 This is Debbie Daschinger, and welcome to Dare to Dream. And I have yet another conversation today that I'm really excited, frankly, just to be present for the fact that you're also here to listen to this is, you know, cream and topping and the cherry and everything else that you get to look in. Somebody I've been fascinated with for a really long time. So welcome to Dare to Dream. This is an award-winning podcast. I am a media visibility expert. I help people to write their book, take their book to a guaranteed international bestseller and learn how to be interviewed successfully on media. I do all of this out in the world. I've been interviewed on 900 media outlets. I've written three international bestsellers, yada yada, grew up in entertainment, and I love it. This is my sweet spot. So I'm thrilled to help you get there too. This podcast basically highlights people, Dare to Dream, right? It highlights people who are really very fierce go-to experts, because they take in ideas, theories, and passions of theirs and put it out in the world. They've created it. They've also hit obstacles just like all of us and had mad success. So I love the cutting edge thought leaders who agree to do these conversations and share their ideas and their dreams. Welcome to Dare to Dream. We are your number one transformation conversation. I have Stephen Kotler here today, and I'll tell you a little bit about him. His work has been translated into over 40 languages, and his work has appeared in over 100 publications, including The New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Wired, Time, and I'm sure we're gonna hear about some more because he just released a new book. And Stephen frequently appears on television and radio and lectures widely on human performance, disruptive technology, and radical innovation. He's a New York Times best-selling author, award-winning journalist, and executive director of the Flow Research Collective. His books include the non-fiction works, Stealing Fire, This Is What Changed My Life, Bold, The Rise of Superman, Abundance, A Small Furry Prayer, which I'm reading right now, West of Jesus, and his new novel, Last Hango in Cyberspace, and The Angle Quickest for Flight. You can find out more about him online at stevencotlerklr.com. And I just wanna thank sponsorship, Dr. Dane Here at drdanehere.com, and accessconsciousnessaccessconsciousness.com, for sponsoring the show. Stephen, welcome to Dare to Dream. It's so good to have you. Thanks for having me. It's good to be here. You know, so I've watched you interviewed before, and I'm experiencing it yet again when you have that reply of thank you. It feels so calm when you're initially engaging with a host, and I'm really curious if you go into a flow state before you're interviewed. No, no, I don't. And by the way, if you would talk to my wife, she would tell you that that calm is not really always there. Okay, well, thanks for saving it for me and for us, for this show. And like all humans, we have a lot going on, but it feels very flow state to me. You always feel like this really calm connection that you start off with. You're a fascinating guy born in Chicago. You went to college and you actually got degrees in English and creative writing. When you started out as a journalist and a writer, did you ever anticipate at that inception that you would end up here, that your pen would actually open doors for you, for your mind, for your passion, to become a voice out in the world, on the stage, in the news, in interviews, for cutting edge technology, futuristic information, and as well as inner ways for optimal living? Was that an arc you anticipated, or is this as much a surprise to you as to anybody else, what this has created for you? There's two parallel answers. Anybody who knows me and has known me a long time will tell you I always sort of knew where I was going. And that sensation, I always say that a lot of times, my career seems to be surprising to everybody, but me, on that front, that said, I was born in Chicago, I grew up in Ohio, outside of Cleveland, so at the time, you have to understand that becoming a writer from Cleveland, Ohio, I might as well have woken up one day and be like, well, tomorrow I'm gonna be an elf. I didn't know any writers, I had no idea how you do this. So the path was totally, completely dark. I had no idea how to go A to B, but I had a pretty strong sense of where I wanted to go. Powerful. The Village Voice said what Kotler is seeking is nothing less than the big explanation. Does that feel like what your path is? It's funny. I mean, yes, of course. What's funny about that particular quote is it took me a really long time to realize that I just thought everybody was spending all their time trying to sell philosophical questions about the world. Like, I just thought that was normal. I didn't actually know that wasn't, so yes, I'm chasing those things, but I had no idea that even at the time The Village Voice said that, which was in West for Jesus came out, it could actually caught my attention and I was like, really? That's what I'm, oh, okay, well, thank you. William Gibson, great site point writer who I loved once said, I love going out on book tour because I get to talk to people and they tell me what I've been up to these past five years. And I always sort of feel that way too, where you don't really see it when you're in it because it's just what you're doing. And usually, at least in my case, and I think of a lot of writers, I always say, people will come up to me and say, thank you so much, your book changed my life. And I always want to be the first person to say, that's not me, that's you, let's be really clear. I was writing this book to save my life. The fact that it happened to work for you, that's fantastic. But that was really, that's about you and not me. I was just trying to save my life. Yeah, I resonate with that. I mean, first of all, I think it's fascinating that somebody can make a comment or review about who you are, what you're doing and actually puts language to what it is you're being out in the world, right? I think it's usually helpful. And I've learned this, I never know what my books are about until I go out into the world. I'm always surprised by what people kind of latch onto and go, this is the thing. And I'm like, really, that's the thing. Not the thing for me, but I see it. It's always interesting. Well, I resonate so much when you're saying, people thank you for changing their life that you've had that kind of influence. And you're saying, no, it was really me. I was trying to say, it makes sense because these are big ideas you take on. And it was so for me, I think it was seven, eight years ago when somebody I went to high school with, big CEO of a company making a bazillion dollars out there was telling me in a phone call, he stopped off at an airport bookstore and found your book Stealing Fire and he was raving. And I would typically not take a book recommendation from him thinking we're in different paths, but there was something that got lit up inside of me when he said that. And I got to get this book, whatever it is. And it was so different than what I had anticipated. And there were so many things I had had judgments about. MDMA and plant and Burning Man and all these things that people out in Silicon Valley and beyond were utilizing to expand their minds and have some kind of personal development and connection experience and growth experience. And I was reading this stuff and I'm not kidding like fireworks were going off. And I actually started feeling very obsessed about having some experiences myself and opening myself up to that. So I feel like your works do that. They take us places that are unexpected and potentially can open our minds to things that we wouldn't normally have considered but they're in a context in which they can be received. Does that make sense? Totally makes sense. It's a nice