Achieve Peak Creativity: Merging Flow States with AI Technology w/ Steven Kotler | EP #151

In this episode, Steven and Peter discuss the role AI will play in creativity and the science behind being creative. Recorded on Jan 6th, 2025 Views are my own thoughts; not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice. Steven Kotler, Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective, is a New York Times bestselling author and leading expert on human performance. He has authored 11 bestsellers, including The Art of Impossible, The Rise of Superman, Bold, and Abundance with his work translated into over 50 languages and nominated for three Pulitzer Prizes. His insights have been featured in top publications like TIME, Wired, and Harvard Business Review as well as academic journals. Learn more about The Alliance: https://flowalliance.co/ Learn more about Steven: stevenkotler.com Follow Steven on socials: https://www.instagram.com/stevenkotler ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ AI-powered precision diagnosis you NEED for a healthy gut: https://www.viome.com/peter Get 15% off OneSkin with the code PETER at https://www.oneskin.co/ #oneskinpod _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You're telling me your thinking is not better now in conjunction with the chat GPT than it was three years ago, just working with Google?

• 0:07Peter Diamandis?

  It's just faster. I mean, I don't know. Is it better?

• 0:11Speaker 00

  That's not the question. The question is. Stephen Kotler.

• 0:15Speaker 02

  Stephen Kotler.

• 0:16Speaker 00

  Best selling author and peak performance expert. What does it take for you to be your best when it matters most?

• 0:22Speaker 03

  He is redefining human potential.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  Pattern recognition, matching like with like, lateral thinking, this is our ability to link unlike with unlike. We humans are far superior at lateral thinking.

• 0:36Peter Diamandis?

  You're telling me that an AI system can't be as creative as a human being?

• 0:41Speaker 00

  There's a revolution going on in our ability to take advantage of our consciousness. This is before then there's the next wave of neurotech as we know, that's BCI, that's brain computer interface.

• 0:52Peter Diamandis?

  It's a thing now. It's real.

• 0:54Speaker 00

  Please keep arms and legs inside the riot at all times.

• 1:00Speaker 00

  Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

• 1:05Peter Diamandis?

  We're here today with my dear friend, my co-author of Abundance, Bold, and the Future is Faster Than You Think. And very soon, our fourth work together, which we'll talk about.

• 1:16Speaker 00

  Very exciting.

• 1:17Peter Diamandis?

  Very exciting. Stephen Kotler is New York Times bestselling author, award-winning journalist, the executive director of the Flow Research Collective, one of the world's leading experts on human performance. He's written a number of incredible books, The Art of the Impossible. I love that. It's a great name, as well as Stealing Fire. You got the best names for your books.

• 1:37Speaker 00

  Well, abundance, bold, I had some help.

• 1:40Peter Diamandis?

  Well, hey, and then The Rise of Superman. That's, that's amazing.

• 1:44Speaker 00

  That was the title that, like, I had that 10 years before I had the book.

• 1:47Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:48Speaker 00

  I just knew I had to write a book with that title because the title was so good.

• 1:50Peter Diamandis?

  And it's, and it's done amazing. You've been nominated for three Pulitzer Prizes, translated into over 50 languages. What's wrong with the other 130 languages out there?

• 1:59Speaker 00

  I know, seriously.

• 1:59Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, they should really get a clue.

• 2:01Speaker 00

  A gift soon.

• 2:02Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 2:02Speaker 00

  You know what the good news is? I've been translated into languages I didn't even know still existed.

• 2:07Peter Diamandis?

  That's the funny thing. I want to hear your audible book. Clicking language.

• 2:12Speaker 00

  You're like, wow, that's still a language. I thought that went away like 20 years ago.

• 2:16Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, my God. You've appeared in over 110 publications, including Academy, academic journals like neuroscience, bio behavioral reviews and psychophysiology. Didn't, didn't, that one just hasn't landed on my doorstep yet. And mainstream publications.

• 2:31Speaker 00

  You would like that psychophys article, though. It's interesting. It's a weird thing about mindset. We can talk about it.

• 2:36Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, fantastic. And you just got published today, and we'll talk about that one, too. But you've been in, in, you know, sort of old style media like the New York Times, Wired, Atlantic Monthly, Wall Street Journal, Time, and Harvard Business Review. And along with your wife, Joy, you run a dog sanctuary. That's where I first met you, you know, Rancho de Chihuahua.

• 3:03Peter Diamandis?

  How many Chihuahuas did you have?

• 3:05Speaker 00

  At our peak at one time, I think it was 50 something.

• 3:09Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, my God. We've done, so it's. I could deal with one.

• 3:12Speaker 00

  It's a hospice care facility. We've done this work for 18 years and we've helped basically 1,200 dogs die along the way, which.

• 3:22Peter Diamandis?

  When they're yapping, sometimes I really wish they would.

• 3:26Speaker 00

  There is that. Yeah, it's, I mean, I will say that when you, I know things about grief that you shouldn't know because it's such, and it's, it's odd, like when you actually have that many laps through the grieving process, you start to realize, like, I think there's a three day neurological grief cycle where grief was a mental illness until the 20th century, and then they changed it to a psychological condition. But I think there's a three day grief cycle where you're actually crazy. Like, I think that was a legit diagnosis. I've wanted to do a lot of work on grief. I haven't done it yet, but I will.

• 4:00Peter Diamandis?

  But you will. Life is long. We're going to talk about AI. We'll talk about flow. We'll talk about mindsets. We'll talk about his research coming up. Are you ready?

• 4:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, let's do this.

• 4:11Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, all right, fantastic. So first of all.

• 4:13Speaker 00

  By the way.

• 4:13Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 4:14Speaker 00

  Please keep armaments and legs inside the ride at all times.

• 4:19Peter Diamandis?

  First of all, it's amazing. Happy 28 year anniversary.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  Thank you. 28 years.

• 4:24Peter Diamandis?

  Do you have a lot of people in your life that you've been friends with for 28 years?

• 4:27Speaker 00

  No, and I want to.

• 4:30Speaker 00

  I want to go back to what we were talking about with this four days ago, which is we were talking about legacy, which is important to you and is part of your 360 community. And I think this is true, like, when I think about what's impacted my legacy the most, if I have a legacy, whatever it is, it's, it's my long friendships with creative entrepreneurs, without a doubt. Our friendship, my 25 year relationship, my editor, things like that, that's actually the relationships are the biggest muscle, I think, in the end.

• 5:04Peter Diamandis?

  I want to take us back. It was about, when did we publish the futures faster, you think? 2020?

• 5:12Speaker 00

  2019.

• 5:13Peter Diamandis?

  2019. It was just before the pandemic, like a month before.

• 5:16Speaker 00

  No, we were in, we were on Fox News. You don't remember this? We were on Fox News the day news leaked out of China that there was a pandemic. And do you don't remember this? We're on Fox News and they found out you were a doctor and so they're asking you all these pandemic questions. We're trying to talk about the futures faster than you think.

• 5:35Peter Diamandis?

  But a lot has happened since that we published that. And I have a list here, like, you know, we had a pandemic. That was, that was a thing. AI is now a very real thing. We're talking about AI forever from in bold and futures faster, but it's a thing now. It's real.

• 5:51Speaker 00

  It's real.

• 5:52Peter Diamandis?

  We'll talk about that. My, my full self-driving in my Tesla is no longer trying to kill me.

• 5:58Speaker 00

  Right.

• 5:59Peter Diamandis?

  It works really well.

• 5:59Speaker 00

  Which is, by the way, knowing how you drive, probably.

• 6:01Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. I mean, listen, I'm, there are many times where it's like, I don't trust myself. I'm going to put it on, on FSD because it's safer than I am as a driver.

• 6:10Speaker 00

  I've ridden with you.

• 6:11Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 6:12Speaker 00

  Truth. He speaks the truth.

• 6:14Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Starship, Starship is flying, which is amazing.

• 6:17Speaker 00

  Amazing. Amazing.

• 6:19Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Let's see what else. Elon is in the White House, sort of.

• 6:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. I don't even know what's in that one.

• 6:24Peter Diamandis?

  There was no predictions on that one.

• 6:26Speaker 00

  Did Ray even first see that one? Is that in one of his books somewhere?

• 6:31Peter Diamandis?

  No prediction sequence there. I heard yesterday, you know, this rumor that Jeff Bezos is going to run for president. But that's a, that's a rumor. We're just starting it right now.

• 6:42Speaker 00

  Okay, good.

• 6:43Peter Diamandis?

  And then Bitcoin hits 100,000.

• 6:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:45Peter Diamandis?

  Pretty amazing.

• 6:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. And they know that not real money.

• 6:48Peter Diamandis?

  Well, I'm a big Bitcoin believer.

• 6:51Speaker 00

  I'm just kidding.

• 6:52Peter Diamandis?

  Okay. Do you own any Bitcoin?

• 6:53Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 6:54Peter Diamandis?

  You do? Okay. You own more? Do you wanna?

• 6:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:58Peter Diamandis?

  Okay. And then quantum computing is sort of materialized.

• 7:01Speaker 00

  That's the, that's the one. Cause I remember like reading, I don't know when David Deutsch's book on quantum computing, which is still to this day, one of the most confusing books ever written on quantum computing. But I want to say it was like the early nineties and I remember, maybe I was in grad school, just out of grad school, and I remember trying to read it and just being so like dazzled by like the audacity of the, like, there's no way.

• 7:25Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 7:26Speaker 00

  And here we are, quantum computing.

• 7:27Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, Hartmut Nevin, who heads Google's Quantum Labs and their Willow, their Willow chip, which has shown with increasing, with increasing qubits, there is a reduction in error rate. And that is, that's amazing.

• 7:44Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 7:45Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, that's the, that's the realization. And for the first time ever.

• 7:49Speaker 00

  That's fascinating.

• 7:50Peter Diamandis?

  I don't, I don't know, but you and I will be with, with Hartmut in a week's time.

• 7:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:56Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, we should ask and really understand that. You know, we're gonna be having a conversation on the convergence of quantum and consciousness.

• 8:05Speaker 00

  So, this is a really weird ass tangent, but in neural dynamics, there's this idea known as the free energy principle. It's essentially the diminishment of uncertainty, that the brain is always trying to diminish uncertainty in every situation. And one of the questions we've been asking a lot, and it's a flow question. So, the question people have been starting to ask, ourselves included, is, is flow just a human property? Cause it's a physical systems property too. And you see the same dynamics when you're looking at water flowing through pipes and whatever. And the question has been, is this actually a foundational property of the universe? And you could look at, if the error rate goes down in quantum computing as you add qubits.

• 8:47Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 8:47Speaker 00

  That's an example of the free energy principle. It's uncertainty being diminished over time. And I wonder, cause the uncertainty principle, the free energy principle is a mathematical principle. It does, it doesn't have a physical reality, but it predicts almost every system in the body. And like, we've just extended it today, the paper that came out, into intuition and flow. So, it's really now every system in the body, and we're starting to look at non-physical systems.

• 9:10Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody, Peter here. If you're enjoying this episode, please help me get the message of abundance out to the world. We're truly living during the most extraordinary time ever in human history, and I want to get this mindset out to everyone. Please subscribe and follow wherever you get your podcasts and turn on notifications so we can let you know when the next episode is being dropped. All right, back to our episode. You know, it's interesting, the idea that consciousness is a quantum phenomenon and that we create reality by collapsing the waveform. And until we do that, things are in superposition. So this is just funny. I had asked Tony Robbins

• 9:51Peter Diamandis?

  if he would do a particular project with me and I left him a voice note last night and this morning when I woke up, because he does his, you know, he's typically up till 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. and I get my voice notes from him at like 3:00 a.m. in the morning. And so this morning

• 10:05Speaker 00

  That's what's wrong with a Tony Robbins conference. If you can't stay up all night, don't go.

• 10:10Peter Diamandis?

  And then I got up at 5:00 a.m. this morning and I see his voice note there and I'm like, okay, the answer to my question is in superposition right now.

• 10:21Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:22Peter Diamandis?

  Right? And it's like, okay, can I collapse the waveform in the affirmative? Because it's, it's there. There's a yes or no in that voice note. And it was just a fascinating thought.

• 10:33Speaker 00

  Just because you put physics, science names on these things doesn't mean I don't think you've gone completely round the bend.

• 10:40Peter Diamandis?

  Well, hey.

• 10:42Speaker 00

  But what else is new?

• 10:44Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, craziness is a good, good feature to have.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  You're the guy who, but I've like, I've learned when, when crazy shit flies out of your mouth, believe it. Because 30 years ago, you were like, no, no, no, we're gonna open the private space frontier.

• 10:58Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, I want to get into the AI of it all. And I want to get into it through creativity. So, you know, if I think about your fundamental abilities, what you teach, because you teach amazing programs and write amazing books, it really is about tapping into creativity in flow. And the question is, is AI going to enhance or destroy that? And, you know, I kind of think there's nothing that AI can't do in the creative field. So I want to have that, I want to have a conversation with you. I've always wanted to.

• 11:40Speaker 00

  It's a, it's a, first of all, it's a hard question. My answer, my, my, my instinctive answer, just, and I'll, and I'll back it up with, with why I think this might be true. My experience with AI has been, one, I think most people, especially creatives, right? You see this a lot with, whether we're talking about creative entrepreneurs or creative artists. They were told things about AI. It's going to make you more productive. It's going to save you time. It's going to do a bunch of these things. And then they start playing with AI, even like a large language model, and it doesn't do those things. And they get disappointed. They walk away.

• 12:16Peter Diamandis?

  Yet.

• 12:17Speaker 00

  Yet. But my point is what it does do is it doesn't help you do the task more quickly. It levels you up to, so you can do the task at a level you can't normally do. So what I see happening is AI seems to be additive on top of creativity. And what has always been the case, and this is definitely true with large language models. So let's talk about what large language models and writing for a second.

• 12:44Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 12:44Speaker 00

  One of the things that's very difficult with large language models, because they're work, they're probabilistic. So they're going to the most common, the most average, the standard is great writing is like 90% of the sentence is exactly what you'd expect. And it's sort of what chat GPT would come up with. But the last word in the sentence is going to be something totally unusual, really outside of the probability field. And that's the one that's going to land the meaning and the content and elevate it.

• 13:10Peter Diamandis?

  You mean in a, when a human writes it?

• 13:12Speaker 00

  When a human writes it. Like, that's usually how great writing is, is like, most everything fits your expected pattern. And then something breaks the pattern. And that's where, when you, first of all, when you break that pattern, the brain notices, right? So it catches your attention and that's where meaning comes from. Large language models are not designed to do that. You can loosen the parameters. People don't do this, but it's really fun. You can go inside like chat GPT or any of the large language models and tune their accuracy, their predictions. So you can get them to be more fanciful or more creative if you want. But what it doesn't tend to do is give you the target accuracy of a human with that kind of stuff.

• 13:47Peter Diamandis?

  I love your writing style. And I think folks should know when we met 28 years ago, you were doing a couple of articles on me. One for GQ, one for Wired. And I'll never forget, I'm reading this article that you wrote that just got published. I think was the GQ article.

• 14:05Speaker 00

  It was the GQ article.

• 14:06Peter Diamandis?

  And I'm reading and I'm like, I literally stopped dead in my tracks as I'm reading and, and had an experience I've never had, which is I stopped and noticed the writing. Usually when I, when I, usually when you read something, you just read and you take.

• 14:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:22Peter Diamandis?

  But I was like, wow, that was beautiful. And then I read on as like, that was beautiful. And I was like, this guy writes in a way I really love. And I remember calling you, I assume you remember this.

• 14:34Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 14:35Peter Diamandis?

  And I said, Stephen, I want to take writing lessons from you. And, and that was, that was one of them. It's still nowhere near.

• 14:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I want to, I want to tell everyone something because this is, this is to me, the most impressive thing, one of the more impressive things about you. So I don't know. Let's say I've taught 20 friends, not many, but like 20 friends over the years, how to actually really write and really work with them on it.

• 14:58Speaker 00

  Nobody practiced except you. Like I remember there was a gap between like Bold and Faster where we lost touch for about a year or two. And I, but I remember when you like came back and we were talking about Pitching Fest, you sent me something. And I remember reading it and I was like, holy shit, he's been practicing. Like I was so blown away. Your sentences have gotten so much better. And this is the, I think the, why we're, I think we're having so much fun writing the new book is.

• 15:26Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. By the way, our, our new book is amazing.

• 15:29Speaker 00

  Amazing.

