Flow Expert: The Secret to Peak Focus, Creativity, and Performance

Welcome to Quick Brain, Bite Size Brain Hacks for busy people who want to learn faster and achieve more. I'm your coach, Jim Quick. So today, we have a return guest. He just got off stage. We are live at Limeless Live. And this is very special because your books just sold out. You've taken enough pictures with our audience because they love you. You spoke at our event back in 2011 and 2013 with Tony Shan Vegas. These are epic times. Welcome back to show Stephen Collar. He's spent decades basically studying what happens when human beings are playing and practicing and performing at the edge of their limits. And so we're going to go into the science of flow. Who doesn't want to feel their best and perform their best? All right, I'm going to crack some myths also as well. He is the founder of the Flow Research Collective. He's for in 17 books. Many of them New York Times best sellers. I mean, I could go on and on. He's a dear long term friend. And thanks for being here. Thanks for having me, Jim. Yeah, back. You know, I've spent the past four days with you. I've seen you every day for the last four days. We've been doing a number of gatherings and panels. And obviously you're here live at Limeless Live. Let's talk about Flow. I mean, we haven't had this conversation for quite a few years. You know, I enjoyed really enjoyed your last book. Yeah, that was a big one. And so I want to talk about a little bit about flow and focus. I want to make this extremely practical. I also want to our audience is a little bit more sophisticated than the average audience in terms of their background and their interest. But what about a myth? I think a lot of people, if they knew we more flow was, if you go on Main Street, they would think like, oh, this is what happens when the conditions are perfect, right? But what in your research when people perform at a high, exceedingly high level under pressure? I mean, what are the ideal, you know, conditions for? That's the question question. Okay. So Flow is optimal performance. Yeah. And one of the things that we've learned the field, we over the past 25 years that my lab help high near some of this work flow states have triggers. Three conditions that lead to more flow. The most famous one is known as the challenge skills balance. And we back up one second and say Flow follows focus. It's a state of like complete focus on the task at hand. So that's what all of these triggers do. There's 26 to 28, depending on how you count them, we discovered there's way more, but that what they all share in common is they drive attention to the present moment onto the task at hand. So the most famous and often called the golden rule of flow is the challenge skills balance. And it's the idea that we pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge of the task makes a stretch, but not snap. Okay. So and me, I check something out of the Godfather Flow psychology actually teamed up with the Google mathematician decades ago, and they figured out that the percentage difference between challenging skills on average was about 4%. We took that into my lab. We beat it on it for 10 years. I don't think we proved it's a hard thing to prove, but we never found anything that conflicted with it. So a 4% is if you're shy, meek, timid, or not as great at the task, it's going to be problematic because it's just outside your comfort zone. If you're a hard charging type, if you're non-tubinary, you'll take on challenges that are 10, 20, 30% greater than your skill set, just because it wakes you up. Top athlete, do that a lot. Yeah. So and secret is to chunk down the task at hand, so it's 4%. Even if the task itself is 50% greater than your skill set, the thing you're doing right here right now is 4%. So this is the myth. This is a long way of backing into your question. One of the myths about when you see peak performance, we think we're seeing somebody at the far edge of their abilities because it's the far edge of our abilities. Yeah. Right? Laird Hamilton used to say this a lot, a big wave surfer, and Laird used to say, you know, people see me on a 50, 60 foot wave and they think, oh my god, wow, that's amazing. I could never do that. He's like, fine, but you didn't see me yesterday on a 49 and a half foot wave. And the day before, on a 49 foot wave, the day before that on a 40, you didn't see me back at pipeline when I was a four year old and my dad used to take me out and let me go swim around pipeline and like the life cards would come rescue because he was a little like, that's how people do it. You never see, they're very rarely do you see this huge jump in performance. You actually, what you're seeing is the next step. That's sort of what flow unlocks is that the next, it's optimal performance. Everything's, I mean, your best, but there's like a window for how hard it's going to take you and it's really more of a ladder that you climb from flow state to flow state to flow state. That's the ladder of complexity and performance anyways. It's an example where people listening, they tend to compare themselves to even on social media or whatever their people are admiring or