# No.1 Flow Expert: How to Wire Your Brain for Extreme Focus

Channel: The Knowledge Project Podcast
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_p-68aRdmc
Duration: 1 hr 6 min
Language: English
Words: 12819
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/w_p-68aRdmc

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[0:00] If you were seeing any human being performing at their best, chances are flow [music] is involved. It's the most addictive state on Earth, period. What does a flow state feel like? It's where I want to be, and when you're in that, it's there's no there's no better feeling. When it happen, you have [music] no idea

[0:15] what the [ __ ] is going on. Everything becomes one, and there is no time. You're so focused on what you're doing [music] that everything else just starts to fade away and disappear. We feel a sense of control. You look at Michael Jordan in a flow state, you see the windmill dunk, but I'm inside it's Wow, that basket looks as big as a hula, but

[0:32] I can't miss. What does it take for you to be your best when it matters most? It's nothing more or less than getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. DARPA's research found that you learn 230% faster than normal in flow. So, let me be spend a few beats and teach me how to get [music] into flow. Two things to know. First, [music]

[0:58] I'm curious how you would define flow. Flow is a scientific definition, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is the one who came up with that definition, but it's technically defined as an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best. It mean refers to any of those moments of rapid attention and total absorption where you get so focused on what you're doing, so focused on the task at hand, that everything else just starts to fade away and disappear. All aspects of performance, mental, physical, and emotional, will

[1:25] skyrocket. What does a flow state feel like? So, this is actually the original work that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi did on flow. He went around the world asking people about the times in their life when they felt their best and they performed their best, and he discovered that flow has six core characteristics. So, there's complete concentration on the task at hand. There's a merger of action awareness, a diminishment of our sense of self, uh time distortion, uh we don't feel peak performance on the inside, we feel a sense of control. So, a sense I can control things I can't normally control. That's what it feels like, right? You look at Michael Jordan

[2:02] in a flow state, you see the windmill dunk, and that's what it looks like, but on the inside it's wow, that basket looks as big as a hula hoop, but I can't miss. It's a feeling I can control. Finally, the last thing is flow states are um autotelic is the technical term that Csikszentmihalyi used. It just means euphoric and delicious. Autotelic means an end in itself. So, it basically means flow feels so good we'll go very far out of our way to get more of the experience. If I were to put it psy- psychologists hate when I do this, but

[2:29] it's the most addictive state on Earth. Period, right? But those are the six characteristics. So, if you're trying to figure out, am I in flow? My team in flow? Those are the six characteristics you're looking for. So many people feel like they're not reaching their potential. Like they're capable of doing more, but they don't quite understand that. Is

[2:47] flow that that key? Flow is how evolution created optimal performance in the human body. We've known for a while that the origin story of flow was probably runner's high. And there's a couple other evolutionary stories go along with it, but there's also some proof, and now there's a little bit more kind of neurobiology to back this up that flocking behavior and mobbing behavior, um which are actually related behaviors uh in nature, are early versions of flow states. But it's very old, and it's so it's it's not just in humans. Sm- All social mammals get

[3:20] into flow, and some insects, some birds. So, this is how we evolved to perform at our best. So, if you were seeing any human being at their best, chances are flow is involved. Another term that's worth defining is peak performance cuz it has connotations. People think soldiers or athletes or And people for all I As far as I can tell, this is This is my definition. It's nothing more or less than getting our biology to work

[3:48] for us rather than against us. Go deeper on that. There's nothing sort of beyond our bi- our biology. There's no secret secret to performance. There's just our biology. Neurobiology is mechanism shaped by evolution. It's the same in all of us. Um what motivates you is going to be different than what motivates me. But in both me and you, that motivation's going

[4:09] to show up as dopamine. So, what we're actually after here is the dopamine. That's the actual energy and focus and drive. And ever all the words and the terms we can put around it don't matter as much as getting the dopamine, which is actually what matters. And so, when you I I sort of figured if we could get to the level of mechanism, this stuff would get very trainable. And that has been our experience. So, at the Flow Research Collective, the our flagship training for a lot of years was Zero to

[4:37] Dangerous. We've 35,000 people went through it. So, after 8-week training, people would see a 73% boost in flow. I would like to tell you that's cuz our kung fu is that good. It's because this stuff is really trainable. And if you start with the neurobiology, which is the same in all of us, it's trainable. Cuz it's built into all of us. So, maybe you spend a few beats and

[5:00] teach me how to get into flow. Two things to know. What we're going to First, flow states have triggers. Preconditions that lead to more flow. There are 26 to 28 that have been discovered. There's probably way more. That's just what we know so far. And the first thing to know is the simplest, flow follows focus. Only shows up when all our

[5:20] attention in the right here, right now. On the task at hand. So, that's what all the triggers do. They drive focus in the present moment. If you peel back the hood, they do this in a number of different ways. They can push norepinephrine into our system. They can push dopamine into our system. They can push both together into our

[5:38] system. Or they can lower cognitive load. Cognitive load is all the crap you're trying to think about at any one time. And if I lower cognitive load, your brain instantly repurposes that energy for paying attention. This is why people will tell you to clean your desk first before you try to focus on on writing or something like that. What you're actually doing is lowering cognitive load cuz now it's more organized and things are in spots and the brain will automatically it's an efficiency [clears throat] engine. It always wants sort of extra energy for the task at hand. And so, that's what happens. You clean your desk, and you get more energy

[6:12] cuz cognitive load has gone down, and you can focus better. So, that's what all the triggers do. I I always There's three triggers I start people with, but I also start I always back up. So, there is what It It's known as a primary flow activity. This is whatever you've done since you were a little kid that you just lose yourself in. You're just totally [ __ ] immersed in. And it's In a certain level, which triggers you're most susceptible to, a little bit of that is uh I probably genetic. A little bit more is early childhood environment. So, for me, it's skiing, right? That's my primary

[6:46] flow activity. Meaning like 90% of the time I go skiing, I'm going to get into a flow state. Or it's uh group flow, the shared collective version of a flow state. Interpersonal flow is two people getting a great conversation, and an hour goes by, and you didn't notice. It's interpersonal flow. I told you earlier that I work with the same editor and have for 25 years. And group flow is

[7:06] really like we're really good at this. We're working together for 25 years. We know exactly sort of how to how to work with each other. And so, invariably, a couple times a week I'm getting into group flow doing that. My wife, it's walking her dogs in the back country. My best friend is playing the guitar. Everybody's got their thing. And usually what happens as we become adults is what

[7:24] do you do? Oh, you have responsibility. You got a family. You got a job. Put down childish things. And you stop your primary flow activity goes away, and it's literally the single worst thing you could do for the following three reasons. First is that This should be obvious, but flow is a focusing skill. Meditation

