focused
and making sure that whatever it's doing up here
is going to be useful information.
There's not a lot of "ums" or "buts"
or taking my time when I talk.
Because I don't feel entitled to your time.
So I get really focused.
And then there's that space where knowledge and skill
set meets opportunity.
It's not easy, but it's not too hard, that I get overwhelmed.
It's just enough that I'm in a happy place, where I'm really
focused, but I can handle this.
And yes, there are moments when I go into deep flow.
What about you?
STEVEN KOTLER: Sometimes.
But interestingly, when we train people up in flow,
obviously, risk is important.
I talk a lot about action sport athletes.
And everybody's always like, oh, but I
don't want to take physical risks to get into flow.
That sucks.
I don't want to break bones and whatever.
And I say well, great news.
You don't need physical risk.
You can replace it with emotional risk,
intellectual risk, or social risk.
And the cool thing is social risk,
your brain can't tell the difference
between physical danger and social danger.
They're processed in the exact same structures.
Which is why fear of public speaking
is the number one fear in the world,
and not, say, getting eaten by a grizzly bear.
You would think from an evolutionary perspective,
getting eaten by a grizzly bear is something scary.
But no, it's public speaking.
And the reason is if you go back 300 years,
and you screwed up socially, you get kicked out.
Kicked out of the tribe.
Exiled.
Banished.
Capital punishment.
So the brain can't tell the difference between social fear
and physical fear.
So being on stage-- even if you do it a lot-- it definitely
focuses you a lot.
And I think Jason's right.
I don't feel entitled anybody's time.
So I don't want to bore you guys.
So that helps drive attention, as well.
In the back.
WOMAN 3: Hi.
You mentioned, Jason, the eternal now,
which is a term that's obviously connected sometimes
to spirituality and mysticism.
And I think you touch on that lightly.
Can you guys talk a little bit more
about any correlations with spirituality and mysticism,
if at all in your research with the states of flow?
JASON SILVA: Oh, he definitely can.
You know about the neurobiology of mystical experience.
It's a chapter in your new book, right?
STEVEN KOTLER: Yeah.
There's a chapter in "Tomorrowland" on it.
So earlier when I was talking about knobs and levers
in the brain-- I'm not saying that there's no mystery.
And I personally am an atheist.
But just because I can tell you how
the neurobiology of spiritual experience works,
all that means is these experiences
are mediated in the brain.
So if you're spiritually inclined, if you're religious,
what I'm talking about does not disavow what you believe.
It just says these experiences are mediated through the brain.
But we now know that flow states,
so-called mystical experiences, psychedelic-- these
are all the same structures in the brain.
And we're getting really good at figuring out where they are,
and how to precipitate them.
Where I think that's interesting is
I think we're at the very front edge of this.
I think for years, and years, and years,
if you go by what the Buddhist meditators have told us,
that these things go on and on forever.
There's layer, after layer, after layer.
I think we're at the front edge of decoding that stuff.
I'm really interested to what happens
as we get deeper and deeper.
Because there are weird questions, even in flow.
We were talking about this earlier.
You have access to really high-quality information.
90% of it makes sense.
90% of it, you're like, OK, I get where this comes from.
10% of it doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
And it really feels magical.
And there's not an easy way to explain it away.
I'd certainly love an explanation for it.
And I think poking deeper into these realms,
especially into the science of these realms,
is going to get us there.
But open questions.
JASON SILVA: I think this will be our last question,
and then we'll just do a little chit chat.
But yep?
WOMAN 4: You had talked about 17 ways to get into a flow state.
Risk has been like--
STEVEN KOTLER: OK, so if you go to stevenkotler.com--
K-O-T-L-E-R is how you spell my last name--
if you type in your email, you'll get a free PDF for flow
in performance.
And it breaks down all 17 of those triggers,
and a little bit of the flow cycle,
and tell you how to apply them.
But you can finish asking your question.
WOMAN 4: You had focused primarily on risk, and action
sports, and so forth.
So I'm just wondering what are the other really important ones
that you would argue.
JASON SILVA: I would say one of them is cannabis.
STEVEN KOTLER: That's not on the list.
JASON SILVA: And especially now the ubiquity
of medical marijuana, turning points.
There's actually a lot of literature
I found online about weed and flow states.
Certainly Carl Sagan, I think, would agree.
A lot of jazz musicians would agree.
STEVEN KOTLER: He's not wrong.
If you want the cheapest flow hack in the world--
20-minute run, cup of coffee, marijuana, that order.
It's the exact same neurochemical cocktail as flow.
Simple.
But I'll go with the classic.
MAN 3: The other?
STEVEN KOTLER: No.
You need-- you want to exercise to the point
that the voice in your head is gone.
And that's it.
So go for a long walk.
And when the voice in your head sorta
quiets down, drink a cup of coffee,
smoke a joint-- that order.
There you go.
[LAUGHTER]
JASON SILVA: It's the truth.
STEVEN KOTLER: It is the truth.
But to answer your question, the most famous of all flows
triggers is what's known as the challenge skills balance.
So the idea here-- and you alluded to it a second ago-- is
we pay most attention-- so every one of these flow triggers
are literally just ways of driving attention into the now.
Flow follows focus.
So all these triggers are-- basically
the 17 triggers that we know of-- they're the 17 things
evolution shaped your brain to pay the most attention to.
So one of them is called the challenge skills balance.
It means I pay the most attention to the task at hand
when the task at hand makes me stretch but not snap.
So you want something that's difficult.
It's beyond your skill set but not
too difficult that it's starting to generate
massive amounts of fear.
It's a tricky balance to find.
For example, under-performers don't like it
because you hit this sweet spot, it's
usually the point you start to get really uncomfortable.
There's no way around it.
You're beyond your comfort zone, literally.
But for overachievers, they screw up
because overachievers-- so a guy named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
is often called the godfather of flow-- he's a University
of Chicago psychologist-- and a Google mathematician sat
down and tried to figure out what
is the exact challenge-skills ratio.
And the number, the gradient difference they came up with,
back of the envelope calculation--
this is not a real number.
This is not real science.
It's pretend science.
But the number was 4%.
So a 4% difference between challenge and skills.
What happens with really high performers is we'll blow by 4%
without even noticing.
We'll take on challenge that's 10% greater, 20% greater,
30% greater.
Generates so much fear, you will block yourself
from a flow state.
So we pay the most attention to those things
where we stretch but don't snap.
They call it the flow channel.
What it basically means that there's not enough stimulation,
you're bored.
You're not paying a whole lot of attention.
Too much stimulation, there's anxiety,
and it'll kick you out.
In between is this sweet spot, this flow channel.
And that can be applied anywhere, obviously-- sports,
creativity, writing, whatever.
In my writing, I always know I'm going to write.
So I tend to believe that, for me at least,
other people will argue with me, I guess.
But for me, the best writing is just really honest.
I want to tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth.
I always know that I'm in that sweet spot
when I'm a little nervous to publish something
because I've been a little too vulnerable.
That's how I know that I've been in that sweet spot
while I was writing.
Does that help?
WOMAN 4: Mhm.
JASON SILVA: Beautiful.
Well, I think we're going to end the formal discussion.
But we're going to mingle here for a little while.
And yeah.
Thank you so much, guys.
STEVEN KOTLER: Thank you, guys.
JAMIE WHEAL: And you take just take physical fitness out
of the beach muscles, cosmetic and aesthetic.
And you turn it into athletic and neurokinetic.
So you've just completely just rebooted physical culture.
And actually, it's more of a throwback to 19th century
Germany and the gymnasium effects, which
is a throwback to Plato, and the original Academy,
and Pythagoras.
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