In this episode, Jeff Dance speaks with Steven Kotler about the future of human performance and the science underlying peak states. The discussion explores flow states, the neurobiology of performance, and how technology—from AI to group flow measurement—is changing our capabilities. Key takeaways include simple strategies for improving performance, insights into the power and risks of technology, and the vital need for both wisdom and cooperation as our global capacity accelerates.

Podcast Transcript:

Jeff Dance: In this episode of The Future Of, we’re joined by Steven Kotler — scientist, bestselling author, and the founder and executive director of the Flow Research Collective — to talk about the future of human performance. Steven, welcome to the show.

Steven Kotler: Thanks for having me, Jeff. It’s good to be with you.

Jeff Dance: For the guests, I’d like to go a little deeper on your background. Steven is the author of 17 books, including 12 bestsellers. His work has earned three Pulitzer Prize nominations and has been translated into more than 80 languages. His writing has appeared in over 100 publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Wired, Time, and Harvard Business Review.

He’s also recognized by The New York Times as one of the world’s leading experts in ultimate human performance, and he does a lot of work in that space. His books The Rise of Superman, Stealing Fire, and The Art of Impossible are considered foundational texts in applied performance neuroscience. His training programs have reached individuals in 156 countries across 20 industries, including groups like the US Navy SEALs, Olympic athletes, and executive teams at places like Google, Meta, and Microsoft.

He’s also a serial entrepreneur — so for those coming from a business perspective, he’s not just a professor who does a lot of fun things. He’s founded and helped launch more than 16 companies spanning media, technology, and human performance. So, hey man, really excited to have you here.

You’ve done a lot in your career — a lot more than the average human — which I think lends credibility to the content we’re discussing today about human performance. What are some of the key drivers that have helped you accomplish so much? Before we get onto the topic of human performance — for you personally, how have you done so much?

Steven Kotler: Such a funny question to me, because I started out with one decision-making heuristic that governed most of my life in the early days, which is: I want to have extraordinary adventures, and I want to get paid for putting words together in a straight line. That was literally the criteria I started with.

And I had areas of interest — neuroscience was a deep area of interest. So some of the adventures I wanted to have were puzzles. I was really interested in consciousness, intuition, altered states, and their relationship with human performance. These are concepts that have been developed in my work, but they’re very old for me. And Jeff, one of the other things — it was that heuristic, but I also think with everything that I’m in love with, whether it’s skiing, neuroscience, or dogs, I want to make a fundamental contribution to that field. I want to figure out who’s best in the world, get myself to that level, and try to make a contribution at that level. In a weird way, I’ve been driven by trying to give back to the things that I love so much, that have given me so much.

That really was the original decision-making heuristic. And the last thing I’ll say is, because I had an unusual childhood, I realized a lot more was possible for myself early on than I think a lot of people do. I started out as a professional magician — prestidigitation, sleight of hand, birthday parties starting at age 11. This was the ’70s, which was this heyday for magic. And Cleveland, where I was, was this weird place — it’s the last city before the East Coast. So if you were going to New York to perform, you showed up in Cleveland first, because you could mess up there and it wouldn’t leak all the way to New York. This was true across the board — bands would come to Cleveland and warm up before going to New York. So I got to meet the best in the world, and I got to learn tricks from them. That was the weird thing about magic: you could be twelve years old and doing a trick that only five people in the entire world know how to do, and four of them are the best in the world, and you’re a 13-year-old kid. It was just because I had access to these people and they were teaching me stuff.

I didn’t realize until later what a wild foundation that was. I came in very early, when I was a kid, before I knew any better. I was like, of course you can master really difficult fields, because you did this thing when you were 13. You had no idea you were doing it. It wasn’t until much later that I realized — whoa, that’s not how it is for most people. I got remarkably lucky. So I thought my possibility space was a little bit bigger.

And my heuristic was very strict — I made crazy decisions. When I said I want to get paid for writing, that also meant I said no to opportunities. Everybody thought it was crazy. Nobody thought I was actually going to make a living as a writer. I would get offered positions that were stable, and for years I couldn’t pay my rent, couldn’t pay my bills. I was poor for a really long time. That was the other thing — I think I was willing to be poor a lot longer than most people. Most people get very scared in their late twenties if they haven’t solved money in the way that they want to. I didn’t. I was willing to keep saying no and stay on course.

Jeff Dance: Take risks, focus on that passion, explore. Pretty cool to think about magic at your beginning — that little angle maybe a lot of people don’t hear — and how that impacted people’s perceptions, their minds, and the work that you’re doing now. What’s possible, right? That’s really interesting.

Steven Kotler: Yeah, well, there was the other thing: my whole career has been about — hey, underneath every impossible feat, whatever you’re looking at, whether it’s in business, science, or sport — there’s a skill set, there’s a methodology, there’s a formula, there’s biology. There’s stuff there. That’s what magic taught me. Magic just looks like magic, but under the hood, there’s always a process. And if you understand the process, you can actually get the same skills as the best in the world. That’s sort of what it taught me.

Which is a really weird lesson, but it turns out to be very true across all domains. I tell this story at the beginning of The Art of Impossible a little bit, but it really was hugely influential. It also taught me — and I think any childhood obsession does this for people, if you’re lucky enough to have that kind of obsession — I learned how to focus for five hours at a time practicing coin tricks and things like that.

And I also learned another wild secret back then, which is that people hide secrets in books. There were books about magic, right? With these amazing tricks in them. I think about that now, because people ask me what I read, and I always read textbooks. People are like, “Why are you reading textbooks?” I’m like, “Because nobody does.” And I write them, so I know: when you write a textbook, you get the best in the world together, everybody contributes, you put it out as a textbook — and nobody freakin’ reads them unless it’s for a specific college class. But these are treasure troves of information. If I can find a pile of information that the competition doesn’t know about, it gives me an edge. Books are where they hide the secrets. All those lessons came from magic.

Jeff Dance: Very cool. What else do you do for fun? Magic was a passion early on. You obviously do a lot of writing — you have a passion for that. You pushed the fear away early on to keep that going until you, I would say, made it big, and you’ve done an incredible amount of work so far in your life. But what do you do for fun?

