How to Become the Best Version of Yourself | Steven Kotler on Conversations with Tom

hey everybody welcome to another episode of conversations with tom i have another three-peat guest on today which i'm very excited about when you have that kind of history with somebody it's way more fun stephen cutler welcome to the show tom it's great to see you again dude for real um first of all somehow i missed or maybe this happened since last we spoke but i can't imagine you've been twice nominated for a pulitzer prize uh that none of that happened yeah that's happened along the way small furry prayer and stealing fire were both nominated by the publishers for the pulitzer that's crazy congratulations amazing um the new book which i'm super stoked on and honestly um never have i read a book that so lined up with my personal experience where i thought oh my god yes like somebody's putting words and science to this thing that feels so perfectly aligned with what i have experienced the book being the art of impossible in it you talk about something that really lit me on fire which is this notion of the habit of inferiority and i want to start there and then we'll get into sort of what you mean by impossible and all that stuff totally totally but the habit the habit of inferiority all right so i wish i i wish you would have known it was coming because the habit of inferiority is a quote from harvard psychologist william james and it was it's either in the very first psychological textbook ever written 1901 or uh something he wrote right around then so this is turn of the century and what he was talking about at the time was the fact that most people have second winds right we have a first one you get tired you pushed or you got a second when you said but most of us have no idea we've got a third wind and a fourth wind and a fifth win because we never get used to even pushing into that second wind let alone beyond and he said the reason is that human beings one way or another are designed to work at much greater speed and with much greater efficiency but we've gotten in the habit of inferiority right we are we've gotten used to performing at a mediocre level and that's what we expect and for geeky reasons that we can cover in a second if you want to there's a lot of neurobiology that basically says your body is a homostation static system and when you level set it mediocre it is going to take extraordinary amounts of motivation energy to get up to like super expert right you have to train you have to fight how you train and train how you fight to quote the army and that was the point james was making but he's also making hey we're all hardwired for extraordinary if we can get out of the habit of impurity so that's another thing in the book that um it comes towards the very very end i think it was the quote of the final chapter and it resonated with me in the same way that this early concept of how we all habituate ourselves to inferiority was the nietzsche quote of today is greatness possible um what does that quote mean to you because when i it hit me and i was like oh my god and then i thought actually i'm not sure if he means it the way that i'm taking it which is like asking yourself that every day to like be charged up and get after it but so yes and no so little context around nietzsche that's in the book nietzsche was the is considered the first modern high performance philosopher or thinker and the reason when i say modern what i mean is he did his work right after darwin wrote the origin of species so suddenly oh wow body evolves over time shaped by evolution and blah blah and if you want to understand how to kind of improve the body or understand the body you need to understand evolution nietzsche said and it was one of a whole bunch of thinkers who were like hey wait a minute mind evolves consciousness evolves for those of us interested in getting more out of her life he was interested in becoming the uber match right the superman he thought it was in all within all of us i tend to agree james tended to agree the big difference nietzsche said hey only 10 of the population should try this james said no no um very good point maybe true today doubtful his point was and this was from nietzsche through about the humanist psychologist so like young sort of thought this way and then you get into like carl rogers and maslow and that's sort of the line so in the 30s and 40s it starts to shift but the general thinking was nobody really blunt mommy and culture way too much and most of us this remember 18th century victorian era right and freud especially was like the way to mommy the way to family the weight of all that psychosis you're inheriting and the weight of these really repressive cultures if you don't like ever all of them said you have to break with this stuff completely um i think that's probably still true today to some level you have to become your own person and autonomy really matters for peak performance etc etc but i don't think culture is nearly as restrictive but all that also depends where you were born what you look like what kind of money you have etc etc so wait he was saying that you're so weighed down by this stuff that you won't be able to break out of it so don't even bother and by the way no he was saying that most people are not going to be able to pull it off um he had a formula like as i laid out nietzsche had a four-step process that has not really changed he was trying to follow the biology to becoming the superman yeah to becoming the superman and as you said when you read the book you went oh my god it's all the stuff the reason is all this stuff is we are all biologically shaped by evolution we are all designed for peak performance there's a limited set of tools there there's a lot of them obviously but they're limited they're meant to work in an order in a sequence and that like nietzsche anybody's ever done this when they read the art of impossible at any level right you should read and go oh wow there's a bunch of stuff that's familiar to me because i'm doing it i didn't know all this other stuff was around it to people who haven't really gone after super high heart goals it may be completely new to them and wow there's a blueprint who knew but for folks who have gone hard they should have your experience of oh my god i didn't like here's all the science here's here's everything in order i did all this [ __ ] of course you did there's we all have the same biology to work with that that's what i want to talk about so i've never read nietzsche and forgive me i'm sure i'm mispronouncing it but it always feels weird to when you hear somebody say it to then just immediately adopt their way of saying it um so what is how did he define a superman like i think of superman the guy in tights with the cape flying literally who's right over my shoulder no so all these people were interested in what abraham maslow started terming self-actualization they were interested in becoming the very best version of yourself that was possible right and for nietzsche all that was much of that was about like creative self-expression also so when he talks about being the best version of yourself he's sort of like you're excellent in a kind of innovative genius kind of way and the quote i love from nietzsche is man is something to be overcome what have you done today to overcome him what did he mean by that like your weaker inferior nature well as a so the point we've been making all along is the only thing peak performance can be is figuring out how to get your biology to work for you rather than against you but when you're not working with your biology it will actually work against you right and it really will like you know sort of crush you one way or another and i'll give you a simple example we can go into a lot of detail but there are eight major known causes of depression two of them are the very familiar ones one of them is genetics right i don't have i can't manufacture serotonin and dopamine take your pick and the other is trauma obviously the other six are literally about what happens when you screw up your intrinsic motivation what happened right when you're not when you're not living with passion purpose regular access to flow all of the things that essentially the article is possible are about the tools that i've worked breaking down when you use them right the result is superman when you use them wrong or don't use them at all if you're not using the organism the way the organism is designed to be used the result is anxiety and depression and we're in the middle of the largest anxiety and depression kind of epidemic in the history of the world so there's it strikes me that there's a correlation here that's interesting so um i want to push on this idea of of man is to be overcome and what have you done today to overcome him so if man is sort of the baseline biology and i have to understand that i'm having this biological experience i've got to work with my biology instead of against it let me give you a simple example let's get out of the theoretical simple example yeah so one of the things peak perf so let's back up and what when we're talking about tools for peak performance simplest most powerful tool we have is our attention is focus focus actually takes quite a bit of energy what like if you think about i got to pay attention to something i'm not totally interested in you're burning a lot of calories the brain is two percent of your body mass 25 percent of your energy at rest so when you're expending energy right big energy hog the brain always wants to conserve energy this is why when i said oh there were homeostatic creatures and we get stuck in mediocrity it's this problem the brain wants to conserve energy it doesn't want to burn extra energy if it doesn't have to because trying to keep you alive makes sense um there are a lot of our intrinsic motivators give us focus for free when you're curious about something you get focused for free when you're passionate about something think about romantic love when you fall in love with somebody how much attention you pay to that person that like that neurochemically is the same neural chemicals underneath any passion right passion of entrepreneurship the passion doing a podcast special for writing a book all of it's the same cocktail fear is a great one fear is a fantastic focusing mechanism peak performers and you i know do this i do this when you're looking for a new challenge you're like well what the hell scares me a lot because i know i'm going to pay a lot of attention to it and you go in that direction you can't do that until you've laid in some other peak performance skills but once you get good enough to use fear as a compass basically you get a tremendous amount of work done that everybody else has to spend energy on for free simply because you've learned to like process you know handle the fear and you can trust your ability to step up to the challenge