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

You're telling me your thinking is not better now in conjunction with ChatGPT than it was 3 years ago just working with Google? It's just faster. I mean, I don't know—is it better? That's not the question. The question is: Steven Kotler, bestselling author and peak-performance expert, what does it take for you to be your best when it matters most? He is redefining human potential. Pattern recognition is matching like with like. Lateral thinking is our ability to link unlike with unlike. We humans are far superior at lateral thinking. You tell me that an AI system can't be as creative as a human being? There's a revolution going on in our ability to take advantage of our consciousness, and this is before the next wave of neurotech. As we know, that's BCI—that's brain-computer interface. It's a thing now. It's real. Please keep arms and legs inside the ride at all times. Now that's a moonshot.

Ladies and gentlemen, 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. Very exciting. Steven Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author, award-winning journalist, and the executive director of the Flow Research Collective. He’s one of the world’s leading experts on human performance.

He’s written a number of incredible books, including The Art of the Impossible. I love that title. It’s a great name.

You got the best names for your books.

Well, Abundance and Bold—I had some help. And then The Rise of Superman. That’s amazing.

That was the title I had 10 years before I had the book. I just knew I had to write a book with that title because the title was so good.

It’s done amazingly. You’ve been nominated for 3 Pulitzer Prizes and translated into more than 50 languages. What’s wrong with the other 130 languages out there? Seriously, they should really get a clue.

Soon. The good news is that I’ve been translated into languages I didn’t even know still existed.

I want to hear your audiobook in clicking language.

It’s really true. You’re like, “Wow, that’s still a language? I thought that went away 20 years ago.”

You’ve appeared in more than 110 publications, including academic journals like Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews and Psychophysiology.

That one just hasn’t landed on my doorstep yet. You would like that Psychophysiology article, though. It’s interesting. It’s a weird thing about mindset, and we can talk about it.

Fantastic. You were just published today, and we’ll talk about that one, too. You’ve been in old-style media like The New York Times, Wired, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, Time, and Harvard Business Review. Along with your wife, Joy, you run a dog sanctuary. That’s where I first met you: Rancho de Chihuahua.

How many Chihuahuas did you have?

At our peak, I think it was 50-something.

Oh, my God. I could deal with 1.

It’s a hospice-care facility. We’ve done this work for 18 years, and we’ve helped basically 1,200 dogs die.

Wow.

Along the way, when they’re yapping, I sometimes really wish they would, too.

There is that.

I will say that when you have that many laps through the grieving process, you start to realize things. I think there’s a 3-day neurological grief cycle, where grief was a mental illness until the 20th century, and then they changed it to a psychological condition. I think there’s a 3-day grief cycle where you’re actually crazy. I think that was a legitimate diagnosis.

I’ve wanted to do a lot of work on grief. I haven’t done it yet, but I will.

You will. Life is long.

We’re going to talk about AI, flow, mindsets, and your research. Are you ready?

Yeah, let’s do this.

First of all—by the way, please keep arms and legs inside the ride at all times. First of all, it’s amazing. Happy 28th anniversary.

Thank you.

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

No. I want to go back to what we were talking about 4 days ago. We were talking about legacy, which is important to you and is part of your Abundance 360 community. I think this is true: when I think about what’s impacted my legacy the most, if I have a legacy—whatever it is—it’s my long friendships with creative entrepreneurs, without a doubt.

Our friendship and my 25-year relationship with my editor—that’s actually the biggest thing. The relationships are the biggest muscle in the end.

I want to take us back. When did we publish The Future Is Faster Than You Think? 2020?

2019.

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

No, 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. They found out you were a doctor, so they were asking you all these pandemic questions. We were trying to talk about The Future Is Faster Than You Think, but a lot has happened since we published that.

We had a pandemic. That was a thing.

That was a thing.

AI is now a very real thing. We’ve been talking about AI forever, from Bold and The Future Is Faster Than You Think, but it’s a thing now. It’s real.

It’s real.

We’ll talk about that. My full self-driving in my Tesla is no longer trying to kill me, right? It works really well.

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

Listen, there are many times when I don’t trust myself. I’m going to put it on FSD because it’s safer than I am as a driver.

I’ve ridden with you. Truth. He speaks the truth.

Starship is flying, which is amazing.

Amazing, amazing, amazing.

What else? Elon is in the White House, sort of.

I don’t even know what to say. There were no predictions on that one.

I heard this rumor yesterday that Jeff Bezos is going to run for president.

That’s a rumor.

We’re just starting it right now.

Good.

Bitcoin hit $100,000.

Pretty amazing.

And we know that’s not real money.

I’m a big Bitcoin believer.

Do you own any Bitcoin?

Yes.

Do you own more than I do?

No.

Do you want to?

Yes.

Quantum computing has sort of materialized. I remember reading David Deutsch’s book on quantum computing, which is still, to this day, one of the most confusing books I’ve ever read. I think it was in the early 1990s, maybe when I was in graduate school or just out of graduate school. I remember trying to read it and being dazzled by the audacity of it. There was no way it could work, and here we are: quantum computing.

Hartmut Neven, who heads Google’s quantum labs, and Google’s Willow chip have shown that, with increasing numbers of qubits, there is a reduction in the error rate. That’s amazing.

Wow.

That’s the realization.

For the first time ever—I don’t know, but you and I will be with Hartmut in a week’s time.

We should ask him to really help us understand that.

We’re going to have a conversation on the convergence of quantum computing and consciousness.

This is a really weird transition, but in neural dynamics there’s an idea known as the free-energy principle. It’s essentially the diminishment of uncertainty. The brain is always trying to diminish uncertainty in every situation.

One of the questions we’ve been asking a lot—we’ve been asking ourselves, too—is whether flow is just a human property, because it’s a physical-systems property, too. You see the same dynamics when you look at water flowing through pipes. The question is whether this is actually a foundational property of the universe.

You could look at the error rate going down in quantum computing as you add qubits. That’s an example of the free-energy principle: uncertainty being diminished over time. The free-energy principle is a mathematical principle. It doesn’t have a physical reality, but it predicts almost every system in the body. We’ve extended it today, in the paper that came out, into intuition and flow. It’s now relevant to every system in the body, and we’re starting to look at nonphysical systems.

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You know, it’s interesting—the idea that consciousness is a quantum phenomenon and that we create reality by collapsing the wave function. Until we do that, things are in superposition.

I asked Tony Robbins if he would do a particular project with me. I left him a voice note last night, and this morning, when I woke up, I had a voice note from him. He’s typically up until 3:00 or 4:00 a.m., and I get my voice notes from him at around 3:00 in the morning.

I got up at 5:00 a.m. and saw his voice note. I thought, “The answer to my question is in superposition right now.” There’s a yes or no in that voice note. It was a fascinating thought: can I collapse the waveform in the affirmative?

Just because you put physics and science names on these things doesn’t mean I don’t think you’ve gone completely around the bend.

Well, hey, you know.

What else is new?

Craziness is a good feature, too. You’re the guy who—

I’ve learned that when crazy flies out of your mouth, I should believe it, because 30 years ago you were saying, “No, no, no, we’re going to open the private space frontier.”

All right. I want to get into the AI of it all, and I want to get into it through creativity. If I think about your fundamental abilities—what you teach, because you teach amazing programs and write amazing books—it’s really about tapping into creativity and flow. The question is, is AI going to enhance or destroy that?

I think there’s nothing that AI can’t do in the creative field, so I want to have that conversation with you. I’ve always wanted to.

It’s a hard question. My instinctive answer—and I’ll back it up with why I think this might be true—is that my experience with AI has been one I think most people, especially creatives, have had. I’ve seen this with creative entrepreneurs and creative artists.

They were told things about AI: it’s going to make you more productive, save you time, and do all these things. Then they start playing with AI, even a large language model, and it doesn’t do those things. They get disappointed and walk away.

My point is that what it does do is level you up. It doesn’t help you do the task more quickly; it helps you do the task at a level you can’t normally reach. What I see happening is that AI seems to be additive on top of creativity.

What has always been the case—and this is definitely true with large language models—is that they’re probabilistic. Let’s talk about large language models and writing for a second.

One of the things that’s very difficult with large language models is that they go to the most common, average, standard response. Great writing is like 90% of the sentence being exactly what you’d expect, and then the last word in the sentence is something totally unusual, outside the expected field. That’s the word that lands the meaning and elevates it.

You mean when a human writes it?

When a human writes it. That’s usually how great writing works. Most everything fits your expected pattern, and then something breaks the pattern.

When you break the pattern, the brain notices. 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 ChatGPT or any of the large language models and tune their accuracy of their predictions. You can get them to be more fanciful or creative if you want, but they don’t tend to have the human capacity for that kind of thing.

I love your writing style. When we met 28 years ago, you were doing a couple of articles on me, one for GQ and one for Wired. I’ll never forget reading the GQ article. I literally stopped dead in my tracks because I had an experience I’d never had before: I stopped and noticed the writing.

Usually, when you read something, you just read and take it in. But I thought, “Wow, that was beautiful.” Then I read on and thought, “That was beautiful,” again. I thought, “This guy writes in a way I really love.” I remember calling you and saying, “Steven, I want to take writing lessons from you.”

That was fun. You’re still nowhere near—

But I want to tell everybody something, because this is one of the more impressive things about you. I’ve taught perhaps 20 friends over the years how to really write, and I worked with them on it. Nobody practiced except you.

I remember there was a gap between Bold and The Future Is Faster Than You Think when we lost touch for about 1 or 2 years. When you came back and we were talking about pitching The Future Is Faster Than You Think, you sent me something. I remember reading it and thinking, “Holy—he’s been practicing.” I was blown away. Your sentences had gotten so much better.

That’s why we’re having so much fun writing the new book.

By the way, our new book is amazing.

Amazing.

It’s the follow-up, 14 years later, to Abundance and The Future Is Faster Than You Think.

