# No.1 Flow Expert: How to Enter Deep Lock-In Mode

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

Steven Kotler argues that flow is trainable—and that managing focus, challenge and play can improve performance and learning.

- Show: The Knowledge Project
- Hosts: [Shane Parrish](https://realalpha.app/people/shane-parrish/)
- Guest: [Steven Kotler](https://realalpha.app/people/steven-kotler/) is a bestselling author and executive director of the Flow Research Collective.
- Published: Oct 27, 2026
- Length: 1 h 6 m

## The best minutes

- [9:31](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=571) [A 4% challenge keeps you learning without snapping](https://realalpha.app/s/a-4-challenge-keeps-you-learning-without-snapping/) (4 min)
- [24:07](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=1447) [Deliberate play can beat deliberate practice](https://realalpha.app/s/deliberate-play-can-beat-deliberate-practice/) (3 min)
- [53:24](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=3204) [Surfing gave Kotler moments of clarity during Lyme disease](https://realalpha.app/s/surfing-gave-kotler-moments-of-clarity-during-lyme-disease/) (7 min)

## Also worth watching

- [16:05](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=965) [ADHD focus improves when people find autonomy in the task](https://realalpha.app/s/adhd-focus-improves-when-people-find-autonomy-in-the-task/) (5 min)
- [6:13](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=373) [Your primary flow activity can train focus for work](https://realalpha.app/s/your-primary-flow-activity-can-train-focus-for-work/) (3 min)
- [31:23](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=1883) [Frustration can be a sign that learning is working](https://realalpha.app/s/frustration-can-be-a-sign-that-learning-is-working/) (4 min)
- [44:53](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=2693) [The first two interview questions should show your preparation](https://realalpha.app/s/the-first-two-interview-questions-should-show-your/) (3 min)
- [51:05](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=3065) [Protect early hours for difficult creative work](https://realalpha.app/s/protect-early-hours-for-difficult-creative-work/) (3 min)

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## Summary

Steven Kotler is a bestselling author and executive director of the Flow Research Collective, where he studies the science of peak performance. He says the collective’s flagship eight-week training has served 35,000 people and produced a 73% boost in flow.

Kotler describes flow as an evolution-shaped state of optimal performance that can be trained by managing focus, challenge and cognitive load. He recommends returning to a personally absorbing activity, reducing distractions and setting tasks just beyond current skill; he says deliberate play can outperform repetition in fields without tight rules. He also argues that curiosity can build toward passion and purpose, and that frustration can be part of learning. Kotler recounts how surfing during his Lyme disease recovery led him to investigate flow, while Parrish shares his own Lyme experience.

### Minute by minute

- [0:39](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=39) **Flow can be trained.** Kotler defines flow as an optimal state of consciousness marked by concentration, absorbed action, a diminished sense of self, time distortion, a sense of control and enjoyment. He says flow is rooted in biology and can be trained; the Flow Research Collective’s eight-week program saw a 73% boost in flow among 35,000 participants.
- [4:53](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=293) **Focus opens the flow channel.** Kotler says flow follows focus, and that triggers such as novelty, risk and complexity draw attention into the present. He recommends resuming a primary flow activity, which he says can build focus and calm anxiety; he cites 2–4 hours a week as a useful amount. For tasks, he describes a back-of-the-envelope estimate of a 4% challenge increase over skill as a sweet spot between boredom and anxiety.
- [12:39](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=759) **Protect attention and autonomy.** Kotler recommends shutting off distractions, limiting communication channels and building focus gradually; he says the brain is designed to focus in 90–110-minute cycles. While disclaiming expertise in ADHD, he calls it a potential flow advantage and says reframing a task around personal autonomy and purpose can help sustain attention.
- [22:39](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=1359) **Flow is morally neutral.** Kotler says flow can serve beneficial or harmful ends, but associates it with well-being, life satisfaction, meaning, empathy and environmental awareness. He also describes bored teenagers’ risky behavior as a possible attempt to find flow by raising the challenge in their lives.
- [24:07](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=1447) **Play can accelerate learning.** Kotler cites research by the U.S. Department of Defense finding that people learn 230% faster in flow. He says deliberate practice suits tightly bounded fields such as mathematics and violin, while deliberate play—repetition with improvisation—can work better in less structured fields because it produces more learning-related neurochemicals.
- [26:30](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=1590) **Curiosity builds toward purpose.** Kotler says curiosity is a foundational motivator and suggests listing 25 curiosities to find where several intersect; he calls that intersection a seed of passion. He says connecting passion to a cause greater than oneself can create purpose, which he associates with additional social neurochemistry.
- [28:06](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=1686) **Spite can motivate but consume.** Kotler says a small chip on the shoulder can motivate, but spite can become destructive; he points to Michael Jordan as an example of it consuming someone. He says he tries not to argue with critics and would rather put the effort into further research.
- [31:23](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=1883) **Frustration can signal progress.** Kotler says flow begins with a conscious struggle phase before performance becomes less conscious, and argues that frustration can signal working-memory overload rather than failure. He cites research linking frustration with a better chance of solving a problem later, and says the struggle can help prepare the brain for flow.
- [35:10](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=2110) **Reading feeds pattern recognition.** Kotler describes the brain as a prediction engine that seeks to reduce uncertainty. He recommends reading at least 25 pages a day to give pattern recognition new material, and says writers can help their brains connect ideas by identifying a piece’s start and ending.
- [39:37](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=2377) **Books offer high information returns.** Kotler says reading books, especially textbooks, is central to improving how he thinks. He compares five minutes spent reading an article with about six hours of work behind it, and a six-to-seven-hour read of Rise of Superman with 15 years of his research. He also advises interviewers to prepare, show domain knowledge and ask follow-up questions.
- [47:19](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=2839) **Feedback and privacy sharpen learning.** Kotler says visible consequences can expose thinking errors, citing Josh Waitzkin’s chess losses and martial-arts setbacks. He and Parrish discuss meditation and tolerating mistakes; Kotler says he prefers learning away from an audience. He calls early morning non-time, when few people interrupt him, valuable for writing.
- [53:24](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=3204) **Kotler connects flow with Lyme recovery.** Kotler recounts being severely ill with Lyme disease and experiencing flow while surfing; he says he went from about 10% to about 80% functionality over six months, then took six more years to feel normal. He describes a possible link between flow’s effects on stress and the nervous system and autoimmune symptoms, while calling a broader claim that flow causes most spontaneous healing an overstatement. Parrish also recounts his Lyme diagnosis.
- [1:04:01](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=3841) **Success means following curiosity.** Kotler says he is happiest skiing or riding and defines success as a way of living rather than a destination. He values doing authentic, useful work and continuing to follow his curiosity; he also says flow lets him discover and push the edges of his abilities.

## Transcript

The Knowledge Project, hosted by Shane Parrish, with Steven Kotler.

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[0:46](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=46) You don't really know what you're capable of because you can only find out inside of flow. I'm curious how you would define flow. Flow is a scientific definition, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is the one who came up with that definition. But it's technically defined as an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best. It refers to any of those moments of rapt attention and total absorption where you get so focused on what you're doing, So focused on the task at hand, that everything else just starts to fade away and disappear. All aspects of performance, mental, physical, and emotional, will skyrocket.

