448 Hack Your Brain and New Technology to Reach Peak Performance with Steven Kotler

"Creativity is probably the most important skill in the 21st century." - Steven Kotler If you enjoyed this episode, check out show notes, video, and more at http://lewishowes.com/448 Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is episode number 448 with Steven Kotler.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week, we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  If you're looking to optimize human performance and increase your potential with the cutting-edge insights, tools, and information, then this is the episode for you, guys. We've got Steven Kotler back on the show. And for those who don't know who Steven is, he is a New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning journalist, and the co-founder and director of research for the Flow Genome Project. He is one of the world's leading experts in ultimate human performance, and his work has been featured in The New York Times, Atlantic, Forbes, Wired, and Time Magazine, guys. He is an all-star. And some of the things we cover today in this interview are:

• 1:13Speaker 00

  Why the drive for intoxication and mind-altering substances is inside all of us? Also, what the largest revolution most people have never heard of and how it's happening right now? The line between using drugs for good and when it goes south? Also, the four emerging forces in human development? And how marketers are using these methods already to sell us every single day? Guys, this is a powerful one. And before we dive in, I want to give a big thank you to our iTunes Review of the Week. And this one is from Brooks Like, who says, "These podcasts are always informative, educational, and always inspirational.

• 1:56Speaker 00

  I always learn new things when I listen and a big fan of everything you do to help others achieve their own success." You are the ambassador of greatness, my friend. Keep the good work coming. I really appreciate that. And this one is from Sarah 714237 who says, Louis, I am learning so much through your podcast. I am letting go of my victim mentality and building a winner's mindset. No amount of words could describe the impact these podcasts have made on my life. I am applying all of what I'm learning into my life and I'm seeing myself changing. Half the people you have on these podcasts, I don't know them, but I'm so glad that I took a chance to listen to what they had to say. Blessings to you.

• 2:41Speaker 00

  These two are the reviews of the week. We appreciate all the reviews we get. Make sure to share yours at iTunes.com slash greatness. If you want a chance to be featured on the show for your review of the week also. And without further ado, guys, let's dive into this. Let's take our mind and our human performance potential to the next level with the one, the only Stephen Kotler.

• 3:08Speaker 00

  All right, welcome everyone back to the School of Greatness Podcast. We have New York Times bestselling author Stephen Kotler in the house. Thanks for calling, man.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  Good to see you.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  Appreciate it. Now you've written many books and you've got a new book out called Stealing Fire. Can you tell me the subtitle?

• 3:23Speaker 01

  Yes, I can. How Silicon Valley Navy SEALs and Maverick Scientists are revolutionizing how we live and work.

• 3:31Speaker 00

  Okay. And what does stealing fire actually mean?

• 3:33Speaker 01

  Stealing fire is a reference to Prometheus who stole fire from the gods, right? And this was, it's told as fire, but it really was the power to seed civilization and language and art and culture and medicine. And, um, and he was eternally punished for it.

• 3:51Speaker 00

  And are we going to be punished for reading the book?

• 3:53Speaker 01

  We are, we are hoping to avoid that. But this is, you know, the book is about a kind of an underground revolution and. It's a modern day Promethean uprising is how we think about it.

• 4:06Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha. And so what are these individuals, these peak performers, learning from this process? Or what have you?

• 4:12Speaker 01

  So what the book really is about is a $4 trillion underground revolution in altered states of consciousness and human performance that's being driven by some of the most elite, high performing individuals and organizations in the world, whether we're talking about the Navy SEALs, or Google, or Maverick, you know, top scientists from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, take your pick. Really top of the top. And these people are driving this revolution forward. And it's probably the largest revolution that most people have never heard of.

• 4:45Lewis Howes?

  Four trillion dollar industry, you're calling it industry, I guess, and altered states of consciousness. What do you exactly mean? How many states are there?

• 4:54Speaker 01

  Great questions. And we're being very specific. So let me back into it. We are looking at, where this came from is at the Flow Genome Project, where we study flow, which is one altered state of consciousness. Two, kind of, in our research with flow, we had to kind of lay out the neurobiology, what's underneath this experience. And in doing that,

• 5:17Lewis Howes?

  How to get into the flow.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  How to get into flow, but what are the changes in the brain, right? And there's some, you know, 21st century normal, where you're in our brains right now, probably our brainwaves are in beta, it's a fast moving wave, right? We've got a steady kind of drip drip of cortisol and norepinephrine. These are stress hormones. They make us focus and it's, you know, and the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that's right here, right? Which is where most of your higher cognitive function, complex decision making, long-term planning is hyperactive. So inflow, that shifts markedly. Brainwaves drop from the high beta down to this alpha theta borderline. Alpha is where people are in daydream mode. Theta is only present during REM sleep or hypnagogic sleep.

• 6:01Lewis Howes?

  Time kind of goes away.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  Time tends to go away.

• 6:03Lewis Howes?

  Fast or slow, it's kind of like.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  And the telltale of theta is like, you know, as you're falling asleep, when you're looking at that gray sweater and suddenly becomes that gray elephant, and then it suddenly becomes an ocean and you're just pattern recognition, there's no resistance. That's a good way to figure out that you're moving in close to theta. And then there are five or six very potent neurochemicals that get released in the system. So with this, this allowed us to map flow, but we started to realize is that Neurobiology over the past 10 to 15 years has progressed so quickly that we now can look underneath other altered states of consciousness. And if you look underneath certain experiences, experiences that get us out of our head, right, that change the

• 6:44Speaker 01

  channel on consciousness, whether it's psychedelic states, meditative and contemplative states, flow states, technologically mediated states, using transcranial magnetic stimulation to knock out the prefrontal cortex, et cetera, et cetera. There's a kind of a broad band of these things.

• 6:59Lewis Howes?

  So different, um, different mechanism or different tools that you're using, like physical tools to using?

• 7:05Speaker 01

  Different, well, there's different ecstatic techniques to get in there. You can use drumming, you can use chanting, you can use psychedelics, you can use action sports to trigger flow, you can take your pick. What's interesting is that what we've discovered is that under the hood, these experiences are very, very, very similar.

• 7:19Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  So what that allowed us to do is to, you know, create categories where there wasn't one. I mean, if you think about, go back over the past 100 years, people who were interested in flow states was primarily artists and athletes. People who were interested in meditative and contemplative states, mystical states, there were, it was mostly seekers, right? The new age, that category. And psychedelic experiences, it was mostly hippies and ravers, right? And these are three big groups of people that don't really like each other and don't often talk to each other and don't cross over.

• 7:49Lewis Howes?

  Don't agree with the way the other person's doing it or yeah.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  And, but under the hood, they're all seeking the exact same experience.

• 7:56Lewis Howes?

  What is that they're seeking?

• 7:57Speaker 01

  So the term that we have used, with, all these terms are really difficult. Altered states of consciousness brings up all kinds of baggage, non-ordinary states of consciousness, all kinds of baggage, even though that's the term we like in the book. But the term we use, and we actually got it from, we were working with the Navy SEALs, um, and one of the leaders of DEVGRU used the term extasis. Extasis is the ancient Greek term for very specific band of altered state of consciousness. Extasis means experiences that are beyond your normal sense of self. And when you are filled with, they use the term divine inspiration, we would just use it as intuition and information, intuition inspiration. So we, we have rebranded like

• 8:41Speaker 01

  this category, the ecstatic category, all these experiences do those things. They get you out of your head, they switch the channel of consciousness, your sense of self disappears, and you get access to a whole level of information and inspiration you wouldn't normally get. Turns out there are a couple other characteristics that, that all these experiences phenomenologically, they share. Sense of self disappears, time disappears.