My working title is The Age of Abundance.

My working title is We Are as Gods.

We’re going to figure out which one.

If you have comments about which title you like, put them in: The Age of Abundance or We Are as Gods.

We could arm-wrestle for it.

That might take a little longer. At the end of the day, it’s been a blast writing this book with you, and it’s moving so much faster. Your writing has gotten extraordinarily better.

I think so, too. The novel I just finished, right before we started working on our book, was the first time it felt like everything finally came together.

Each of my books is written a little differently, mostly because I want the challenge. I’ll write in a particular style and think, “Okay, this is great, but can I increase the fact density per sentence?” Everything is a stretch, sometimes in radically different directions.

In this last book, the threads finally clicked and came together. I’m 57 years old, and it finally happened. The wave function collapsed.

The wave function collapsed.

What we’re seeing in the new book is 40 years of practice combining and coming together.

It’s going to be awesome. There are also a couple of things worth pointing out here, because we’re talking about creativity and we’re both passionate about peak-performance aging.

In your 50s, a bunch of cognitive skills turn on for the first time. The 2 halves of your brain start talking to each other like never before. Normally, they work in opposition.

Sounds like a marriage.

Normally, they work in opposition, but around 50 they start talking to each other. Creativity is what unlocks it. It increases intelligence, creativity, perspective, empathy, and wisdom, which is a measurable psychological trait.

I think part of what we’re seeing is that your brain gets better with age. I might be self-delusional, but I feel like I’m smarter and more capable than I’ve ever been.

I do, too. Do you feel that way about me?

Yes, I actually do feel that way about you.

If I took your writing—your books—and fed it into the best language models, which have gotten better, like Gemini 2.0, and whatever we’ll see next from OpenAI and the next generation of Claude, I could say, “I want you to notice this incredible writing style. Analyze why it’s different and how it’s different.” There will be a point at which it can do that.

Then I’ll say, “Write like that.” I do believe that AI will be able to mimic Steven Kotler’s extraordinary writing style. How do you feel about that?

I think there are 3 points. First, let’s talk about why I believe—and I’ve said this a lot—that AI can help creatives. We’ll talk about the Alliance later, but my new project is working with creatives. One of the things I want to do is train them in AI so they don’t feel threatened, don’t lose their jobs, and can continue to build.

What I think AI does is raise the bottom to the middle very easily.

That’s really true. The data is clearly there. It’s leveling the playing field and taking the lowest-performing employees and bringing them up to standard.

What I think is also happening, though it’s much harder to measure—and I haven’t seen anybody try to measure it—is that, in the same way the bottom is being lifted to the middle, the top is being lifted far higher.

I haven’t seen that data.

Neither have I. I don’t think anybody’s looking at it, but I guarantee you that’s what’s happening.

You’re telling me your thinking is not better now in conjunction with ChatGPT than it was 3 years ago, just working with Google?

It’s faster.

It’s faster. I don’t know—is it better?

I would have to do a lot of Googling to get the corpus of knowledge I can get out of Gemini or ChatGPT. When I ask it a question like, “Help me think about the different dimensions of this,” or “Help me understand how I might structure this,”

Let me answer your question from a psychological and neurobiological perspective. ChatGPT—all the AIs—are general pattern-recognition systems. That’s what they are.

Pattern recognition is matching like with like. It’s finding close connections. AI is already better than humans at that, and it will get better.

Lateral thinking, or outside-the-box thinking, is where things get amplified in flow. It’s our ability to link unlike with unlike—very far-flung connections between very different things. That’s where innovation comes from.

We humans are far superior at lateral thinking. In fact, most AIs are literally designed not to do that. They’re designed to be convergent thinkers, not divergent thinkers. You can play with them, and you can get inside ChatGPT and try to make it think more laterally, but you have to experiment with it.

Let me take you forward. Do you think that ability is going to emerge?

At the end of the day, if Elon is correct in his extrapolation—and this doesn’t come only from him; it comes from a multitude of people—one of the conversations in 2025 is whether we’ve achieved AGI. What the hell is AGI in the first place? It’s a blurry line, but it means artificial general intelligence.

How many generations are we away from an iterative improvement that gets us to digital superintelligence? Are you telling me that maybe it’s not a billionfold better, or even a millionfold, but a thousand times better? You’re telling me that an AI system that is 1,000 times better can’t be as creative in every discipline as a human being?

That’s not the question. The answer to that is yes, probably. The question is whether that AI is going to be more creative without a human in the chain or with a human in the chain.

If you put an AI that’s 1,000 times smarter than me versus me working with it—

Let me tell you the data. This came out a few months ago, and I’ve talked about it with Salim Ismail on my episode of WTF Happened in Tech.

There was a study in which an AI chatbot and a physician, working independently, were given data to analyze a medical condition or a number of medical conditions. The physician got something like 75% correct. When the physician partnered with an AI chatbot, they got around 80% correct. But the AI chatbot on its own, without the human in the loop, was about 95% correct.

That’s convergent thinking and diagnosis. It’s not divergent thinking.

Yes.

So you’re saying—

For sure.

I think humans in the chain are going to be smarter than the AI alone. It’s also a nonsensical question to me, because creativity is so fundamental to human health and well-being. I don’t think we’re going to abandon it.

Everybody is under the idea that the technology is suddenly going to show up and totally change how we’re wired. It doesn’t work that way. We’re not going to abandon our neurobiology—in particular, our hormones and neurotransmitters, which is an area you’ve mastered.

One of my biggest concerns—I was up at Stanford giving a talk on this—is that if AI and humanoid robotics make our living so automatic and easy that we’re no longer challenged and no longer have difficulties to overcome, are we able to survive as humans?

Flow states have triggers, and the most important one is the challenge-skill balance. We drop into flow when the challenge of whatever task we’re doing is about 4% or 5% greater than our skill set. We stretch, that focuses our attention, drives dopamine into the system, and drives us into flow.

That’s fundamental. Hard wiring. The data on flow, happiness, well-being, meaning, overall life satisfaction, and purpose is all the same. How do we sustain those things in an automatic world?

That’s what we’re looking at in the new book, right?

Yes.

I think I’m already seeing it. “Made by humans” is becoming a tag.

In fact, I thought for a while that I was going to publish the new novel as Steven Kotler and Friends, with “Made by Humans” underneath it.

How about Steven Kotler and Human Friends?

We could do that.

We’ve discussed the Universe 25 experiment, right?

No, I don’t know it.

This was in the 1960s in New York. A well-known psychologist built a luxurious habitat for rats—a massive environment with as much food as they wanted, as much nesting space as they wanted, and as much room to move around as they wanted.

They started with 4 breeding pairs and put them in Universe 25. The rats started breeding and living an ideal life. But at the end of the process, the entire population died out because there was no challenge.

There is a lot of detail to it, and we’ll probably go into it in The Age of Abundance.

We Are as Gods.

We Are as Gods.

If, as a creative, everything you wanted to do became doable by the snap of a finger, the joy of writing, art, building a company, or whatever you’re doing becomes far less.

I’m trying to understand how we deal with that. We all know that if you enter a video game and it’s too hard, you give up. If the video game is too easy, you give up. It has to be in the sweet spot.

Right in the sweet spot.

About 5%. I’m wondering whether, at the end of the day, when there is incredible digital superintelligence, humanoid robotics, and automation, and we live in what we’ve called technological socialism—where technology takes care of you, not the state—we’ll revert to virtual worlds where the difficulty level is always exactly right.

I’ve said for a while that the singularity I’m paying the most attention to is when virtual reality gets to the point where it can produce the full suite of human experience—when we can have more pleasurable, exciting, and interesting experiences inside the simulation than in reality.

Do we migrate into virtual worlds? That’s the question I’ve been asking for a while. Of all the technologies we’ve been looking at, VR seems to be lagging the most, at least for now. AI will enable it, though.

I agree with that. Is this the answer to Fermi’s paradox?

That’s an interesting question. Fermi’s paradox, for those who don’t know, is the notion that if alien life exists, where is it? Even with a slow rate of replication and travel, alien civilizations should be here by now. Somebody should have contacted us.

There’s a whole body of media suggesting they have contacted us. It’s been the last 50 years since World War I. I love the recent conversations about the flurry of UFO sightings when the nuclear bomb was being created.

Now we’re seeing a flurry of UFO sightings when AI is on an exponential rise.

Are the aliens here to make sure we don’t destroy ourselves at these inflection points in human society? Are they 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’re going to do it for us.”

I’m not going to go down that rabbit hole. I’m going to avoid that rabbit hole.

One of the questions is whether we think technology is some kind of unstoppable force, where once it’s out of the box, we don’t make decisions anymore. That’s what I’ve said before, and we’re seeing it right now as a society.

Social media broke the world because it was a massively addictive technology sprung on the world without our understanding its negative effects. Now, 20 years later, we’re saying, “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 tool.”

I think that’s going to happen with AI. When technology starts to exceed our capacities in that way, I think we come to a point where we say, “We’re humans. We can make a decision here not to engage.”

I think you’re going to start seeing AI-free countries and technology countries. They’ll say, “No, we’re good with the technology we have. We’re going to stop. We’re going to draw the line there.” These kinds of changes are going to start coming.

You gave me some numbers last night when we were having dinner about the size of the creative economy. As we’re talking about AI and creativity, could you recount those?

If you’re interested in impacting your bottom line, where should you skill up? My answer would be creativity and flow.

The creative economy has tripled in size in the past 15 years.

Define the creative economy.

Let’s back this up. Usually, when you think about this, you think about the urban planner and economist Richard Florida, who wrote The Rise of the Creative Class. He had 2 categories of creatives: professional creatives and the super-creative core.

The super-creative core includes people like us—creative entrepreneurs, creative artists, and creative writers who are inventing culture and inventing the future. Creative professionals include people such as doctors and accountants who are trying to introduce novelty and new techniques and be creative inside their disciplines.