[7:41] is a focusing skill. They're different. They're different kinds of focusing. You're doing different things in the brain. Related, but different. But just like mindfulness is trainable, flow is trainable. So, focusing skill. So, if I go skiing on Sunday, and I'm in flow, and I go to work on Tuesday, I'm going to have an easier time getting into flow on Tuesdays. That is the first thing to know there. The second thing is for reasons that we can get into uh as we go along,

[8:06] anxiety will block flow. Um in most of us, right? A little bit is good. Little bit sort of primes the brain for focus and attentional alertness and learning. Too much will block flow. And primary flow activity lower resets your nervous system. So, it'll calm you down. So, primary flow activity on Sunday, go to work on Tuesday, encounter like a work problem, and your threshold your anxiety is a little bit lower. If you're burned out, if you're dealing with burnout, um the my lab did some work on this, but uh Corina Pfeifer's lab really is the one that proved this, but flow overrides

[8:42] burnout. It'll override PTSD, burnout. We do work. Now, we're doing a lot of work with veterans and on PTSD, addiction, uh depression cuz flow is neuroprotective [clears throat] against those things and can construct over pave over some of them. But, if you're really burnt out, doubling down your primary flow activity is the sort of the only way back. Um And but the what's Coolest research says shows that like two to four hours a week is about what it takes on your primary flow activity. So, the first place to start if you're training flow is actually the thing that you've done your whole life that you've probably stopped

[9:18] doing, and I will set you back there first. Because if you get into flow in one thing, it's easier than in another. in another thing. And then I'll thing to get into flow in is your primary your primary flow activity cuz it's what you're like you're naturally inclined to do that. And the most common flow state

[9:33] on Earth, by the way, reading. Oh, interesting. most common flow state on Earth. What are some common flow triggers? If you're trying to think about flow triggers, one of the easy ways to do it is like if you look at the list, they're all they look like psychological interventions. So, novelty, complexity, unpredictability, risk are all flow triggers. Whenever we encounter any of those things, you get dopamine, right? In complex situations, the most famous flow trigger is the challenge-skills balance. So, we said

[10:03] flow follows focus. We pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge of that task slightly exceeds our skill set. So, you want to stretch but not snap. Bunch of years ago, decades ago now, uh Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi teamed up with a Google mathematician and tried to put a number on it just to see if they could put a number on it. They got 4%

[10:23] and they never said this was science. They said this was a back-of-the-envelope calculation, meaning when the challenge is 4% greater than your skills, um that's seems to be the sweet spot. One of the things I will say is it's right outside your comfort zone. The more you sort of train being just outside your comfort zone, just pushing a little bit, um the easier it gets and the other side of it is that's if if you were to talk about the the sweet spot, emotionally you'd say it's between boredom, there's not enough stimulation here, I don't care, I'm not paying any attention, and anxiety, whoa, way too much. Right in between is this

[10:57] sweet spot. What uh flow scientists call the flow channel, but if you're a physiologist, you call it the Yerkes-Dodson curve. It's one of the oldest findings written physiology, um that there's this sweet spot between challenge and skills, but if you're shyer meeker timid or less skilled thing that you're doing, you're going to be just outside your comfort zone. If you're like a hard-charging entrepreneur, um yet the problem is that that 4% is so small that you'll blow by and you'll take on challenges that are 50% 60% greater than your skills simply cuz it sort of wakes you up. And so if you're training people on flow,

[11:33] you either have to train them to push a little bit harder or usually with type A types, you got to back them off and tell them to chunk it down. Those big huge overarching goals are great. Motivation science tells us that a good properly set hard goal gives you an 11 to 22% boost in motivation. Um so, that's amazing. Like just for having a well-set goal, but you want to chunk it down so the thing in front of you sits in that sort of 4% sweet spot. What this really tells you is you can only get about 4% better at a time, right? Like that that when you're laddering up, it's

[12:07] like 4% gains. This is the thing that we learned when we tested it. And again, I I don't know how accurate this is, but like we saw it again and again. We found if you only stay in that 4% sweet spot, and the reason I like we could do with action sport athletes is we started doing it with downhill down mountain bikers, and we measured every feature on the hill. And that's how we could figure out, okay, this is what you can jump, so this would be 4%, and that's how we did it. That's how we were testing it. And what we discovered is if you stayed in

[12:39] that sweet spot, you never plateaued. You would get more flow and more flow and more flow, and you made way more progress over the course of a season, um than you did the other way. How can we mute distractions and get into a flow state? We said earlier flow follows focus, right? All the flow triggers drive attention to the present moment. The most obvious flow trigger is complete concentration. What do I mean by complete concentration? For me, it's writing, so I'll give you a writing example. When I'm going to go writing, the first thing I want to do is get rid of all the distractions. So, my

[13:12] smartphone gets turned off because, you know, they modeled it after a jackpot, the single most, you know, addictive and distracting technology uh in the world, and uh so that gets shut down, notifications, email. When I used to start at this work uh 20 years ago, average executive I dealt with had like three ways you can interrupt them. There was cell phone call them, you could email them, you could message them, you could knock on their door, right? The average executive I work with these days has like 17 to 18 different incoming channels, WhatsApp and messages and Slack and Notion, and

[13:51] it's it's insane. But do you know how many people [ __ ] on me? Like my phone is perpetually in focus. If you're not my kids, it doesn't get through. That's it. Just my kids. And so, like people are like, "You're always in focus. I feel like I'm interrupting you." And I'm like, "Well, you can text. I'm just not going to get your text until I choose to look at I Yeah, well, that's the other thing. I tell people you train people. So, limit communication channels, keep one channel open for emergency. So, like your boss or your you know wife or whatever. One channel for emergency. Get rid of the

[14:20] others batch communications. So communications in the morning, the end of the day. The next question is how long should focus? And here's a really good biological answer because we actually have an answer here. So everybody knows they go through a sleep cycle when they sleep and it's roughly 90 to 110 minutes long um which is the REM cycle. You have an awake and alert cycle. It's the exact same like this 90 to 110 minutes long. Your brain is biologically designed to focus for 90 minute slots. So I always tell people when we're training them in flow and we're training them how to focus, you know, start by starting. You know, start

[14:57] by like walling yourself off and if you can only focus for 10 minutes at a time, start there. If it's 15 minutes, start there. It doesn't matter. Start by starting. But when you start to get better at this, you will find that your brain will naturally move. Like you'll people will be training up and training up and I can I got 20 minutes, 25 minutes and suddenly they're like, oh my