[1:24](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=84) What does a flow state feel like? So this is actually the original work that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi did on flow. He went around the world asking people about the times in their life when they felt their best and they performed their best. And he discovered that flow has six core characteristics. So there's complete concentration on the task at hand. There's a merger of action awareness. a diminishment of our sense of self, time distortion. We don't feel peak performance on the inside. We feel a sense of control. So a sense of I can control things I can't normally control. That's what it feels like, right? You look at Michael Jordan in a flow state, you see the windmill dunk, and that's what it looks like. But on the inside, it's, wow, that basket looks as big as a Hulu, but I can't miss. It's a feeling I can control.

[2:10](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=130) Finally, the last thing is flow states are autotelic is the technical term that text me high used, it just means euphoric and delicious. Autotelic means an end in itself. So it basically means flow feels so good, we'll go very far out of our way to get more of the experience. If I were to put it, psychologists hate when I do this, but it's the most addictive state on earth, period, right? But those are the six characteristics. So if you're trying to figure out, am I in flow, my team in flow, those are the six characteristics you're looking for. So many people feel like they're not reaching their potential, like they're capable of doing more, but they don't quite understand that. Is flow that key?

[2:48](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=168) Flow is how evolution created optimal performance in the human body. We've known for a while that the origin story of flow was probably runner's high. And there's a couple other evolutionary stories to go along with it. But there's also some proof, and now there's a little bit more kind of neurobiology to back this up, that flocking behavior and mobbing behavior, which are actually related behaviors in nature are early versions of flow states but it's very old and it's so it's it's not just in humans some all social mammals get into flow and some insects some birds so this is how we evolved to perform at our best so if you were seeing any human being performing at their best chances are flow is involved another term that's worth defining is peak performance because it has connotations. People think soldiers or athletes or, and people for all, as far as I can tell, this is, this is my definition. It's nothing more or less than getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. Go deeper on that. There's nothing sort of beyond our biology. There's no secret, secret to performance. There's just our biology.

[3:56](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=236) Neurobiology is mechanism shaped by evolution. It's the same in all of us. What motivates you is going to be different than what motivates me. But in both me and you, that motivation is going to show up as dopamine. So what we're actually after here is the dopamine. That's the actual energy and focus and drive. And all the words and the terms we can put around it don't matter as much as getting the dopamine, which is actually what matters. And so I sort of figured if we could get to the level of mechanism, this stuff would get very trainable. And that has been our experience. So at the Flow Research Collective, our flagship training for a lot of years was zero to dangerous.

[4:37](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=277) We've 35,000 people went through it. So after eight-week training, people would see a 73% boost in flow. I would like to tell you that's because. our kung fu is that good. It's because this stuff is really trainable. And if you start with the neurobiology, which is the same in all of us, it's trainable because it's built into all of us. So maybe you spend a few beats and teach me how to get into flow. Two things to know. First, flow states have triggers, preconditions that lead to more flow. There are 26 to 28 that have been discovered. There's probably way more. That's just what we know so far. And the first thing to know is the simplest, flow follows focus. Only shows up on all our retention in the right here, right now on the task at hand. So that's what all the triggers do. They drive focus into the present moment. If you peel back the hood, they do this in a number of different ways. They can push norepinephrine into our system. They can push dopamine into our system. They can push both together into our system. Or they can lower cognitive load. Cognitive load is all the crap you're trying to think about at any one time. And if I lower cognitive load, your brain instantly repurposes that energy for paying attention. This is why people will tell

[5:51](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=351) you to clean your desk first before you try to focus on writing or something like that. What you're actually doing is lowering cognitive load because now it's more organized and things are in spots and the brain will automatically, it's an efficiency engineer, always wants sort of extra energy for the task at hand. And so that's what happens. You clean your desk and you get more energy because cognitive load has gone down, you can focus better. So that's what all the triggers do. I always, there's three triggers I start people with, but I also start, I always back up. So there is what, it's known as the primary flow activity. This is whatever you've done since you were a little kid that you just lose yourself in. You're just totally freaking immersed in. And it's in a certain level, which triggers you're most susceptible to a little bit it at is probably genetic, a little bit more is early childhood environment. So for me, it's skiing, right? That's my primary flow activity, meaning like 90% of the time I go skiing, I'm going to get into a flow state. Or it's group flow, the shared collective version of a flow state. Interpersonal flow is two people who get in a great conversation and an hour goes by and

[6:57](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=417) didn't notice. It's interpersonal flow. I told you earlier that I work with the same editor and have for 25 years. And group flow is really like, we're really good at this. We're working together for 25 years, we know exactly sort of how to work with each other. And so invariably, a couple times a week, I'm getting into group flow doing that. My wife, it's walking her dogs in the back country. My best friend is playing the guitar. Everybody's got their thing. And usually what happens as we become adults is what do you do? Oh, you have responsibility. You got a family, got a job, put down childish things and you stop. Your primary flow activity goes away. And it's literally the single worst thing you could do for the following three reasons.

[7:35](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=455) First is that this should be obvious, but flow is a focusing skill. Meditation is a focusing skill. They're different. They're different kinds of focusing. You're doing different things in the brain, related, but different. But just like mindfulness is trainable, flow is trainable. It's a focusing skill. So if I go skiing on Sunday and I'm in flow and I go to work on Tuesday, I'm going to have an easier time getting into flow on Tuesday is the first thing to know there. The second thing is, for reasons that we can get into as we go along, anxiety will block flow in most of us, right? A little bit is good.

[8:09](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=489) A little bit sort of primes the brain for focus and attention and alertness and learning. Too much will block flow. And primary flow activity resets your nervous system, so it'll calm you down. So primary flow activity on Sunday, go to work on Tuesday and counter like a work problem and your threshold, your anxiety is a little bit lower. If you're burned out, if you're dealing with burnout, my lab did some work on this, but Karina Pfeiffer's lab really is the one that proved this. But flow overrides burnout. It'll overwrite PTSD, burnout. We do work now. We're doing a lot of work. Work with veterans on PTSD, addiction, depression, because flow is neuroprotective against those things and can sort of pave over some of them.

[8:55](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=535) But if you're really burnt out, doubling down your primary flow activity is sort of the only way back.

[9:02](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=542) **Steven Kotler:** But what's cool is the research shows that like two to four hours a week is about what it takes on your primary flow activity.

[9:10](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=550) the first place to start if you're training flow is actually the thing that you've done your whole life that you've probably stopped doing. And I will set you back there first. Because if you get into flow in one thing, it's easier. It's easier in another thing. And the easiest thing to get into flow in is your primary. Yeah, it's your primary flow activity because it's what you're like, you're naturally inclined to do that. The most common flow state on earth, by the way, reading. Oh, reading is the most common flow state on earth. What are some common flow triggers? If you're trying to think about flow triggers, one of the easy ways to do it is like, if you look at the list, they're all, they look like psychological interventions. So novelty, complexity, unpredictability, risk are all flow triggers. Whenever we encounter any of those things, you get dopamine, right? In complex situations, the most famous flow trigger is the challenge skills balance.