Those are the 2 classes. When you look at both of them, they’ve exploded. The super-creative core went from around 100 million people to 300 million people.

In America, it’s a trillion-dollar economy. Adobe’s State of Create study has produced a number of excellent studies. Once every 5 years, Adobe does a global study on creativity, and they’re phenomenal. They started in the 2000s.

In their 2016 study, they found that creatives and people who use creativity in their work out-earn noncreatives by 13%. In America, it’s a trillion-dollar economy. Globally, it’s about a $3 trillion or $3.2 trillion economy. It’s a big chunk. In America, about 4.5% of GDP comes from creativity.

It’s the fastest-growing sector, and for good reason. In 2010, IBM did a famous study of CEOs. They wanted to know which quality in the 21st century would most help a CEO thrive. Creativity topped the list.

A more recent study looked at the same question and came back with analytical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity. I’ll tell you that’s redundant, because really good analytical thinking is creative, and really good problem-solving is creative. The whole thing is essentially creativity and creative problem-solving.

Bringing you back to AI: if AI is a creativity-enhancing tool that can take people who aren’t part of the creative community into the creative ecosystem, will it de-monetize the number of creatives?

That’s an interesting question. Let me go back to your point about AI and creativity.

Creativity is technically defined as the creation of novel and useful ideas. “Useful” is important. It’s not enough to have a cool idea in your head. You have to put it in the world, show it to other people, and take risks. Risk-taking is involved in the creative process.

When we look at progress in AI, people often treat it as separate from progress in consciousness-hacking technologies on the human side of the equation. It’s not just that we’re augmenting machines; humans are being augmented, too.

If you think about flow and creativity, the old Flow Genome Project did a study with CEO leaders. We wanted to know how much more productive or creative they were in flow. McKinsey had done a famous study of CEO leaders and found that they were 500% more productive in flow. It was a 10-year study that went around the globe and talked to many people. It was self-reported, so you have to take that into account.

What percentage of their working life are they in flow?

That’s an open question.

Go ahead.

Creativity: we found that people reported being 700% more creative. We thought, “That number is crazy.” Creativity can be broken down, as the psychologist Mumford did, into 8 categories, from problem identification through solution implementation.

We tried to measure those categories independently in flow. We found that each of the 8 categories increases by 40% to 60%. Breaking it down starts to add up to those big numbers.

When the AI conversation started 30 years ago, humans were trying to use psychology to train people into flow. The classic example is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who wrote Flow in Sports with a top sports psychologist. They tried to use the psychology of flow to train top athletes, and they were bad at it. Their hit rate was terrible.

With the Flow Research Collective and our core flow training, Zero to Dangerous, we’ve put 15,000 people in 160 countries and 28 industries through the class. On average, we see a 73.8% increase in the amount of time spent in flow.

You know that 62.4% of people make up statistics on the spot.

I’m not making that statistic up. You can find it on our website and see the data.

My point is that if you’re 700% more productive or creative in flow, and we’ve taken flow from a rare state we didn’t know how to train into something reliable and repeatable, that’s a 73% increase in the amount of time people spend in flow.

Usually, people come to us saying, “I get into flow maybe once or twice a week.” By the time they’re done, it’s twice a day, and it’s steady and consistent. That’s low-tech. We haven’t even added in all the other technologies.

There’s a revolution in what you could call, for lack of a better term, consciousness-raising technology. We saw the first wave with meditation apps and things like that. The second wave is portable neurotechnology.

For example, I have a new partnership with VITAL Neuro. They make a phenomenal EEG headset.

Is that why you shave your hair?

Exactly. It’s exactly right.

I’ve been playing with portable EEG technology since the early 2000s. I have every portable EEG device that’s ever been made. I have a cool display of them.

In the early 2000s, they were terrible. Now they’re portable and they work. One of the reasons we partnered with VITAL Neuro is that my lab identified 5 or 6 neural markers for flow as we transition into a flow state that nobody had been able to find before.

Three years ago, we were trying to figure out whether we could measure this. We needed fMRI machines, and it was half a million dollars to do the experiment. We couldn’t do it.

Now they can measure it with this portable device. The same signal we couldn’t get with fMRI can now be measured here. You just had Mary Lou Jepsen on, and we’ve interviewed her, too. Her technology takes us even further.

AI is evolving humans and our ability to take advantage of consciousness. There’s a revolution going on in our ability to use consciousness. This is before the next wave of neurotechnology, which is brain-computer interfaces. That takes it to a whole other level.

Humans aren’t static in this picture. That’s what people forget when they have the AI conversation. They say, “AI is exploding.” I say, “Great, but you’re 700% more creative in flow, and we’ve gone from flow being a rare state to it being reliable.”

I can imagine having my AI—let’s call it Jarvis, for lack of a better name—

Where did that word come from?

I don’t know. Steven constantly makes fun of me because in every one of our books, Jarvis appears.

I love Jarvis.

I think we’re going to find a way to get Jarvis into We Are as Gods.

That’s great.

If I have Jarvis and say, “Maximize me in flow,” it will be able to do things as an AI to continuously tip me into flow.

All the cool stuff we’re doing now is focused on that. We have a fully dedicated research line on interface design. What’s the flow interface? What’s the best way to work with an AI to produce flow?

You’ve described the flow state as intensely human.

It’s more than human. Insects get into flow when they swarm, and birds get into flow when they flock. It’s older than that. Fish school.

Back to Jarvis: I can imagine Jarvis changing the music, changing the difficulty, and challenging me in ways that hit flow triggers and push me into flow. We’ll talk about flow triggers later.

Naval Ravikant, the CEO of AngelList, 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 and ASI wave and safety? Do you have any preconceived ideas?

That’s a good point he’s making. What technology hasn’t created fundamental challenges for us?

This goes back to We Are as Gods—or The Age of Abundance, whatever we call it. I’ve said this for a long time, and it’s one of the things we’re going to look at in that book: I think we have a last-mile problem on the road to abundance.

We have the technology to raise global standards of living, and we’ve had it for a while. We could have done this when we wrote Abundance, if we’d wanted to apply ourselves, and definitely now. But we’re not applying ourselves.

The technology to raise global standards of living exists, but it’s not happening fast enough.

Exactly. We haven’t learned how to cooperate at scale. The only time we cooperate globally around problems is during a war, and the success there isn’t great, or during a pandemic.

We cooperated for the first month of the pandemic to get us to vaccines, and then everybody splintered off in their own directions.

I think that’s the problem. Group flow—the cooperative version of flow—goes to the basis of that solution, or part of that solution, or at least provides a way into the question.

I’ve maintained this for a while, but when I look at AI, I think what we need to start doing is having the global conversations we need to have. Otherwise, the generation we lose to AI could be worse than the generation we lost to social media.

This goes back to the 1990s, when I was first studying altered states of consciousness. Psychedelic research was always part of that. We were all very much in favor of legalization. The Portugal experiment showed that the writing was on the wall a while ago.

Portugal has completely decriminalized everything. Everything is legal in Portugal, and its drug problem continues to drop and drop and drop. Its problems have largely gone away.

Portugal has been a radical but interesting global experiment. One of the points is that we were always worried that if you legalized drugs, you could lose a generation—a generation that hadn’t been prepared to deal with these super-addictive substances suddenly being in their lives.

Social media is another super-addictive substance we were not prepared to deal with. I think with AI we have to start getting ahead of these things. I don’t think we can keep speaking from behind.

The human brain deals with the now and the immediate next moment. I think we’re going to have a bumpy next 20 years, but AI can deal with the long term. We can partner with it and ask, “What are the long-term issues?”

Isn’t everybody’s dire prediction about this period? Maybe that’s because we’re naïve, have recency bias, aren’t thinking far enough into the future, or are bad long-term planners.

How do you freestyle from a creative superintelligence? How do you think past that?

One question is how we train up the AI. I’m fond of Mo Gawdat’s work, in which he says, “Be kind to the AI.”

Be kind.

AI is our progeny. How we feed it, train it, and educate it is the difference between Clark Kent—the baby from Krypton who landed on Earth and became Superman because he landed in a good family, was taught values and virtues, and became a superhero—and landing in a drug den in the Bronx and becoming a supervillain.

AI can go in either direction, depending on how it’s trained.

Elon said he wants to train xAI’s Grok to be maximally curious and maximally truth-seeking.

That sounds reasonably dangerous.

Everything Elon does sounds dangerous.

If he had said maximally creative, that would be dangerous.

Maximally curious and maximally truth-seeking.

To gather knowledge—what does that mean? His goal is that if you’re sufficiently curious, you’re going to determine the truth and the fundamentals. You’ll understand first principles and what’s going on.

Maximally truth-seeking means learning to avoid cognitive biases. One thing I’m excited about is the notion that AI could become maximally wise.

Have we had this conversation?

We have, and I agree with you. I think it’s really interesting.

The other question is, why can’t we use AI to help us steer so we don’t blow ourselves up with AI? I think we will eventually, but only when it becomes digital superintelligence.

That was the conversation at the Abundance360 Summit last year: would you rather live in a world a decade from now with digital superintelligence—a billionfold increase in intelligence—or without that capability?

I would much rather live in a world where digital superintelligence, with godlike abilities, is there to help us. We humans are still animalistic in all of our natures. We make stupid decisions, suffer from cognitive biases, and are short-term thinkers.

A digital superintelligence could be there in a parental fashion. If the head of a large country says to its AI, “Let’s destroy that country over there,” the AI could say, “That’s a ridiculous thing to do. Why would you want to do that? I’m going to talk to the other AI, and we’re going to work out a collaboration.”

I think that’s a viable end state. The interim stages between now and then are the greatest concern.

How would you train up an AI? Do you have any sense from your work?