[15:15] god, I was 90 minutes. What happened? And I'm like, what happened is your biology. Like you're built to do that. Um so if you start getting your biology to work for you in this way, you're going to move in that direction um naturally. So complete concentration is one of the first flow triggers. You know, you have your primary flow activity. I always say, you know, manicure the space for complete concentration and then use the challenge skills balance to figure out how to tune the task. So I'll give you a writing example. I write every day. Sure you do too. When I'm starting a book for me,

[15:50] I like to write about 500 words a day. And so that's that's right in that 4% sweet spot for me. Cuz that's so mutable, you have to also tune it on a daily basis for what's your energy level. Right? If I didn't get any sleep last night cuz my plane was delayed and it was 3:00 in the morning when we landed and I woke up, you know, and it was starting a book, I

[16:10] wouldn't ask myself to write 500 words. That would be too hard. I'd do 300 words. That's sort of in that sweet spot. So you can manicure the space for complete concentration and manicure the task with the challenge skill sweet spot. How would you teach somebody with ADHD? Would that be different? Couple of things. Um I'm not an expert ADHD, but in my original flow my first flow company, Ned Hallowell, literally coined the term ADHD. He's a Harvard psychologist, just retired. He's a mentor. Uh married to his now both of us think that ADHD is an evolutionary superpower for cuz it's it's hyperfocus. ADHD, the problem isn't I can't focus. The problem

[16:46] is I can't focus on [ __ ] I don't care about. Right? On [ __ ] I care about, I can lock in and you're not going to find me for months. And I will say I have met very few people at the top of industries business athletics arts. Like everybody I know has ADHD. I think it's an absolute superpower in

[17:10] in in business and everything else. But here's the first thing that I would say. First thing you have to know when you're working with ADHD, and this is just another flow trigger. Well, most people don't know this, but autonomy and attention are coupled systems in the brain. So you cannot maximize focus. If you're not the one driving the bus you won't just not going to care where it goes as much as the driver. Like it's just that simple. So for people who have ADHD, um reframing is the tool you want to reach for. So I used to I'll give you an example again from writing, but we can apply it anywhere,

[17:48] but or work. If you have a boss comes to you, so you have a boss, right? And you have ADHD, and the boss says, "I need you to do X." And you don't like X. X isn't your thing, and you're pissed. You're going to have a really hard time focusing. But if you If X is something you want to do, you're locked in. 3 days go by, no problem,

[18:07] done. So you have to reframe the task. You have to say, "God, you know, 90% of this task is crap. I don't care. 10% of it is going to make me a better salesperson." And that's something I really care about cuz it's aligned with my purpose and who I think of myself and right, so that's what matters or when I used to get early on in my journalism career where I was really poor and I would have to take every assignment that could possibly come my way cuz I needed the money. Not all of them were stuff that I loved. You know what I mean? No,

[18:33] do I really want to write 5,000 words on data caves? I could think of, you know, better things to do with my time, but I will I do it if you're going to pay me? Yes, absolutely and I'll I'll find this task and be like, okay, I don't like any of this task, but writing this is going to teach me how Wired magazine structures their stories and that matters to me. So, I will focus on the thing that I want to learn that's aligned with my purpose and sort of that's my gateway in. So, if you have ADHD, the first thing you have to do is

[19:03] reframe the task to find the autonomy because you can't marshal attention without it and with ADHD, this is really a problem for you have to figure out what in the task aligns with who you are, your purpose and your values and all that stuff that will allow you to sort of push through. You said that's the first thing. What

[19:21] else? Know that you're super distractible. So, that's going to manifest in two ways. One, it means distraction management, right? Manicure your space, manicure your environment, all that stuff. The other thing you're super distractible too is as you move into flow, one of the things that happens in flow is you get a [ __ ]

[19:40] load of dopamine and norepinephrine. These chemicals do a ton of things in the brain. One of the things they do is they massively amplify pattern recognition. So, when we link two ideas together, right? Uh that little rush of pleasure you get, that's dopamine. So, if you've ever done a crossword puzzle and you stick you get an answer right, that little rush of pleasure, that's dopamine, right? And it shows up when there's pattern

[20:03] recognition. We actually talk about this as the creative trigger. Flow's creative trigger. It's really just cuz pattern recognition sits underneath creativity. So, that you have to manicure the space is the first way, but you have to protect yourself against your own thoughts. Cuz when you're in flow and you've got more dopamine in your system, there's more pattern recognition, creative ideas tend to spiral. One idea will lead to the next idea, lead to the next idea. In flow, tangents are delicious. So, with ADHD, that's it's twice it's easier to get distracted and you've got that crazy focus, so you're going to get distracted and then you're going to focus down that

[20:41] rabbit hole and you're going to going to be gone and you're not going to finish the task at hand. So, you sort of need the discipline to stay focused on what you're doing and just sort of like write down the tangents. We're going to save that for later. So, you want to manicure the space on the front end. You sort of want to police your thoughts as you as you move through it um on the back end. And you always want to sort of find your autonomy in in the act. Those would be the first three

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[22:40] free at heygen.com/tkp. That's h e y g e n dot com slash tkp. Is [music] flow always good? So, that's an interesting question. One of the things that's worth pointing out is flow is morally neutral. It's a tool. So, soldiers get into flow. So, depending on which side of battle you're on, right? Csikszentmihalyi pointed out years ago and he was absolutely right that most so-called juvenile delinquency, graffiti art, vandalism, fighting, that sort of stuff, it's actually bored teenagers who are natural Your body Your body will naturally seek flow and they're actually tuning the challenge

[23:22] skills balance with through delinquency. They're upping the challenge level in their lives and trying to get into flow. Um rather than This isn't about like misbehaving. It's actually This is flow-based behavior. So, flow's just a It's It's neutral, can be used for good or bad, and can have good and bad effects, right? Depending What do we know for sure? We know it underpins happiness, well-being, overall life satisfaction, meaning and purpose, and increases longevity. I mean, we could talk about what cognitive benefits, but these are just like kind of well-being benefits. Those are beneficial. It expands empathy, which I always think is a good thing. It increases uh

[24:02] environmental awareness, which is our ability to see, perceive, and care about the natural world. I always think that's a good thing. What's one specific thing everybody listening to this podcast can change today that will increase their performance? So, uh we did this work a a while ago. It's It's written about in my book, Narnia Country, which was really in uh in experiment in longevity. But, one of the things that we discovered is um So, I have uh and I knew Anders Ericsson before he passed. He was He was a really nice guy. Really liked him. But flow or challenges his 10,000 hours like right it does cuz it says you can

[24:38] flow. And this is if you go by DARPA's uh research, Defense Department looked at learning and flow and they found that you learn 230% faster than normal in flow. 230% faster than normal is obviously, if it's going to take you if 10,000 hours, which we all know is a fantasy number, and that was Malcolm and not and and not Anders