Steven Kotler: I’m a skier, I’m a surfer, I’m a skater, I’m a rock climber a little bit, I’m a little bit of a mountain biker. I love lifting weights. And my wife and I — I don’t know if this is fun, but I think it’s fun, and it would not be fun for most people — have co-run a hospice care dog sanctuary for twenty-five years. We do hospice care. We’re sort of the cutting-edge front line of canine longevity; we do a lot of work at that edge. I share my house with a huge pack of dogs — it’s hospice care and rescue. My life is really: I work with you, I ski with you, or you’re canine.

Jeff Dance: That’s amazing. Man’s best friend — being able to make that friend live longer. Really interesting. Thanks for sharing that.

Steven Kotler: Live longer and walk them home. A lot of it is about a good death. We’ve had fifteen hundred animals pass through our facility, and all of them have died a really amazing death. That’s sort of the job.

Jeff Dance: Well, if you talk to our team here that’s listening in, I think I share probably 90% of those passions. So that’s fun. We won’t derail there, but we’d love to chat more about all those topics. Coming back to our topic of human performance, especially in the age of AI: as we think about human performance, what facets do you like to focus on? I know there’s peak performance as a topic, and there’s flow, as sort of concepts in your book. Give us a little bit more definition so we understand more going into this conversation.

Steven Kotler: So I always tell people: at the Flow Research Collective, in my work, we study the neurobiology of peak performance. What that really means is we study what goes on in the brain and the body when people are performing at their best.

When you ask me to define peak performance — as far as I can tell, and this is not new; William James did something like this about a hundred years ago at the birth of psychology, and I don’t think the definition has really changed, just the language — peak performance is nothing more or less than getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. I don’t think there’s a secret. I think there’s just our biology.

I tend to focus on neurobiology, because psychology is very individual, very personal, very shaped by nature and nurture. And when you try to train human performance from psychology, it often fails for a lot of different reasons that we’re not going to go into. But when you get down to neurobiology, it’s mechanism. It’s shaped by evolution. It’s the same in all humans — usually most mammals, sometimes insects and birds.

At the center of all this is the state of consciousness known to researchers as flow. Scientists define flow as an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best — which doesn’t get us very far. It’s really any of those moments of rapt attention and total absorption. You get so focused on the task at hand, so focused on what you’re doing, that everything else starts to melt away and disappear. Your sense of self and self-consciousness get really quiet; time passes strangely. This could be: you sit down to write a quick email, you get so sucked into what you’re doing, you look up, and an hour’s gone by. That’s a state of micro flow, by the way. On the other end of the spectrum is macro flow, where time slows down and your sense of self disappears so much that you start to feel like you’re one with everything. We know the biology underneath that and why it happens; it’s really common at the extreme end. And in flow, all aspects of performance — mental, physical, and emotional — go through the roof.

And to get back to your original point: the one moral of the story in writing We Are as Gods, in investigating technology and talking to leaders all over the world, is that everybody seemed to agree that the next 10 years belong to leaders in flow who know how to collaborate with each other and with AI. That’s a really clear map of who gets to win over the next ten years. We’ll circle back on that, but I thought it was important to put some context around what we want to talk about today.

Jeff Dance: That’s great. Tell us more about your book. You just started on that, but give us some more details.

Steven Kotler: So the book — let’s start with the title. It’s called We Are As Gods: A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance. The title comes from a famous Stewart Brand quote. Stewart Brand was a Stanford biologist and one of the founders of the Whole Earth Catalog, and he said back in 1968, “We are as gods, and we might as well get good at it.” He was, of course, talking about technology — the Whole Earth Catalog was actually a collection of tools. In fact, the very first computer was advertised in there. So he was really interested in technology all along the way.

When he said it, we didn’t have godlike technology. It was almost a silly statement — we were a year away from landing on the moon. That’s where 1968 was. But today, that’s a very different story. We don’t tend to use the biblical terms — we don’t talk about omniscience or omnipresence. Instead we talk about ChatGPT or Google or Zoom — but the superpowers are the same. Creation ex nihilo is creation of something from nothing, right? It’s the core biblical miracle. Today we have synthetic biology, personalized genomics, all these technologies, de-extinction. These are real technologies. I co-wrote the book with my longtime writing partner Peter Diamandis — this is the fourth book we’ve written together.

I really wanted to call it that, and we don’t mean it as a statement of arrogance, by the way. If you look at the cover, it’s got a little computer enter sign. We mean it as a provocation, as a dare, and also as a danger — and a warning. We mean all three of those at once. This is an opportunity and a colossal challenge, and that’s what we meant by it.

Two more things I want to say about the godlike miracles. You can take the Old Testament and break it down — there are 83 miracles in the Old Testament. They fall into roughly 10 categories: healing miracles, provision miracles, miracles of battle, et cetera. If you take all of modern technology and filter it through those miracles, you get — in the book — six single-spaced pages of examples. The actual list was 12 and a half pages long, and I was like, I can’t do this to my readers, so I shrank it way down. The one I come back to over and over again is artificial vision. In the book, we talk about Max Hodak and Science Corporation. They’ve got a new retinal implant that cures macular degeneration. That’s the largest cause of blindness on the planet — 170 to 180 million people suffer from this condition. That’s a miracle of biblical proportion. There’s no other way you could talk about that. So that was the starting point for the book.

Where we went from there is: hey, godlike technology requires a very different cognitive operating system than the one we currently have. Our brain was not wired for the speed, the scale — anything we’re dealing with. So if you really want to thrive in today’s world, if you really want to deal with AI, you need a whole new way to think and a whole new way to live. It’s imperative.

And the reason I say it’s imperative — the subtitle is “A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance.” Give me three more minutes to round this out, and then we can go anywhere. Peter and I wrote a book in 2012 called Abundance. In that book we said, hey, there are these 10 technologies — bionics, robotics, AI, sensors, networks, compute — that are all accelerating on exponential growth curves, right? Moore’s Law, doubling in power on a regular basis. And we said it looks like very soon these technologies are going to give us the ability to meet and exceed the basic needs of every man, woman, and child on the planet. The book was a runaway hit and became a cultural movement — but I always like to point out, not when it first came out. The Wall Street Journal was so offended by what we had to say that they ran a two-page op-ed naysaying it. People really didn’t believe it.