people build big businesses. And it's a reminder that every expert was once a beginner, right? Every professional was once an amateur, but those incremental steps at the opposite would also be hard also, right? If the challenges too low and you're in the skill basis too high, you're not going to be focused. So we actually just published an article in neural image to new, we found 12 different new ways for measuring flow in the brain, published about one of the things that was interesting in this article. What we're talking about the challenge skills balance. If you were to talk about emotionally, I would say the sweet spot, what's known as the flow channel sits between boredom. There's not enough stimulation here. I'm not paying any attention and anxiety and frustration. Whoa, wait too much. I can't stop. So we've always thought it was equidistant between the two to get into flow and what our research seems to suggest is that it is easier to go from frustration and anxiety into flow than from boredom into flow. And the secret when frustration and anxiety is you've pushed too hard and then you back off. So you'll hear athletes always say, I want my training to be harder than my race. So I want my training to be harder than my fight or whatever. So one of the reasons athletes are training, they're actually trying to push themselves to the very edge of that sweet spot. So when the competition shows up, it's actually easier. 35 years ago, I did the same thing with mental training for speed reading. If I would train myself to read, if I was reading super slow, I would get bored, not engaged, my mind would wander, all the things fall asleep. But I would train myself at exceedingly high levels almost at that kind of anxiety limit. But then when I had to compete or perform, then I would scale it down. And it was just lose your sense of self. I do it so the weird stands out for me is as an athlete skiing. You know, I skew with a lot of people who are former pros and whatever. And so I'm a writer. I'm an a neuroscientist. I'm not pro athlete. I'm good. But I'm not what they are. And so invariably the whole day I'm over my head. I'm over the challenge. I'm out of the challenge skills balance. And they'll get a point where like I sort of split apart from the group. And like we've been skiing the gnarliest stuff on the mountain. I'll just back it off like one or two steps. That's what flow shows on. It's super, super consistent. So then if somebody was going to design like a like a Tuesday and they wanted to create, you know, some ideal conditions for them, I always started the same place. First you manicure the environment, then you give the brand a target and then you figure out how to attack the problem. So complete concentration is a flow trigger. That means very specific things. But what it really means is shut off your damn phone, turn off your notifications, shut off email, you know, hang a sign on your door. I like to tell companies to hang a sign on your door. This is off. I'm flowing. I like to swear at that point. So they get the point that you're not going to be more powerful than your devices. They're literally built to distract you. That's what they're designed to do. So you know this. Of course, if you teach this, shut all that stuff down. Batch your communications if you can. So you answer emails and messages. The other people make for you early in the morning, end of the day. Those kinds of things, limit communication channels, have conversations in advance. Flow makes you much more productive. Really ample performance and productivity. So you get more time back for the people who need you. They just got to leave you alone so you could focus and concentrate. Then the brain needs a target. So that's what manicured the environment. Right? Then the brain needs a target clear goals list daily to do list. Flow follows focus. All the flow triggers drive our attention in the present moment. A clear goal is list says, oh, this is what I'm supposed to focus on. This is what I'm not. And this is what I'm supposed to ignore. And this is what I'm supposed to go from here to this one to this one. One, when you cross those things off, you get dopamine. That's added motivation. And one of the systems involved in flow. You always see the executive attention network and the goal directed network working together. Those are the two main networks. The default network kits quiet. Those two networks tend to work together. The front end of flow state, they're not stable at the back end. They tend to be synchronous, brain entrainment. But it's a goal directed state. So if you give the brain a goal, that's what it wants anyways to get into flow. You're working with your biology. That's the second part. The third part is I always tell people on your daily to do list. If you can, Start your day with your hardest task first, biggest challenge. biggest win for the day, one, and make sure it's your thing, not some work other people made for you, because you're more fired up to do your work, it's more aligned with your motivation, your purpose, your meaning, all that stuff matters more. So your hardest task of the day, the thing if you finish it, you've won the day, and