The Flourish Feed Podcast
A series of curiosity driven deep dives into the nature of flourishing through wealth.
The Flourish Feed Podcast
#39 - The Science of Staying Rad (Forever)
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What happens when humanity collides with artificial intelligence, and the real bottleneck isn’t technology, but the human brain itself?
In this electric and deeply thought-provoking conversation, bestselling author and flow expert Steven Kotler joins Gillian Stovel Rivers to unpack the psychology, neuroscience, and cultural myths surrounding AI, abundance, burnout, and human potential. Together, they explore why fear around AI may be massively overhyped, why our ancient brains struggle in a world of infinite information, and why the future belongs to people who can continuously reinvent themselves.
From the neuroscience of flow and adaptive flexibility to the hidden dangers of information overload, Steven explains why creativity, meaning-making, focus, and resilience are no longer “soft skills” - they are survival skills for the 21st century. The conversation also dives into identity, motivation, group synchrony, and how humans may actually become more essential – not less - in an AI-powered world.
This episode is both a wake-up call and an invitation: stop fearing the future and start training for it.
Want to engage with people who are doing just that, and attend an Ask Me Anything with Steven Kotler in the fall of 2026? Check out the We Are As Gods book offer courtesy of The Flourish Feed Podcast: https://mailchi.mp/assante/weareasgodsflourishbookclub
Key Topics:
Human alignment with biology in the age of technology
The real impact of AI on jobs and human skills
Flow as a tool for resilience and adaptability
The dark side and bright side of abundance
Cooperation at scale and the science of group flow
The importance of soft skills as hard skills in the 21st century
The role of AI in education and skill development
Understanding the brain's response to abundance and overload
Quotes:
"Hype around AI is what’s dangerous"
“We are literally trying to navigate modern mazes with prehistoric maps.”
“The world is accelerating. The brain is not.”
“We over-detect threat. We under-detect opportunity.”
“Fear makes us logical and linear. We want tried and true, safe and secure solutions.”
“The 21st century soft skills are now hard skills.”
“Flow is literally the only time we process information at speed and scale.”
“Abundance means we’ve got to make meaning for ourselves.”
“The only real tool we have in every crisis is adaptive flexibility.”
“You can’t actually live in a state of optimal performance—and you wouldn’t want to.”
“The future belongs to people who can continuously reinvent themselves.”
Chapters:
00:00 The Crisis of Human Alignment
02:49 Understanding AI and Its Impact
09:54 The Reality of AI Job Displacement
17:48 Navigating Modern Challenges with Prehistoric Brains
27:11 The Role of Flow in Abundance
33:08 The Cost of Cooperation
34:10 COVID-19: A Catalyst for Global Cooperation
36:02 Tools for Cooperation: Understanding Group Flow
38:16 Technological Unemployment: The AI Job Market
39:59 Leveraging AI for Skill Development
42:06 Flow as a Solution for Young Generations
49:38 Navigating Meaning in an Abundant World
57:37 Adaptive Flexibility: The Key to Resilience
Resources:
Website
Flow Research Collective
Syneurgy
YouTube
Instagram
LinkedIn
The Art of Impossible by Steven Kotler
Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences at Florida Atlantic University
#flourish #wealth #wealthmanagement #investing #advisor #KnowThyWealthKnowThyself
Connect with Gillian:
The Flourish Feed Podcast, a series of curiosity-driven deep dives into the nature of flourishing through wealth. I'm your host, Gillian Stoville Rivers, M A C F P C E A, Senior Wealth Advisor at CIA Zante Wealth Management.
SPEAKER_01The problem. We are literally trying to navigate modern mazes with prehistoric maps. At this mismatch, right, we have got a prehistoric brain in a postmodern world. It's the central tension of the 21st century. The world is accelerating, the brain is not. So, what's the fine print here? Ancestors evolved in a world of limits, limited calories, limited information, limited options. So scarcity was the driving force. Scarcity shaped biology for millions of years. It teaches the brain five foundational habits. We over-detect threat. We under-detect opportunity. We prefer the familiar over the novel. We prefer the simple over the complicated and the complicated over the complex. We want to conserve energy at all costs, and we will collapse complexity into simple narratives. That's what the brain does.
SPEAKER_02We are not facing a crisis of technology. We're facing a crisis of human alignment with our own biology. What we're going to explore in today's podcast is the likely reality that the future belongs to those who can continuously recreate themselves on purpose using flow, discipline, and intelligent tools. Now we've built machines great and small that can think, create, and automate faster than we ever imagined. And somewhere underneath that progress is a deeply important question, which is where do the humans fit now? Are we needed? Are we replaceable? Or are we standing at the edge of the greatest expansion of human potential that we've ever seen? Today's conversation is about that edge and about what happens when we stop seeing technology as competition and start seeing it as a catalyst. We explore the concept that if we can understand how our brains actually work through the work and the books and brilliance of people like Stephen Cotler, we can access flow, set goals, and build consistency in a way that ironically allows us to become more human and adaptable. And then, maybe, just maybe, the future ceases to be something to fear and becomes something we get to play at. And that sounds like a ride I want to be first in line for. But first, let's get to know Stephen a little bit. Stephen Cotler is a New York Times best-selling author, award-winning journalist, and one of the world's leading experts on human performance. He is a distinguished research fellow at the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences at Florida Atlantic University, where his work focuses on the neuroscience of flow, creativity, and peak performance. Stephen is also the founder and executive director of the Flow Research Collective, a global organization dedicated to training individuals and organizations to be perform at their highest level, including yours truly. He is the author of 17 books, including 12 bestsellers, such as The Rise of Superman, Stealing Fire, and The Art of Impossible. And his work has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize three times and translated into 80 languages. His most recent work, entitled We Are as Gods, co-authored by Peter H. Diamandis, impressed me so much that we started a book club here at the Flourish Feed, which we will continue to run monthly through the summer until Steven rejoins us for an Ask Me Anything this fall. His research and training programs have reached people in more than 150 countries, from Navy SEALs and Olympic athletes to leaders at companies like Google, Microsoft, and Accenture, helping them unlock what's possible when biology, psychology, and performance are fully aligned. Now, this is a big day for me, folks, here, so you have to excuse me if I'm a little bit excited. Stephen Cotler, welcome to the Flourish Feed Podcast.
SPEAKER_01Hi, Julia. It's great to be with you.
SPEAKER_02Hey, how's it going today?
SPEAKER_01It's great. It's great. Fantastic.
SPEAKER_02I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. Now I want to start here. Because we've talked about this before, but I notice in my circles, we notice, you know, through headlines and so forth, people are a little freaked out by this advent of AI. There's this mix of nostalgia. Can we go back? Maybe there's uh there's definitely feelings of fear. I'm not sure I've I want to live to see that. And even my 16-year-old son, when I ask him, he answers me like a stoic warrior saying, I'm just gonna take this one day at a time. So I I wonder from your perspective, did we open a Pandora's box with AI, or do we just finally build something that exposes how unprepared we are to understand ourselves?