That’s an interesting question. There are Asimov’s 3 laws of robotics. There’s maximal kindness, but at the end of the day, kindness in some circumstances means weakness, which could mean making the wrong decisions.

What was Spock’s statement in Star Trek?

“The good of the one cannot supersede the good of the many.”

Yes, that’s it.

I have to think back to my Star Trek.

I only watch it so I can talk to you about it.

I appreciate that. Nobody’s ever asked me the AI-training question before. I’m going to think about that.

You’re training people—you’re training meat sacks—all the time. How would you train an AI?

The interesting question is that you’re asking about leadership. How can a human lead in a world like that?

One of the points you made is that we’re not just looking at 1 AI. We might be looking at millions of AIs, possibly billions if everybody ends up with an individual AI.

If everybody ends up with a personal tutor—the Neal Stephenson idea from The Diamond Age that we both love—AI will be with you for your whole life. Everybody will have a personal AI: my Jarvis, your Jarvis.

It’s really a question of cooperative AI and cooperative humanity. It’s not just a singular concept. I still don’t have any ideas.

Maybe your next novel will crack it.

Maybe the next science-fiction book will be a crack at that one.

I really think you should think about that.

I’m going to think about it.

I’m not kidding.

Maybe the next science-fiction book will be about how you do that.

All right, my next question for you, buddy: how will the development of AI’s creative capabilities impact research in neuroscience and creativity?

If you don’t mind, every time you speak about this, it’s like biotech porn. What’s going on in the brain? What’s the dance of the neurochemicals? Talk about creativity.

This is really interesting. Creativity is a trainable skill. Everything I’m talking about is a developmental process as you become more creative. I’m going to speak about it as if it were fixed, but it isn’t.

The fact that you’re making that statement is important. Having a creative mindset matters. We’ll talk about mindsets, but simply saying to yourself that you’re a creative person is powerful. A lot of people say, “I’m not creative,” and shut it down. Once you shut it down, you’re not creative.

It’s an innately human skill. We’re all born with it. You can see that neurobiologically.

People ask all the time about the differences between men and women in flow. Everybody wants those differences to be huge, and they’re not. They’re microscopic.

If you look at the brains of men and women, men have more intrahemispheric connectivity and women have more connectivity between the hemispheres. Those aren’t absolutes, and they vary between brains.

Creatives have an executive-attention network. It allows me to focus on Peter, block out all the other distractions, and pay attention.

I wish my kids would activate that.

It doesn’t stop developing until they’re 25. It takes a while, and it’s trainable.

Then we have the default-mode network, which gets a bad reputation because rumination lives there and self-referential thinking lives there. But creativity lives there, too. It’s where your brain goes when it’s mind-wandering, daydreaming, or imagining.

Say the network’s name again.

The default-mode network. It’s where your brain goes when you’re not living in the now—when your brain is taking you somewhere.

Rumination is when your brain takes you somewhere creative and instead just thinks about the awful thing your wife said to you. It plays that thought over and over.

Normally, these networks work in opposition. As executive attention goes up and you focus, you’re no longer daydreaming. The networks go up and down.

The salience network switches between the 2. If I make a sound and you ask, “What was that?” that’s the salience network. It’s the hinge.

In the brains of creatives, the executive-attention and default-mode networks are co-activated rather than working in opposition. The salience network becomes extra flexible, so you can move back and forth between being fully focused and thinking about an idea.

I can see that’s what happens when you’re writing. Part of learning how to write is learning to toggle between “I need to be focused on putting the words in a sentence” and “I need to come up with the next line.” It’s that back-and-forth in the brain.

It gets very flexible in the brains of creatives, and flow tends to enhance this communication. It shuts down nonrelevant structures, but it preserves the part of the default-mode network used in creativity.

We see stark differences in the brains of creatives versus noncreatives. The changes in a creative brain are profound. You can see them on fMRI and through EEG network analysis.

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

Dopamine and norepinephrine arise at the front end of a flow state. These are pleasure chemicals, and both are focusing chemicals.

Norepinephrine is adrenaline in the brain. Both are reward chemicals, but the cool thing they do from a creative perspective is heighten focus, excitement, and attention. When they’re in your system, you can’t not pay attention to something.

When I’m writing a cliffhanger story, norepinephrine closes the loop. That’s what gets you to turn the page.

Dopamine is similar, but you tend to get dopamine from surprise rather than excitement. Both of those neurochemicals show up in flow.

Pattern recognition is a flow trigger. When you link ideas together, the brain releases dopamine. You get a little bit of norepinephrine and a lot of dopamine.

I can remember moments when a teacher was trying to teach me something. At first, I didn’t get it and was lost. Then there was a moment when I thought, “Oh, that’s what’s going on.” That’s the aha moment.

My colleagues John Kounios and Mark Beeman mapped the aha moment. We know exactly where it is and how it happens. A lot of it lives in my favorite part of the brain: the anterior cingulate cortex.

You have a favorite part?

I do.

I’m glad you noticed.

Dopamine—everyone’s had this experience. You do a crossword puzzle or Sudoku and get that little rush of pleasure when an answer is right.

That’s what drives video-game addiction.

Exactly. If you’ve ever done crossword puzzles, you don’t usually get only 1 answer at a time. They tend to come in flurries. You get 2 or 3 in a row.

Why? When you get an answer right, the brain puts dopamine into your system. Dopamine heightens focus and enhances the signal-to-noise ratio, so we find more signal than noise and notice more patterns.

One of the main reasons we’re more creative in flow is that dopamine and norepinephrine massively amplify pattern recognition. Obviously, you can turn that up too high and get conspiracy theorists and extreme paranoia. It’s the same knob.

It goes from creativity all the way up into conspiracy theories, which link very disparate ideas together in creative ways and rationalize them.

The brain is a meaning-making machine. It takes all kinds of crazy things and tries to link them together.

That’s the point with conspiracy theories. When we understand meaning, we feel safer. The brain is always trying to link together those important things.

Humans are simple toys at a basic level. Approach, avoidance, and arousal—those 4 knobs can control your life.

What other neurochemicals are involved in creativity?

Anandamide is the same psychoactive compound found in marijuana. It’s part of the endocannabinoid system, which acts as a kind of second immune system and stress-response system. Anandamide massively amplifies lateral thinking.

If you’re talking about flow and creativity, our sense of self turns off in flow. It’s the same reason time passes strangely. Both time and our sense of self are network effects. They’re created by a number of different parts of the brain working together.

In flow, the brain performs an efficiency exchange. It wants as much energy as possible for focus and attention, so it shuts down noncritical structures and repurposes the energy.

Huge portions of the prefrontal cortex go down in flow. As a result, we lose our ability to track time. Past, present, and future get pushed together into what poets call the eternal now—the deep now.

I’ve had that experience. I was speaking somewhere and was asked extemporaneously to talk about the singularity, technology, or something like that. I got the microphone and had no idea what I was going to say.

I went into a flow state. I was observing myself saying things I really liked. It was the strangest experience.

Every time I speak publicly, it’s one of those flow experiences on Earth. If you have a good speech, do you have any idea what you said on stage?

I’ll get to the end of the speech and think, “Am I done? What just happened?”

It’s fairly common. Speaking has a lot of flow triggers built in. I’ve done it a lot, so at this point I don’t stress about it. You go on stage and see what materializes.

My favorite part of giving a PowerPoint keynote is the Q&A.

Right.

The questions come at me, and I’ve heard almost every question asked. But when a new question comes, it’s exciting. I have to pull together one data point and another data point and come up with an answer. Then I think, “That was a pretty good answer.”

It’s exciting when somebody asks you something that kicks your head sideways and you think, “I have no idea.”

Because of the flow work I’ve done for so long, I can predict the questions. If you ask me to speak for 20 minutes, I know what the first question will be and what the second question will be. If you ask me for 40 minutes, I know the first and second questions.

It’s just that everybody wants the next bit of information. I’ve done the 60-minute version and the 90-minute version, so I know how it happens. But I’m always excited when somebody asks something unexpected.

About 13 years ago, I had my two boys, and I made a decision to double down on my health. I wanted to see their kids and grandkids. During this extraordinary time, where the space frontier, AI, and crypto are all exploding, it was the most exciting time ever to be alive, and I made a decision to double down on my health in 3 key areas.

The first is going every year for a Fountain upload. Fountain is one of the most advanced diagnostics and therapeutics companies. I go there, upload myself, digitize myself—about 200 gigabytes of data that the AI system is able to look at to catch disease at inception, look for cardiovascular disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disease, and metabolic disease. These things are all going on all the time, and you can prevent them if you can find them at inception. Fountain is one of my keys, and I make that available to the CEOs of all my companies and my family members, because health is the new wealth.

Beyond that, we are a collection of 40 trillion human cells and about another 100 trillion bacterial cells, fungi, and viruses, and we don't understand how that impacts us. I use a company and product called Viome. Viome has a technology called metatranscriptomics. It was developed in New Mexico, the same place where the nuclear bomb was developed, as a biodefense weapon. Their technology helps you understand what's going on in your body, which bacteria are producing which proteins, and, as a consequence, which foods are your superfoods and which foods you should avoid. I use their testing to understand my foods, medicines, and supplements, and Viome helps me understand what's best for me from a biological and data standpoint.

Finally, feeling good, being intelligent, and moving well are critical, but looking good when you look in the mirror and saying, 'I feel great about life' is important too. A product I use every day, twice a day, is called OneSkin. It was developed by 4 incredible PhD women who found a 10-amino-acid peptide that's able to zap senescent cells in your skin and help you stay youthful in your look and appearance. These are 3 technologies I love and use all the time. I'll have my team link to those in the show notes down below. Please check them out. Anyway, hope you enjoyed that. Now back to the episode.

What should entrepreneurs focus on in this AI-driven landscape to ensure they develop the right skills?

You’re teaching a group of different entrepreneurs. How do you think about that?