then the question is, how do you attack the challenge? And I just gave you that answer, the challenge skills balance. So you want that task, whatever you're doing, about 4% greater than your skills. So let me give you an example from my own office, a writer, you've written books. When I start a book, I usually try to write like 5600 words a day. The reason I like that target is almost anybody can write or can write about 350, 400 words, because that's about a single idea. That's what takes me to give an idea. Then you have to transition to the next idea, which is always the hardest thing to do in writing, as you know. So it's about 4% greater than my sweet spot. That's what that is. Now in the middle of the book, I know more of what I'm doing. So 400, 500 words a day. No, no, no. Now it's 700, 800, thousand words a day. And to the book, where I totally know where I'm going and most of the stuff's been done, 1500 words a day. So you always have to remember the challenge skills sweet spot. It's a moving target. If you went out partying the night before in our hungover and tired, it's probably 1%. If you've got a lot of trauma illness, any of those things in your past, allostatic overload shrinks the challenge skills spot a lot. So you have to read your energy level, read your recent history, and said it accordingly. And no, it's just enough, as you pointed out, just hard enough that you're slightly challenged by it, but not overloaded. And then what is your first day in terms of your environment, look like generally if people are you're going to pay the picture when you're writing, you know, till, like, distractions. Yes, I wake. So I'm, as you know, a little nuts with this stuff. I'm an early riser to begin with. So I start my day at 3 30 or 4 a.m. every day. I've literally seen the sunrise every day for 30 some years at this point. I open the document I'm working on the night before I put it in focus view. So it's literally just the words and black and the lights stay off in my office. So if you want to amplify divergent, super creative thinking, darkness. If you want to amplify logical linear thinking, yeah, light makes you convergent. You want to do your taxes turn on the lights. If you want to write fiction, turn them off. Really like quick hack. Not my work, John Mark Beeman and John Koino's two friends of mine at Drexel. They're experts on insight. They've done all the foundational research on insight. So I like to keep the lights off. Everything is off the night before. There's one emergency channel that stays open for like, handful of people who love me, my managing director, my assistant, my chief of staff, and nobody else has that can get in that channel. Are you a high achiever constantly seeking the next level of success? Welcome to the quick success program. It's a deep dive in support system to master your life and scale to new heights and personal and professional achievement. Included is our exclusive monthly book club where we process transformative ideas from amazing books to level up your learning and your life. We also bring the author to the club to answer your burning questions. You could also participate in monthly live coaching calls with me where your questions meet my decades of expertise. Simply go to quicksuccess.com. That's kwiksuccess.com and choose the plan that works best for you. And so those are the only like, you know, an only bug. If it's an emergency and I work from 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. and then at 8 a.m. No breaks. No breaks. I will get it. Sometimes I'll get up. You know, there's a natural focusing window. That's about 90 minutes long. It's a great way to alert cycle. So usually you find at the end of one of those cycles, what I will do is I will walk outside and I watch the sunrise for a little what like for a minute and just deep just some deep breathing, you know, just to survive. I will definitely not do anything to activate my prefrontal cortex, my emotions, never just social. I mean, never be distracted. I want the reason I go outside is it's another creativity hack. A wide view when we're right. Wide field of view also increases insight and creativity. So darkness and then as it starts to turn light, wide field of view. So yeah, you know, more narrow view is like even if you're in threat, right? You're going to focus. Yeah, because that's right. We have fight or flight is directly in front of you. So you can trick the brain to calming yourself down. You know, that's right. You deep breathe and you look at the world out of your eyes. And in a minute or so, you'll calm down because your brain goes, oh, look, you're looking at you're using peripheral vision. There's no way you could be under attack and it calms you down because it doesn't want to waste the energy to build stress chemicals. That's interesting. That's another explanation for why we do these peripheral vision kind of to be able to take in more words when we're teaching people to read faster. So they'll have less fixations because they could they're more relaxed than they could take it. But by the way, flow, this is very new research. One of these people report in macro flow, the high end of the flow state