One of the reasons we wrote this new book — our books are usually both of us trying to solve a problem. You can ask me what I was trying to do in a second. On Peter’s side: at the end of Abundance there are 120 charts that track everything from literacy to lifespan to maternal mortality. He kept updating the charts every year and saying, “Steven, you’ve got to pay attention to this data. It’s amazing. The message in the world is pessimism everywhere, and the data is showing the exact opposite.”

Just to give you an example — there are dozens of examples, and there are more charts in our new book — between 2010 and today, extreme poverty dropped by 200 million individuals. It’s the largest poverty drop in history in the shortest timeframe. A billion people gained access to electricity, two billion gained access to safe drinking water, and basically six billion people gained access to computing and connection technology.

And here’s the one that blows my mind. Value density is this funny term for all the stuff you get for free inside a cell phone — GPS, a movie camera, a record player, an encyclopedia, a health monitor, all that stuff. If you measure the value density of a 2010 cell phone using 1980s technology — the last time you could get these things individually — it’s about $1.5 million. So you buy a 2010 cell phone and you’ve got a million and a half dollars of 1980s technology built in for free. If you do that today, pick up your freakin’ smartphone: $7.34 million worth of value density. So if you measure access to goods and services, rather than just raw capital, over the past two decades, then literally six billion people gained seven million dollars’ worth of value density. Which is a really crazy thought.

That’s the upside. The downside is: we’re moving into this world of abundance — that’s very, very clear; those are examples of abundance — but there’s a dark side to abundance. We’ve got an abundance of cheap food; we have an obesity epidemic. We have an abundance of cheap energy; we have an abundance of carbon in our atmosphere. We’ve got an abundance of convenience; it’s led to an abundance of plastic pollution freakin’ everywhere. We’ve got an abundance of communication technology and social media; it’s led to the largest mental health crisis in history. There is a dark side to abundance. So when I say, hey, we need a cognitive upgrade to handle the challenges our technology is now creating for us — we need this upgrade as well. I’ll stop there. That’s what the book is about.

Jeff Dance: Amazing. I love the notion of the opportunity and challenge of today. I speak a lot on AI as well, and I’ve always said technology has good and evil — it always has, if we look back on history. But there’s this notion of how we use it for good, given the potential, and how we put ourselves in position as creators versus consumers — because it’s overwhelming, with the abundance of information we have going on right now. So I’m really resonating with what you’re saying. I’ve got to buy your book this afternoon.

One of the ways I’ve viewed this godlike capability, which I resonate with — I call it the god-frog principle. A frog in hot water, as you increase the temperature over time, will die. But over time, as human beings, we’re going to wake up and be like — we’ve basically developed all these godlike capabilities of creation, right? Because we have so many capabilities to create.

And shifting to AI here and going a little deeper: what’s happened in the last few years, as you think about value density — knowledge is no longer locked in people’s brains. The value density has gone exponential in terms of our ability to access the information of today over our smartphones, which is the computer in our pocket, as you mentioned. I see a big acceleration there.

To your point — even this notion of “we are as gods” sounds empowering, but it also sounds terrifying for some people. So what do we feel more — fear or optimism? And what would you say to that person? It sounds like you’re an optimist — you and Peter both. But for those on the fear side, in the spirit of neuroscience, what do you say to people who are fearing more? You mentioned opportunity and challenge, so maybe it’s okay to have fear. But I’d love your thoughts on that.

Steven Kotler: There are a bunch of different ways I can go at this. I will tell you that in the relationship with Peter, I’m the journalist, the scientist — I’m the realist. Peter’s the hardcore optimist. So we tend to meet in the middle. And in this book especially, there are things we disagree on. We disagree on population, we disagree on AI, we disagree on longevity — not fundamentally, not so much that we can’t write together — and we share those opinions in the book. We’re more than willing to say, hey, wait a minute, we’re on opposite sides here; you pick. This is what we’re looking at.

So as the realist — fear is a really big blanket statement. When most people talk about fear of the future, they’re either talking about having difficulty processing the speed, the scale, and the uncertainty of today — and there’s an entire set of human performance tools and ways I think about that problem — or they’re talking about technological unemployment. They’re scared they’re not going to have a job. And those are two different categories, two different sets of questions. So I want to pause here before I go down a rabbit hole. Which way do you want me to go?

Jeff Dance: Fear of unemployment is fine. I think it’s a common topic right now, so it’d be good to hear.

Steven Kotler: All right. I think people make a lot of mistakes around AI. I love AI. I think it’s a fabulous, amazing technology. I use it as a scientist, I use it as a writer, I use it to run my companies. I think it’s amazing. But I also think it’s the most overhyped technology I’ve encountered since maybe NFTs and Bitcoin. I always point out: go look at the Gartner hype cycle and see where we are on that curve. Understand that everybody who’s talking about AI right now at a really loud level is selling you AI. And not only are they selling you AI, they’re secretly competing with China.

I’ll give you an example. Every time Elon jumps on a stage and says, “The robots are coming, the robots are coming, the robots are coming” — what he’s not saying is: hey man, I’ve got a $40,000 robot that’s coming, China’s got a $16,000 robot that’s coming, and I want to scare you so badly that you buy mine before theirs arrives. He doesn’t say that, but that’s what’s going on. That’s a different sort of discussion. Are the robots coming for your job, or is a very smart marketer trying to get you to buy his robot first? I think that’s a fair question.

I feel the same way about AI. I always tell people: inside narrow, bounded skills, this is an astounding tool. If you’re trying to use it to find ideas inside buckets of science, for example, it’s phenomenal. But as a scientist who works on the cutting edge of a field, none of the LLMs can help, because they’re bounded knowledge sets. So I’m less impressed. And as a writer, they’re still laughable, and they’re not going to get better. I always say that everybody who’s claiming that LLMs are going to get to superintelligence or consciousness doesn’t know a thing about neuroscience — doesn’t know a thing about how the brain works and how those skills actually work. And I’m not saying we’re not going there — the book talks about it; we absolutely are.