thing to say. And it's a powerful gift to have. And I'm curious how that is for you. So you take on these projects, you deep dive. You say it's a way for you to save your life and you're a curious guy. The information you get every time you take one of these on, how does it change your life? What kind of shifts happen for you because of your projects, your experiments or your research? That's an interesting question. So for one thing that the high performance work, so four of my books, three to four of my books depending on how you count them and are all about high performance. And those have obviously made it a considerable difference in my life. It, they always say that psychologists are trying to save themselves and you know what I mean, trying to cure themselves. And I think a lot of high performance experts start out really trying to fix their lives and tinker that way. So on that front, the voodoo works, right? I'm an incredibly productive author. I run a couple of companies. I do a lot of things in the world and I couldn't do it without the work I do. It's made me, I think the biggest, the most colossal change is that I love the work so much that I don't, I spend so much of my time alone. And that's really different. I like, I would have, when I started out this career, I would never have assumed that at this point I would spend so, even when I get a day off and I go skiing, most of the time I'm alone. And most of the time I'm off and the tree is on the far away runs where there's no, but you know what, I'm purposefully seeking out solitude in the back country, solitude. That's surprising to me. And the work has shifted that in me. As the work has gotten more fulfilling, I've found myself pulling farther and farther back from the world a little bit. And that's very true. What do you find in that solace that's so appealing to you? Mostly just either the quietude to think or the quietude to not be thinking, right? It's one or the other, right? I'm either actually really with them, I thought, and working something out or I've tried to shut off my prefrontal cortex to induce flow and not have anything there so I can get that reset. So you have a quote which is, I fly, I try to fly to Denver, San Francisco, LaGuardia and San Jose. The airports with the best bookstores room to room to browse. The places I might add with kick-ass sci-fi sections. We'll actually know this segue, but I want you to tell people your latest book, which I recently finished, which is awesome, Page Turner. It's a novel. It's called The Last Hango in Cyberspace, highly recommended, about to be launched. And why did you choose to write a near-term future techno thriller? For years, as you pointed out, I'm a huge, so cyberpunk is a genre of sci-fi that was near-term future science fiction. It started showing up in the 80s and the 90s and was noir based. So they were writing like noir, like real classic noir writers and there was, there's great noir writers. Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler and they do amazing, amazing, amazing things with language, which I loved. And so I fell for noir thrillers, but the near future that were dark and kind of like the movie Blade Runner. And for somebody who was interested in questions like what is future tech? How does this affect culture? And those kinds of questions, it was a genre just made for me. And I loved it, fell in love. And over the years, especially when I'm on airplanes, right? I'm like, I have a rule. I only read when I travel. I don't try to do no other work and I have a rule that for every, I read three non-fiction books and then I have to read a novel. And one of it is, a lot of people stop reading fiction, but fiction is where you get perspective, right? You can get facts from the non-fiction and that's great. And sometimes if you're reading enough, it'll really stretch your perspective, but a novel will do that for you. So I find that that combination of filling up kind of the fact database and then stretching my perspective of the novel really leads to interesting thinking and ways of learning around the world. And whenever I'm reaching for a novel in an airport, I always wanted something cyberpunk. And the cyberpunk guys just stopped writing. William Gibson was putting out great books but every two to three to four to five years, but Neil Stevenson had started writing hard science fiction set elsewhere. And a lot of the other people just sort of dropped out and I was like, God, I am absolutely missing this genre and I'll bet other people are too. And I had a novel in me. You know what I mean? I was trained as a novelist. My first book is a novel. I knew I was gonna come back to it at some point. And I just had this urge to kind of get in and I've been poking at a story for almost 10 years that I just couldn't kind of wrap my head around how to tell and it just sort of snapped together, finally snapped together for me. The result of the last hang-up, which was some of the most fun I've ever had writing. By the way, myself and my editor laughed almost straight through the book. And it's not like, it's funny when I was writing it. I think it's a laugh. I call it a laugh out loud page turner. And my editor was like, are you sure? Cause it's only laugh out loud if you have exactly like my sense of humor. But if you do, I think there's a joke on pretty much every page. I don't think everybody's gonna see that though. That's hilarious. I love that. That was like a cracker jacks moment. There's a little gift inside there. And if you look for it, you can find it on every page. But funny story. So if you angle, my first novel, 10, 12 years after the book comes out, my old college roommate, well, I hadn't talked to him in a while, but a very good friend of mine and was a good friend of mine when I was writing that book, calls me and says, I think I solved it. And I was like, what do you mean? He's like, well, you hit all those riddles and angle, right? And he's like, I think, at that moment, remembered that I hid nine or 10 riddles inside the book that if you solved them and put the answers together, you got some, I have no idea where they are. I just remember, I had totally forgotten I did it. And he calls me up and says, I thought he had the answer. I was like, daddy, I don't even remember doing it. I remember, like, I know you're right, but I have no idea what's actually in the book, which is funny. So Kotler fans, now you have it incumbent on you to do that research. By the way, first novel, not the greatest thing I've ever written before, Warren. Well, last tango is really about the evolution of empathy, which is so interesting that you imbue the book with that factoid, especially considering what the world is like right now. And the book's main character, love his name, Lion Zorn, is an empathy tracker. He's a first of his kind, right? He can see cultural shifts and trends that are just about to happen ahead of time. So why Lion? Why would you highlight a gift-like empathy? And what's the import of him being an emotional oracle? Well, first of all, it gave me, I needed a character who was going to get embroigled. The typical cyberpunk noir character choice is character is embroigled in something so much bigger than they could possibly know. And it was part of it. And I knew I wanted the character to have, so a lot of what I think this book is also about, besides the evolution of empathy, is the way that accelerating technology changes the way the reality feels, like what I call the phenomenological texture of reality. I'll give you a simple example from the term cyberspace itself. Cyberspace was William Gibson's term for the mind space produced by the internet. So if you're old enough and you remember what your life felt like before the internet, it was a lot smaller and closed and the internet comes along. The only thing that actually changes is they put a blue wire in your telephone, right? And it's carrying