[10:01](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=601) **Steven Kotler:** So we said flow follows focus. We pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge of that task slightly exceeds our skill set. So you want to stretch, but not snap. A bunch of

[10:13](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=613) years ago, decades ago now, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi teamed up with a Google mathematician. They tried to put a number on it just to see if they could put a number on it. And they got 4%. And they never said this was science. They said this was a back of the envelope calculation, meaning when that challenge is 4% greater than your skills, that seems to be the sweet spot. One of the things I will say is it's right outside your comfort zone. The more you sort of train being just outside your comfort zone, just pushing a little bit, the easier it gets. And the other side of it is that if you were to talk about the sweet spot, emotionally, you'd say it's between boredom.

[10:50](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=650) There's not enough stimulation here. I don't care. I'm not paying any attention. And anxiety, whoa, way too much. Right in between is this sweet spot, what flow scientists call the flow channel. But if you're a physiologist, you call it the Erks-Dobson curve. It's one of the oldest findings in physiology that there's this sweet spot between challenge and skills. But if you're shy or meek or timid or less skilled at the thing that you're doing, you're going to be just outside your comfort zone. If you're like a hard-charging entrepreneur, the problem is that 4% is so small that you'll blow by and you'll take on challenges that are 50%, 60% greater than your skills simply because it sort of wakes you up.

[11:28](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=688) And so if you're training people on flow, you either have to train them to push a little bit harder or usually with type A types, you've got to back them off and tell them to chunk it down. Those big, huge overarching goals are great. Motivation science tells us that a good, properly set hard goal gives you an 11 to 22% boost in motivation. So that's amazing. Like just for having a well-set goal, but you want to chunk it down so the thing in front of you sits in that sort of 4% sweet spot. What this really tells you is you can only get about 4% better at a time, right? Like that, that when you're laddering up, it's like 4% gains. This is the thing that we learned when we tested it. And again, I don't know how accurate this is, but like we saw it again and again, we found if you only stay in that 4% sweet spot. And the reason like we could do it with action sport athletes is we started doing it with downhill mountain bikers and we measured every feature on the hill. And that's how we could figure out, okay, this is what you can jump. So this would be 4%. And that's how we did it. That's how we were testing it. And what we discovered is if you stayed in that sweet spot, you never plateaued. You would

[12:41](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=761) get more flow and more flow and more flow. And you made way more progress over the course of a season. reason, then you did the other way. How can we mute distractions and get into a flow state? We said earlier, flow follows focus, right? All the flow triggers drive attention to the present moment. The most obvious flow trigger is complete concentration. What do I mean by complete concentration? For me, it's writing. So I'll give you a writing example. And I'm going to go writing. First thing I want to do is get rid of all the distractions. So my smartphone gets turned off Because, you know, they modeled it after jackpots, the single most, you know, addictive and distracting technology in the world.

[13:23](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=803) And so that gets shut down, notifications, email. When I used to start this work 20 years ago, average executive I dealt with had like three ways you can interrupt them. There was cell phone, call them, you could email them, you could message them, you knock on their door, right? The average executive I work with these days has like 17 to 18 different incoming channels, WhatsApp and messages and Slack and Notion. And it's it's insane. But do you know how many people shit on me? Like my phone is perpetually in focus. If you're not my kids, it doesn't get through. That's it. Just my kids. And so, like, people are like, you're always in focus.

[14:01](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=841) I feel like I'm interrupting you. And I'm like, well, you can text. I'm just not going to get your text until I choose. And yeah, well, that's the other thing I tell people, train people. So limit communication channels. Keep one channel open for emergency. So like your boss or your wife or whatever, one channel for emergency. Get rid of the others. Batch communications. So communications in the morning, the end of the day. The next question is how long should you focus? And here's a really good biological answer because we actually have an answer here. So everybody knows they go through a sleep cycle when they sleep, and it's roughly 90 to 110 minutes long, which is the REM cycle.

[14:37](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=877) You have an awake and alert cycle. It's the exact same length. It's 90 to 110 minutes long. Your brain is biologically designed to focus for 90-minute slots. So I always tell people when we're training them in flow and we're training them how to focus, you know, start by starting. You know, start by like walling yourself off. And if you can only focus for 10 minutes at a time, start there. If it's 15 minutes, start there. It doesn't matter. Start by starting. But when you start to get better at this, you will find that your brain will naturally move. Like you'll, people will be training up and training up and I can, oh, I got 20 minutes, 25 minutes. And suddenly they're like, oh my God, I was 90 minutes. What happened?

[15:15](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=915) And I'm like, what happens to your biology? Like you're built to do that. So if you start getting your biology to work for you in this way, you're going to move in that direction naturally. So complete concentration is one of the first flow triggers. You know, you have your primary flow activity. I always say, you know, manicure the space for complete concentration and then use the challenge skills balance to figure out how to tune the task. So I'll give you a writing example. I write every day. I'm sure you do too. When I'm starting a book, for me, I like to write about 500 words a day. And so that's right in that 4% sweet spot for me. Because that's so mutable, you have to also tune in on a daily basis for what's your energy level, right?

[16:01](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=961) If I didn't get any sleep last night because my plane was delayed and it was three o'clock in the morning when we landed and I woke up, you know, and it was starting a book, I wouldn't ask myself to write 500 words. That would be too hard. I'd do 300 words. That's sort of in that sweet spot. So you can manicure the space for complete concentration and manicure the task with the challenge skills sweet spot. How would you teach somebody with ADHD? Would that be different? A couple of things. I'm not an expert at ADHD, but in my original flow, my first flow company, Ned Hallowell, literally coined the term ADHD as a Harvard psychologist, just retired to U.S. Mittery, Meritius now.

[16:37](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=997) Both of us think that ADHD is an evolutionary superpower for, because it's hyperflow. ADHD, the problem isn't, I can't focus. The problem is, I can't. focus on shit I don't care about, right? And shit I care about, I can lock in and you're not going to find me for months. And I will say, I have met very few people at the top of industries, business, athletics, arts, like everybody I know has ADHD. I think it's an absolute superpower in business and everything else. But here's the first thing that I would say. The first thing you have to know when you're working with ADHD, and this is just another flow trigger. Well, most people

[17:19](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=1039) **Steven Kotler:** don't know this, but autonomy and attention are coupled systems in the brain. So you cannot

[17:26](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=1046) maximize focus. If you're not the one driving the bus, you will just not going to care where it goes as much as the driver. Like it's just that simple. So for people who have ADHD, reframing is the tool you want to reach for so i used to i'll give you an example again from writing but we can apply it anywhere but well or work if you have a boss comes to you so you have a boss right and you have adhd and the boss says i need you to do x and you don't like x x isn't your thing and you're pissed you're gonna have a really hard time focusing but if you if x is something you want to do you're locked in three days go i not a problem done so you have to reframe the task you have to say, God, you know, 90% of this task is crap. I don't care. 10% of it is going to make me a better salesperson. And that's something I really care about because it's aligned my purpose and who I think of myself. And right. So that's what matters. Or when I used to get early on in my journalism career where I was really poor and I would have to take every assignment that could possibly come my way because I needed the money. Not all of them were stuff that I loved. You know what I mean? No. Do I really want to write 5,000 words on data caves? I could think of, you know,

[18:37](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=1117) better things to do with my time, but will I do it if you're going to pay me? Yes, absolutely. And I'll find the task and be like, okay, I don't like any of this task, but writing this is going to teach me how Wired magazine structures their stories. And that matters to me. So I will focus on the thing that I want to learn that's aligned with my purpose and sort of that's my gateway in. So if you have ADHD, the first thing you have to do is reframe the task to find the autonomy because you can't marshal attention without it. And with ADHD, this is really a problem where you have to figure out what in the task aligns with who you are, your purpose and your values and all that stuff that will allow you to sort of push through.