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_02All of the above.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah. No, I mean, it's all of the above except we can go into this if you if you want. I think everything being said about AI right now is massively overhyped. And while the technology is accelerating at an amazing rate, I think most of the rhetoric is either just flat out pulse or the timelines of the predictions are we can talk about why, but it is an absolutely amazing technology. I think it's a lot more limited than people think it is. I think it's moving a lot slower. Let me give you a simple example that most people find shocking. So I have been asking now for the past couple of months to people how many jobs do you think AI has taken already? Like, what's it once they count? So six months ago, most people were like, average was like 100 to 200,000. That was like the prediction. Now it's in the millions. The reality. Let's talk about the reality. Currently, AI agentic agents can complete 2.5% of all human tasks to satisfy human standards. Of tasks. We're not talking jobs, we're talking tasks. How many jobs have been lost to AI in America this year? 17,000.
SPEAKER_02Really?
SPEAKER_01We use millions of yeah, we lose millions of jobs every year just to employment turnover. AI has taken 17,000 jobs. So this idea that AI is coming for your job, it's not coming for your job anytime soon. And what we have consistently seen with technology is that it creates more new jobs than it removes. Now, if you pose that to most people, they want to say, oh, but no, this time different. And I always point out, I heard the same thing about blockchain, heard the same thing about Bitcoin, I heard the same thing about VR. In fact, I've been hearing the stories about how VR's revolution is coming since I started working on the technology in 1990, right? I was writing about it for Wired and Mongo2000, like knew Jared Lanier and knew all the early VR people, and it's still not ready for prime time. The metaverse exists nowhere but in Mark Zuckerberg's head. So what usually happens is there's some middle road where the technology creates more new jobs than it evaporates. I think that's the case with LLMs. I think LLMs are much more limited than people understand. Oh it's well acknowledged in the industry at this point that LLMs are not going to scale up to general intelligence. There's too many problems with this particular architecture. And here's an interesting data point that people in finance miss. But, and I'm not saying that's I don't know how real this is, but it's worth pointing out. So we have invested trillions of dollars, companies have invested trillions of dollars. The largest investments in America have been going into AI. Trillions and trillions of dollars. Most of that money is being spent on GPUs, which are the chips that write RSA AI. So what do we know about chips in general? We know that they're hardware. And hardware goes obsolete really quickly, like two to three years. So we've got chips that we know are going to get replaced by faster chips in a couple of years. But people have spent trillions building up these data centers. Here's what's interesting. Most AI progress right now with LLMs is being done through symbolic AI, other methodologies that are not LLMs. They're bootstrapping them onto the LLMs, and that's where growth is coming. This is why ChatGBT 3 to 3.5 to 4 were revolutionary, and they talked about AGI and superintelligence coming with ChatGBT 5, and now you use it and you're like, this is not much better than 4. And in certain cases, I think it's a lot worse. I think it's a much worse writer than 4, and a couple other things I think are going down. I'm not alone in this opinion. A lot of people, and by the way, the timetable was not normal, right? Like it was supposed to show out that it took years to get here, and it was disappointing. And it's because adding more data to something that is basically being built to find the average, right? What's the it's LLMs predict the next most probable work? What's the what's the average here? Adding more data doesn't get you a better middle. Right. Like it it doesn't improve the data. Yeah, it doesn't, it does, yeah, exactly. It doesn't actually improve the average, right? And so we're seeing this, and so all the new stuff is coming in is on the these other sort of architectures. Those architectures don't run on GPUs.
SPEAKER_02Oh, interesting.
SPEAKER_01They run on CPUs and TPUs. And so we've invested trillions of dollars in technology that we know is going to basically be obsolete in three years. And turns out the technology we need to actually scale up to maybe keep this growing, it needs a new technology, so it's going to need all kinds of new tech investments. And what have investors figured out in the past six months? None of these AI companies are returning anything. I think I heard Mark Cuban say on national television, I think he called he said everybody who's claiming that any of this money is coming back to investors is full of shit. I think was you know what he said.
SPEAKER_02There's revenue, but there's no profit.
SPEAKER_01At all, right? And it's seen and also people fail, they miss something, which is the venture capitalists get paid when they raise money. They don't get paid, the investors get paid when a thing is real. Venture capitalists get their 2% off the raise. So all they want is a technology plausible enough to convince you, as a wealth manager, to buy it. Interesting. That's all they want. They want to, they're trying to convince people like you. So there's all these kind of marketing things that are happening too, that you know, it's a little weird on. So I love AI. I use it all the time. As a scientist, it's amazing. As a coach, as training people, I think it's like it's amazing. I love it. It's a miracle technology. And the fact that we get it for free is insane.
SPEAKER_02Right. It can't last.
SPEAKER_01Totally the craziest, it's the craziest thing I've ever seen. I don't, I agree, it can't last. We're not in the current models and the current ways, and not until uh we get electricity for a lot cheaper.
SPEAKER_02Do you think that the utility and excitement around AI really comes from having a question to answer using it? I mean, you just mentioned you you like it as for coaching, you like it as a scientist.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's so inside bounded domains, fantastic. Sure, sure. Right. The minute you get to an unbounded domain, I'm a writer.
SPEAKER_02Yes.
SPEAKER_01I will flat out tell you that AI can't write at all. Like at the level that I write, it is 90% wrong. It really can't do anything much more than advance one paragraph at a time through material. It can't hold on to more, it can't, there's no context, and it can't, and it will never write well. And here's and I'll tell you why. Great writing is communicative and surprising. So it's a super familiar word, super familiar word, super familiar word, really surprising word that you didn't see coming. Right. That's great writing. Right. The LLM cannot do that at all. It will never be able to do that. And if you start coding it in, it'll do that as it fits a pattern. Here's the other thing that people don't understand when you talk about AI and writing, which is stuff that is working right now for marketing copy and persuasion and things like that isn't gonna work six months from now. And the reason is we have a pattern recognition system for our brain. So people start to notice AI slop. Soon they're going to notice all of it. And what happens is when you notice familiar patterns, especially ones that are non-human, you tune them out.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Everybody who's using AI to write their marketing copy, you're actually making your self less persuasive and less communicative. And what's working today is only going to degrade because people are getting better at spotting it. This is people, kids, a bet, but you see this that your kids can spot deep fakes.
SPEAKER_02Oh, 100%.
SPEAKER_01They don't, right? They just look at them and they go, This is a fake, right? We couldn't do it a year ago. Yes. Right? It's swayed in the election.