• 9:05Lewis Howes?

  Body awareness, right?

• 9:06Speaker 01

  Normal sense of effort, exactly, disappears, right? That struggle and toil that is, is that vanishes.

• 9:13Lewis Howes?

  Suffering disappears.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  And disappears. And you're, and the last would be richness, information richness. You're plunged into this high data field, right? And all these experiences, we use STUR as our acronym, stealthless, timeless, effortless richness, right? That's, that tends to be what these ecstatic experiences produce. And there's tremendous value there across the boards. And it seems that, and it's not just those subcultures, right? You can, the biohacking subculture is doing the same thing. They're aiming for these same experiences. So you can kinda start looking at, you know, suddenly, you know, hardcore Dave Asprey biohackers and soccer moms with yoga practices who don't actually like, they would never think of

• 9:59Speaker 01

  themselves in the same category. Turns out you guys are actually playing the same game, right? You see the same thing with inside of organized religion, right? A lot of the so-called kind of really established Pentecostal religions where they're literally trying to change state. They're doing it inside of a different container. They've got all kinds of different language. But what is the experience of, say, speaking in tongues? Well, it's selfless, it's effortlessness, it's timeless, it's information rich. And neurobiologically, if you look at what's going on under the hood, and we've got, you know, speaking tongues, which is this crazy thing, we now know where it comes from, very similar to these other experiences. So huge groups of people, and we talk about the $4

• 10:38Speaker 01

  trillion, where that came from, is when, where this started for us is, we train people in flow, which is an altered state of consciousness. And it's pretty strange to go into businesses or Fortune 100 companies or Wall Street and be training people in an altered state of consciousness. That's a strange thing. For me, it's a strange thing. And yet, it didn't matter really where we were. We'd come offstage and everybody would rush up to us and they're like, "Oh, the flow stuff is great." But my entire team, we're microdosing on a regular basis, or we're going to weekend Vipassana, silent meditation retreats, or we're doing this tantric sex practice to get right. And it was everywhere we went, people were using all of these different techniques to change their consciousness.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  Not to reach these states of selflessness. So interestingly, just to terminology-wise, if you go back 100 years, at the start of kind of modern psychology and modern neuroscience, like William James's time, when William James was at Harvard, William James thought mystical experiences, flow states, psychedelic experience, they were all the same thing. They were thought of as the same category. And then over the next 100 years, we broke them apart and broke them apart and broke them apart and broke them apart, called them all these different things. And now, that over the past 10 years, we can look under the hood with neuroscience advancements, we're saying, "Oh, wait a minute, these are actually all the same things together." So the $4 trillion is, we call it the altered state economy. We did a huge calculation,

• 12:06Speaker 01

  how much time and money do people spend trying to alter their consciousness, trying to change the channel unconsciousness? Now, not all of this is conscious. Not all of it is good, right? There are a lot of substances, caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, all kinds of- Sex addiction. Sex addiction, that are, can have negative outcomes, but they're right. But we did a calculation, we were as conservative as possible. So let me give you just one example in our calculation. So, the live music industry. You can make an argument, a good one, that pretty much anytime anybody goes to a show, they want their consciousness altered. They want to get sucked up into the crowd,

• 12:48Speaker 01

  have that group flow, communitas experience, right? We said, "Okay, that's great. That's fine, but that's way just too big." There are other reasons people go to shows and whatever. So we narrowed it down. We're like, "We're just gonna take electronic dance music." Because a lot of the reasons people go to see bands, well, there's no lyrics out the window. There's no band. DJs pushing play on a tape most of the time. Maybe a little mixing on top, but nobody goes to see the performance. They go for the state of consciousness the experience produces. The feeling. The feeling, and what it does and how it kicks them out of their head. That sort of thing. So we very conservatively built this thing together, but four trillion dollars

• 13:27Speaker 01

  added up, that's one sixteenth of the global economy. Put it in context, that's the GDP of Germany. It's bigger than the GDP of India or Russia.

• 13:37Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Put it in kind of crazy terms, it's twice the number of stars in our current galaxy. Like it's a, it's a huge, huge number. And what's changing, right? This is four trillion dollars that we're spending right now is we, the book kind of covers four emerging forces, neurobiology, psychology, pharmacology, and technology that are emerging right now and giving us much more access to these states with far more precision than we've ever had before. So a lot of what was unconscious is starting to become conscious. We're starting to be able to pick and choose the exact experiences we want, the way we dial them up. We're being able to scale them for the very first time. These kinds of shifts are coming or are happening right now.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  And it's a totally different ballgame. So I think that four trillion dollars is where we are right now. And it's only going to get bigger over the next few decades.

• 14:29Lewis Howes?

  Wow. So you interviewed all these different people in different genres, from the soccer mom to the psychedelic person, to the Navy SEAL, to the executives who all were experiencing different, trying and implementing different strategies to reach this altered state of consciousness, correct?

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:46Lewis Howes?

  Did you find a, um, a group that had the most effective way? Or that had like the easiest way to get in, tap into this, the least cost effective, the fastest, the least damaging?

• 14:58Speaker 01

  So that it's an interesting, it's a great question. Um, let, let's be specific about it. Let's, so let's talk about, uh, worked on on post-traumatic stress disorder. Cause it's a really, it's a really great case. What, what, our argument about the benefits of these states are, um, you know, there's a healing side to it, right? They make us feel very alive, but they also heal trauma at a really deep level. Um, and enhance creativity, cooperation, all that stuff. So let's just focus on the healing trauma stuff. And so.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  The first place to start is with the psychedelic research, right? With the pharmacological research. And Rick Doblin, who runs MAPS, Harvard-trained doctor, runs MAPS. And a doctor named Michael Mithalhofer teamed up back in the 90s to look at MDMA, which is this street drug known as ecstasy or molly or take your pick, as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. And they looked at it in soldiers, so people coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, and they looked at victims of sexual abuse and child abuse. And they were using MDMA therapy. So it's one to three rounds of, you take the substance, the compound, and there's therapists in the room who work with you.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  They found that one to three MDMA therapy sessions was enough to produce either a marked decrease in PTSD symptoms or a total reduction. And the studies have been now running for over four years. So when I say total reduction, we know that the symptoms, all the symptoms of PTSD have gone away and that has persisted for four years. I talked to one of the guys who took part in that original study, and I'm not going to give you his name because he's a stand-onist, but he was an Army Ranger and got blown up in New York, neck, back, and ankles totally shattered. Non-stop nightmares, basically lived in hell for a year. Heard about this study, got involved, and literally one session was all he needed.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  He said, but he was scheduled to do three sessions, but he had so much healing from the PTSD that literally his nightmares went away instantly. By the time he got to the second session, he was like, "We don't have to talk about me getting blown up in Iraq. I'm done with that. Let's go back into my childhood and see what else we can fix." So that's where we started. That psychedelic approach, it's one approach. Is that an addictive approach, though? Well, not in the context of psychedelic therapy. It's risky. So let me get through the comparison and contrast, and then we can talk about that, because that's a great question. They basically reran that study and they replaced the psychedelic with flow. They, at Camp Pendleton, they took soldiers with PTSD and they, over a thousand soldiers have taken part. And they used surfing as a trigger for flow, right?