But everybody’s like, “Oh my God, AI is coming for my job.” No, that’s not actually happening at all. In fact, in 2025 — this year — we lost 54,000 jobs to AI. We lose 2 million jobs a year to general job turnover. It wasn’t an apocalypse; it was a blip. AI agent models — there’s a new study that just came out that said thirty percent of them are failing, not producing ROI, and not being used. I’m not saying job fear isn’t real. I’m saying jobs are really complicated things. They’re not just one little task — there’s culture and laws and et cetera, et cetera. There are a lot of things that go into jobs, so they usually take longer to go away.

We’re hearing a lot from coding, because this is the front end of coding. And I sort of laugh, because as a writer, my industry went away in 2001 with the dot-com crash. I woke up making three dollars a word, writing 10,000-word articles on a Friday, and by Monday I’d have been fired. The new jobs were 25 cents a word, and we were writing 2,000-word articles. That was 2001. Then my next business, which was publishing — books went away in 2008. So I’ve seen this a lot, and artists have seen this a lot already. I think coders thought they had this advantage, that they were untouchable — and they got touched. And now they’re mad that their own creation actually touched them. You’ve done it to all of us for 30 years, and now it’s happening to you, and you’re screaming about it and scaring everyone. But most of us have been living through this for a while.

My whole point is: it’s going to be slower. Historically, technology creates way more jobs than it takes. One of the things that’s really funny in the book — in our examination of godlike technology, we talk about Ben Lamm’s work, his actual de-extinction work. He’s trying to build the real-life Jurassic Park. He’s brought Tasmanian tigers back from the dead; he’s working on the dodo; he’s working on the woolly mammoth. He’s de-extincting species, which is a miracle of biblical proportion, and he’s doing it at scale. In the book, I say: okay, this is a miracle, but here are all the jobs that come off of this weird, crazy thing — and there’s a job board. When I wrote the book, those were sort of fake jobs that came out of my head. It’s now a year later, and those are all real jobs. Those jobs now exist in the world. And people don’t see that.

So yes — are AI and robots coming? Yes. Is the timetable for development a lot slower than most people understand? Yes.

And here’s the point I really want to drive home. I talked to you about flow a second ago. When I say flow is optimal performance, among the things it optimizes are creativity, learning, and productivity. Let me give you a couple of numbers so you understand this point. DARPA — the Department of Defense — found that soldiers in flow learn 230% faster than normal. McKinsey, the business consultancy, found top executives are 500% more productive in flow. My lab and a bunch of other labs found that people are 400 to 700% more creative in flow.

And here’s the ultimate catch: flow amplifies lateral thinking, outside-the-box thinking, divergent thinking most of all. That’s what LLMs can’t do. They’re convergence engines. They’re never really going to do divergent thought. If you know anything about AI architectures, there are novelty detection engines and curiosity engines — they’re trying to get around it — but these are pattern-detection systems, and you’re trying to get them to not detect obvious patterns. It’s very, very hard to do, at least in the same kind of focused way the brain can do it.

My point is: this is why flow plus AI is the ultimate job skill for the future. But it’s also really important that people understand that when technology threatens your job, AI is different — because you get to use the technology to reskill. And flow, which was this weird psychological concept back in the ’80s, is now completely neurobiological, completely measurable, and very, very, very trainable. So yes, are we going to have to reskill a ton of people? Absolutely. Do we have amazing technologies to do that at a speed we’ve never had before? Yes, we have those things too. So when I say opportunity or challenge, that’s what I mean. It’s going to be slower, there’s a lot of hype, and we’ve got really cool tools for it.

I’ll also say that fear itself, if you’re trying to prepare for the future, is the single worst starting point, for a bunch of reasons. Let me give you one, because we want to stay on the AI topic. When I talk about AI and humans, this is one of the things I talk about. I noticed this in Silicon Valley first — you’ve probably seen it too — a lot of the AI leaders are talking about AI like a tsunami happening to them. “Oh my God, AI is happening to us” — rather than “it’s this thing we’re creating,” which is actually the truth.

The problem with this AI-victim mindset of inevitability: in the science of peak performance, there are a couple of rules. If you come to me, Jeff, and you’re like, “Steven, can you train me in human performance?” I would say yes — but there are two things I’ve got to ask you. One: can you pay your bills, with a little left over for disposable income? Because if you’re food insecure or rent insecure, you’ve got too much fear in your system, and I can’t actually train you — it will block peak performance, for a bunch of different reasons we could get into. The second one is: where’s your locus of control? Do you believe you have an internal locus of control — I’m in charge of my life, I can shape my destiny a little bit — or an external locus of control, a victim mindset: bad things happened to me as a child, AI is coming, I’ve got no control here?

A victim mindset functions in the same way a growth or fixed mindset functions in the brain. The brain is designed for efficiency — it wants to save energy at all costs. And if you don’t think you have control over a situation, if you don’t think you can effect change in a situation, when you reach a problem your brain goes, “Man, you’ve got no power here. There’s nothing you can do to help this,” and it won’t even generate the energy you need for focus, for attention, for flow, for all the things. So you’re literally blocked from getting into the ring. And this AI victimization that’s sort of everywhere right now — “it’s happening to us” — is bringing this out. I’m seeing very, very capable people become very, very incapable because they’ve adopted a victim mindset and they’re filling themselves with fear. You put those two things together and you’ve literally just crushed your shot at performance, resilience, creativity, innovation. You’re no longer able to think your way out of the situation.

One last thing I want to say here, because it’s so important. My favorite part of the brain is the anterior cingulate cortex — this is a bit of geeky neuroscience. One of the things I love about this part of the brain is that it decides how we get to think about thinking. The more fear you have in your system — measured in norepinephrine, which is literally anxiety versus curiosity — your brain becomes either logical and linear or exploratory and creative. The more fear, the more logical. Your brain doesn’t want to experiment. It goes, “Whoa, there’s real danger here. Give me safe, give me secure, give me tried and true.” You get very survival-minded, you get very aggressive, empathy goes away, humanity goes away, and you’re blocking all creativity. All creativity is shut down, because your brain wants the most convergent, logical, and linear thinking it can possibly get in that situation, and it’s really scared of novelty. And that’s the exact worst position from which to try to problem-solve anything, let alone technological unemployment. So — I had a lot to say on that. I went a lot of different places, but I’ll park it there for a second.