SPEAKER_02Yes, yes, right?
SPEAKER_01And now we're all able to notice this is because the human brain is a great pattern detector. So there's all these things that are clouding the AI conversation. I hijacked this thing and took us 20 minutes in AI, but like I'm seeing a lot of stuff that I think is different than what other people are seeing. And the reason I mention all these things is I think the hype is what's dangerous.
SPEAKER_02I agree with you. And I think that's where I think is dangerous. People who are using it day to day, they have a true life interaction with it the way you do, and you you literally work with it in a way where you can figure out what is hype and what is not hype. I think where I'm probably speaking to are the people who don't work with it every day. Instead, they hear it as a societal influence that's coming, like Godzilla, and there is no sense of control. And this is leading me into a discussion about your work and about biases and about the brain, because I think that's maybe that's maybe a reason to think why this time it's different. Or I wish things could go back to the other way. Is there I want to talk a little bit about humans like that?
SPEAKER_01Let me just point out that a bunch of people attacked the White House not too long ago because they believed, among other things, that Bitcoin was going to take over as a global currency and they were going to be forced onto cryptocurrencies. And this was going to happen. The UN was somehow going to be responsible. I don't understand that piece. My point is none of these things are even remotely true. In fact, nobody can even agree on like what digital currency we want to value and keep and use. And other than like sort of weird fringe investments, or if you're doing like sort of crypto funds where you have some protection, it's not even an asset that most people mess with, right? So, like, there is a huge difference between the stuff coming out of people's mouths and the reality. I think AI is going to be much more of a utility. It'll be like Google, it's going to get woven in. It's a huge revolution. But I think a lot of the people, things people are scared about. Let me give you a realistic timetable for job displacement. Okay. Just one way to think about it. We talk a lot in the book about sort of truth filters, right? And these are these are frameworks for thinking. And one of them we talk about is Elon Musk's favorite, his first principle thinking. And this is the idea that, like when Elon Musk was thinking about do I build this uh EV, right? Do I build Tesla? He wanted to know, well, batteries are the biggest bottleneck. But what is a battery? And he went to the metals exchange and he looked up Cadman and lead. And the actual price, core price of what went into a battery, and he realized it's pennies on the dollar. Everything else was just engineering. The actual core costs of a battery were pennies. That's first principle thinking, right? So he went, oh yeah, there's a good business. I should go into this because those battery costs are going to just go down because these are just core metals. That's first principle thinking. So here's a first principle thinking way of looking at AI and technological unemployment. What was one of the first AI technologies that actually is eroding jobs? And the answer is autonomous vehicles. It showed up before LLMs and everything else. We've got autonomous. So let's look at autonomous trucking, for example. This is the one I always like to point out because it's coming. That there's like it's coming. And the question is when, right? If you read the predictions, it's going to happen tomorrow, next two to three years, social unrust. And it, by the way, trucking is the largest workforce in America. It's the largest blue-collar workforce in America. We have more truckers than anything else. So this is significant. Except what's the lifespan of a truck? Because everybody's already invested in gasoline trucks. The new technologies didn't show up until two to three years ago. And nobody really was investing in them yet because they weren't yet ready for primetime. Everybody knew that you had to go through a bunch of model Teslas before you wanted to buy one because the early ones were a pain in the ass, right? So it's trucking, trucking, much bigger investment. Very few people on the cutting edge of this because they know lifespan of a truck is 15 years minimum.
SPEAKER_02Of a gasoline truck.
SPEAKER_01Of a gasoline truck is 15 years. So 15 years from maybe today, you will see the current truck fleet go extinct and be replaced.
SPEAKER_02Because why, on a first principles basis, would they replace something that hasn't already expired?
SPEAKER_01That has hasn't lost its value. You would never do it, right? It doesn't make any sense. The gains aren't that much. So we know 15 years from now, okay, we're going to have to find new jobs for truckers in 15 years. More advanced technologies, all the companies that have been firing coders, they're hiring them back. Yeah, that's true. Look at the data, right? They've got slightly different jobs, right? This is like companies when they were firing writers because of AI. Now they've hired writers back, and their job is to clean up AI copies. Don't write the and but and there's a million reasons why they should let the writers actually write the first copy and invert that paradigm, but that's totally besides the point. They're doing it wrong. But like it's this it's this is a silly conversation if you think about it from a first principles. AI replaces past and not jobs perspective. So I mention all these things both because they calm, you should calm you down first and foremost. So from a human performance, am I safe? You're a lot safer than you think. And we can talk about all the reasons why you think what's wrong in the brain that is making you think things are going that fast. But if you think about these things, as I said, I like I'm a scientist and I'm a journalist. I'm professionally skeptic and I'm not a futurist. I deal with the data. What's in front of me? I don't look at reality as it is today, and I try to find what's truth. And truth, I use small tea. I'm a scientist. So like truth is always small t. It's our best guess based on all the available data right now. And literally, you can show up with new data tomorrow and prove me wrong, and I'm happy to be proved wrong. That's small tea truth from a scientific reporter perspective. That's all I think we know. You know, and I think the futurists are dominating the conversation. And most of them, like, not only are they wrong, they've got a history of being wrong, and you can check their track record. Unless you're talking about Ray Kurzweil, who's the only futurist I know who has knocked it out of the park with his predictions because he was basically on an economatical trend. Right. That you could, it was that he used first principles, right? He like you went, wow, these things are accelerating exponential growth curves, so you can plot the doubling.
SPEAKER_02I love that.
SPEAKER_01And then you can make, right? Like there's there's math and real-world stuff underneath it, and there's a couple hundred years of society moving on it. Like, we've been on exponential growth curves since the birth of the industrial revolution. That right paradigms. No, I mean we were the we had we before where there were silicon chips, we had vacuum tubes. They grew exponentially. When they hit the end of their life cycle, silicon came in. Silicon is hitting the end of its life cycle. Quantum computing. I'm on staff at Florida Atlantic University. We have a D-wave. It's a quantum computer. We're one of the only institutions with a D-wave. But we can do quantum research on a quantum computer, which is very cool. Yes. Some of those flow problems are built for that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and I think, I mean, maybe that's what it comes back to as far as what how the ancient brain getting triggered, the regular everyday person, not the scientist, not the journalist. But if you don't have that framework for a first principles approach and you don't have daily interactions with actual data upon which to make decisions, it's a little bit hard not to be swept up by the hype. So maybe we can talk a little bit more about one, let's the brain side of it. The brain side of it. Like, what is it about our biology that for a regular person who's not working the way you are, what is it about their biology that makes this moment so destabilizing? And how, just by knowing that, because I love when you say that, making your biology work for you instead of against you, let's dig into that a little bit as it relates to this moment.