[19:18](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=1158) You said that's the first thing, what else? Know that you're super distractible. So that's gonna manifest in two ways. One, it means distraction management, right? Manicure your space, manicure your environment, all that stuff. The other thing you're super distractible to is as you move into flow, one of the things that happens in flow is you get a shitload of dopamine and norepinephrine. These chemicals do a ton of things in the brain. One of the things they do is they massively amplify pattern recognition. So when we link two ideas together, right, that little rush of pleasure you get, that's dopamine. So if you've ever done a crossword puzzle at Sudoku, you get an answer, right, that little rush of pleasure, that's dopamine, right and it shows up when there's pattern recognition we actually talk about this as the creative trigger flows creative trigger it's really just because pattern recognition sits underneath creativity so that you have to manicure the space is the first one but you have to protect yourself against your own thoughts because when you're in flow and you've got more dopamine in your system there's more pattern recognition creative ideas tend to spiral one idea will

[20:23](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=1223) lead to the next idea, lead to the next idea. In flow, tangents are delicious. So with ADHD, it's easier to get distracted and you've got that crazy focus. So you're going to get distracted and then you're going to focus down that rabbit hole and you're going to be gone and you're not going to finish the task at hand. So you sort of need the discipline to... stay focused on what you're doing and just sort of like write down the tendency. We're going to save that for later. So you want to manicure the space on the front end. You sort of want to police your thoughts as you move through it on the back end. And you always want to sort of find your autonomy in the act. Those would be the first three things I would do.

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[22:22](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=1342) That's HeyGen. Record yourself for 15 seconds and get an avatar that keeps you posting without filming. So you don't need to become a full-time content creator. 30 million people already use it, from financial advisors and real estate agents to 85% of the portion 100. Your first three videos are free at HeyGen.com slash TKP. That's H-E-Y-G-E-N dot com slash TKP. Is flow always good? So that's an interesting question. One of the things that's worth pointing out is flow is morally neutral. It's a tool. So soldiers get into flow. So depending on which side of battle you're on, right? Chick Set Me High pointed out years ago, was absolutely right that most so-called juvenile delinquency, graffiti art, vandalism, fighting, that sort of stuff. It's actually bored teenagers who are naturally, your body will naturally see flow and they're actually tuning the challenge skills balance with through delinquency. They're upping the challenge level in their lives and trying to get into flow rather than this isn't about like misbehaving. It's actually, this is flow-based behavior. So flow is just, it's neutral, can be used for good or bad, and can have good and bad effects, right? Depending.

[23:41](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=1421) What do we know for sure? We know it underpins happiness, well-being, overall life satisfaction, meaning and purpose, and increases longevity. I mean, we can talk about what cognitive benefits, but these are just like kind of well-being benefits. Those are beneficial. It expands empathy, which I always think is a good thing. It increases environmental awareness, which is our ability to see, perceive, and care about the natural world. I always think that's a good thing. What's one specific thing everybody listening to this podcast can change today that will increase their performance? So we did this work a while ago. It's written about my book, NAR Country, which was really an experiment in longevity. But one of the things that we discovered is, um so i have uh and i knew anders erickson before he passed he was a really nice guy really liked him but flow work challenges his 10 000 hours like right it does because it says you can flow and this is if you go by darpa's uh research defense department looked at learning and flow and they found that you learn 230 percent faster than normal in flow 230 percent fast So the normal is, obviously, if it's going to take you 10,000 hours, which we all know is a fantasy number, and that was Malcolm and not Anders Ericsson.

[24:55](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=1495) It's 10,000 iterations. And even that, it depends on what domain you're trying to learn, right? So what we discovered, among many other things, is not just flow. We compared deliberate practice, which is Anders Ericsson, which is doing repetition with incremental improvement against deliberate play. which is repetition with improvisation, and as learning tools, and you will actually learn better in very tight domains like mathematics and violins, the stuff that Anders was studying, deliberate practice is great because they're very structured and bounded disciplines.

[25:34](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=1534) **Steven Kotler:** And if you're inside one of those, deliberate practice is effective. If you're outside of a bounded discipline, which is pretty much almost everything else other than like a musical instrument, a couple other things, deliberate play outperforms deliberate practice significantly. And the simple

[25:50](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=1550) reason is how does learning work? Quick shorthand for learning and memory is the more neurochemicals that show up during the experience, the better chance that experience will move from short-term holding to long-term storage. It's what neurochemicals do. They do a lot of different things, but one of the things they do is tag experience, important save for later. This is why flow. It flows this huge dump of neurochemistry, which is why learning goes through the roof. But quite simply, when we play versus when we repeat the same thing with incremental improvement, we get way more neurochemicals. So deliberate play will outperform deliberate practice.

[26:27](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=1587) So you ask for one thing that most people can do to increase learning and peak performance, be more playful. What are the sources of motivation? If you're trying to amplify human motivation, the way I always explain it, people, usually I talk about this, people will come to me and they're like, how do you find a purpose? How do I get a purpose, right? And I said, well, biologically, you follow the biology. The way the biology works is curiosity is the foundational motivator. It's a little bit of dopamine. It's a great motivator, but it's just a little bit of dopamine. If you are trying to build towards passion, right, which is this bigger individual motivator, you just want the intersection of multiple curiosities.

[27:10](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=1630) So this is one of the things when people are trying to find their purpose, one of the things I do is I say, list 25 things you're curious about and find where they intersect. This used to be a hard thing for people. Like they would have a hard time doing this and it would take people a really long time. The great thing is we all have LLMs. And they're great at this. Like you can literally use an LLM to do this. But if you can figure out where like one, three or four of your curiosities intersect and start playing there, that's passion. That's a seed kernel of passion because now you've got a lot of different dopamine coming in.

[27:42](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=1662) When you attach that passion to a cause greater than yourself, that's purpose. The reason we care about purpose from a motivational standpoint is better drugs, right? Passion is dopamine and norepinephrine. It's really powerful, but purpose is dopamine, norepinephrine, and then all the pro-social neurochemistry that you get when other people are there. So you get serotonin, and you get endorphins, and you get oxytocin. It's better drugs, right? It's more feel-good drugs. It also seems like there's two fundamental power sources for motivation, if you will, which is, one, I have a chip on my shoulder.

