Glenn Beck and Steven Kotler dissect America's regression from a Stage Five society to a reactive Stage Two mentality, linking this decline to the Otto Warmbier tragedy, the "Hunt Republicans" rhetoric following the Scalise attack, and geopolitical tensions in Syria. They analyze how social media exploits dopamine spikes to mimic flow states while warning that true flow requires balancing challenge and skill to avoid dangerous groupthink. Ultimately, the episode argues that political leaders must speak the specific dialect of their constituents to prevent societal collapse into violence and chaos. [Automatically generated summary]
If there was a drug that could make you 500 times more creative in problem solving and thinking out of the box, would you take it?
Yes.
Yes.
You would take it?
Yes.
There is a drug, and we have a guest coming up who is now working in Silicon Valley that says all of the billionaires in Silicon Valley are taking it.
And that's what's causing them to think out of the box.
The source on that, by the way, is Tim Ferriss, a guy who is extraordinarily credible and a guy who has experimented with his own body.
So this is like the limitless thing.
Exactly like that.
This is being done in conjunction with some Navy SEALs and some testing.
The drug, by the way, mescaline and LSD.
Wait until you hear the case Silicon Valley is trying to make for getting into the flow.
North Korea's Violent Rhetoric00:08:14
Amazing.
That's coming up in an hour from now.
Also, we have to share the amazing story of Tucker Carlson talking to this Democrat who has tweeted right after the shooting, tweeted, hunt Republicans.
This guy is one of the more despicable human beings that I have heard for quite some time.
He is actually calling for, I think, would you agree, more violence?
At least more violent rhetoric.
Yeah, more violent.
Democrats.
More violent rhetoric.
Meanwhile, CBS News has just a poll out that says, Americans say that our political debate is increasingly uncivil and a remarkably sad story.
An ending to the story of the kid that went to North Korea, tried to take a souvenir poster home on New Year's Eve, was just sent home years later after being beaten, now we know, to death.
What is America going to do?
We give you that story right now.
I will make a stand.
I will raise my voice.
I will hold your hand.
Cause we have won.
I will beat my drum.
I have made my choice.
We will overcome.
Cause we are one.
The fusion of entertainment and enlightenment.
This is the Glenn Beck Program.
In Cincinnati, there's a 22-year-old American college student that returned home last week.
He had been imprisoned in North Korea for 17 months.
He died in a Cincinnati hospital.
He had been home less than a week.
Now, the reason why the North Koreans sent him home is because they said he got botulism.
He was in prison, and somehow or another, he got botulism and he went into a coma.
That excuse, doctors are now saying, is not an excuse.
It is a slap in the face to America, to our intelligence.
As Otto Warmbringer, Warm Beer came home to Cincinnati, greeted by his parents, he was unable to speak.
He was unable to see.
He was unable to react to any verbal commands.
His parents said he looked so uncomfortable and in so much pain.
They knew they would never hear his voice again, but they said the look of anguish on his face within a day was gone.
They believe that he knew he was home.
He had severe brain damage.
One senior U.S. official told the New York Times that intelligence reports show that Warm Beer had been repeatedly beaten, beaten into a vegetative state.
Now, since the 1990s, 16 Americans have been detained by North Korea.
And during that time, it's incredibly rare to see evidence of abuse or torture.
North Koreans have been very, very careful.
They don't want to give humanitarian groups any, you know, any cause to protest.
They don't want to hand anybody more ammo for criticism.
We're, by the way, still technically at war.
I don't know if people really understand this, but no peace treaty was ever signed during the Korean War.
We are still technically at war.
We have an armistice.
We have a standoff.
So now, why at the brink of war with three carrier battle groups?
The only time the United States has ever had three carrier battle groups in one region, it has been because we were about to go to war.
War always follows, in the past, war always follows three carrier groups in a region.
So why, when we have all of that firepower, did the North Koreans break decades of pattern to deliver us a broken, beaten, and clearly tortured American citizen?
He was murdered by the Kim family syndicate.
And I want you to understand that because it's not a nation.
This is a group of people held hostage by gangsters.
Kim Jong-un made this Cincinnati, 20-year-old Cincinnati resident into a Corleone-style message.
This is what the mob does.
They beat or kill and dump the body on your doorstep.
And that's exactly what they did.
He was killed and beaten, not because he took a poster or tried to take a poster.
He was beaten because he was an American citizen and his death was meant to intimidate us.