• 15:30Peter Diamandis?

  It's the, it's the, we'll talk about it later, but it's the follow on some 14 years later to Abundance, The Future Is Better Than You Think. My working name is Age of Abundance.

• 15:42Speaker 00

  My working name is We Are As Gods.

• 15:44Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. So we're going to figure out which, and by the way, if you have comments about which subtitle, which title you like, put them in the.

• 15:51Speaker 00

  Age of Abundance or We Are As Gods.

• 15:54Peter Diamandis?

  Yes. Okay. Anyway.

• 15:57Speaker 00

  Or we could arm wrestle for you.

• 15:59Peter Diamandis?

  It'll take a little longer. End of the day though.

• 16:05Peter Diamandis?

  It's been a blast writing this book with you and it's moving so much faster. I mean, your writing has gotten extraordinarily better. I personally, I

• 16:14Speaker 00

  So much better, so much better. I there's, I it was the the novel that I just finished right before we started working on our book. Um, it was the first time it was like, cause each of my books is a little bit different. Yeah. Written differently, mostly because I want the challenge. Like I'll, I'll write in a particular style and be like, okay, this is great. But if I could get, increase the fat density per sentence or whatever it is. So everything's a stretch. And sometimes in very radically different directions. And then in this last book, the novel, it all like finally came together. I'm 57 years old and finally like all the threads click.

• 16:47Peter Diamandis?

  The waveform collapsed.

• 16:48Speaker 00

  The waveform collapsed and the, then what we're seeing in the new, in the new book is that it's all, it's like 40 years of practice, kind of combining and coming together.

• 16:58Peter Diamandis?

  It's gonna be awesome.

• 16:59Speaker 00

  It's also, by the way, a couple of things that are worth pointing out here because we're, we're talking about creativity and we're both really passionate about peak performance aging. In your 50s, uh, a bunch of cognitive skills turn on for the very first time. So it's because the two halves of your brain start talking to each other like never before.

• 17:19Peter Diamandis?

  Sounds like a marriage.

• 17:21Speaker 00

  Normally they work in opposition. Sounds like a marriage too. Normally, and but as you, around 50, they start talking to each other, provided you, creativity is what sort of unlocks it, but it increases intelligence, creativity, perspective, empathy, wisdom, which is a measurable psychological trait. Um, so I think part of what I'm, part of what we're seeing is actually the fact that your brain gets better with age.

• 17:47Peter Diamandis?

  Might be self-delusional, but I feel like I'm smarter and more capable than I've ever been.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  I do too.

• 17:53Peter Diamandis?

  You feel about me?

• 17:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:56Speaker 00

  I do actually feel that about you. Oh, my God.

• 17:59Peter Diamandis?

  So, so here's my question. If I were to take your writing, your books, and I feed that into.

• 18:08Speaker 00

  I've tried it.

• 18:09Peter Diamandis?

  Feed it into the best language. Well, but the language models have gotten better, right?

• 18:14Speaker 00

  Much better.

• 18:15Peter Diamandis?

  You know, Gemini two dot O, and what we'll be seeing next set of OpenAI and out of, out of the next generation of Claude. And say, OK, I want you to notice this incredible writing style. Analyze it, why it's different, how it's different. There will be a point.

• 18:35Speaker 00

  There's gonna be a, there's gonna be.

• 18:36Peter Diamandis?

  At which it can. And then I'll say, write like that. I do believe that AI is going to be able to mimic Stephen Kotler's extraordinary writing style.

• 18:50Peter Diamandis?

  And I'm just curious, how do you feel about that?

• 18:53Speaker 00

  I, so I think there's, there's three points. One, OK, so let's talk about why I believe. And I've said this a lot, and we'll talk a lot about the alliance later on, but, you know, my new project, which is working with creatives, one of the things I want to do is train them enough in AI.

• 19:12Peter Diamandis?

  So they don't feel threatened?

• 19:13Speaker 00

  So they don't feel threatened, so they don't lose their jobs, so they can continue to build. What I, what I think with AI is it raises the bottom to the middle very easily. That's really.

• 19:23Peter Diamandis?

  That's true. We, the data is clearly there.

• 19:26Speaker 00

  Clearly there, right.

• 19:27Peter Diamandis?

  It definitely is leveling the playing field and taking your lowest quarter percentage operating employees or whatever, and bringing them up to your standard.

• 19:37Speaker 00

  So what I think is also happening, but it's a lot harder to measure, or I haven't seen anybody try to measure it, is in the same way the bottom is being lifted to the middle, the top is being lifted far higher and not like far, far higher.

• 19:51Peter Diamandis?

  I haven't seen that data.

• 19:51Speaker 00

  Oh, I know. I haven't seen that data either. I don't think anybody's looking at it, but I guarantee you that's what's happening because I'll just give you. You're telling me your thinking is not better now in conjunction with ChatGPT than it was three years ago, just working with Google?

• 20:06Peter Diamandis?

  It's it's just faster. Yes, it's faster. I mean, I don't know, is it better? Um, I would have to do a lot of Googling to be able to get sort of the the corpus of knowledge I can get out of Gemini or or ChatGPT. Um, when I ask it a question like, help me think about the different dimensions of this, or help me understand how I might, uh, you know, uh, structure this this.

• 20:33Speaker 00

  So let me let me answer your question from a just a psychological, neurobiological perspective. ChatGPT, all all the AIs is general, they're pattern recognition systems. That's what they are. And, uh, pattern recognition is like with like, it's matching like with like, and it's finding closer flung connections. AI is going to be better than humans, already is probably. Lateral thinking is outside the box thinking. It's the thing that mainly gets amplified in flow. This is our ability to link unlike with unlike. It's really far flung connections between very, very different things.

• 21:08Peter Diamandis?

  Which is where innovation comes from.

• 21:10Speaker 00

  Which is where innovation comes from.

• 21:11Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 21:12Speaker 00

  We humans are far superior at lateral thinking. In fact, most AIs are literally designed not to do that. They're designed, they're convergent thinkers, they're not divergent thinkers. You can play with it and you can, as I said, you can get inside ChatGPT and muck around and try to get it to think more laterally. And it it it's like you have to experiment with it.

• 21:33Peter Diamandis?

  Let me take you, let me take you forward, right?

• 21:35Speaker 00

  You think that ability is going to come on in AI?

• 21:37Peter Diamandis?

  I think, listen, at the end of the day, um, if Elon is correct in his extrapolation.

• 21:43Speaker 00

  You know I disagree with Elon on many things.

• 21:46Peter Diamandis?

  I I understand, but you know, this doesn't come from just him, it comes from a multitude of people. And one of the conversations here in 2025 is have we achieved AGI? What the hell is AGI in the first place? It's a blurry line, but artificial general intelligence. And then how many generations are we away, uh, from an iterative improvement that gets us to digital superintelligence? So are you telling me that, okay, maybe let's say it's not a billionfold better, um, or even a millionfold, but a thousand times better, right? You're telling me that an AI system that is a thousand times better can't be as creative in every discipline as a human being?

• 22:31Speaker 00

  That's not the question. The answer to that is yes, probably. The question is, is that AI going to be more creative without a human in the chain or with a human in the chain? If you put up the AI that's a thousand times smarter than me versus me working with an AI.

• 22:49Peter Diamandis?

  Let me tell you, let me tell you the data that just came out. So this is a few months old now. I've, I've talked about this along with Salim Ismail on my episode WTF just happened in tech. There was a study done in which an AI chatbot, a physician on their own was given data to analyze a medical condition or number of medical conditions and they hit something like 75% correct. When they partnered with an AI chatbot, they got like 80% correct. But the AI chatbot on its own, without the human in the loop, was at like 95% correct.

• 23:28Speaker 00

  But that's again, convergent thinking, diagnosis. It's not divergent thinking. So yes, for sure.

• 23:36Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 23:37Speaker 00

  I, one, I think that humans in the chain are going to be smarter than just the AI alone. Two, it doesn't even, to me, it's a nonsensical question because creativity is so fundamental to human health and wellbeing. I don't think we're going to abandon it. Ivory is under this idea that like, suddenly the technology is going to show up, so we're going to totally change how we're wired on the, it doesn't work that way.

• 24:05Peter Diamandis?

  Exactly. Our neurobiology in particular, our hormones, our neurotransmitters, which, which is an area that you have mastered and understanding of. So I have so many ways to go here. One of my biggest concerns, I saw at Stanford giving a talk on this, is that if AI and humanoid robotics make our living so automagical, so easy, so automatic, and we no longer are challenged, we no longer have difficulties to overcome.

• 24:41Peter Diamandis?

  Are we able to survive as humans?

• 24:43Speaker 00

  Certainly with flow, with, you know, flow states have triggers and the most important one is the challenge skills balance, right? We drop into flow when the challenge or whatever task we're doing is like four or five percent greater than our skill set.

• 24:56Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 24:56Speaker 00

  We stretch.

• 24:57Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 24:58Speaker 00

  And that focuses our attention and drives dopamine into the system and blah, blah, blah, drives us into flow. That's fundamental, and we can't like the data on flow at this point, happiness, well-being, meaning, overall life satisfaction, purpose, all those things that we're going to need no matter what, like really, one of the things that we're looking at in the new book, right, is how do you sustain those things in an auto magical world?

• 25:21Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 25:22Speaker 00

  I like to me, first of all, I'm already seeing it like made by humans is like a tag. You know what I mean? Like, in fact, the new novel, I thought for a while that I was going to publish it as Stephen Kotler and Friends and with parentheses under it, made by humans. Jess.

• 25:42Peter Diamandis?

  How about Stephen Kotler and Human Friends?

• 25:44Speaker 00

  And Human Friends, we could do that.

• 25:46Peter Diamandis?

  So have we discussed the universe 25 experiment?

• 25:49Speaker 00

  No.

• 25:50Peter Diamandis?

  So this was in the 60s in New York, a well-known psychologist basically builds a luxurious habitat for rats. Okay. You know, something that was was massive and you can see the images if you Google universe 25. And there was going to be as much food as they wanted, as much nesting space as they wanted, as much area to go. And they put it, they start with four breeding pairs and they put them in the universe 25 and they started breeding and living, loving life. And you watch as at the end of this process, they die out.

• 26:35Peter Diamandis?

  The entire population of riots die out.

• 26:39Speaker 00

  Because there's no challenge.

• 26:40Peter Diamandis?

  Because there's no challenge. There is, and we can go into it in more detail, we probably will in age of abundance.

• 26:48Speaker 00

  We are as.

• 26:49Peter Diamandis?

  We are as gods, yes. Anyway, and it's fascinating. And I think about that. If, if all of a sudden, as a creative, everything you wanted to do was doable by the snap of a finger, the joy of, of writing, the joy of art, the joy of building a company, the joy of whatever, becomes far less. And I'm, I'm trying to understand how we deal with that because we all know if you enter a video game and the video game is too hard, you give up. If you, the video game is too easy, you give up. It's gotta be just.

• 27:32Speaker 00

  Right in the sweet spot.

• 27:33Peter Diamandis?

  Just in that sweet spot.

• 27:34Speaker 00

  Four, five percent.

• 27:34Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. And I'm wondering if at the end of the day, when there is this incredible digital superintelligence and humanoid robotics and automation, and we live in what we talked about as a, a technological socialism where technology is taking care of you, not the state, whether we revert to virtual worlds where always that level of challenge is just the right level.

• 28:00Speaker 00

  So one, like I've said for a while that the singularity I'm paying the most attention to is when VR gets to the point that it can produce the full suite of, when we can have more pleasurable, more exciting, more interesting experiences inside the simulation than in reality, do we migrate into virtual worlds? Has been the question I've been asking for a while. And VR, of all the techs we've been looking at, it's the one that seems to be lagging the most, at least.

• 28:29Peter Diamandis?

  But AI will enable it massively.

• 28:32Speaker 00

  I agree with that.

• 28:32Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, this, is this the answer to Fermi's paradox?

• 28:36Speaker 00

  That's an interesting question.

• 28:37Peter Diamandis?

  Right, which is, you know, Fermi's paradox, for those who know, is the notion of where is all the alien life? We should, even in a slow replication and travel rate, they should be here by now.

• 28:48Speaker 00

  Right. Somebody should contact us.

• 28:50Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, and, and, and the question of, you know, there's a whole bunch of media right now that, in fact, they have contacted us.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  Right.

• 28:57Peter Diamandis?

  It's been the last 50 years, since World War I. I love a recent conversation I had with somebody where we saw a flurry of, of, of UFO sightings when the nuclear bomb was being created.

• 29:09Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 29:11Peter Diamandis?

  And now we're seeing a flurry of UFO sightings, sightings when AI is on the exponential rise. So are the, are the aliens here to make sure we don't destroy ourselves in these, these inflection points in human society?

• 29:25Speaker 00

  Or maybe they're helping us along. Here, have nuclear power. Here, have AI. We're coming for your planet in a second, but we don't have to do the hard work of killing you. You guys are gonna do it for us. It, uh, I'm not gonna go down that rabbit hole.

• 29:39Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 29:39Speaker 00

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna avoid that rabbit hole. I still, so there's, there's a handful of questions here. One is, we seem to think, and technology is some kind of incredibly unstable force, where we don't make decisions afterwards, like, once the, it's out of the box. And that's, what I've said before is, and we're seeing this, and we're doing it right now as a society. Social media broke the world.

• 30:08Peter Diamandis?

  Mm-hmm.

• 30:09Speaker 00

  And it broke the world because it's a massively addictive technology that was sprung on the world without, like, we didn't know it had all the negative effects and blah, blah, blah. Um, now it's 20 years later, and we're saying, oh, no, wait a minute. Maybe it's not a good idea for our kids to be on social media all the time. Maybe we need to rethink how we interact with this particular tool. I think... That's going to happen with AI. I think that's that's what happens when we when our technology starts to exceed our cap best capacities in that way. I think we come to a point where we're like, we're humans. We can make a decision here to not engage. I think you're going to start seeing AI free countries. I think you're going to start seeing technology.

• 30:51Speaker 00

  Countries where they're like, no, no, we're we're good with the technology here. We're gonna we're gonna stop. We're gonna draw the line there. I think these kinds of changes are gonna start coming.

• 30:59Peter Diamandis?

  So you gave me some numbers last night when we were hanging out, having dinner about the size of the creative economy. And as we're talking about AI and creativity, could you recount this?

• 31:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, so so here's this. It's interesting. If you're looking like, if you're interested in sort of impacting your bottom line, what like which where should you scale up? And I would I would creative flow would be my answer. And so the creative economy has tripled in size in the past 15 years. So the

• 31:33Peter Diamandis?

  And you're defining creative economy as how?

• 31:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, let me let's back this up. So usually when you think about this, you think about urban planner and economist Richard Florida, who wrote The Rise of the Creative Classes. And he had two categories of creatives, and that there were professional creatives and the super creative core. Super creative core are folks like us. They're creative entrepreneurs, creative artists, creative writers, these people who are inventing culture, inventing the future. And creative professionals are things like you're a doctor, you're an accountant, you're and you're trying to bring in novelty and and new techniques and be creative inside the discipline. And those are the two classes. When you look at both of them, they both exploded. The super creative core

• 32:18Speaker 00

  had went from like 100 million people to 300 million people. Yet the numbers in America are to trillion dollar economy. And it's interesting because Adobe State of Create study, Adobe's done a bunch of really great studies, like once every five years, they do a global study on creativity. They're phenomenal studies, and they've started them back in the 2000s. Their 2016 study, they found that creatives and people who use creativity in their work out earn non creatives by 13%. It's uh in America, it's a trillion dollar economy. Globally, it's like a three trillion dollar economy or three point two trillion dollar economy. So it's a big chunk in America. It's like four point five percent of the GDP

• 32:58Speaker 00

  comes comes out of creativity. So it and it's the fastest growing sector and for good reason. Back in two thousand and ten, IBM did a very famous study of CEOs. And they wanted to know what's the quality in the twenty first century that will most help a CEO thrive. Creativity topped the list. There was a more recent study a couple of years ago that looked at the same question. They came back with analytical thinking, problem solving and creativity. And I will tell you that like that's redundant because really good analytical thinking is creative. Really good uh problem solving is creative. So the whole thing is essentially creativity and creative problem solving.

• 33:38Peter Diamandis?

  So the question, bring you bring you back to AI then. If AI is a creativity enhancing tool.

• 33:47Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 33:47Peter Diamandis?