• 17:42Speaker 01

  Blended it with talk therapy. And they found that it took five weeks of surfing and talk therapy to produce the exact same result. Marked decrease in symptoms or total abatement, right? Five weeks surfing. Then they redid that experiment again with mindfulness-based meditation. And they found they could get similar, not total abatement of symptoms, but marked decrease of symptoms with 12 weeks of daily 20-minute meditation. So, three varying techniques of ecstasy, right? Yeah. They're all roughly producing the same kind of results under the hood. The difference is a safety, in the first case, you A, have to be comfortable with, you know, a substance. It would affect your brain. It can affect your brain.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  Now, that said, so effective as these PTSD studies been, the FDA is now seriously looking at MDMA as treatment. Forget about PTSD, they're looking at it for anxiety and depression. And there's a, there seems to be a lot of proof that that's going to get actually approved and be a prescription. You know, something you can actually do with a doctor. So, yes, it's dangerous, you have to take an amphetamine, you have to be comfortable doing all that. Surfing, a little less dangerous, you can still, you know, snap your neck and you gotta, you can drown, there's still risk there. Sure. Meditation, a lot less, I mean, people, people talk about meditation as if there are no risks. And that's not true. If you've ever seen people come through like a hardcore Vipassana silent meditation retreat,

• 19:11Speaker 01

  it can really not, yeah, it can mess with people. Sure. There's, it's not, it can go wrong as well. But there you have three different techniques of ecstasy to access this state. They're all producing very similar results. And you can pick and choose. And that's what this, that's what this revolution is so great. That's what's so neat now is that we actually, first of all, we have the information to know, oh, wait a minute, these are doing the same thing. The research and the data. Options, right? And I think what's really interesting and what seems to be very cutting edge is combinatorial therapies. So there's work that's being done in England, I want to say it's at Oxford, but I could be wrong, where they're looking at combining MDMA therapy with meditation.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  It seems like they're getting better results. The combinatorial therapies, which is really sort of the cutting edge of what's next and what's coming, people are just starting to look at. But that's where I think this gets really interesting and that's where it's going. But the other thing is, by the way, we're talking about these three innovations. You can also use technology, right? I mean, right now, we talk about psychedelics as a consciousness altering technology, but there are a whole lot of actual technologies coming that do sort of the same thing.

• 20:24Lewis Howes?

  Virtual reality therapy that could be created, you know, there's all sorts of stuff too, right?

• 20:27Speaker 01

  Just talking about flow. We know video games produce a tremendous amount of flow, right? And so just neurobiologically, there are five of those neurocomics that show up in these states. Video games can really only get at two of them, sometimes three, but two is what most get. Virtual reality, a lot more work needs to be done. It seems to be able to get at kind of all of them at once. So I think VR as a state changing technology is phenomenal. And I think, I mean, I really think that's where it's going.

• 20:58Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 20:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:00Lewis Howes?

  You know, I saw like a video on Facebook the other day of a guy who was in some, strapped into some contraption and he was on like a circular like running machine where he could run in every direction, 360 with strapped in with the virtual reality. And he was like, he crouched, he jumped and he was in the game. He probably lost sense of like his body where he was. He probably felt like he was actually in it as he was running and punching and you know, everything. It's just like.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  I got a chance to, so at USC, they've been using kind of early VR techniques again as a treatment for PTSD. A guy named Skip Rizzo is behind this work and I got a chance to play in one of those simulators. I also a couple of weeks ago got a chance to fly the Air Force's Osprey VR simulator through the jaws of death.

• 21:42Lewis Howes?

  I'm going crazy.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  First shot through the jaws of death. I don't even know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but I was very proud of myself. But. The sim- when I tell you that the simulations are getting really good, they're getting

• 21:56Lewis Howes?

  Really good.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  Realistic, right? Really good, yeah. When I crashed the helicopter.

• 22:00Lewis Howes?

  You're dead.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I freaked. I was like, this is so immersive.

• 22:04Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Very powerful.

• 22:05Lewis Howes?

  You know, why do you feel like we, uh, we need to seek this so much? Why can't we just be happy? You know, why do we, why is there so much trauma and so much?

• 22:16Speaker 01

  So it's interesting.

• 22:17Lewis Howes?

  Destruction and stress and anxiety. Why can't we just live normal lives?

• 22:22Speaker 01

  There's a handful of answers to it, right? And they're real answers. The first thing is we have a, you know, in the book, we talk about three different, like, why have we missed a $4 trillion revolution? Like, how, like, that's a huge revolution, right? I don't know if you saw the headlines yesterday, the Pentagon tried to bury like $160 billion worth of stuff and it's troop carriers and whatever, like, you know, and like, they couldn't, they could barely bury that, and yet this is, you know, $4 trillion, much, much bigger, and it's, so how the hell is that possible? And one of the reasons is, we talk about these states as being beyond the pale, and

• 23:03Speaker 01

  there are three pales we look at, one of which is kind of the pale of society, and we don't like to talk about it, but we really do have state sanctioned states of consciousness, which is to say that the chemicals that, and the states of consciousness that society supports are the ones that sort of work in a capitalist society. If you're going to have a, you know, a functioning market economy, you need super, hyper alert workers, so we, you know, the caffeine break and the smoke break, right? These are stimulants that drive focus, and because people are so wired at the end of the workday, they need cocktails to come down. These are state sanctioned states of consciousness. We support them. We enshrine them in our laws, we back them up with culture, right? There are a whole bunch of other things that we don't support.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  And it's interesting because it shifts, right? Like, yoga in the 90s was not a stanchions way to alter your consciousness. It was okay maybe for hippies, but now everybody's doing it. Businesses are doing it. You know, it's a, I think it's a $27 billion industry already.

• 24:04Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  It's a big number. So these things are shifting. There's also the pale of the church, which basically says, "Look, these ecstatic experiences, they're really good for the founder, the first person, you know, and they're allowed to have this crazy burning bush, you know, mystical experience." But it's, you know, heresy if the, you know, the followers try to repeat it, basically. And so there's, there's that's, there's, there's a whole cultural and religious side of it. And then there's what we call the pale of the body, which is, um, we have a tendency, and you see this a lot when, um, with psychedelics, we tend to think that states that we produce through hard work internally, through meditation or contemplative practices, these are authentic, true and good, but anything that requires an external technology, be it a psychedelic

• 24:49Speaker 01

  or neural feedback or whatever, it's not quite as pure, right? This is technically what's called the skin bag bias, right? Things that are produced inside the skin bag are, are pure and good. Things that are from outside are suspicious, not to be trusted. When under the hood, they're the exact same thing. So, you know, some of the answer to your question is, all this has been, been hiding behind kind of these views and those things are starting to kind of shatter open. We're starting to see through there, right? That's part of it.

• 25:19Lewis Howes?

  Right. What do you want people to know the most about the research you've been doing about this book? What is the thing, the most important?

• 25:26Speaker 01

  Well, the most important thing is, like, to me, is that, first of all, most people actually have no idea this, this is even going on, right? Let alone, I would assume, most of your listeners are probably part of this actual revolution. They're probably driving it forward, one way or another. So first of all, that's exciting in and of itself. "Hey, folks, you're part of a revolution?" Didn't know, right?