Why would he break decades of a standoff?
Well, I think the answer is found here.
How exactly do we respond to this?
We're at war.
Is this not a war crime?
The State Department should be demanding those responsible to be held accountable.
But North Korea is never going to comply.
But we at least owe that to the family of this victim.
Why would Kim Jong-un do this at this time?
Secretary of Defense James Mattis said that a war with North Korea, quote, will be catastrophic and the worst kind of fighting in most people's lifetimes, end quote.
Is it possible that we have waited and waited and waited and waited and pussyfooted around with North Korea to the point of no return?
And now North Korea knows we don't want to fight.
They know they have the upper hand.
And now the tail is going to wag the dog.
Multiple battle carrier groups are sitting off the coast of North Korea.
They can't sit there forever.
Capitulation on our side is not an option.
The only way out, we have said, is if Kim Jong-un gives up and dismantles his nuclear and missile programs.
War Looms Over Korea00:02:43
Do you think he's going to do that?
Was this the sign of a guy dumping a body off on our doorstep?
Is that not the answer of what I'm going to do with our nuclear missiles?
Yeah, am I going to stop them?
No, I just dumped a body on your front doorstep.
Here's the thing.
He's worried about the survival of his regime.
He can't be perceived as giving in to the United States of America.
He is escalating this.
And we are moving closer to war.
The question is, what will we do?
What should we do?
What comes next?
More in a second.
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This is the Glenn Beck Program.
Mercury.
You're listening to the Glenn Beck program.
Warmbier has just passed away.
Save Yourself From Repair Bills00:15:40
He spent a year and a half in North Korea.
A lot of bad things happened.
But at least we got him home to be with his parents, where they were so happy to see him, even though he was in very tough condition.
But he just passed away a little while ago.
It's a brutal regime, and we'll be able to handle it.
I don't know exactly what that means.
We're going to be able to handle it because I don't know what I would do if I were in his position.
I mean, what would you do if you're president of the United States and you wake up?
That's why you don't want to be president of the United States because somebody is always waking you up from a nap to say, Mr. President, there's a problem.
I don't want to wake up every day like that.
These are big problems, too.
These are huge.
We've got the Russian thing going on in Syria, and we've got this North Korean deal.
We can't just, are we going to let him just get away with it?
Are you going to just lob missiles?
No, you're going to assassinate that fat bastard.
I mean, that would be the only thing that you could come into my office, you know, without an actual professional briefing.
You know, if you guys, if you guys, if I were a president, let's laugh about that, and you guys were my cabinet, okay?
Man, would we be in trouble?
If this is the best information I get, I'm going for you, Pat.
I'm going to put that operation together.
Although it's legally barred.
I know.
I know.
Well, we would say that.
I would say to do it, Pat.
This is what I would say to you, Pat.
I'd be very disappointed.
If I find out, if I ever found out that you put something like that together and had that done by the end of the week, I would be very pissed.
Why would you say by the end of the week?
Or at any time by the end of the week or somewhere around there, I would be very upset.
Of course, was it the 80s when we supposedly made that illegal?
Yes, we did.
Reagan, right?
Yeah.
And we shouldn't assassinate.
No, of course not.
Not as a general rule.
Just when you really want to?
Yeah.
Just when you really need to, like with this guy.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I don't know what you do or how you handle this, but there's got to be sanctions.
Okay, hang on just a second.
Let's just play devil's advocate because I know there have got to be some people that are thinking, well, just leave it alone.
Just leave it alone.
Just don't do anything.
What are the ramifications of not doing anything?
Let's open yourself up for more of the same.
And that's where we're at now by not doing anything, right?
Yeah, with this guy.
Well, yeah, that's why this kid is dead, because Obama did nothing.
Right.
He did nothing.
Although, though, they said that he went into this coma soon after being captured.
Well, of course.
He's been in it for a while.
Soon after they beat the crap out of him and knocked him into a coma.
But what I'm saying is if you brought him back, he still would have been in a coma, whether he would have died right away.
No, we don't know how soon it was, though.
I think they said within a few weeks, right?
Well, no, but you don't.
Do you remember the day?
I remember the days.
You know what's amazing?
I got up this morning and I thought, there are so many millennials that are working here now and so many people that are 20, 25 years old.
They do not remember an America before 9-11.
They don't remember that.
So they've always been in a world where the American passport was a target.
When I was growing up, the American passport was like, back off, Jack.