  Uh which I think it is. Which can take people who are not part of the creative community um into the creative ecosystem.

• 33:58Peter Diamandis?

  The question is, is the value in terms of earning power, in terms of being in business going to demonetize is the number of creatives.

• 34:07Speaker 00

  That's an interesting question. Here, let me go back to your AI creativity. First of all, let me give you creativity is technically defined as the uh creation of novel and useful ideas. And the useful is important because it's not just enough to have something cool idea in their head. You actually have to put it in the world. You have to show it to other people. You gotta. So there's risk taking involved in the creative process also at the end of it. When we look at creativity, one of the things, so we're gonna, I know we're both interested in this.

• 34:38Speaker 00

  When we look at the progress in AI, people are looking at it as if it was separate from progress in consciousness hacking technologies, also on the human side of the equation. So it's not just that we're augmenting the machines, the humans are being augmented. If you think about, so 20, let's just talk about flow and creativity. So my old organization, the Flow Genome Project, did a big study with CEO leaders. We want to know how much more productive they were creative they were in flow. McKinsey did this really famous study of CEO leaders and found they were 500% more productive in flow. It was like a 10-year study, went around the globe, talked to tons of people, self-reported. So you always got to like.

• 35:19Peter Diamandis?

  And how long, what percentage of their working life are they in flow? A small fraction?

• 35:26Speaker 00

  No, it's an open, that's an open question that I'll, hold on, let me just, let me get there. Creativity, we found people on average were 700% more creative. That's what they reported. And we were like, God, that number's crazy. So creativity can be broken down, this psychologist named Mumford did it into eight categories, problem identification, all the way through like solution implementation. And we measured though, we tried to measure those independently in flow, and we found that each of those eight categories increases by 40 to 60%. So ever breaking it down, and which starts to add towards those big numbers. My point, when 30 years ago, when the AI conversation started, humans were trying to use psychology to train people into flow.

• 36:09Speaker 00

  And the classic example I always give is, Mehach sent me high, the godfather of flow psychology, wrote a book called Flow and Sports, where he worked with the top sports psychologists, and they tried to use the psychology of flow to train up top athletes, and they sucked at it. They're bad, like it's in books in print, you can see their hit rate is terrible. With the Flow Research Collective, with our core flow training, Zero to Dangerous.

• 36:31Peter Diamandis?

  By the way, another name I love.

• 36:33Speaker 00

  15,000 people in 160 countries, 28 industries have taken that class. On average, we see a 73.8% increase.

• 36:43Peter Diamandis?

  By the way, you know that 62.4% of people make up stats on the spot?

• 36:48Speaker 00

  On the spot, I'm not making this stat up. You can find it on our website and the data.

• 36:53Speaker 00

  But uh, my point is, if you're 700% more productive in flow, or more creative in flow, and we've taken it from, we don't know how to train this at all, to, oh no, it's reliable, it's repeatable, and that's a 73% increase in the amount of time spent in flow. So usually when people come to us, they're like, no, I get into flow maybe once, twice a week, and by the time they're done, it's twice a day, and it's pretty, it's pretty steady and consistent. That, and, and this is like, low tech, we haven't even started adding in all the, there's a revolution in what you could call, for lack of a better term, consciousness raising technology, right? We saw the first wave, were like meditation apps and things

• 37:35Speaker 00

  like that. Uh, the second wave, so for example, I have a new partnership with Vital Neuro. They make a phenomenal EEG headset, and it's a neural feedback. Is that why you shave your hair? Yes, exactly. Electrodes back on? Exactly, it's exactly, right. Um, but I've been watching, this is like portable EEG tech, like I've been playing with this stuff since the early 2000s, and in the early 2000s, like, I've got every single portable EEG device that's ever made, I've got a cool display of it. Um, they were terrible. Now they're portable, they work, and one of the reasons we partnered with them is, we identified, uh, my lab identified like five or six neural markers for flow, was we transitioned to flow state that nobody had ever been able

• 38:20Speaker 00

  to find before, and when, this was three years ago, and three years ago, we were like, trying to figure out, can we measure this, can we, you know, blah, blah, blah, we needed FMRI's, and it was half a million dollars to do the experiment, couldn't even do it. They can now measure it with this frickin' portable, three years later, and the same signal that we couldn't get at with FMRI, we can now get it here, and you know what, you just had Mary Lee Jepson on, we just interviewed her, talked to her, her technology takes us farther. So my point is, AI is evolving. Humans and our ability, there's a revolution going on in our ability to take advantage of our consciousness. This is before then there's a, the next wave of neurotech, as we know, that's BCI, that's brain-computer interface.

• 39:04Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 39:04Speaker 00

  And that takes it to a whole other level. So it's not, humans aren't static in this picture. That's the thing that people forget when they have the AI conversation, they're like, AI is exploding. I'm like, alright, great, but you're 700% more creative in flow and that's gone from this rare state to something that's reliable.

• 39:20Peter Diamandis?

  I can imagine, uh, having my AI, let's call it Jarvis.

• 39:26Speaker 00

  For lack of a better term. Where did that word come from?

• 39:29Peter Diamandis?

  I don't know. Steven constantly makes fun of me because in every one of our books.

• 39:33Speaker 00

  Everyone of our books, Jarvis has to get in there.

• 39:35Peter Diamandis?

  I love Jarvis. I mean, I think.

• 39:36Speaker 00

  We're gonna find a way to get Jarvis into We Are His Gods.

• 39:39Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, that's great, right? After we write Age of Abundance. Um, so, uh.

• 39:44Speaker 00

  Maybe let's just call it Jarvis 2.0. Let's fuck it, look.

• 39:48Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, so listen, I, I can imagine if I have Jarvis on.

• 39:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:53Peter Diamandis?

  Um, and I say maximize me in flow, that it will be able to do things as an AI to basically continuously tip me into flow.

• 40:02Speaker 00

  Oh, so all the cool stuff, the, most of the cool stuff that, cause we're doing a lot of work. We have, um, a humans, I, my belief is that humans and flow collaborating with each other and AI are gonna own the future. And is this gonna be true 50 years from now, 30 years from now? I don't know, but is it gonna be true for the next 10 to 15 years? Absolutely, for sure. Um, and I think it'd be true for a lot longer, but I definitely think it's gonna be true for this next period. And a lot of what we're doing, we have a fully dedicated research line here, it's all on interface design. How do, what's the flowiest interface? What's the best way to work with an AI to produce? Cause why not give you something that's really wild that never used to happen? So, in that challenge skills sweet spot, right?

• 40:47Peter Diamandis?

  Have to do with your physical appearance or?

• 40:51Speaker 00

  Just gonna leave it alone. Just gonna leave it alone. I don't even know what I was saying anymore.

• 40:55Peter Diamandis?

  So something that happened, something really wild about AI and flow. Uh, so sorry, I took you off the game.

• 41:04Speaker 00

  It was gonna be the most insightful thing I've ever said. In fact, I was, it was like solving for pie and you just screwed it up. Sorry, people. I was gonna solve for pie here and it.

• 41:12Peter Diamandis?

  So the question is, you know, you've described the flow state as intensely human. Um, as intensely human stage.

• 41:22Speaker 00

  It's well, mammalian because it and insects get into flow when birds flocking. So it's actually, uh, it's older school fish schooling.

• 41:31Peter Diamandis?

  So going back to Jarvis, I can imagine Jarvis.

• 41:34Speaker 00

  Oh, interface design. That's what we're talking about. Yeah. So almost everything. Oh, if this is, this is one that I was gonna tell you about. So. In that challenge skill sweet spot, right? Anxiety is the upper level. So if you overload cognitive load, right? Your brain can hold seven items at once in working memory, but that's digits. If you go to something like concepts, most people tap out at three or four. Right? This is why I always say.

• 41:58Peter Diamandis?

  Which is amazingly, amazingly low. Yeah.

• 42:01Speaker 00

  To tiny bottle. Yeah. I mean, people don't get the, the brain takes in, if you go by Marvin Zimmerman's calculations and they're probably way off. It's 11 million bits of information from our senses every second. That's what they counted, believe it or not. Our bandwidth of human attention is 120 bits. You're using 60 bits of attention to listen to me talk. If we're talking together and there's a faucet dripping.

• 42:24Peter Diamandis?

  I'm not noticing it.

• 42:24Speaker 00

  Everybody's tapped out, right?

• 42:25Peter Diamandis?

  This is the whole basis of cognitive bias.

• 42:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. So one of the things that you've noticed, we talked about it a second ago, it used to take you with Google, right? To get over, yeah, I want, I've got an answer to a question. I need, I need as much data as I possibly can get. You could really spend like a couple of hours doing your research until you filled up your brain and like pushed yourself into anxiety. That challenge skill sweet spot with chat, GPT, or any of the AI systems, you can get such accurate information. You can overload cognitive load in five minutes. Like, and I've done it where I'm researching something and I'm 10 minutes in and I've literally like blown out my brain for most of the day.

• 43:03Peter Diamandis?

  Then you can go to the LLM and say, can you please pull out the five most important concepts that are through, you know, you can use that as a sorting mechanism.

• 43:11Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 43:12Peter Diamandis?

  But going back, I do imagine that Jarvis can do things, changing music, changing difficulties, challenging me, that can hit flow triggers, and we'll talk about flow triggers later, that can push me into flow. Let me read you a quote from Naval Ravindran, who's the CEO of Angel List. He recently said in an interview, "This whole idea that we can somehow make AI safe is nonsense, because creativity by its nature is unbounded." What are your thoughts about the coming AGI, you know, ASI wave and safety there? Do you have any preconceived notions?

• 43:55Speaker 00

  That's a good, that's a good point he's making, by the way.

• 44:00Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, this is the whole example of DeepMind with Go, right, where it comes up with moves you've never seen before.

• 44:06Speaker 00

  Move 27, right? That is the move that Lee Soto had never seen before.

• 44:10Peter Diamandis?

  And this notion that in AI in our world, and you and I are the ultimate optimists, but I can imagine AI in our world doing things that has never been seen or conceived of before, and creating some fundamental challenges for us.

• 44:28Speaker 00

  I mean, what technology hasn't created fundamental challenges for us? To me, it's, so, and this is going back to We Are As Gods, or Age of Abundance, whatever you want to call it, and I've said this for a really long time, and this is one of the things we're going to look at in that book, is I think we have a last mile problem on the road to abundance, and it's, we've got the technology to raise global standards of living, and we've had it for a while, right? We could do this.

• 44:56Peter Diamandis?

  Food, water, energy, healthcare, education, everything.

• 44:59Speaker 00

  Like, it was a done deal probably when we wrote Abundance, if we wanted to apply ourselves, and definitely now, but we're not applying ourselves. So, why is that? We have the technology to literally raise global standards of living, and it's not happening, and it's because we haven't figured out.

• 45:14Peter Diamandis?

  Well, let's just say, it has been happening, just not at a fast enough rate.

• 45:17Speaker 00

  Not at a fast enough rate, exactly. And I think the problem is that we haven't learned how to cooperate at scale. The only time we cooperate at scale globally around problems is if there's a war, and the success rate there isn't so good, or a pandemic. And again, the success rate, like, we cooperated for the, what, the first month of the pandemic to get us to vaccines, and then everybody sort of splintered off, and, you know, everyone in their own ways. I think that's the and group flow, which is the cooperative version of is, I think, going to the basis of that solution or part of that solution, or at least a way in to look at the question. And I've maintained this for a while. But when I look at AI, I'm like, what we need to start doing is whatever you're saying, we need to have these global conversations.

• 45:58Speaker 00

  Otherwise, the generation we lose to AI, I think it's going to be worse than the generation we lose.

• 46:04Peter Diamandis?

  To social media.

• 46:05Speaker 00

  Social media, right? It's people this is, this is, by the way, this was back in the nineties, when early days of, you know, I, my field is alter states of consciousness. So psychedelic research has always been part of that. And you looked at the drug war and things like that. And we, everybody was very much for legalization, what the Portugal experiment. Sort of that writing was on the wall a while ago. People were looking at going, God, that might be the way.

• 46:29Peter Diamandis?

  What was the Portugal experiment?

• 46:31Speaker 00

  Portugal has completely decriminalized everything. Everything is legal in Portugal and their drug problem continues to drop.

• 46:38Peter Diamandis?

  Better than Las Vegas.

• 46:39Speaker 00

  Drop and drop and drop and drop. So like, you know, their problems have actually gone away with this happening. So Portugal has been a very like radical, but interesting global experiment in that. And one of the, one of the points, I think, is we were always worried that if you legalize drugs, you could lose a generation. Right? Because there's a generation that hasn't prepared to like, deal with these super addictive substances that are going to be in their lives suddenly. The same, like with social media, that's another super addictive substance that we were not prepared to deal with. I think AI, like I, I think we have to start getting a little ahead of these things. I don't think we can just be playing.

• 47:19Peter Diamandis?

  But you know, the human brain, it deals with the now and the immediate next moment.

• 47:25Speaker 00

  Which case I think we're going to have a bumpy next 20 years.

• 47:28Peter Diamandis?

  But AI can deal with the long term. We can partner and say, what are the long term issues? It's just that, you know, it's the tragedy of the commons.

• 47:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, isn't everybody, I mean, we're, most people.

• 47:41Speaker 00

  When they have sort of dire predictions, it's about this period, right? Maybe that's just because we're naive and we've got a recency bias and we're not thinking too far into the future and we're bad long-term planners, many of those things. Or, you know, how do you freestyle from a creative superintelligence? Like, how do you think past that?

• 47:59Peter Diamandis?

  So, one of the questions is how do we, how do we train up the AIs? You know, I'm fond of Mogadat's work in which he says, listen-

• 48:07Speaker 00

  Be kind to the AI.

• 48:08Peter Diamandis?

  Be kind, yeah. AI is our progeny, right? How we feed it, how we train it, how we educate it is the difference between Clark Kent, you know, I forget his name from, from Krypton, but that young baby landing on Earth and becoming Superman because he landed in a good family and was taught values and virtues and, and became a superhero versus landing in a drug den in the Bronx and becoming a supervillain, right? So, that AI can go either directions depending upon how it's trained up. You know, Elon said, "I want to make, train XAI Grok to be maximally curious and maximally

• 48:52Peter Diamandis?

  truth-seeking." Which sounds reasonably-

• 48:57Speaker 00

  Sounds reasonably dangerous, like everything-

• 49:02Peter Diamandis?

  No, no, no. I think, no, if you said maximally creative, that would be dangerous.

• 49:06Speaker 00

  Okay. You're maximally curious?

• 49:08Peter Diamandis?

  Maximally curious, to gather knowledge about what's, I mean, his goal is that if you're sufficiently curious, you're going to determine the truth. You're going to determine the fundamentals. You'll understand first principles, what's going on. And maximally truth-seeking means you're going to learn to avoid the cognitive biases out there. You know, one of the things I'm, I'm excited about is the notion that AI could become maximally wise. Have we had this conversation?

• 49:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, we have, and I agree with you on that. I think it's really super interesting. I like, the other question is, and this is the one that, like-

• 49:52Speaker 00

  Why can't we use AI to help us steer us so we don't blow ourselves up with the AI?

• 49:59Peter Diamandis?

  And I think we will eventually, but only when it has becomes a digital superintelligence. This was the conversation at the abundance summit last year, which was, would you rather live in a world a decade from now with digital superintelligence? Like at a billion fold increased level of intelligence or without that capability? I for one would much rather live in a world where this digital superintelligence at this godlike abilities is there to help us because we humans are still animalistic in all of our natures. We make stupid decisions, all these cognitive biases, you know, we are, we are short term

• 50:41Peter Diamandis?

  thinkers and a digital superintelligence, almost like in a parental fashion is there if, you know, if the head of some large country says, I want to, you know, says to his AI, let's go destroy that country over there. At some level of wisdom, the AI says, that's a ridiculous thing to do. Why would you want to do that? You know, I'm just going to talk to the other AI and we're going to work out a collaboration. And I do think that that is a viable end state. It's the interim stages between now and then that's the of the greatest concern. How would you train up an AI?

• 51:25Peter Diamandis?

  Do you have any innocence from your work?

• 51:30Speaker 00

  That's an interesting question.

• 51:32Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, there's Asimov's three laws of robotics, Brian. There's, you know, maximal kindness, but at the end of the day kindness in some circumstances means weakness, which could mean, you know, making the wrong decisions that maximizes. What was Spock's statement in, in Star Trek four, you know, the good of the one cannot supersede the good of the many, something like that. Yeah, something like that.