different data. That's the only thing that actually is physically different. But suddenly you're connected to the world in a way that you've never been connected before and reality felt different. So when Gibson was talking about cyberspace, he called it a shared consensual hallucination. And right, the fabric of reality, the texture of it, changes with the internet. It changes again every time kind of technology accelerates. And I was trying to get at that feeling of dislocation. I was also trying to get at a feeling of, that feeling of technology, it's I'm a punk rock kid from Cleveland, Ohio. I really am. And I find myself on stages in front of audiences all the time going, Jesus, I should not be here. Like if you knew who I was, you would not have let me out on this stage. And I feel that a lot. And that feeling of disassociation of like, this is very similar to what technology, the way I feel about accelerated technology is a similar feeling. It's like you're dislocated in your own life and you can't quite figure out how. That's what I was trying to get at. So with Lyon, I wanted him to be braggled with a big corporation. Cause I've had that feeling myself where you find yourself in rooms having discussions with people. And I found that as a high performance expert where, rise the Superman and stealing fire came out and a lot of military people contacted us. And some were people who were related to the KGB and like really weird, right? Like you get a phone call and somebody wants to talk to you about this idea and you're like, well, who are you? And you start doing a little bit of the homework and you're like, holy crap. I don't. How do you navigate that? I mean, that's pretty big. You pay it, you pay it. I mean, you know, for myself, that's not really, that's not a world I really want to be. I mean, I work with the Navy SEALs and there are versions of that world I'm interested in but foreign military, it's like, that's not a version of the world I'm interested in. And so, you know, we've gotten very, I'm careful with, you know, sort of fact checking references by the way, but that sense of like, I'm not quite sure who I'm talking to and I know you have a lot of power that had a feeling to it. So like, you asked me a question about empathy and things like that. I was trying to get it kind of a felt sense of the world. So wet one, an empathy tracker was a really good way to get at those sensations as a character. And two, it gave me a way to get at the feeling I was trying to get this dislocated, not quite sure where the power dynamics lie and not quite sure what the fabric reality really is anymore and not in a I'm on drugs, fucked up, messed up kind of way, rather like this is a feeling we all have these days where, you know, suddenly you walk into an airport and you're like, wow, this doesn't, is this an airport or a shopping mall or a stadium? Like, where am I? What is this thing? Right, all the signifiers we grew up where I grew up with are gone. They become other things. So trying to sort of locate yourself in this new time and space that shifts so quickly is really one of the things I sort of wanted to poke at. That's so cool. Yeah, you know, Lyon talks about cultural changes and you address towards the end of the book in one of the phone conversations he has with the guy who owns Arctic, interesting character, that Lyon starts explaining co-evolution. Yeah. As a partnership and a collaboration between humans and wolves, I found that so fascinating. I am assuming because of your work with dogs, and thank you for that, is there truth? Is that true? Yeah, so this is, a lot of people, this is, you're reading small furry prayer, so all the science that goes into that idea is actually in small furry prayer. It had, so let me walk you back to the core question that had plagued a lot of biologists, a lot of, basically thinkers for the 20th century was where does altruism come from? Where does empathy come from, right? Once we figured out genes are selfish, altruism became this giant puzzle and there's a hundred-year argument that flows through psychology and sociology, sociobiology and evolutionary theory and all this stuff over the origins of altruism and the same questions about empathy and the way ethologists, people who study animal behavior and more specifically primatologists, people who study primates are closest living relatives. What to ask themselves is our so-called humanity, those are traits like loyalty, empathy, the desire to care for people who are outside your close relatives and kin, things along those lines, kindness, patience, those are not primate traits at all. You will not find like primates with chimps, for example, they will maybe sometimes like share food with their brothers and sisters. Everything else they do in the world is about deception and trickery and meanness and trying to get up on people. Like there is no, none of those traits are in humans. So people who've been trying to figure out for a really long time where the hell did they come from? And a lot of the breakthrough work was done by a phenomenal Hungarian ethologist still alive today, his name is Vilmos Kaciani and brilliant, brilliant, brilliant man. His innovation was very similar to what my wife and I do with our work is he went, well, wait a minute, dogs evolved in big packs. Maybe we should study them in packs. So he literally took over a whole building in this Hungarian university, he teaches that, and he has a pack of dogs that run free throughout the building. People come from go for classes and students come in and out, but there's a pack of dogs that sort of has the run of the building and they're studying them sort of in their natural environment as they are. So a lot of these ideas came from his work, but what he realized is that, so 40, 50,000 years ago, depending on how you date it, humans started co-evolving with wolves. And all this means is we used to create a lot of garbage. Wolves who weren't afraid of humans would come to our camps and start like feeding on the garbage, right? Cleaning up our garbage. The result was we got cleaner camps and better hygiene, right, and less disease, and the wolves got more food. So the wolves that had shorter flight distance, the technical term, which is they're less afraid of humans, right, their friendlier to people would get more food and would come in and pretty soon, they started out being our kind of garbage collectors and then they started being our danger detectors, right? They would bark at danger and they'd live sort of near the camps and they would smell better and see better. And pretty soon they started, they came into our beds and they became part of our families. The phrase three dog night, that is a night so cold, we need three dogs in the bed to stay warm, right? So this partnership changed everybody. And what started out as sort of garbage collecting and then alarms and then cuddle bunnies, we started co-hunting together, right? And this allowed us to track down bigger game and do all kinds of stuff. And it was incredibly evolutionary beneficial for both parties. But because it was so beneficial, we had to learn to live a little bit like wolves, which means wolves, humans are small groups of family, humans, small troops or who you're related to. And suddenly it's bigger. And suddenly you need cross species cooperation, you need collaboration, you need patience, you need empathy, all these skills that are actually found in wolves were not in humans. And the current thinking is that we learn them from wolves. Where did empathy come from? We learned it from wolves. All of our so-called humanity, our traits that we learned from wolves, that's the current thinking on this matter, which is unbelievably strange and interesting and really makes you sort of rethink a lot of things, right? Yes. The shocking idea. And but if there's a lot, there's mounting, mounting proof that it's right, Robert