etc etc all those kinds of things you're getting tons of work done for free so when it works what are you getting for fear focus for free when it doesn't work what are you getting anxiety and depression one of the largest epidemics on earth does that help yeah yeah for sure so going to the core concept of the book which definitely feels like a companion piece to some of the earlier things you've written especially the rise of superman you know coming to understand just how far human potential is out there um and the early thing that you talked about you know that fourth and fifth wind um that's the thing that david goggins said that always resonated with me when you just think you're broke and you're spent your your second wind is dead and gone you couldn't possibly go anymore you're only 40 of the way to your actual abilities and i that just always hit me so hard reading the book one i love that you go into the process and make it seem like hey you can get better at all of these different steps but there was one thing in the beginning that i found really interesting and that is that you called it the art of impossible and not the science of impossible even though you go ham on the science in the book i'm guessing or maybe not but i'm guessing that you at one point considered that sort of alternate take on the title why'd you ultimately focus the reader on the art of this all it's a great question and despite the fact that every single thing i did in you know i'm crazy about evidence-based performance right like you know at the flow research collective we're training about a thousand people a month at this point you know uh between it's i've trained i think at this point over a hundred thousand people so there's a tremendous amount besides the narrows how to get well you can't flow comes with peak performance right so like all that stuff together that's a lot of data points is my point and so almost everything in the book is based on that but a couple of things that are true no matter what one for example flow triggers you want more flow there are flow triggers there's 22 to work with which triggers you're going to master and going to be most useful for you that comes down to your genetics and your early childhood experience those things play a major role so i i can say these are the this is the suite this is the tool kit figuring out which one works exactly perfectly for you and they may change over time that's an art that's a self-awareness that you're gonna have to carry into the world that's not something i can say tom it's exactly what you do it's based on the evidence and so i got my staff like i'm trained as a hardcore investigative journalist from a time when we had crazy crazy fact checkers so like i have five sources for every you know fact i i try to put in the book everything's been checked with five other you know what i mean and i'm just nuts about it and this scientific method i work with some of the smartest neuroscientists in the world and they won't work with me if i'm not super crazy rigorous and i start spouting nonsense in public right my company goes away so like everything is super i try to tighten it down as pos but i can't tell you that everything in the book is completely evidence-based 90 of his evidence-based but there's a section for example on long-haul creativity what does it take to sustain creativity at a really high level over a long career there's very little research done on that in the real world i have spent 10 years investigating experts about it and i summed it up and gave you the best stuff i thought in the book that's still my opinion and so i couldn't call it the science of impossible because even though it's probably 85 there there's 15 that it's not i don't think it's truthful and the other side of it is there's an art to it you have to bring your own i can't train you in self-awareness right i can train you in self-awareness a little bit but you actually have to bring that in into the work um yourself and that self-awareness is an art form you know the create learning how to be create creative for example is another one like i could tell you that one of the easiest ways to be creative and you know this is to develop a personal style i'm not saying go high fashion or i'm saying style is a choice make a choice right if you're choosing to work at microsoft and wear khakis at a button down because you blend in it makes you a better manager that's a choice that's cool you're being a ninja i like it right but like when you're not making those choices on a moment by moment basis you're not trading up creativity i can tell you that as a fact the next step in how to do that in your life i'm now getting into my opinions and i try like i try to differentiate and i couldn't yeah so that's me being a geek and like just an a reporter and like a guy trying to like work in neuroscience um and be credible and respectable and things like that but that's really why there was something else in the book that um i thought might be part of the answer certainly rhymes with what you were just saying which is this concept of personality doesn't scale biology scales what did you mean by that what the long story or the short um i'll take the long one what whatever is is most here's the here this is cause this is a lesson i learned the super hard way and also i'll go i'll go in the middle but i did not have a normal life by any stretch of the imagination i was a working magician by the time i was 10 years old i was doing bar mitzvahs in weddings i was working in restaurants at 11 years old doing birthday parties all saturday and all sunday and magicians are strange weird people that are like one step out of the circus and they're con men and jewel thieves and right and i went from being a magician to being a punk rocker and hanging out with bikers and more weird dangerous kind of people and then i went into covering action sports especially in the early days where like the people i knew once a month nearly died this was just how people lived their lives and i covered science mostly that in that era field biologist i was an animal geek the field biologist you want to go to africa and hang out with lemurs you got to hang out with field biologists and you think the actions professional action sport athletes are dangerous and crazy and like i remember being in madagascar i got caught in a lightning storm once and while running through the mountains back to this jungle camp and i got back there and particularly the macarthur genius award-winning primatologist conversation conservation there's a dear friend of mine was there and she's like did you get struck by lightning i was like what do you mean did i get struck she's like yeah it happens there was this guy from harvard he got struck twice on the way back once and i was like the people literally like i'm hanging out with people who routinely like they get struck by lightning twice and still make it back to camp right and this is just like another day so my point is my risk tolerances were totally out of whack i had like grown up in incredibly high risk crazy environments and i started learning something about peak performance and flow and look when anybody learns a little bit about peak performance about flow all that stuff you make the same mistake you start giving advice especially those people you care about and love and you you're like oh my god i see so much potential in you if you only just write and because i had was publishing books and i was writing columns for psychology today and like i had some street cred they took my advice and one person nearly died two people one guy put himself in the hospital one woman almost put herself in the hospital almost caused a divorce two friends still won't talk to me and i don't blame them um the point is that personality doesn't scale things that are foundational to peak performance what your risk tolerances are these are genetically hardwired by dopamine receptors and availability of the neurochemical dopamine and they're shaped by early childhood experience you can change them over long periods of time like a decade you cannot flip a switch and do it overnight no matter how hard you try and it's really dangerous to do it it's not just that where you are in the introversion extroversion scale same thing so there's about 10 critical things to be performance that are biologically or biologically hardwired and set up by early childhood experience that should create your personality that have huge impacts on how you should study and learn peak performance there's another reason why it's an art and not a science and this is the same answer the point is personality doesn't scale so many people in the coaching peak performance world they figure out works for them they teach to other people and they get disastrous results people can't do it it's not actual or they try to get it and they get bad it's for this very reason we have a foundational idea at the flurries of collective and in this book fluid research collective is my company that studies this stuff um biology scales because because it's the very thing that evolution designed to work for everyone so you find the foundation and when i say biology i really mean the neurobio biology what's going on your brain and your body when you're performing at your very best figure out what that core basic mechanism is and you and train from that if you try to train from personality or from psychology people forget that when you use a term for example like mindset if i say mindset you probably think i mean attitude towards life when scientists say mindset they mean a very specific thing that happens in the brain and it does not mean attitude towards life there's a whole other thing that we could talk about that is attitude towards life they mean a very specific set of things that are going on in the brain that we may or may not completely understand yet but psychology is a metaphor for neurobiology neurobiology is mechanism it's not it's not mechanism we understand a hundred percent but it's damn we understand it well enough to be practical so that's what i mean by that and if you can get down to the mechanism we are all designed for peak performance we're hardwired for it by evolution so that's the biology that's what i mean by getting your biology to work for you rather than against you and by the way again not a new idea to go back to william james 1901 this isn't the first psychological textbook ever written he says the great thing then in all education is to make your nervous system your ally and not your enemy and nervous system is the brain well let's uh you why do we start where the book starts right and the because this is you know my whole thing is like hey let's follow biology the biology starts someplace as i said all like focus and attention is the gateway to all performance right you have two big levers you've got focus and attention and then you've got habit