• 25:52Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, a lot of people listen, are big meditators, do, you know, practices to get in the flow. They're constantly looking to be peak performers. They want to achieve higher results, greater results.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  And the, and the, so the answer, I wanted the other half of your question, and I think this is, this is what I want people to know, is... Because of these pales, because we haven't looked at these states, because we haven't understood the neurobiology, because of all that, we have, we are missing what high performance really looks like. I think most people, in a lot of situations, if they're, creativity is a great example. Creativity tops everybody's list of skills most critical in the 21st century, right? Whether it's the 21st century skill list where it's school, kids and education, or IBM did a recent study where they surveyed 1600 CEOs from 1600 countries, 60 countries,

• 26:42Speaker 01

  1600 CEOs. What's the most important quality in a CEO? Creativity, number one. So, in the 21st century, creativity seems to top the boards. And by the way, if robots and AI are coming for our jobs, and the new study out of Oxford says that 40% of our jobs are vulnerable replacement by AI and robotics over the next few decades, the jobs that are going to be safe are the ones where there's creative problem solving. Now, the interesting thing is, we got a chance to take part, we, meaning myself and Jamie Weill, my partner, who I co-wrote the book with, and the Flow Genome Project, we took part in the Red Bull Creativity Project, which is the largest meta-analysis of creativity ever done. And they learned a couple of things, right? Out of, like, early rounds of this. The first

• 27:25Speaker 01

  was what I just told you, which is creativity is probably the most important skill in the 21st century. Second thing they learned is, we suck at training people to be more creative. We're flat-out terrible at it. We have almost no tools for it. And the reason is, we are trying to train people on a skill when we really need to be training a state of mind. So, non-ordinary states of consciousness are the tools that evolution shit gave us to perform in peak states, right? We see this in flow, you see this, other things. We have, we've been trying to train up all these skills, and we keep getting stuck when we should be training people to alter their consciousness, to train up states of mind. Their way of being, too.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  And it fundamentally filters down from there, right? That, I think, is the most important takeaway. Collaborative skills, creative skills, inspiration, intuition, all these things that are fundamental to success in the 21st century, these are best accessed by changing the channel in consciousness. Wow. Turning off your normal state of awareness and going here. And by the way,

• 28:32Speaker 01

  The craziest part about all this is, and this is Ronald Segal's work at UCLA, really neat guy, but he is one of the, other people have written about this, but he started to realize that pretty much every species on the planet, every mammal and most birds have found a way to alter their consciousness. He talks about the urge towards intoxication as the fourth urge, the fourth evolutionary driver. So there's sex, food, water, shelter, intoxication, which sounds crazy, like why the hell would that be? But as it turns out, going to nature and humans are really good at this, we get stuck in ruts, right? We keep doing the same thing over and over and it happens in the wild as well. And the easier

• 29:14Speaker 01

  you have to change the channel. So the creative problem solving you get from non-ordinary states of consciousness are so fun, is so fundamental that evolution actually shaped it into a basic drive that's found across all mammals. And you know, you can go into the animal kingdom and you will see, you know, elephants will drink fermented bog water, mandrill baboons will take ibogaine, one of the most powerful psychedelics on earth. Jaguars will use ayahuasca, goats will gobble magic mushrooms and the list goes on and on and on. There's a great NPR story from a couple of years ago about a dog that, dogs seeking out magic mushrooms. There was a, the famous one is dolphins will take pufferfish

• 29:58Speaker 01

  and they will get it to excrete its nerve toxin, which in tiny quantities is a state-changing drug, right? Too much and you get poisoned. And there was fantastic footage online of a pot of dolphins doing this with pufferfish, like passing it, they gave puff puff pass an entirely new meaning, right? Totally changed it. But this drive towards intoxication is really, it's in all of us, but it's really all over nature for the fact that it is so, it is so powerful to change the channel in terms of creative problem solving.

• 30:31Lewis Howes?

  Why can't we just tap into it and get in those states without having to use one of these other mechanisms to get there? Are we capable of accessing?

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, meditation will get you there, you know, pretty quickly. It's, I mean, and it's, and it's interesting because it's not even that. Much meditation, right? Like when they started doing the early meditation research, they were researching on, you know, Tibetan Buddhists who had thirty thousand hours of cushioned time and they were saying, "Oh, my God, okay, their brains are more creative and blah, blah, blah, but who's got thirty thousand hours?" Right?

• 31:02Speaker 01

  New studies, you know, then they dropped it down to like, there was a whole bunch of different studies where they're like, "Well, that's impractical for anybody, but can we shrink it?" You know what I mean? Like, "Could maybe we get to ten years?" So they started doing studies and, you know, in the beginning, they found, "Oh, wow, you can do this in three months. Oh, wait a minute, you can do this in eight weeks." And now they're down to like, four days of meditation training is enough to start shifting the brain and unlocking these things. So-

• 31:29Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I just got back from India, uh, two weeks ago where I did a two-week intensive meditation training and I literally feel like now with a fifteen-minute practice in the morning that I got into some, you know, crazy states where I felt like I was literally floating in the universe and moving everything around in the universe. It was like, kinda crazy, and maybe it sounds weird, and I was floating through the stars. I came back through the earth and was like diving into the core of the universe or the earth and was able to see everything perfectly.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  That's amazing.

• 32:01Lewis Howes?

  And I was able to move like the stars. It's just like slight movements, everything was able to move and shift. And it was crazy. And even yesterday morning, as I was meditating, I literally felt like everything around me, I was in the middle of the universe. It took about ten minutes, but then I was meditating with someone else. I didn't have awareness that they were in the room. I didn't have awareness of, I felt like I was just floating. I still had like foundation, but I was kind of like, I wasn't in my room anymore.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 32:28Lewis Howes?

  And it was crazy. And just, and I was there for two weeks, learning these techniques and practices and, and diving in and, um, it's definitely a powerful experience. But for me now, it's fifteen minutes. It's only happened a couple of times since then, but-

• 32:42Speaker 01

  That's amazing that you can get that powerful experience. That's phenomenal.

• 32:46Lewis Howes?

  It's crazy.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  It's really cool.

• 32:47Lewis Howes?

  But no drugs, no, you know?

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Well, that's, I mean, one of the things that, you know- The interesting thing about the drugs is that they can show you what's possible. But the really critical lesson that people need to learn is all of those same experiences are available without the drugs, right? Those substances, for somebody who, you know, when they're just starting out, sometimes can be, that can be a useful, you know, kick your head sideways, just like, oh my god, look, there are a whole bunch of universes that, inside you, that you had no idea existed. But what's really interesting, I always say that for me, um, and I've, you know, I've had psychedelic experiences, I've had meditative experiences, you know,

• 33:31Speaker 01

  and I've had flow experiences triggered by action adventure sports, I think I've experienced way stranger things through sport and flow than I have, you know, in other situations, for sure.

• 33:43Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I mean, as an athlete, you know, I think, you know, why I'm addicted to sports and being a part of a team and other things is because I'm able to tap into that place, you know, just going to play pickup basketball, I can get there quickly in a few minutes. If I allow myself to forget about all the stresses or work or what's on my mind and I just am present to playing ball and making every play my best and being a part of the team and getting beyond myself, I can play for hours. You lose track of time and you just feel like you're, you know, invincible in a way. And I tell people, you know, for a guy who's been hit with the head thousands of times, literally, I don't know how many times I led with my head playing football for a decade, if, if a guy who's been hit that many times in the head, he's probably got brain damage, if I can get there, then I think anyone could get there

• 34:27Lewis Howes?

  just through meditative practice and, and other, and action sports, things like that, so. Music as well, which I know you talk about all the different ways to get in the flow. So, yeah, what do you think's, what do you think's missing for people in their lives right now?