Coppedger, a lot of other canine ethologists, Mark Backoff had looked at this and worked on it and more and more troops seems to be piling up that this is actually the accurate reading of our history. So my brain goes so many places when you say all of that and it causes me to just wonder about the possibilities with the state of the world and what if that phenomenon was on crack. So I wanna ask you a question then about shape shifting because you once made a comment about the possibility. So this is gonna take a little while to unpack but I can do it for you if you want. I would love that. Yeah. So I study flow and flow is an altered state of consciousness and a lot of the kind of the best science about altered states has been partnerships between somebody in the spiritual community and somebody on the science side. So Richie Davidson teaming up with the Dalai Lama at the University of Wisconsin to do brain scans of monks. Andy Newberg at the University of Pennsylvania looking at Tibetan Boos and Francis, right? Look, these kinds of collaborations have been very, very fruitful. And from Andy Newberg who did one of them who has been sort of my mentor and friend since I wrote West of Jesus and really has sort of guided me in a lot of this. One of the things Andy was working on, the feeling of oneness with everything, right? What Huxley called the perennial philosophy. It's in every religion, every mystical system on earth. And Andy Newberg was a scientist and he was like, look, if something is everywhere and it's everywhere before the age of mass communication even before we have mass transit then we're looking at biology. It's gotta be biology. That's the only explanation if you're looking for a rational explanation, which he was. So he started doing brain scans of Tibetan Buddhists and Francis and nuns who were feeling cosmic unity and he figured out why we feel this, that there's a part of our brain that separates self from other and it allows us to like walk through a crowded room. So you don't bump into people or it allows you to sit down on a couch because it says, hey, your leg ends here, the couch begins here. So if you have a stroke or brain damage, the right paratole right here to this spot you can't sit down on a couch because you don't know where your leg ends and the couch begins. This is all a tangent by the way. But what Andy discovered is this part of the brain during moments of intense concentration like happen in flow, like happen in meditation, shuts down. So no energy and no energy out. It's an efficiency exchange. The brain wants more energy for focus so it shuts down non-critical structures, right? This is one that gets shut down. And at that moment in time, your brain can no longer tell where you end and the rest of the world begin. It's convinced in other words that you are then one with everything. And so there's biology underneath our spirituality is the point. So shape shifting, the ability to turn into an animal is in every native culture everywhere on earth before the age of mass communication, right? So you have to, if you're a science guy like me and you don't believe in the woo, then you say, okay, if this was everywhere it's gotta be something. If there's gotta be biology there, right? And let me just say, because it's worth pointing out just because there's biology here it doesn't say anything about the why, right? Like it just means that if there's a spiritual layer to the world it's biologically mediated. And that these experiences are biologically real, right? So you're no longer, if you go into a shrink's office in the early nights as a doc, I feel one with everything, you're going to a mental institution, right? Like that's where you're going. Today, they're like, oh yeah, we know what that that's the right parietal lobe shutting down, okay, cool. This is why that's, right? That's where we've come to. But shape shifting is one of these open puzzles. So, and a couple of people have worked on it. But one of the things, so I, my wife and I run a dog sanctuary and we use flow in the healing of the dogs. And the reason we do is because when you move into the state there's a shift in neurochemistry and all those neurochemicals are really good for your immune system. And we do special needs in hospice care and work with sick animals. So it's very good. And so I spend a lot of time in the back country running with packs of dogs. And when you get, so this, and this is by the way that we evolved to do this, right? We co-evolved with dogs and getting into flow with dogs is something that we can do. Flow crosses species lines. There's a group flow, it's a shared flow state and you can do it with dogs. And of course you can because that was how we hunted and packs together, right? That was what, that in fact, there's thinking that co-flow is such, heightens all your pattern recognition. So it heightens non-verbal communication. So in an era before medicine, like if I get a little cut, I'm hunting a buffalo with a pack of wolves and whatever, and I get a little cut. Well, that's gangrene, I'm gonna lose my arm, I'm gonna die. So you can't really get injured, but if you've ever run through the back country pack of dogs, you trip all over each other until you drop into flow together. So I spent a lot of time running around with dogs. One of the things that happens in really deep flow states, people talk about it, they call it the voice. It's the voice of intuition. Basically, so much of the prefrontal cortex, the brain that your inner voice turns down. So the sound of intuition turns up. Let's just say. Right? And this is, I wrote about it in the rise of Superman. We called it the voice. There's lots of different kind of descriptions of this. So the, and the funny thing about like action sport athletes will tell you, when you start hearing the voice, you do exactly what the voice tells you to do, otherwise you're going to the hospital. Like it's really like, it's almost like taking dictation in a weird way. We're an artist, I've had that experience writing books occasionally where it feels like, I'm not the guy doing the right, right? So occasionally when you're running around with a pack of dogs and playing games to follow the leader or whatever, I would hear the voice in my head. And we'd be running through the back country, the canyons up and down cliffs and dangerous. And I would get the voice in my head and instead of it sounding like it was mine, it would, whoever was leading the pack, it sounded to me like it was coming from that dog. And that is not as weird as that sounds. It would make that kind of pattern recognition shifting. If we co-evolved the dogs that we hunted together, if that was the kind of thing that happened, that phenomenon doesn't strike me as, as strange. And it's also, David, what is David's last name? I can't remember. No, not David Asprey. He's a philosopher, he's loot. A lot of work on kind of early hunting, right? And shape-shifting where they have same experience where they're staring at an animal, watching an animal and suddenly it feels like they've shifted places with the animal, that's the exact feeling. And that's the feeling I had when I was in flow with these dogs. So I don't understand all of it. There's a lot of things that are unanswered. There's a lot of stuff we can't measure yet about flow, but it was, that was the first semi-scientific like weird, it's just a really loose hypothesis, but it's the first one sort of I've seen that actually looks at shape-shifting because you have to take it seriously as a phenomenon. You don't have to believe that people are turning into animals, whatever that is. But as a phenomenon, it's global. It was there before there was mass communication. And if you're a rational materialist like myself and are interested in those kinds of answers, you got to take it seriously. You got to say, okay, this is something. Something biologically is happening. None of this