right and the things you focus your attention on repeatedly and the actions you start executing as a result those become your habits those are your big lepers right so if i said earlier the goal is to get focused for free you have to start with your big intrinsic or internal motivators i always say that you have to start with motivation because motivation is what gets you into the game um and you when you're interested in that you really now there's a certain amount of safety and security stuff that um sort of you have to be able to pay your bills and have a little left over right before this stuff starts working if you're below that line you have to solve that problem first this isn't a hundred percent of the time but as a general rule um meaning like maslow's pyramid is not a real thing it's not really a pyramid but he wasn't particularly wrong about that for biological reasons if you're not if you have too much anxiety and fear i can't make a living i can't pay my bills how am i going to eat this stuff is really hard so i'm not i'm assuming that stuff is taken care of that stuff is taken care of right and you just a little bit over uh like my book my bills are being paid is you're fine you can start there the place you want to start is curiosity because it's the simplest motivational fuel curiosity neurochemically is a little bit of the neurochemical norepinephrine this is you know if you get a lot of it it's anxiety whoa i'm paying too much attention to this [ __ ] a little of it is excitement a little bit primes your brain for learning you're interested you know what's going to happen next kind of thing and you get dopamine dopamine is talked about as a reward chemical a pleasure chemical cell phone dings you know you gotta that's dopamine that pleasure but it's basically a it's a focusing chemical but it also gets us up for the fight it's a get it gets you ready to take risks or you know encounter the world or step up that's what dopeman's all about is curiosity inborn or can you do things you can totally cultivate curiosity over time and the way you literally i mean it's not that hard you literally have to notice anything that catches your attention and give it a couple extra explore it for one extra beat just start following your curiosity and the way the next step is you have to turn curiosity into passion and the point is really simple curiosity is a great motivator right when you're interested and curious about something just think about any tv show you kind of oh my god i didn't know they did ice fishing on mars look at that honey right like you're paying a little bit of attention um and you're not working at it passion is the next step passion is literally the intersection of multiple curiosities most people don't realize this because when they when i say tom tell me about a passionate athlete you're like well here's lebron james windmills dunking scowling you know over three defenders and that's what you think of and you forget that passion on the front end is like a little kid in a driveway shooting balls through a hoop that's what passion looks like on the front end does not look like what we think it looks like and when we compare ourselves to the end result that's really demotivating and not going to work very well but pat curiosity and there's i mean i can i will i can give you listeners passionrecipe.com which is the step process in the book for this i'm giving it away to anybody for free so don't just listen to me go there you know we have a interactive pdf takes you through all these steps but you can there's the intersection of multiple curiosities that's passion neurochemically it's more dopamine and more uh nor epinephrine just a lot more the next step is once you know what you're passionate about you want purpose you want us to attach that passion to a cross greater than yourself there's lots of peak performance reasons why but at an aerocable colombo you start getting more feel-good powerful drugs oxytocin endorphins right blah blah and then once you have your purpose well then what do you need you need the freedom to pursue your purpose you need autonomy that's your next big intrinsic motivator and once you have oh i've got i've got the freedom to explore my purpose you need mastery the skills to explore that purpose well these are the big five intrinsic motivators they're others right um but these are the big main five they give us the most neurochemical reward and they're literally designed to work in that sequence and if you get them all right they all do double duties as flow triggers so flow state of optimal performance we can go into more depth if you want but let's for optimal performance right now flow follows focus it only shows up when all of our attention is in the right here right now so all of flo's triggers drive attention into the now they do this by increasing mostly focusing chemicals like norepinephrine and dopamine do a couple other things but that's not important the point is all these things curiosity passion purpose autonomy mastery they're all flow triggers on their own you'll get a little bit of like neurochemicals maybe not enough to put you in the state but when you get them all in a row you're doing your work and it's flow 60 70 80 of the time and since the uptick on performance and flow is so enormous so huge that not only i mean along the way anytime you have any of these things you're getting so much more work done for free right you're getting farther faster and by the way once you get all your intrinsic motivators right lined up you know exactly i've got skills for mastery cool what do you do next you need goals where the hell am i going and the biology says you need three sets of goals a mission statement for your life a series of high hard goals like i want to be a great writer it's my mission statement i want to write a book on cooking i want to write a book on anime i want to write a book on batman i want to write a book right okay i'm just kaiser so zagging you sorry um but uh yeah so you know those are your high hard goals and then underneath that you need clear goals what am i going to do today precisely and then it goes on from there my point is that's a system that's the biology and when i say like you need three levels of goals we are goal-directed creatures we have a giant like we're either sort of shaped by our fears or our goals if you want to like that's that's sort of what drive how human beings work at a really basic level so the biology of goal setting is amazing like you get your high hard goals right you can get an 11 to 25 boost in motivation simply by setting the right kind of goals and that's if you need you're working an eight-hour day that's your baseline that's like two free hours of work give give people the idea around what a high hard goal is a higher goal is exactly what i said if my mission statement purpose is i want to be a great writer or i want to end world hunger let's say i want to end world hunger then my high heart goals is i want to become a vertical farming expert i want to learn everything i can about restorative sustainable agriculture isn't part of the definition though that it needs to be like within your reach but hard so that you want something not right out of the mission statement right mission statement goal that's a big high hard goals should be within your reach but they should be like one to five year timelines within your reach is how i think about them different people sort of put different time horizons on them um what this research shows is one to five years i find personally with the rate of change in society and all the other work i do with peter and all that stuff i find i can't set high hard goals that are farther than three years in the future because so much is changing that so i that's the window that i i have started working in recently um but again you also have to figure out what's right for you in that one i think um and yes but it's got to be attainable and the whole point is um you have to break them down if it's not if you can't wrap your head around and believe it's attainable break it into chunks until the chunks are attainable right and those are your high hard goals part of what i find so intoxicating about your work and just like the space of peak performance is you know going back to where we started so most people are living a really sort of shitty version of what their life could be they're not pushing themselves they're not setting high hard goals they're not making big demands of themselves they're never finding out what they're actually capable of doing and so look i get it personality doesn't scale but so my obsession is with what i call the physics of being human what you would refer to as the biology there are just some things that are true they are universal and i will postulate that doing hard things is universal that there is some wiring in you to make sure that you went out and hunted and faced getting gored by something raising kids like you've got to be willing to do hard [ __ ] yeah no i mean like when i say like when i literally we are hardwired to go big and not going big is bad for us like flat out and we all know this if there's i always say this at the beginning of the book and i really believe this is true um i think the only thing harder than trying to is the then the sort of the agony of trying to chase down your dreams is the agony of not chasing down any of them it is so much work i kind of figure it's it's the way if i was being darker or more blunt or more punk rock i would say look it sucks here it sucks here for everybody it doesn't matter it's called life it's just hard here it's unpleasant it's gonna be unpleasant but it's going to suck whether or not you're trying to be jesus gandhi martin luther king or you sit in front of the tv and watch reruns of castle right this is what makes it suck mr cop i don't even think it's i don't think it sucks i just think there's like a i just think it's heart it is i think life itself you said the agony of chasing your goals yeah i mean like tom you've done really hard [ __ ] in your life the joy of life is doing hard [ __ ] the joy of life is realizing that oh my god what i mean by meaning and purpose and and then when and we all know this think back on your life and what are my favorite things that i've ever done that mean the matter they're never [ __ ] that you were given that accidentally popped into your life that this stuff you worked really hard for right like that for me that list like my marriage i've been married for 15 years being married for 15 years it's hard freaking work you know what i mean and really that's a dif that's a difficult kind of one in the book i talk about the difference between capital i and small i impossible marriages are small i impossible to get right right it's there's no clear gap bit point between a and b and statistically right now pretty shitty odds of success right marriage right