• 34:41Speaker 01

  Well, I, you know, The other thing that we see with these ecstatic experiences is, and this is research that was done at Harvard, there's something called adult development theory, which basically is how do adults continue to grow and mature? And what we've seen is, what the research shows is that people who have more access to these experiences, they move farther up the adult development scale. Now, what happens as you move up that scale is you get more empathetic, you can see problems from multiple perspectives, and you get this kind of polyphasic awareness. So I think one of the things that's missing, we also see the research is pretty consistent

• 35:22Speaker 01

  that frequent access to these experiences gives you much more overall life satisfaction, much more well-being, much greater happiness. And, you know, what's missing for people today? I mean, the studies now show that one out of four Americans are on psychiatric meds. Suicide rates are increasing for everybody ages seven to 70. Those are insane numbers, right? Those are crazy numbers about our mental health as a society. So clearly, something is wrong with us psychologically.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  And again, I think a lot of it is, we have kind of banished this whole, there's a whole set of experiences that are north of happy, right? All the experiences we're talking about to sort of take place north of happy, and we ignored them for the past 100 years, right? If you look at, it wasn't until positive psychology showed up, right? Psychology in the 20th century, even though it started with William James, who was really interested in human possibility, very quickly, it sort of devolved into fixing pathological problems, right? That's what, it wasn't about exploring psychological possibilities, it was depression and anxiety. And we've gotten very good at that stuff, right? And we made a lot of progress, but it's only with, you know, fairly recently, when Martin

• 36:47Speaker 01

  Seligman became head of the American Psychological Association, that people started to say, "Hey, wait a minute, these north of happy experiences might be exactly what we're missing, what we need." And that's, so I think that's some of it, that, you know, we just turned away for 100 years, and we're now turning our attention back. That's what I think is missing.

• 37:11Lewis Howes?

  I'm curious to learn more about you and who's been the most influential presence in your life since growing up till now.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  I don't even know if I can answer that question. I mean, you know, obviously, my, my, you know, parents were usually influential. I don't know, I think I've had great mentors, you know, every step along the way. I think I learned different things from different people. Peter, my partnership with Peter Diamandis, my friendship with Peter, we've known each other a long time. We, I mean, we knew each other back in the kind of early 90s. And so I, before the X Prize was won, like, right when the X Prize, right before the X Prize actually got announced officially, was when Peter and I first met. So, being that close to Peter as a guy who actually like helped open the space frontier and, you

• 38:02Speaker 01

  know, like, like, Peter's been a phenomenal mentor. Like, my, my, like, what do I think individuals can achieve? Well, my friend Peter helped open the space frontier and establish what is, you know, becoming a multi-billion dollar, you know what I mean? So like, I learned different things from different people along the way. I, you know, in all honesty, like, if I were gonna start pointing at who the people who were most influential in my life were other writers who I didn't even know, but their books impacted me so much. Like, you know, I'm fundamentally an author, right? Like, that's, that, like, at my core, I'm a guy who likes to put words together in a straight line. That's really what I love doing most. So, a lot of, a lot of that, a lot of me was shaped by that. I was also

• 38:47Speaker 01

  shaped, I was a professional magician.

• 38:49Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 38:49Speaker 01

  Most people don't know this. Yeah, I started working when I was 11 years old. I was in restaurants, doing birthday parties and bar mitzvahs and blah, blah, all the way until I was in college. So, there were a lot of magicians, actually, who were massively influential on me. And magicians were a very weird group of people. So, I learned A lot of really key, key core fundamental lessons from this, these strange group of people. When I was growing up, they had huge influence on me.

• 39:17Lewis Howes?

  Wow. What's the biggest lesson you learned from that group?

• 39:20Speaker 01

  So.

• 39:20Lewis Howes?

  Being in that, you know.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  Just this, I mean, one was they were a profession without judgment. It didn't, these were really weird people. They were, they were truly strange artists. So, you know, and this was, you know,

• 39:34Lewis Howes?

  Brilliant at the same time, right?

• 39:35Speaker 01

  You know, in the seventies, we're going back to the seventies and this was a group of people. They didn't care who you had sex with. They didn't care what color your skin was. They did like, they didn't even care. You could be annoying. You could be a drunk. If you had the goods and can, could do magic.

• 39:49Lewis Howes?

  The talent, right?

• 39:49Speaker 01

  If you, you were fine. Um, so like one thing I, you know, a fundamental lesson, uh, at a time, I, you know, I grew up in Cleveland and in Chicago. There was a lot of sexism.

• 40:00Lewis Howes?

  Cleveland?

• 40:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:01Lewis Howes?

  I'm from Ohio. I'm from Columbus.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  It's Cleveland. I'm a Browns fan. Long suffering.

• 40:05Lewis Howes?

  Wow, Browns too, man. It sucks.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  Damn. Yeah. Oh, that's heartbreaking.

• 40:10Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  Um, do not go gently.

• 40:13Lewis Howes?

  Hey, Cavs, baby. Cavs.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Do not go gently into that good night Cleveland. That's all I'm saying. Um, there was a lot of racism and sexism and things like that. So just like being around people who, you know, didn't, weren't that way was really important. I think the other thing, the most important thing I learned. So when I was growing up in Cleveland, the magic store was Pandora's Box. It was in Richmond Mall, um, in Mayfield, Ohio, and it was kind of a long skinny store. And at the back, there was a big wall of books and magic stores are like eye candy everywhere, right? But the books sort of had like the most prominent display. And I remember asking Joe, Joe Lefler, the guy ran the shop. I was like, at one point I, I, you know, in my, I was 11 or 12. I don't even know how I phrased it.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  But I was basically like, why do I see the books first when I come into the store? Why not all these crazy, you know,

• 41:07Lewis Howes?

  Shiny objects.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Other, other shop, blinky shiny objects. And he looked at me and went, well, books are where they keep the secrets. And he meant two things. First of all, I just thought he meant books are where they keep the secrets. Right? And he was actually giving me like magic specific things. And what he really was saying is, look, man, these were, this was an oral tradition until like the 50s or the 60s, when this stuff started getting written down really for the first time. And right now, like at the back of my store, the best magicians in the world have put their tricks in books for you to learn. Like you can actually get expertise here. That's what he was talking about. I just thought he meant, hey, man, books are where they keep the secrets. So I just, I mean, I was already an avid reader, but to me it was just like,

• 41:53Speaker 01

  oh my God, of course that's where they keep the secrets. And, you know, I still, you know, found fundamentally think that, you know,

• 42:03Speaker 01

  reading, reading books is the number one thing you can, anybody can do to improve their lives. I can't like, it's at the top of every list.

• 42:11Lewis Howes?

  Do you have a trick that you still use or you still like to perform?