• 51:59Speaker 00

  I have to think back to my Star Trek board. I only see them just so I could talk to you about them.

• 52:04Peter Diamandis?

  I appreciate that.

• 52:06Speaker 00

  Um, yeah, they're they're remarkably the training. Nobody's asked me the training AI question before. I'm going to think about that.

• 52:14Peter Diamandis?

  Cause you're training people, you're training, you know, uh, meat sacks all the time.

• 52:19Speaker 00

  All the time.

• 52:20Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 52:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:21Peter Diamandis?

  So how would you try, would you train in AI?

• 52:24Speaker 00

  The, the interesting question is, I mean, you're asking essentially like a question about leadership, right? That also, how do you, how can a human lead in a work? Cause I mean, I think you're, one of the points you made is, uh, is a part of it is we're not just looking at one AI. We're looking at millions of AIs, possibly, you know, billions if everybody ends up with their individual AI. Like if we end up with a personal tutor, right? The Neil Stephenson Diamond Age idea that we, we.

• 52:56Peter Diamandis?

  Both love.

• 52:57Speaker 00

  Both love.

• 52:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 52:58Speaker 00

  Um, and talked about in education for a really long time. That AI is going to be with you for your whole life. So everybody's going to have, you know.

• 53:05Peter Diamandis?

  My Jarvis, my version of Jarvis.

• 53:07Speaker 00

  Your version of Jarvis. So, um, it's really a question of like cooperative AI and cooperative humanity. It's not just a singular.

• 53:16Speaker 00

  Concept, I don't think. I still don't have any, any ideas. Um, maybe the next novel will be a crack at that one.

• 53:21Peter Diamandis?

  I really think that, that you should think about that.

• 53:24Speaker 00

  I'm gonna think about that. I'm not kidding. I think maybe, uh, uh, maybe the next sci-fi book is going to be around. How do you do that?

• 53:30Peter Diamandis?

  All right. My next question for you, buddy. Um, how will the development of AI creative capabilities impact research in neuroscience and creativity? So I'd like you, if you don't mind, cause I, every time you, you speak about this, it's like, uh, it's like biotech porn.

• 53:50Peter Diamandis?

  What's going on in the brain?

• 53:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, so let's talk about creativity. So this is really interesting. The difference, so one creativity is a trainable skill. So everything I'm talking about, like this is a developmental process. As you become more creative, this is what happens in the brain. But I'm going to speak about it as if it was a fixed thing, but I'm not.

• 54:12Peter Diamandis?

  But by the way, the fact that you're making that statement, I think, is really important. Having a creative mindset, and we'll talk about mindsets, right? Like, I am being, first of all, saying to yourself that you're a creative person. Like, a lot of people say, I'm not creative, and they shut it down. And once you shut it down, yes, you're not.

• 54:33Speaker 00

  No, you're not creative. Yes, absolutely.

• 54:36Peter Diamandis?

  So it's important for people to realize that it is.

• 54:38Speaker 00

  It's an innately human skill. We're all born with it. And, I mean, and you'll hear about it neurobiologically. Yeah, so this is what's wild.

• 54:48Speaker 00

  If you're just looking at sort of male and female, for example, the differences between, and people ask this all the time with flow, are the differences between men and women and flow? Are the, and everybody wants those differences to be really great, and they're not. They're microscopic. Like, if you look at the brains between men and women, men have more interhemispheric connectivity. And women have more connectivity between the hemispheres. But those are not absolutes, and they can, they could, they vary. Brains are creatives, so we have an executive attention network. This allows me to, I'm focusing on Peter, I'm blocking out all the other distractions. I'm paying attention. That's the executive attention network.

• 55:30Peter Diamandis?

  I wish my kids would activate that.

• 55:32Speaker 00

  It doesn't stop fully formed until they're 25. It takes a while. It's trainable. And then we have the default mode network. And.

• 55:41Speaker 00

  Which gets a bad rap because it's rumination lives there, self referential thinking lives there, but so does creativity. Say the network name again. Default mode network. It's where your brain goes when it's mind wandering, daydreaming. When you're not living in the now. When you're not living in the now, when your, when your brain's taking you somewhere. And rumination is when the, instead of like your brain taking you into creativity, it just thinks about that shitty thing your wife said to you and it, you just play it over and over. That's all default mode network. Normally, most brains, these networks work in opposition. Can you shut down the default? Sure, meditation, that's one of them, among other things, like that's one of the main things you're doing. They work in opposition. So as executive attention goes up, or you're focused, you're no longer daydreaming, we

• 56:26Speaker 00

  all know this, so you start daydreaming, you're not focused, they go up and down this way. And it's actually the, the salience network, which is if I do this, and you, what's that sound? That's the salience network. It switches between the two. That's, that's what does it. So in the brains of creatives, normally this, this is opposition, they work together. So literally these networks are co-activated. All of them? No, the default mode network and the executive attention, they're co-activated. And the salience network, which is the hinge in creatives, this is what really, really happens is it gets extra flexible. So you can flop back and forth and back and forth, you can go from fully focused to thinking about an idea wildly fully focused, right? I can see, I can see that. That's sort of what happens like when you're writing, right?

• 57:11Speaker 00

  Part of the process of learning how to write is this process of learning to toggle between, I need to be focused putting the words in a sentence and, oh no, I gotta come up with the next line, right? And it's this back and forth in the brain. And it gets very, very flexible in the brains of creatives. And flow tends to enhance this communication, it shuts down non-relevant structures, but even the default mode network, which really gets turned off in flow, except for the part of it that's used in creativity. So we see really stark differences in the brains of creatives versus non-creatives in a really, in a really big way. It's almost like, the changes in a creative brain are, I don't know if I can make this statement across the board, it might not be a blanket statement, but like.

• 57:57Speaker 00

  Somebody who's been addicted to coke for drugs for 20 years versus the creative brain. No, the creative brain actually has more difference than that. Like it's really, uh, it's really profound and you can see it. You can see it on if MRIs and you can, you can see it on EEG, network analysis is the brain. Um, super interesting and, um,

• 58:19Peter Diamandis?

  Can you go into a little bit of dopamine and the neurotransmitters?

• 58:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, the next side of this is the neurotransmitters that are involved in it. And, um, dopamine and norepinephrine, which are show up arise at the front end of a flow state. These are all pleasure drugs and both dopamine and norepinephrine are focusing chemicals. Norepinephrine is just, it's adrenaline in the brain, right? Noradrenaline is what they call it in Europe. We call it norepinephrine. It's essentially adrenaline in the brain. Um, but both of these are reward chemicals, but the cool thing they do from a creative perspective is they heighten focus and excitement and attention. You know, when they're in your system, you can't not pay attention to something, right? Like,

• 58:56Peter Diamandis?

  You see something amazing. You see something, a demonstration that's fascinating. You hear something that makes you think.

• 59:02Speaker 00

  When I'm writing, when you're writing, when I'm writing a cliffhanger story, we taught, when I teach writing, we talk about norepinephrine closes. Um, right? Like, that's what like, that's what gets you to the page. Exactly. Or, um, and dopamine is the same thing, but you get tend to get dopamine from surprise instead of excitement. And, but the point is that both of those neurochemicals, this is, so this is interesting. Flow creativity is a flow trigger. When you link ideas together, pattern recognition, the brain releases dopamine. A little bit of norepinephrine, a lot of dopamine.

• 59:34Peter Diamandis?

  It's fascinating. I can remember moments in time where like if, when I was in class and the teacher's trying to teach me something, there's a moment where you don't get it and you're lost. And a moment you go, oh, that's what's going on. And that,

• 59:49Speaker 00

  That's that aha moment. Like, uh, my, uh, my colleagues, John Koinos and Mark, Mark Beeman mapped the aha moment. Like we know exactly where it is, how it happens. Um, and it's really, we're, we'll talk a lot about my favorite part of the brain, the anterior sing of cortex in a second, because that's where a lot of this is living. But anyways,

• 1:00:07Peter Diamandis?

  You have a big one, don't you?

• 1:00:08Speaker 00

  I do. So glad you noticed.

• 1:00:16Speaker 00

  Once again, you killed me. So it's something like dopamine and norepinephrine. So dopamine and norepinephrine. Wait, so, by the way, the dopamine, everybody's had this experience, you do a crossword puzzle in Sudoku, with that little rush of pleasure, you get one, and answers right? Yeah. So. I mean, that's, that's what is driving video game addictions. Mm-hmm. Right? So check this out, because this is another example, you know, like if you've ever done crossword puzzles, you don't tend to just get one answer at a time, usually they come in flurries, like you get two or three in a row. Why is that? It's because when you get an answer right, the brain puts dopamine into your system. Dopamine, Titans Focus does all that other stuff, it enhances signal to noise ratios. So we find more signal than the noise, we notice more patterns. Why are we more creative and flow?

• 1:01:01Speaker 00

  One of the main reasons is because dopamine and norepinephrine both have massively amplified pattern recognition. Now, obviously, you get, you take this too high, and you get conspiracy theorists and extreme paranoia. It's the same, it's the same knob, right? It goes from creativity all the way up into conspiracy theories are just linking really disparate ideas together in really creative ways. And rationalizing them. And rationalizing them, it does, I mean. I mean, that's what the brain does, it's a meaning-making machine. It will take all kinds of crazy stuff. But that's the point with the conspiracy theories, it's not only a meaning-making machine, when we understand meaning, we feel safer. The brain is trying to come, like, link together those. That's a really important point there.

• 1:01:45Speaker 00

  It's really important, we're always the, we're, I always say humans are really simple toys at a really basic level. Approach, avoid, valence and arousal, those four knobs control, like, those are the four knobs that control your life. Yeah. Uh, other neurochemicals? Uh, in creativity, nandamide, same psychoactive that's in marijuana. It's in the endocannabinoid system, right, which is a sort of a second immune system and a stress response system. That massively amplifies lateral thinking. The other thing that happens, especially if you're talking about flow in creativity. Our sense of self turns off in flow. It's a, we've talked about this before, but it's the same reason time passes strangely in flow.

• 1:02:30Speaker 00

  Both time and our sense of self are network effects. There are a bunch of different parts, most of the prefrontal cortex, sometimes other stuff is working. And in flow, the brain performs an efficiency exchange. It wants as much energy as it can have for focus and attention. So it shuts down non-critical structures and repurposes the energy. Huge portions of your prefrontal cortex go down in flow. And as a result, we lose our ability to track time. So past, present and future get pushed together into what poets talk about as, you know, the eternal now. Right? The moment, the deep now is a psychological term.

• 1:03:07Peter Diamandis?

  I had that experience. I remember I, I was speaking somewhere and I was asked extemporaneously to speak about singularity or technology or whatever it was. And I remember I got the mic and had no idea what I was going to say. And I went into a flow state and I was like observing myself saying things that I really liked. And it was, it was the strangest experience. It was, it was like, I, that was an anchor for me of what a flow state felt like.

• 1:03:43Speaker 00

  Every, every time in public speaking, right, is one of those flow experiences on earth. Do you ever, if you have a good speech, do you have any idea what you said on stage? Like, I'll get to the end of the speech and I'll be like, am I done?

• 1:03:57Speaker 00

  What, just what? You know what I mean? And it's fairly, it's fairly common. Cause you know, speaking is really flowy. It's got a lot of flow triggers built in. I've done it a lot. So like, you know, I, at this point, I don't, I don't.

• 1:04:10Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. I don't stress about it. You go on stage and whatever materializes, materializes. And it's funny. You know, my favorite part is at the end of giving a PowerPoint keynote is the Q and A.

• 1:04:21Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:04:21Peter Diamandis?

  Right? Because these questions are coming at me. And I've heard like almost every question asked, but when a new question comes.

• 1:04:28Speaker 00

  Oh, it's so exciting.

• 1:04:29Peter Diamandis?

  It is exciting and I have to, I have to pull together like this data point and this data point and it come up. And it's like, that was a pretty good answer.

• 1:04:36Speaker 00

  No, I gotta tell you something. It's, cause the flow stuff, I've done this for so long. I can, if you ask me to speak for twenty minutes.

• 1:04:43Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:04:44Speaker 00

  I know what question they're gonna, it's gonna be my first question, my second one. If you ask me for forty minutes, I know the first question, the second question. Cause it's just like, everybody wants to know the next bit of information.

• 1:04:53Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:54Speaker 00

  I've done the sixty minute version of the talk, so I know, you know, in the ninety minute version, and it's really funny how that happens, but I'm always excited. That's the great stuff, when somebody, you know, asks you something that kicks your head sideways and you're like, wow, I have no idea. Like, my friend Peter asked me how I was gonna train an AI today. I don't know.

• 1:05:10Peter Diamandis?

  But you're gonna figure it out.

• 1:05:11Speaker 00

  I'm gonna figure it out, yeah.

• 1:05:12Peter Diamandis?

  It's about thirteen years ago, I had my two kids, my two boys, and I remember at that moment in time, I made a decision to double down on my health. Uh, without question, I wanted to see their kids, their grandkids, and really, you know, during this extraordinary time, where the space frontier and AI and crypto is all exploding, it was like, the most exciting time ever to be alive. And I made a decision to double down on my health. And I've done that in three key areas. The first is going every year for a fountain upload. You know, Fountain is one of the most advanced diagnostics and therapeutics companies. I go there, upload myself, digitize myself, about two hundred gigabytes of data that the

• 1:05:56Peter Diamandis?

  AI system is able to look at, to catch disease at inception. You know, look for any cardiovascular, any cancer, neurodegenerative disease, any metabolic disease. These things are all going on all the time, and you can prevent them if you can find them at inception, so, super important. So Fountain is one of my keys, I make it available to the CEOs of all my companies, my family members, cause, you know, health is a new wealth. Uh, but beyond that, uh, we are a collection of forty trillion human cells, and about another hundred trillion bacterial cells, fungi, viroid, and we, you know, don't understand how that impacts us. And so I use a company and a product called Viome.

• 1:06:40Peter Diamandis?

  And Viome, uh, has a technology called meta-transcriptomics, it was actually developed, uh, in New Mexico, uh, the same place where the nuclear bomb was developed, as a biodefense weapon, and their technology is able to help you understand. What's going on in your body to understand which bacteria are producing which proteins? And as a consequence of that, what foods are your superfoods that are best for you to eat? Or what food should you avoid? Right? What's going on in your oral microbiome? So I use their testing to understand my foods, understand my medicines, understand my supplements.

• 1:07:21Peter Diamandis?

  And Viome really helps me understand from a biological and data standpoint, what's best for me? And then finally, you know, feeling good, being intelligent, moving well is critical, but looking good. When you look yourself in the mirror, saying, you know, I feel great about life is so important. Right? And so a product I use every day, twice a day, is called One Skin. Developed by four incredible PhD women that found this 10 amino acid peptide. It's able to zap senile cells in your skin and really help you stay youthful in your look and appearance. So for me, these are three technologies I love and I use all the time.

• 1:08:04Peter Diamandis?

  I'll have my team link to those in the show notes down below. Please check them out. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that. Now back to the episode. What should entrepreneurs be focused on in this new AI-driven landscape? To ensure they develop the right skills, how do you think about that? I mean, you're teaching a group of different entrepreneurs.

• 1:08:25Speaker 00

  We're so, um, and I'm, I'm blending a bunch of things together also. I, I like, I'm using AI also to teach people how to like work with bias and mindset and framing. Um, also woven into that program, um, because to me it's all coupled together, but we can get into that. I just, I don't think it's-

• 1:08:46Peter Diamandis?

  Before we forget, we forgot about the interior. The ASC, what do you call it, singular cortex?

• 1:08:54Speaker 00

  Oh, the anterior singular cortex. Okay, yeah, let's go there.

• 1:08:56Peter Diamandis?

  No, I want to understand your favorite part of your brain.