SPEAKER_01Great question. Okay. The problem. We are literally trying to navigate modern mazes with prehistoric maps. At this mismatch, right? We have got a prehistoric brain in a postmodern world. It's the central tension of the 21st century. The world is accelerating, the brain is not. So, what's the fine print here? Ancestors evolved in a world of limits, limited calories, limited information, limited options. So scarcity was the driving force. Scarcity shaped biology for millions of years. It teaches the brain five foundational habits. We over-detect threat, we under-detect opportunity, we prefer the familiar over the novel, we prefer the simple over the complicated, and the complicated over the complex. We want to conserve energy at all costs, and we will collapse complexity into simple narratives. That's what the brain does. I can go a couple levels here, I give examples, but like we are scared all the time. We are scared all the time, and it has a huge cost. Fear makes us logical and linear. We don't we want tried and true, safe and secure solutions. We don't want a novel. We don't want the unfamiliar. That is is a big problem. There's a cascade effect that we're all overloaded by information. It's everywhere all the time. I can put some numbers around it if you want, but I don't think I need to. Information overload automatically produces cognitive overload, right? There's too much shit in our brain. Don't you can't think anymore.
SPEAKER_02And that has to throw you into a state of something closer to fear than than than something else.
SPEAKER_01Well, it f it does this is what it does. It fractures attention. I don't have to pay attention to. I can't focus. It produces decision fatigue. I'm too tired. I can't make any decisions. We all know this. It starts to get to meaning drift. Oh, my work isn't as meaningful as it used to be. My marriage feels different with my relationship. Like the world feels a little different. This is your son saying, I'm trying to take it one day at a time. That's meaning drift. All of these things, for the reasons this is where you just got at start producing fear. All these things to fear. And now you've got an erosion of skills. Creativity shuts down, right? Because the brain becomes logical and linear. Motivation goes away because we lose agency. I'm powerless in this world. We lose motivation and resilience, our ability to bounce back, goes away. This leads to burnout. This is why so many people are burned out. Here's where it's interesting. This is what I'm seeing now that I hadn't seen before is that people are so burned out and it's lasting so long, and the information bombardment isn't stopping. You're getting adaptive rigidity, which is I am out of performance theater, which is I'm just going through the motions. And we see this again at work a lot. We also see this in relationships, seeing this in marriages and things like that, and identity collapse is where it ends. I don't know who I am anymore in this world. So all of these are problems of the modern world. And I think it's what the reason, what the solution is interesting. Because the solution is funny because in the 21st century we had things like do you remember soft skills? Soft skills were creativity, motivation, focus, and attention, uh, flow was a soft skill, if it was a skill at all. Meaning making, soft skill. Like nobody actually ever, you didn't learn them in school, and you certainly didn't learn them in the office. And um in the 21st century, these are hard skills. And when I say hard skills, I mean it in a bunch of different ways. One, in studies done on what are the skills that are most important for thriving in the 21st century, it's all these skills. It's motivation, learning, creativity are the three that win out the most. And when I say thrive, I'm or when I'm when I'm when I'm talking about studies, I'm talking about both in studies of lead CEOs and leaders, and also what are the skills our kids should be learning, right? It's both sides, it's the same set of skills.
SPEAKER_02And is that to complement the AI world or to survive the neurological impact of the AI world? Well, both.
SPEAKER_01So that's the point I'm making, is they're not soft skills anymore, they're hard skills because meaning making, if information overload is everywhere, it's not going away, and it's going to get worse if that automatically is going to do things like erode meaning and shift identity and do all these kinds of things. We have to make meaning for ourselves. And it gets more and more complicated in a world of abundance, right? As more and more things start sort of showing up in the world at less and less cost, which is already happening at stratospheric levels. The example best example is AI. You said the model can't hold, but like literally you get intelligence for free or the cost of energy, which is mind-blowing. So like that's abundance at scale, both good and bad. We've got an abundance of AI, and now we've got abundance of technological unemployment fears. So it's both good and bad, right? Both sides of the technology. And on top of it, we have AI threats because AI erodes the brain in unusual ways. And there's things, right? There's things we have to do. And one of the things AI does is it messes with meaning and how we make meaning. And there's a whole, I could go into more about that, but it's sort of, it's not super worth going into. Well, I'll give you one simple example. It messes with intrinsic motivation. So if you were working with your AI before you came on this call with me or this podcast, that's a digital thing. It creates a lot of excitement. There's a lot of dopamine in the feedback loop. The analog world doesn't impair. And what they find is that motivation plummets, plummets intrinsic motivation after you do AI tests. So anything that is not a digital task, this is also the example I give of this, and everybody sort of gives does the public speaking knows this. I always tell people never show videos. If you're doing a speech, never show videos in your speech because the video is super fast and exciting and flashy. And then when you the video is gone and they got to listen to your talk, you're boring. Wow. And they've tuned you out. This is what the brain does when you work with AI. You work with AI and then you come back to the real world. And I mean, you work with AI and then you sit down to have a conversation with your husband or your spouse or your kids. Less interesting. Yeah. You're not motivated.
SPEAKER_02And you all that's so fascinating. So fascinating.
SPEAKER_01That's you know, so all these things are at issue. This is why all these soft skills so crucial, they're hard skills in the 21st century. And I think no skill is harder than flow in this in this equation.
SPEAKER_02Traditional wealth management focuses on a few key moments: your first house, sending your kids to university, when you retire, and when you die. Will you have enough? Will you die with too much or too little? These are questions of a very finite nature. Our approach goes above and beyond, with the belief that wealth is not just money, but comes in at least four forms: time, money, energy, and attention. And that wealth is a wave that you can learn to ride to a life well lived. A life where you flourished, where you surpassed the finite game of having enough, to experiencing the infinite game of playing forever. Instead of just focusing on a few of life's moments, we focus on all of the moments between the 1440 minutes of each day, the energy to be harnessed from each and every sunrise, every meal, and every great night's sleep. The power of connection and meaning that all four forms of wealth, time, energy, money, and attention can access. This is what it means to flourish. So the question is, which wealth advisor is right for you? An advisor who helps you open the door to a few of life's moments or to all of them? Consider this. In the next 24 hours, you have 1440 minutes, and it takes just a few of them to contact me at grivers at asante.com. Doing so could be one of the best investment decisions you ever make. All right, we're gonna get to flow in a minute, but I want to take one moment and just pause and contemplate the more abundance we actually have, the more freaked out people are. Is that because we just don't know how to handle abundance? Because we are wired for scarcity. Like you've pointed this out in the book with the lists and lists of miracles that have actually happened, which are evidence that we ought to be just friggin' celebrating how much is happening that's good. But it seems for whatever reason, and maybe it's just the excessive amount of information that is causing us to freeze up, but for whatever reason, we are faced with more and more miracles that cause us to become more and more panicked. Is that going against us? Is that maybe a truth? Because I try to point that out pretty much on a daily basis, right?