Jeff Dance: That’s perfect. But I want to build on one point there about fear, because I know you talk about this in your book as well, or maybe in some of your other books: information overload, and how that’s accentuated fear, and the cycle that happens. Tell us more about that cycle, that progression.

Steven Kotler: Yeah. When I first saw what you’re talking about, I called it exponential leadership syndrome, because when I first saw it, it showed up in leaders — CEOs and business leaders and people I was working with who were really at the top of their companies. And within six months, it was literally every single person I know.

Let’s start at the beginning, because you raised a point I need to go back to for this to make sense. You talked about information overload. Just to put a number on it — this is also in We Are as Gods — in 3000 BCE (and this is Buckminster Fuller who did the calculation), the first year we have written text, the very first time we got papyrus scrolls and all the rest, we created essentially a gigabyte’s worth of data in a year. That’s about 4,000 books. In one year, we produced 4,000 books. That’s not the amount of information the human brain evolved to handle, because it evolved a lot earlier than that — but let’s just say that’s baseline, what it can deal with in a year. In 2025, we produced 181 zettabytes of information. That’s like a quadrillion trillion books. That’s what we did. And that’s coming into all of our brains. We’re being bombarded by this.

Information overload produces a very particular and very specific biological reaction in the brain. We’re all experiencing this, so let me walk you through it. Information overload produces cognitive overload — there’s too much stuff coming into your brain, so now it’s hard to think. This is most of us, all the time, these days. The first thing that does is fracture attention. It makes it hard to focus, and we’re all experiencing that a lot. Once attention is fractured, decision fatigue sets in. It’s hard to choose, hard to pick. “Enough already — you decide. I don’t want to pick what’s for dinner,” let alone what retirement plan I should have or what I should invest in. All of those things become much harder. Once decision fatigue sets in, it increases anxiety and leads to meaning drift. Fear goes up, because it’s harder to make decisions and act on the world, and things start to mean less. They feel less good than they used to.

Once you’re there — for the reasons we just talked about with the anterior cingulate cortex and how it reacts to fear — meaning drift immediately goes to skill erosion: creativity drops, motivation drops, resilience drops. We’re all experiencing that. This leads directly to burnout. What’s really interesting here is that burnout is a pretty broad category — there’s actual clinical burnout, which is a distinct mental health condition that can last for years. And what I’m seeing with persistent burnout is that these things are showing up faster. You get adaptive rigidity: “I no longer know what the fuck to do. I’m out of ideas.” Performance theater: “I’m just going through the motions — as a father, in my marriage, in my job.” And finally you get total identity collapse, which I’m actually seeing sort of everywhere in executives. People who’ve been running businesses and knew exactly who they were in the world forever suddenly don’t. That’s really interesting to me.

So that’s one of the real apocalypses going on right now. This is one of the reasons why, when I talk about upgrading the cognitive operating system — this is happening to everybody, and it’s going to keep happening. This is information overload. This is just what happens. If you’re not protecting against it, this is where you’re going.

Jeff Dance: It’s a global pandemic, essentially. Each of those phases is happening on a global scale. I think anyone who’s listening knows.

Steven Kotler: Exactly. I didn’t think some of these things were even possible. I’ll give you another one that’s making this worse, and it’s really weird. Flow is really common at work — flow mostly shows up when we’re at work. Reading is the most common flow state on earth. The second most common is two middle managers in an office who get into a great conversation, and an hour goes by and they didn’t notice. So it’s really common at work.

Back in the 1960s, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the godfather of flow psychology, did an experiment where he blocked micro flow for three days. Any time anybody started to focus on something, he just shattered their concentration. He did it for three days, and then he looked at what happened. If you look at the data on the back end after three days, it’s like extreme burnout. People said crazy things: “I’m hostile, I’m violent, I’m dangerous, I can’t focus, my life has no meaning.” This was after three days. It was really crazy.

What I always want to remind people is: that’s the modern workplace. What he did to block flow for three days — which was super crazy in the ’60s and ’70s — was distract you all the freakin’ time. That’s the modern workplace. The average executive gets distracted something like four times every 15 minutes. We have so many incoming streams of information. When I started training executives — flow follows focus, so we’re always managing distraction — most executives had three incoming channels of information: you could email them, call them, or text them. The average executive I work with today has 17 different incoming channels of information. And that doesn’t include what apps they’re on — WhatsApp and Notion and Slack and all that stuff — or all the other apps they’re getting notifications from. It’s crazy. All of that is coming for our brain. And that’s why, as you pointed out, we’re in the middle of a pandemic of mental health crises.

Jeff Dance: Yeah, I think people think it’s other things, but the reality is: no — your mobile phone, all the overload that’s going on. They’re not pointing to this as one of the biggest things actually affecting their mental state. It was accentuated through the pandemic, because people went from looking at their phone like 90 times a day to like 360 times a day, because we had way more screen time — and not the social time or the flow state. We just increased the bombardment of information.

So I really appreciate the explanation. I think that’s going to really resonate with people. I remember, personally, I did a news fast — I just said, I’m not going to look at the news. And it was a big increase in my own productivity, in my own flow state, just by not looking at the news, not having that negativity, and not having that spiral. That was a little personal experiment of my own, but it’s great to hear you articulate it from a science perspective.

One of the things you mentioned — you argue that humanity now has godlike powers: AI, gene editing, longevity, robotics, all the neurological research — but not necessarily godlike wisdom. What did you mean by that?

Steven Kotler: I mean lots of different things: responsibility, empathy, morality, ethics — a lot of those things. But I said earlier that Peter was trying to solve a challenge, and I was trying to solve a challenge. Let me speak to what I was trying to do, and I think this answers your question in a better way.

I was looking at all the challenges of abundance, and I thought: wow, these are all problems of cooperation at scale. The major problems of the 21st century require cooperation at scale — whether we want to solve climate change, regulate AI, or deal with cryptocurrencies. These are essentially global challenges. And cooperation at scale — when I think of our responsibility, that’s our responsibility.