[28:22](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=1702) I'm moving away from something. And then the other is I'm moving towards something. It's an interesting way of thinking about it. So I, one of the more famous things that I wrote, it was a newsletter actually, but I love small letter S spite as a motivator. This is Tom Brady, right? Like with a chip on his shoulder. There's a fortune cookie that's. tape tar refrigerator that like my wife found and it says you get great satisfaction out of proving other people wrong and almost everything i've done like i've done because somebody i thought was doing it wrong and it pissed me off and so i want to i want to i want to fix it so i love that as a motivator um when is a chip on your shoulder healthy and when is it unhealthy so michael jordan is the example of unhealthy because greatest basketball player of all time of all time and i was born in chicago i grew up a bulls fan it was like watching jordan play was amazing but watching what that chip became after he was out of basketball like do you watch interviews with michael jordan and think oh here's a really happy dude i'm thinking he's starting to get a little bit there now, but as a general rule, that level of spite as a motivator ends up eating

[29:42](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=1782) you alive. So I think like it's really, really useful, but you sort of got to know when to put it down. That's why I say small s spite. One of the things that I never do is read criticisms of my work, take it personally and care what my critics say or argue with my critics. But I know lots of thinkers, lots of really brilliant men and women who somebody said they were wrong. They will like go toe to toe. I'll give you this happened fairly recently. And it was just we put out a very I have a new science article out right now in Frontiers of Neuroscience called The Body Doesn't Keep the Score. And it is a direct rebuttal against Vanderpoel, who I think is totally wrong. And I think that book is very problematic. Some of my co-writers, because people are freaking out and there's a lot of like podcasters are trying to people are trying to argue with us and i had to call i was like we're not going to play that game like at some point if you know the right person comes to us and says hey will you have the conversation yes we'll do that but our job is not to like defend our territory against commerce we took our stand we made our stay it's a very well-written article you can argue this you don't have to argue with

[30:55](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=1855) us, but we don't have to rebut all the, like, that's not the job. The job is to do the research and, you know, our job is to prove it more, right? Like people got mad. Great. Let's, let's go do another study and prove it more. Right. And like, that's our job. Our job isn't, isn't all the rebuttals and you don't have to sort of do that. Or, you know, I see those writers and it's amazing because I like, I see really smart people who are amazing contributors to this world. And I can't tell you how much time they're, they're, you know, like flushing down a toilet because they want to argue with their critics. One thing we haven't talked about with flow is its relationship to learning. So I know Cal Newport argues that flow isn't the optimal learning state because we need a lot of discomfort. I'm curious, what's your reaction to that?

[31:45](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=1905) One of my pet peeves is people who coin a whole bunch of new language for themselves. one of the reasons flow research was so damn hard so damn hard the entire altered state space is everybody wanted to coin a new name right maslow called it peak experiences chick sent me high was flow then phil jackson the zone and so i look at cal and i think and i'm picking a fight here that i don't really need to pick a fight but like it bugs the shit out of me i'm like deep work is another word for flow, brother. Like, I'm sorry, you've coined a new term. When he says, well, no, you're going to need a lot of struggle for flow. Well, that's because there's a flow cycle.

[32:24](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=1944) The front end of a flow state is what is known as struggle. It's a loading phase. Flow is unconscious when we can perform tests without much conscious interference. To perform something unconsciously, we first have to learn it consciously. Right. And so that's why there's front end of flow state is struggle, right? It's all conscious. It's all thinking. It's And Cal is exactly correct. And this is Colleen Seifert sort of did some of the original work here. She was the University of Michigan. She's brilliant. But she found that in struggle, the more frustrated you get, the more sort of overloaded your RAM, the better chance you have of A, solving the problem later and B, of getting into flow once that solution shows up.

[33:10](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=1990) If you're curious about this, if anybody who's listening, thing uh if you look my name and our big paper on the neural dynamics of intuition it's called pathfinding a neurodynamical account of intuition ran in nature we found that uh this is also true if you want an intuitive breakthrough like when you're learning a subject the more frustrated you are the better chance you will later like intuit the solution and this is so this is i'll talk more about flow and learning but this is like for parents i think it's one of the most important things that you need to teach kids. And I think it's one of the most important things that all of us need to learn. So I always say, if you actually understand peak performance, you find out that a lot of our emotions don't mean what we think they mean. You know, frustration is a great example. When most people get frustrated, they're learning something they can't learn, they're frustrated, they can't solve them. They think it's a sign they did something wrong. They think it's a sign that they're moving in the wrong direction or they should stop or whatever. From the literature, I can tell you it's the it's exactly right you have a label on it you like it still feels like

[34:14](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=2054) shit it's still frustrating but you're actually moving in the exact right direction okay good thing not a bad thing it just doesn't feel very good or so frustration is feedback frustration kind of feedback it's all it's telling you is that you've overloaded your working memory but

[34:30](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=2070) **Steven Kotler:** anyways frustration is a sign that you're moving in the right direction and uh so yes is he right

[34:37](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=2077) Like, do you need to struggle for learning? Yes. In fact, you need norepinephrine in your system to learn. Norepinephrine is low levels is curiosity, high levels is anxiety, right? And you cannot learn without a little bit of norepinephrine in your system. It will completely block learning. So he's not wrong, but there's a biological cycle here. It goes farther than that. And what he's calling deep work is like, as far as I can tell, is flow. And you've just reblanded, you know, something else. And you've just made it harder for people who are trying to study this and get smarter about it. I want to come back to something, maybe double click on pattern recognition and anticipation, the relationship between those two things.

[35:26](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=2126) The brain fundamentally is a prediction engine, right? What the brain is doing at every moment of every day is it's trying to predict what is about to happen, right? And what it wants to do is lower uncertainty, wants to minimize uncertainty, and it wants to know exactly how much energy, right? because we evolved in an environment where calories are really hard to come by. So it never wants to waste energy. So it's what's about to happen and how much energy do I need to meet the challenge? That's what the brain is always trying to do. So when I think about when you say anticipation, I'm really just thinking about what we mean by like a prediction engine brain that's always sort of trying to lower uncertainty. And I also think like if you're trying to understand in human behavior, you always have to start there. We use pattern recognition as a flow trigger. So it's another one of flows triggers and it's really, really, really important. And I'll give you a couple of like sort of really common examples. So one of the things I will always have people I'm working with do is read a minimum of 25 pages a day, usually in a book. I like, I think books are the best but because you have to stock the pattern recognition system with ammunition right

[36:43](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=2203) if you're not feeding the pattern recognition system new information it doesn't have the raw materials to make connections. So one of the ways to start getting more flow in your life is if you start taking in more information. And I like reading books because they're just the densest form of information available on the planet and you have the best opportunity for stocking the pattern recognition system that way. But that's one of the things I think of when talking about pattern recognition. Again, on the other side, this is something that I train a lot. I will train different thinking styles, lateral thinking, right? Outside the box thinking, how do you make sort of connections between sort of unrelated things? How does that work? And the brain will, you know, sort of automatically do that. I always say with, we were talking earlier about writing and sort of one of the most common causes of writer's block is not knowing your starts and your endings. If you know where you're starting, you know where you're ending the brain is a built it's a pattern recognition system right the brain does pattern recognition at like this is what neurons do it at most basic level right everything everything we do is built out of pattern recognition if you know your starts and your

[37:57](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=2277) endings you have a pattern recognition system for the brain it will connect them this is how we do narrative this is how we do cause and effect this is how the brain does everything so with writing people are you if they're stuck it's usually because they don't know where they're starting and where they're going, because eventually the brain will automatically fill in the middle for you because it's built to do that. Let me tell you about the best new product that I've used in the past five years. It's the Matic Vacuum. This thing vacuums, it mops, Matic does everything. Other robots bump into things, but the Matic sees things. It actually avoids the problems. And the Matic automatically adjusts between my carpeted surfaces and my hardwood floors. It's also super easy to schedule. I have it run every night while I'm in bed, and every morning I wake up to clean floors.