• 1:08:58Speaker 00

  Let's go there. So the ACC is really interesting because it's the part of your brain that does pattern recognition versus lateral thinking. So it decides you're facing a problem. Is it going to be super creative and come up with this wild solution or is it going to be safe, tried and true? And the lever is anxiety. The more anxiety in your system, the more you want the safe, secure, tried and true. This is why I always tell people for hiring, you always hire two people. You hire the person they are normally, the person they are when they're afraid, and they're radically different people. And it's because of the ACC. And I always, in hiring, I try to like, there's always a trial period

• 1:09:41Speaker 00

  if you want to come work with me. And I will stress you out in that trial period in such a way because I want to see how you're going to be when you're scared and you're failing. Because we're going to be in that situation. I'm an entrepreneur. Shit's going to go wrong. You're not going to need you to be able to be at your creative best and stay calm and do all that stuff. For years, I liked to hire action sport athletes, professional action sport athletes, for this very reason, because they're used to staying very calm in making good decisions in extreme situations. Same thing with hiring out of the military. You do the same thing.

• 1:10:16Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Going back to, so a lot of folks who are listening or watching this right now are entrepreneurs. And I think there's no entrepreneur on the planet that isn't diving deep into AI right now in some way, shape or form, right? It may just be.

• 1:10:31Speaker 00

  I've seen three, I see three trends. I see the trend with like, a lot of creatives were just, they're just like, fuck this. I want nothing to do with it. They were told it was going to make them more productive or blah, blah, blah. And they tried it. It didn't work the way they thought and they've walked away. There's a second group. Um, and this is, uh, and this is, I fit into this category and it's one of the reasons I'm creating the alliance is to solve this problem for myself also is I'm like, I like to really get great with my tools. So when I taught myself how to draw for the first year and a half, I just drew in charcoal. Then I added in ink, like black ink. And it's now, right? It's now like four years in or five years.

• 1:11:15Speaker 00

  I know. So like, I do the same thing with AI. I'm really great with chat GPT and some of the large language models.

• 1:11:21Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:22Speaker 00

  I'm okay with some of the drawing programs, but like you get into the audio and the video stuff and I suck. I'm, I mean, I, I'm, I'm right. I've got a handful of tools I'm good at. And then there's people like you know, our friend, uh, Mike Koenig, who like every new AI tool that comes out, Mike has figured out, how do you use it? How do you monetize it? How do you, you know, use it to problem solve for you? How do you blend it with other AIs? That's what I think, um, it's a gap, right? Cause the more we get towards like a super intelligent AI, you're just going to have one system. Now you have a whole bunch of different tools you have to learn and it's, it's a little more complicated.

• 1:12:00Peter Diamandis?

  This is for my mind where the creativity and the, or I'm sorry, the curiosity mindset comes in.

• 1:12:05Speaker 00

  Well, that's, I, yeah, I was exactly what I was about to say. My experience with all of it, my advice. And this is what I was told to do. And I came to, I didn't come to AI through all this stuff. I came in as a scientist. We've been using machine learning and a whole bunch of stuff in flow research for 20 years now. Um, so I came in thinking, how do we use machine learning? How do we use AI to help us do better science and then moved it into other things? But I think you have to, people are so intimidated or so they've made up their mind that they forget that the simplest thing to do is, this is what somebody told me that you're like, they don't go prompt this, that would play with the fucking system.

• 1:12:46Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:46Speaker 00

  Just get on the system. It's free. Play.

• 1:12:49Peter Diamandis?

  Yes. Ask the system to teach you.

• 1:12:51Speaker 00

  To teach you how to use the system. And I just, the same approach, one of the coolest thing, one of the reasons I like teaching myself to draw, I think everybody. So one, microdosing with creativity between tasks.

• 1:13:02Peter Diamandis?

  What do you microdose with?

• 1:13:03Speaker 00

  With creativity. So I will, I'll be focused on my book, right? And then I've got a meeting and I've got a five minute block.

• 1:13:11Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:11Speaker 00

  If you're in flow, you don't want your prefrontal cortex to turn back on, right? So what do you need to avoid? Anything emotional, anything that'll get your ego fired up because the ego lives right there. So all social media is, is no good because it's probably going to get a rise out of you or do something and mess with that system. There's limited things. A lot of people like low grade physical activity and sometimes I'll do that. I'll go for a walk or things like that, but I like, like a 10 minute drawing thing or, or whatever. And what I love, and this is the approach I take with AI, is no, no, people don't run this experiment and it's fascinating. If you do something 10 minutes a day, just 10 minutes a day, but you do it for a year, you're going to get excellent. You're, you'll still, it's amazing.

• 1:13:56Speaker 00

  It's the coolest thing in the world to like, I've watched.

• 1:13:58Peter Diamandis?

  So what would you do with, what would you do for 10 minutes a day that you haven't been doing right now?

• 1:14:03Speaker 00

  Uh, the next, once I get my drawing to sort of where it wants, I've got, I've already got a piano in my office and that's the next one is I'm going to move into teaching myself how to play music. Um, and yes, I know pretty soon the AI is going to be able to do it for me and everything else, but I still believe that by training up my skills and training up my consciousness raising skills at the same time, me working with AI is going to be better than without. Like the, the combination, the combinations will be better. And I, I still think like, what you've been asking is, hey, Stephen, I'm really, really fucking smart and I cooperate with AI. At what point is the AI going to replace me, right?

• 1:14:45Speaker 00

  At what point is the AI going to be better than just Peter and the AI together, Stephen and the AI together? And I'm hoping the answer is not in our lifetime. That's what I'm hoping the answer is.

• 1:14:56Peter Diamandis?

  Ooh, I have a hard time believing that.

• 1:14:57Speaker 00

  I have a hard time believing it too.

• 1:14:59Peter Diamandis?

  I think AI challenges, we humans have all these cognitive biases. We have a limited font of knowledge. We bias the output, um, that in AI.

• 1:15:10Speaker 00

  I want to talk about this for a half a second. We do all those things, but people don't understand that. So let's back into creativity for a second.

• 1:15:18Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 1:15:19Speaker 00

  Creativity is a recombinatory process, right? The brain takes a novel information, connects it to older ideas, it bursts something startlingly new. So we already talked about the fact that you got, you're taking 11 million bits a second, but you're only like getting 120 bits. And we talked about the negativity bias. That means nine negative bits of information for every one positive bit that gets through. And most of the negative stuff is older patterns. It's other, it's fears, right? We're scared of it because we've seen it before and it's gone wrong. So it's not new information. It's not the stuff that feeds creativity, right? One of the reasons that I like a gratitude practice is so helpful is it'll tune it down to like five or six negative bits for every positive bit that gets through.

• 1:16:01Speaker 00

  So it basically doubles your novelty input. But those, if you want to mess around with those things, people don't realize this. Yes, bias is unconscious. Our frames are often unconscious, though you can make them conscious. And mindset for a lot of people, it's unconscious unless somebody like you or me has made it conscious for them, right? So, but people don't realize, these are knobs, these are tuning knobs.

• 1:16:29Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:16:29Speaker 00

  You can control the novelty, the information you're taking in by messing with bias and framing and mindset.

• 1:16:37Peter Diamandis?

  What I remind people of is, listen, our brains are large language models. They're neural nets.

• 1:16:43Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:16:43Peter Diamandis?

  And how do you train a neural net? By showing it repeated data after data after data so that the connections that are made reflect the data. And if, you know, let's talk about mindsets. You know, I talk about an abundance mindset, an exponential mindset, a moonshot mindset, you know, a longevity mindset, gratitude mindset, curiosity mindset are the ones that I care about, and a purpose driven mindset most of all. And I think about the notion that people can train those mindsets by selectively choosing who they hang out with, what they read, what they listen to, what they watch.

• 1:17:24Peter Diamandis?

  All of that is data coming into your 100 billion neurons, 100 trillion synaptic connections that is forming the neural connections. And that's massively powerful.

• 1:17:38Peter Diamandis?

  It's jumping to mindsets for a moment, and I want to just talk about something you and I have discussed a lot, which is basically the notion that we have a default negative fear and scarcity.

• 1:17:53Speaker 00

  By the way, ACC, it's part of the brain we were talking about before.

• 1:17:56Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:17:57Speaker 00

  This is exactly where like the scarcity mindset is going to do its most damage. Because literally by having the scarcity mindset, you're telling your brain, give me logical, give me safe, give me secure, give me something that's worked a million times before. That's what you're saying to your brain. You're basically keeping your brain in hunter gatherer mode. Doesn't matter that you're living in the 21st century. If that scarcity mindset, that fear-based mindset, you're keeping your brain.

• 1:18:25Peter Diamandis?

  How does the ACC relate to the amygdala?

• 1:18:29Speaker 00

  It's direct, it's connected. So it directly, it's, it's, the amygdala is the next connection down, basically.

• 1:18:35Peter Diamandis?

  And for those who don't know, the amygdala is an almond-sized piece of the brain of two of them. Yeah. That everything you see, hear and feel, all the data you collect goes to the amygdala. It's your early warning center. We talked about that in abundance. So we've got a challenge, which is people quickly fall into a doom mindset around AI.

• 1:19:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, and by the way, like the curiosity mindset is your cure here. Because like

• 1:19:06Speaker 00

  until you play with it, it's scary. Once you start playing with it, you're like, oh, wow, I see how this is working. I see how this is augmenting what I can do. I see the things that were frustrating me earlier. I don't think those frustrations have yet gone away, but you start figuring out what the system is good at, what it's not good at. How it, you know, what it can do, what it can't do. I mean, I was laughing about the conversation I had with your wife last night. We were talking about like, how do you get one of these drawing programs to render a person far in the distance?

• 1:19:37Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:39Speaker 00

  And, you know, there's a lot of like really basic stuff like that that still doesn't work. And really answer your question.

• 1:19:46Peter Diamandis?

  It's okay, but let's talk about the mindset side of the equation here because I think the point you just made that you can tune your mindset is I want everybody to get that, that message.

• 1:19:55Speaker 00

  Well, let me, yeah, let me. So I want to, I want to, I want to back up because. This is almost funny. So like a lot of my mindset knowledge came out of, I don't, I want to say it was in Faster. When we were writing Faster together, um, you had

• 1:20:10Peter Diamandis?

  The full name is Futures Faster.

• 1:20:11Speaker 00

  Futures Faster than you think. When we were writing that.

• 1:20:13Peter Diamandis?

  By the way, I'm still pissed that the publisher had us change the name from Convergence.

• 1:20:18Speaker 00

  Convergence. So it should have been Convergence.

• 1:20:20Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, it was Abundance Bold Convergence, the ABCs.

• 1:20:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm with you.

• 1:20:25Peter Diamandis?

  Just, so I don't want the publisher to drive the name of our next book.

• 1:20:29Speaker 00

  No, of course not. Of course not.

• 1:20:32Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 1:20:33Speaker 00

  By the way, whatever power you think you have in the world, publish a book and find out how little it really is.

• 1:20:41Speaker 00

  But, uh, so five years ago, six years ago, when we started having the mindset, uh, then I, this was around the time people were talking about a bunch of different mindsets. I thought it was bullshit. I was like, okay, I know there's a growth mindset and a fixed mindset and there's like, you can see neurobiological differences between the two and I kind of figured the scarcity mindset was going to be a hyperactive amygdala and a, a, you know, a unactive ACC, because that made sense, but I didn't think these other things. Turns out they're all real. Like, they're neurological phenomenon. I was wrong. You were totally right. Let me say that again. I was wrong. You were totally right.

• 1:21:19Peter Diamandis?

  We could open the episode with that.

• 1:21:21Speaker 00

  You should, because I mean, what is this, the first time in 30 years?

• 1:21:25Peter Diamandis?

  But that these mindsets exist and that you can train.

• 1:21:27Speaker 00

  And they're real, they're neurobiological phenomenon, and you can train them, and it's like,

• 1:21:35Speaker 00

  as you, like, thinking, it's information coming in, connecting it to older ideas. We were already about talking about training of the pattern recognition system. Like, you're literally, if you, the thing that I always point out to people is if you don't learn to play your brain, Your brain's gonna play you, right? Like you can't, it's one way or the other. Either you're gonna be kinda driving or it's, it's gonna do the driving and I like, left to my own devices, it's bad up here. As a general rule, it's bad up here. Like, one of the reasons I got into the flow work and all the work I do is cuz under normal conditions, not safe. And um.

• 1:22:15Peter Diamandis?

  How much have you listened to Eckhart Tolle's work at Power of Now?

• 1:22:20Speaker 00

  So, I mean, I've, I know it and all of it. You have to remember that I was living in monasteries and I've been meditating since 1986 daily.

• 1:22:30Peter Diamandis?

  Have you figured it out yet?

• 1:22:31Speaker 00

  I know, I still haven't. Like, in fact, by the way, I'll tell you a funny story about meditation. I had been meditating for twenty years, twenty-five years. Friends of mine built a neuromarketing company. They were doing movie trailers and they bought an FMRI. They bought a three-chip FMRI. It was down in San Diego and I went and they'd done a bunch of work with meditating monks and Buddhist monks and Franciscan nuns and things like that. And I made them put me in the FMRI to brain image me while I was meditating. So sure I was doing it wrong. So sure, I was like, I don't know, I've been doing this for twenty years and like, nothing. I mean, like, like, oh, I mean, I can, yes, I can focus and I can chant for eight hours at a time and I can sit in the full lotus for a couple hours at a time and whatever.

• 1:23:15Speaker 00

  But like, where are the fireworks that ever, and I was so sure I was doing it wrong. Like, I got out of the mirror. He's like, no, Stephen, you prayed, like, he showed it to me. My brain looked exactly like long-term monks cuz I'd been meditating at that point.

• 1:23:27Peter Diamandis?

  The hairdo looks like.

• 1:23:28Speaker 00

  The hairdo also.

• 1:23:29Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, part of the equation.

• 1:23:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I, like, it turns out I'm doing it right.

• 1:23:33Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, congratulations.

• 1:23:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I mean, when I came to like all that stuff with Eckhart Tolle and whatever, I was like, well, yeah, okay, I mean, okay, yeah, you're just saying the same thing. People were saying for a very long time. What I, what is really exciting to me now, though, is, and people don't even think about this, when I started this work in the nineties, there were a bunch of us. Rick Doblin was, who founded MAPS, was advocating for psychedelics. Richie Davidson, Dan Goldman, and I was at the University of Wisconsin. Richie was at the University of Wisconsin, starting in on meditation. My mentor, Dr. Andrew Newberg, was looking at like stranger spiritual and mystical experiences, speaking in tongues. And we were all interested in altered states of consciousness, different things in the brain from different angles. And.

• 1:24:16Speaker 00

  You couldn't even do this research. Like you couldn't like you couldn't get funding. We had to prove, I was just talking about this with Andy Newberg. We had to spend like nineteen ninety to nineteen ninety six, almost everybody in this field. We had to prove that religion was good for you.

• 1:24:30Peter Diamandis?

  What?

• 1:24:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was literally the first, it was the, that was the wedge issue. Everything we're looking at in the consciousness revolution, nobody remembers this. But after Skinner, you couldn't talk about consciousness at all. You couldn't even bring it up out loud. Christoph Conshugh, we're gonna be within a couple of, a couple of weeks. Was the, he was, he was the first person to stand up and talk about it out loud. And he could do it because he partnered with Crick, who invented the, you know, discovered DNA. And you couldn't, because of that, you couldn't mess with him. So that was sort of, that was the wedge issue into consciousness. But it was spirituality is good for you. We had to prove that spirituality was good for you. It was health benefits. Right, Cap? Because people who go to church, there's pro-social neurochemistry.

• 1:25:15Speaker 00

  There, maybe there's stuff from spirituality, but there's a bunch of stuff. And we had to prove that was good for you. And then scientists were like, oh, okay, religion's good for you. We can fund this now. The National Institute of Health suddenly got involved in all that stuff. This, that was our wedge issue. It was the, it was the, we, literally, the whole field spent like six years trying to prove that this stuff was good for you. Just so we could get funding to do the, kind of the basic research that we wanted to really do, which is, oh, no. Meditation is good for you and flow is good for you. And psychedelics are really useful tools for treating X, Y, and Z.

• 1:25:49Peter Diamandis?

  Do you remember that movie Altered States?

• 1:25:51Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:25:51Peter Diamandis?

  Love that.

• 1:25:52Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:25:52Peter Diamandis?

  So I.

• 1:25:53Speaker 00

  John Lilly, that was the John Lilly story.

• 1:25:55Peter Diamandis?

  Have you?

• 1:25:56Speaker 00

  Done ketamine in a, in a sensory deprivation take?

• 1:25:59Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:25:59Speaker 00

  No, I haven't.

• 1:26:00Peter Diamandis?

  But I mean, don't you want to?