• 42:15Speaker 01

  Uh, there are a couple. We're not going to do them here, no matter what. I will not be doing. That was one of the things I discovered about myself. Um, and it's one of the reasons I walked away from magic is I don't like fooling people. To be a magician, you really have to like lying to people and it makes me really uncomfortable, right? You have to, people get a rush, magicians get a rush from that. I never did. I'm uncomfortable with deception. And so it now, it really, it really put me at ease. I loved, what people don't realize about magic is you've got Michael Jordan level dexterity taking place in nanoscale, right? That's what's going on at the, that's what I like. The athletic prowess of magic is what really amazed me.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  But the deception part of it, I just wasn't good at. I didn't like it. It wasn't, it wasn't who I was. I couldn't make it, I couldn't make it fit.

• 43:10Lewis Howes?

  So who was, uh, which of your parents was more influential and what was the biggest lesson that they taught you?

• 43:15Speaker 01

  You know, you're, I, I, I think you'll appreciate this and, you know, it was what I learned. I mean, it's what you learn in the Midwest, right? Which is Midwestern values, work hard, don't lie, right? Those are the, those are the core Midwestern values and, you know, my father taught me so much about hard work and, you know, what's really required. That was just a great lesson to learn early and, um,

• 43:42Lewis Howes?

  What part of Cleveland?

• 43:44Speaker 01

  Well, a bunch of different parts in the, in the Anne Pepper Pike.

• 43:47Lewis Howes?

  Okay, cool. I'm not sure where that's at, but.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  East side. Yeah, you go and keep going east.

• 43:52Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha, gotcha. Yeah. I'm actually from Delaware, Ohio, if you've ever heard of that.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  And which is where?

• 43:56Lewis Howes?

  It's about thirty miles north of Columbus.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 43:58Lewis Howes?

  Very small town. Yeah. Um, about, about an hour and forty-five from Cleveland. So, um, very cool. Um, what else do we need to know? What else do we need to know about this besides buying the book?

• 44:09Speaker 01

  Oh, besides about, about stealing fire?

• 44:11Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  Uh, that's super interesting. Well, it, it's worth talking a little about, uh, kind of the four emerging forces, right? The neurobiology, psychology, the pharmacology and the technology. And I think, you know, some of the stuff that, that's going on technologically is, is really interesting at this point. For example, um, there's a company called Palo Alto Neuroscience. Very, they're at the front end of their work, but they have using, they, you can go in there, they can take it to Bed and Buddhist, who has thirty thousand hours of meditation training. They can put themselves into a meditative state. They can record the biomarkers of a bunch of different biomarkers that, that are present.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  They can then take the device, put it on you, who have no meditation training and using neurofeedback, walk you towards that same state.

• 45:02Lewis Howes?

  No way.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  Yes. So that's one example of where things are going, right? And it's

• 45:08Lewis Howes?

  It's like Matrix.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  It's like the Matrix. And it's, you know, so what we're looking at, you know, the psychology, what, what shifted fundamentally is, you know, if you go back to the fifties, the psychological personas you were allowed to inhabit were pretty, like, you got the strong, silent masculine type, and you've got the Betty Homemaker, and that was kind of, you know, the edge of psychological possibilities. But psychology and our versions of ourselves and who can, we can be in the world have expanded so much in the past, you know, seventy-five years. There are versions of ourselves that are gigantic right now and can hold a much bigger container, you know, can hold all this stuff. Neurobiology has allowed us to look under the hood, right? It's turned stuff that was mystical

• 45:54Speaker 01

  into the empiric, right? Which is phenomenal. Then we psychopharmacology is allowing us to access a lot of these things nearly on demand, right? They've taken these sort of like the neurochemistry that underpin these states, it's now a cookbook, right? And even more interestingly than just the cookbook is there's an open, so I'll give you an example. If you go back, foundation of any religion, Moses went up, had a conversation with God, came down, bunch of tablets, got angry, shattered them. That was the only time in religious history where God spoke directly to man, gave him a vision, and the proof disappeared, gone, right? Like, and so you've got to take this guy's Word.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  word for it, which, you know, maybe you want to, maybe you don't. We're getting now, and you're seeing it, it's emerging out of a DMT, which is an extremely potent psychedelic, but there are now all kinds of open source research projects online, the hyperspace lexicon, where they say like people take this substance, they have profound cosmic religious birthing style experiences, but they're open source databases. So hundreds of thousands of people are recording their experiences. So now, yeah, you can have a major epiphany, but you can compare it to all this bit where it's a big data analysis of something that before you would have had to take somebody's word for and right? So that's super interesting. That's

• 47:21Speaker 01

  starting to change. And, you know, as I said, with technology, technology is allowing us to bring this stuff to scale. You brought up music, right? Like music's ability to shift consciousness and the research on it is getting incredibly robust, even just like the research on music's ability to bond us together. Right. Apple did this crazy experiment with Sono speakers where they wired up people's homes. They wanted to know how much music do people listen to on average, four and a half hours? A day? A day. And what happens when they do? And almost every metric for togetherness, whether it's Number of times you say I love you, number of times people have sex, hugs, cooking dinners for friends, any metric you look goes through the roof.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  So music's power to shift consciousness and bond us together, really extraordinarily powerful. And if you think, we talk about in the book, the kind of evolution of, we focus on Function One, which is a really high-end loudspeaker manufacturer. The guy who started the company, started it because he thought music could be a bonding tool, to shift people's state of consciousness and bring them to this higher plane. And so he has literally spent 60 years building bigger and better loudspeakers that can take more and more and more people into these altered states of consciousness. We don't think about it that way. We don't think about the evolution of music in terms of a state-changing tool. But if you, you know, back when this guy started out,

• 48:46Speaker 01

  you could only really get that kind of fidelity if you were, you know, literally listening with through headphones, really high-quality stereo. And he wanted to bring what he calls the audio moment, that phase change that we're talking about, to the masses. And now we can do it at scale, right? You go to Boomvest or something like that, and the entire place is wired to shift your consciousness.

• 49:08Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  That's a relatively new change in tech. I mean, we, you go back to prehistory and people were using sound to alter consciousness, right? Like, this is, Stephen Johnson did this work, but he was looking at kind of caves in France where there are early cave paintings. And one of the things they noticed about like these cave paintings is the paintings are really deep in the caves. And why, if you have to truck your paints and your torches and everything, like, why would they be in so, like, a mile and a half into these caves? Why not near the surface, where it's easy, right? And the answer is they were looking for the most acoustically powerful spots in the cave, the places where the reverberation of the voices could actually alter consciousness.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  So with the flickering torchlight and these, their cave art and sound enchanting, right? That, so for going back into prehistory, we've been using sound to alter consciousness. What's different now is the scale. And of course, just one example, but I think we're seeing it across the boards. Like, these experiences are now sort of, we can experience them at scale, which is radically new and radically different and really cool.

• 50:14Lewis Howes?

  Amazing, amazing. Do you have a question that I should ask before I wrap things up?

• 50:21Speaker 01

  It's a fantastic question. I think it's relevant across the boards here. So we talked about adult development earlier. And the interesting thing is child development, like everybody knows child, there's the terrible twos. That's a developmental phase, right? There's teenage years and kids go through them no matter what, right? Like you're going to progress out of the terrible twos. You're not going to get stuck there your whole life. But adults can actually get stuck. Adult development is not guaranteed at all. You can get stuck. And so all of these states can be very, very sticky, right? They're grabby. Flow is as good as we can feel on the planet. It can be deeply addictive.

• 51:02Speaker 01

  There's a lot of studies also that show that kind of the more flow you seek, the more risks you'll take to get into flow. Oh, and that continues, that will increase over your whole lifetime.