[38:45](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=2325) Messes happen, and when they do, Matic rolls into action. Go to maticrobots.com today and put Matic to work for you. Ever hit 3 p.m. and feel like your brain just quit? For a lot of people, that's not caffeine or sleep. It's electrolytes, and water alone won't fix it. That's why I drink Element, every day after lunch zero sugar no dodgy ingredients just a real dose of sodium potassium and magnesium i know you're all thinking electrolytes are for athletes but you don't have to be an athlete to benefit from it and it tastes great stay sharp in the afternoon and grab a free eight count sample pack with any purchase at drinkelement.com tkp that's drink l m n t dot dot com slash TKP. Can you teach people to think better? If you want to think better, you have to start by reading more. You want to think better, read more. First thing, people ask me how I got my career, how I did anything, and I will flat out tell you I outread the motherfuckers. I realized very early on I wasn't the brightest guy. I wasn't the best at all that stuff. But I was willing to read three or four or five times the amount as anybody else was willing to read. So I think, one, if you want to teach somebody to think better, you've got to

[40:13](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=2413) teach them how to read more. When I say read, I actually mean books. I spend most of my time these days reading textbooks because I think it's the ultimate edge. I love them because literally you have the best people in the world summarizing and putting all their most important stuff into it and nobody else reads them i always talk about this in terms of the roi on reading and so for For example, if you read a blog of mine or a short article you write, it's going to take you. five to eight minutes, about a thousand words, right? It's going to take you five to eight minutes to read it. What do you actually get for those thousand words?

[40:52](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=2452) Well, if I'm writing a blog article, I'm going to, it's two writing sessions, really. I'm going to write it one day. I may do one phone call, one interview. I'll call a friend, hey, you know, you're an expert. What do you think? This is the idea, you know? And then I'm going to polish it the next day. So you give me five minutes and you get roughly six hours and maybe one phone call. So two brains on the problem and about six hours for five minutes. That's not bad ROI. But if you read a book, say take Rise of Superman, my books on average are about 70,000, 72,000 words. So they take mostly about six to seven hours reading them.

[41:25](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=2485) This is just normal reading speed, right? So, okay, cool. You've given me six to seven hours. What's your return on investment? Well, for Rise of Superman, it took me 15 years worth of research to write that book. There were thousands of conversations. And, you know, so literally you're giving me six or seven hours, but you're getting 15 years of my life and hundreds of other people beating on those ideas. That's amazing ROI. Two ideas that dovetail into this that I want to hear you maybe respond to. One is I have a concept called the learning loop. Okay. And it's you have an experience. You take that experience.

[42:01](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=2521) You compress it. So you reflect on it. So you have an experience. You reflect on it. you create a compression, and then you act on that compression. And when we communicate with other people, we're often communicating the compression. And I feel in a lot of cases, it's the illusion of knowledge. It's like me going home. I pull out a cookbook. I can make that recipe, but if something goes wrong, I have no idea what went wrong, why it went wrong. But the chef who's had the experience reflected on that experience and then given me the recipe, which is in fact the compression, they know exactly what went wrong. There's too much salt, your oven's not the right temperature, you didn't start enough. They like instantly know all of that stuff. And a lot of what we consume is the compressions, other people's compressions.

[42:47](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=2567) So in the podcast space, one of the reasons I wanted to do long form is to get away from the compression, at least as reasonably as we can get away from the compressions, get into the experiences and show the thinking, show the reflection, and then people can come up with their own compressions that they take away from the episode in an effort to make it more useful. I'm curious, A, how you would respond to that, B, how I can make the podcast format better for people to take away information they can actually use. One, I think it's a medium is the message kind of thing. So I think you will get with this kind of thing, better stories better the human side i like there's a lot of advantages because those things even get compressed in books for a lot of reasons so i think the podcast is really there's certain kinds of things that are that are very that is very effective for when it comes to like teaching knowledge though i still think there's something about reading oh definitely it's just better i also always tell people that like you can't read the same books as other people right if you read the same books as other people you think the same thoughts as other people and so whenever the whole

[44:03](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=2643) world's running around talking about a book like i'm i'm usually usually suspicious of that book but i'm usually curious about what the author read to produce the book right that's really interesting to me i like i like backtracking that way in terms of sources how to make the podcast better from an information perspective information density perspective is interesting to me it's also about your willing to a willingness one's willingness to always sort of ask the extra question as a bit on both sides of the microphone right i started out as a journalist um there's an urge to sort of get through your questions and get through the interview and sort Absolutely.

[44:46](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=2686) do that part of the job. But like every there's always the next question, right? There's that follow. And so that like the restraint to like, oh, I'm not going to get through my checklist. I'm going to take the time to ask the next question and the follow up and the follow up, which you've been doing. So like. But this is why you're the perfect person to talk to with your journal. Like, how do you pull out the best information from people? So this is how do you interview experts yeah right these are my roles um one i don't go into like if i'm being interviewed by somebody or even interviewing somebody i know i learn everything like everything i will know your hometown i remember um at one point i had to meet uh i can't remember the vodka company was the guy one of the big vodka companies i was interviewing him and i found out like not only was Did I find out what his hometown was?

[45:35](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=2735) I found out what the patron saint of his hometown was, and there was a statue, Saint Edwina. This is the patron saint of ice skating. It's still stuck in my brain. I can't even tell you what town it is. It was in Finland, I want to say. So, like, I'll go into the interview knowing all their work and a lot about them.

[45:53](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=2753) **Steven Kotler:** First question I ask always displays personal knowledge.

[45:58](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=2758) So you grew up in so-and-so, and when you were 10 years old, X happened. something that like lets you know i know your history that's question one question two i'm going to always display domain knowledge about not just your like i'm going to display knowledge about your work but i'm going to put in domain context so david eagleman science writer right so david when you uh wrote incognito and you presented your information on synesthesia that's really interesting but it conflicts with what helmalt said back in blah i'll do that kind of thing so the first two questions i want to establish one i know you i know you and i know your work and i can speak your language so feel free to speak freely um i will i'm also always the first person to be like hey stop you're gonna have to explain that to me like i'm a four-year-old right i've got no i've got no ego like i love being the dumb guy in the room right love being the dumb guy in the room and being able to be like, hey, how did that work? It's about sort of seducing your interviewee into flow, right? What you want is to interpersonal flow. What you're trying to get here is interpersonal flow, us to get so lost in the conversation that my filters

[47:10](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=2830) come down and I'm willing to, you know, that's what, that's sort of what everybody's sort of going for. When you're interviewing experts and suddenly you're like, oh my God, you know my history and you speak my language you're one of us i could talk to you right it's a big deal i want to switch gears just a little bit uh josh witzkin says he hunts for his own thinking errors is that like the meta skill why is he so effective at learning i love josh um i think he's a genius about about this stuff i don't know if this is an answer i'm gonna fumble around for a little while But I will tell you that the areas where Josh learned how to learn, first as a chess player and then as a martial artist, especially in Tai Chi, which is a sort of a slower, more meditative stuff, when you make errors in thinking, in chess you're going to lose, and in Tai Chi, he's going to get thrown out of the ring because he was doing competitive, the martial version of Tai Chi, and you get pushed out of the ring.