Nobody would touch an American citizen.
You're not going anywhere and they kidnap an American citizen or arrest them.
They might arrest you, but they're not going to beat you to death because they know America will respond.
American passports were a shield to go anywhere.
Everybody wanted an American passport.
Not now.
You have an American passport.
They took this guy.
It's one thing to arrest him and convict him for hard labor or whatever because he stole a poster or tried to steal a poster.
I don't even know if he actually stole a poster early.
Whatever.
But that's one thing to arrest him and try him.
That's something the old Soviet Union would have done.
But they would not have beaten him.
They would have made sure that they took care of that guy.
Do not let him die or fall down or have a bowl of botulism.
Let's make sure he doesn't do that.
Well, I mean, you know, I don't know if this is related, but it seems like there's now a huge industry into saying how bad the American country is and what we stand for.
I mean, the left, people don't remember this now, but at the time when this guy was captured, the left attacked him.
Yes.
They wrote white privileged stuff.
Bussell wrote, why do people blame Otto Warmbier for his North Korea sentence?
Privilege can sometimes come at a price.
Privilege?
North Korea proves your white male privilege is not universal.
Salon, this might be America's biggest idiot frat boy.
Meet the UVA student who thought he could pull and prank in North Korea.
I will tell you that if this were my son at the time, and if he would have called me, I would have said, are you crazy?
What the hell were you doing?
It was obviously not a good decision.
Yeah, not a good decision.
But then you're calling the State Department and you're asking him, what are you doing to get my son out of this?
Right, right.
Someone's life is a decision.
And apparently, according to the father, the family was told, hey, keep a low profile by Obama.
Keep a low profile.
Don't make any waves.
And this is the result of it.
He pretty much credited Trump for getting this presentation to him here.
It was interesting.
I mean, I don't know if North Korea actually gave him up because they thought he was on the verge of death and didn't want him to die on their soil.
Because it's interesting that he would be over there and be in a coma for what is reported 16, 17 months, and then come over here two days later and die.
So maybe he was just on life support the whole time and they just brought him back and it was just all artificial that he was alive in the first place.
I don't know.
Salon also, a frat boy, Otto Frederick Warnbier gets the nightly show treatment he richly deserves.
And then there's a thing, a picture of Larry Wilmore, who was the host of the nightly show.
And he's got a little acronym, Alpha Sigma Sigma, but in big letters at the top, ASS, ass.
Over his picture, they're calling him an ass.
Isn't that funny?
Interestingly enough, Otto Warmbier actually did outlive the nightly show.
We can say that.
Just in case anyone was keeping track.
But I mean, this is despicable.
The guy was, I mean, yes, he made a mistake.
Yes, it was a silly mistake.
I mean, just going there.
I want to go to North Korea.
I've always wanted to go to North Korea because I find it to be a fascinating place.
But I'm never going to go to North Korea.
Wait, we could send you there on special assignment.
Pat, are you in with me on this show?
Special assignment.
That's a good idea, Glenn.
Thank you.
I thought so too.
Can you imagine the reporting you'd be able to do?
My gosh.
You can finally see that hotel, that giant hotel.
Yeah.
And you can talk about what a rat hole the place is.
What I'd really like is like a poster from the wall of one of those hotels.
That's nice.
That would be great.
I appreciate it.
You can't blame the kid.
You don't beat people to death for trying to take a New Year's Eve poster.
This is the Glenn Beck program.
So last night, we were saying our prayers before the kids go to bed and said a long-involved prayer for Donald Trump last night because we are...
I don't wish his position on any man.
If you just look at what has happened in the last 24 hours, I don't know how we get around these things, but we really need to come together because there's real trouble ahead.
What was it, yesterday or the day before, Syria time, the U.S. shot a fighter jet down.
We had a Syrian fighter jet, and it was a dogfight.
I mean, when's the last time the United States was in a dogfight with another plane?
We shot them down because this Syrian fighter jet had just bombed Syrian rebel forces.
Well, we are there to help the Syrian rebel forces.
There was a time during the last presidency that I would have applauded that kind of action.
And I'm sure there's a lot of people still that will still applaud that action.
But here's the problem with this latest escalation into our intervention into Syria.
So we have North Korea that is bubbling over.
I don't know what the president should do.
And now, because we did nothing in Syria for so long, and the Russians know, A, how weak we have been, and the Syrians know how weak we have been.
Now Donald Trump comes in and is like, we're not weak anymore.