now you're 50 um odds of success and that's that's that they're a little better than a lot of the other impossibles but yeah the notion of not going after big things is hard for you really i resonate with that a lot i think though that you're right that pursuing that stuff there is an agony to it there's also an ecstasy and the ability to vacillate to ride the waves of like [ __ ] this really sucks and i just failed at something and it mattered and it doesn't have to be a broken bone but it's like you know i really went after something and you've got the high of that and then you know like take your own context some of what you've written has been nominated for pulitzer prize like that's insanity but then i'm sure there were other books where you were banging your head against the wall um and they didn't go where you wanted them to go and so or just like a shitty review there are books that were nominated for pulitzer prizes that like one of the books that got nominated for the public surprise is the hardest thing i've ever done and every every word shocked yeah i mean literally i've never had that experience i didn't know you could have that experience i had that experience um now what did it suck because it was forcing you to confront your sort of limitations that it was like everything was just it uh i had it was uh i was co-writing the book with somebody that was very difficult to work with i had an editor that did not trust the subject matter at all like the book was nominated for a pulitzer by the publisher but one month before it came out the editor called me up without my co-writer on the phone and said if you don't rewrite this entire book right now i won't publish it whoa yeah like it was heavy they hated it they thought it was wrong they were scared by the subject matter blah blah blah how did you deal with that can we talk about what book i mean there's only so many books you've written that have been nominated yeah so yeah all right we'll look that up afterwards but i want to i want to better understand that too much but it was the problem but so we'll make it about you i want to know how you deal with that how do you deal how do you stay like confident because this is something everybody can relate to you believed in something you've put the effort in the energy but then external forces are like no no it's crap and in that moment most people break no no no so i so one i've written a bunch of books and i've gotten i come out of when i come out of the school of journal i'm a journalist and i that's why i was trained and editors are the most merciless mean people you've ever they they're super overworked they have narcissistic lunatic bosses often um who uh start magazines and they have incredibly high standards and no time and they are they say some of the example i once spent three four months living in a swamp in the everglades reporting a story where the only place to get food was a really dark evil strip club in the middle of the swamp that like it was the only place you could get food and i was out there for three months reporting this story i wrote it i turned it in um my editor called me up and uh the editor is by the way a very good friend of mine and still to this day called he's like steven by the way it took me three months to report the story and five months or six months to write it so i'm nine months in and um and i'm desperate for the money by the way at this point i'm really poor and i need to get paid this story is going on editor calls me up and he's like stephen there's just one thing i don't understand and i'm thinking oh my god i'm so damn good like one thing cool what do you got man hit me he's like yeah man every [ __ ] word you wrote and no [ __ ] no kidding and uh like start over and so what i've learned all along is the following it's a general rule if you think the person you're talking to has an opinion that is at all of merit if you think they're you know and i think most people's general are are fairly smart especially willing to give them the benefit of doubt on a lot of this stuff so what i always say is usually when somebody tells you something is shitty the thing they're telling you is shitty like what they're pointing at they're probably wrong about but the fact that it is creating this something's wrong and it's making them you trust that shitty feeling you don't trust why they think it's shitty is what i've learned so um when the editor came to me and said reread it she wasn't wrong we were it was a very hard book besides the fact that we were butting heads and we had just different ideas about where it should go and how it should go it was trying to do a lot of things i was trying to write um i always try to write about my head but this one was i was writing farther above my head meaning the fact density in a normal book of mine is one to two facts per sentence or paragraph this was like sometimes three to four facts a sentence that's a harder thing to do right and not lose your readers not bore people so it's technically challenging and we had not taken it to the level of it was all there at but it wasn't fun yet and that's actually like often the final thing you have to do you have to get it all there in the right order and it still doesn't sing and then you do one final massive polish that is usually you think you've got a 10 polish and you've got like a 40 polish and it's herculean and impossible and you you know it's awful but that's what it needs and when you do it you're like oh crap this is right like this is right and um we got it right i mean it it worked and um the editor has yet to apologize by the way i like i was we were nominated for a bullet so it's an international bestseller you'd think i'm gonna be like hey i was sorry about that maybe i was wrong but yeah people definitely have a hard time with that um do you have like uh i only take books where i'm really confident in the subject matter or because you know it's so easy to be swayed by external forces when you don't have a strong sense of what something is and writing is such a sort of naked art form where you're really putting yourself out there to get to get knocked around and i'm just wondering you know for if you think of a sort of beginning writer listening to this what is how do you create that stability of the idea to weather the storms where you can go okay cool there's a problem they're probably wrong about how to fix it but i know what this idea is i have the confidence to to keep going and i'll further contextualize this you've often said that in the beginning you may only get three to five hundred words a day but by the end when you've really found the book you're at like 1400 words a day so obviously there's a phase where the idea is quite delicate and like maybe you haven't quite found it what advice you have for people that you know they're creating something artistically and it is very possible that other people will knock them off what they're trying to do um so i mean the really long answer to that question is found in flow for writers which is the whole right the class i built about this so there's no short answer but i'll give you some stuff that we talk about in the art of impossible that applies to the creativity in general and definitely book writing that's some high percentage probably over 50 of writer's block of any kind of creative block is you don't know your starts and your endings earlier i said we are goal directed machines i'm not like that's not a figure of speech the brain has a built-in pattern recognition system it links ideas together automatically if you give it a place to start and you know where you're going if you can pay attention you will get like it will find all the steps in between goal setting is both about driving motivation and filtering reality our goals filter our reality when you don't have goal set property you will not notice the op the opportunities won't like you literally won't see them for neurobiological reasons we can go into um but it works the same with creativity right you've got to know where you're going think about like the simple example the one that everybody can kind of get is we've all ridden a bike when you ride a bike you don't really steer for where you are you look 30 feet ahead right mountain bikers are taught to look 30 feet down the trailer when your mom taught you how to ride a bike look in front of you don't look down at your tires right because we get we're literally as biological beings built to go where we look right if you've ever surfed and tried to surf a tube you cannot surf a tube everything is moving way too fast you have to look yourself through the tube you pull into that wave you peg your eyes to the end of a hole and that's how you get there when you walk a balance beam or a slack line you put your eyes on the end of the thing and that's how you get there you can't actually steer consciously we steer with visually by where we go this is why visualization as a performance technique actually works same same system these are all parts of the same system and knowing your ending so my point on this is i have an outline i um i have a general belief that i am not all that special meaning if i'm really interested in something bunch of other people probably are too that's just my general thesis is like if i find this interesting i'm not all that special a bunch of other people are too so i if i can accurately communicate what it is that i find so damn fascinating and i'm willing to give 10 years of my life to it i think there's a whole bunch of other people will go oh yeah that's cool i want to i'll read about that you know what i'm in so that's the my modus operand i trust my instincts and i've had the advantage of i've had been having instincts like that in public for decades i would pitch editors five ideas at a time they would say four sucks do this one right and over and over and over and over again so i've you know i've gotten i trust i trust at this point you know what i mean at a certain point when you move transition from being a journalist to being a book writer you just sort of have to go okay i god i hope people like my words because like i'm trying to turn words into money that's the sort of the job you know what i mean like we can make it all fancy and call it art and all but like at a really basic level i'm turning words into money and that only works if i is if i write compelling interesting words and at a certain point you have to just trust it there's something that you in there about the notion of turning words into money that reminded me of what we were talking about right before we started rolling which is this idea that your early 20s is this utterly fascinating period in your life and i think what i'm cueing off of is is sort of how you end up in that position where you're turning words into money um and you were talking about antimatter a sort of visual arts collective that you were a part of or