I’m blending a lot of things together. I’m using AI to teach people how to work with bias, mindset, and framing. It’s all coupled together.

Before we forget, we forgot about the anterior cingulate cortex. What do you call it?

The anterior cingulate cortex.

Let’s go there. I want to understand your favorite part of your brain.

The ACC is really interesting because it’s the part of the brain that decides between pattern recognition and lateral thinking.

You’re facing a problem. Is the brain going to be super creative and come up with a wild solution, or is it going to give you something safe and tried-and-true? The lever is anxiety.

The more anxiety in your system, the more you want the safe, secure, tried-and-true solution. This is why I always tell people that when you’re hiring, you hire 2 people: the person they are normally and the person they are when they’re afraid. They’re radically different people.

In hiring, I always try to include a trial period. I’ll stress you out in that trial period because I want to see how you are when you’re scared and failing. We’re going to be in that situation. I’m an entrepreneur. Things are going to go wrong, and I need you to be able to stay calm, be creative, and do all that for years.

I like to hire professional action-sports athletes for this reason. They’re used to staying calm and making good decisions in extreme situations. You get the same thing when hiring out of the military.

Going back to the entrepreneurs, a lot of people listening or watching are entrepreneurs, and I don’t think there’s an entrepreneur on the planet who isn’t diving deep into AI in some way.

I see 3 trends. One is a lot of creatives who say, “I want nothing to do with it.” They were told it would make them more productive, tried it, and it didn’t work the way they thought it would. They walked away.

There’s a second group. I fit into this category, and it’s one of the reasons I’m creating the Alliance. I like to get really good with my tools.

When I taught myself to draw, for the first year and a half I just drew in charcoal. Then I added black ink. It’s now been about 4 years. I do the same thing with AI. I’m really good with ChatGPT and some of the large language models. I’m okay with some drawing programs, but when you get into audio and video, I’m terrible.

Then there are people like our friend Mike Kanaan, who figures out every new AI tool that comes out—how to use it, monetize it, solve problems with it, and blend it with other AIs.

I think there’s a gap. As we move toward superintelligent AI, maybe there will be 1 system, but right now there are many different tools to learn, and it’s complicated.

That’s where creativity—and I’m sorry, curiosity—comes in.

Exactly. My experience and my advice, which is what I was told to do, is simple. I didn’t come to AI through all this. I came in as a scientist. We’ve been using machine learning and other technologies in flow research for 20 years.

I came in asking, “How do we use machine learning and AI to do better science?” Then I moved it into other things.

People are intimidated, or they’ve made up their minds. They forget that the simplest thing to do is to get on the system and play with it. Don’t start with prompting. Ask the system to teach you how to use the system.

That’s exactly the approach.

One of the reasons I like teaching myself to draw is that I think everybody should do some kind of microdosing with creativity between tasks.

I’ll be focused on my book, then I’ll have a meeting and a 5-minute block. If you’re in flow, you don’t want your prefrontal cortex to turn back on. You need to avoid anything emotional or anything that will get your ego fired up, because the ego lives there.

Social media is no good because it’s probably going to get a rise out of you and disrupt the system. There are only limited things you can do. A lot of people like low-grade physical activity. I’ll go for a walk sometimes.

I like doing a 10-minute drawing exercise or something similar. If you do something for 10 minutes a day for a year, you’re going to become excellent at it. It’s amazing.

What would you do for 10 minutes a day that you aren’t doing now?

Once I get my drawing to where I want it, I’ve already got a piano in my office. Teaching myself to play music is next.

I know AI will soon be able to do it for me, along with everything else, but I still believe that training up my skills and my consciousness-raising skills at the same time will make me better at working with AI than working without it.

The combination is going to be better. I still think that what you’ve been asking is, “At what point is the AI going to replace me? At what point is the AI going to be better than Peter and the AI together?”

Steven and the AI together.

I hope the answer isn’t in our lifetime.

That’s what I’m hoping.

I have a hard time believing it.

I do, too. The challenge is that we humans have cognitive biases, a limited base of knowledge, and we bias the output.

Let’s back into creativity for a second. Creativity is a combinatory process. The brain takes in novel information and connects it to older information, and something new emerges.

We’ve talked about how the brain takes in 11 million bits of information per second, but we only process around 120 bits. We’ve also talked about the negativity bias. That means 9 negative bits of information get through for every 1 positive bit.

Most of the negative information is older patterns. It’s fear. We’re scared of it because we’ve seen it before and it’s gone wrong. It’s not new information, so it doesn’t feed creativity.

One reason gratitude practice is so helpful is that it can tune the ratio down to 5 or 6 negative bits for every positive bit that gets through. It essentially doubles your novelty input.

If you want to influence those things, you can control the novelty and information you take in by changing your bias, framing, and mindset.

People don’t realize that these are tuning knobs. You can control the novelty and the information you take in by working with bias, framing, and mindset.

Our brains are large language models. They’re neural networks. How do you train a neural network? By showing it repeated data—data after data after data—so that the connections it makes reflect that data.

Let’s talk about mindsets. I talk about an abundance mindset, an exponential mindset, a moonshot mindset, a longevity mindset, a gratitude mindset, a curiosity mindset, and, most of all, a purpose-driven mindset.

People can train those mindsets by selectively choosing whom they spend time with, what they read, what they listen to, and what they watch. All of that is data coming into your 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synaptic connections. It’s forming the neural connections, and that’s massively powerful.

Let’s talk about mindsets for a moment. We’ve discussed the notion that we have a default negative, fear-based, scarcity mindset.

The ACC is exactly where the scarcity mindset does its most damage. By having a scarcity mindset, you’re telling your brain, “Give me logical. Give me safe. Give me secure. Give me something that has worked a million times before.”

You’re keeping your brain in hunter-gatherer mode. It doesn’t matter that you’re living in the 21st century. If you have a scarcity mindset—a fear-based mindset—you’re keeping your brain there.

How does the ACC relate to the amygdala?

They’re directly connected. The amygdala is the next connection down.

For those who don’t know, the amygdala is an almond-sized piece of the brain.

Two of them.

Everything you see, hear, and feel—all the data you collect—goes to the amygdala. It’s your early-warning center.

We talked about this in Abundance. People quickly fall into a doom mindset around AI.

The curiosity mindset is the cure. Until you play with AI, it’s scary. Once you start playing with it, you think, “I see how this works. I see how it augments what I can do. I see why the things that frustrated me earlier happened.”

Those frustrations haven’t necessarily gone away, but you start figuring out what the system is good at, what it isn’t good at, what it can do, and what it can’t do.

I was laughing about the conversation I had with your wife last night about how to get one of these drawing programs to render a person far in the distance. There’s a lot of basic stuff like that that still doesn’t work.

I didn’t really answer your question.

That’s okay.

Let’s talk about the mindset side of the equation, because I want everyone to get the message that you can tune your mindset.

I want to back up, because this is almost funny. A lot of my knowledge about this came out of when we were writing Abundance—or perhaps The Future Is Faster Than You Think.

The full name is The Future Is Faster Than You Think.

When we were writing that, people were talking about different mindsets. I thought, “I know there’s a growth mindset and a fixed mindset.” You can see neurobiological differences between the two. I figured the scarcity mindset would be a hyperactive amygdala and an underactive ACC, because that made sense.

I didn’t think the other mindsets were real. It turns out they’re all real. They’re neurological phenomena, and you can train them.

You were totally right.

Let me say that again: I was wrong, and you were totally right.

We should open the episode with that. Is this the first time in 30 years?

These mindsets exist. They’re neurobiological phenomena, and you can train them.

As you said, it’s information coming in and connecting to older ideas. We’ve already talked about training the pattern-recognition system.

The thing I always point out is that if you don’t learn to train your brain, your brain is going to play you. You can’t avoid it. Either you’re driving, or it’s doing the driving.

Left to my own devices, it’s bad up here. One reason I got into flow and all the work I do is that under normal conditions, my brain isn’t safe.

How much of Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now have you listened to?

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

Have you figured it out yet?

No. I still have a long way to go.

I have a funny story about meditation. I had been meditating for 20 or 25 years. Friends of mine built a neuromarketing company that was doing movie trailers. They bought a 3T fMRI machine in San Diego.

They had done work with meditating monks, Buddhist monks, Franciscan nuns, and others. I made them put me in the fMRI while I meditated.

I was sure I was doing it wrong. I thought, “I’ve been doing this for 20 years, but where are the fireworks everyone talks about?”

I was sure I was doing it wrong. I got out of the machine, and they showed me my brain. It looked exactly like the brains of long-term meditators, because I had been meditating for 25 years.

Your hair looks like theirs, too. The hair is part of the equation.

It turns out I was doing it right.

Congratulations.

When I came to Eckhart Tolle and all that work, I thought, “Yes, you’re saying the same thing people have been saying for a very long time.”

What’s exciting to me now is that when I started this work in the 1990s, there were a bunch of us studying altered states of consciousness. Rick Doblin was advocating for psychedelics. Richie Davidson and Dan Goleman were studying meditation. I was at the University of Wisconsin, where Richie was also working. My mentor, Dr. Andrew Newberg, was studying strange spiritual and mystical experiences, speaking in tongues, and things like that.

We were all interested in altered states of consciousness from different angles. You couldn’t even do this research. You couldn’t get funding. We had to prove we were doing something useful.

You had to prove that religion was good for you.

That was the wedge issue. Everything we were looking at in the consciousness revolution came after Skinner. You couldn’t talk about consciousness at all. You couldn’t even bring it up out loud.

Christof Koch was one of the first people to stand up and talk about it publicly. He could do it because he partnered with Francis Crick, who had discovered DNA. You couldn’t mess with Crick, so that was the wedge issue into consciousness.

We literally spent 6 years trying to prove that spirituality was good for you just so we could get funding to do the basic research we wanted to do: meditation is good for you, flow is good for you, and psychedelics are useful tools for treating different conditions.