Well, the Russians are desperate.
With oil at $47 a barrel right now, Russia is collapsing.
Everything outside of Moscow, all of the towns and farmlands that are surrounding Moscow, outside of the main cities of Moscow, everything is defaulting.
They are in real trouble.
They need a game changer.
So the problem with this is there's not any good guys in this scenario.
You know, when we used to be able to cheer during the Olympics as kids, because we knew China and Russia were bad and, you know, America and England and Australia, we were good, and we were a team and they were a team.
That's not the way the world is right now.
There is no, you know, Australia in the Middle East.
There's no England.
There's no Thomas Jefferson guy who's like, you know, Tom, Tom Paine, you should write something because all the stuff we're talking about is common sense.
You know, the Mahdi crawling out of a well, coming back, you know, after thousands of years hiding in the well, coming back to wash the world in blood.
That's common sense.
Everybody knows it.
No, no, there's no Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson in this area.
So we are just like in North Korea now, we are looking at bad and worse options.
And here's why.
We know what the Russians are doing.
The Russians are just trying to broker a deal in the Middle East.
That's all they're trying to do.
They want to be the power in the Middle East.
That's why they're in with Syria.
That's why they're in with Iran.
Iran is sweeping now across Iraq and into Syria.
They're looking to build a crescent-shaped power and their own little caliphate.
ISIS now is starting to fade into the background, but we're saying we're there fighting ISIS.
Well, we are and we aren't.
We let ISIS foster and grow.
And now what we're doing is trying to hold Iran back from taking Iraq and Syria.
And Russia is on the side of Syria and Iran.
So let's just look at the bad guys here.
You have the oppressive Bashar Assad government forces, which are battling against ISIS, and the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces.
Well, they're democratic.
They're democratic.
That's good.
No, just like the former socialist republics that all had democratic people's republic, no.
These guys are now the PKK.
These guys are really bad.
They're Kurds in Iraq and there are Kurds in Syria.
The Kurds in Syria are Marxist, Leninist, revolutionary terrorists.
And they're the guys that we are backing.
So we're supporting them.
What are we doing here?
Who are we really backing?
We've been down this road so many times in Iran with the Shah, Pinochet in Chile, Noriega in Nicaragua, the Contras, Batista in Cuba.
I mean, we keep making the same mistake over and over and over again.
We support or prop, you know, a dictator up one after the other.
And then there was the complicated mess in Bosnia, where we backed the Muslim majority while bombing the Christian minority into submission.
And let's not forget the recent disasters backing the initial Muslim Brotherhood leadership in Egypt and the situation in Libya, which is still a monumental mess.
All of these issues are complex and they're all tribal.
They're all people who have been warring with each other for a thousand years.
And there were compelling reasons that we took action before each of them.
But there were better reasons each time to stay out of the mess.
The decision to intervene in a civil war and coups and regime changes over the years have been made both by the Republicans and the Democrats.
Neither party is immune from the temptation to mess up other people's lives.
But in the civil war in Syria, the stakes have never been higher.
After shooting down the Syrian plane the other day, Russia threatened to target any American jet that strays into Russian protected space.
Well, that's anything west of the Euphrates.
That's almost all of Syria.
They also not only say we're now pitting the Soviets or the former Soviets with the United States.
Chaos Pushes Us Forward00:02:00
We're going to take the MiGs and our F-18s and go head to head.
They've also cut off all communication on the battlefield.
Pray for our president.
Because almost anything we do now is a disaster.
The last thing anyone should want is a direct military conflict between the two most powerful nuclear-armed nations on earth.
What we need to do is lead from behind.
We have started to begin this lie that we don't count, but we do.
The entire world is pushing us into chaos.
The entire world is in commotion.
I wouldn't be surprised to see the sun hide its face and the moon turn blood red and the stars fall from the sky.
The entire earth is in commotion and there are wars and there are rumors of wars.
We need to let our leaders know that cooler heads must prevail here.
And long term, it's important, imperative, that the United States of America go back to our founding principles and stay out of foreign entanglements.
When we respond, we have to respond with overwhelming, frightening, terrifying, and awesome power on any direct threat to us, any hit on us.
But when it comes to everybody else's foreign mess, we need to keep our nose out of it and mind our own business.
Stay Out Of Foreign Entanglements00:02:01
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Well, let me just say this.
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You're listening to The Glenn Beck Program.
Thank you.