started um in your early 20s and living in like a super dicey area in san francisco what is it about those sort of early formative years um i i think they're incredibly important to the artist somebody that will will become i don't know maybe you don't think that or maybe you do but do you think anything is special about that period and if so what is it uh i don't know if anything is more like there's something special about that period there's really something special about your 30s and your 40 i mean like there's adult development sort of follows up right a a set set of patterns but i do think you're right in that um i was around a lot of people who um you had to be a little bit of a dreamer i was around like artists and entrepreneurs essentially and both are you know people who are sorted chasing the impossible a little bit and by the way action sport athletes who suddenly decided they were going to try to get paid for action sports like nobody in the history of the world had ever gotten paid as an action sport athlete right they didn't have sponsors we weren't even like full-fledged members of society right skateboarding was a crime and like you know what i mean like people forget how punk rock that stuff really was but it was it was not really you know surf bombs ski bombs these were not you know it changed after the x games and the grabby games and people started to get sponsors but i was part of the generation that sort of solved that puzzle and figured that out so you all the people around me were sort of like betting on themselves against really impossible odds and often in the face of culture and society to get back to the nietzsche idea we started with right um that's what really i think that's one of the things that shaped me is you know as i said my level of risk tolerance but my level of like what's possible in this life i always say that like i was living in and around [ __ ] valley in the early 90s i was 22 23 like after anti-matter right and coming out of that period when i was living at the largest performance in video house and people were getting famous like you know people getting shows at major um galleries and then made museums and things like that so like i was watching people really succeed um but even with the action sport athletes like you have to understand that it's like you go out drinking with your friends on you know it's friday night you go drinking with your friends everybody gets hammered every does the same stupid [ __ ] we all go home and you wake up in the morning and those same friends do something that's never been done before in the history of humanity and for all recorded history we believed was impossible that's a very weird thing right peter diamandis was one of my close friends he wanted to unlock the space frontier and it seemed really possible the first guy who invented the flying uh it was actually a flying motorcycle deja molnar he was a friend i was the first guy who ever saw the blueprints he like barged in my apartment in l.a one time and like spread him out he's like look i've invented a flying motorcycle and you're like what the [ __ ] are you talking you've been better that turns out yeah actually so this was that kind of world and it was it was very hard to figure out where like what's possible where are the limits like we're not supposed to be we're supposed to be punk rockers we're supposed to be dead before we're 30. like that was the crowd we're not supposed to be redefining the limits of human possibility and sort of this was also the 90s so you got to remember that like the weird punk rockers took over music took over magazines like all of a sudden like this really weird group of outsiders um we weren't charged right like nirvana released an album a couple other things happened and you know suddenly you could self-publish you couldn't self-publish but the tools of publishing were no longer a million-dollar tools they were things that people could afford and suddenly you could challenge big major magazines you didn't have to right and i was part of all of that so the possibility space um was really open so the 20s were amazing that way was very hard though is like everybody else the 30s are when reality said it sets in always across the board so like i think one of the big differences between me and almost everybody else i knew is um i just never gave up on that idea like i think everybody a lot of people i knew i watched them making choices and i was like well that's it's cool that you bought that great house but now you've got a mortgage and with a mortgage you're locked into certain decisions or now you're you're married and have a baby and now you're locked into certain decisions and that may be cool but it is also limiting you know peak performance stuff and i mean you know yeah this is getting into why i think the the 20s or the early 20s especially such a magical period you talk in the book really profoundly about creativity and the things that sort of lead to creativity and one of the things you talk about is like the ability to do pattern recognition from sort of oblique angles but that if you want to recognize those patterns you must encounter a lot of patterns so in your early 20s being poor is okay first of all people don't have a lot of the responsibilities they're not tied down by kids they're not tied down by a mortgage and they don't have all the preconceived notions a lot of the things that you think are impossible are things that you learn over time that are impossible because you watch somebody else fall you get hurt you break a bone the world tells you you know that that's not gonna work and in your early 20s you're sort of still in that phase where you haven't given up like you're talking about you don't have the huge responsibilities you haven't broken all the bones yet and so people will in that sort of drinking in the world um to begin to have the patterns that they will recognize later that they'll monetize right like looking back at people in their early 20s they just seem like a chaotic mess like it it is i do not romanticize it right they look like a [ __ ] mess but when i was in it i remember thinking that i was as old as i was ever going to be that i had everything figured out the world just seemed incredibly open oh god somebody there's a quote please tell me you know who said this it's something like when you're young the world is literally infinite you could become anything but then at some point like it starts narrowing down until you are a very specific person well so you know the quote we you started with the habit of inferiority the james quote in the book i say look there's a modern version written by the screenwriter charlie kaufman that opens confessions of a dangerous mind um the movie that george clooney made the chuck berry story which to me is one of the more devastating heartbreaking quotes in the world which is when you're young your potential is infinite you could be anything really you could be einstein you might be dimaggio and then you get to an age when what you might be gives way to what you have been you weren't einstein you weren't anything that's a bad moment now some people hear that and they're like screw you stephen man i'm just trying to be right i'm just trying to get through monday um i don't need to become anything i and okay that's like sure and in that case go read art impossible to make monday easier for you you know what i mean but like i don't believe you honestly like most people came to do something and if they knew there was a blueprint and they knew like you know hey wait this is really within the realm of possibility for me they'd go for it and that's what i think is true well we're speaking of devastating quotes tied to this idea of the world being more infinite when you're young there is a quote that haunts me i think about it not every day but damn it it's close genius is a young man's game and i hate that quote because as a late bloomer i i just don't want it to be true right i want to feel like my best friend i think i think that's totally crack that it's crap and um i can by the way so there's a great book that'll like one book that'll solve your problem go read uh the wisdom paradox by a neuroscientist named alcanon goldberg and funny greatest name ever goldberg he's israeli but now teaches nyu but this is a little before your time i think but like interesting so the book's about what is wisdom but he set out to solve this really weird puzzle reagan when reagan was president his second term but when after his presidency was very clear about i had alzheimer's right and so he was for at least two if not three years was governing the most powerful nation on earth with alzheimer's and so elkanah asked himself how is this even possible like sure people were helping you know what i mean but like he was still in charge and he wanted to know how was this from a biological how is this possible and so he wrote a book about where what's the neurobiology of wisdom and it is and where it comes from and i don't like geniuses they stop when they say jesus you got to give us the punchline of of the wisdom paradox so where does it go from pattern recognition interesting you you i mean you it's if if you can lay in the brain it works by associations right it makes it so so if you can fill it with enough rich connections and associations and habituate them his point with reagan is the guy had habituated so many high level programs that he could execute automatically that literally like he could like oh it's statesman mode time cooling clicking it's just automatic and you've seen this you've been around it's fairly common with certain breed of thought leaders where they've just they've been in front of the microphone too long and they like you ask a question they just slap into like i'm going to give you robo answer right now what i call the loop right the loop so you've seen that um reagan just had more loops and higher level loops than a lot of people because of you know his level of experience that but that was all kanan's point but this is how we all learn and that doesn't change right genius is cumulative and they always like when you actually look at um some of the really good books on creative genius and where it comes from and what do we know and sort of this is tangential to that idea i talked about long-haul creativity so there's a lot of this work that's been done they always point out geniuses have a couple things in common one is they produce an enormous amount of [ __ ] right like just stuff you just produce a lot and seventy percent of it is crap but thirty percent is freaking genius and you know right that's a commonality throughout history shows up everywhere so while quality is there there's also a quantity to it and as you know quantity increases over time what they were talking about though was the calcification of imagination that does occur as you get older and that's that's real