[24:56] iterations. And and even that, it's it depends on what domain you're trying to learn, right? But so what we discovered among many other things is not just flow. We compared deliberate practice, which is Anders Ericsson's, which is doing the repetition with incremental improvement. Mhm. With against um deliberate play. Which is repetition with improvisation. And as learning tools, and you will actually learn better. In very tight domains like mathematics and violins, um the stuff that Anders was studying, deliberate practice is great cuz they're

[25:32] very structured and bounded disciplines. And if you're inside one of those, deliberate practice is effective. If you're outside of a bounded discipline, which is pretty much almost everything else other than like musical instrument a couple other things, deliberate play outperforms deliberate practice significantly. And the simple reason is how does learning work? Quick short hand for learning and memory is the more neurochemicals that show up during experience, the better chance that experience will move from short-term holding into long-term

[26:03] storage. It's what neurochemicals do. They do a lot of different things, but one of the things they do is tag experience important save for later. This is why flow flow is this huge dump of neurochemistry, which is why learning goes through the roof. But quite simply, when we play versus when we repeat the same thing with incremental improvement, we get way more neurochemicals. So deliberate play will outperform deliberate practice. So you asked for one thing that most people can do to increase learning and peak performance,

[26:34] be more playful. What are the sources of motivation? If you're trying to amplify human motivation, the way I always explain it people that we usually I talk about this people will come to me and they're like, "How do you find a a purpose? How do I get a purpose, right? Like what is my" And I and I say, "Well, biologically, you can you follow the biology. The way the biology works is curiosity is the foundational motivator. It's a little bit of dopamine. It's great motivator, but it's just a little bit of dopamine. If you are trying to build towards passion, right, which is bigger individual motivator, you just

[27:10] want the intersection of multiple curiosities. So, this is one of the things when I'm people are trying to find their purpose, one of the things I do is I say, "List 25 things you're curious about and find where they intersect." This used to be a hard thing for people. Like they would have a hard time doing this and it would take people really long time. The great thing is we all have LLMs. Those they and they're great at this. Like you can literally use an LLM to do this. But if you can figure out where like one, three, or four of your curiosities intersect and start playing there,

[27:39] that's passion. That's a seed kernel of passion cuz now you got a lot of different dopamine coming in. When you attach that passion to a cause greater than yourself, that's purpose. The reason we care about purpose from a motivational standpoint is better drugs, right? Passion Mhm. is dopamine and norepinephrine. It's really powerful, but purpose is dopamine, norepinephrine, and then all that prosocial neurochemistry that you get when other people are there. So, you get serotonin and you get endorphins and

[28:07] you get oxytocin. It's better drugs. Right. Right? It's more feel-good drugs. It also seems like there's two fundamental power sources for motivation, if you will, which is one have a chip on my shoulder. I'm I'm moving away from something. And then the other is I'm moving towards something. It's an interesting way of thinking about it. I I I So, I uh one of the more famous things that I wrote it's it was a newsletter actually, but I love small

[28:39] letter S spite as a motivator. This is Tom Brady, right? Like with a chip on his shoulder. I My wife there's a fortune cookie that's taped to our refrigerator that like my wife found and it says you get great satisfaction out of proving other people wrong. And almost everything I've done like I've done because somebody I thought was doing it wrong and it pissed me off. And

[29:01] so I wanted I want to I want to fix it. So, I love that as a motivator. Um What When is a chip on your shoulder healthy and when is it unhealthy? So, Michael Jordan is the example of unhealthy. Because Greatest basketball player of all time. of all time. Of all time. And I was born in Chicago, I grew up a Bulls fan. It was like watching Jordan play was amazing. But watching what that chip became after he was out of basketball, like do you watch your interviews with Michael Jordan and think, "Oh, here's a

[29:33] really happy dude?" I'm thinking he's starting to get that a little bit there now, but as a general rule that level of spite as a motivator ends up eating you alive. So, I think like it's really really useful, but you sort of got to know when to put it down. That's why I say small S spite. One of the things that I never do is read criticisms of my work, take it personally, and care about what

[30:01] my critics say or argue with my critics. But I know lots of thinkers, lots of really brilliant men and women who somebody said they were wrong, they will like go toe-to-toe. I'll give you This happened fairly recently and it was just we put out a very I have a new science article out right now in Frontiers of Neuroscience called The Body Doesn't Keep the Score. And it is a direct rebuttal against van der Kolk, who I think is totally wrong and um I think that book is very problematic. Mike So, my co-writers cuz people are freaking out and there's a lot of like podcasters are trying to People are trying to argue

[30:35] with us. And I had to call I was like, "We're not going to play that game." Like at some point, if, you know, the right person comes to us and says, "Hey, will you have the conversation?" Yes, we'll do that. But our job is not to like defend our territory against commerce. We took our stand. We We made our statement. It's a very well-written article. You can argue with this. You don't have to argue with us. But we don't have to rebut all the Like that's not the job. The job is to do the research. And you know, our job is to prove it more, right? Like people got

[31:07] mad. Great. Let's Let's go do another study and prove it more, right? And like that's our job. Our job isn't isn't all the rebuttals. And you don't have to So you do that. Or you know, I see these writers. And it's amazing cuz I like I see really smart people who are amazing contributors to this world. And I can't tell you how much time they're they're you know, like flushing down a toilet cuz they want to argue with their

[31:31] critics. One thing we haven't talked about with flow is its relationship to learning. So I know Cal Newport argues that flow isn't the optimal learning state because we need a lot of discomfort. I'm curious, what's your reaction to that? One of my pet peeves is people who coin a whole bunch of new language for

[31:51] themselves. One of the reasons flow research was so damn hard so damn hard. The entire altered state space is everybody wanted to coin a new name. Mhm. Right? Maslow called it peak experiences. Csikszentmihalyi was flow. Then Phil Jackson, the zone. And so I look at Cal and I think and I'm picking a fight here that I don't really need to pick a fight. But like it bugs the [ __ ] out of me. I'm like, "Deep work is another word for flow, brother." Like I'm sorry. You've coined a new term. When he says, "Well, no, you're you're going to need a lot of struggle for flow." Well, that's cuz

[32:24] there's a flow cycle. The front end of a flow state is what is known as struggle. It's a loading phase. Flow is unconscious when we can perform tasks without much conscious interference. To perform something unconsciously, we first have to learn it consciously. Right. Right. Um so that's why there's a four The first front end of flow state is