This is The Glenn Beck Program.
Next hour, I want to share with you a couple of things.
A new insight about who we are and where we are as people and the way out.
There's an interesting set of books that I've been reading as I've been looking for this answer for the last six months.
And I've kind of narrowed it down to five books.
And I've been teaching it here at the studios and looking for some assistance from some of the writers of these books to come in and help steer me in the right place so I really understand it and then share it with you.
I want to share one of them, one of these observations next that I had reading a book.
And then in hour number three, we have the authors of a new book called Stealing Fire.
And it is the new thing now to what's being called get into the flow.
And the flow is something that you can induce, they say, with meditation, but also they say that you can get into the flow by taking a very small amount of LSD and mescaline.
And they are saying that this is happening in Silicon Valley.
The real disruptors are all altering their mental state.
And if I haven't read this book, I've read some of this book.
And if I'm not mistaken, I think they're actually advocating.
And some of these guys are like the Navy SEALs are experimenting with these things.
And DARPA, I mean, it sounds very, what was the Red Skull?
Who was the Captain America came after at first?
It wasn't the Red Skull that was experimenting with drugs that make you superhuman.
Racking my mind going through history.
Like, which one is he talking?
The Nazi regime?
Is this the no, you're talking about Captain America?
Yeah, right.
Yeah, that was real.
That was the Nazi regime.
Anyway, but the Nazis did do this.
They were looking for things that make you superhuman.
And we're apparently doing that too.
And this is a case that it's a good thing.
I don't think I'm going to be convinced.
That was the reports with LSD Forever, right?
I mean, that the CIA created that for our military and then it broke loose into the public, which created the 60s movement.
They're saying that it's such a low dose that it doesn't cause any of those psychedelic effects.
But one, like 100 million.
I don't remember.
I don't want to give the exact dosage, but they say it's really, really small and that you don't almost don't even feel it in your system.
And unlike other shows, we were telling you to try this at home.
Just experiment with it, see how much you can handle.
No, actually, we're not.
What is mescaline?
I'd have to go to Jeffy.
Jeffy, what is mesculine?
I actually forget what Mescaline is.
Mescaline, because that was like a 60s drug.
Yeah, it was definitely a 60s and early 70s drug.
It was a, I wanted to tie it in with LSD because I can't remember exactly what it is.
But I think mescaline was a stimulant taken from some sort of plant.
But I don't know.
LSD was obviously mad-made.
And I don't remember.
I just don't remember.
Just don't.
Yeah, it looks like it is a hallucinogen.
That's what happens when you take too much of it.
Yeah.
What was it used for?
Is it used for treatment of anything?
Effects comparable to those of LSD.
Occurs naturally in the peyote cactus.
Was a plant.
You got that right.
You know your drugs.
I mean, don't test him on it.
Seriously, Jeffy really is our drug.
He knows his drugs.
Whenever I have a question, we go to the doctor and we'll call up Jeffy Jeffy.
What do you think about this?
Double up on this, take another one of those.
You're welcome.
Also, we have new poll numbers out on the United States.
And where do we perceive?
7% of the American population believe that the political rhetoric in America is getting better.
I want to meet those people.
This is the Glenn Beck program.
Mercury. The Blaze Radio Network.
On demand.
Hello, America.
Welcome to the Glenn Beck program.
There is a new poll out.
Shows most Americans feel like there is real problems in our communication with other fellow Americans, but that's crazy talk.
What is it, six percent, seven percent?
Say that it's getting better, seven percent.
Yeah, yeah, say it's it's getting better.
Oh, yeah, things are great.
I'd like to, I'd like to meet those seven percent.
I have to beat the snot out of them, quite frankly.
Um, but uh, are we getting better?
Are we getting worse?
Uh, I think we're getting worse as evidenced on something that happened with Tucker Carlson last night.
We'll get into that here in just a second.
But not only, uh, not only that, how do we get around this?
Other than just admiring the problem, how do we solve this?
Um, I have a new attitude on this that I'm going to be laying some of the foundational work on here in the next few months.
And I want to bring you along for the ride and hear your opinion because to me, and I've shared it with a lot of people here recently in the building, and it makes an awful lot of sense to me.
And I want to start there with Tucker Carlson and what happened last night with a liberal who said it's okay to hunt Republicans.
We go there right now: I will make a stand, I will raise my voice, I will hold your hand, because we are one, I will be my drum, I have made my choice, we will overcome, because we are one.
