Revolutionize Your Life w/ Steven Kotler

Finding The Flow State in uncertain times and a message of Hope as the Future is Now In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, anxiety, stress, and worrying about the future is heavy on our minds but I am here to remind you today that our future is BRIGHT! What can only be described as a blessing of timing .... I sat down with award-winning journalist, Steven Kotler, who is MONUMENTALLY predicting and influencing our FUTURE way of life. Steven is the Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective and is one of the world’s leading experts on high performance. As a 3x New York Times Bestselling Author and a 2x Pulitzer Prize Nominee, his writings explore the upper limits of societal possibility, revolutionize peak performance and reveal the answers to leading a more satisfying and meaningful life. In this interview, Steven shares the keys 🔑 to tapping Into the Ultimate Human Performance Zone called “FLOW STATE” This is a CRITICAL message especially today when emotions are running high. Steven is sharing his key tips to get control over your emotions and gives concrete, concise information on why our brains look for threats and how we can use our negativity bias to our advantage. Then we shift gears and talk about cutting edge medical technologies like “Crisper “ that promise to possibly cure disease right now We also dive into the transformation of artificial intelligence, flying cars, going to Mars, longevity, the decrease of genetic disease, and how the fundamental fabric of society changing for the better. The WORLD is evolving rapidly, and the next ten years are full of OPPORTUNITY you never saw coming! I hope this interview provides you hope, encouragement and the inspiration we all need to hear right now about what it means to be human. Listen/Watch this GROUNDBREAKING conversation right HERE! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ed Mylett?

  I hear so many small business owners say the exact same thing. They just never have enough time in the day. Well, I measure time differently. I've compressed, condensed, heck, I've bent time. My first day is 6:00 a.m. to noon. My second day starts at noon and goes till 6:00 p.m. And my third day, 6:00 p.m. to midnight. I now get 21 days a week. Stack that up over a month, over a year, over five years, and my life's completely different than it would have been otherwise. And if you want to win as an entrepreneur, you have to compress your time, too. And you definitely can't afford to waste it. Waiting weeks on a big bank for capital? Your best bet's to work with my friends at Cardiff. They know how to compress time for entrepreneurs. They get your business approved in minutes and funded the very same day. They're America's favorite small business lender, and for good reason.

• 0:45Ed Mylett?

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• 1:01Speaker 01

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  On October 2nd.

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• 1:25Speaker 01

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• 1:27Speaker 02

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• 1:38Speaker 03

  This is The Ed Mileage Show.

• 1:47Ed Mylett?

  Welcome back to Max Out, everybody. Today's show is why I did the show in the first place. And it was about maxing out your life. And I've been fascinated all my life with finding out the ultimate way that human beings can perform. And this man to my left, I consider to be an expert on that topic and many other topics. And so if you started a program called Max Out, your ultimate guest would be the gentleman to my left. He's an all, multiple time New York Times bestselling author in all kinds of different categories. He is the executive director of the Flow Research Collective. And he's becoming a good friend of mine and I can't wait to talk about flow today with all of you with Stephen Kotler. So Stephen, thanks for being here.

• 2:24Speaker 04

  Pleasure.

• 2:25Ed Mylett?

  So good, man. Any of you that have ever been in that zone in your life, you've had that moment where you just, the right words came out of your mouth. Or when you're an athlete, you just performed at your peak state. There's just, we all know that moment. We've touched them, all of us in our lives. But you call that flow. What would you describe what the process of flow is, the state of flow?

• 2:45Speaker 04

  So flow is a technical term. It's a scientific term. We can talk about where it comes from in a sec. But, and as you pointed out, right, lots of synonyms, being in the zone, runner's high. If you're a basketball player, you call it being unconscious. If you're a jazz musician, it's in the pocket. If you're a stand-up comic, it's the forever box. Everybody's got their lingo.

• 3:04Ed Mylett?

  Yeah.

• 3:06Speaker 04

  Scientists define flow as an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best. And more specifically, so everybody knows what the hell we're talking about, right? It's those moments of rapt attention and total absorption when you get so focused on the task at hand, what you're doing. Everything else just disappears, right? So your sense of self, self-consciousness will vanish completely. Time will dilate, which is a fancy way of saying it passes strangely, right? Sometimes it speeds up, five hours go by in five seconds. Or if, sometimes it slows down, you get that freeze frame effect, Birmingham, you've been in a car crash. And throughout, all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go through the roof. So that's flow in a nutshell.

• 3:42Ed Mylett?

  How did you stumble upon this? Cause you've written on all these other topics. Was it, I heard this story about, I know you were following around all these sort of like ultimate athletes, these peak performance type crazy athletes. Is that when this all sort of came into your frame of being?

• 3:55Speaker 04

  It's a two-fold story. So part A is I, when I was a journalist, as you pointed out, coming up in my twenties, actions were just happening, surfing, skiing, rock climbing, snowboarding. And the gravity games were starting, the X Games, the media was starting to pay attention. And so if you could ride and ski, you're riding, rock climb or riding whatever, there was some work. And I couldn't do any of those things very well. But I was really drawn to the sports and I really needed the work. So I lied to my editors and, you know, claimed I was a lot better than I was. And I was lucky enough to essentially spend a decade chasing professional athletes around mountains across oceans. And along the way, what, first of all, their level of performance, this was, it started to rise to the roof, right?