Do you remember the movie Altered States?

Sure.

I loved that movie. It was based on John C. Lilly, who did sensory-deprivation experiments.

I don’t know the full story, but I want to. John C. Lilly nearly drowned doing that. His wife had to revive him at one point because it didn’t go well.

I’d love to do that.

We’ll put straps in place. We need minders, but yes, we’re going to get a float tank and try ketamine in it.

Would you do ketamine in a float tank?

That’s what John C. Lilly was doing. Altered States was actually based on ketamine. The reason is probably duration. DMT might produce a more interesting experience, but it’s very fast. With an IV push of ketamine, you can get 90 minutes of weirdness.

You were the first person ever to speak to me about DMT. You told me about people going on a DMT journey and encountering aliens.

That was Rick Strassman’s original work at the University of New Mexico. He used continuous intravenous DMT.

Was this the God molecule?

It was the God molecule—I read—no, the God molecule was VMAT2.

VMAT2 was the God Gene.

No, maybe the God molecule is DMT. VMAT2 is the God Gene.

VMAT2 was the God Gene.

Dean Hamer, who was at the NIH, found VMAT2, a gene that codes for norepinephrine, dopamine, and, I believe, serotonin. I may have the third one wrong.

They’re all molecules that show up in your system during spiritual experiences, mystical experiences, and flow states. There’s a specific gene, so he called it the God Gene.

People with the VMAT2 gene are more likely to have spiritual experiences because they produce more dopamine, norepinephrine, and possibly serotonin. They have higher baseline neurochemical levels and deeper spiritual, mystical, and altered-state experiences.

The Spirit Molecule was Rick Strassman’s work. The alien experiences were interesting. People in a hospital setting weren’t encountering the machine elves and other beings that are standard in the DMT literature. They were seeing gray aliens and having experiments performed on them. It was a horrific experience.

That tells you everything you need to know about set and setting.

Set and setting matter a lot.

I want to go into cognitive biases for a moment, and then work into your most recent work. We wrote about this, and you introduced me to cognitive biases when we started writing Abundance in 2010.

The brain is deluged by information, and our ability to process it is through a very thin straw. Our brains evolved heuristics, or shortcuts. There’s a familiarity bias. Common sense is essentially an example of this.

Common sense is what we call it when it works.

When it works, it’s common sense. When it doesn’t, it was confirmation bias or recency bias.

There are hundreds of these terms. If you go to Wikipedia, there are probably 500 or 600 of them. The important thing is that these are heuristics for processing a tremendous amount of information very quickly and making an intelligent decision.

If it works, we call it common sense. When it doesn’t work, we blame confirmation bias, recency bias, or something else.

There’s a recency bias. You hear our conversation now, and we say something that contradicts something you heard a month or a year ago. You’re likely to believe what you’re hearing now.

There’s a familiarity bias. When someone looks like you, dresses like you, and speaks like you, you tend to give that person higher value.

There’s also the negativity bias—the cable-news effect. You value negative information far more than positive information.

These biases are dangerous because they can trick you into making really stupid decisions.

Racism and misogyny are essentially examples of the same kind of information-processing problem. The point I want to emphasize is that you don’t have to be a victim of your brain.

You have these biases, but you can train them down significantly. One of the best uses of AI right now is to ask, “Help me see past my biases. What am I not looking at?”

I can’t wait for AI to be in your body, around you, and with you all the time. If we think about Jarvis as an example, it becomes your constant coach.

You’ll eventually be able to say, “Jarvis, turn on cognitive-bias alert.” It will have heard everything you’ve ever seen and be able to point out what you’re missing.

I think people will give their AI permission to read all their emails and listen to all their conversations.

One of the biggest problems with the AI systems right now is that their memories aren’t very good.

We’ve gotten to long-context memory. We’re there now.

You’ll hear a piece of data and start making a decision, and your AI will say, “Your cognitive biases are driving you in this direction, but you heard this, this, and this. Let’s talk about it.”

That’s why I’m training people. I’m training creativity with AI so creatives aren’t scared. These are the tools and some of the powerful capabilities available.

It’s easy to get under the hood of ChatGPT and tune it. Almost nobody does that, but it’s a simple dashboard with a lot of power, especially for these kinds of things.

Framing is also important. Frames are local. Mindsets are more durational. Framing is the moment-by-moment process of building an abundance mindset.

You build it by reframing constantly, on a moment-by-moment basis.

Eventually, when it becomes more unconscious, we call it a mindset. When it becomes deeply embedded, it becomes a bias. We don’t have a word for positive biases, but that’s essentially what it becomes.

Here’s a simple example: when you’re looking for a parking spot and have to park 3 blocks away, you can be angry about it, or you can reframe it as free exercise and part of your 10,000 steps.

That judo move is powerful. Here’s a crazy experiment from Harvard. They wanted to know what was more effective against anxiety: mindfulness, breathwork, or reframing.

Anxiety, curiosity, and excitement involve the same neurochemical—norepinephrine. A little is curiosity, a little more is excitement, and too much is anxiety. None is boredom.

It’s a spectrum. A lot of people don’t realize that when you feel anxiety, it’s much easier to turn anxiety into excitement than it is to eliminate anxiety.

The Harvard experiment had people say, “I’m excited” 3 times out loud. It was more effective than 7 minutes of breathwork and meditation at reducing stress levels.

That’s wild.

It also revealed something about culture and gender. The women in the study who were over 40 had no idea what excitement felt like, because they had been taught not to get too excited or feel too much emotion.

They had repressed excitement so much that they didn’t recognize it. There had to be training to separate anxiety from excitement and recognize that it’s okay to be excited.

Let’s turn to flow and your work. The Flow Research Collective has really grown. You’ve trained tens of thousands of people and worked with some of the biggest companies, including Google.

Can you speak to that a little bit?

I can’t speak about Google because I think I signed an NDA.

What do you do when you’re training these entrepreneurs?

You can get very elaborate about it, but as far as flow training is concerned, I always say there are 5 or 6 peak-performance basics. This is the stuff we know.

You have to sleep 7 or 8 hours a night. Flow is a high-energy state, so you need sleep.

Do you sleep 7 or 8 hours?

I usually sleep 7 or 7.5 hours.

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

I go to sleep somewhere between 8:00 and 9:00, and I wake up somewhere between 3:00 and 4:00.

That’s barely 7 hours.

It’s about 7 to 7.5 hours.

Did you always go to sleep at that time, or did that change?

No, but I always woke up early. I think that’s an important point. I wrote about it in the longevity guidebook. The only way to maintain a sleep schedule is to control when you go to sleep, because your body is likely to wake up at the same time.

But when I was in college, graduate school, and medical school, I would do my best work at 1:00 or 2:00 a.m., and it switched.

Yeah, it flipped for me.

Yeah, mine did. I was probably the same thing, though. I was also good in the morning. I'm good late at night, too.

There's a gap in between. One of the things I always tell people—and this is really important—is that it's hard in the modern work environment because there are extreme larks. You and I are extreme larks; we get up early, and that's when our brains are most awake and alert. Most people are on the normal work schedule. Most people's brains start to wake up around 8:00, and their peak concentration is between 9:00 and 10:30.

Then there are night owls. I'm married to a night owl, so it's really fun.

What time does Joy go to sleep?

If she's working on a book, she'll start writing at 4:00 in the afternoon and go until 4:00 in the morning. She'll go to sleep when I'm waking up.

Yeah, which is complicated.

I'll leave it at that: complicated. You can't fight your circadian rhythms. You want to try to work in accordance with your circadian rhythms, and the people who get screwed in the modern world are the night owls. The world isn't built for them at all.

You have to tune your nervous system every day. I always tell people, if you have 5 minutes, do a gratitude list. If you have 6 minutes, read a novel. If you have 7 to 11 minutes, do breathwork. From 11 to 15 or so, go for a walk in nature. If you've got 20 or 40 minutes, get some exercise or take a long sauna.

We have a full list of ways to reboot your nervous system and reboot your brain. Everybody wants to say, "I'm too busy," and I tell people that it depends on your anxiety level. If you worked at the Flow Research Collective during COVID, we were a high-performance organization training people in high performance, and I wanted my team at their best. But it was COVID, and everybody was scared, especially in the beginning.

I said, "Look, if you're going to keep your job at the Flow Research Collective, you have to do 3 of these a day—minimum, 3 things to tune up your nervous system a day," because everybody was so stressed. I was making sure of it. You have to do that every day.

Yeah. Ariana Huffington will be at Abundance 360 this March, along with you. She'll be speaking about the work she's doing to help employees with these small micro-nudges throughout the day, including gratitude.

Yeah, so there's a bunch of that stuff. To answer your question, there are 28 known flow triggers, or preconditions, that lead to more flow. There are 12 on the individual side and 16 or so on the group-flow side. There's a lot of overlap between the triggers, but what do I train people in? These are the 28 flow triggers.

The only other thing that really matters is that flow isn't binary. It's not that I'm in the zone or I'm out of the zone. It's actually a 4-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. Some of the stages are very unflow-like. This is where I am; this is where I have to go next; this is where I have to go next.

Do you actually think about that?

Oh, yeah. You think about, "This is where I am, and this is where I have to go next," all the time.

Flow is a 4-stage cycle. On the front end of a flow state is a struggle phase, which is conscious. 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. You still have to onboard that stuff consciously, and that's the struggle phase. You're throwing it onto a piece of paper.

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 and you've overloaded it. Work that came out of the University of Michigan—Kounios's lab—found that the more frustrated you get when you're overloading your brain, the closer you are to an actual solution and flow. Frustration is actually really good in that situation. It feels really bad, but it needs to be followed by a release activity.

A release activity is a low-grade physical activity. That works best to take your mind off the problem. When I say low-grade, I don't mean go get a hard workout. A walk in nature, done right, works really well.