is, we now know, for example, there's really great work on like out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences is the projection of consciousness outside self. And we know, by the way, same part of the brain, right, parietal lobe, right, you move up a little bit to the temporal, parietal junction. If I stimulate that spot with transcranial magnetic stimulation or whatever, I can cause you to have an out-of-body experience. So we know consciousness can be dislocated in time and space. And we know there's a part of the brain that does that. So, and that's also the part of the brain that gets stimulated in flows. The stuff that I'm talking about, there is some science there. There are people who have done neat stuff. And by the way, we've gotten so good at this stuff without out-of-body experiences, we can actually do it to you in a VR simulation. So we can, yeah, it's like, oh, this is, yeah, Peter Brueger's work, he's in Switzerland. But yeah, so him, there's a guy named Shahar Arzi I write about in Steel and Fire. He did the work on Kabbalah. He teamed up with Moshe Adal and they've been looking at Kabbalistic Judaism and the mystical states produced by it and what's going on in the brain. He was part of the original team that did the out-of-body experience work when he was in Switzerland. Wow. So when you talk about this flow, I also think about geese, right, who fly in formation and they have something innate built into them that gives them an understanding when this bird at the apex is exhausted and needs to take a break that everybody understands that it's a communication that happens, right, without talk. Maybe there's a honk, but that bird goes to the back, the other one's still in the formation and this is how they travel. Yeah, it's so hurting and flocking and so this is, you're totally right and you're actually, the work really has, you're talking about the work that's done on that because it's interesting if you actually study those behaviors, what they realized is flocking, which looks incredibly complicated, right? Schools of fishes, millions of fish moving, or thousands moving directly together, but they actually mathematically follow three very simple rules that so you look at, it looks incredibly complicated, it's actually fairly simple, but you are absolutely correct. When you look at a phenomenon like group flow, is it related to flocking, it's swarming to all those behaviors, which are complexity science things and I have said for years it is and I have said for years that we will not completely decode the neurobiology of flow until we explain it in terms of complexity science, which is the exact question you're asking. Nobody's done that yet because group flow, flow itself is a fairly well researched phenomenon, right? The science goes back to the 1870s, there's thousands of papers that have been written, there's a dozen papers that have been written about group flow. So it's really a black box. Very exciting. There's a handful of people who've worked on it, but this is really the future of where we're gonna go with that research for sure. Well, I love the future. I love even this glimpse because when I hear you talking about how one can get into the state of being one with, rather than having separation, I think about the people I know who are extremely smart and tend to live in their heads, right? And they're thinking, although it's genius, also creates separation. There's separation from heart, separation often from empathy or an awareness of other things going on that other people who are more sensitive might pay attention to so that oneness seems to me that it would be a great healing balm for people who are over thinkers who overly live in their head that they would create that balance for them to more connect with the world and with others and be better functioning in that area. I don't think you have to go, I mean, I don't think you have to go that far, meaning as we move into flow, the prefrontal cortex deactivates, right? The part of your brain that's right back here, it's called transient hypofrontality. And this is the part of your brain that creates your sense of time. That's why time passes strangely in a flow state. It creates your sense of self. So when self goes away, you get the exact reaction you're talking about. So oneness, yes, can be very helpful from an empathetic standpoint, right? But the real actual relief, meaning like stress hormones, when we move into flow, the stress hormones are flushed out of your system. So those flows out and you're freed up from self and that temporary relief, that's why where they do, they're starting to use transcranial, it's either transcranial magnetic, the transcranial direct stimulation where they're putting a weak magnetic pulse through people's prefrontal cortex in clinics, walking clinics all over Silicon Valley already, some in New York, and they're doing this as a treatment for depression and anxiety because by knocking, and by the way, this is not surprising. You've exercised, if you walk on a treadmill for 20 minutes and it gets quiet upstairs, that's exercised induced transient hypofrontality. That's the deactivation of the frontal cortex. Your body is going, oh crap, you need a lot of energy for walking on that treadmill. We're gonna shut down things you don't need right now. Prefrontal cortex goes off and that's where that massive relief comes from. That's one of the reasons that exercise is so important for resetting kind of mood and stress and cognitive load. It's because of that particular exchange. So taking it further and getting empathy, getting oneness with everything, that's a bonus. Like if we can get people there, that's amazing, but just getting us relief from kind of the voice in our own head is where we start to see significant change. Beautiful, oh my goodness. So you are listening to Dare to Dream Radio on podcast. You can be part of this community and thank you for always tuning in and supporting this show as long as you have. If you would like to donate to the show, go to patreon.com slash dare to dream. The show will always be free to you and if you would like to support us, deeply appreciated. You have such a big purpose to fulfill and this show is really here to ask you the key questions like what would you do if you knew that you could not fail? What would it take for you to feel completely free and bold and what would you do with that? At patreon.com slash dare to dream, you can support the show for just the price of a cup of coffee or more you decide, but just know we are podcast number one transformation conversation and we thank you in advance for all your continued support. If you're just tuning in after we've started, this is Debbie Daschinger. I've got Steven Kotler here. You can find out more about him. It's StevenKotler.com. And so I wanna go back to this animal idea, Steven, that you were talking about and tie this in with something you mentioned earlier because in your book, Last Hangover in Paris. Cyberspace, Paris is the movie. That's so funny. That's what it's a play on. So, ta-da. Yes, thank you. Last tango in cyberspace. Lion Zorn in his past had a relationship with a woman named Sonia and she was someone who led the animal liberation front, which for me seemed like a parallel to your life with your wife Joy, having founded the Rancho de Chihuahua dog sanctuary. Is that a true connection? Well, the ALF is a real thing and the ALF were much more extreme. We were on a dog sanctuary. We're a 501c3. I think the ALF spent some time on the government's terrorist watch list. So different kind of, the ALF was about breaking into monkey research centers and freeing primates and things like that. But I was, I've had two different women I was involved with before. I have a thing for animal geeks. I like women who like animals. So I've had a couple of girlfriends earlier on, especially back in my punk rock days. There was a big