where it's really intense is feeling like they can see out of the back of their heads like they've got panoramic vision. What's happening in flow is you actually get peripheral, what your peripheral vision widens out and your focal vision is very attuned. So it's very rare to be able to see straight ahead and sideways at the same time. And in flow, you can do it. One of the reasons time pass is so strangely inflow. There's a bunch of different reasons time passes strangely, but if time slows down, one of the three things that's slowing it down is not the time slowing down. It's that your brain is going from super focal to wide and back again. And that produces a time dilation effect. Is it still true that it's the people feel that they report the loser sense of self. It's more effortless, the time changes. So this is six. This is me. How do we know word and flow, right? One of the six conditions. Flow is it's an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best from a performer best, but that doesn't help. Right. So more specifically, it's any of those moments of rapt attention and total absorption. We so focused on the task at hand, complete concentration is one of the characters as a flow. Everything else starts to melt away. The next thing that happens is action awareness start to merge. That's the second characteristic of flow. The third, as you mentioned, your sense of self disappears, diminishes your inner critic. It's really quiet. Time passes strangely. It's time distortion. We were just talking about it's slowing down, which doesn't happen that frequently. If you've been a car crash or action sports, it's a little more common. Usually it speeds up. You just get sucked into what you're doing and five hours go by. It feels like five minutes, right? There's that sense. There's a sense of control. You don't it doesn't look like peak performance from the inside. From the inside, it looks like, wow, I can control things. I can't normally control four o'clock in the morning. My sentences are dancing all over the page. That doesn't usually happen when I write, but in flow, it does. I'm controlling length, right? Or you know, on and on could be a business leader reading, leading a great business meeting and suddenly like, instead of like checking their phone and being just everybody's on the same page, ideas are bouncing off the walls, right? There can be group flow. Oh, yeah, group flow, shared collectivers comes in individual and group flow comes in all kinds of varieties. Like, if we get lost in a conversation two hours, goodbye, that's interpersonal flow. If it's a fourth quarter, come back in football or like a great improv theater performance or a band coming together, that's group flow. Team flow is group flow with a goal at the end of it. So you see team flow and work environments a lot and then scale when you go to rock concert every clapping and sank or political rally. That's community toss. That's group flow scale. That was actually the earliest flow research was early flow research was done by Gerta and Nietzsche and they were trying to, this is great, a lot of early flow research in the 1800s was done in and around beer. Don't ask yeah. So the earth first flow work was done because they were trying to figure out what the hell happens to people like German beer festivals. They're like, yes, everybody gets drunk, but there's this like change and consciousness in the crowd never restart behaving like one like one singular organism rather than like a bunch of drunk people. And what is that? And community toss is what that is. And so that was where flow research started with that that very question. This, by the way, the challenge skills balance. Yeah. Bounder of experimental psychology is Wilhelm Wundt. So he's German. He finds it flounds it in Germany and in America, it's William James. But Wilhelm Wundt comes first and he is hired by a German beer manufacturer in the 1870s to figure out if there was a perfect amount of bitterness in beer. And what he figures out is it doesn't matter what the thing is bitterness. Loudness doesn't matter. What the sense thing is there's a threshold below which we're bored. We're not paying attention. We don't notice this stimulus. There's a sweet spot. The challenge skill suites about the flow channel. We're fine. And there's a threshold above it that we can't stand and produce this anxiety. We're true for bitterness. It's true for the challenge skills. But that's in physiology. That's the earth stops and curve. This is one of the oldest findings in modern neuroscience and modern physiology. Still holds the flow channel. Yeah. We've found it the first time in the 1870s. We found it again when we were studying fighter flight and the earth stops and curve in the 1910s and teens. And then it shows up again when chicks set me high. And by the way, this is when me high chicks, I mean, I was doing the original flow research. search. When he was looking for optimal performance, he didn't find flow. He found the challenge skills balance first and that led him to flow. Like, he knew people were getting into the state, but what he noticed is everybody was at right in this like sweet spot. That's what he