[48:16](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=2896) That's how you lose in that version. And so his thinking errors were very visible to like the errors of thinking have consequences that are that were right in his face. And I think. Something like that, even like me learning to think as a journalist, right, when I got something wrong, I would get fired or I wouldn't get hired again. You know what I mean? So I think. To develop the meta skills, one, like I think the consequences sort of help a little bit. to help you think about thinking um i also think i'm a long time meditator josh is a long time meditator and when you start getting that separation between emotion and feeling right because emotions surface first and they're automatic and feelings come second and they feel automatic and they feel like but you know like if you can get into the gap between feeling emotion and feeling you start to figure out oh wait a minute that feeling is a frame it's not exactly trustworthy. It's different. There's two things going on here. And the minute that feeling shows up, it locks me into a meaning. And so when you start doing that work and you start noticing there's like there's a difference there, I think all these things are very helpful sort of on the

[49:31](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=2971) way to metacognition. I want to tie that back to Josh for a second. So it seems like there's a couple of things. I'm going to say how I'm hearing what you're saying and maybe you can respond to this. So it sounds like a lot of the conditions Josh was using were the same conditions we need for intuition. So rapid feedback, a lot of iterations and a relatively unchanging environment. You know, you're confined in what's happening. And then I heard, but you didn't say, or maybe I inferred from my past knowledge of Josh that he was okay being uncomfortable, Which means he was okay looking like a fool and being a beginner, and he didn't have an image or something he had to maintain, and he was okay making mistakes and then getting the feedback from those mistakes.

[50:22](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=3022) That's interesting. I wasn't thinking about that. That is obviously true. I think anybody who's good at learning doesn't. I don't like being bad in public, so I try very hard. Like, even with, you know, when I ski, I try to get as far away from the chairlift. Like, I will, you know, I want to iterate in the woods out of sight. I think Josh was a little bit, like, when Josh was transitioning from Tai Chi and martial arts, Gracie Jiu-Jitsu at that point, and moving into surfing and pedalboarding, which is, you know, where he is right now, he left New York and went down to Costa Rica, right, where he doesn't really know anybody he got.

[51:02](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=3062) And some of it was access to waves and I got that, but I think some of that, it was also like, let me get away from everybody I know so I could like be really bad and it doesn't matter. So I have a theory on how people learn just on this notion. I think the best people in the world often learn in what I call the dark hours. Nobody's watching them. There's no boss. It doesn't matter what your field is. It's how you hone your craft. You play. You're there after 5 p.m. It's 10 o'clock at night. You're playing around with an Excel spreadsheet. or you're riding a wave or you're doing whatever and nobody's watching you. And in those moments, you can fail because there's no consequences. There's no boss directing you and you're playing and you're learning. And that sort of ties into what you were saying with skiing and how you, yeah, I want to do this in the back where nobody can see me.

[51:49](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=3109) I think about this slightly different. I always talk about the importance of non-time. I get up and start my writing day about 3, 34 o'clock every day. And one of the reasons is

[52:01](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=3121) **Steven Kotler:** nobody bugs me. Nobody owns 4 a.m. to 7 a.m. is non-time. It doesn't belong to anybody.

[52:08](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=3128) And I, you know, this is an old habit from, I used to live on the West Coast and I was like, I was the West Coast reporter for a lot of East Coast publications and we were all young and hungry. And so like my friends, which my editors would show up at like eight o'clock in the morning, they'd get to work early and it's five o'clock back on the West Coast and they would start to call me so i knew i had to get my work done like my books written before the phone started ringing because i was so poor like the minute they called what do you need how high i'll jump right like what do you need i'll go do it um so it was all it was an instant yes and i knew this so i had to start getting up earlier and earlier and earlier. And I started to realize exactly what you did is now I love it because sometimes in my job, I'm sure in your job too, there are days I got to spend an hour or two hours on a sentence. And if you're asking me to spend two hours on a sentence at 9 a.m. in normal business hours, when I got to like run my company, you're crazy. I cannot do it.

[53:11](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=3191) And it's certainly not playful. Right. And really what you want when you're stuck writing is exactly that. You have to start playing with the language to like get that break. You have to come at it from weird angles, do all that stuff. And you can only do that with like that non-timer, your dark, dark, dark hours. Yes. That's sort of how I think about it. One of the things we have in common is that we both had Lyme. Tell me about your story. It's sort of the second half of my entrance into flow science comes out of this. I had this crazy sort of year of sort of the last year of where I was a journalist.

[53:48](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=3228) I had a bunch of badass assignments. I went to Africa and lived on the side of a river in Madagascar for a couple of months. I was part of the first National Geographic sand surfing expedition into the Sahara. Then I did the first biotic survey ever in a slot canyon. It was like all this man stuff. And then I went to a wedding, a friend's wedding in Long Island and went for a walk in the Arboretum because I'm shy around people I don't know. And he was his friends and I didn't know anybody. And I got bit by a tick at a wedding in Long Island. But I lost. I spent three years in bed. I was one of the first cases in California, so they had no idea what it was.

[54:24](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=3264) uh, on me and it was no, and nobody could fix me so that I was on drugs, uh, to my stomach lining. I was on doxycycline till my stomach lining started bleeding out. And they were like, we don't know if you're ever going to get better. We're done with you. We can't do anything more for you basically. And, uh, it's so interesting because doxycycline is the, I know it's the drug, but they kept me on it for so long that like now they'll keep you, it's a month or two months. they kept me on it for a year and a half like which was insane so they it did a lot of bad stuff to me the story i always tell is i was functional like 10 of the time i don't know how sick you got but i couldn't i was really sick yeah my brain stopped working my short-term memory was gone my long-term memory all of it and i couldn't you know walk across the room and after i was going to kill myself i had sleeping pills i had booze i had a plan it was just it was like when not if and i was in la at the time and a friend of mine showed up my dressed up and demanded that we go surfing and i was laughing i was like andrew i can't walk across a room i'm not saying i'm not going surfing and she would not leave my apartment and wouldn't leave and wouldn't leave and wouldn't

[55:33](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=3333) leave and after like three hours and you know how irritable you are with lime right you have no reserves um and she really just didn't matter what i said to her she was not leaving and after three hours I was like I give up let's just go surfing today what is the worst that can happen I'm gonna kill myself anyway right so um she took me to the Pacific they gave me a giant board right and surfing the bigger the board the easier it is to surf and it was summer it was a mellow warm day and that people had to like take me by the elbows and lead me out to the break and I was on my board like less than 30 seconds and a wave came I think I took literally all the energy I had in the world and popped my feet and I had no intention like when we went surfing I was like I'm gonna sit out in the sun for an hour and then we're gonna go home I'm not gonna surf that would be insane and impossible and I popped up into a dimension I didn't even know existed I time slowed to an absolute crawl and I've been flow states before but not a full-blown macro flow state I started to have a an out-of-body experience um and a bunch of other really crazy things happened and

[56:36](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=3396) **Steven Kotler:** And it felt it was amazing because the best part about it is like my head was clear. I could surf. The pain was gone.