for a lot of neurobiological ways but it's also completely defeatable like you don't have to get stuck that way in fact the art of impossible like the stuff on creativity and long-haul creativity is essentially a formula for hey here's how you keep developing your creative problem-solving syllabus don't calcify but you know break that down for me because one that term is magical the calcification of imagination is very evocative how do we avoid that well i mean you know easy way hire a lot of people across a bunch of different ages or work with people from a bunch of different ages and a bunch of different cultures why would that work because what happens as so as we get older um we gain more and more and more expertise on sort of how we like to live how who we are how we like to live and what we know in the world and we take in less new information because we think we have all the right ideas and that's fine there's some great expertise there but you can that's not how imagination requires novelty creativity is a recombinatory process we can go deeper but at a simple level your brain notices something new it finds something old it connects the dots and it bursts something completely novel that's how creativity works and that middle step is pattern recognition right but you've got to feed it something novel so if you're not taking in the novel you've got a problem and if you're getting older and all you the people around you are your age and look like you you have no access to novelty also even made worse by the fact that people stopped reading novels novels are novel like they literally give you somebody else's perspective they're designed to shift your head sideways and say hey man your view of reality might be totally accurate but somebody else is right here they got another view it's totally different and they're they think theirs is totally accurate and i don't know who's right but just so you know right and i like i i read novels for that reason and i also like to have people who are a lot older than me you know working in my company and people who are a lot younger than me working in my company um i i like to surround myself with smart people who disagree with me and you know and i like you know i always say as a journalist you're taught that the best room to be in is the room where you're the dumbest how do you navigate that though so this is the um the abraham lincoln idea of a team of rivals which i'm obsessed with i'm the same as you i want people to disagree but it is not easy to orchestrate that disagreement without it turning into dysfunction so do you have any insights there yeah i i so um let us say that the art of impossible is a book that is very much focused on individual peak performance there is some team stuff in there you're getting into leadership and team questions and i have knowledge i don't necessarily know if i have expertise and i don't mind you popping off i'm just like this is just stuff i man i don't know i mean like i don't like i'll give you a really freaking simple example from the past couple of days my wife who i love to death and is amazing and she like she's doing her job when she says this she's like look man you think you're really funny and you are but you got to be careful because you pay people and the people you're editing with like are they laughing because it's funny or are they laughing because you're paying them and until you know be careful with this stuff because blah blah she's not wrong about that stuff and i was always talking to literally like a bunch of people i'm working on a big project with on my staff about this very thing we're creating content together and i was like look you guys are laughing and i can't tell if you're laughing because this is funny or you're laughing because you think you have to be laughing or you're laughing because you can't believe that stephen would consider doing this he must be out of his [ __ ] mind right like it's one of the three and i was literally talking about his stuff and i was like i don't know which one to trust and i've had my wife wasn't saying anything i wasn't already feeling you know what i mean she was like hey man the reason this is irking you is because of and i mean i like the fact i think i work with some of the greatest people in the world who are my friends but it doesn't change the fact that like 60 people work for me and you know i'm excited that they get to do what they've always wanted to do for a living and i can sort of make help make that happen but it's a fair point and i don't know how that's a difficult challenge for me to solve i'm not sure what the answer is to that particular one is my is my answer that's as honest i could i can be because i really don't like this is live and learn when it comes to like team management stuff right and leadership stuff for me yeah it's i mean i think it's live and learn for everybody that's in the middle of it but whenever you own a company it's like well you have to do something you've got to be making decisions every day and getting people to talk to power is brutally difficult it's one of the things that i actively hire for i'm looking for people yeah just in the interview process i mean i like to hire ex-journalists for a lot of different reasons i personally believe that if you can write a 10 000 word article you have most of the skills you need to succeed in business and almost everything else i can teach you depending on where where i need to push you because there's so much that sort of comes baked into that particular one but journalists have some of that stuff built in as well like they are i was paid a i was an old punk rocker right b i was a magician and like magicians i was around the best in the world like literally like you'd hang out a magic store and the biggest names in the world the guys who were on broadway or in vegas we're making millions of dollars at it would come in and stand around and do card tricks with the 13 year old 12 year old kids like that how long did you stay practicing i started working when i was 10 and i sort of started to phase out around the time i was 17 because i started to realize that honestly to be great at magic and i don't like to do anything that i can't be great at you have to like lying to people ultimately you have to like that you like conning people or fooling people like that has to be part of the thrill for you getting over in that way and that's actually not a thrill for me like it wasn't natural and it was too i i was you know i didn't it turns out that i like i liked part of the equation it was the same reason like i played around kind of a lot of theater it did a lot more theater than most people ever do but again it wasn't like it wasn't the right fit for me i ended up you know in a performance in art video gallery because i thought maybe performance art would work and it didn't like it turns out like when i wrote my first book and got up on stage and started talking about like the ideas that i was actually interested in writing about that was the right fit and i was like oh this one fits i can do this thing those other things work quite right even though the urges were pointing in the same direction the fit was wrong what was some of the like craziest performance art that either you did or you've seen done though hard to say i mean i was so like yeah this is the same crowd that created burning i mean the survival research labs shows like the one that was under the bay bridge where they like afterwards i don't even think they're allowed to perform in california anymore i think like um you got to remember that like long before they were robo wars or birding man or any of that stuff there was this group of crazy artists led by a guy named mark pauline um who had nine fingers because he blew one off in a crazy accident doing building they would build like sonic death cannons out of jet engines that fired sonic air and they would build 90 foot flame throwers and hundred foot robots that would do battle underneath the bay bridge there was literally three places in the world they could perform and you had to sign waivers and take your life in your hands to you can look up survival research labs online but like they were huge these were a lot of the people who ended up building burning man all the art cars and all that stuff same this is the dna this is where it came from and they were all sort of like mad rocket science geniuses um coming sort of out of southern california orange county rocket science aerospace world and like started to use that knowledge to do things like build surfboards and then what do they do in their free time they build death robots that you know what i mean that was sort of the culture but like if you look early action sports was a lot of crossover out of the aerospace community where do you think those materials came from for surfboards and skis and like so there was this weird you know and this was all san francisco so there was a lot of proto silicon valley early v this was the world world of early vr with jared lenair and though you know that was that that kind of world um so survival research labs i saw scosie fetish which was mini survival research labs they played in our living room or at antimatter which was like having their opponent no they were uh they were a they were a noise band that played things like chainsaws and oil drums and destroying a car with a sledgehammer um and maybe a little guitar um et cetera et cetera while they had death robots fighting it out on stage with them um gwar came out of this whole same scene if you've ever heard of the metal band of war but this noise band is well outside of anything that i've experienced with i don't believe that because there's a there's actually crossover with like early anime like there's some of the stuff you're into it's coming coming out out of japan crossed into some of the early noise industrial i mean this was nine inch nails came out of this sit like later on in this progression marilyn manson is a couple like same lenny is just a bunch of steps down those guys i dig but there's definitely melodies and things i'm far more drawn to the ones that sound like songs and not the ones that sound like a piece of equipment breaking by i have to tell you the spectacle was amazing the spectacle was astounding there were people i knew who who like would listen to it as if it was like music or something like i was like this dude is like torturing live animals is what it sounds like and that's not like i don't want to listen i want to watch it because the spectacle is amazing and i can't like there was really amazing creativity in it like it sounds like but it was really well done and well orchestrated and thought out and interesting um at the time also like when you're 18 19 20 21 22 um and you haven't seen as much spectacle and in the world before like you gotta also remember i didn't grow up in a world with the internet i didn't