• 1:26:01Speaker 00

  Yes, very much so, very much so. John, you know, he nearly drowned doing that. His wife had to bring him, revive him at one point because he, it didn't go so well. But yes, I would love to do that.

• 1:26:11Peter Diamandis?

  We'll, we'll put straps in place.

• 1:26:13Speaker 00

  I just, we need minders, but yes, like we're gonna get a float tank and we're gonna try ketamine in a float tank and redo. And when we wake up in the.

• 1:26:20Peter Diamandis?

  Would you do ketamine there?

• 1:26:22Speaker 00

  Well, that's what John Lilly was doing. That Altered States was actually based on ketamine. He was doing ketamine.

• 1:26:28Speaker 00

  And I think the reason is, is duration. Right? Because DMT, it might be a more interesting experience, but it's really gonna be fast. And ketamine, at least you get, you know, a nine, within a good IV push, you can get ninety minutes. Of weirdness.

• 1:26:45Peter Diamandis?

  All right.

• 1:26:47Speaker 00

  Yes, by the way, this is Peter and Steven on a national podcast making a plan.

• 1:26:53Peter Diamandis?

  You were the first person ever to speak to me about DMT.

• 1:26:58Peter Diamandis?

  And I was just so fascinated. You told me about basically people on a DMT journey going and experiencing alien.

• 1:27:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was the original Rick Gossman's. That was Rick's original work, which is the University of Mexico. When he was doing intervitus.

• 1:27:15Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it was it was continuous IV.

• 1:27:17Speaker 00

  Continuous IV DMT. And it wasn't, they weren't getting like.

• 1:27:21Peter Diamandis?

  Was this the God molecule?

• 1:27:22Speaker 00

  It was the God molecule.

• 1:27:23Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I read that book.

• 1:27:24Speaker 00

  No, the God molecule was a um, V map two. V map two that is the, oh, that was the God gene. No, maybe the God molecule is DMT, right? V map two is the God gene. People who have V map, the V map two gene. Turns out this was, uh, this was another thing that came out, same era, the 1990s, things we had to prove to do the work we're doing. Dean Hammer, who was at the NIH, found V map two, which is a, which is a gene that codes for norapinephrine dopamine. And I want to say serotonin, but I may, the third one may be wrong. But it was all the molecules that show up in your system when you're having spiritual experiences, mystical experiences, flow states, all that stuff. There's a very specific, uh, so he called it the God gene. He was also the guy.

• 1:28:04Peter Diamandis?

  Wait, so, so people who have this gene are more likely to have.

• 1:28:08Speaker 00

  They are more likely to have spiritual experiences because they produce more dopamine, norapinephrine, and I want to say it's serotonin. They have higher baseline neurochemical levels, um, and they have more deeper spiritual mystical altered states experiences.

• 1:28:23Peter Diamandis?

  Fascinating.

• 1:28:25Speaker 00

  But the God molecule, that was Rick, and he was doing, and they, the alien stuff was interesting, right? Because it was, they were in a hospital and they, instead of getting like the machine elves and the sort of the things that are much more standard in the DMT literature. They were, people were literally like seeing gray man and having, you know, experiments performed on them. And it was sort of a horrific, like you read about the original work of the hospital, you're like, well, it tells you everything you need to know about setting, setting, right?

• 1:28:50Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, setting it matters a lot.

• 1:28:51Speaker 00

  A lot.

• 1:28:52Peter Diamandis?

  I want to go into cognitive biases for a moment because I think it's, it's really important. And then, and then work into your most recent work.

• 1:29:03Peter Diamandis?

  We wrote about this and you introduced me to cognitive biases first.

• 1:29:08Speaker 00

  Peter, these are your cognitive biases? This is your bias against Steven?

• 1:29:12Peter Diamandis?

  No, I learned about cognitive biases when, back in 2010, we started writing a bunch.

• 1:29:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:19Peter Diamandis?

  And they're really incredibly important for people to realize. And that we, you know, the brain, as you said, is deluged by information. And our ability to process that information is through a very thin straw. And so our brains evolved these heuristics, these shortcuts.

• 1:29:38Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:29:39Peter Diamandis?

  And there's like a familiarity bias, like, you know.

• 1:29:41Speaker 00

  Well, common sense, I mean, that's the most, right, common sense is when it works, right? That's, that's not a cognitive bias, but that's a heuristic for how do you process a fuckload of information really, really quickly and make an intelligent decision? If it works, it's called common sense. When your decision doesn't work, it was your confirmation bias or your recency bias. There's, if you go to Wikipedia at this point, or the DSM, there's like 500 of them, 600.

• 1:30:04Peter Diamandis?

  Wikipedia is crazy, it's crazy.

• 1:30:05Speaker 00

  It's an insane list.

• 1:30:06Peter Diamandis?

  Really weird names. But the ones that are, people should realize is there is a recency bias. Like, you hear our podcast conversation now, we say something that perhaps contradicts something you heard a month ago or a year ago, you're likely to believe what we are telling you now. Or there's a familiarity bias, which is when someone looks like you, dresses like you, speaks like you, you're tending to give higher value to that person. And then there's this negativity bias, which is the crisis news network, you know, that you value negative information far more than positive information. And, and these are, they're dangerous in one regard, because they can trick you into making really stupid decisions.

• 1:30:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, racism, massage, all these things are essentially the same version. These are biases, right? And it's the same sort of information processing issue.

• 1:31:05Speaker 00

  The thing, I want to back up one step to the idea that we talked about before, because it's just so important to me, which is you are not, you don't have to be the victim of your brain. These are all, like, yes, you have all these biases, but you can train them down significantly. And, um, and by the way, one of the, we, both of us do this all the time. One of the best uses of AI at this point is help me see past my biases.

• 1:31:34Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:31:34Speaker 00

  What am I not looking at?

• 1:31:35Peter Diamandis?

  I can't wait for, for AI to, you know, again, if you think about Jarvis, uh, as the example where it's on your body, in your body, it's around you all the time. It is your, your constant coach, right? And you can eventually turn on and say, you know, Jarvis, uh, turn on cognitive bias alert. And it will have heard everything you've ever seen. You're going to give, I think personally, you're going to give your AI permission to read all your emails, listen to your conversations.

• 1:32:05Speaker 00

  Well, to me, that's one of the biggest, one of the biggest problems with the AI systems right now is their memories aren't robust enough.

• 1:32:12Peter Diamandis?

  But we've gotten to, we've gotten to, uh, long context memories. We're there now.

• 1:32:15Speaker 00

  We're there now.

• 1:32:16Peter Diamandis?

  Okay. And so you'll be able, you, you will hear a piece of data, um, and start making a decision and your AI will be able to say to you, listen, your cognitive biases are driving in this direction, but in reality, you heard this and this and this. Let's talk about it.

• 1:32:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. Again, I like it's, that's, um, it's why I'm training people, like we're trying, I mean, I'm training creativity with AI. I just want to skill creatives up so they're no longer scared and these are the, these are the tools and some of the whiz bang stuff that where you can do, like, it's really easy to get under the hood on chat GPT at the front end and like tune filter. Nobody does that, but it's really, it's a really simple dashboard and there's a lot of power there, especially for, for these kinds of things. But I, I think that's a really, um, it's huge. It's also, um, frames, which are what, you know, they're very, frames are very local. Um, and, uh, you know, the, the collective framing isn't, is, mindsets are more durational and frames are essentially

• 1:33:19Speaker 00

  like, when you're building up your abundance mindset, right? How do you do that? Is by reframing.

• 1:33:26Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:33:26Speaker 00

  Moment by moment basis. Constantly for the abundant frame and eventually when it becomes a little more unconscious, we call it a mindset, right? And when it becomes totally deep, it becomes a bias for, you know, we don't have a, we don't have a word for positive biases, but that's, it's really like, it starts as a frame that's fully conscious and goes all the way to.

• 1:33:46Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, a quick example is when you're looking for a parking spot and you have to block, you have to, you have to park like three blocks away. You can be pissed about that or you can flip it and say, oh, I get some free exercise. I get part of my 10,000 steps. Um, I mean, that's, that judo move is, is really.

• 1:34:05Speaker 00

  So here's something, here's this crazy experiment, uh, they did it at Harvard and they wanted to know what was more effective against anxiety, mindfulness, breath work or reframing. And, uh, they did a study where they found literally like

• 1:34:22Speaker 00

  because anxiety and curiosity and excitement are the same neurochemical, they're all nor epinephrine, right? A little bit is curiosity, a little bit more is excitement, too much is anxiety, right? None is boredom, right? I'm not curious, I'm not interested, right? That's literally, it's a spectrum and

• 1:34:43Speaker 00

  a lot of people don't realize that that anxiety, when you feel anxiety, it's much easier to turn anxiety into excitement than it is to get rid of it.

• 1:34:53Peter Diamandis?

  Really?

• 1:34:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this was the experiment they did at Harvard. When you're feeling anxious, this was the experiment, they had people say, I'm excited, I am excited, I am excited.

• 1:35:02Peter Diamandis?

  Literally.

• 1:35:02Speaker 00

  Three times out loud and it was more effective than seven minutes of breath work and meditation and reducing stress levels. Here's something crazy. This is, this is the wild one. You want to talk about like misogyny and culture and like weird stuff. So this, they did this experiment about 15 years ago and they found that women in the study group who were over 40.

• 1:35:23Speaker 00

  Had no idea what excitement felt like because women were not supposed to get too excited and feel too much emotions. So they had repressed excitement so much. They didn't actually realize that when they did this study, so there was this whole training for women now that like has to separate anxiety from excitement and be like, these are the same. Like they feel the same, but they're actually different. It's okay to be excited. Yeah, it's wild. So the point there is culture can come in so heavily, you know what I mean? And tilt your tilt your brain that you literally can't even recognize a core emotion.

• 1:35:59Peter Diamandis?

  That's crazy.

• 1:36:00Speaker 00

  It's crazy.

• 1:36:01Peter Diamandis?

  Buddy, uh, you're, let's turn to flow and your work. Uh, the flow research collective is really just blown up. You've, you've trained tens of thousands of people, uh, and you've been at some of the biggest companies like Google. You're just at Google. Um, can you, can you speak to that a little bit?

• 1:36:18Speaker 00

  Um, I think I can't speak to Google because I think I signed it on the, on the egg.

• 1:36:23Peter Diamandis?

  So what do you, what do you do when you're training these?

• 1:36:26Speaker 00

  Uh, it's, it's always, so you can get really whiz bang about a lot of stuff and there's, there's a million different things here, but it's, it varies. As far as flow training is concerned, I always say there's like five or six, what I call the peak performance basics. These are like, this is all the stuff we know. You gotta sleep seven, eight hours a night. Flow is a high energy state, for example. So you, you need that. You have to.

• 1:36:47Peter Diamandis?

  And do you, by the way?

• 1:36:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, I always sleep seven.

• 1:36:49Peter Diamandis?

  What, what time, what time do you go to sleep? What time do you wake up?

• 1:36:52Speaker 00

  I go to sleep somewhere between eight and nine and I wake up somewhere between three and four.

• 1:36:58Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 1:36:58Speaker 00

  Every day.

• 1:36:59Peter Diamandis?

  Let me do the math. That's barely seven hours.

• 1:37:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's about seven and a, seven and a half is what I usually come in at. I'm probably seven.

• 1:37:05Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, did you always go to sleep at that time as you?

• 1:37:09Speaker 00

  No, but I always woke up early. So.

• 1:37:13Peter Diamandis?

  By the way, I, I think that's an important point. I wrote about that in longevity guidebook. It's like the only way to maintain a sleep schedule is when you go to sleep. Cause your body is likely to wake up at the same time. But when I was in, when I was in college, graduate school, medical school, I would do my best work at 1:00 AM, 2:00 AM and.

• 1:37:32Speaker 00

  And it's switched.

• 1:37:33Peter Diamandis?

  And it's switched. Yeah, it flipped for me.

• 1:37:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, it mine, I was.

• 1:37:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was I was probably the same thing, though I was also good in the morning. I was also good. I'm good late at night, too. Right? There's there's gaps in between. One of the things I always tell people, and this is really important, and it's really hard in the modern work environment. There are extreme larks. You and I are extreme larks. We get up early. That's when our brain is most awake and most alert. Most people are on the normal work schedule. Like, most people's brains start to wake up around eight o'clock, and their peak concentrations is between nine and 10, 10:30. And then there are night owls. I'm married to a night owl. So like, you know, it's really fun. Like, when Joy was What time does Joy go to sleep? Well, she's working on a book. She'll start writing at like four o'clock in the afternoon

• 1:38:23Speaker 00

  and go to four in the morning, and she'll go to sleep when I'm waking up. Yeah, which is

• 1:38:31Speaker 00

  complicated. Oh, even that. Complicated. The So we're talking about the seven things. So he's You know, you can. Well, I was gonna say is you can't fight your circadian rhythms. Like, you want to try to work in accordance with your circadian rhythms, and the people who get screwed in the modern world that way are the night owls, right? Like, the world isn't built for them at all. So you have you have to, basically, you have to tune your nervous system every day, right? And I always tell people, if you have five minutes, do a gratitude list, right? If you have six minutes, read a novel. If you have seven minutes, do breath, seven to 11, do breath

• 1:39:11Speaker 00

  work. 11 to 15 or so, 20, go for a walk in nature. If you've got 20, get some exercise, 20 minutes or 40 minutes, get some exercise, or take a long sauna. Or like, there's literally like, we have a full list of like, these are the ways to reboot your nervous system and reboot your brain. And everybody wants to say, oh, I'm too busy. And I will tell people that, like, depending on your anxiety level. So if you worked at the Flow Research Collective during COVID, right? We were a high-performance organization, training people on high performance, and I wanted my team at their best. But it was COVID, and everybody was especially in the beginning, everybody was scared. And I said, look, if you're gonna keep your job at the Flow Research Collective, you have to do three of these a day.

• 1:39:56Speaker 00

  Minimum three things to tune up your nervous system a day because everyone was so stressed.

• 1:40:01Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:01Speaker 00

  Um, so I was making sure of it, but like you need, you have to do that every day.

• 1:40:06Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, Arianna Huffington will be at Abundance 360 uh this March along with you. Um, and uh she'll be speaking about the work she's doing and helping employees uh with these small micro nudges through the day.

• 1:40:22Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:40:23Peter Diamandis?

  Including gratitude.

• 1:40:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:40:24Peter Diamandis?

  So.

• 1:40:25Speaker 00

  But anyway, so there's a bunch of that stuff. And then the other things you would train, just to answer your question. There's 28 known flow triggers, preconditions that lead to more flow. There are 12 on the individual side. And 16 or so on the group flow side. There, there's a lot of overlap between the triggers, but what do I train people in? These are the 28 flow triggers. And then the net only other thing that really matters is flow is not a binary. It's not, I'm in the zone or I'm out of the zone. It's actually a four stage cycle. So you don't get to live in a permanent flow state because it doesn't work that way in the brain. It's a cycle. And um, some of the stages are very unflowy, but you have to move through the complete cycle. So you gotta teach people this cycle because that's the map of the territory. Oh, this is where I am. This is where I have to go next. This is where I have to go next.

• 1:41:09Peter Diamandis?

  Do you actually think about that?

• 1:41:11Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:41:11Peter Diamandis?

  You think about this is where I am and this is where.

• 1:41:13Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, all the time. Well, I, I also, so flow is followed or X. Let me do it quickly. On the front end of a flow state is a struggle phase. Flow is unconscious, right? It's what happens when you've loaded your brain up with a bunch of information and can put it together in a new way and like put it all together. So I always uh

• 1:41:34Speaker 00

  you have to still onboard that stuff consciously.

• 1:41:37Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:37Speaker 00

  Right? And that's the struggle phase.

• 1:41:39Peter Diamandis?

  It's like throwing shit on a piece of paper.

• 1:41:40Speaker 00

  Right. Struggle is always followed by a release phase. You have to take your mind off the problem because you've been loading the conscious brain. It's, you've overloaded it and it turns out in struggle, and this is work that came out of the uh University of Michigan.

• 1:41:55Speaker 00

  Carlene Seifert's lab, really great work. She found that the more frustrated you get, like when you're overloading your brain, the more frustrated you get, the closer you are to actual, uh, real solution and flow. So frustration is actually really good in that situation. You know, it feels really bad, but it needs to be followed by a release activity. A release activity is a low-grade physical activity works best to take your mind off the problem. And when I say low-grade, I don't mean go get a hard workout, a walk in nature, drawing, right? Um, works really, really well. So the way my schedule is, I wake up at four, I start writing and I write seven thirty, eight. Um, if you and I talk, we usually-

• 1:42:34Peter Diamandis?