animal rights arm of punk rock movement that sort of came out of that crass commune in London. So I was exposed to it very early on and sort of passionate about the cause from very early on. And so you talked about hospice care at your sanctuary. You talked about a long-term rehabilitation for special needs dogs. I don't know, frankly, how you have the heart to do it. I also understand how could you not have the heart to do it, but that's really a big undertaking. How do you go through that gestalt with each of the dogs because you must get so connected and in relationship with them? I'll be totally honest. So we do everything nobody wants to do. We work in the, I live and work in the second poorest county in America with the highest instance of animal cruelty. So we are directly on the front lines. It's very poor here. It's hard living. We do hospice care and special needs care which nobody wants to do. And when we started, my wife's point was let's do everything nobody else wants to do. I'm tough enough to take it. What about you? And I think I said, yes, before I knew what the hell I was getting into is in all honesty. Now it is so strange because I have like, I can tell you that depending on how close I am, most dogs, unless I'm really close to them and we've probably worked with five or 600 animals who've come through our facility over the past decade, I know that the bereavement cycle is three days and that for three days, I'm gonna be crazy. And I should not talk on the phone and I should not have conversations outside of people because my reality is gonna be so tilted and I won't know it. So I've got, like at this point, I've got grief protocols because so many animals have lived and died. And for me, it's awful. Every time it's awful. It is, I don't, like you never, I don't think you ever get used to having your heart crushed. Like it's just like death is death is death and when you love something and it dies, it crushes you. There's no, it doesn't get better with practice. At least for me, it hasn't gotten better with practice. And my wife, I haven't seen it. You're not, the only thing you know that's a little helpful is it's gonna end because you've done this so many times, right? Even when I'm totally destroyed and it's one of my best friends and I'm crazy for a month or two months. I know it's gonna end because I've done this before. So there is that. But I do think, I don't know if I'm, like other people could do it as well. I don't think there's any special about me. I just don't think other people would run the experiment to find out they were tough enough to do it. And so now to me, the old dogs, getting to care for old dogs is just about the coolest thing in the world. Personality comes out more and more as dogs age. So you get a lot of wisdom, a lot of intelligence and a tremendous amount of personality. So if you're interested in animal behavior and all this stuff that I'm geeked about, it's super, super fun. The cost of it, right, is the hospice care stuff. But to me, like, it's much more of a blessing than a curse is all I can say. And it's just like what you end up sort of getting to learn from the old dogs is well worth it. For me it is. I love it. That's such a great title for a book. I geek out about stuff like that. So what I've learned from old dogs. What I've learned from old dogs. That's great. But yeah, that would be a concept. That would be a talk at least that I would really love to come hear. I'd have to think about it, but it's actually a really good idea. I'm gonna think about what I've learned from old dogs. I'm not quite sure. Well, certainly be yourself. Wow, that's for sure. Yeah, show up just like you. That's great. I'm old enough just here I am. Great wisdom there. I heard you say, yeah, you were talking to Joe Rogan and it was just this hilarious conversation about coffee. But that led into you making a remark that there are six things you do. Like you have this discipline. Could you talk about that a little? Like why those six things? Yeah, so it's, so you gotta start with the fact that the human brain is a goal directed system. So goal setting theory, just having, for example, high hard goals will give you an 11 to 25% boost in motivation. That's a big deal, right? That's a really big deal. It's like getting an extra two hours of work out of an eight hour day, simply for building a frame around the stuff you're doing. So when I train people performance, I always start by telling people they need a massively transformative purpose. Whatever it is, this is the thing. This is what you're here to do, whatever it is. I've got a couple of things in mind. And then I expanded out of that. I was like, all right, I got three massively transformative purposes. Three things I'm here to do. How many things do I need to do to support that? So, and when I say that it's, I'm a firm believer that everybody should have a passion and purpose and they should keep it to themselves, right? I don't, it's not something, but for the purposes explanation, I'm massively transformative purposes. I want to continue to write great books. I want to advance flow science and research. I might want to make the world a better place for animals. So those are the three things I focus on. To do those three things, I need to do six things in the world. So I do every day, I do some writing. I try to make the world a better place for animals. I try to advance flow science and research. I also have to tend my relationships, right? Friends and family, right? You need, for performance alone, you need social support, right? It doesn't have to be why, it doesn't have to be a huge social network. I have very few friends, but I connect with, I try to connect with people in my lives a little bit, especially because I'm prone towards solitude, right? So I do that. I also have to do all the business stuff that I need to do to support those things. So I have to, I'm talking to you. We're on a, I'm on a book tour. That's one of the things, and you know, there's a million other things. That's one of the categories, right? And then I have to throw myself down mountains at high speeds a couple of times a week. I go up some crazy upstairs. So I got to ski, I got a mountain bike, I got to surf, I got to run down a mountain. I got to do something like that. And those are the six things I do. And if it doesn't fall in that category, I don't do it. And one of the reasons I do this is we are, we think we're defined by what we say yes to, because that's what the brain pays attention to, but we're really, really, our lives are really defined by the millions of things we say no to all the time, right? So I want to be very clear about what I say yes to and what I say no to. If it fits into one of those six categories, it's a yes, if it doesn't, it's a no. I don't do it. And I always, like I don't, I have a firm belief this is just me. I don't think anybody else needs to live this way. This is just how I choose to live, which is I, if I'm not working the soluble problem, I'm not talking about it, it's not mine. I don't like, I only pay attention, like if I'm gonna get involved in something, I'm there to win, I'm there to solve it. And I don't like, I don't need to kind of focus my energy on other places. So this, that map just tells me where to put my attention and where not to put my attention. And it allows me, you know, and I go from massively transformative purposes to these six things. And then that allows me to translate those things into high hard goals, right? Making the world a better place for animals is a really big amorphous thing, but writing a small furry prayer, that's a high hard goal. I wanna write a book about the relationship through your last hang on cyberspace. I wanna write a book about animal rights, evolution of empathy, and a whole bunch of stuff wrapped up in a thriller, right? That's a high hard goal underneath. And I can use that to shape my