grow up in the world with i was grabbing cleveland before there was cable tv there you know what i mean we had three channels new york culture would sort of arrive in cleveland like eight months late or eight months before it was like bands would show up show up to play where i grew up in cleveland um i saw everybody in like these you two would come to play a giant you know american tour and they would come to cleveland first because like who cares is freaking cleveland so we'll warm up there we'll screw it all up and then we'll go to the rest of the world so we either got culture like a couple years later where we got bad culture like early because people wanted to test the market that's hilarious when i think about some of the sort of ultra-creative out-of-the-box thinkers that you're describing here people that make big battle robots before it's a thing people that are turning chainsaws and flamethrowers into music ish it reminds me of the part in the book where you actually say actually maybe what you need is to think inside the box you put forward some counter-intuitive ideas around you know what creativity is and how to hack creativity um how do we hack creativity yeah we you we covered that so i earlier i said know your starts and your endings right it's a form of this there is the reason the blank page is so awful is we're not we're actually built to be creative sort of inside the box it's much better we're much freer for a a lot of ways um the brain just rear with restrictions with free or with restrictions it's easier to be creative but that takes a little while because it gives us the the light at the end of the surf tube to look at and point our eyes at is that like how does that generate freedom it limits the possibility space the possibility space is too big when you can go anywhere it you can literally go anywhere what are my choices how do i pick right when i have i used to you like it's like when i choose to start a chapter i used to get really i care more about the first line than i care about anything because it's where like it's my start and i've got to get it right but i that used to [ __ ] me and then i realized that like no just start like i'll give you a simple example i write in layers my first pass is literally who what where why when who what where i went my second paths are all the sort of like plot points that have to come so who well where does he live and what colors is hair and what is it right like though that kind of [ __ ] and the art gets added on last and i and i do you're talking about when writing fiction or not writing anything anything you've ever read of mine for the past 20 years or so i write in layers and i do that because the limit of the who what where why um is it once it's in place then the art can be free if i try to start with a style and i want to start with the art and the flair and the whatever i am making it i'm locking myself into a position that i don't know if i want to be locked into like if i want to communicate getting what i need to communicate out first before i layer the art in works better for me because the art shackles it completely down to one way i don't know if i'm making any sense there but there's there's a tremendous amount of uh research that basically says you know if i say tom create a funny sketch for me go you got two minutes you're gonna get stuck but if i'm like tom okay i need i need a funny sketch i need uh superman meets wonder woman in a bayou cantina and what's the talk right suddenly you can actually and your brain is already like i can just look at you and i know you've got like one or two superman meets lava and a cantina ideas floating around your head i gave you some pre-existing limits you know how to put these things together in a way that's kind of funny it's automatic-ish your brain is a pattern recognition system and will do that but if you say if i just say dude just be funny be be funny it's gonna be about superheroes you're like what i don't there are so many yeah that's right when people invite me to give talks i'm always you know give me the theme of the event uh have people ask me questions like give me some sort of prompt and you actually quote a jazz musician i forget who in the book is saying you can't impossible off of nothing yeah you can't improv off of nothing and it's he's i think he's totally right yeah that that makes a lot of sense to me it's the same thing as it's the same thing with like so i like think about football is a really great example because for for play football plays last about seven to eight seconds nine seconds um and for the first six seconds or so you have a job to do right bill belichick do your job well that job actually is going to last about six seconds and then if the play is still going it's because either somebody doing something good or the play has broken down and you're freestyling and you've got four seconds to be a creative genius and that's what makes football so challenging is because you have to play color completely with little in the lines for the first half of the play and then be an improvisational genius for the second half of the play and that's a really like that's a really strange thing for people to learn how to do it's really hard and it's also it's a very it's a very flowy game but only if you get enough repetitions and being that it's contact sport it's super violent it's hard right like it's it's got a bunch of really interesting limiting factors that make football a very interesting sort of like i like watching it for like the creative puzzle solving of like they're trying to create lim and what when a coach is creating plays he's creating limits he's saying look this is the play this what we're going to try to do but if it doesn't work i'm setting it up these are the bounds and you freestyle inside of it because if you freestyle outside of it the quarterback is gonna have no freaking clue where to throw the ball but i'm giving you limits freestyle inside these limits and we can find you kind of thing that's an example that everybody can kind of wrap their head or all the males who like but or all the people who like football um sorry i grew up in a world where women didn't really like football now women like football and i love that that makes me a lot happier yeah no joke uh i want to talk about creativity how we expand it drugs and how it plays in in the book you give an example which of course i thought the punch line would be that drinking messes up your creativity but you actually give an example of there is like a sweet spot right below or at least this is what they tested right below the legal limit and they were able to solve word puzzles faster and with more answers than people who were sober which i was very surprised and how far does that extrapolate so uh with which question you want first do i you want booze or creativity first uh well in the book you were talking about booze as it ties to creativity so what i'm trying to figure out is do you want me to answer the booze question first to the creativity question first go go with creativity okay so um one thing that's worth knowing the part of the brain that finds farther flung associations between ideas appears to be uh the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex don't worry about that's just a fancy name for like this is where it is right in the brain that's what it and what it looks like but i'll ignore that what we know is that when the more anxiety in your system the more logical and linear your brain wants to be and the extreme example that everybody is going to go oh wow i didn't think of it that way it's fight or flight when you're facing a really big challenge your brain says no no no you should not have lots of options you'll die we're going to give you two you can fight or you can run right those are your choices you can actually freeze there's three but like fight freeze and flee is less sexy than fight or flight so people leave it out but like literally that's that's not just at the extreme that's every step along the way so the more fear the more anxiety the less creativity your brain wants logical linear safe solutions the less anxiety the and and and booze uh low they didn't get people drunk they took them right up i think it was right below the legal limit is where they got him a little a little tipsy um is um first of all you get dopamine from booze so that's a feel-good drug so you're in a better mood we know like being in a good mood is one of the best hacks for creativity right for sure and it's this mechanism when you're in a good mood you feel safe and secure so your brain will find farther flung connections between ideas simpler way to do it by the way is look at a wide vista and try to look at the corners of your eyes your brain goes so when you're anxious you focus really intently so when you're looking at your peripheral vision your brain goes oh well focus isn't really intense you must be calm and it actually activates your parasympathetic nervous system it calms you down um so it's a very if you're looking to calm yourself down really fast looking out of your peripheral vision seems to be one way to do it um this is not my work this is dr andrew huberman's work at stanford we do some work with him this is this is stuff incredible dude i love that guy yeah andrew's great um so uh same thing so one booze puts you in a in a better mood and two so dopamine neurochemicals are the brain communicates in two ways right electrical signals chemical signals and um neurochemicals are multi-tools right they do lots of different jobs in the brain dopamine amplifies focus that's one of the things it does it also rewards any behavior that like has a survival value but another thing it does is it tunes signal the noise ratios which is a fancy way of saying it amplifies pattern recognition so when we have dopamine in our system we find more connections between stuff so i'll give you a simple example one of the things that happens we get dopamine from insights if you ever do a sudoku or a crossfit puzzle get an answer right that little rush of pleasure you get that's dopamine you ever notice that you get like three or four answers right in a row it's because dopamine you get a russia dopamine from getting one answer together pattern recognition and then because dopamine amplifies pattern recognition you get a bunch of answers in a row this is why creative ideas spiral well one idea leads to the next at least the next leads to the next right this is the mechanism underneath all of that so um and by the way turn up the dopamine too much you have schizophrenia you start finding patterns where there aren't connections you get concerns that's interesting right so this is peter bruegger's work in switzerland beautiful study crazy study you'll love this took a bunch of uh people who are he called them true believers these are people who believe in conspiracy theories and gods ghosts