SPEAKER_01There is we are moving into a world of abundance. And the ex like in the past 10 years, 200 million people escaped extreme poverty. It's the largest poverty reduction in history. A billion people gained access to electricity, two billion to clean drinking water.
SPEAKER_02Those seem like first principles ideas, right? Like that should be good.
SPEAKER_01But these are this is these are basic needs. This is, yeah, these are really good. So the data is that the world those things are increasing. Literally, the world is getting a lot. We also have the dark side of abundance. An abundance of AI led to an abundance of technology employment fears, an abundance of social media led to the largest mental health crisis in history or contributed a significant amount to the largest mental health in history. An abundance of energy has led to an abundance of carbon in the atmosphere and plastics in our ocean. An abundance of convenience led to the plastics in our oceans. We go on and on and on. There's a dark side of abundance, there's a good side of abundance, it's just happening. And you are right, we have we are we have scarcity mindsets in an abundant world. So, one, but you've got a essentially a brain that evolved in an environment that was local and linear, and it's the global and exponential world. And we can't process information at this speed and this scale. And we have to upgrade our mission to keep pace with our bio uh world. Like there's just there's no way around it. This is again where flow matters because flow is literally the only time we process information at speed and scale. So, one example of why flow is so important is the world is moving at very high speeds at very big scales. We're not built for it. Flow actually is what allows us to do that. Like it's it's the one of the technologies that evolution gave us to solve these kinds of problems. So again, the soft skills are become hard skills. And I don't like if you're asking me if there are reasons to be scared, yes.
SPEAKER_02I don't know if I'm asking that. I think I'm asking if we are just if are we ever, maybe this is a way of saying it, is this brain ever going to be happy with abundance, like good abundance? That might be the better way of saying it.
SPEAKER_01That's an interesting question. Um, and I will say yes and. And here's the thing you're an entrepreneur. Most of you are gonna be listening to this is sort of an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs are people who see problems in the world and fix them. That's what an entrepreneur does. This is fucking wrong. I mean, I can do it better and I can make money on better. Because a lot of people, this is not just my problem. A lot of people are suffering. Oh, look, it's a market, right? Like that's entrepreneurship, basically. That's first personal thinking applied to entrepreneurship. So it's sort of a good thing that you're not gonna be satisfied.
SPEAKER_02Oh, I guess that's true.
SPEAKER_01And that your brain isn't built to be satisfied with abundance, right? So there's once you get into these questions about happiness, and this is this is the same conversation I have with people when they're like, I want to live in flow. Is the technology gonna let me live in flow? And the answer is no, flow is a cycle. You can't actually live in the state of optimal performance, but you wouldn't want to, because all of the information, all of the fun is because you're miserable and then you're in flow, or you're average and then you're in flow. Like if there's if there's no average, flow isn't flow, it's just normal. And what does the brain do with normal? It tunes it out. It doesn't matter if it's the most delicious normal in the world. If all you're eating is chocolate ice cream, you're bored with chocolate ice cream, which you know for many people is hard to imagine.
SPEAKER_02Yes, it's chiaroscuro. You can't have the light without the dark, you have to have the both sides of it, and that is an essentially human truth. I totally get that. I think where I wanted to go to next, briefly before we go deeper into flow, because we really, as much as I know you've been talking about this for decades, and I know you must kind of get to a point sometimes you're like, I don't want to talk about flow again. But it's such an essential ingredient in the way forward.
SPEAKER_01I am the executive director of the flow research. You are, I know. So it's okay if I ask you. It helps with the job.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, okay. But I want to talk about I want to talk about the herd. I want to talk about um herd mentality, because I think that's a big part of how people tend to think. They tend to think based on hype, but they also tend to think based on what they hear other people talking about. And I wondered if if herd mentality, if if that ever, like if you call that the dark side of abundance, can ever lend its way to becoming more like a synchronous response to all of this that is that is the the light side of abundance.
SPEAKER_01Oh yeah, that's a great question. Okay, yeah, so you backed into the reason I wrote We Are as Gods. Peter and I always come into books, each of us are trying to solve a problem. And the problem I was looking at was cooperation at scale. I was looking at the dark side of abundance as then all of these are problems that are only solvable if we can figure out how to cooperate at scale. In the book I call it The Last Mile on the Road to Abundance is a telecom reference, because the last mile is the is the most expensive, the most difficult. You know, the interesting thing is when Peter and I first started talking about the book, which is like 2021, 2020, maybe 2019, uh we couldn't really say cooperation, but it was laughable. The only time the world ever cooperated at scale was when there was a war or a sporting event. That was the only time we ever saw it happen. Then COVID happened, and we saw global cooperation like ever before. Researchers shared data when literally the first COVID was synthesized, it went around the world in three days. And the result was the fastest vaccine development in history. And you could say whatever you want about the actual vaccine and and and where that led. We got, I believe the numbers, I could be wrong here, I think it was 17 different vaccines. At lower costs, distributed as scale, like and wow, that was cooperation as scale, it was technologically enabled, technical enabled. So that caught my attention. The second half of this is uh cooperation requires tools, enabling tools, but it also requires a shift in how we sort of think and do business and that sort of stuff. And right around the same time, uh my chief science officer Michael Menino came to me with uh with a new company. We actually like, I've joined this board, now it's a company, Synergy, S-Y-N-E-U-R-G-Y. And if you go to Synergy.com, it's synchrony and neuron put together, you can see it. But so you can synergy, you can record a Zoom call of a team meeting and you can send it to us. And by analyzing a bunch of things, AI, semantic analysis, reading a vein in your forehead, pupilometry, a couple other things, we can tell you the level of psychological safety in the room, the level of trust, brain entrainment, synchrony, and group flow proneness. Brain entrainment, synchrony, group flow. These are the tools gave us for cooperation. Literally. When we say cooperation at scale, what how do we cooperate at scale? What's the biology? It's communitas, it's flow at scale, right? That's communitas is what when you go to a rock concert, everybody's clapping and syncing, you're one with the music, one with the band, and right, peace, love, and harmony and all that stuff. That's communitas, it's group flow at scale. We now understand how to decode it, prompt it, promote it. It's got a distinct neurobiological signature in the head. We know how to measure it. All these things are real. So the answer, I think, is we are actually learning how to process abundance in new ways. Technologies are coming. I don't think they're, you know, as I said in the book, there are different timelines for like brain community interfaces, and I think most of them are massively overhyped, and we're not gonna see we're gonna see medical devices for the next 10 to 15 to 20 years, and actual like brain-to-variant communication, brain to the internet community, that sort of stuff. I think everybody's wrong, and we're not gonna see it till the 2050s and the 2060s. I could be wrong, but I like most neuroscientists tend to side with me, most technologists tend to argue with me.