• 4:39Speaker 04

  We, the growth in action sports in the 90s, nothing like this has ever happened before in the history of the world. We saw kind of more impossible feats fall in one, and so what the hell was going on? All the journalists who were covering this, it was a topic of conversation because it wasn't like, it was, this was a rowdy bunch of people. You'd be out at night, everybody's doing 12 shots of tequila, smoking an ounce of weed, taking acid, lighting a bus on fire and seeing if we could throw naked backflips over it on, you know, on skis. Like it was nuts. These are real things. Real things. Good. And the next morning, you'd go out into the mountains with the same group of people and they would literally do something that your friend, that has never been done in the history of the world and people thought was never going to be done. And it was brain scrambling, right? Yeah. It was totally brain scrambling. I broke a tremendous amount of bones.

• 5:24Speaker 04

  If you're not a professional athlete and you chase them around, you're gonna, so at a certain point, I realized I was gonna kill myself and I had to take this question of how do you do the impossible into a lot of other domains? That's where it started. And then when I was 30 years old, I got Lyme disease and I spent three years in bed. And by the end of it, like I lost everything. I lost the job I spent a decade trying to get, you know, what did Dean say? The success tax? I was paying my success tax, right? And getting my ass kicked. And after about three years of it, and I was like, I couldn't work. I was functional about 10% of the time. I was in massive amounts of pain, couldn't think, couldn't read because my short-term memory had disappeared, my long-term memory was gone, I was hallucinating sometimes. It was bad. And I was gonna, I decided I was gonna kill myself because the doctors, they'd pulled

• 6:08Speaker 04

  me off meds, there was nothing anybody could do for me. And all I was gonna be was a burden to my friends and my family from that point on. And I was like, well. That's not any way to live. And so I did, I had sleeping pills, I had bourbon, like I had a plan, it was when, it wasn't if. And a friend of mine showed up at my house and demanded we go surfing, dragged me, this was LA, dragged me to the Pacific. I couldn't walk across the room, it was a joke. But like, they carried me out there, they put me on a giant surfboard and thirty seconds later a wave came and muscle memory sort of took over, I spun the board, pedaled a couple times, jumped over my feet and jumped up into a dimension I didn't even know existed. It was the deepest flow state I'd ever experienced, I didn't even know you could go that far. It was a full out of body experience, a whole bunch of other weird things happening.

• 6:50Ed Mylett?

  Did you know this was flow at the time?

• 6:51Speaker 04

  I didn't know, I knew I was having like what I thought was a mystical spirit. I was floating about above my body, I was not in pain, physical pain for the first time in three years, I felt great, I felt clear headed, I felt like I had panoramic vision. These are all, by the way, we understand the neurobiology of where all this stuff comes from now. But, uh, so I had this crazy experience and I felt great and went home and like, I was done, like they put me into bed for two weeks and they'd bring me food and like on the fifteenth day, when I could walk again, I caught a ride with one of my neighbors and went back to the beach and did it again. And over the course of about six to eight months, because it was the only time I had felt alive at all in three years, right? My life had been miserable and this is the one, and I was like, well, if I can't do

• 7:34Speaker 04

  anything else, at least I can do this. So I went back, we did it again and over the course of about six months, eight months, I went from ten percent functional to about eighty percent functional. I, like, Lyme disease went away and I was like, well, what the fuck is going on? Like surfing is not a known cure for chronic autoimmune conditions, right? And I'm a science guy, so I lit out on a giant quest to figure out like what the hell's going wrong with me. And I learned a couple of things very, very, not quickly is a relative term, but within a couple of years I had learned that, um, one, I figured out why I got better. So when you move into flow, there is a, uh, essentially it resets your nervous system, so it calms you way down, right? Your stress hormones are flushed out of your system, um, there's a global release of nitric

• 8:19Speaker 04

  oxide, it pushes all the stress hormones out of your system and then you get a bunch of feel-good, positive. ...uplifting neurochemistry on the back end. So two things, Lyme disease, any autoimmune condition is a nervous system going haywire. So just by calming your nervous system back to zero, I could level set again. I could find normal. Because oftentimes with an autoimmune condition, your body doesn't even know where normal is. Like it's a homeostatic organism that doesn't know how to find homeostasis. So Lyme allowed me to do that. All these same neurochemicals, it turns out, this is not my work, this is Herb Benson's work at Harvard, massively boosts the immune system. So that was what was happening physically. But what I quickly figured out is I was like, holy shit, the same thing that's taking me from seriously subpar back to normal

• 9:05Speaker 04

  is taking these normal mathletes all the way up to silver.

• 9:07Ed Mylett?

  Taking guys who they thought, you can't ride a wave more than 25 feet. And then now there's guys riding 100, 150 foot waves now.