The emphasis I want to put here is interesting, because pre-pandemic, the idea of cooperation at scale was almost laughable. The only time humans cooperated at scale pre-pandemic was a war or a sporting event. Those were the only times we came together and cooperated at scale. But in the pandemic — however you come out on the results of the vaccine research — what we saw was technologically enabled global cooperation in record time. When COVID’s genome was sequenced, it was literally spread around the world to every research lab within three days. Nothing like that had ever happened. People shared information across borders. Everything worked. And like it or not, we had — I think the total was 17 — different vaccines, all developed in record time at cut-rate costs. That was amazing. So this idea that was spurious and almost nonsensical pre-pandemic — suddenly you’re like, wow, we just got a really interesting test case. It was technologically enabled global cooperation. That was really interesting.

Two other things happened in that same window that really caught my attention. First: if you’re talking about cooperation at scale and you want to talk about the biology of it, that’s known as group flow. It’s the shared, collective version of a flow state. And at scale, we call that communitas. That’s the word for when everybody’s in sync at a rock concert, clapping along with the band, or at a political rally, all swayed by the candidate. That’s communitas. It’s how biology shaped us for cooperation at scale. We’ve gotten very, very good at mapping, measuring, and understanding group flow. And in 2022, a colleague of ours, Mohammad Shehata at Caltech, found that it has an individual signal in the brain. So group flow got mapped and measured, and got a distinct signal. That was interesting.

The third thing that happened, that really changed me around on this: my chief science officer at the Flow Research Collective came to me and said, “Hey, on the side, me and some friends have been building this technology — you should see it.” You can see this too — go to Syneurgy, which is “synchrony” and “neuron” together: S-Y-N-E-U-R-G-Y dot com. Check it out if you want. What the technology does: you could have a Zoom meeting with your team, Jeff, and then send the recording to Syneurgy. They analyze it — they use AI to do semantic analysis, pupillometry, phase tracking, a whole bunch of stuff — and you can get moment-by-moment psychological safety, trust, brain entrainment, synchrony, and group flow proneness in real time.

So suddenly, within three years, we had a demonstration of cooperation at scale; the neurobiology of it got mapped; and then we got a technologically enabled training for psychological safety, trust — all the elements of cooperation. Any great cooperation is underpinned by brain entrainment, synchrony, and then group flow. We’ve known this — this is not new, it’s old — we just haven’t been able to do any of this before.

So when I say we have godlike responsibility, I’m talking about wisdom, empathy, cooperation at scale, all these sorts of things — but it’s not a hopeless cause. In a weird way, it’s not pie-in-the-sky morality, like “can’t we all just get along?” ’60s rhetoric. There’s some meat around those bones at this point. There’s science, there’s technology, there’s progress, and we’ve seen real-world case studies of it. That’s what I’m talking about — but I need to dress it up a little bit so it doesn’t sound so fantastical.

Jeff Dance: No, that’s great. I think the substance is really helpful. One of the things I’ve thought about, as we contemplate AI and the information hierarchy — data, information, knowledge, and wisdom being at the very top — is just that knowledge is no longer locked in people’s brains. We can tap all this different data. We have the world’s biggest tech companies racing to harness it all, make it accessible, make it clean. But knowledge is experience — it’s applied knowledge over time. And it seems like that’s still missing as we use AI. It gives us complete confidence, but we don’t have the experience factor. That’s the difference between an expert like you saying, “Yeah, I used AI, and it gave me this information with confidence — but I know from experience that this actually works.”

Steven Kotler: I call it AI rot — there are twelve major ways AI is eroding human potential. Maybe thirteen, actually, because I just saw a ton of data before this meeting. My chief science officer came to me and said, “There are six new studies that just came out that all show that AI makes us less sympathetic to other people and to criticism of our ideas.” He was laying out the data, and it’s because the AI always praises us, right? When we get that much reinforcement, we become intolerant of others. So sympathy is being eroded — that’s thirteen. Well, actually, social cognition is already on the list.

But AI is coming for your brain. There’s no way around it. It’s an amazing freakin’ tool, but cognitive offloading is real. Cognitive overload is real. Automation bias is real. The erosion of creativity and imagination is real. Reduced intrinsic motivation — I don’t know if you’ve seen this data; this is the craziest one. If you spend your morning working with your LLM, getting that sort of immediate feedback, and then you leave your LLM and go try to talk to your kid — it’s not as interesting. You’re not as intrinsically motivated to talk to your kid as you are to talk to the LLM, because the feedback isn’t instantly customized to you. It’s literally reducing motivation for non-AI tasks — which is basically our families, our lives.

So it’s giving us access to a tremendous amount of intelligence, and I love the upside. We’re doing science right now at a level that I never thought we’d be working at. It’s so cool what you can do — it really is. But you really have to know what you’re doing, and you really have to protect yourself and know how to properly work with AI.

In the book, one of the things I put at the end is what I think of as the Ten Commandments of human–AI creativity — ten rules. We started looking at this issue of human–AI symbiosis — that seems to be the best positive term right now — eight years ago. Because I realized — I got a chance to ride around in Google’s very first autonomous car back in 2008 or 2009, around the Stanford campus — I knew autonomous trucks were coming, and that’s the largest blue-collar workforce in America. So somebody’s going to have to reskill all of the truckers. Now we have a clock on that: the current truck fleet is going to go basically extinct by 2045, 2046. So by then, we have to have the technology to reskill the largest blue-collar workforce in America, or we’re going to have a problem. So we were looking at that, and also looking at the fact that, hey, we need AI to do that reskilling — so let’s work on both sides of this issue. Let’s figure out how to use flow and AI to reskill people, and let’s also figure out how people can work with AI without frying their brains.

We’re not a hundred percent there yet, but we actually think we found a signal in the brain that shows up when cognitive offloading is going on. So we may be able to build a device that basically tells you when the AI is thinking for you and it’s time to walk away.