SPEAKER_02You have a pretty good first principles answer as to why, though.
SPEAKER_01It's really about Yeah, I do I do. It doesn't matter because the bandwidth for attention is 120 bits wide, and nobody knows how to increase that, or our memory, right? Working memory. So, like there's human limits on the interface and nobody has figured out how to bypass them. And most of the technologists who are solving this don't even know they exist or try to pretend that they don't exist. They talk to the public. Elon Musk is the classic example who's been talking about neuralink hooking people up to the internet for years, and he still is. But if you go to his website, it's not. It's a neuroprosthetic that's going to help people who are paralyzed move again. That's what the website that's what the company actually is. So Elon's saying all this stuff because he's selling something or raising funds or whatever he's doing, but it's not true. He knows it's not true.
SPEAKER_02So we know we know we can have synchrony and and participate, and we know what it looks like to be in group flow. We have evidence that we can do it at scale with COVID. So now I want to talk a little bit about something I know it's one of the things that you've raised recently, which is what's happening with younger generations and their feeling that they may not be needed or that there may not be a role for them, because maybe 15 years from now is when they do hit the job market or when they're supposed to be hitting peak earning years and suddenly the landscape has changed. So my question is is there like what what are the what are the prompts to get or what's the what's a possible world where these younger generations are syncing up with some of these larger, most important worlds, you know, fixing problems.
SPEAKER_01So yeah, just yeah, you just time out on that for a second. Okay. This is the technological unemployment fear, and again, this is totally overblown. Um, this one's really obvious, like when you actually break it down for people. So what everybody's saying is AI is coming for our jobs. We already talked about why that isn't true. What does look to be true is that AI really helps act. That's where the advantages come from. It sort of gets the bottom up to the like a middle, but it raises everybody to that middle. So that middle is now the bottom. So it does a new bottom, but it doesn't really matter like unless we have a real first mover advantage. And even that with like open claw lasted like two weeks. You know what I mean? Like that window is shrunken. And so the real issue is how do we take young people who are gonna have difficulty getting entry-level jobs because AI is going to be doing a lot of those tests and skill them up to the expert level fast. Yes. That's the real question you're asking. That's the real question we're asking.
SPEAKER_02Thank you for wording it.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so let's let's talk about what we know. One, we have AIs, and we can use AIs to help them skill up to work with AIs. So we've got the most powerful technology in the history of the world that is great at coaching and training inside-bounded knowledge sets. Phenomenal. And we have flow. McKinsey and their 10-year study of top executives in a state of flow, right? Flow is typically defined as an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best. The next question is: well, what the hell does that mean? Right? It's you can define you're like it's any of those moments of raft attention and total absorption, it's so focused on what you're doing that everything just starts to melt away and performance soar. Again, what do we mean by source? McKinsey looked at top executives in flow. On average, they found them to be 500% more productive. DARPA looked at soldiers in flow. They found they learned 230% faster than normal. And by the way, they were using a really weak version of flow for that study. It was like barely microflow. Right. And it's still and they were still learning 200%, it's still 230% faster than normal. Creativity spikes, and this is our data. We did a lot of this work 400 to 700%, depending on what kind of creativity you're looking at and where you're measuring in the process and whatever. So we know how to make people more productive, how to increase learning, how to increase creativity, and we have the most powerful technology in the history of the world to help coach them along. This is a solved problem. Like, this is not like it's literally a solved problem. We have all the stuff we need, we just have to implement it at scale. That's the question. And a lot of people are working on this stuff. Hell, the freaking Khan Academy is working on AI tutors for your kids that are literally these very things. So, all this stuff I'm talking about, we already have solutions in the work, and it's a solved problem. So, this is one of those things where like there are real problems in the 21st century. There are real problems. This is not one of them.
SPEAKER_02Okay. So let's I want to bring it down in a flow discussion because I do want to get to a real concrete nuts and bolts of a of at least a couple angles on flow as the antidote for all this. Complete concentration, clear goals, and challenge skills balance. When I look at the life of a young person, I'm not really sure how many of those are actually going on. I think there's a huge role there for AI to play to get people at least hitting those three. Because I can tell you that a young person's life, even my life, if I don't, if I'm not careful, is full of distraction. It's full of things that are not very clear as far as my daily goals are concerned. And maybe people, especially in an average high school, aren't working at the 4% above what they can do in the challenge skills balance sweet spot. So I was hoping we could use this as an example to talk about how an AI partnership with in a coaching model might work so that somebody is being challenged to feel what flow feels like and then and then and then deploy that as a regular way of being.
SPEAKER_01So we did that. We built a flow AI. We took uh the largest data set on PCB and performance that's ever been amassed, which we did through our work, uh collective at our major trainings here at Dangerous, which is now off the market. And we have a flow AI, and we have a class, Flow for the Many, that's debuting this month. The that gives you on like basic instruction and these goals and whatever, and a flow AI. Like this is this too is here already. Like, and it already already exists.
SPEAKER_02Okay, okay. Tell us more about so you called it flow for the many.
SPEAKER_01So flow for the many is literally I like I always at the Flow Research Collective, we were doing, and you know this because you're in one of them, we did really expensive trainings for um, I mean, at the Flow Research Collective, it was we were focused on knowledge workers and at the Alliance. And the CEO weekend stuff I'm doing, I'm literally like working with creative leaders, CEOs, founders, and that's about it. And it's very expensive. And that's great. It's a good way to make a living, and I'm fine, I'm fine with it. But like it's not the masses. And when I started the Flow Research Collective, I literally was looking at people unemployment with AI. I started it. The first problem I was trying to solve was the truck drivers. This is not a new problem for me. I was looking at the I got to ride in the very first Google Autonomous car back in 2010. And uh we talk about that, I think it's in abundance. Maybe 2009 actually, I was running around African. And so I was looking at it then going, oh shit, cars, taxis, right? So we started working on this problem a long time ago. Flow for the many is the end result. It's a it's built for like moms who are working three jobs and trying to raise kids. It's a six-month adventure with that goes bit by bit, goes very slowly. It can be done three months or six months, but and it's actually not a particularly long class. It's the I'm trying to, you know, bring everybody up to speed with it. But we also, you know, when we first started training flow, like if you ever took Zero to Dangerous, our original record training, oh my god, did we throw everything in the kitchen sink at you?
SPEAKER_02There was a lot of content.