demons a lot of spiritual right that group then he took a bunch of skeptics and then he took a bunch of faces scrambled some and kept others as real faces so you could get like your nose my eyes and her ears pushed together it looks like a real face but it's not or you get a real face and they started showing them these clusters of people the people who were the conspiracy buffs always saw more real faces where the skeptics said oh no that's fake that's real they redid the experiment and they gave people dopamine they gave the skeptics l-dopa which is a parkinson's drug it increases the amount of domain and some of the skeptics were saying oh no that's a real face that's a real face it's a real face yeah so dopamine this is why also like all that when they give l-dopa to people you can suddenly spontaneously develop gambling addictions yes i've heard about that that's a love of patterns that's about patterns and reward whatever but you can also um this happens fairly frequently people have like second third creative careers like they get on el dopa for parkinson's and they have like this creative flowering because they're saying right so it's a hybrid it's a sort of okay okay okay hold on so why uh everybody's gonna tell you to do psychedelics if you want to increase your creativity i micro dose psilocybin it did [ __ ] all for me it was not interesting in the slightest um why why don't people talk about taking ill delta i'm literally going to get off this call and go find a supplier i mean the thing is first of all there's you can get it naturally um better but you know or i mean if you uh smoke sativa or any uh any of the marijuana's just nothing for me nothing like i'm not saying um you're not your experience is real i'm not doubting your experience this is interesting because like i mean most people i mean i'm not saying it's creativity you can use i hate like tom i'm not a fan of micro dosing and i'm not i wrote stealing fire i i pointed out that yes there's a long history of people using psychedelics for creativity at the flow research collective we are interested in psychological and physiological interventions and not technological or pharmacological and people ask me why all the time and i'm like look i can if i was dramatic i would say well back when i was a journalist on five separate occasions i was shot at and at no point when somebody was shooting at me was i like excuse me sir would you please put that ak-47 down while i put this eg headset on and train my brain waves in alpha so i can dodge your bullets right that [ __ ] doesn't happen or when the boss says hey tom get in here i need the presentation we're gonna do next week i need it now and i need to do it for my boss and her boss and his boss and the future of the world depends on it you don't have time for a substance or the much more familiar example hey honey can i talk to you for a minute right like you don't get to say oh like let me hold on let me get jiggy with all this tech and these substances and then yeah right like that's not how reality works i want tools that can work under any circumstances that are reliable and repeatable and i'm not um to say nothing of the fact that like psychic and i've done more psychedelics than you know we talked about this last time we were on the air i've got a long i did a lot of psychedelics in my 20s um and i'll still do them every now and again for fun um but i like i think drugs are fun i think they can be fun and a good vacation every now and again i don't think they're worth a damn for insight people a lot of people think you can get creativity and insight and i'm not saying other people can't i certainly can't it's never worked that way i've learned one or two things that may or may not be true about the universe and that's what i've learned and i've you know i've taken you know more psychedelics than than most people ever go near um i um and okay interesting you know what i mean but like i went on a giant spiritual quest thinking psychedelics were given the answer and like one i ended up an atheist and two you know what i mean like like i don't know what to tell you but like that was my experience was that was it directly the experience of suicide or sorry not still assignment but psychedelics that made you an atheist it was no i'm not i'm really actually an agnostic um no it was uh i don't um first of all i really dislike psychedelic culture i really like it is it about the culture you don't like so we talked about this in in stealing fire a little bit this is true with flow work this is one of the dangers so at the flow research collective the only swag we have is a t-shirt that says never trust the dopamine and um the reason is and a lot of these drugs amplified dopamine is that psychedelics and these experiences where your ego vanishes with your selflessness there's a rebound effect so the when your ego comes back on it actually comes on bigger and more ferocious and people come back from psychedelics they have visionary experiences and they think they have authority like some kind of spiritual authority some kind of create like i don't like i don't maybe you do but i don't like i i'm not i don't think so i think you're experiencing well well documented meaning like 10 000 years of documentation um ego inflation and a whole bunch of other stuff and you know we tell at the flow research collective i t we teach people like literally if we put you into flows if you can do a flow state don't go shopping pattern recognition is all turned up everything looks good right don't uh and but and by the way there's a lot of like people in the self-help coaching world who think it's perfectly fine to alter people's consciousness and then try to upsell them stuff and i think it's criminal because when you're in flow for example risk-taking is up and long-term planning is down right the flow is great for a lot of stuff it's not great for long-term planning have big dreams in flow verify them in reality right like and this is the same reason the burning man ticket says don't make a life-changing decision for six weeks until after the event right now nearly six weeks after yeah i think it's six weeks maybe it's four weeks but like yeah they i mean they flat out warn you like this is no dangers this is not like you know what like this is these this is because people are having a breakthrough because i would get while you are high but six weeks is a long time so people are having sort of false epiphanies or what they're having false epiphanies they're having like they're falling in love with somebody who's not their significant other that they meet on the playa and they think you know that the peak experience like you have to like if you're having a peak experience that's astounding but you got to sort of verify and validate in the real world for a while i think before you can really trust it this is i teach my my staff this all the time and i think this i this happens in the world it makes me crazy the order is supposed to be insight research publication meaning like have other smart people beat on your ideas then communication right what we have right now in psychedelic culture is insight and communication and there's no research and there's no i did the research here's what i think i'm looking at hey like here's my idea of smart people beat on them for a while and let me hone this and then let me stand on stage and tell you it's true instead like people are going inside and then they're jumping to whatever platform they can and they're talking to you as if it's true that's what i mean by when i say don't like psychedelic culture that to me is nonsense like just because you're having a crazy mystical experience doesn't like doesn't mean you don't have to still go out and validate it as truth um using the same we you know we have truth filters we have there's a whole bunch of stuff in our impossible here's how you evaluate knowledge quickly right you're gonna have to learn you're gonna have to accelerate learning skills and you're gonna need truth filters scientific method is a truth filter investigative journalism the way i was that those are truth filters uh elon musk's first principle thinking that peter and i talk about in in bold these are all how do i evaluate information quickly and things like that when when engineers want to know what are the boundary conditions right what are the limits what they're saying is everything beyond those limits is where the nonsense or the breakthroughs are but it's either or and you just gotta know right i'm not saying don't learn the weird ass [ __ ] but know that this is the line and once you step over this line it's an open question go explore for sure but like there's a line and like you know i was a reporter who specialized in the cutting edge and i that was the hardest thing to always figure out like where's the line in this field where i'm not exactly an expert right i'd go into like genetics and you have to know well this is established truth and this is somebody's wild idea and it may be right it may be wrong but like if you're going to publish it you've got to know where the line is just so you can describe it to most people like hey this is what we know for sure this stuff may or may not be true you can make up your mind here's here's the way to do that um blah blah that i feel is responsible and smart and i don't know that answer your question at all or did i just go off in some other no no you did for sure and uh i think truth filters is a great place to wrap up steven as always man thank you so much for spending the time with me the art of impossible i really enjoyed it like i said i there are precious few books that so line up perfectly with what i have experienced i forget who said it but something along the lines of the if the research doesn't validate what is actually happening then there's a flaw in the research so to see it line up with things that i couldn't put the eloquent words to it that you have or and i certainly didn't have the science behind it but it's so lined up with what life seems like to me um it was very very eye-opening so thank you as always for putting out another amazing piece of work into the world and where can people learn more get the book follow you whatever the case may be yeah all that uh so the book um the art of impossible.com uh is is a place stephencottler.com um is another and we talked about the passion recipe so passion recipe oneword.com that's for everybody listening um as well but the art of impossible.com um is uh it was where you find it amazon barnes and noble support your indies and tom uh once first of all it's an honor that i've gotten to be on your show three times thank you for the interest in the work that i do and and thank you for the work that you do in the world i appreciate it man my pleasure guys speaking of things that you will appreciate if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care [Music] you