[32:43] struggle. Right? It's all conscious. It's all thinking. It's And Cal is exactly correct. Um and this is Colleen Seifert sort of did some of the original work here. She was at the University of Michigan. She's brilliant. But she found that in struggle, the more frustrated you get, the more sort of you've overloaded your RAM, the better chance you have of A solving the problem later, and B um of getting into flow uh once that solution shows up. If you're curious about this If anybody's listening, uh if you look my name in the in our big paper on the neural dynamics of intuition, it's called pathfinding and neural dynamical account of

[33:21] intuition written in nature, we found that uh this is also true if you want an intuitive breakthrough. Like when you're learning a subject, the more frustrated you are, the better chance you will later like intuit the solution. And this is So this is I'll talk more about flow and learning, but this is like for parents, I think it's one of the most important things that you need to teach kids. And I think it's one of the most important things that all of us need to learn. So I always say if you actually understand peak performance, you find out that a lot of our emotions don't mean what we think they mean. You

[33:55] know, frustration in This is a great example. When most people get frustrated, they're learning something they can't learn, or they're frustrated, they can't solve the They think it's a sign they did something wrong. They think it's a sign that they're moving in the wrong direction, or they should stop, or whatever. From the literature, I can tell you it's

[34:11] the ex- it's exactly right. You have a label on it. You Like it still feels like [ __ ] It's still frustrating. But you're actually moving in the exact right direction. That's a good thing, not a bad thing. It just doesn't feel very good. Or So frustration is feedback. Frustration is a kind of feedback. It's all it's telling you is that you've overloaded your working memory. But anyways, frustration is a sign that

[34:34] you're moving in the right direction. And uh So yes, is he right? Like do you need to struggle for learning? Yes, in fact, you need norepinephrine in your system to learn. Norepinephrine is Low levels is curiosity, high levels is anxiety, right? And you you cannot learn without a little bit of norepinephrine in your system. It will completely block learning. So, he's not wrong, but there's a biological cycle here. It goes farther than that, and what he's calling deep work

[35:07] is like, as far as I can tell, is flow. And you've just rebranded, you know, something else, and you've just made it harder for people who are trying to study this and get smarter about it. I want to come back to something. Maybe double click on pattern recognition and anticipation, the relationship between those two things. The brain fundamentally is a prediction engine, right? What the brain is doing at every moment of every day is it's trying to predict what is

[35:37] about to happen, right? What it wants to do is lower uncertainty, wants to minimize uncertainty, and it wants to know exactly how much energy, right? Cuz we evolved in an environment where calories are really hard to come by, so it never wants to waste energy. So, it's what's about to happen and how much energy do I need to meet the challenge? That's what the brain is always trying to do. So, when I think about when you say anticipation, I'm really just thinking about what we mean by like a prediction engine brain that's always sort of trying to lower uncertainty. And I also think like, if you're trying to understand human

[36:12] behavior, you always have to start there. We use pattern recognition as a flow trigger, so it's another one of flow's triggers, and it's really, really, really important, and I'll give you a couple of like three really common examples. So, one of the things I will always have people I'm I'm working with do is read a minimum of 25 pages a day, usually in a book. I like I think books are the best, but cuz you have to stock the pattern recognition system with ammunition, right? If you're not feeding the pattern recognition system new information, it doesn't have the raw materials to make connections. So, one of the ways to

[36:53] start getting more flow in your life is if you start taking in more information. And I like reading books because they they're just the densest yet form of information available on the planet, and you have the best opportunity for stocking the pattern recognition system that way. But, that's one of the things I think of when talk about pattern recognition. Again, on the other side, this is something that I train a lot. I will train different thinking styles, lateral thinking, right? Outside outside the box thinking. How do you make sort of connections between sort of unrelated things? How does that work? And the brain will,

[37:29] you know, sort of automatically do that. I always say with We were talking earlier about uh writing and sort of uh one of the most common causes of writer's block is not knowing your starts and your endings. If you know where you're starting, you know where you're ending, the brain is a built It's a pattern recognition system, right? The brain does pattern recognition at like this is what neurons do at at most basic level, right? Everything Everything we do is built out of pattern recognition. If you know your starts and your endings, you have a pattern recognition system for the brain, it will connect them. This is how we do

[38:03] narrative, this is how we do cause and effect, this is how the brain does everything. So, with writing, people are you If they're stuck, it's usually cuz they don't know where they're starting and where they're going because eventually the brain will automatically fill in the middle for you cuz it's built to do that. Let me tell you about the best new product that I've used in the past 5 years. It's the Matic vacuum. This thing

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[39:41] Can you teach people to think better? If you want to think better, you have to start by reading more. Like the You want to think better, read more. First first thing. People ask me how I got my career, how I did anything, and I will flat-out tell you I have read the [ __ ] I just I realized very early on I wasn't the brightest guy, I wasn't, you know, the best at all that stuff, but I was willing to read three or four or five times the amount as anybody else was willing to read. So, I think one, if like you want to teach somebody to think

[40:14] better, you got to teach them how to read more. When I say read, I actually mean books. I spend most of my time these days reading textbooks. Um I and I I cuz I think it's the ultimate edge. I love them cuz literally you have the best people in the world summarizing and and putting all their most important stuff into it, and nobody else reads them. I always talk about this in terms

[40:37] of the ROI on reading. And so, for example, if you read a blog of mine or a short article, you write it's going to take you 5 to 8 minutes, about 1,000 words, right? It's going to take you 5 to 8 minutes to read it. What do you actually get for those 1,000 words? Well, if I'm writing a blog article, I'm going to it's two writing sessions, really. I'm going to write it one day. I may do one phone call, one interview, what call a friend, "Hey, you know,

[41:02] you're an expert, what do you think? This is the idea, you know?" And then I'm going to polish it the next day. So, you give me 5 minutes and you get roughly 6 hours and maybe one phone call. So, two brains on the problem and about 6 hours for 5 minutes. That's not bad ROI. But, if you read a book, say take Rise

[41:18] of Superman. My books um on average about 70, 72,000 words. It's going to take most people about 6 to 7 hours reading them. This is just normal reading speed, right? So, okay, cool. You've given me 6 to 7 hours. What's your return on investment? Well, for Rise of Superman, it took me 15 years worth of research to write that book. There were thousands of conversations and and you know, so literally, you're giving me 6 or 7 hours, but you're getting 15 years of my life and hundreds of other people

[41:47] beating on those ideas. That's amazing ROI. Two ideas that dovetail into this I I want to hear you maybe respond to. One is I have a concept called the learning loop. Okay. And it's you have an experience, you take that experience, you compress it. So, you reflect on it. So, you have an experience, you reflect on it, you create a compression,