found first. And if you read his original book Beyond Board of Mananxiety, which is why it's called Beyond Board of Mananxiety, because he was looking at that exact ratio. That was where like the early research and flow came from, we found the trigger before we found the state. Do you have very experienced boredom yourself? Not often as a kid I did. My parents are the children of immigrants. You know what that family that you get the weight of a lot of tradition. You get a lot of expectation. You get a lot of stuff, right? It weighs a lot. That goes away over time, like, like, went away over time a little bit and there was more freedom. Absolutely convinced there was like a whole world going on that adults weren't telling me about. I was right. It was a lot, right? But I was really convinced that like there was there was more interesting elsewhere. So I remember that as a kid, but I also remember solving it with art and, you know, performance and like that's that was sort of early flow for me was like trying to deal with boredom and anxiety, which I felt a lot of both. And in the last I was immersed in things. It was like early stuff. Like as it was an accident sports at the time, like, we would jump our bikes off anything we possibly could. We were riding skateboards. We were building obstacle courses like that was what you know what I mean. So that was the physical side. But I was, I started writing poetry when I was four years old. I started making art projects and designing things games. I built a lot of games as a kid. And by the time I was eight or nine, I was doing professional magic. And I was working by the time I was 11 doing birthday parties, apartments, physical, the performing on stages. So like I just sort of rode risky athletic activity and creativity into flow. And that was sort of how I navigated my childhood. A lot of people are using AIS as a as an offloading, which is pretty things in your calendars grade you and technologies it's amazing, right? But what if what are surrendering in that frictions not there? The challenge is not there. Most people know about cognitive offloading. But if you, so I like to say we have one of the only labs in the world that's fully dedicated to how to use AI and not get stupid, right? That's one of the things we've been looking at. And I'll tell you the flow tie in in a second. We'll come back to flow in AI in a second and you'll understand why we're studying it. But there's actually 12, 13 different things that AI is coming after it's cognition, creativity. Do you know your less sympathetic and pathetic and compassionate after you've used AI? So you need to do a resetting ritual. I like drawing drawings are really good. Like you need a reset ritual. If you're going from AI to I'm talking to my girlfriend, my spouse, my kids, my boss. Your tolerance for their disagreement with you because the AI's are built to please us right when the feedback is really fast. So if your boss waits five seconds where he answers you and said doesn't agree with you, you have less sympathy and tolerance and more aggression. And this is very well established like eight different studies. So people have had it because they're used to getting. Yeah. It's so responsive. So much. So much so my lab is working with one of the top epidemiologists in America. He's a Vanderbilt in the head of the UT law school. Lauren Fields, we're writing an article about how AI is need to come with warning stickers like cigarettes. It's taking the challenge away and you can't get into flow and you can't learn without challenges. You know, right? If you look in the brain, you need a little bit of norepinephrine in the system that comes from challenge to even learn. So all of these are I and by the way, I love AI. It's an amazing technology. It's phenomenal if you know what you're doing. But if you use it wrong, it will actually make you stupid. The way I always tell people explaining it is I always like to say that we had soft skills in the 20th century or if I worked into a board reminded the business world in the late 80s or the 90s, I walked into a boardroom in 1990 and said, you know what we need in this company? We need some focused training. Maybe some mindfulness. Maybe we're going to need a gratitude practice. We got a rollout of gratitude practice, especially about the C suite. We're going to need more flow purpose. Do we all have a purpose? Are we aligned on purpose? You would have gotten laughed out of the room and you brought it up again. You would have gotten fired. Right? They were dismissible soft skills. In the 21st century, they're hard skills. And what I mean by that is their mandatory because if you're not actively training creativity right now, AI is stealing your creativity. If you're not actively training cognition right now and protecting your cognition from AI, it's stealing it. If you're not actively training focused in attention, your cell phone, social media is stealing it. If you're not actively working against anxiety and depression, social media is pushing, so all these things that were optional in the 20th century, if you wanted to perform your best, you did them, but like it wasn't commonplace for everybody, you