• 9:13Speaker 04

  That's the example I love to get, exactly. Like if, so when we say action sports exploded in the 90s and more impossibles were happening than ever before, surfing is a great example, right? It's a thousand year old sport. Progress is really slow. 4A D to 1996, biggest wave any was surfed is 25 feet. And there's physics papers written about how a human being can't surf a wave over 25 feet. And you know, here we are, a couple of decades later, and surfers are paddling into waves that are over 60 feet, and they're towing into waves that are over 100, right? And this was happening in every era of action sports. So that's what I was seeing, and I realized it was the same mechanism. And then as I took this question of, hey, what does it take to do the impossible? Out of action sports into other domains, which I did. Business, technology, science, arts, culture, take your pick, and wrote books about what I found.

• 9:57Speaker 04

  The mechanism is the same, because it's biology.

• 10:00Ed Mylett?

  Stay on this though. So what is going on in a flow state? So we're gonna, we're gonna kind of go into flow and what it looks like now. What is going on from a neurochemistry, neurobiology perspective? You started to touch on that.

• 10:10Speaker 04

  So yeah, let me back up half a second and say, when you talk about what's going on in the brain, right? Usually, you want to talk about four things. You want to talk about neurochemistry and neuroelectricity, which are the two ways the brain talks to itself into the body, right? And then you want to talk about neural anatomy and networks, which is where in the brain something is happening. And because things rarely happen in one place, you have a network, right? So that's what you want to talk about. So inflow, we see changes everywhere. The two big things, the first is...

• 10:43Speaker 04

  We see what's known as transient hypofrontality.

• 10:45Ed Mylett?

  Yes.

• 10:46Speaker 04

  What that means is transient, temporary, hypo, H Y P O. It's the opposite of hyper. It means to slow down, to shut down, to deactivate. And frontality is your prefrontal cortex. It's the part of your brain that's right back here. Really powerful part of your brain. Executive function, your sense of morality, your sense of willpower, logical decision-making, long-term planning. All this stuff is housed in the prefrontal cortex. In flow, the brain performs an efficiency exchange. It says, oh, you need extra energy for attention, focus, so I can keep your focus laser-focused on the target, task at hand. Let's shut down things that we don't need. So you just watch the prefrontal cortex, mostly the sides, turn off. This is, by the way...

• 11:27Ed Mylett?

  Contrary to everything you've ever heard before.

• 11:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, what I always say is this contrary, exactly. Like 100 years of high-performance theory is a 10% brain width. We only use 10% of our brain, so peak performance must be the whole brain in overdrive.

• 11:39Ed Mylett?

  Turns out, no.

• 11:40Speaker 04

  This turns it upside down. Yeah, totally wrong. So this is, by the way, this is why self disappears. This is why time passes so strangely. So time is a calculation that's performed all over your prefrontal cortex. It's a bunch of different structures working together. And when parts of it wink out, we lose the ability to separate past from present from future. So we're plunged into that deep now, right? So that's what happens there. Same thing happens to your sense of self. Self, self-consciousness, that your inner critic, that nagging defeatist voice, that's also housed in your prefrontal cortex. So in flow, like not only, I mean, when you say sense of self goes away, the obvious example that everybody's experienced is, okay, I'm gonna back up and tell you one other thing before I... So there's microflow, low-grade flow state, and macroflow.

• 12:23Speaker 04

  What happened to me when I was skiing or surfing? That was macroflow, right? Feels like a mystical experience, all kinds of crazy stuff. Microflow is you sit down and write a quickie email, right? You look up an hour later, you've written an essay, and it's not that your sense of self disappears, but maybe you had to piss and you didn't notice the whole hour and something like, you're back in your butt.

• 12:42Ed Mylett?

  Everyone's experienced it.

• 12:42Speaker 04

  Right? Everybody's had that experience. So that's microflow. That's the other end of the spectrum.

• 12:46Ed Mylett?

  I've heard you talk about this, but I just want to like, get away from the science for a second, just like everyday life. Do you pay attention to your emotions? Like, I find that, for me, when I've performed at the highest levels for me, whether I've gone into the flow state every time, I'm not sure. I'll figure that out with you as we talk. But I don't always believe every emotion that I have. Whereas I think most people just believe their emotion. In other words, what they're feeling must be true because they feel it.

• 13:10Speaker 04

  Emotions are two things here. One, they're just signals. They're signals meant to alter behavior. And they're meant to be experienced and let go. Right? We're not supposed to hold on to that. They're just a signaling mechanism. Brain takes in a whole bunch of information, and it's got to summarize it really quickly to trigger action. What's the fastest way to summarize a bunch of negative information? Fear. That's a summary. It's a summary of information, right? It's a signal that does that. So, in peak performance especially, I always say your emotions don't mean what you think they mean.

• 13:41Ed Mylett?

  Yes.

• 13:42Speaker 04

  Right? At all. And so, first of all, everybody who's ever succeeded learns early on that fear, most people avoid fear, they don't like it. Successful people steer by fear. They go right at things that scare them. And one of the reasons, and this is automatic, like, we all will naturally move in the direction of peak performance. We're biologically hardwired for it. So, a lot of when we talk about peak performance with the Flow Research Collective, what we really mean is getting your biology to work for you rather than against you.

• 14:10Ed Mylett?

  Is there a basic strategy you would give them, one of these 22 triggers that they could begin to find themselves?