• 51:13Lewis Howes?

  Keep pushing the limit.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  These experiences are like across the board. They can be sticky and grabby. As I said, they could, some of them can be very, very addictive. So there's definitely a dark side to these experiences. Like there's a reason these three pales exist, right? Like I tell you, state sanctioned, state sanctioned consciousness and you know, pale literature. It sounds like, oh, these are the bad guys, but no, those guys were trying to keep us safe for a reason, right? Like those pales exist for really good reasons. What's changing now and what hopefully is different is with the amount of precision information we're getting, we're able to tune these things much more specifically and we're able to use them much more maturely. But they bring enormous amount of responsibility. We talk about three levels of danger. One, which is what we've been talking about now, which is hedonism, right?

• 51:59Speaker 01

  It's easy to go off the rails with any of these experiences. But there's also dangers of commercialization and militarization. For example, when Rise of Superman came out, the first two groups of people who reached out, who wanted the Flow Genome Project involved was the military and the marketers. The military saw a strategic advantage and the marketers went, holy crap, can we put people on the flow and sell them things? And The answer is yes. Like, you know, we, you know, the answer is yes. And it's already going on, right? We're, we're starting to move, uh, when we talk about this in the book as well, from kind of the experience economy, right? Where you go to Starbucks because it's that cozy third place to what we're calling the transformational economy where like you use a product because of

• 52:44Speaker 01

  who it's going to turn you into. The great example is Equinox was a classic experience economy gym, right? You go in there and it's bespoke, everything in the hot towels and the eucalyptus is steaming, blah, blah, blah. Right? That's an experience economy. CrossFit is transformational economy. It's not, you're, there's, all that stuff is gone, right? You're working out in a box in an ugly gym, right? In somebody's garage. You're paying as much as you were at Equinox. And right, it's, it's somebody's dungeon, as you said, right? But the reason is because it's going to transform you, right? It's not just like at Equinox, they're saying, well, you do this and you might look like the woman in the black and white photo. CrossFit says, no, you do this, you commit, you be fierce, you're going to be a radically different person three months from now.

• 53:25Lewis Howes?

  And you do a shared experience too.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  Shared experience, all that stuff. So they're selling transformation, who you can become. And we're getting more, and now that transformation, you know, is available on lots of different ways. So that's going to change. And militarization, which sounds like tinfoil hat conspiracy stuff, but if you look at like, and, and the problem is like, like, when we do, we, there's a, from the very, so the very first time anybody invented a state changing technology, right, was Dr. John Lilly, back in the 1950s. And he basically invented a pleasure probe that you could, it's a probe that goes into the brain and you could stimulate basically your, the pleasure centers of the brain. And they, you know, they

• 54:09Speaker 01

  found, uh, when they, when he, I think he was using it with, uh, monkeys and monkeys trained to use this device will literally like choose to orgasm for 16 hours straight. Then they'll sleep for eight hours and then they'll, that's what they'll do, right? And he, like, he was in You know, when the military approached him and everybody like they heard about it and every three-letter agency you could imagine beat a path to his door, he was like, whoa, wait a minute, you know, in the wrong hands, you could literally use my device to fundamentally alter people's consciousnesses to change their beliefs. So even this is the very 1950s, right? Then in the 60s, everybody's heard about MKUltra, right? As the psychedelic experiments where the CIA was using

• 54:51Speaker 01

  psychedelics and the army was using psychedelics. What they don't realize is there were thousands of research organizations involved in those experiments and they never really went away, right? We have a 70-year history of trying to use consciousness-altering techniques as one kind of weapon or another, right? Whether it's to, you know, confuse enemy combatants or brainwashing, blah, blah, blah. So, and now that we're getting more like it's farcical because the technologies weren't very good. Turns out LSD doesn't make a very effective weapon, right? Like, okay, that and it fine and it's funny and you can have all kinds of tinfoil hat conspiracy theories. The problem is that like the technology is getting really, really, really good. And so

• 55:33Speaker 01

  what wasn't possible and what was funny and comical and conspiratorial 70 years ago is suddenly a little nerve wracking today and worth paying attention to at least.

• 55:43Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, gotcha. Very cool. Awesome. Answer the question. Cool. We've got a few final questions. One is called the three truths. I ask this to everyone at the end. So.

• 55:52Speaker 01

  Bring it.

• 55:53Lewis Howes?

  If this is your last day, many, many years from now, and you've accomplished everything you wanted, you've done everything you want to do, you've built everything you've ever dreamed of, it's happened, but it's the last day and you feel accomplished, fulfilled, done. And everyone there you care about is there who cares about you. And for whatever reason, all your books have been erased. All your books have been gone and all the content you put out has been gone. And.

• 56:18Speaker 01

  So I've accomplished everything, but I've vanished from the earth.

• 56:21Lewis Howes?

  For whatever reason, it's gone. The information is gone. And you get to write down and someone says, will you write down the three things you know to be true? You've written so many books, you've created so much. But what if it comes down to three simple truths that you would share with your friends and family and then to the world?

• 56:37Speaker 01

  Three simple truths.

• 56:41Lewis Howes?

  Those lessons or those truths?

• 56:43Speaker 01

  You're not a nice man. Can we come back to this? Let's go to the next question, then I'm coming back to the three truths.

• 56:49Lewis Howes?

  Where can we, where can we, where can we connect with you personally online?

• 56:52Speaker 01

  Oh, this is the lame question. Okay.

• 56:54Lewis Howes?

  I got, I got two more. Yeah.

• 56:57Speaker 01

  Steven Kotler dot com, for sure. Stealing Fire, the book, dot com is where you can check out the book. And FlowGenomProject dot com is, you know, the three places. You can find me on Twitter, Steven underscore underscore Kotler.

• 57:12Lewis Howes?

  Okay, cool. Do you want to wait? Want to ask one more until you get back to this?

• 57:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're going back to the truth one.

• 57:18Lewis Howes?

  Okay, so the, what I want to do next before I ask the final question is acknowledge you for a moment, Steven, for, for your incredible wisdom and your intelligence and your ability to find and discover all the secrets in the world and write them in books for us to discover them as well. So I know how dedicated you are to your mission, to learning this information, to learning these tools, and you spend so much time and energy discovering these secrets. So I want to acknowledge you for putting them in simple terms for us to all get the secrets as well. It means a lot to me.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  Appreciate that. Thank you so much.

• 57:54Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. But before I ask the final question, you've got to share the three truths.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  All right. So I'm not, I don't know if three, I don't know if I'm going to get there. All right. So.

• 58:04Lewis Howes?

  Let's start with one. What's number one?

• 58:05Speaker 01

  Let's see if, let's see if we, so number one is, and I don't know, I don't have a pithy phrase for it, but

• 58:14Speaker 01

  to be really blunt, if you're not, if you're, if you're, if passion isn't fueling your life, you're [BLEEP]. We know this. This is pretty clear. You need, you need passion and purpose to drive you forward. But the thing that I would want to remind people is that. We think passion, we think, when we think of passion, we always see it in its mature form, right? We think of passion for basketball and you see Michael Jordan in your head. What you don't see is what it looked like on the front end, which was, oh wow, I'm curious about this orange ball. I wonder if I can put it through that hoop, right? That's what curiosity over time, multiple intersections of multiple curiosities over

• 58:54Speaker 01

  time is what breeds passion, right? As far as I can tell. So, one thing I, you know, one truth that I think is really fundamental, especially now that people are recognizing how important passion and purpose is, and I think people are super frustrated because they, they want this thing that they can sort of see out in the world, except all the examples, all the people you're modeling after, you're modeling mature passion. You're not seeing what it looks like at the front end, which is just like cultivated curiosity over time, right? So that, to me, would be one of them. Okay. That I think is, is sort of fundamental.