  Seven thirty-eight?

• 1:42:35Speaker 00

  In the morning.

• 1:42:35Peter Diamandis?

  Seven-

• 1:42:36Speaker 00

  Is I'll write from four AM to seven thirty, eight o'clock. And the minute I'm done writing, I take my dog for a hike. Why? Because I've, if I'm in struggle, I want to follow by release. If I was in flow while I was writing on the back end of a flow state, flow's a high-energy state, you, this, it's got a built-in recovery period. So you have to recover on the back end. So if I was in flow while I was writing, great, a walk in nature is a phenomenal recovery activity. It's also phenomenal recently, activity. So a lot of, I always say that, like, ultimately in the end with flow stuff, especially with like top performers, first of all, flow is how everybody performs at their best. It's like, this is how humans are hardwired. This is what optimal performance looks like. So most people, if you're in the top twenty percent of your field, top thirty percent of your, you've been good,

• 1:43:21Speaker 00

  you're good at this anyways. I'm not going to come in and totally reboot your life. What I, with, my goal is, if I do my job right, I'm going to find two or three things that you should start doing, two or three things you should stop doing, and then two or three things that I want to rearrange your schedule. So you'll do, you're doing the right thing, but probably at the wrong time for your neurobiology. This is what's so great about what we've learned over the past twenty years is, this is what's an art of impossible is, we have a complete map of cognitive peak performance in the brain now. We know what it is, we know the order of the sequence, we like, the data is getting really, really robust for training these things.

• 1:43:58Peter Diamandis?

  I want to just, uh, mention something that you taught me years ago, which I want to pass along to everybody listening, which is the, the greatest writers in the world-

• 1:44:10Peter Diamandis?

  Complete a single finished page per day.

• 1:44:14Speaker 00

  About a page a day.

• 1:44:14Peter Diamandis?

  I've I've thought about that a thousand times.

• 1:44:17Speaker 00

  Well, it was to me, it was the unlocking. So I.

• 1:44:19Peter Diamandis?

  Could you just just for those who are prospective writers.

• 1:44:22Speaker 00

  Let me tell you the story because the story is amazing. So I was in grad school at Hopkins and I got to study under Stephen Dixon. He's not a name a lot of people don't know, but he um he very distinguished writer, won the national uh book award. Has done a lot of stuff, but at the time, I don't know if it's still true, but at the time, he was the most published fiction author in history. And Chekhov had the record before him, had like two hundred and fifty things. Stephen had published six hundred and fifty short stories, novels, books, like it was the massive productivity.

• 1:44:53Peter Diamandis?

  Wow.

• 1:44:54Speaker 00

  On top of that, he taught at Hopkins, so he wasn't right, wasn't writing full time. He was teaching and he had a very, very, very sick wife. She was in a wheelchair. She needed a tremendous amount of care.

• 1:45:05Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:05Speaker 00

  And I remember thinking like, how the hell could this guy? Like, he's got a full time job and he's got a really sick wife and he's not rich, so he's not, doesn't have full time care. He's doing the work. The hell is he so productive? And I asked him, he said, it's really simple. I write a page a day and I edit what I wrote the day before. And if you do that three hundred and sixty five days a year, you've written a book. And I was like, oh, okay, you know, and so from that point on, um, I write. I mean, I write five hundred when I'm starting a book, it's five hundred words a day, which is about a little over a page. Um, I'll bump it up to like seven or eight hundred words in the middle because it's it's easier and you know more what you're doing.

• 1:45:46Speaker 00

  At the end of the book, it's about a thousand words a day, but like I published sixteen books.

• 1:45:52Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:53Speaker 00

  Probably, I mean, they it, this was a bunch of years ago, but they tried to add up. It's gonna be like five million published words um is was was um and there's an equal amount of unpublished words, right? So like um and it's it's that formula, right?

• 1:46:09Peter Diamandis?

  And I love that. And I think about that. So when I wake up in the morning. Where my mind is the clearest and I've got the most energy, you know, the first thing I do when I wake up, um, and I typically wake up before my alarm is I do a gratitude practice.

• 1:46:24Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:46:25Peter Diamandis?

  It's like, you know, thank you for the amazing day ahead, what I can do in this world. Uh, and then I get, then I focus on what am I excited about today? Like what's, like, what's the big thing? And this morning it was like, spending this time with you and having an awesome conversation and, and sharing your wisdom with the world. And, uh, it's that those golden hours in the early, earliest and it's, you know,

• 1:46:49Speaker 00

  Well, the other, there's another thing. Let me ask you this question. Do you find when we're working on a book? And you're waking up and you're, and you're writing and you're focused on that, but are you happier throughout the day? Then if you're not?

• 1:47:01Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, probably because I feel like I've made a significant, uh, I'm, I'm a accomplishment junkie. Right? And so when I feel like I've like won the day in the first two hours.

• 1:47:16Speaker 00

  One, but the other thing I think is also that's equally important that people don't realize. I like to go from bed to desk in under five minutes. And the reason is when you wake up, so flow, if we're talking about networks, brainwaves, flow takes place on the border between alpha and theta. Alpha is daydreaming mode, theta is REM sleep or focus. Um, and, uh, so the alpha theta borderline, by the way, that aha moment. So that's always takes place inside a gamma wave. Gamma is coupled to theta. So you, if the brain can't get to theta, you can't have an aha insight. So one of the reasons you have more aha insights and flow

• 1:47:58Speaker 00

  is because it purchased you on the edge in that, in that theta state, you're on the edge of aha insight. You're ready to have a breakthrough, but, um,

• 1:48:11Speaker 00

  The Alpha Theta borderline, you wake up in Alpha. Your brain wakes up in Alpha. So as soon as it gets awake, alert, excited, that's high beta. It's hard to move back down to Theta. It's a much slower wave. But if you go like bed to desk and immediately drop into flow, focus your attention and start working on something, get sucked in. It's easier to drop into flow that way. And I find it's not just that I'm, I, I used to think it was just the goal stuff. Like I'm very goal oriented and if I win my day, that's huge. But it's also if I tame my brain right out the gate and teach it to focus and don't let it run wild.

• 1:48:50Peter Diamandis?

  With that brain.

• 1:48:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I mean, to me, it's like, to me, it's the, it's the two, it's the two together. And if I can be a little creative in the writing, like that's the recipe for a perfect day.

• 1:49:00Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing, amazing. Yeah, you have done an amazing job. I'll call it your moonshot of putting flow on the, the world's conversation.

• 1:49:10Speaker 00

  I will say, we have, we are now writing the textbook, myself, my chief science officer and other neuroscientists, for the field of applied performance neuroscience, which is essentially the field that, you know, me and a couple, a bunch of other people.

• 1:49:24Peter Diamandis?

  There was no conversations around this.

• 1:49:26Speaker 00

  None of this, it didn't exist. So to me, like the moonshot, I always said my goal was to put flow science on a hard, or flow research on a hard science footing. Like I wanted to bring it into the realm of neurobiology and make it really, really real. Um, I didn't actually realize I was going to end up inventing a field, right? Like that was, that was a weird one, but it, but it was, it wasn't just me. It was a bunch of us who were thinking about altered states of consciousness as tools for performance. And, you know, it, uh, I want to go back to the psycho fizz paper because here's a weird one for mindset, but this is also a field.

• 1:50:02Peter Diamandis?

  So the psycho fizz paper released today?

• 1:50:05Speaker 00

  No, this is a year, a year ago, but I, this is just a great example of applied performance neuroscience and the weird stuff we're discovering. So we were looking, we weren't, this wasn't a flow, flow study, it was a mindset study. And we wanted to know people who love exercise.

• 1:50:23Speaker 00

  What does it look like in their brain versus people who hate exercise and right? And we discovered that people who love exercise literally process exercise and all the information in a totally different part of the brain than people who don't like exercise.

• 1:50:38Peter Diamandis?

  And I shifted myself.

• 1:50:40Speaker 00

  Boy, that's but that was the point I was trying to make is it turns out it works like a mindset and you can shift it. And you could so we looked at that.

• 1:50:48Peter Diamandis?

  I I linked exercise to longevity.

• 1:50:51Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. And that's what shifted for you. I mean, you were always, but I mean, I I remember back. Well, at least in like two thousand seven, two thousand, like I remember we're coming to LA and going for runs with you on the beach.

• 1:51:03Peter Diamandis?

  But but this is different.

• 1:51:04Speaker 00

  Now you're told now you love it and you're into it.

• 1:51:07Peter Diamandis?

  You know, five days a week in the gym with weights and uh it's part of who I know you established this is who I am.

• 1:51:15Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:51:16Peter Diamandis?

  And I'm this because I'm gonna I'm gonna win that that arm wrestle. We're gonna continue that.

• 1:51:21Speaker 00

  Well, for the rest of our lives.

• 1:51:22Peter Diamandis?

  So.

• 1:51:24Peter Diamandis?

  But this is who I am and uh my longevity mindset fuels that desire for exercise.

• 1:51:31Speaker 00

  You know, I will say that longevity mindset. You've done such a spectacular job with it. I just remember I was, I think it was at a Joe Polish event. I think I was at at his hundred K. Uh last hundred K event and Dan Sullivan was there and he was talking about living, I think his number is one fifty four.

• 1:51:47Peter Diamandis?

  One fifty, one fifty four, yes.

• 1:51:49Speaker 00

  One fifty four, right? Is that right? Is that right?

• 1:51:51Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:51Speaker 00

  And I I was like, this is Peter. This is Peter rotting Dan's brain. No, uh but uh it's really um. Uh the longevity mindset, um I'm interested to see if there's actual neurobiology underneath it like I'd be be curious to like, is it uh, does it work as a frame or is it actually producing like?

• 1:52:12Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:12Speaker 00

  Information processing.

• 1:52:14Peter Diamandis?

  But let's talk about your your next project.

• 1:52:17Speaker 00

  The alliance?

• 1:52:17Peter Diamandis?

  The alliance. Yeah, I want to hear hear about it. So so what is it? What is it offering? Why are you excited about it?

• 1:52:25Speaker 00

  So high level. Let me just start at the beginning because you asked me this question earlier and I didn't answer it. We train. You know, kazillions of people at this point.

• 1:52:33Peter Diamandis?

  And at the top tech companies around the world.

• 1:52:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, like just Meta, Accenture, Audi, Google, Bain Capital, on, you know, on and on.

• 1:52:45Speaker 00

  And tens of thousands of people at those events, yeah. Yeah, um, and one of the things, but predominantly knowledge workers, right? Like if you're at any of those companies, high performing knowledge workers. And then I have another class that this is sort of like just a passion class where I've done flow for writers. Once a year for 10 years, I train up writers how to use flow to write better and. I took the private version. You took the private version, right? And what I started to notice, and it was more accidental, is if we got super creatives in Zero to Dangerous, didn't quite work as well. It worked, but it wasn't like the explosions we would get for normal people.

• 1:53:26Speaker 00

  And if I had knowledge workers in flow of writers, it didn't work as well. And it was like, it started me thinking about, this is the stuff we were talking about, how the creative brain is different. How you train peak performance in creatives versus non creatives is actually almost exactly backwards. So that was the first insight is whoa, how you train creatives is is different. The second insight was, um, I think of myself, you know, first and foremost as a creative and most of, most of the people I know in the world, um, you could be a creative entrepreneur, you could be creative scientist, creative technologist, creative innovator, creative artist, whatever, but they're all in this category.

• 1:54:07Speaker 00

  And I started to realize that like both myself and every friend I had, almost every conversation, it was the same conversations. We were all facing overlapping, like five overlapping challenges. And I was incredibly well suited to help people with some of them. So one, there was just, one of the biggest differences between professional, between creatives and other people and knowledge workers is, and this is really important, in for knowledge workers, flow is essentially a luxury. It's great to have. You will be way more productive. You will have way more meaning. Your life will be more fulfilling, happier, less illness, etc., etc. But you're not going to get fired if you can't get into flow. You won't lose your job.

• 1:54:49Speaker 00

  For people who are top creatives, if you're a creative entrepreneur and you're running, running a company, if you're an artist, writing a book, or any of that stuff, if you can't get into flow, you can't do your job at all, period. Like it's not so full stop. And I, and I was, that was interesting to me. So like being able to train the alliance, let me back up and tell you what it is. It's an eight month. It's a combination of like a 21st century think tank and a mastermind for the super creative core. So this is an eight month program that you put people through? Put people through. All digitally on Zoom? No, this is the, so this is the exact opposite. It's not, I'm not even doing it inside the flow research collective because it's literally

• 1:55:33Speaker 00

  the exact opposite of everything the flow research collective was created to do. It's, which was a high ticket, digital trainings, blah, blah, blah, for predominantly knowledge workers. This is, um, and live events. So people have been wanting to get more time hanging out with me for years. I've heard this and I'm an introvert and like, I have to do it with super creatives because I mean, this is, this is rare for us, unfortunately. We're on the phone every morning. It's hard to get me into the world. So it is. Um, so no, there's, there's three live events. You kick off with a two day live. There's a two day live training in the middle and there's, there's a close. And then there's a six, six week training cycles.

• 1:56:14Speaker 00

  And I kick each one off with like a two hour content window and then That's over Zoom? That's over Zoom. Now, now what's the size of the group? A hundred people. It's specific for a reason. One.

• 1:56:28Speaker 00

  So there's a certain amount of cross-training and cross-pollination of ideas. That's amazing. The second reason, I mean, I always say, you know, you want that cross-pollination with creatives. I always, the example I always give to people is actually you, which is, you know, we've gone back so far that like, my friend Peter unlocked, helped unlock the space frontier, right? Like it was a crazy fricking idea. And then it was a breakthrough, right? The same thing we're always talking about the day before. So things are truly a breakthrough to create. It's a crazy idea and you had a legit, true crazy idea. It was like a lot of the action sport athletes I knew back in the nineties also who were doing impossible things. I had friends, my friends were actually people who were pulling off the impossible. And the truth of the matter is like,

• 1:57:14Speaker 00

  By the time the X Prize was won, because the right once it was won, eight years later and the writing was on the wall that this was the like private space was real. This was gonna happen. Jeff had already founded Blue Origin was right. Blue Origin was there. Richard was and you were like, fuck, this is real.

• 1:57:30Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:30Speaker 00

  And so my level of what I think is possible in the world is absurd. Because my friend Peter helped unlock the space frontier and my other friends, the athletes, literally redefined what was possible for human, human species. So I came into the world with this really warped like expectation for what I could do in the world because my friends were the same way. And that to me is, it's the, it's, that's a cross pollination. That's not really ideas. It's a cross pollination of like aspirations and you can't really get that. But a hundred people, um, I want, I've been involved. I helped birth five or six major subcultures. I was in Seattle at the birth of the Grunge Movement. I was in San Francisco at the birth of the Internet.

• 1:58:15Speaker 00

  I was in Cleveland and Chicago and Illinois at the birth of like industrial music when that whole movement started up. A bunch of these in Santa Fe at the beginning of the new age. Inside these huge culture shifting communities, but at the center, it's like a hundred people. Across the world, every time I've been in, in one of these things, it's about a hundred people.

• 1:58:34Peter Diamandis?

  It's a really important point. It's, it's not.

• 1:58:36Speaker 00

  It's not giant. It's not.

• 1:58:38Peter Diamandis?

  It's always a core.

• 1:58:39Speaker 00

  Even if you're looking at something like the internet, which sounds absurd.

• 1:58:42Peter Diamandis?

  Crypto cards or Bitcoin, right? All of these things started with a very small group of radical thinkers who gravitated together and yeah.

• 1:58:51Speaker 00

  Yeah. No, and I mean, you know.

• 1:58:52Peter Diamandis?

  I call them the benign conspiracies.