• 14:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, I like to, at the end of my day, or first thing in the morning, depending on how I'm feeling, I like to start my day with like a five-minute gratitude practice, right? Everybody has a different one. I like to list 10 things I'm grateful for, and just try to feel that gratitude a little bit, right? It's not, this is just about, this is, by the way, about two, gratitude tunes the amygdala. That's what you're doing with. So, the amygdala takes in, we take in, according to Manfred Zimmerman, the guy who did the research, credit where credit is due, 11 million bits of information a second, right? Consciousness is about 2,000 outputs. So, most of everything that's going on, it's either processed subconsciously, or it's just tossed out, right? 11 million bits is way too much for the brain to deal with.

• 15:00Speaker 04

  It's got to sift, it's got to sort. Where does it go first? It goes to the amygdala. What does the amygdala look like for? Threats, danger, and opportunities. Is there anything new here? Can I sleep with it? Can I eat it? Do I have to run away from it? Right, that's what the amygdala is doing. And it's biased, because its survival is at stake, towards negative information. So we have cognitive psychologists talk about the negativity bias. What it means is your brain will take in six to nine bits of every, of negative information for every positive bit that's skipped through. Right? This is a real problem for creativity, because creativity is what happens when we take novel information that's coming in and combine it in a new way. And if you can't get, if there's too much fear in the way, right?

• 15:41Speaker 04

  So why did I say earlier, you gotta do gratitude, mindfulness, or exercise every day? Because otherwise, you're taking in too much negative information and not getting enough other stuff. The brain really does two things. It takes in negative information and takes in stuff that will help you serve your goals. Right? So if it's not grabbing shit that's scaring you, it's grabbing stuff that is helping you get what you want. That's the trade-off. So you're not doing gratitude because there's something wishy-washy, spiritual, whatever. You're doing gratitude because it's gonna help you get more stuff. And gratitude works because the brain, this is why affirmations don't work and gratitude does. Brain's got a phenomenal built-in bullshit detector.

• 16:23Speaker 04

  So if you're working at Walmart and you look in the mirror every morning and go, "I am a millionaire, I am a millionaire," your brain goes, "Fuck you, man." No, you're not. You work at Walmart. Right? I mean, and then it's totally demotivating. It's crushing you.

• 16:37Ed Mylett?

  Thank you.

• 16:37Speaker 04

  Right? Gratitude, "I am really grateful that my legs work today and I can still talk." Right? Well, that's true. Right? And so if I chalk off 10 of those that I'm really grateful about every day, my brain goes, "Oh, maybe it's not so scary here. Let's start grabbing stuff that we can use to get to our goals rather than stuff we're scared of." That's why you do gratitude. Mindfulness is basically the same reason, works a little different, mechanism's a little different, but same thing.

• 17:05Ed Mylett?

  One of the points that you made about cars leads me to your new book.

• 17:09Speaker 04

  Ah.

• 17:09Ed Mylett?

  And so the book is "The Future is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Lives." And so, why? I think culturally, we've, we could enter a flow state as a culture. In other words, I'm watching how fast the world is changing, how much... Performance and lifestyle and access to information and all these changes have happened in such a short window of time, if you even just look back 10 or 15 years.

• 17:37Speaker 04

  Amazing, right?

• 17:38Ed Mylett?

  The difference in how we live our lives now. And if you can think forward, I've heard you and Peter talk about, if you can even think forward 30 years, which is about as far forward as he says he can see. But in terms of all these things that are coming, I want to talk about that because I just want people to get a picture. Like, you don't have a choice. What you've said is, you've got to decide in your life whether or not you're just going to embrace the science of being a peak performer or not. And if you don't, you're probably heading towards, not neutral, you're probably heading towards depression, frustration, anxiety, fear, these negative things. The other part of it is, you better get on board because culture is changing so quickly. The way we live is changing so quickly. So to me, flow state, embracing that, getting great at it, getting in it more often, and your latest book go right together.

• 18:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, they do. And I'm going to do three things to make all this make sense. One, you pointed out that I cover a broad range, seems like I cover a broad range. And I'm, other than the fact that I am a huge animal advocate and have done a lot of work on animals and the environment, that's the odd man out, right? And that's just personal. I love animals, I love the environment, I like plants, animals, and ecosystems. They're the ultimate underdog, and I like fighting for the underdog.

• 18:45Ed Mylett?

  I love that.

• 18:45Speaker 04

  So there's all that. But everything else, I study the impossible. When does the impossible become possible? That's what I study. And when you see the impossible become possible, you tend to see two things, one of which we've talked about, which is flow. That shows up all the time. The other thing you see is, when the impossible becomes possible, you basically, I always say you find, you're seeing people extend human capability, and that usually means flow. Sometimes it could mean other things, like during the Renaissance, it meant the printing press, and everybody had access to information for the first time, right? But often it's flow, or flow is in that mix. And the other side is people leveraging disruptive technology. That's the other half of this equation, right? The impossible becomes possible, you know, even like you look at like the skiers that I was running around with in the 90s.