clear goals, which is what I do every day, right? So there's a stack, and it's what I'm trying to do is align motivation. So we have a bunch of intrinsic motivations. And if you really wanna perform at your best, you really want speed and momentum. You want all of them in alignment because the long haul is fricking long. It's hard here. Like it's just hard here, right? And I, you need all, if you're interested in getting anywhere, you're gonna need all the help you get, you can get. And you can, there's no, I always say that 95% of what high performance really is is just getting your biology to work for you rather than against you. So this is, you're getting your biology to work for you by aligning your motivated in doing this. That's why I only do six things. That's awesome. Do you ever have to go into an intuitive state because something is a little blurry and you're not quite sure. So you have to sort of get an energetic feel about a yes or a no. So I can, yeah, I said this, I don't know. I would just add this to the Wall Street Journal a couple of days ago. They were asking me about psychedelics, which is not my favorite topic, but to me, insight is the foundation of research. So there's a rule, the flow research collective, which is insight, research, publication, communication. And that's the line I follow. So I don't talk about it out loud. I start with the insight and that's where I start my research, right? And then I do my research around it and then I write about it and publish it and get feedback about it. And then I'm willing to talk about it out loud, right? I have very, I'm very, I'm trained as a journalist and one of the things you learn as a journalist is have a really rigorous truth filter, really, really critical. And I have a very, very, very, very rigorous truth filter that goes all the way out and it's funny. It sounds like I have all these rules for how I live my life and it seems really, and what it really affords me is massive amounts of flexibility and agility inside my life. I just know exactly who I am and how I want to live. I'm lucky enough to be old enough to learn those things, right? And also to figure out that like, I'm just not good at anything. I can only kind of live one way. I'm not good at anything else. I don't fit easily inside of other people's boxes. Totally, I relate 100%. And I get it. And I get that the idea I've had this before in my life too where I've actually had a recipe for something that was successful. And even though to someone on the outside, it might've looked like rules or rigidity, the truth is that recipe that worked created freedom for me. I knew if I followed this I was gonna get the result I wanted. Everything else extraneous was gonna be cut away and that there was tremendous freedom because I had all this attention to focus on other things. Lots of it. I think there's a lot. I think those kinds of exercises are really, really, really, really useful. And I'm shocked more people don't do things like this. I'm always surprised by it, but I don't know. Yeah, well, especially when goals become to the forefront, it's important to figure out how to work them and be successful at them. Well, the other thing is, I mean, we take in 400 billion bits of information a second on average is the current calculation and consciousness, what we can actually pay attention to is 2,000 bits. So the vast majority of everything gets filtered out. And the vast majority of what gets through is stuff you're scared of. Because the amygdala, you danger detectors the first stop that filter gets and you'll get nine negatives for every positive sort of on average, six to nine negatives for every positive. And that's just basic safety and security function. So your entire world is essentially sculpted out of tiny bits of information filtered out out of this huge mass that's coming in. What gets in is chosen by your goals other than the shit that you're afraid of, right? The stuff that actually comes through is stuff that you have set goals around. It's your brain, because your brain is looking for that stuff, right? And your brain, we have special, literally we store information when we have unsolved problems. We store information in special circuits that are like flash circuits that are always constantly looking for answers, right? It's a different way of storing memory in the brain. And so knowing what your goals are, knowing exactly where you want to go, right? Very specifically this way is very, very useful. The thing that's interesting and the thing that the kind of new age gets wrong here with vision boards and the secret and stuff like that is you cannot lie to yourself. So when you set goals and if you've never made more than $25,000 in a year and you're running around going, I am so happy and grateful that this year I made a million dollars. Every time you say that out loud, your bullshit detector in your brain is going, you're out of your mind. That's not possible for you. And in science, we call this the banister effect. It's this very tight linkage between kind of brain and body. And it basically says you can't do the impossible. You can't take on a giant challenge and you can see yourself doing that challenge. So you can't lie to yourself, right? That's why you have to like when you're hitting goals, they have to be just out of reach. If they're too far out of reach, your brain doesn't know how to get there and so it doesn't know what information to give you, right? Like it doesn't know how to filter reality. That's why that fails, right? You have to have a much clearer map. But if you have a clearer map, your brain goes, oh, I'll give you this bit of information and this bit of information and this bit of information and they combine together too, right? 1000%. I think that's also why when creating a big goal and you actually have steps or you reverse re-engineer something, right? You know, okay, this next step, well, it becomes a reality. The light goes off. It's like, okay, that was achievable. The next little step, that was achievable. Eventually you'll get where you're going and I think those bites are- So I say it this way, so I spent my career essentially studying people who have taken on capital I impossible. Who have done things that people didn't think you could do at all, right? That's what I've done for 30 years, more than anything else and that's most of what my books are. Even in animal rescue, right? Like animal rescue is the most frontline hard edged of all the kind of causes. It's maligned. People don't even like the fact that you work with animals. Why aren't you saving children, right? Like there's a whole bunch of that stuff. It's very, very difficult. And so the people who are, I studied in the book, you're reading a small Fourier prayer that people who have been incredibly successful on the front lines, even that's capital I impossible. But I always say that like, we have capital I impossible. So then we have small I impossible. What I think is impossible for me or what you think is impossible for you. And over and over and over again, I will tell you that the only way anybody ever pulls off capital I impossible is that it's just, if you keep going after small I impossible, after small I impossible, the thing I thought was impossible for me, the thing I thought was impossible for me, that eventually sometimes you get lucky enough to get the capital I impossible. We're gonna be back in just a second, exclusively for Dare to Dream listeners only. I have a unique deal for you, just for you guys from Thinkific and available only to my listeners. You can create, you can market and you can sell your own online courses. Thinkific's powerful all in one platform, makes it easy to share your knowledge, grow your business, grow your audience. And whether you're educating 10 students or 10 million, Thinkific offers the easiest technology and best support in the business. I've got my products up there, I'm