The fusion of entertainment and enlightenment.
This is the Glenn Beck program.
You know, there's a lot of things today that are really disturbing.
Al Franken was talking about, hey, let's not move so fast with impeachment, telling the Democrats, let's not move so fast with impeachment because Mike Pence is worse.
And at the same time, it just shows that there's just not an honest bone in any of their bodies.
It's not really about Donald Trump and his tweets and his incivility or anything like that that they say it is.
It's just the fact that he's a Republican for many of them.
And then on the flip side of that, you have Keith Oberman, who thank God nobody is watching.
But he is speaking in terms of revolution.
And he said something really disturbing a few weeks ago, and now he's saying it again, just in a different way.
This time he's saying, you know what?
Best that Donald Trump implodes than our country implodes.
You know, we never, ever, ever said anything like that about Barack Obama.
We, at least on this show, we prayed for his safety.
We prayed for good decisions to be made.
If he were making a bad decision, I know my prayer every night was, Lord, if there are people that want to destroy the country, please thwart them.
Please help the president see the right decisions for the country.
Never did any of us want to see the president implode or go down in flames because conservatives, at least the ones I know, we were all saying the same thing.
If he goes down, we all go down.
Keith Oberman is saying it's your responsibility now to help him implode.
That is so reckless.
But there are good people on the other side that have kind of lost their way, and there are bad people on the other side who have just are just bad people that just want to see us destroyed and want a war.
And I have news for you.
There are people on our side that have lost their way and people on our side that want a civil war.
I'm not into that.
I don't think that's the answer.
Listen to Tucker Carlson interview a progressive who put out a tweet as a columnist right after the shooting last week with the hashtag Hunt Republicans.
People were horrified, of course, by last week's assassination attempt on Republican members of Congress, which wounded five people and nearly killed House Majority Whip Steve Scalise.
But most people apparently does not include some people, including New Jersey Democratic strategist Jim Devine.
After the shooting, Devine tweeted this, quote, we are in a war with selfish, foolish, and narcissistic rich people.
Why is it a shock when things turn violent?
Hashtag Hunt Republican Congressman.
After many people objected, Devine did not back down.
He followed up by tweeting this.
I'm sorry if my Hunt Republican Congressman hashtag hurt the feelings of any GOP snowflakes, but you have not engaged in civil discourse, end quote.
We invited Jim Devine to come on the show, and remarkably, he agreed.
He's brave at least.
Jim Devine joins us tonight.
So, Jim Devine, under what circumstances is it morally acceptable to use violence for political ends?
It's never acceptable to use violence for political ends, except perhaps in the most extreme cases.
I'd refer you to George Washington in those times.
The fact of the matter is we do with ballots in this country what they do with bullets elsewhere.
And it is not uncommon in politics that we use the language of war.
We talk about fierce rhetoric.
Talk about camp crusades and so on.
You were on a television program, and I don't know what your body count was when you were on Crossfire.
I assume that there were no real casualties there.
Okay, now stop.
Stop.
What is he saying there?
It's ludicrous.
What is he saying?
He's saying that we're used to this.
We're used to this.
This is violent rhetoric, sure, war rhetoric, but there was no body count on Crossfire.
So he is accepting CNN's Crossfire.
CNN's Crossfire and saying that there was no body count.
And also, by the way, retroactively mocking every Democrat's position in 2011.
Retroactively saying that was completely fine.
What do you mean?
It was on Crossfire.
You guys, was there any body count there?
Correct.
Now, that was the exact opposite position they took when it was thought initially that a Republican may have shot a congressperson.
Of course, that wound up not being true, but when they thought it was true, they said it was about the violent rhetoric.
It was.
We got to stop the violent rhetoric.
Okay.
I said he's not.
I mean, wait, no, stop.
You know what?
I want to have a reasonable conversation.
I want to demagogue this.
But in the hours after five people were shot, including the House Majority Whip, you sent out a tweet that said, hunt Republicans.
I mean, it was clearly a reference to the assassination attempt against Congressman Scalise.
It's hard to imagine how you could justify writing something like that.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting at the Sandy Hook School, we've heard people say, this is not the time to talk about gun violence.
We've heard lots of things follow this.
What does that have to do with it?
Yeah.
But what does that have to do with it?
In the immediate aftermath, we don't make policy decisions.
That's when you're emotional.
You find out exactly what's going on.
You make terrible decisions when you're super emotional.