• 19:28Speaker 04

  Shane McConkey, who's the most famous of all of them, one of his giant contributions is he invented new skis that were much wider. So we had big platforms to land on. So suddenly the human body could jump off 100-foot cliffs. Because the platform got bigger and it was better made. And at the same time that they started harnessing flow in ways nobody had ever done. So convergence of both. That's what you see. So what's happening now is we're seeing convergence. We're seeing artificial intelligence smash into robotics, smash into 3D printing, smash into biotechnology, smash into material science. And the effects are insane. And so Ray Kurzweil, head of engineering at Google, so does their AI stuff, smartest, probably smartest guy in the world on this topic, has worked the math.

• 20:13Speaker 04

  And he believes we're going to essentially experience about 100 years of technological change over the next 10 years. So think back to 1920. Think the now, think everything that's happened in that period. And put it in the next 10 years, that's what's coming. Does everyone hear that? Did you get that? Okay, that's huge. And you've got to understand, like, for entrepreneurs, for people who want to get out in front of it, oh my God, there's, I mean, we're going to create more wealth in the next decade than we have over the past 100 years. But there's more Google-sized opportunities, sort of like waiting right now than ever before. So tremendous opportunity. If you're an established organization, a traditional business, something that's been built for safety and security, oh, you're screwed. That's right. Get nimble, get agile, because you've got a problem other than that.

• 20:59Speaker 04

  So here's where all this ties together. We have a problem dealing with this amount of change, which is our brains are local and linear. We evolved in an environment where local, everything's a day's walk away. Linear rate of change is really slow. Great-granddad's life, great-grandson's life, roughly the same. Not much changes. Today, global and exponential, right? Happens in China, we hear about a second later. Exponential, meaning like the difference between last week and next week could be enormous. Enormous. So the brain doesn't work at that speed or at that scale. Fundamental problem. And there's a third problem, which we'll get to in half a second. Flow is the only time we can process information at speed and at scale.

• 21:42Speaker 04

  Even better, so there's a part of your brain right here, the medial prefrontal cortex. It does a bunch of different things, long-term memory retrieval, blah, blah, blah. It's really creative self-expression. And it's a very selfish part of your brain. So if you think about yourself... It will get really active. If you think about your wife, it'll get a little less active. It'll stay active. If you think about me, you don't know me as well as your wife, it'll shut down a little bit more. Think about a total stranger, it's turned off.

• 22:09Speaker 04

  If I ask you to think about who you're going to be in 10 years and who you're going to become, you would think this part of the brain gets active. It doesn't. It teaches, the brain treats the person we're going to become as a total stranger. This is why people have a hard time staying on diets. This is why people have a hard time lifting weights, right? Oh my God, it's going to hurt today, right? The benefit's not going to show up for two years, right? Or why do I want to get that prostate exam? Because the person who's going to benefit most from that stuff is not the person who you are today. Literally, the brain treats it like a stranger. Flow is the only time you can think about who you're going to become in the future and this part of your brain stays active. So it gives us an enormous advantage. One of the things that happens in flow, the technical term for it is the watchtower effect. It basically feels like you're high above your life.

• 22:54Speaker 04

  I have insights. I can see farther, right? And it really comes because our sense of self is shut down and we can think of the future and this part of the brain stays active. It's a couple of those things working together. But it means that if you're going to plan for your future, if you're going to try to steer your company into the future, like you want to do this, the thinking at least in flow, for sure, if you can, because it's the best. We can think for the future and we can think fearlessly about the future, which is a big deal.

• 23:23Ed Mylett?

  All of this is converging. The fearlessness part, being in flow, being able to process information this quickly. And you guys, one of the things all of you entrepreneurs listening, which is a large part of the audience here too, or your work in a company can change. I've heard you say this and I believe this. There's not going to be a single industry the next 10 years that's the same.

• 23:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, so in the book, we go through the 11 largest industries on earth. And we track what's converging into these industries and what are the changes that we see already? Like, there's nothing, the book is out. I mean, it's outrageous.

• 23:55Ed Mylett?

  Get it.

• 23:56Speaker 04

  It's outrageous. Everybody has the same, like, everybody has the same, oh my God, my brain is going to melt. And by the way, It's not like I had to stop writing the book. I wrote a sci-fi novel in the middle because I had to, I couldn't. I was starting to like, how do these things converge? And what is that? I want to know what was it going to be like to live in that world? So I literally created a universe, five years in the future, and put a character in it and wrote a novel so I could write this book with Peter. Because I could hold the individual stuff in my mind, but once you started putting it together, I was like, oh, this is really hard to track and even think about.

• 24:33Ed Mylett?

  What it means to be human is going to change. I, I, I'll give you an example.

• 24:37Speaker 04

  I think that's probably true.

• 24:38Ed Mylett?

  I, I do, I, I, let's.

• 24:39Speaker 04

  Well, certainly CRISPR stuff and genetics.

• 24:42Ed Mylett?

  Well, that's where we're going. We gotta, we gotta at least touch on this. Because the vast majority of people, CRISPR is here now. So this isn't like, you know, eight years from now. CRISPR technology exists today.

• 24:52Speaker 04

  Dude, last year, they used CRISPR and they edited sickle cell anemia.

• 24:56Ed Mylett?

  Right.

• 24:56Speaker 04

  Out of the, I mean, sickle cell anemia, right? It's 30,000, there are 50,000 heritable diseases.