[56:44](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=3404) And it was amazing. four more waves that day and i was i was done and they drove me home and they put me into bed and i didn't move for 14 days people had to bring me food because i couldn't even get to my kitchen i was so destroyed from it and on the 15th day i could walk again i had a neighbor who was a pro surfer a foreign pro surfer and i didn't even know him and i just like knocked on his door and i said hey can you drive me to the beach and i went surfing again and over the course of like six months i went from about 10 functional to about 80 functional and the only thing i was doing was surfing and coming back being destroyed. And slowly over time, I got healthier and healthier and I was having these wild altered state experiences in the waves. And Lyme, as you know, is only fatal if it gets into your brain. And I'm a hardcore science guy. I'm a rational materialist. I'm having basic quasi-spiritual experiences in the waves. And I think, okay, I might be feeling better, but it's got to be an illusion. The disease is in my brain and I'm clearly dying.

[57:44](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=3464) So I lit out on a giant quest to figure out what the hell happened to me. And I had seen flow sort of work earlier in my career with athletes and getting them sort of from zero to superhero. But I didn't exactly know it was flow. We didn't quite know what was going on. It was hard to tell what was flow, what was a quote unquote spiritual experience. The literature was very confusing. The science wasn't there yet. The neurobiology wasn't done yet. So it was really hard to figure that out. But I, you know, quickly figured out that these states have a name. And from a neuroimmunology perspective, Herb Benson, who sort of at Harvard is the cardiologist who's famous for the relaxation response. He actually mapped the original neurochemistry, the flow cycle. Flow is a four stage cycle. It's not a light switch experience. And he mapped it and he looked at healing. And he has said in his book, The Breakout Principle, that he thinks flow is responsible for most cases of spontaneous healing.

[58:39](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=3519) And I think, by the way, that's a massive overstatement, but not for an autoimmune condition. And here's why. As we transition into a flow state, there's a global release of nitric oxide, right? It's a gaseous signaling molecule. You go to the gym and when your lungs open up after about 20 minutes, it gets quiet upstairs, that's nitric oxide. And it pushes stress hormones out of your system. In flow, when you transition into flow, it's a huge nitric oxide release. So the stress hormones are good stuff in your system, and they're replaced by performance enhancing feel-good neurochemistry. The biggest problem over time with an autoimmune condition is you no longer know where homeostasis is.

[59:13](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=3553) Your body can't find baseline because it's always bouncing it. So, like, a lot of that is because your nervous system doesn't know where's normal. So by moving into flow and just having the stress hormones pushed out of your system resets the nervous system to baseline. So the system can sort of the prediction engine brain can start making more accurate predictions again. It brings back agency. It does a whole lot of stuff psychologically and emotionally and physically. And the neurochemistry of flow, dopamine and norepinephrine and serotonin and endamine, all those things boost the immune system.

[59:48](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=3588) They don't just sort of reset the nervous system and feel good. They're immune system boosters. This is why flow can often be really healing from especially from autoimmune conditions. And this is now much more well-established back in the 90s. You know, the mind-body connection was still suspicious right back in the 90s. Ellen Langer hadn't done her work at Harvard yet and all the stuff that sort of like smoothed that over hadn't happened yet. How long did it take you to feel normal again? I was sick for three years. The surfing to like 80% functionality, which is what got me to, was about a year.

[1:00:26](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=3626) And then it took six more years till I was sort of back till normal. I lost like 30 or 40 pounds. I was 170 pounds when I started and I was 129 pounds when I finished with Lyme disease. I still can't get my weight above 160 like this. Like I can't get, I can't. get back. I lost about an inch of height, too. And I was done. I was shorter. And I was lighter. I thought I had a bad case of Lyme, but that takes... What happened to you? I just woke up one morning and started drinking coffee. And the left side of my face was completely paralyzed. Paralyzed. And that was the start. And I had no idea. So I called my mom and I was like, Can you come watch the kids? I got to go to the hospital. And I show up at my doctor's office and they're like, oh my God, we think you're having a heart attack. So they brought me in, saw the doctor. She's like, yeah, I think you're having a heart attack. And I'm like, well, rationally speaking, that doesn't make a ton of sense, right? Like healthy, no family history.

[1:01:30](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=3690) Out of all the things, like what else could it be? And she's like, you need to go to Emerge like right now. And I show up at Emerge. They're like, yeah, you're not having a heart attack. And then, you know, six hours later, because this is Canada, I see a doctor and they give me all these tests. And I was like, oh, you know, I was talking to some neurologists while I was waiting. And he's like, oh, you were playing Dr. Google over here. And I was like, well, they said that, you know, in a healthy, you know, male at my age, test for these four things. And that will probably cover 80% of what would cause it. And he's like, here's some Pregnizone, go home. If your family doctor thinks you need it, she can order the test. And over the next two weeks, I started to gradually lose almost all functionality. I couldn't stand still at one point. If I stood still for more than three seconds, the back of my knees felt like somebody had stabbed them.

[1:02:30](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=3750) I'd be lying on the floor crying. And then after that, I had locked jaw. I couldn't open my mouth. And so my whole body was just shutting down. But luckily, a friend saved me. I told her about it. She's like, this feels like Lyme. She wrote me a prescription for doxycycline. And within three days, I just started feeling improvement. And she gave me the requisition to get tested for Lyme. And I got tested for it. It turns out I tested positive. My family doctor called me the day after I got my test results, because it takes seven days in Ontario to get a Lyme test result, which is insane in and of itself, given what it does to your body and how destructive it is and how prevalent it is.

[1:03:15](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=3795) And so she calls me and she's like, I finally agreed to give you a requisition, you know, because you're just arguing with me. If you go, if you open up West of Jesus, which is the book I wrote where I tell the sort of the story we just walked through, I don't really write about much about the Lyme. It just sort of kicks off the book and it's there a little bit. And but there's a paragraph where I list all the diseases they thought I had before they would test me for Lyme. Interesting. It's literally a paragraph. Such a simple test. Refused. There's first the disease and then there's the medical establishment and what it's like to deal with a long-term illness and the medical establishment.

[1:03:58](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=3838) You have to advocate for yourself. And it's, I don't know, it was eye-opening for me in so many ways. But luckily, we're both fully recovered and healthy today. So we always end these interviews sort of with a similar question or theme. But I have two questions for you. When are you most happy? When I'm skiing or when I'm riding. And what is success for you? It's always been the same thing, right? It's like I get to, like, put words together in a straight line for a living. It's the most mad. Like, I can't believe people pay me for it. And now I get to, like, put words together in a straight line, often based on the, like, science experiments that me and my friends get to run.

[1:04:44](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=3884) Are you kidding? Like, are you crazy? I would have done all this shit for free. In fact, I was doing it for free for a very long time. Right. So I think of it that way. I'm also I flat out tell you it's one of the reasons I get along so well with the action sport athletes is I am ferociously competitive. I don't take it very seriously. But if you came to me, I will flat out tell you I want to be the greatest writer in the history of the universe. I know that's not a specific title, but I still want that title. Right. Like I'm that ferociously competitive. The coolest thing about flow. Right. And performance is that it's emergent. You don't really know what you're capable of because you can only find out inside a flow and you get into a flow state and you push your skills to their to their edge. And then, you know, you get into another and you push it, push it and push it.

[1:05:37](https://realalpha.app/v/w_p-68aRdmc/?t=3937) And so when I think of what success is, it's always I don't like it's not a destination. It's a way of living. And to me, the way of living is one. I'm doing things that are like core to me and dearly authentic and where I can be very effective and useful. I get to keep following my curiosity out and it doesn't stop. That's how I think about it. You