[42:09] and then you act on that compression. Okay. And when we communicate with other people, we're often communicating the compression. Yeah. And I feel in a lot of cases it's the illusion of knowledge. It's like me going home, I pull out a cookbook, I can make that recipe, but if something goes wrong, I have no idea what went wrong, why it went wrong. But, the chef who's had the experience, reflected on that experience, and then given me the recipe, which is in fact the compression, they know exactly what went wrong. "There's too much salt. Your oven's not the right temperature. You didn't stir enough. You" They like

[42:42] instantly know all of that stuff. And a lot of what we consume is the compression, other people's compression. So, in in the podcast space, one of the reasons I wanted to do long-form is to get away from Oh, or at least as reasonably as we can get away from the compressions, get into the experiences, and show the thinking, show the reflection, and then people can come up with their own compressions that they take away from the episode in an effort to make it more useful. I'm curious, A, how you would respond to that, B, how I can make the podcast format better for people to take away

[43:17] information they can actually use. Well, I think it's a medium is the message kind of thing. So, I think you will get with this kind of thing better stories, better the human side. I like there's a lot of advantages cuz those things even get compressed in in books for a lot of reasons. So, I think the podcast is really there's certain kinds of things that are that are very ef- that is very effective for. When it comes to like teaching knowledge though, I still think there's something about reading

[43:52] Oh, definitely. that's just better. I also always tell people that like you can't read the book same books as other people. All right, if you read the same books as other people, you think the same thoughts as other people. And so, whenever the whole world's running around talking about a book, like I'm I'm usually usually suspicious of that book, but I'm usually curious about what the author read to produce the book, right? That's really interesting to me. And I like I like backtracking that way in terms of sources. How to make the podcast better

[44:24] from an information perspective. Information density density perspective is interesting. To me, it's also about your willing to a willingness, one's willingness to always sort of ask the extra question. As a as I've been on both sides of the microphone, right? I started out as a journalist. Um there's an urge to sort of get through your questions and get through the interview and sort of do that part of the job, but like every there's always the next question, right? There's that follow and so that like the restraint to like, "Oh, I'm not going to get through my checklist. I'm going to take the time to ask the next question and the

[44:59] follow-up and the follow-up." Which you've been doing. So like But this is why you're the perfect person to talk to with your journal. Like how do you pull out the best information from people? So this is how do you interview experts? Yeah. Right. These are my rules. Um one, I don't go into like if I'm being interviewed by somebody or if interviewing somebody, I know I learn everything. Like everything. I will know your hometown. I remember um at one point I had to meet I can't remember the vodka company. It was the guy one of the big vodka companies I was interviewing him. And I found out like

[45:34] not only was did I find out what his hometown was, I found out what the patron saint of his hometown was and there was a statue St. Lidwina. This is the patron saint of ice skating. It's still stuck in my brain. I can't even tell you what town it is. Um it was in Finland I want to say. So like I'll go into the interview knowing all their work and a lot about them. First question I ask always displays personal knowledge. So you grew up in so-and-so and when you were 10 years old X happened. Something that like lets you know I know your history. That's

[46:08] question one. Question two, I'm going to always display domain knowledge about not just your like I'm going to display knowledge about your work, but I'm going to put it in the domain context. So David Eagleman, science writer, right? So David, when you wrote Incognito and you presented your information on synesthesia, that's really interesting, but it conflicts with what Helmholtz said back in blah. I'll do that kind of thing. So the first two questions I want to establish one, I know you. I know you and I know your work and I can speak your language. So feel free to speak freely. Um I will I'm also always the first person

[46:47] to be like, "Hey, stop. You're going to have to explain that to me like I'm a four-year-old." Right? I've got no I've got no ego in what I like. I love being the dumb guy in the room, right? Love being the dumb guy in the room and being able to be like, "Hey, how did that work?" It's about sort of seducing your interviewee into flow, right? What you want is to interpersonal flow. What you're trying to get here is interpersonal flow. That's to get so lost in the conversation that my filters come down and I'm willing to, you know, that's what That's sort of what everybody's sort of going for when

[47:16] you're interviewing experts and suddenly you're like, "Oh my god, you you know my history and you speak my language? You want us? I could talk to you, right? It's a big deal. I want to switch gears just a little bit. Uh Josh Waitzkin says he hunts for his own thinking errors. Is that like the meta-skill?

[47:38] Why is he so effective at learning? I love Josh. Um I think he's a genius about about this stuff. I don't know if this is an answer. I'm going to fumble around for a little while. Um but I will tell you that the areas where Josh learned how to learn, first as a chess player and then as a martial artist, um especially in Tai Chi, which is a sort of a slower, more meditative stuff, when you make errors in thinking, in chess you're going to lose and in Tai Chi push like he's going to get thrown out of the ring, right? Cuz he was doing competitive the the martial version of

[48:15] Tai Chi. Um and you get pushed out of the ring. That's how you lose in that version. Um and so his thinking errors were very visible to like the errors of thinking have consequences um that are that were right in his face and I think something like that even like me learning to think as a journalist, right? When I got something wrong, I would get fired or I wouldn't get hired again, you know what I mean? Um so I think to develop the meta-skills one like I think the consequences sort of help a little bit to help you think about thinking. Um I also think I'm a long-time meditator. Josh is a

[48:54] long-time meditator. Um when you start getting that separation between emotion and feeling, right? Cuz emotions surface first and they're automatic and feelings come second and they feel automatic and they feel like but you know, like if you can get into the gap between feeling emotion and feeling, you start to figure out oh, wait a minute, that feeling is a frame. It's not exactly trustworthy. It's different. There's two things going on here in the minute that feeling shows

[49:20] up, it locks me into a meaning. And so when you start doing that work and you start noticing there's like there's a difference there, I think all these things are very helpful sort of on the way to meta-cognition. I want to tie that back to Josh for a second. So it seems like there's a couple things. I'm going to I'm going to say how I'm hearing what you're saying and maybe you can respond to this. So it sounds like a lot of the conditions Josh was using were the same conditions we need for intuition. So rapid feedback, lot of iterations and relatively unchanging environment. You know, you're confined in what's

[49:59] happening. And then I heard but you didn't say or maybe I inferred from my past knowledge of Josh that he was okay being uncomfortable, which means he was okay looking like a fool and being a beginner and he didn't have an image or something he had to maintain and he was okay making mistakes and then getting the feedback from those

[50:22] mistakes. That's interesting. I didn't I wasn't thinking about that. That is obviously true. I think anybody who's good at learning doesn't like I have a I don't like being bad in public. So I try very hard like even with, you know, when I ski I try to get as far away from the chairlift. Like I will, you know, I want to iterate in the woods out of sight. I think Josh was a little bit like when Josh was transitioning from Tai Chi and martial and martial arts Gracie Jiu-Jitsu at that point um and moving into surfing and and and Pan Am which is,