• 25:03Ed Mylett?

  Right.

• 25:03Speaker 04

  32,000 of them are single mutations, which is what CRISPR is designed to change. So 32,000 genetic diseases could go away this decade?

• 25:14Ed Mylett?

  Right.

• 25:14Speaker 04

  I mean, that's, right? That's a radically different world.

• 25:17Ed Mylett?

  Right, and is everybody getting that? So I think a vast majority of people don't know what even CRISPR is.

• 25:22Speaker 04

  Right.

• 25:23Ed Mylett?

  And they think it's a future thing, but it's here now. Guys, we are currently, not only just a disease eradication, that changes what it means to be a human being. How long you're going to live, how healthy you're going to live, what your life experience is going to be like. And, and having said that, like, I have a sister who's got diabetic retinopathy, right? Which is one of the original places this stuff started to really work. Guys, we're remaking the retina. Like, blind people are seeing. Like, this is remarkable stuff that's happening right now.

• 25:51Speaker 04

  It's a, so I was in the room as a Wired reporter, the very first time the first artificial vision implant was ever turned on. So the very first time there was a blind guy who was made to see again. No, but I was in the room, I was actually what was seen. Funny story. So I'm in this lab, it's Professor William De Bell, we're in New York. The patient, his name is Jens, and this is, so this is 2000, he's. Literally got what we would used to call stereo jacks in the side of his head. So he's literally got wires jacked into the side of his head. He's got an implant in his brain. He's been blind for 20 years. And they're about to, it's literally they're counting down to when they hit the button. It's 10, 9, and I'm like, and I realize I'm sitting across from him.

• 26:35Speaker 04

  And I'm a reporter. Our job is not to be history, right? Like, our job is to report on history. You don't want to be the history. And so what do I do? I push back and try to get out of the way. He's blind. He's been tracking like motion through sound for 20 years. So what happens? 3, 2, 1, I swear. I try to get out of the way. And I always say there's a moral here, which is you can never get out of the way of the future. It's coming for you whether or not you like it. I thought that was, I thought that was amazing. I was literally like trying to duck.

• 27:08Ed Mylett?

  So give them, you guys, I just want everyone to get a little bit of picture of this. So if you're tying together where we were in the beginning to where we are now, this is such a great time to be alive. It's such a remarkable time. And frankly, the, the, the concept of how long you're going to have. I've had Dr. David Sinclair on.

• 27:25Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, great, great.

• 27:26Ed Mylett?

  We talked a little about CRISPR more off camera than on, but just give them a flavor, just for fun.

• 27:31Speaker 04

  So we open the book with flying cars, which are like everybody's crazy sci-fi technology. And it turns out that, like, they're here, like, there are 100 different car companies, or there are 100 different companies making flying cars. Every car company is in it. Toyota put 400 million, 396 million into Joby Aviation Flying Car Company three weeks ago. Bell Helicopter, the big, right, they just changed their name to Bell. Because they dropped, because no more helicopters, flying cars. And they're the ultimate tech conversion technology. Flying cars happened because AI hit robotics, hit material science, hit 3D printing, et cetera, et cetera. And wow, that's totally revolutionary, crazy flying cars. But it's not just flying cars. It's also autonomous cars. Every major car company has an autonomous car.

• 28:15Speaker 04

  Like Waymo is rolling out on our streets, Google's autonomous car company this decade or this year.

• 28:20Ed Mylett?

  Year.

• 28:21Speaker 04

  Simultaneously.

• 28:23Speaker 04

  Hyperloop, high-speed trains, LA to Las Vegas in 25 minutes, right? There are 25 different Hyperloop projects in the world today. Then Elon Musk, the boring company. We're going to drill tunnels under cities, and this is already happening all over the place, and put cars on high-speed conveyor belts. And Elon's crazy idea, the rockets that he's using right now to put satellites in space that he wants to take people to Mars with in the 2030s. He has promised that by before 2030, you can use them for terrestrial travel. So New York to Shanghai in 39 minutes. The point is, so the point is not just it's one, it's all of these over the next 10 years. You have to, like this does, like think about simple things.

• 29:08Speaker 04

  Car insurance. Well, if the cars are all autonomous, you don't need cars. In fact, Waymo, when you sit in one of their autonomous cars, you're automatically insured. It happens automatically, the risk profile is shifted, right? So whole categories of insurance go away. But simple stuff. If Las Vegas to Los Angeles is 25 minutes, how big is the local dating pool?

• 29:31Ed Mylett?

  You got it.

• 29:31Speaker 04

  Right? How big is the size of the local school district, right? You live in LA, you don't like the schools your kids are going to? Suddenly, they can go to school in Vegas, right? It's an hour away or 20 minutes away. All fundamental things, the way we like to talk about it is with, when you have solitary exponentials, AI, right, whatever, they tend to disrupt products, services, and a little bit they make markets wobble. So like classic example is Netflix, right? Streaming video, it's one accelerating technology, and they put Blockbuster out of business, right? So this is product, service, and a little bit of the market. With converging exponentials, you get the scale increases massively, so you get products,

• 30:13Speaker 04

  services, markets, institutions, and all the structures that support them. So, right, suddenly the local dating pool, the local school, like really foundational things.