have to do them in the 21st century. Not negotiables. Not negotiables. So for reasons that are going to take too long to explain, flow is our favorite experience on the planet. And you can't live in flow. You can't live in flow. It's a cycle. So you move out of it and back into it and the neurochemicals that produce this date have a shelf life and they'll burn out. A lot of things that AI does. It agrees with you. It sees you. It provides very feedback as a flow trigger, fast feedback because it focuses our attention to the present moment and masteries and innate drivers. We all want to get better. So feedback really works. We trust. We love flow and group flow better. They're our favorite experiences on earth and group flow. People prefer to flow. There's more research needed, but it seems like group flows are favorite state on the planet. We also trust it extremely. And one of the reasons is one, we trust flow because it's optimal performance and word are best. And you know two brains are more creative, more innovative than ones of two people together. But if you and I are in flow together and I suddenly like go off the reservations, start talking about flying pineapples from Mars, you can be like Stephen, why don't you come back when we talk about flow, somewhere we can revisit. You're going to error correct me. You're going to get my back. If you and I are playing jazz together and we're improv and I do crazy sex solo and I go to Mars, you're going to find some melody that leads me back towards planet earth, right? That's we error correct for each other in group flow. We trust it a lot for that reason. AI produces a fake group flow. It feels like group flow. It's actually closer to mania. And I always point out that the differences between mania and somebody who's snorted a lot of cocaine are negligible. And if you've ever spent any time around, so when you snort a lot of cocaine, you know you get nonstop, bladder, nonstop, ego, and not much good critical thinking at all because it messes up your brain. That's what's happening to people. So it's producing this fake group flow. And we trust it more. So now you're trusting a system that we know hallucinates, right? Five different times the AI is hallucinating anyways. So you know it's doing that. And now the most trustworthy experience on earth is being faked. So you have a deep level of trust and none of its deserved. So you have to really guard against that. And the other thing is so one of the other things that happens is cognitive offloading where the machine starts to think for you. It's also cognitive overloading. So do you think about when you and I were coming up, if we wanted to overload our brain with research, we'd have to go to the library, use the card catalog, gather books, scan it, it would take a day to get enough information to like around your topic. Overload your brain, even with Google search engines, they weren't great. It still took an hour or so to two hours with an AI. You can do it in like three minutes, right? And so that can take you out for the entire day if you're not careful. So it's sort of a double ed sword. And that fake flow leads into cognitive offloading a lot. I always tell people this when social media showed up, whatever was Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, whatever the first social media site you've got on. For the first two weeks, you're giddy. You're dubmin high. You were like, oh my god, look at all these people I'm connected to. I am so safe. I've got so many friends. I'm never going to want for a date on Friday night. Again, I'll always be able to get a job in like two weeks in. You were using it and you started to feel a little icky, a little lonely, a little weird afterwards. Like you watched too much television or too much junk food. And we all ignored that. We all ignored that a key feeling that we were getting from social media and what we're ignoring. The largest mental health crisis in history. That's what it felt like. That was the run end of the largest amount and we ignored it. AI is giving you the same X signal. You're getting it. If you work on AI too long or doing it the wrong way, you get that same icky signal. Social media was coming for, in a sense, your mood and your attention. That's what it was coming for. AI is coming for your creativity and cognition, which is much deeper and much bigger. It's like nuclear power, right? Amazing energy, but it can blow us all up. It's the same kind of thing with AI. Even the earliest technology, you know, fire could cook your food or it could burn down your home. I mean, it's how it's used and managed. But if someone's listening right now, you brought awareness to things. Maybe that wasn't in their awareness. But then now they feel like they need to do something. I mean, the choice is not, not use technology, right? There's four things I like to teach people. Like, four practices. I just gave you one. Pay attention to the icky signal. If you feel it at all, put the machine away. That's time to walk away. This is the single most important thing I can say about AI. I'm, oh, and I gave you the second one. Have a ritual when you're done using AI that resets you as a heroine or