I always tell people you have to pay a lot of attention to the ickiness factor in your gut. I’ll give you an example. Remember when Facebook showed up? If you’d never seen social media before, for the first two weeks it’s amazing. You’re suddenly connected to all these people in the world, you’ve got friends everywhere, you feel so seen and safe and all those amazing feelings. And two weeks later, you feel a little icky, a little lonely, a little weird. And we all ignored it. We all felt it, and we all ignored it — you’re nodding, I see you nodding. That was the largest mental health crisis in history, and we ignored it. That little feeling of “this is icky, this doesn’t make me feel good” — that’s what we were ignoring. Most people know that if you work with AI for too long, you get that same kind of icky feeling. That is no longer just a mental health crisis — it’s coming for your cognition and your creativity. That’s cognitive offloading.

There was a study — it wasn’t my team, it was a friend’s team — where they had executives use AI alone to write their emails for a month. Just for a month, a couple hundred people. And they found that in one month of just letting the AI write their emails, they could no longer write an email. They couldn’t structure and write any basic thought. Their grammar skills eroded, their spelling skills eroded — after one month of letting the AI write their emails for them. So it’s an amazing tool, but you really have to use it responsibly. This is also what I mean by wisdom and godlike responsibility.

When the Luddite movement started, the loom was just threatening job security. It wasn’t threatening your freakin’ brain. Now the technology is actually threatening our brains. We’ve seen this with the Google effect: kids no longer remember facts because they can look them up. And maybe that’s a good way of doing it — maybe that’s smart. Maybe Einstein was right: why memorize anything you can look up? But I certainly think, as a critical thinker, the fact that I know a ton of stuff about a ton of different things, and my brain just stocks facts — that’s a huge asset. I can do all kinds of things with my brain that a lot of people can’t do, because I packed it with facts, because I like reading books a lot. So even with the Google effect, I’m like — are we sure this is a good trade-off? But now, when you’re looking at AI and offloading, it’s a different story.

Jeff Dance: There’s a difference between reading something on a screen and in a book, even, right? There’s research around that.

Steven Kotler: Yeah, I actually write about this in The Art of Impossible. Memory in the brain is done in the hippocampus, which evolved for a very specific purpose. Memory evolved for a reason, and it evolved from map-making. The hippocampus is foundationally pathfinding and map-making: where’s the ripe fruit tree, where’s the watering hole, where was the saber-toothed tiger that wanted to eat me? That was survival. So the brain uses geography and geometry to store things.

When you’re reading on a screen, everything’s flat, and you’re actually hurting the brain’s memory. If you’ve read a book and you have a favorite quote, you don’t just remember the quote — you sort of remember where it is, what page it’s on, and where on the page it is. Ever wonder why that is? It’s because you’re using map-making for memory. If you do everything on a screen, without thickness, without geometry, it significantly reduces retention. I won’t read on a Kindle. When I go on trips, I still pack seven books — and I just told you I read textbooks. It’s awful. I carry a huge backpack. It’s a pain in the ass, but you know.

Jeff Dance: That’s awesome. I think the map-making is a good analogy, because it seems like we’ve lost some of our sense of direction just by using Google Maps and autonomous cars.

Steven Kotler: Oh yeah. I can’t read a map anymore. I was thinking about it the other day — I was trying to navigate something where there was no GPS, and I was on a map, and it took me a while to reorient my brain. And I was like, oh yeah, there’s a map. This is how you do this.

Jeff Dance: I love that you mentioned the Ten Commandments there at the end. What are some recommendations you have? There’s the information overload you mentioned; there’s the impact of AI taking away some of our creative thinking. But there’s a way to keep this positive for us. How do we do that? What are some of your recommendations?

Steven Kotler: I’ll give you two or three that I think are important. The place I always start — I think the law is “thou shalt protect the first spark.” What I always tell people is: you write first, you create first, you do the first draft — because you have an associative cortex. That’s how the brain works, right? It links things together. So if you’re trying to solve a problem and you ask the AI to do the thinking for you and start the conversation, it’s going to start where it wants to start. It’s not going to start with something in your brain. So you’re now locked out of the entire associative process — you’re letting the AI think for you. These systems are phenomenal for feedback. Put your ideas out first; use the AI for feedback. Start with your own stuff. Even if it’s an email newsletter, write as much of the first draft as you possibly can. Don’t start with the AI, because all that happens then is the AI gets better, you don’t get better, and your own ideas are locked out.

Also, a lot of people are using AI to make hard tasks easier. That’s problematic, because struggle — first of all, if you want to get into flow, the front end of a flow state is known as struggle. It’s a challenge. Challenge drives focus and flow. It drives you into the zone. And if you don’t have challenge, if you don’t have struggle, there’s no learning in the brain. You actually need a little bit of norepinephrine, a little bit of anxiety, in the brain for learning. All these things are foundational. So the AI is making everything really easy — and you’re seeing this. One of the big problems in work environments right now, at the next level up, is when you’ve spent your whole career doing a bunch of tasks that now AI can do for you. The meaning you used to draw from task completion is now gone. So you have to create meaning for yourself. You have to take that further, because the AI is coming for that.

Another one that I always think is really important: if you look at creativity in the brain, innovation, it’s a recombinatory mechanism. The brain takes in new information, combines it with older ideas, and the result gives you something startlingly new. That’s innovation; that’s creativity. But AI removes serendipity and chaos. They’re pattern predictors — what’s the next most obvious thing? So surprise comes out, randomness comes out, the unexpected comes out. Novelty is the seed of creativity, and these machines strip it out all the time. My running argument with ChatGPT as a writer is that it’ll come back to me with amazing confidence, telling me, “You should change your sentences to these words,” and I’m like, no, this is just average AI-speak. Enough with this fucking confidence. This is bad writing. And I’m not mad that you’re giving me bad writing — I’m mad that you’re suggesting bad writing with this much confidence. That’s the problem.

And faster is not always better. You can’t mistake efficiency for depth. AI should deepen thought. It was interesting — Marshall Goldsmith, who has helped as many companies upgrade to AI as anybody and writes about what he’s learning, said one of the things they think is the primary question companies need to ask is: does AI make work more meaningful for teams? And if the answer is no, don’t use the AI. If it’s not making work more meaningful, get rid of it. If it’s just about efficiency, you’re going to lose all your people — everybody’s going to quit. If you’re not following that metric, sure, you may gain some efficiency and productivity, and then you’re going to lose your entire staff, because they’re going to quit.