• 30:23Ed Mylett?

  What's it do to the real estate market?

• 30:24Speaker 04

  Oh, the real estate market is insane, right? Because, and it's, and the consequence, so you went to someplace smart, right? So suddenly you can live, flying cars, by the way, do 150 miles an hour, and they can... They can do three hours of continuous flight. So imagine how far you can live. And this has enormous environmental consequences. The best thing we can do for the environment is leave nature alone. And suddenly, we can live in, right? You were just in Coeur d'Alene. You were talking about how much you like Idaho. And one of the reasons we like Idaho so much is because there aren't many people there. Right? That's about to change with flying cars. Or we're going to have to legislate around it and think about this stuff and get out ahead in front of it. That's just one, that's just transportation, right? Every other industry is just as crazy.

• 31:07Ed Mylett?

  We're going to look at our lifetime back and go, most people used to live within 30 miles of where they worked. We're going to look back at that time and go, how bizarre, what a small world it once was. And how much, where you want to go to dinner at night.

• 31:18Speaker 04

  And by the way, let's, let's talk about your new industry. You're now in the podcasting business. And we were just talking, you like to make your things an hour, 45 minutes to an hour long because the average commute.

• 31:29Ed Mylett?

  Yeah.

• 31:29Speaker 04

  It's 45 minutes to an hour, right? So, and you're more popular on audio than video because people are listening to you. So in flying cars or in autonomous cars, you can have a completely, it's a theater. It's a moving theater, right? If you want, you can have a desk to work at, you can have blah, blah, blah. So suddenly, people, podcasters who have been relying on audio, right? It may go to video because the autonomous cars, like the cars where people are driving to work, the commute hasn't changed. But they don't longer have to drive and now they can watch it. Even like, I'll tell you something crazy, nobody likes it when I talk about this out loud, but everybody on the inside of the autonomous car industry is talking about it.

• 32:10Speaker 04

  Autonomous cars are going to revive the sex industry in ways we haven't even, like, it's a brothel on wheels, right? Imagine what happens with Tinder, like Tinder for autonomous, want to share a car home, right? I mean, like, people are talking, like, they don't like it when you talk about it out loud, but like, that's what I mean when you talk about like, the fundamental fabric of society is going to change. All that stuff is gonna shift in wild weird ways and you know, one of the reasons we wrote the book is most people are scared about the future and that fear is based on a lack of knowledge. So go out, read about what's coming and figure out how you can take advantage of it in your industry.

• 32:50Ed Mylett?

  Get their book. I'm serious. I endorse books when someone's on my show if I've read the book. Like, why would you not want to know this information? Why would you not want to know what's coming? Why would you not want to begin to think this way? And when you can converge these two things, everybody, when you have the convergence of this flow state and the convergence of what's coming and people say, wow, that sounds pie in the sky. Many of the things we've described are here now. Most of my very wealthy friends and we're talking about different things that we're being pitched on investment wise. I mean, I'll be honest with you. Flying cars and autonomous cars are constantly coming up all the time. Right now, like significant investments from very smart people.

• 33:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I mean, Tony Peters and what are they doing? Longevity and stem cells, right? Like our friends are, Peter's got four different longevity companies, right? Like, I don't know how many Tony has, but like

• 33:35Ed Mylett?

  A bunch.

• 33:35Speaker 04

  Right? Like, they got a lot of money? They want to live forever? Okay, cool. I'll like, thank you.

• 33:41Ed Mylett?

  Right. Let's go one more area because I have not talked about this with you at all and I'm just curious because we're talking about travel and there's all kinds of, there's quantum computers and all these other things we could be talking about. And if you think that this is pie in the sky stuff, if I'd have told you 10 years ago, even 10 years ago, that you would just say, uh, you know, I want a jug of milk and it's at your house the next day. You just say it out loud into the air and the milk shows up at your freaking house, right? Like, you'd have thought I was absolutely crazy. My son and I were touring this college and they were showing us how amazing their library was. Their library. And I'm like, these still exist? Like, you used to have to get in your car, drive somewhere, give them your card, they'd with ink on a deal, write it on there, check you a book out. Like, think of

• 34:25Speaker 04

  Dude, wait, do you remember learning, we're roughly the same, but do you remember learning the card catalog?

• 34:30Ed Mylett?

  Yes!

• 34:31Speaker 04

  Like, that was the thing you had to learn. Here's how we use the card catalog. And I was like, right?

• 34:35Ed Mylett?

  It's stupid things you take for granted, like You used to have a Thomas Guide, like that wasn't long ago.

• 34:41Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 34:41Ed Mylett?

  I just looked at a pretty vintage car, not that vintage.

• 34:44Speaker 04

  Was there a Thomas Guide in it?

• 34:45Ed Mylett?

  Yeah, of course there is. So when we're talking about these things, guys, you have to, you, you, you must, it's a necessity that you be able to think this way. I'm just curious, because I haven't asked you this. What do you think it means for space travel? Do you have any insights into that?

• 34:58Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, so we, at the end of the book.

• 34:59Ed Mylett?

  I know.