• 59:32Speaker 01

  The other thing I think is, just the, first of all, the fact that we are all hardwired for ultimate performance, it comes built in. There isn't a person on the planet who can't get into flow, can't change the channel of consciousness and access these states. We're all built for these experiences. This is the stuff that evolution designed for us to amplify our performance. And if you're not taking advantage of it, first of all, other people are. So there's no, if you just go back to flow and you look at McKinsey's research, and McKinsey said people in flow are after 500% more productive than out of flow. So 500% more productive says you can go to work on Monday, spend Monday in a

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  flow state, take Tuesday through Friday off, get as much done as your steady state peers, right? Two days a week in flow, you're 1,000% more productive than the competition. And the competition is using this stuff, right? Like, it is my job to train up companies, to train up executives, to train up coaches, to blah blah. That's a lot of what I do in the world at the Flow Genome Project. And we're doing it. This is happening already. So if you're not doing this stuff, you're going to start having a very hard time competing. So I think my second, whatever, however, we phrase that second truth is, you know, take advantage of the advantage you you have, like you're, this comes built in with every human being. We can change the channel

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  in our consciousness and it can massively improve performance and the competition's already doing it. So you are only falling behind if you're not playing this game. And with the four fours that we were talking about, this stuff is only accelerating. So you're falling farther and farther behind. Right? You don't want to be AOL. You want to be Google. And a third truth, huh? A third truth.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  Well, books are where they keep the secrets, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe one of them.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  I think we're gonna go with books are where they keep the secrets because it's pithy and we did it already.

• 1:01:37Lewis Howes?

  There you go. I like it. Okay.

• 1:01:40Lewis Howes?

  Is there any question that you wish someone would always ask you or that you haven't answered?

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  Well, there's a question that I want to ask you, which is what are your three hard tourists? If I had to sit here and, you know, do this, like, I want, teach me something, brother Louis. Come on, man. I'm here. You just got back from India, having your psychedelic trance state experience. Bring me up to your level, brother.

• 1:02:04Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man. I'll share with you afterwards.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  All right. Excellent. Because you could, you can mess with me, but uh huh. Excellent. I see how this is gonna roll.

• 1:02:16Lewis Howes?

  Is there any question that you wish people would ask you or that you never get asked? You're like, oh, why don't they ask me that?

• 1:02:23Lewis Howes?

  Or you think they should be asking?

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  You know,

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  I don't know if I have, I don't know. Can I give you a slightly longer answer? So one of the things that

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  I've noticed a lot of what I've done over like 30 years, basically, working is ask the question, how do we achieve the impossible, right? And I've looked at this in extreme athletes who have achieved impossible feats. I looked at it in terms of empathy and altruism. I wrote about animal rescue, which is kind of the extreme hardcore. Everybody understands when you're helping people. You got a lot of accolades for that. It's not the same when you're helping animals. So this is kind of the extreme edge of empathy and altruism. I looked at in abundance. What does it take to take on grand global challenges? Bold, it was how do you build the fastest, biggest company as fast as you can? And Tomorrowland is what does it take to invent the future, right? The very people who dreamed up all the technology. And it turns out that

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  you see very similar things under the hood, right? And one of the, one of the things that,

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  I mean, one of the things that I think is interesting, like the question is, you know, what does it take to achieve the impossible? Might be the question, might, and, and the thing that I want to point out is if you start talking to these people, what you'll realize is there is, in a weird way, no real difference between I want to do this absolutely impossible thing like open the space frontier, or kind of, you know, one of my mission, decode ultimate human performance, as it is to be an extremely successful dry cleaner. Like, it takes just as much fricking work and time and energy and everything else. Like, you're going to, we all have the same 24 hours in the day, and across the board, it's the size of your vision. Everybody's got the same amount of energy. And if you're going

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  to be successful as a dry cleaner, as a librarian, you have what it takes to change the planet. You do. It's the same amount of energy. You need a bigger vision, right? You need the confidence to believe that you can do it, right? You got to go after. That's what I think.

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  So, you know, if you meet the actual people who have invented the possible, very rarely do you find some uber genius where you're like, oh, my God, what your brain does, I don't like, I don't even know what that is. Occasionally, you do bump into that guy. You'll meet the Ray Kurzweils of the world like you do, and you're like, holy crap, what your brain does, I didn't even know what that is. But most of the people who have radically altered the planet, they're just me and you, right? They they really are. It was just the size of the vision that really is the distinguishing thing. So I don't know how to put that into a question. What does it take to do the impossible? You know, how big should my vision be? I'm not sure what the question is there, but maybe this is

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  one of those truths that I, yeah, maybe I that's a truth, and I need a different question. I don't know.

• 1:05:14Lewis Howes?

  There you go. I like it. It's a good. It's a good thought. Good truth. Final question, then, is what is your definition of greatness?

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  Nothing easy with me, huh? So it's my favorite quote from Jack Kerouac. There's a couple of them that I like, and I'm not really a big Kerouac fan, but he said a couple of things. And I don't know if this is going to make sense, but what he said was walking on water wasn't built in a day, which is sort of my answer to greatness. Like, what do I think of his? I mean, like, true greatness, when I think of it, is, you know, A, if you're not brimming with joy, like, you're not there, right? Like, whatever my definition of greatness, if it doesn't come with like massive amounts of well being and life satisfaction, it's not there. If you're not changing the world, I have one metric for people, is the

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  world better with you in it or with you out of it? Like, that's it. I've got that's, am I judging you? Yes, I'm judging everybody I meet on that metric. And so greatness, obviously, you're here to you get one, the one thing we know is we get one shot at this life. Do not waste it. You are, you know, make, try to have the biggest impact you can possibly have. Um, that's kind of my definition of greatness, but really like I, when I think of greatness, I think of people who show me something I couldn't even imagine seeing. The walking on water wasn't built in a day. You know, that's, that's really, you know, the paradigm shift is really what I think of when I think of this greatness. And it could be anything. It could be paradigm, you know, in our, a new way of rapping, a

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  new way of making music, a new, it doesn't, it doesn't matter. Show me something I've never seen before.

• 1:06:52Speaker 00

  That's great.

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  Try to change the world with it.

• 1:06:53Speaker 00

  That's cool. Make sure you guys go get the new book, Stealing Fire. Thank you so much for coming on.

• 1:06:58Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:06:59Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:07:03Speaker 00

  There you have it, guys. I hope you enjoyed this special interview. Again, make sure to share it with your friends, lewishouse.com/448. Leave us a review over on iTunes, itunes.com/greatness for your chance to be featured as a review of the week on the show. Make sure to connect with Steven, connect with him on social media and stay up to date on all the things that he is up to. And check out the full show notes, again, lewishouse.com/448. Full video interview, all the photos, behind the scenes, and all that other good stuff that we talked about on today's episode. I love you guys very much. It means the world to me that you continue to show up with a full heart, learning and taking action in your life to make a difference

• 1:07:46Speaker 00

  and following your dreams. It means the world to me. You know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.