super happy it's drag and drop and like for me that's great and it looks spectacular. So for you as a Dare to Dream listener, use the link thnk.cc slash deb and you will get the first three months of Thinkific's business plan for free to set up your online course. The only way to get that exclusive free deal is to go to thnk.cc slash deb. And if you're tuning in, I'm speaking with Stephen Kotler, he is a New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist, one of the world's leading experts on high performance. You can find out more at stevenkotler.com. What have you found out in your life about setbacks? I don't know what that means. Other than, there's a number of different ways I sort of think about this, but one of them is it sucks here. It just does, that's just the rule of the game. And it turns out if you try to ignore the fact that it sucks here and numb yourself with television and beer versus you try to dent the universe, right? It sucks for both people. And I actually think it sucks a little less for the person who's trying to dent the universe than the person who's trying to numb themselves with beer and television, right? And I think that's very, very true. I don't think like there's no way around that. It's you're just gonna get kicked in the teeth over and over and over again. I get up really quickly, right? I take the hit very hard, but I get up really quickly. I will always get up the next day and sort of keep going and just get up and keep going. And I will tell you, and anybody in high performance will tell you the same thing. One, every one of your kryptonites is your superpower, right? My best friend and lifelong editor, guy who's kind of almost edited most of my articles and books along the way. His name is Michael Wharton. Calls my career, my whatever I've done in the world, he calls it the empire that fear built. Which, I mean, he's not wrong, right? I have like, I grew up, well, as a freelancer coming up as a writer, you never need fricking money. I mean, like I was poor, right? I was so poor for so long and you were always trying to think like a story ahead or two stories ahead or three stories ahead or if I'm writing a story right now, I have to be selling five others otherwise I'm not paying my rent next month kind of thing. And it was just this constant kind of future anxiety loop that I got into, but it worked really well over time, right? Like being like that fear of, oh shit, I'm gonna run out of money six months from now I better start hustling, right? That was sort of built into me as a freelancer when I was still kind of bartending and writing and trying to build my career together. It never really went away and that's also a very, it's a punk rock thing. I heard Henry Rollins talking not too long ago and he was like, yeah, I really, I still expect somebody to like show up and be like, okay, you come with me, no more of that, right? Like I'm still, you know, it doesn't matter how many best sellers I've written I'm still kind of amazed that I get to do this for a living. I'm like, really? You're gonna let me do this again, you know? Is that imposter syndrome or is that? No, imposter syndrome was something that it took me a while to, I had that for a little while until I was actually doing actual flow science like we were doing running real research. I felt like a little bit like I was up there, you know, as the guy talking about flow, but I wasn't, you know, I might've been one of the worlds leading experts on it, but I wasn't conducting my own experiments. And so once we got our research lab up and running that last bit went away, I don't think it was imposter syndrome. Though I did, you know, I remember with the first bunch of times I got to Wall Street or when I was working with the Navy Seals or things like that, where you're in rooms with people and just like, are you sure? Like it took me a really long time to believe that, so my philosophy is one of the, I see this all the time in high performance, people figure out how to do something really, really well and they start training other people in what they figured out works for themselves. And it's usually a fricking disaster because personality doesn't scale. Biology scales, right? So the people who are really good at this might have figured out what works for themselves and then they backtracked it to the biology. Oh, here's how the system works. Let me teach you about how the system works because the system will work for everybody, right? The biology will work for everybody. Personality doesn't at all. It doesn't scale and tend to make disasters out of other people's lives along the way. But so that gave me some confidence of what I was training people in, but until I started, we measure everything. Until I started seeing that this stuff really was effective and I don't know how many, it was thousands of people who had to come up to me and be like, dude, your stuff changed my life before I actually started believing them because I'm a really skeptical guy. And if I'm gonna stand on a stage and tell you something works, it really better work. So that took a while and it was a long time before I would speak from a point of authority, right? I would go at things more from a maybe, Nietzsche used to call himself the philosopher of maybe. And I felt that way for a long time. It was only until the data started just piling up and piling up and piling up that I was like, oh, I think I can actually say this as something of an expert rather than, there's still caveats everywhere, but that took a while. Thanks for your transparency. I really appreciate that. Steven, this is Dare to Dream. What are you next to Dare to Dream? What are your future dreams and goals? Oh, you know me, total world domination. With puppies. Puppies for sure. Honestly, I have, this is gonna sound crazy, but I have four books coming out in the next year and a half. So there's, I've got two more books after that. So there's a bunch of books that I'm working on. That's coming next. And I'm really, at the Flow Research Collective, we've now got six or seven major research partnerships with major institutions. And my entire career has been spent on trying to decode the neurobiology of flow. And when I got into this 25 years ago, I remember our conversation with Dr. Andrew Newberg, where I asked him 25 years ago, I said, do you think we're ever gonna actually, in our lifetime, do you think we're actually gonna figure this out? He was like, no way. And I was like, yeah, I think so too. I think so. And now I will tell you, no, I act like technology has increased so much. We've learned so much. We're making such progress that I actually, I think sometimes in the next five to 10 years, we're not only just gonna decode it, but I think we'll have a physiological based flow detector and we're gonna know a whole lot more about using, the last century was about skills for performance, right? This century is gonna be about states of consciousness for performance. And I think we're on the front edge of that revolution and I'm hoping to nudge it forward a little bit. Thank you so much for coming on the show today and sharing your brilliance. It's been amazing. Thank you for having me. I end today's show with this quote from Israel Moore, Ivor. Most great accomplishments do not look promising from the beginning. If you give up on a big dream too early, you have probably stepped on gold and mistook it for a rock. Next up on Dare to Dream, I'm featuring Carrie Samuels. She is world renowned for her astrology and numerology forecast. It's just gonna be a blast to hear what she has to say about the state of affairs and what's coming up. You can subscribe to Dare to Dream on all the podcast sites, also on my website as well as right here on YouTube and that's youtube.com slash deb on the radio. Thanks for being with us today and remember the secret of success is having the courage to begin in the first place.