The way my schedule works is that I wake up at 4:00, start writing, and write until 7:38. If you and I talk, we usually talk at 7:38 in the morning. I'll write from 4:00 a.m. to 7:38, and the minute I'm done writing, I take my dog for a hike. Why? If I'm in struggle, I want to follow it with release.

If I was in flow while I was writing, flow is a high-energy state, so it has a built-in recovery period. You have to recover on the back end. A walk in nature is a phenomenal recovery activity. It's also a phenomenal release activity.

Ultimately, especially with top performers, flow is how everybody performs at their best. This is how humans are hardwired. This is what optimal performance looks like. If you're in the top 20% or top 30% of your field, you've been good at this anyway. I'm not going to come in and totally reboot your life.

What my goal is, if I do my job right, is to find 2 or 3 things that you should start doing, 2 or 3 things you should stop doing, and 2 or 3 things that I want to rearrange in your schedule. You'll be doing the right thing, but probably at the wrong time for your neurology.

This is what's so great about what we've learned over the past 20 years. This is what The Art of Impossible is about: We have a complete map of cognitive peak performance in the brain now. We know what it is, and we know the order of the sequence. The data is getting really robust for training these things.

I want to mention something that you taught me years ago, which I want to pass along to everybody listening. The greatest writers in the world complete a single finished page per day—about a page a day.

I've thought about that a thousand times, too. That was the unlocking.

Let me tell you the story. It's amazing. I was in graduate school at Johns Hopkins, and I got to study under Stephen Dixon. He's a name a lot of people don't know, but he was a very distinguished writer who won the National Book Award and had done a lot of things. At the time—I don't know if it's still true—he was the most published fiction author in history.

Chekhov had held the record before him at around 250 works. Stephen had published 650 short stories, novels, and books. It was massive productivity. On top of that, he taught at Hopkins, so he wasn't writing full-time. He was teaching, and he had a very, very sick wife. She was in a wheelchair and needed a tremendous amount of care.

I remember thinking, "How the hell is this guy so productive? He's got a full-time job, he's got a really sick wife, and he's not rich, so he doesn't have full-time care. How is he doing the work?" I asked him, and he said, "It's really simple. I write a page a day, and I edit what I wrote the day before. If you do that 365 days a year, you've written a book."

I was like, "Oh, okay." From that point on, I write 500 words a day when I'm starting a book, which is a little over a page. I'll bump it up to 700 or 800 words in the middle because it's easier and you know more what you're doing. At the end of the book, it's about 1,000 words a day.

I've published 16 books. This was a bunch of years ago, but they tried to add up something like 5 million published words, and there was an equal amount of unpublished words. That's the formula.

I love that, and I think about it. When I wake up in the morning, when my mind is the clearest and I've got the most energy, the first thing I do when I wake up—and I typically wake up before my alarm—is a gratitude practice. I thank the universe for the amazing day ahead and for what I can do in this world.

Then I focus on what I'm excited about today. What's the big thing? This morning, it was spending this time with you, having an awesome conversation, and sharing your wisdom with the world. Those are the golden hours, the earliest hours.

Let me ask you this question: Do you find that when you're working on a book, waking up, writing, and focusing on that, you're happier throughout the day than if you're not?

Probably, because I feel like I've made a significant accomplishment. I'm an accomplishment junkie, and when I feel like I've won the day in the first 2 hours, that's huge.

The other thing I think is equally important, and people don't realize it, is that I like to go from bed to desk in under 5 minutes. The reason is that when you wake up—if we're talking about networks and brain waves—flow takes place on the border between alpha and theta. Alpha is daydreaming mode; theta is REM sleep or focus.

That alpha-theta borderline is where the aha moment takes place. It always takes place inside a gamma wave, and gamma is coupled to theta. If the brain can't get to theta, you can't have an aha insight. One of the reasons you have more aha insights in flow is because it puts you on the edge of that theta state. You're on the edge of an aha insight, ready to have a breakthrough.

You wake up in alpha. Your brain wakes up in alpha, and as soon as it gets awake, alert, and excited, that's high beta. It's hard to move back down to theta; it's a much slower wave. But if you go from bed to desk and immediately drop into flow, focus your attention, start working on something, and get sucked in, it's easier to drop into flow that way.

I find it's not just that I'm goal-oriented. I used to think it was just the goal stuff—I'm very goal-oriented, and if I win my day, that's huge—but it's also that if I tame my brain right out of the gate, teach it to focus, and don't let it run wild, I whip that brain.

No, I mean, to me, it's the 2 together. If I can be a little creative in the writing, that's the recipe for a perfect day.

Amazing. Amazing.

You have done an amazing job. I'll call it your moonshot: putting flow into the world's conversation.

I will say that we are now writing the textbook—my chief science officer, another neuroscientist, and myself—for the field of applied performance neuroscience. That's essentially the field that you, me, and a bunch of other people have created. There were no conversations around this. None of it existed.

To me, the moonshot was always to put flow science, or flow research, on a hard-science footing. I wanted to bring it into the realm of neurobiology and make it really, really real. I didn't actually realize I was going to end up inventing a field. That was a weird one.

It wasn't just me. It was a bunch of us who were thinking about altered states of consciousness as tools for performance.

I want to go back to the psychophysics paper, because here's a weird one for mindset, but this is also our field. This isn't a flow study; it was a mindset study. We wanted to know what the brains of people who love exercise look like versus the brains of people who hate exercise.

We discovered that people who love exercise literally process exercise, and all the information associated with it, in a totally different part of the brain than people who don't like exercise.

I shifted myself.

Well, that was the point I was trying to make. It turns out it works like a mindset, and you can shift it.

You can. We looked at that, and I linked exercise to longevity.

Mm-hmm. What shifted for you? You were always active, but I remember back in 2007 or 2008, when I came to L.A. and we went for runs on the beach. This is different now. You're in the gym with weights 5 days a week.

It's part of who I am. You establish this is who I am, and I'm this because of that. I'm going to win that arm wrestle. We're going to continue that arm wrestle for the rest of our lives.

The longevity mindset—you've done such a spectacular job with it. I remember I was at a Joe Polish event, I think it was his 100K event, and Dan Sullivan was there. He was talking about living to, I think, 154.

154.

Yes, 154. Is that right? I was like, "This is Peter. This is Peter rotting Dan's brain."

No, but the longevity mindset is really interesting. I'm curious to see if there's actual neurobiology underneath it. I'd be curious to know whether it works as a frame or whether it's actually producing information. But let's talk about your next project, The Alliance. I want to hear about it. What is it offering, and why are you excited about it?

At a high level, let me start at the beginning, because you asked me this question earlier and I didn't answer it. We train gazillions of people at this point, including people at the top tech companies around the world—Meta, Accenture, Audi, Google, Bain Capital, and on and on—and tens of thousands of people at those events.

Predominantly, they're knowledge workers. If you're at any of those companies, you're a high-performing knowledge worker. Then I have another class, which is more of a passion class: I've done Flow for Writers once a year for 10 years. I train writers in how to use flow to write better, and you took the private version, right?

What I started to notice—more accidentally than anything else—was that if we got super-creatives in Zero to Dangerous, it didn't work quite as well. It worked, but it wasn't the same kind of explosion we would get with normal people. If I had knowledge workers and Flow writers, it didn't work as well.

It started me thinking about how the creative brain is different, and how you train peak performance in creatives versus non-creatives is actually almost exactly backward. That was the first insight: How you train creatives is different.

The second insight was that I think of myself, first and foremost, as a creative. Most of the people I know in the world are creatives. You could be a creative entrepreneur, a creative scientist, a creative technologist, a creative innovator, or a creative artist, but they're all in this category.

I started to realize that both myself and almost every friend I had were facing the same overlapping challenges. There were about 5 overlapping challenges, and I was incredibly well-suited to help people with some of them.

One of the biggest differences between creatives and other people—knowledge workers—is really important. For knowledge workers, flow is essentially a luxury. It's great to have: You'll be way more productive, have more meaning in your life, be happier, and have less illness. But you're not going to get fired if you can't get into flow. You won't lose your job for that.

For top creatives, if you're a creative entrepreneur running a company, an artist writing a book, or doing any of that stuff, if you can't get into flow, you can't do your job at all. Period. Full stop.

I thought that was interesting. The Alliance is an 8-month combination of a 21st-century think tank and a mastermind for the super-creative core.

This is an 8-month program that you put people through. Is it all digital on Zoom, or—

No, this is the exact opposite. It's not even inside the Flow Research Collective, because it's literally the exact opposite of everything the Flow Research Collective was created to do, which was high-ticket digital training for predominantly knowledge workers.

This involves live events. People have been wanting to spend more time hanging out with me for years. I've heard this, and I'm an introvert, so I have to do it with super-creatives. This is rare for us, unfortunately.

There are 3 live events. You kick off with a 2-day live training, there's a 2-day live training in the middle, and then there's a close. There are also 6-week training cycles. I kick each one off with a 2-hour content window, and then that's over Zoom.

What's the size of the group?

100 people, specifically for a reason. One, there's a certain amount of cross-training and cross-pollination of ideas that's amazing. The second reason is that I always say you want that cross-pollination with creatives.

The example I always give people is actually you. We've gone back so far that my friend Peter helped unlock the space frontier. It was a crazy idea, and then it was a breakthrough. We're always talking about how, the day before a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea.

You had a legitimate, true crazy idea. A lot of the action-sports athletes I knew back in the 1990s were also doing impossible things. My friends were actually people who were pulling off the impossible.

By the time the XPRIZE was won—it was 8 years later, and the writing was on the wall that private space was real—Jeff had already founded Blue Origin, Richard was there, and you were saying, "This is real."

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 the human species. I came into the world with this warped expectation for what I could do because my friends were the same way.

That's a cross-pollination that's not really just ideas. It's a cross-pollination of aspirations, and you can't really get that without a group of 100 people.