something. One of the things, so you know this, if you're a speaker and you come off stage, it tends to put you in a fixed mindset, you've been an expert on stage, and that will put you in a fixed mindset. And you have to kick yourself back into a growth mindset. How do you do that? You ask people questions, you get curious about them, you stop talking about yourself, turn off your ego, right? You have a humanizing ritual. If you're been a public speaker and you know this is going to happen, you don't want to sound like an egomaniac when you come off this way. You, you know, somebody comes up and talk to you, you don't answer the question. You ask about them. Everybody does this, who wants, that's what you're doing. So, AI, you need a humanizing ritual. When you come back, and I said, I like drawing, I like sketching for five minutes, like just a little like draw tree for myself, whatever, something low friction. The most important thing I can always tell people is never, ever, ever cardinal rule, let the AI start your thinking. Yeah. You write the first draft, you make the first art product because we have an associative cortex. So if you let it come to the first thinking, you've locked your associative, you've locked your brain out of the equation, and you can now it, the AI is getting smarter and you're not. You have to start the thinking, you need a ritual on the back. And I also think you've got to simultaneously train attention because the world doesn't provide feedback. What would be the example of that? Just any, any attempt to practice. Reading a book, reading a book. Rate attention training, mindfulness, rate attention training, vipostina. I like vipostina meditation. And you and I, we go in the same direction that way. Someone watching this right now, and they are fascinated, as I imagine, most of our community is with your work. How can they stay connected? How can they go deeper in your work? Books are everywhere. Yeah. Right. Ardom Possible, sort of the flowbook, more than the new one is we are as gods. And that's sort of how flow and technology, a lot of the conversation we've been having. Those are some places to start. @StevenCollar on Instagram. My Instagram is literally just about how to collection of great videos. And if you want to train with us, we have a brand new training after 25 years of work called flow for the many. And it was, how do you train really just ordinary folks in the flow? A lot of the our early work was with C-suite executives or top Navy SEALs, and it's sort of a different protocol. But I was interested in questions. I saw a technological unemployment before other people. So I was interested. I knew whatever the solution to workery skilling is, flow amplifies learning. So it's going to involve flow, right? We learned 250 percent above baseline to 130 percent, but baseline depending on which numbers you're going from in flow. And so it was very clear that it was going to be flow plus AI is how we're going to reskill people. But we're really looking at it for a long time. And I was looking at the question of how do you reskill truck drivers? Because they're going to lose their jobs to autonomous trucking. And that's the largest blue color workforce. And so that was the question or a single mother raising two kids working three jobs. This woman definitely needs more flow. How do you get her more flow? Or an entrepreneur who you know you're starting out. You have no time college athletes. These were all patient populations in a sense where I found that like our training was awesome and seemed to work for almost every two. But there was this big. There were gaps. So flow for the many was designed for that. So flow dot Stephen Kotler dot com will get you to flow for the many from me on Instagram. I love it. So I mean, who doesn't want to feel their best and perform their best? You know, especially in a world of AI rapid change. And you know, I love this conversation. And I love this idea of just building your intelligence before you borrow from the AI, right? Sure. You know, then even when you when you wake up and you're focused, you're doing that deep work. One last thing to say about this because we were I think we were talking about this the other night. It was a conversation here. I don't know if you were involved in it. It's very clear that the people who are most successful with AI, they're generalists more than specialists, but generalists is a bad word. What the people who really thrive with AI have like three or four or five different things that are pretty expert in, which is to say they're very, very well read. You know, in all honesty, right? First of all, to error crack with AI and really like advance it. You need distinctions. You need email. You need points of view. You need even I mean, you need range, right? Easiest way to get successful is to outread the mother. Like I always said that. I think it's three times as true in an SVA, especially now. I love it. We'll put all of the links that Stephen Collar mentioned in our show notes as we always do at JimQuick.com/notes. And thanks for me on the show, buddy. Thanks for having me. Yeah. We'll see you in our next episode. Until then, be limitless.