Do we need to talk about the doom cross team?
When things are at an emotional high, you make really bad decisions and you destroy people's lives.
That only makes sense.
You don't strike out in anger.
This also seems like when you have your quarterback and he gets hurt and then your backup comes in and he gets hurt and then your third string guy comes in and he gets hurt and then you have to have the punter be quarterback for the rest of the game.
That's this guy's role, the Democratic Party.
He is not good at this.
No.
But that's not what you were saying.
You were encouraging gun violence.
Wait, hold on.
You were encouraging gun violence.
Absolutely not.
You never encouraged gun violence when I stated unless you're not.
What did you mean by that?
Don't put down that word.
I'm talking about you, not some other paper.
I mean, please.
This is what's been out there.
I'm not interested in what other people do.
We see stuff like this.
And this is not an uncomfortable thing.
So your excuse apparently is other people have done it.
That's not an excuse.
I'm here to ask you about something that you wrote, and why don't you explain it?
Why do you say for too long, Republicans in this country have failed to distinguish the differences between politics and war?
And a lot of Democrats have failed to see the similarities.
So you guys either have to tone down the rhetoric or we have to step up.
Unbelievable.
And I don't think there's anything hunt Republicans.
There's nothing wrong with that.
Sarah Palin put the crosshairs on Congress.
Hey, stop.
I'm just saying hunt Republicans.
But here's the difference.
Here's the difference.
Sarah Palin did that before.
He did this within hours of someone attempting to assassinate.
He wasn't a shooter.
He's an assassin.
Sarah Palin's implication, too, was target these districts for election purposes.
His implication is hunt them down and shoot them because that happened right after the shooting.
There's a target the district is different.
Unbelievable.
Hunt Republicans.
Hunt Republicans Or Assassins00:02:22
Yeah.
What?
How do you hunt?
You hunt with a gun.
What was that guy doing?
He was hunting.
He had a list of people he was trying to kill.
He was an assassin.
That's like after Oswald, you say hunt Soviets, hunt Russians in America.
Hunt Republicans then.
What are you talking about?
You don't use that after someone has attempted to assassinate someone.
I mean, obviously, the timing there is crucial.
I mean, the Sarah Palin thing, and by the way, Democrats were also using maps with targets on them at the exact same time.
I know, but this has been so overdone.
And the press here and the Democrats, and this is your point, I think, is we all know this.
We all know this.
Yeah, it's an obvious thing.
Both sides have always done it.
This guy's point, even his ridiculous point today that the Democrats need to start doing it more isn't even valid.
It's all a bizarre justification.
My guess is he at the moment tried to do something controversial so he would get attention because we're in that age, right?
The social media age, where here's an unknown punter-level quarterback trying to make a name for himself in the Democratic.
That's an insult to all punters.
It is.
It is.
But that's why I say punter-level quarterback.
Punters are fine.
No, no, no.
That is an insult to all punter-level quarterbacks.
Okay.
This is the water boy who is.
Oh, my gosh.
Oh, wow.
Holy cow.
This guy's not even in the stadium.
He has not seen a football.
He thinks football is soccer.
That's how far away he is.
And this is a guy who thinks saying something like this will make him brave so he can get on television and stand out from the other 9,000 Democrat consultants out there.
But this is not.
But he is a guy.
He is speaking a different, he is speaking a different language, and I don't think he's speaking American.
He might be speaking English, but he's not speaking American.
So the question is, why is he doing this?
I don't know.
Is this healthy?
No.
Identity Theft Is Stolen Daily00:03:29
How do we respond?
That is what has tripped me up for the last probably four years.
You have been asking me, Glenn, how do we get out of it?
And I've given you platitudes.
I've given you, well, stick by your principles.
And quite honestly, and I've said this to you before, I've given up hope.
I mean, I've been lying to you.
and I'd be like, well, there's a way out.
We're going to...
I've been lying.
Because I know there is...
I just haven't been able to find it.
I don't know what it is.
I have been doing a lot of studying and a lot of soul searching in the last eight months.
In the last four months, I've really gone to work and buckled down and got up off the floor and said, okay, enough is enough.
The answer is surrender or find a new way to live.
And I knew I didn't want to surrender.
I've been here before.
As an alcoholic, I was down on the floor in my apartment that smelled like soup.
And I was broke and out.
And I was on the floor.
And I thought to myself, I'm either going to die and commit suicide and I'm done or I'm going to stand up and start again.