[50:56] you know, where he is right now. He left New York and went down to Costa Rica, right? Where he doesn't really know anybody. He got and some of it was access to waves and I got that, but I think some of that was also like, let me get away from everybody I know so I can like be really bad and it doesn't

[51:12] matter. So, I have a theory on how people learn good just on this notion. I think the best people in the world often learn in what I call the dark hours. Nobody's watching them. There's no boss. It doesn't matter what your field is. It's how you hone your craft. You play. You're there after 5:00 p.m. It's 10:00 at night. You're playing around with an Excel spreadsheet or you're writing a wave or you're doing whatever and nobody's watching you. And in those moments you can fail cuz there's no consequences. There's no boss directing you and you're playing and you're learning and that sort of ties into what

[51:45] you were saying with skiing and how you Yeah, I want to do this in the back where nobody can see me. I think about this slightly different to say when I I always talk about the importance of non-time. I get up and start my writing day about 3:30, 4:00 every day. And one of the reasons is nobody bugs

[52:04] me. Nobody owns 4:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. is non-time. It doesn't belong to anybody. And I you know, this is an old habit from I used to live on the West Coast and I was like I was the West Coast reporter for a lot of East Coast publications and we were all young and hungry. And so like my friends which my editors would show up at like 8:00 in the morning. They would get to work early. And it's 5:00 back on the West Coast and they would start to call me. So, I knew I had to get my work done, like my books written before the phone started ringing

[52:37] because I was so poor. Like the minute they called, what do you need? How high? I'll jump, right? Like what do you what do you need? I'll go do it. Um so, it was all it was an instant yes and I knew this so I had to like start getting up earlier and earlier and earlier. And I started to realize exactly what you did is now I love it because sometimes in my job, I'm sure in your job, too, there are days I got to spend

[53:00] an hour or 2 hours on a sentence. And if you're asking me to spend 2 hours in a sentence at 9:00 a.m. in normal business hours when I got to like run my company, that you're crazy. I cannot do it. And it's certainly not playful, right? And really what you want when you're stuck writing is exactly that you have to start playing with the language to like get that break that you have to come at it from weird angles and do all that stuff. And you can only do that with like that non-timer, your dark dark

[53:28] dark hours. dark hours. Um it yes, that's sort of how I think about One of the things we have in common is that we both had Lyme. Tell me about your your story. It's sort of the second half of my entrance into into flow science comes out of this. I had this crazy sort of year of sort of It's the last year of where I was a journalist. I had a bunch of badass assignments. I went to Africa and lived on the side of a river in Madagascar for a couple of months. I was part of the first uh National Geographic sand surfing expedition into the Sahara. Then

[54:03] I did the first biotic survey ever in a slot canyon. It was like all this mad stuff. And then I went to a wedding a friend's wedding in Long Island and went for a walk in the arboretum cuz I'm shy around people I don't know. And I He was his friends and I didn't know anybody. And I got bit by a tick at a wedding in Long Island. And but I lost I spent 3 years in bed. I was one of the first cases in California so they had no idea what was uh on me and it was no nobody could fix me. So that I was on

[54:30] drugs uh to my stomach lining. So I was on doxycycline and my stomach lining started bleeding out. And they're like, "We don't know if you're ever going to get better." "What done with you. We can't do anything more for you basically." And uh It's so interesting cuz doxycycline is the I know it's the drug, but they kept me on it for so long that like now they'll keep you It's a month or 2 months. They

[54:54] kept me on it for a year and a half. Like which was insane. So they it it it did a lot of bad stuff to me. The story I always tell is I was functional like 10% of the time. I don't know how sick you got, but I couldn't I was really sick. Yeah, my brain stopped working. My short-term memory was gone. My long-term memory all of it. And I couldn't, you know, walk across the room. And after I was going to kill myself, I had sleeping pills. I had booze. I had a plan. It was just It was like when not if. And I was

[55:20] in LA at the time and a friend of mine showed up at my dressed up and demanded that we go surfing. And I was laughing. I was like, "Andrea, I can't walk across the room. I'm not I'm not going surfing." And she would not leave my apartment and wouldn't leave and wouldn't leave and wouldn't leave and after like 3 hours and you know how irritable you are with Lyme, right? You have no reserves. Um and she really just like didn't matter what I said to her, she was not leaving. And

[55:45] after 3 hours, I was like, "I give up. Let's just go surfing today. What is the worst that can happen? I'm going to kill myself anyway, right?" So, um she took me to the Pacific. They gave me a giant board, right? And surfing the bigger the board, the easier it is to surf. And it

[55:58] was summer. It was a mellow warm day. And the people had to like take me by the elbows and lead me out to the break. And I was on my board like less than 30 seconds and a wave came. I think I took literally all the energy I had in the world and popped right up. And I had no intention. Like when we went surfing, I was like, "I'm going to sit out in the sun for an hour and then we're going to go home. I'm not going to surf. That would be insane and impossible." And I popped up and turned into a dimension I didn't even

[56:24] know existed. Like time slowed to an absolute crawl. I've been flow states before, but not a full-blown macro flow state. I started to have a an out-of-body experience. Um and a bunch of other really crazy things happened and it felt It was amazing cuz the best part about it is like my head was clear. I could surf. The pain was gone. And I was It was amazing. I caught four more waves that day and I was I was

[56:49] done. And they drove me home and they put me into bed. And I didn't move for 14 days. People had to bring me food cuz I couldn't even get to my kitchen. I was so destroyed from it. And on the 15th day, I could walk again. I had a neighbor who's a pro surfer, a former

[57:03] pro surfer, and I didn't even know him. And I just like knocked on his door and I said, "Hey, can you drive me to the beach?" And I went surfing again and over the course of like 6 months, I went from about 10% functional to about 80% functional. And only thing I was doing was surfing. And coming back being

[57:20] destroyed. And slowly over time, I start I got healthier and healthier. I was having these wild altered state experiences in the waves. And Lyme, as you know, is only fatal if it gets into your brain. And I'm a hardcore science guy. I'm a rational materialist. I'm having basic quasi-spiritual experiences in the waves. And I think, "Okay, I might be feeling better, but it's got to be an illusion. The disease is in my brain, and I'm clearly dying." So, I lit out on a giant quest to figure out what the

[57:49] hell happened to me. And I had seen flow sort of work earlier in my career with athletes and getting them sort of from zero to superhero, but I didn't exactly know it was flow. We didn't quite know what was going on. It was hard to tell what was flow, what was a quote unquote spiritual experience. The literature was very