• 1:58:54Speaker 00

  It is exactly how I think about it. It's exactly, that's exactly right. But so I started to realize there was. I've been looking at all these subcultures that I was involved in the birth of. I was like, you know, it's always about a hundred people. So, right, that, that was, that was one thing. I didn't want to go too big because I wanted it to be intimate, but I didn't want it to go too small. Because I wanted so, I want, I wanted that vibrancy and that cross pollination of ideas and I also wanted. You know this, like, people think about like the lone creative inventor. I don't, it doesn't work that way. Creativity is a cooperative sport. Yeah. Even if you're a totally like the, I write books, there's nothing more, I'm gonna do this alone, but I don't do it alone. I've got an editor I work with twice a week. I've got a bunch of people

• 1:59:37Speaker 00

  at the publishing house I'm gonna end up working with. Then there's gonna be the marketing team and the PR team and the social media. These are collective collaborative efforts and you need a bunch of people involved. All creative projects are like that. So what I wanted to do is I wanted to really lift up the super creative core, solve a bunch of these challenges, train them up and flow. I'll talk about some of the other human stuff, but the hundred people was for the cross pollination of ideas and to get enough people in sort of every category that there was always gonna be one or two bodies in every category. Give me some, give me some category examples. Um, well, I saw, uh, let's just talk about faculty, for example. Um, my faculty at this

• 2:00:17Speaker 00

  point stretches from like Jody Levy, who's the head of Summit. So he's a great experience designer. Ivy Ross, who's the head of design at Google. She's a hard goods designer and a tech designer, all the way to like Scott Barry Kaufman, who's the world's leading expert on creativity and transpersonal psychology. So like, there you've got like, you know, three, three different disciplines. Um, but I mean, I like, you know, we've got musicians, AI people, filmmakers, writers, tons of different entrepreneurs and tech entrepreneurs and seventeen, twenty different disciplines and things like that. But I also, the thing I really wanna talk about, because this is the one that creatives get immediately, is I started to realize that

• 2:01:01Speaker 00

  everybody I knew, creativity is so lonely. It's fucking lonely. It's a, you're a weirdo to begin with. So you came up weird. You took whatever made you weird and you turned it into your profession. You just honed it. But I always say that like, you know, another word for like, world's leading expert is nobody around to talk to about the stuff you care about the most. Right? I mean, back, think of- About like early days of the spa- of of of space and like when you and I were first meeting to talk about the X-Files. Fuck, you take that conversation almost any place, they're just laughing at you. You can't have a conversation.

• 2:01:39Peter Diamandis?

  This is only NASA can do it, yes.

• 2:01:41Speaker 00

  So I started to realize, and the other thing about creatives, every creative I know, it's not just that the jobs are isolating, because they are, you spend a lot of time alone. But you're very isolated in your head, right? You could be in a room filled with people, but if you're a super creative core, you could be totally lost in your thoughts and walled off from everybody. And everybody I knew, literally everybody I knew, this level of like deep loneliness was sort of under, it was in everything and it's loneliness impacts creativity, it impacts intelligence, it it it's not great.

• 2:02:16Peter Diamandis?

  So it sounds like the Alliance is an incubator.

• 2:02:18Speaker 00

  It's, I mean, it could, it's among, I'm, we haven't been around long.

• 2:02:22Peter Diamandis?

  Or a studio of some type.

• 2:02:24Speaker 00

  It it's, I mean, I think it's going to be a combination of a of a of a writer's studio and artist's studio and incubator, all, I think all those things, it's um, it's training creatives up in flow and training them up in the neurobiology of creativity, a lot of the stuff we're talking about, like, these are tools, you can use them. I'm training them up in AI for all the reasons we've been talking about. I want to solve the loneliness problem. I also want to give people a space to come finish a masterpiece. So this is the thing that hangs up so many creatives is they're like, it could be, this is the dream company I want to start. This is the book I want to finish, this is the movie I want to make, whatever, everybody's got that that thing and you and I were both so goal oriented, you know, when you have a an unfinished masterpiece hanging over you.

• 2:03:06Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:06Speaker 00

  It's like an albatross.

• 2:03:08Peter Diamandis?

  It is, it's also your guilty pleasure and you're trying to steal time to do it. Uh, and having, having a community that keeps you accountable.

• 2:03:17Speaker 00

  Right.

• 2:03:18Peter Diamandis?

  Is so critically important.

• 2:03:20Speaker 00

  Not only keeps you accountable, because I like, it's, I think creatives get derailed at a couple of places. It's it's both that keeps them accountable, this is the hundred people. Because there's also, you know, I always tell this to writers, and you know this, like, writing the book, you're only halfway through the process. Of actually like putting that book into the world and like you've just spent like five years and you think you've just written like run the like

• 2:03:45Peter Diamandis?

  The marathon.

• 2:03:45Speaker 00

  The marathon. And then you get to this point, you're like, oh shit, it's a triathlon. I've got two more of these because then you've got the editing. Which is going to be you finish the book. Now you've got a year long editing.

• 2:03:56Peter Diamandis?

  It's the polishing.

• 2:03:56Speaker 00

  Polishing. And then you've got the launch.

• 2:03:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:59Speaker 00

  And what happens with creatives is.

• 2:04:01Peter Diamandis?

  And by the way, if you're interested in writing a book, one of the things to realize is your publisher does almost nothing for you.

• 2:04:08Speaker 00

  Nothing, nothing. They yeah, they they don't like I the reason I have a personal editor.

• 2:04:12Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:12Speaker 00

  Is because feedback, immediate feedback is a flow trigger.

• 2:04:15Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:15Speaker 00

  And so I always tell companies, like if you're running your company with like quarterly reviews or annual reviews. You're a moron because like you're driving your employees out of flow. I realized with writing. My publisher, when I had like the best editors I've ever had at publishing houses and they don't often exist that much anymore. I've got a couple of good ones now, but uh. If they read one of my books three times along the way, right? Like that's huge. If I can get three readings of a book, that's huge. I need feedback almost daily, like definitely a couple of times a week. I used to like chat GPT makes it a little bit easier because while I don't like it to write my copy, it's really says nice things about me.

• 2:05:00Speaker 00

  Hey, how's this version? Oh, this version is excellent. It's strong for this reason. I do that all the time. I do that all the time. I use I use it to give me.

• 2:05:08Peter Diamandis?

  Why do you like it so much?

• 2:05:09Speaker 00

  Feedback. Yeah.

• 2:05:10Peter Diamandis?

  It's ego boost.

• 2:05:10Speaker 00

  It's ego boost. Um, so no, what I was was gonna say is I wanted to, uh. First of all, you know, train up their brains and everything else. So the actual creative portion of it was solid, but. I also noticed that how many people have you seen who have like they finished a book? But they can't get through the editing or they've got through the editing, but they have no clue. How do you publish it? How do you promote it? How do you build a marketing campaign? So I was like, if I can get enough bodies in there, there are a couple of people in every seat around that process, you're not going to get as derailed.

• 2:05:44Peter Diamandis?

  So when's the first alliance?

• 2:05:45Speaker 00

  We're gonna launch in June. This is the uh. I think you're gonna break the new, I think you're gonna break the news to the world because we haven't even told uh But you've started bringing people in. We have started bringing people in, we're building it, it's, it's, I, I'm so excited. I know, I, when you told me about it first, I'm like, wow. Oh, yeah, I mean, you know, it was funny, I was telling you, a friend of mine yesterday, who's uh

• 2:06:11Speaker 00

  he's one of those guys with a B in front of his name, right, for, for billions. Oh, okay. One of those guys, I was talking to him yesterday about it and B in front of his bank account. Yeah, B in front of his bank account, and he was like, he's like, are you kidding? You're going, because as soon as I, what happens usually when I talk about to creatives, it's like, it's the funniest thing in the world, I say, oh, you know, I'm gonna train you up in flow, it's, you know, and first of all, then they light up, and then I usually just talk about loneliness, and everybody's done, like, they're like, I'm in, I signed me up. He was like, are you freaking kidding? He's like, I probably lose five million dollars a year to loneliness. Oh. To the days that I lose, because I'm not at my best, because there's, like, I'm dealing

• 2:06:52Speaker 00

  with just emotional stuff, he's like, if I averaged out, you know, he, he obviously makes a lot of money, so he's dealing in bigger sums than maybe most other people, but I was like, he's like, Jesus Christ, like, forget about this thing paying for itself, and he's like, that's only one of your features, I was like, yeah, I like, I sort of think about it that myself, let me put it in a different context, every, this is definitely true of artists, I don't know if it's as true about entrepreneurs, but I think it is, because freaking, every book I write about entrepreneurship talks about the emotional upheaval of entrepreneurship, and it's funny, I just read Secrets of Sand Hill Road, which is old, right, like, we, that was early thousands, I want to say. Yeah. And it's got a whole chapter on the insanity and the emotional upheaval and loneliness of entrepreneurship. Yeah.

• 2:07:35Speaker 00

  And I was like, this is at least 25 years old, but I talk about it with creatives, and they're so instantly like, oh my God, we're gonna solve that, oh, please. Do people come in on their own, or do they bring a team with them? Depends, we've, we've seen both, we've also seen, um, some of the bigger organizations are, um, using it as like an education program. That's interesting. So they're like, okay, I've got, because You know, $30,000, it's a lot of, if, if, but if you don't control your, your upper income and you can't like, yes, I know, if I train you up in creativity, you're going to make at least 13% more. And I know, we like, we know that from, from that kind of stuff. But what if you can't affect that? So big companies are coming in and saying, dude, I got art directors and I got designers and I've got even publicists and things like

• 2:08:20Speaker 00

  that where they're writing and their whatever and my scientists. And so they're actually coming in and saying, oh no, we've got a budget and we're going to call this continuing education and we're going to send like six of our top team people.

• 2:08:31Peter Diamandis?

  Makes it, makes a ton of sense.

• 2:08:32Speaker 00

  Ton of sense.

• 2:08:32Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, the, you're, you're training up your most critical asset.

• 2:08:37Speaker 00

  In like, in creativity, which is this skill that at least for the next 10 to 15 years until the AIs get, and we don't know, but I'm more optimistic than you are. By the way, this is the first time in history where I am more optimistic than Peter. I'm usually this cynical bastard who has to ground our books in reality because Peter's the wild-eyed boy from Free Cloud.

• 2:08:57Peter Diamandis?

  Well, no, I'm, I'm, I'm optimistic about AI crushing our creativity.

• 2:09:04Peter Diamandis?

  So, so where do people?

• 2:09:05Speaker 00

  I just, I just wanted to take my cell and sell it on the open market.

• 2:09:09Peter Diamandis?

  Well, there'd be buyers, there'd be buyers. Let's not go there. So where do people go and find out about their lives?

• 2:09:18Speaker 00

  WWW.FLOWALLiance.co.co.

• 2:09:23Peter Diamandis?

  Dot co.

• 2:09:23Speaker 00

  Flowalliance.co.

• 2:09:25Peter Diamandis?

  And where else do they find you on the internet?

• 2:09:29Speaker 00

  You get Steven Kotler.com, FlowResearchCollective.com.

• 2:09:33Peter Diamandis?

  And you're?

• 2:09:34Speaker 00

  At Steven Kotler on the Insta Google Tweet Face.

• 2:09:38Peter Diamandis?

  Heard that before. That's great. If you got the X in there, but that's okay.

• 2:09:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, Tweet Face, Insta Google. I'll have to, that'll be next time. When I come back, I'll have a better one.

• 2:09:50Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, brother, I love you.

• 2:09:52Speaker 00

  I love you.

• 2:09:53Peter Diamandis?

  I'm so.

• 2:09:54Speaker 00

  This is so fun.

• 2:09:54Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, you know, it's, I love the fact when you, you text me in the morning and say, you're ready for a reading with Stephen. Um, and that's my, one of my favorite moments.

• 2:10:02Speaker 00

  I also, I, I get to just say this out loud, just because one of the things that I think is really amazing is, I think this happened to both of us like a couple of years ago, where we like woke up and we were like, holy shit, we've been friends for almost three decades. This is really, really, really special. And like carrot water is, it's like, we've gotten very tender with how we, how we treat each other from like, when we first came together and like, it was just like the war of ideas over every sentence.

• 2:10:29Peter Diamandis?

  I have, I had to, I've had to talk you into books.

• 2:10:32Speaker 00

  Yes, you have.

• 2:10:32Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:33Speaker 00

  Yes, you have.

• 2:10:33Peter Diamandis?

  First book, Abundance. I tried to write a book with you about space first, which was a failed, a failed attempt. Um, and then, uh,

• 2:10:42Speaker 00

  But abundance, I mean, you didn't have to talk me into abundance because I was looking at the environmental side of it.

• 2:10:46Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, you were.

• 2:10:46Speaker 00

  I was worried it was gonna be too ungrounded.

• 2:10:51Peter Diamandis?

  You know, you, you were, you were like, I have other things I'm working.

• 2:10:55Speaker 00

  Well, no, I was, I was.

• 2:10:56Peter Diamandis?

  I had to like, I had to like disrupt.

• 2:10:57Speaker 00

  No, you didn't. I was working and I never went, I was working on a, a Richard Granger, who's in Dartmouth, he's a neuroscientist. I was, we were gonna co-write a book. Um, I'm really glad we didn't. I would have gotten my, I wasn't smart enough yet about, I hadn't educated myself enough. Uh, I would have gotten my ass kicked. There were like three other projects. And yeah, we, you came in and I, no, you were, you were, you were the lowest ranking one in the beginning, but like you rapidly climbed up there. But it was really like, when you presented the ideas to me, because I had been looking, it hadn't been, you were really sweeping. I mean, I was, obviously I'd been a tech science writer.

• 2:11:33Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 2:11:33Speaker 00

  For 20 years at that point. So it wasn't, I was ignorant about it, but my, I care about plants, animals and ecosystems.

• 2:11:39Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:39Speaker 00

  So I was like, how do we apply technology to plants, animals and ecosystems? How do we use technology to save plants, animals and ecosystems? And you were really, especially then, uh, really focused on the X Prize, using technology to help humanity.

• 2:11:56Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 2:11:57Speaker 00

  Right? So I thought like, when you came in, I was like, holy crap, we've got. We each got half of the puzzle.

• 2:12:03Peter Diamandis?

  Hmm.

• 2:12:03Speaker 00

  Um, and you had the good overarching tech framework. I had a little bit of the, the science and the psychology and the cognitive, but all that stuff. It was really, I mean, it was, it was incredibly fortuitous partnership because we, each of us like had to, each of us had components of this that we absolutely had to bring together.

• 2:12:19Peter Diamandis?

  And then it took me about a year to get you on board with our latest book.

• 2:12:24Speaker 00

  Oh, longer. I think, I think, I think it's, I think you've been working on for two to three years on this one.

• 2:12:29Peter Diamandis?

  Are you happy we were doing it?

• 2:12:30Speaker 00

  I'm so happy. This book is so fun. As I, as I said, like, yet not only, well, one, because it's, you have to understand though, it's still my, I mean, the, the new book, just so people know, in abundance, we made the argument that, hey, exponential technology gives us the chance to raise global standards of living for every man, woman, and child on the planet.

• 2:12:52Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:52Speaker 00

  And man, did, there were there naysayers, right? Like, that was the hardest argument to make out loud. And even, I mean, Christ, the, the, you, you opened TED and that guy who followed you, right? Like, they found, they couldn't even, they couldn't even put you on the stage at TED and let you talk. They had to like have a counter argument immediately afterwards, right? And now it's 20, 15 years later, the most astounding thing to me is how, like, the amount of like, when you talk about basic standards of living going up and up. And I mean, it's, it's

• 2:13:29Peter Diamandis?

  It's been insane.

• 2:13:30Speaker 00

  The data is sort of astounding.

• 2:13:32Peter Diamandis?

  It is astounding and

• 2:13:34Speaker 00

  And nobody realizes it.

• 2:13:35Peter Diamandis?

  And nobody realizes it. We are the, we are the frog boiling in the proverbial water.

• 2:13:39Speaker 00

  It's, yeah, it's the, it's the craziest.

• 2:13:41Peter Diamandis?

  By the way, just so folks know, this is a book that'll come out in 2026.

• 2:13:46Speaker 00

  2026, probably at abundance 360.

• 2:13:48Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, March, March 2026. And so don't go looking for it right now.

• 2:13:52Speaker 00

  If you want an early copy, I'm bribable.

• 2:13:56Speaker 00

  WWflowalliance.co forward slash bribes.

• 2:14:03Peter Diamandis?

  In all seriousness, good luck on Flow Alliance. Thank you, sir. And the Alliance. I know it is something which can level up people in extraordinary fashion. Yeah, thank you, sir. And love our conversations. Excited to see you again. We're gonna see each other. I think it's in two weeks. I'm so excited. Two weeks, yes. It's gonna be awesome. All right. And as I end every conversation every morning, I love you, buddy. I love you, buddy.