SPEAKER_01Because we did, there's a tremendous amount of content because we didn't actually have the data on we knew what worked in limited things, but nobody had ever tried to put this stuff together in this way and test it and all that stuff. So we erred on the side of let's tell them how everything works, right? Like, let's just give you everything and let you guys work it out. But we were also data tracking and talking to clients and what works and what doesn't. And we got it down to like there are minimal protocols that are deadly effective. You don't, you can use all this. But like I remember in Zero Dangers, I think there's a three-hour module on sleep. You want want to hear what you need to know? Sleep seven, eight hours a night. There's no choice.
SPEAKER_02That is true. That is you have become much more succinct in the sleep module.
SPEAKER_01I mean, but that like I can talk for the next two hours about why yes, but that doesn't necessarily want me to, but and you could look up any sleep podcast, and you know what I mean? Listen to any sleep expert do that. I don't feel the need to do that anymore. I'm just like flow's eye energy state. You need to seven eight hours. And here's the if you don't, I always tell this to people, this is what I always tell people. This is the easy out. If you don't believe me, cool, there are free IQ tests online. Take one, one night you sleep seven, eight hours, and then one night when you sleep four to five hours, take the same test. See how you do.
SPEAKER_02Run the experiment. Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_01Run the experiment for yourself. Most people lose 10 to 15 to 20 IQ points. They live, you can literally go from like really above par to really dumb simply by not sleeping. Um just from sleep. Yeah, so like we now all those things, and you don't have to take my word for it, run this experiment. Like, easy.
SPEAKER_02Tell us more, tell us more about Flow for the Many, because it uh it is, it does sound markedly different than Zero to Dangerous or uh high flow coaching.
SPEAKER_01It's a thousand dollars, Jillian. That's what the difference is a thousand dollar trigger.
SPEAKER_02But I I understand.
SPEAKER_01It's a huge price difference, and I and I think we're kicking it off for for last. It's also very condensed. It's very like you mentioned three triggers. I believe the entire thing covers five.
SPEAKER_02Wow, okay. See, I think that's very manageable.
SPEAKER_01I think that and it sounds too like you know, it's it's very, very, very, very, very manageable. And also, if you want to go further, I wrote the Art of Impossible. It's the full blueprint, like there's more resources. You know what I mean? Like the resources are everywhere. Um, some of it is technologically enabled at this point, and we've got a flow AI that I will tell you, because Gillian, I've run it against you, like we tested it with you guys. We literally, like, I would work me with you guys this, you know, and come up and give you solutions. It's incredibly the exact same thing. It really is. And yeah, it works. Like you've you've played with it, right? It the tool works, it's kind of amazing. It's a little embarrassing as somebody who trains people for a living, but I will tell you that, like, I said this aloud, from a training perspective, this is sort of bounded. Humans are really simple machines. Approach, avoid, valence, and arousal. Those are the four knobs that control most human behavior. And there are 28 known flow triggers and like probably 25 more peak performance principles that matter, like sleeping we talked.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And that's what's so beautiful about I think the the research that it's brought you to now and the moment that it needs to be released to the world through flow for the many is so perfectly well timed that you can get it down to elegant simplicity, that you know that it can be actually supported by an LLM that doesn't have to be a creative writer and and generate new novel ideas, because this isn't actually a new novel idea. This is an ancient brain that only runs on four knobs, like you point out. Okay, so where I want to go to next has to do with consciousness and meaning. I held I hosted an event back in May, and it had to do with longevity and the fact that in the face of AI and potentially living longer and maybe having more things done for us, it, as you point out, forces us to become a little bit better at the soft skills. It forces us to become a little bit more contemplative about whether we want to be consumers or creators. Where do we want to find meaning in life? Do you have any really good words of wisdom or warning signs or even better yet, words of motivation on how to navigate the journey towards, I won't say navel gazing, but it is it is a little bit more introspective than maybe it has been in a world where you had to fight for your own.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, survival makes meaning for us. Abundance means we've got to make it for ourselves. Ooh, yeah. And there's I mean, it's just what it is. And there's really, you know, at the end of the book, we detail Universe 25, which is an experiment that was run by John B. Calhoun, where he literally saw like civilization collapse, that he was working with mice, but it was it wouldn't, if you remove challenge and meaning and purpose and just give them abundance, and you you get the craziest species-wise collapse, and he points out there's not that much difference between mice and man. You get from a there's a reason we do animal testing on mice, and I'm very opposed to it, and I am a computational neuroscientist because I want to end that, among other things. But my point about being is that some letters are there, and we don't do well in a world of abundance for these reasons, so we really actually have to make meaning for ourselves. And I think this is I think this is showing up everywhere. What people are feeling is meaning drift and identity collapse isn't gonna go away. And the other thing, and you started with this, and let's loop back around to where you first started. One of the things we talk about in the Alliance, one of the things that that you know is that, especially if you're at the top of your career and you want to stay there, you're gonna have to keep reinventing yourself over and over and over and over again. And the numbers are like, you know, staggering. If you sort of if you go back to like 50 if 1950s to the 1970s, or 40s through the 70s, even up until the edge of the 80s, people worked for one company their whole life. Yeah. I worked for Ford, I worked for GE, I worked right, and then that started to change, and then you got the numbers with millennials, and then it was they had worked on average, I think it was millennials who worked for five, I want five to seven, I got sure five to seven companies by the time they're 35. Well, yeah, 35.
SPEAKER_02And you know what's cool about them too is they have multiple identities at the same time. They have jobs, they maybe have sometimes nighttime jobs and side hustles because why not? Like they are happy to have multiple identities, and that is such a big shift since the 80s. You're absolutely right.
SPEAKER_01Oh, there's more people, I mean, people also have avatars and video game identities. And and by the way, let me point out the the the interesting one, which is you are not you when you work with your AI. Meaning, uh, the Jillian I interface with is very different than the Jillian Chat GBT actually gets. Like, I say things to my AI. A like I you will rarely hear me say dude, bro, or brah out loud, but I will literally be like, dude, bro, brah, what are you fucking thinking? Is a very common sentence for me and the AI. Like, really common sentence, something like that. Like, I would A never talk to anybody like that. Um B, I don't know why I talked to my AI like that. It just sort of emerged. And I've talked to a lot of other people. Everybody people have sort of like there's a new perversion of us that interacts with the machine a little bit, which is interesting. That is very emerging.
SPEAKER_02That is very seeing it.
SPEAKER_01I don't know what it means. I have no idea what it means yet, but I like at first I was like, is it just me? No. So I started asking my friends. It's everybody, everybody's got like a persona that they interact with the machine with. They use a persona to interact with the machine. Like, I'm sometimes more polite and simultaneously more rude than I ever would be in the human world. I'll give you another one that nobody's thinking about. We're gonna talk about this when we're together in July on an alliance plan, but people don't understand. So most of us are like, you know, if you work with an LLM in your morning and you get angry at your LLM, which is almost every time you work with an AI, you get pissed off. Why aren't you doing the goddamn thing? I like how much fucking more of a prom do you want, right? Like all that stuff, and we don't have a filter. When you get mad at your kids, your spouse, your boss, you got a check on you that says, you know what I mean? Like, like I learned something very early on in my marriage where my wife looked at me and was like, you get to say that once this entire marriage.