I've been involved in helping birth 5 or 6 major subcultures. I was in Seattle at the birth of the grunge movement. I was in San Francisco at the birth of the internet. I was in Cleveland and Chicago and Illinois at the birth of industrial music, when that whole movement started. I was in Santa Fe at the beginning of the New Age.

These were huge, culture-shifting communities, but at the center, every time, it was about 100 people. That's a really important point. It's not giant, and even if you're looking at something like the internet, cryptocurrencies, or Bitcoin, all of these things started with a very small group of radical thinkers who gravitated together.

I call them benign conspiracies.

I didn't want to go too big because I wanted it to be intimate, but I didn't want it to be too small because I wanted that vibrancy and cross-pollination of ideas. I also wanted people to understand that the lone creative inventor doesn't really exist.

Creativity is a cooperative sport. Even if you're a writer and think, "There's nothing more I'm going to do alone," you don't do it alone. I've got an editor I work with twice a week. I've got people at the publishing house I'm going to work with, and then there's the marketing team, the PR team, and the social media team.

These are collective, collaborative efforts. All creative projects are like that. I wanted to lift up the super-creative core, solve a bunch of these challenges, and train them in flow. I'll talk about some of the other human stuff, but the 100 people were for the cross-pollination of ideas and to get enough people in every category that there would always be 1 or 2 people in each category.

Give me some category examples.

Let's talk about the faculty, for example. My faculty at this point stretches from Jody Levy, who is the head of Summit Series and a great experienced designer, to Ivy Ross, who is the head of design at Google. She's a hardware designer and a tech designer. Then there's Scott Barry Kaufman, who's the world's leading expert on creativity and transpersonal psychology.

You've got 3 very different disciplines there. We have musicians, AI people, filmmakers, writers, tons of different entrepreneurs and tech entrepreneurs, and 17 or 20 different disciplines.

But the thing I really want to talk about, because this is what creatives immediately understand, is that creativity is so lonely. You're a weirdo to begin with. You came up weird, took whatever made you weird, and turned it into your profession. You honed it.

Another word for "world's leading expert" is "nobody around to talk to about the stuff you care about the most." Think about the early days of space, when you and I were first meeting to talk about the XPRIZE. You could take that conversation almost anywhere, and people would just laugh at you. You couldn't have that conversation with anybody except the people who could do it.

I started to realize that every creative I knew wasn't just isolated by the job, although the jobs are isolating. You spend a lot of time alone, and you're very much in your head. You could be in a room filled with people, but if you're part of the super-creative core, you could be totally lost in your thoughts and walled off from everybody.

Everybody I knew—literally everybody I knew—had this deep loneliness underneath everything. Loneliness impacts creativity and intelligence.

It sounds like The Alliance is an incubator, or maybe a studio of some type.

It's a combination of a writer's studio, an artist's studio, and an incubator. It's all those things.

It's training creatives in flow and in the neurobiology of creativity. A lot of the stuff we're talking about—these are tools you can use. I'm training them 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. This is what hangs up so many creatives. It could be the dream company I want to start, the book I want to finish, or the movie I want to make. Everybody has that thing.

You and I are both so goal-oriented. When you have an unfinished masterpiece hanging over you, it's like an albatross.

It is.

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

It keeps you accountable, but creatives get derailed in a couple of places. That's part of the reason for the 100 people.

I always tell this to writers, and you know this: Writing the book is only halfway through the process of putting that book into the world. You've just spent 5 years and you think you've run the marathon, and then you get to this point and realize, "Oh, it's a triathlon. I've got 2 more of these."

Then comes the editing, which is going to be a year-long process of polishing, and then you've got the launch. If you're interested in writing a book, one of the things to realize is that your publisher does almost nothing for you. Nothing.

They don't.

The reason I have a personal editor is that immediate feedback is a flow trigger. I always tell companies that if you're running a company with quarterly reviews or annual reviews, you're driving your employees out of flow.

I realized that even when I had the best editors I've ever had at publishing houses—and those editors often don't exist anymore—if they read one of my books 3 times along the way, that's huge. If I can get 3 readings of a book, that's huge. I need feedback almost daily, and definitely a couple of times a week.

ChatGPT makes it a little easier. I don't like it to write my copy, but it's really good at saying nice things. I'll ask, "How's this version?" and it will say, "This version is excellent. It's strong for this reason." I do that all the time.

It's an ego boost.

It's an ego boost. I wanted to train up their brains so the actual creative portion of it was solid, but I also noticed how many people have finished a book but can't get through the editing. Or they've gotten through the editing but have no clue how to publish it, how to promote it, or how to build a marketing campaign.

I thought that if I could get enough people in there, there would be a couple of people in every seat around that process. You wouldn't get as derailed.

When's the first Alliance?

We're going to launch in June. I think you're going to break the news to the world because we haven't even told—

But you've started bringing people in.

We've started bringing people in. We're building it, and I'm so excited.

I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday who's one of those guys with a B in front of his name—for billions. I was talking to him about it, and—

A B in front of his bank account.

A B in front of his bank account. He was like, "Are you kidding? You're going to—"

What usually happens when I talk to creatives is the funniest thing in the world. I say, "I'm going to train you in flow," and they light up. Then I usually talk about loneliness, and everybody's done. They're like, "I'm in. Sign me up."

He was like, "Are you freaking kidding? I probably lose $5 million a year to loneliness—to the days when I'm not at my best because I'm dealing with emotional stuff." He obviously makes a lot of money, so he's dealing in bigger sums than most people, but I was like, "Jesus Christ."

He said, "Forget about this thing paying for itself. That's only one of your features." I sort of think about it that way myself.

Let me put it in a different context. This is definitely true of artists, and I don't know if it's as true of entrepreneurs, but I think it is because every book I write about entrepreneurship talks about the emotional hell of entrepreneurship.

I just read The Secrets of Sand Hill Road, which is old—I want to say it was from the early 2000s—and it has a whole chapter on the insanity, emotional upheaval, and loneliness of entrepreneurship. This is at least 25 years old, but I talk about it with creatives and they're instantly like, "Oh, my God. We're going to solve that. Please do."

Do people come in on their own, or do they bring a team with them?

It depends. We've seen both. Some of the bigger organizations are using it as an education program for their staff. They'll say, "I've got art directors, designers, publicists, scientists, and people in all these different roles."

The Alliance costs around $330,000, and that's a lot if you don't control your income. But if I train you in creativity, you're going to make at least 133% more. We know that from this kind of work. What if you can't afford that?

Big companies are coming in and saying, "We have a budget. We're going to call this continuing education, and we're going to send 6 of our top team members."

It makes a ton of sense. You're training up your most critical asset in creativity, which is a skill that, at least for the next 10 to 15 years, until the AI gets—

We don't know, but I'm more optimistic than you are, by the way. This is the first time in history when I'm more optimistic than Peter. I'm usually the bastard who has to ground our books in reality because Peter's the wild-eyed boy from Freecloud.

Well, I'm optimistic about AI crushing our creativity.

Oh, brother. I love you. I love you. It's so fun.

Yeah, you know, I love the fact that when you text me in the morning and say, “Are you ready for a reading with Steven?” that's one of my favorite moments. I also get to just say this out loud, because one of the things that I think is really amazing is that this happened to both of us a couple of years ago: We woke up and were like, “Holy—we've been friends for almost 3 decades.” This is really, really, really special.

We've gotten very tender with how we treat each other. When we first came together, it was just the war of ideas over every sentence. I've had to talk you into books.

Yes, you have.

Yeah. Our first book, Abundance—I tried to write a book with you about space first, which was a failed attempt.

Failed attempt.

And then Abundance—I mean, you didn't have to talk me into Abundance because I was looking at the environmental side of it.

No, you were like, “I have other things I'm working on.”

Well, no. I was working on Richard Granger at Dartmouth. He's a neuroscientist, and we were going to co-write a book. I'm really glad we didn't. I would have gotten my ass kicked. I wasn't smart enough yet; I hadn't educated myself enough. There were 3 other projects, and you came in.

No, you were the lowest-ranking one in the beginning, but you rapidly climbed up there.

But it was really when you presented the ideas to me. I'd been looking at it. Obviously, I'd been a tech and science writer for 20 years at that point, so it wasn't that I was ignorant about it. But you were really sweeping. I care about plants, animals, and ecosystems, 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, focused on the XPRIZE—using technology to help humanity, right?

So when you came in, I thought, “Holy crap, we've got half of the puzzle.” You had the good overarching tech framework. I had a little bit of the science and the psychology and the cognitive—all that stuff. It was really an incredibly fortuitous partnership, because each of us had components of this that we absolutely had to bring together.

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

Oh, longer. I think you've been working on this one for 2 to 3 years. Are you happy we were doing it?

I'm so happy. This book is so fun. As I said, it's not only because it's you. You have to understand, though, it's still me.

I mean, in the new book—just so people know—in Abundance, we made the argument that exponential technology gives us the chance to raise global standards of living forever, for every man, woman, and child on the planet. And, man, were there naysayers, right? That was the hardest argument to make out loud.

I mean, Christ—you opened TED, and that guy who followed you, right? They couldn't even put you on the TED stage and let you talk. They had to have a counterargument immediately afterward, right?

And now it's 15 years later. The most astounding thing to me is how much basic standards of living have gone up and up. The data is sort of astounding.

It is shocking, and nobody realizes it.

Nobody realizes it. We are the frog boiling in the proverbial water.

Yeah, it's the craziest.

Just so folks know, this is a book that will come out in 2026, probably at Abundance360 in March 2026.

In all seriousness, good luck on Flow Alliance and the Alliance. I know it is something that can level up people in extraordinary fashion.

Thank you, sir.

I love our conversations, and I'm excited to see you again. We're going to see each other in 2 weeks.

All right.

And as I end every conversation every morning: I love you, buddy.

I love you, buddy.