Jeff Dance: Thank you. So: think first — get it down on paper first, so that you’re driving your own thinking, not eliminating it. Create meaning for yourself — understand what your passion and purpose are, so that you’re driving from that with AI. Those are some of my core takeaways from what you just said.

Steven Kotler: And preserve the joy of creation. If the AI is creating, that spark, that joy — the satisfaction of making something drives motivation, right? Meaning and purpose. You can’t let AI automate that away, because you’re going to automate away meaning, purpose, and motivation.

Jeff Dance: Great. Other thoughts on the future? I have just a few more questions and then we’ll wrap up. We have a lot going on right now with technology — everything is converging with AI, in a sense, as an accelerator. That’s been really interesting for us in the world of robotics, augmented reality, and autonomous vehicles — to see how it amplifies tech. Any other trends you want to speak to as we think about the future, or any recommendations as we prepare for it? Because it is coming — it’s now, in a sense — and we’re at the very beginning of a bunch of movements.

Steven Kotler: There are a million things we didn’t even touch on that are fascinating and astounding. I love what AI is doing in healthcare — I think that space is really interesting. I think longevity and healthcare are a little overhyped. I think it was Demis Hassabis who said, “I think AI will cure all diseases in the next 10 years,” and I’m like, dude, what are you smoking? What kind of crazy-ass thing are you saying? And that’s in our book, by the way — this is one of the things that Peter and I disagree on.

But what I think is so interesting, when you say that: in the 20th century, there were a bunch of soft skills — creativity, passion, purpose, flow even, focus. I entered the business world — I got out of high school in ’85, out of college in ’89, grad school in ’91. If I had walked into a boardroom then and said, “We’ve got to talk about creativity, we’ve got to talk about flow, we’ve got to talk about attention, we’ve got to talk about employee cognitive bandwidth” — they would have laughed at me. You would have gotten laughed out of a boardroom. This wasn’t a serious topic for business, or for life, for that matter. And today, all the almost laughably soft skills of the twentieth century are fucking survival in the twenty-first century. They’re not just hard skills — if you don’t have these skills, something is actually coming for your brain, coming for your meaning, coming for your purpose.

This is — if you haven’t read the book — the weird, dire warning at the end of the book. We talk about John B. Calhoun. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this story — Universe 25. John B. Calhoun was an ethologist at the National Institutes of Health. It’s 1968 — same year as Stewart Brand, actually. Consumerism has been happening; in the ’50s and ’60s we’ve got cheaper technologies and more stuff. And he started to realize: wow, we’re moving towards this world of abundance. This is really happening. All mammalian brains evolved from scarcity. What happens if we create a world of abundance?

He studied animal behavior, and he built a mouse universe known as Universe 25. He had been creating mouse habitats forever, and he took basically a million dollars and built the perfect mouse habitat — all the food, all the water, enough material, everything they could possibly want. And he let the mice go. Society evolved to a certain point, and then it devolved in a way nobody had ever seen before. It wasn’t just that things fell apart and got chaotic — it was how they fell apart. Male mice would either endlessly groom themselves or form these roving packs of incredibly violent animals. The females’ maternal behavior went away almost entirely; they stopped weaning their infants. They would step over their dead. He actually shut the experiment down early because it got so crazy. And the realization was that we are actually not hardwired for abundance, and we need to prepare differently for that future.

Jeff Dance: I want to wrap up with two questions, and I’m going to try to get at the essence of some things — although I feel like we could chat for hours about human performance. You’ve written 17 books that probably indirectly hit on different aspects of performance and the future, which is awesome — you being an example yourself. What’s a key insight that has transformed your own approach to your own performance? What is something that has really affected you personally, that you try to keep in mind?

Steven Kotler: It’s interesting — if you read The Art of Impossible, for example, by the time you’re done, you’ll know that when we talk about human performance, it’s really about six or seven small things to do every day, and maybe six or seven small things to do every week. They’re not extraordinarily hard. What I find is the difference between having an ordinary life and actually accomplishing the impossible is just the relentless ability to do the same sort of thing over and over again — these really small steps. I always say that the thing that always shocks me is the discovery that we are all capable of so much more than we know. And what it takes to start to unlock that capability is a lot smaller than most people think. You just have to be regular with it. I don’t know if that was an answer, but that’s what popped into my mind.

Jeff Dance: Yeah, thank you. What about for the leaders you impact — you do a lot of speaking around the world. What’s one thing — or maybe a few things — that has really impacted others from your thought leadership? Things they have applied where it’s like, “That’s really dramatically improved my performance.”

Steven Kotler: Let me give you one. Flow states have triggers — preconditions that lead to more flow. Flow follows focus. The very first of those triggers is complete concentration. What I mean by that is: when you sit down to do work that you care about, practice distraction management. Shut off all notifications, turn off your email, shut down your phone, limit incoming communication channels, have your conversations in advance.

Also, one of the biggest things: the brain has a built-in focusing slot that’s about ninety to a hundred and ten minutes long. It’s the opposite of a sleep cycle, which is about 90 to 110 minutes long — we have an awake-and-alert cycle of the same length. And we always try to train people, if you can, to start your day with an uninterrupted block of complete concentration — roughly 90 minutes — that you spend on your hardest task of the day. There’s something really foundationally important about starting your day with a deep-work focus period and chunking out your hardest task of the day. I think it’s the single most important peak-performance thing you can do, and it’s so simple and small that most people don’t do it.

Jeff Dance: Thank you. Any other thoughts before we wrap up that you want to share on the topic of the future of human performance?

Steven Kotler: Well, if you want to know more about the work we do with flow: flowresearchcollective.com. If you’re interested in training with me: stevenkotler.com, and @stevenkotler on the socials. My Instagram is essentially endless flow coaching, so there’s a ton of stuff there for people.

Jeff Dance: Awesome. Steven, thank you for your insights, your wisdom, your leadership, everything you’ve done for humanity, and all this great thinking. I really appreciate you being on the show as an influencer for the future, especially in the age of AI. Grateful to have you here.

Steven Kotler: Thank you for having me, and thanks for your interest in my work. I appreciate it.