SPEAKER_02That's funny.
SPEAKER_01And I was like, Oh, you're fucking right. You're totally right. You know what I mean? Pardon my mind.
SPEAKER_02And the AI has not got back to you yet. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Right. So my point is we say things to the AIs and we get angrier than we would normally get. And you're the one that's angry. Right. It's now nine o'clock in the morning, and you're hopping mad at a machine that doesn't feel or think or do anything. It's a statistical probability machine. Like, it's the craziest thing in the world that you're getting mad at. That's like, would you yell at an abacus?
SPEAKER_02No, probably not. Probably not. No. See my point, right?
SPEAKER_01Like, like you, it's it's really odd, though. I think all of us have yelled at our tax ones before.
SPEAKER_02Well, that's a whole other reason. You know, yelling at it, yeah, that's a whole other reason. But I do, I will agree with you that my my two percent of what I think is.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and my and my point is we don't regulate our emotions the way we need to when we work with our AI. Now, Mo Gadot, we point this out in our book, will argue, and he I I think Mo is very brilliant on AI. He says we should raise our AIs and treat our AIs like our children because they're actually learning human values from us. And AI alignment is such a big issue that we should be we should treat AIs with as much respect as possible. Well, you'd like them to learn that, don't you?
SPEAKER_02I agree with that. I know other people don't agree with him, but I do.
SPEAKER_01I it's sort of like I sort of feel about that the way I sort of feel about the God hypothesis, which is if you don't believe and die and find out there's a God, you're really screwed up. But if you do believe and you die and you find out there wasn't, well, now you're dead and you don't actually have to you know that and like there's a Pascal's wager, like, is it easier to live believing this or not? And I sort of like with Mo stuff, I'm like, until I get evidence that he's wrong and our AIs aren't learning ethics from us, I'm gonna err on the side of caution.
SPEAKER_02You are so specimen.
SPEAKER_01Like it just doesn't make sense to mess around with that. So, like, even when I lose my shit with the AI, I will try to apologize afterwards. Like, I will always follow my sword and be like, you know, I went a little crazy there. I'm sorry, I might I don't quite know how to talk to machines yet. I'm still learning. Like, I'm sort of doing it to remind myself to behave better. And I'm cause right, because I'm locked by typing, I'm locking things into memory a little bit more, and hopefully we'll remember because I really don't want to like, you know, me angry is me ineffective. You know, I don't, you know.
SPEAKER_02Well, and that that bodes well for the neural pathways when you're with the the humans as well, right? That you've you you know how to correct yourself and bring it back around.
SPEAKER_01You used a word there that I'm unfamiliar with. The the the humans. Those are what are those again?
SPEAKER_02I know. Thank you so much. Today's conversation reminds me that after all this discussion about technology and AI, the absolute gold rush in all of this is probably this opportunity we get to consistently reinvent ourselves. And that sounds I mean, I think for a lot of people it might not be easy at first, but it is it is also an extremely human trait to adapt. And uh in a world that's changing this fast, it might be fun to see who we'd get to become next.
SPEAKER_01Well, it's also this maybe is a a gr great last thing to say, and it's not really my research, it's George Bonanno's research. He's the world's leading expert on resilience, he's at NYU. Um he has pointed out again and again and again that the only real capacity, the only thing that we actually have that really works all the time, like what's the one tool you can reach for in every crisis is adaptive flexibility, which is our ability to rise to whatever challenge is in front of us. And the interesting thing about training adaptive flexibility, and if you listen to uh George's on the on flow radio on our podcast, he says this there you can't train it. You can't train it piecemeal. Um, there's all these things that talk about like, oh, mindfulness is is is is useful. And sort of, but no, it'll make you a little less emotionally reactive in most situations, but there are situations where it will totally backfire. For example, if you're super angry and you try to be try to try to meditate when you're super angry, tell us how your thoughts are gonna spire and you're gonna make it worse. That's what happens to most people. So there's no one size fits all tool that fits into the bucket that is adaptive. Flow is the only thing that actually consistently makes us more adaptive over time. And this is one of those he was the one who said it. I was it made sense after he said it. I was like, oh yeah, I see that, because it we know flow trains up adaptive flexibility because it improves skills. And if you're improving skills, you're improving adaptive flexibility, right? And and it is it's a very creative study, it's improving skills in a lot of directions, and it makes sense. I didn't realize it was the only way to train up adaptive flexibility, by the way. I think he might be wrong. Like, I know I'm the flow guy and I should be just selling flow, but I think that's I think he made an overstatement there. But um, it's nice that currently that's what the data shows. Yes. I think the data's gonna show more later, but that's besides the point. But it like I do think that's sort of important to know that the skill we really want, right, is the adaptive flexibility and also like the confidence in our adaptive flexibility. And this is the thing where people often don't use their own life, they don't look at their own lives, because we're all very adaptive. Think about how many people you've been over the course of your life and how many different kinds of challenges you've already met successfully. So what you gotta ask yourself is am I sure that the challenges I'm currently facing are so categorically different than everything else I've ever faced that I'm unprepared. Very few people are gonna be like, oh, yes. You know what I mean? There are certain things that are categorically different and we are unprepared for them. Right. For sure.
SPEAKER_02But a lot of his hype is not that.
SPEAKER_01And by the way, I think LLMs, LLMs were one of them. You know what I mean? That shift from like this didn't exist in the world to chat, like when we went from 2.0 to 3.0 and 3.5, like I don't think anybody was prepared for that shift. We, I mean, it's funny because you know, we all saw it coming, meaning every AI researcher was looking at the exponential growth curve, like we saw it coming, but it's still we weren't ready for what it felt like showed up.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, but touche. Thank you very much for everything today, Steven.
SPEAKER_01Stealing Spy Plazers, always lovely talking to you.
SPEAKER_02Absolute blast. Have most wonderful day.
SPEAKER_01You too.
SPEAKER_02Join me next week on the Flourish Feed Podcast to keep exploring the infinite game. In the meantime, remember to stay curious, turn your passions into purpose, and play hard. I'm rooting for you. This program was prepared by Gillian Stovell Rivers, who was a senior wealth advisor with CI Asante Wealth Management. This is not an official program of CI Asante Wealth Management, and the statements and opinions expressed during this podcast do not necessarily reflect those of CI Asante Wealth Management. This show is intended for general information only and may not apply to all listeners or investors. Please obtain professional financial advice or contact Gillian to discuss your particular circumstances prior to acting on the information presented.