• 35:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's where you're going. The book is really, I, it's focused on the next 10 years. What's going to happen in the next 10 years? But we pull back in the last chapter for the 100-year view. And, um, two things to know about the 100-year view. So Ray Kurzweil also worked the numbers on what happens over 100 years. So it's 10 years, where it's 100 years worth of change over the next 10 years.

• 35:26Speaker 04

  Deep breath, before the end of the century, according to Kurzweil, who's barely wrong about anything. Like, he's just not wrong. He's made so many predictions, he's batting like 86%. I mean, from the fall of the Soviet Union to the arrival, like, I mean, just, he doesn't seem to miss with this stuff because it follows, just, there's math underneath it, essentially. He says, over the next 100 years, before the end of the century, we're going to experience 20,000 years of technological change. So that's birth of agriculture to the industrial revolution twice in the next 80 years. So let's say he's off by 50%, right? Let's say he's spectacularly wrong, right? And it's only 10,000 years, are you kidding?

• 36:11Speaker 04

  Right, so one of the things that's going to happen, and we look at this in the, in the end of the book, is this is the century that we stop being a single planetary species. We become a multi-planetary species. And this, you know, it, being partnered with Peter for almost 20 years at this point, um, you know, this is his big passion, so I've got to see it up close a lot. And I've watched this, you know, go from Peter's crazy idea that he shared with a handful of other people into a billion-dollar industry growing towards a trillion-dollar industry. Um, so it's really, right, it's massively matured, but... And it's, I mean, it's really funny because what we write about in the book is like, if you think about the space race, you know, I say that to most people, they think USSR versus USA.

• 36:56Speaker 04

  Right? That's the like, what got us into space? It was, well, there was competition between two superpowers. What's gonna unlock the space frontier this century? Competition between two superpowers, only those powers are Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Right? They're arguing, Bezos got Blue Origin, Musk has got SpaceX, and they both, and they've got different viewpoints. Bezos wants to go to the moon and build space, floating space colonies. Musk wants to go to Mars, right? And that is what is unlocking the space frontier. And I mean, by the way, just so people can wrap their heads around this, this isn't actually in the book, but there's a company, I'm gonna plank the name of it, Peter's been talking about it for weeks now. They figured out how to 3D print in a couple of weeks, a rocket.

• 37:40Speaker 04

  A rocket. A rocket. And this is amazing because it used to be like, you know, rockets are billion-dollar toys and like, if you screw something up in design, right? Like, you have to, you build it and you're like, oh damn, I wish the fin was five degrees off or like, what? You're screwed. Now we can build, we can iterate a rocket in two weeks? Like, this has ever happened. And this is already, like, this is here right now. Really cool, really interesting. So yeah, this is, and it's probably gonna happen over the next 20 years.

• 38:11Ed Mylett?

  Just amazing. Just the fact that you just used a term called single, single-planet species. Like, we're gonna be a multiple-planet species, right? Like, guys, it's just, it's coming. You're fascinating. Today was fascinating. It exceeded my expectations. Like, I'm so glad that we did this, and I am, I guarantee you, we're having you back. We are having you back. People are gonna want you back. We've, you guys, we've touched 1%. Literally 1% of which in really any of his flow content or in their latest book on future. So how do they find you? Where do you want them to go find you?

• 38:47Speaker 04

  First of all, a free tool for anybody. If you go, so the flow stuff, flowresearchcollective.com. But if you go flowresearchcollective.com forward slash flow blocker.

• 39:00Speaker 04

  It is a diagnostic we built that says, hey, let's analyze your life. Figure out what is the thing that is the biggest stumbling block between you and getting into flow. So that's a free diagnostic for anybody who wants it, that's out there. And I'm Steven Kotler.com. And if you're really psyched about Future, the book, more than anything else, you can go to futurefasterbook.com. Because no matter what I do, I can't convince my co-writer that we shouldn't build individual websites for our books. Because I do only floating, like, orphan websites for books. I've got 14 books, they've all got a little website, and I've got 10 of them all? Like, no, it's a bad idea.

• 39:38Ed Mylett?

  I think it's been working out pretty well for you. Dude, thank you so much.

• 39:41Speaker 04

  My pleasure.

• 39:42Ed Mylett?

  I enjoyed this today so much. Everybody, I know you enjoyed today's show. I know you learned a ton. I know you're inspired. Hey, listen, if you follow me on Instagram, you know this, I want to engage with you more deeply because I want to know who you want sitting next to me and what kind of content you want me creating. And so every day on Instagram, I run the max out two-minute drill. When I make a post, you've got two minutes, make a comment. So turn your notifications on. If you miss the first two minutes, just make a comment every day on every post. At the end of the week, we add up anyone who posted on every comment on every post, we pick a winner from there as well. Or if you reply to people's comments on there, you increase your chances of winning as well. We pick winners every week. They ride on my plane with me, they go to events, they get coached by me or my guests, they get max out gear. It's really cool stuff, just to reward you for engaging with me, so I can learn more about you. So participate in the max out two-minute drill.

• 40:27Ed Mylett?

  God bless you. Max out, everybody.

• 40:33Speaker 03

  This is The Ed Marlin Show.