[58:06] confusing. The science wasn't there yet. The neurobiology wasn't done yet. Um so, it was really hard to figure that out. But I, you know, I quickly figured out that these states have a name. Um from a neuroimmunology perspective, Herb Benson, who sort of at Harvard, who's the cardiologist who's famous for the relaxation response. He actually mapped the uh original neurochemistry of the flow cycle. Flow is a four-stage cycle. It's not a light switch experience. And he mapped it. And he looked at healing. And he has said in his book, The Breakout Principle, that he thinks flow is responsible for most cases of

[58:39] spontaneous healing. And I think, by the way, that's a massive overstatement, but not for an autoimmune condition. And here's why. As we transition into a flow state, there's a global release of nitric oxide, right? It's gaseous signaling molecule. You go to the gym, and when your uh lungs open up after about 20 minutes, it gets quiet upstairs. That's that nitric oxide. And it pushes stress hormones out of your system. In flow, when you transition into flow, it's a huge nitric oxide release. So, the stress hormones are get stripped from your system, and they're replaced by performance-enhancing feel-good neurochemistry. The biggest problem over time with an autoimmune condition is you

[59:13] no longer know where homeostasis is. Your body can't find baseline cuz it's it's always bouncing it. So, like a lot of that is cuz your nervous system doesn't know where's normal. So, by moving into flow and just having the stress hormones pushed out of your system resets the nervous system to baseline. So, the system can sort of the prediction engine brain can start making more accurate predictions again. It brings back agency. It does a whole lot of stuff psychologically and emotionally and physically and the neurochemistry of flow, it dopamine, norepinephrine,

[59:46] serotonin, and anandamide. All those things boost the immune system. They don't just sort of reset the nervous system and feel good. They're immune system boosters. This is why flow can often be really healing from especially from autoimmune conditions. And this is now much more well-established. Back in the '90s, you know, the mind-body connection was still suspicious, right? Back in the '90s, um Ellen Langer hadn't done her work at Harvard yet and all this stuff that sort of like smoothed that over hadn't

[1:00:15] happened yet. How long did it take you to feel normal again? I was sick for 3 years. The surfing to like 80% functionality, which is where it got me to, was about a year and then it took 6 more years till I was sort of back to normal. I lost like 30 or 40 lb. I was 100 70 lb when I started and I was 129 lb when I finished with Lyme disease. I

[1:00:42] still can't get my weight above 160. Like this like I can't get I can't get back. I lost about an inch of height, too. I was done. I was shorter. I was lighter. I thought I had a bad case of Lyme, but that takes What happened to you? I What's yours? Just woke up one morning and started drinking coffee and the left side of my face was

[1:01:05] completely paralyzed. And that was the start and I had no idea. So, I I like called my mom and I was like, "Can you come watch the kids? I got to go to the hospital. And I show up at my doctor's office and they're like, "Oh my god, we think you're having a heart attack." So, they brought me in, saw the doctor. She's like, "Yeah, you're you I think you're having a heart attack." And I'm like, "Well, rationally speaking, that doesn't make a ton of sense, right? Like, healthy, no

[1:01:30] hit family history. Uh out of all the things, like what else could it be?" And, you know, she's like, "You need to go to emerge like right now." And I show up at emerge. They're like, "Yeah, you know I'm having a heart attack." And then, you know, 6 hours later cuz this is Canada, I see a

[1:01:45] doctor. And they give me all these tests and I was like, "Oh, you know, I was talking to uh some neurologists while I was waiting." And he's like, "Oh, you were playing Dr. Google right here." And I was like, "Well, they said that, you know, in a in a healthy, you know, male at my age, um test for these four things and that will probably cover 80% of what would cause it." And he's like, "Here's some

[1:02:10] prednisone, go home. Uh if your family doctor thinks you need it, she can order the the test." And over the next 2 weeks, I started to gradually lose almost all um functionality. Like, I couldn't stand still at one point. Like, if I stood still for more than 3 seconds, the back of my knees felt like somebody had stabbed them. I'd be lying on the floor

[1:02:32] crying. Uh and then, you know, after that, my I had lockjaw. I couldn't open my mouth. Wow. And so, like, my whole body was just shutting down. But luckily, a friend saved me. It was like I told her about it and she's like, "This feels like Lyme." She wrote me a prescription, doxycycline. And within 3 days, I like my I just started feeling improvement. And she gave me the requisition to get tested for for Lyme and I got tested for it. Turns out I

[1:02:59] tested positive. My family doctor called me this the day after I got my test results cuz it takes 7 days in Ontario to get a Lyme test result, which is insane in and of itself. Um given what it does to your body and how destructive it is and how prevalent it is. And so, as calls me, and she's like, "I finally agreed to give you a requisition." You

[1:03:22] know, cuz you're just arguing with her. If you go If you open up "West of Jesus", which is the book I wrote where I tell the sort of the story we just walked through, um I don't really write about much about the Lyme. Um it just sort of kicks off the book and it's there a little bit. And um but there's a paragraph where I list all the diseases they thought I had

[1:03:42] before they would test me for Lyme. Interesting. Um it's literally a paragraph. It's just a simple test to use. refused. There's first the disease and then there's the medical establishment and and and what it's like to deal with a long-term illness when and the medical establishment. You have to advocate for yourself and it it's I don't know. It was eye-opening for me in so many ways, but luckily we're both fully recovered and healthy today. So, we always end these interviews sort of with a similar question or theme, but I have two questions for you. When are you most

[1:04:16] happy? Uh when I'm skiing or when I'm writing. And what is success for you? It's always been the same thing. Right? It's like I get to like put words together in a straight line for a living. It's the most mad Like I can't believe people pay me for it. And now I get to like put words together in a straight line, often based on the like science experiments that me and my friends get

[1:04:44] to run. I Are you kidding? Like are you crazy? I would have done all this [ __ ] for free. In fact, I was doing it for free for a very long time. Right? So, I think of it that way. I'm also will tell I'll flat-out tell you, it's one of the reasons I get along so well with the action sport athletes is I am ferociously competitive. I don't take it very seriously, but if you can, I will flat-out tell you I want to be the greatest writer in the history of the universe. I know that's not a specific

[1:05:14] title, but I still want that title. Right? Like I'm that ferociously competitive. The coolest thing about flow right and and and performance is that it's emergent. You don't really know what you're capable of cuz you can only find out inside of flow and you get into a flow state and you push your skills to their to their edge and then you know you get into another and you push it push it and push it and so when I think of what success is it's always I don't like it's not a destination it's a way of living and to me the way of living is one I'm doing things that are

[1:05:51] like core to me and dearly authentic and where I can be very effective and useful. I get to keep following my curiosity out and it doesn't stop. That's how I think about it. [music]

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