And I didn't have any idea when I stood up what it was going to take.
And for a long time, I didn't know.
I've done it again.
And this time, I am at the beginning of really knowing exactly where we need to go.
And I want to share some of that with you when we come back.
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America Spirals Into Stage One00:16:05
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This is the Glenn Beck Program.
Mercury.
This is the Glenn Beck program.
All right.
I want to talk to you about something that I have been reading.
There are five books that I'm making everybody, literally everybody in this company, read.
And one of them is called Tribal Leadership, and it is by Dave Logan, John King, and Haley Fisher-Wright.
And it's a good book on, you know, tribes.
If you read Seth Godin or anything like that, you know what tribes are in your company.
And it's a good management book.
It's not, you know, it's not fantastic.
It's not going to change everything on management books.
It's just a good book.
But as I'm reading this, what came to mind was they're not just talking about companies here.
This is a great way to describe where we are in the United States.
And it talks about five stages of tribes.
And I'm going to go over them real quick, and then I want to explain how this goes into the country.
I'm going to explain it as it was meant to be explained in workplaces.
The first stage of tribes is the lowest stage, and it is, you know, a place where everybody thinks just life sucks.
I imagine this is what a lot of DMVs are like, where this life sucks and you have, you know, you have fighting in the hallways, you have, you know, high theft.
Everybody's just miserable there.
That's a really bad place.
High suicide rates.
I've never worked in a place like that, but bad.
The next level is my life sucks because.
First level, all life sucks.
Just life sucks.
Second level is my life sucks because.
And it's usually things like, my life sucks because I've got this bad boss.
Think of the office.
Okay.
They're all there.
Well, in that particular case, they're not normal, but they could all go out in real life and be generally normal.
But it's somebody at work, not Santoy.
But it's because their boss and their work is so crazy and nobody's getting anywhere.
Nobody has a chance of advancement.
The place is never going to change.
They've tried all kinds of stuff, but, you know, yeah, right, we're going to change.
We've tried that before.
But my life sucks because.
The third level is I'm okay.
You suck.
And that's where people at work go, yeah, don't talk to anybody else.
I'll get that done.
Just don't worry about it.
I'll get it done.
And there are those few people that are confident in their abilities.
They can work the system.
They can get it done.
Their life is good and they're building up to get out of there.
Okay.
My life is great.
I'm okay.
It's just everybody else around here.
There's two more stages above that.
And you can relate to these if you've ever worked in these places before.
But I want to show you how it applies to us as Americans.
back in a minute.
All right.
Talking about a book called Tribal Leadership that I've been working with my staff on.
And there are about five books that I want to share with you.
And I've been talking about some of them on the television show at five o'clock.
But I really want to take you along for the ride on this because I think it's the answer to America.
I've been looking for some other answers internally and externally.
There's a problem in America that we're all feeling and we all know it.
So now Let's go back to this book about work.
Stage one is life sucks.
Stage two is a company where, you know, people say, my life sucks because of my boss, because this is in my way, because of education, because the, you know, the boss has tried things, but he's not going to stick to them.
There's always an excuse.
And what happens, and it's based in reality.
When I say it's, there's always an excuse, it's based in reality.
But what happens is it starts to reward entrenched mediocrity and it calcifies.
Stage three is, I'm okay.
Everybody else here sucks.
Stage four is really where very few companies ever get.
Most companies are in stage two or stage three.
Stage four is a company where everybody says, we're okay.
We're doing great.
It's our competition that sucks.
The problem is outside.
We're doing a great job, but boy, do they suck.
And where you really want to get to is a stage five company where a stage five company is, this is great.
I don't even know how we're getting all this stuff done.
It's so great.
And I don't care about other people should come and join us.
Why aren't people coming here?
This is so great.
And you don't worry about competition or anything.
You just focus on what you're doing.
As I'm reading this, I am looking at this and saying, we used to be a five-stage country.
We were a country in the 1800s and really for a very long time that we didn't say the other nations sucked.
When we were at our founding and when we were at our best, we were just worried about us.
We were like, this is great.
Guys, you should see what we're doing over here.
You should come over here.
And people were looking over to us.
And that's when they gave us a Statue of Liberty.
Look what America is doing.
Because all we were focused on was what we could accomplish.
And we didn't bother anybody else.
We didn't hate anybody else.
We just were doing our thing.
Now, that's a nice view of it, forgetting the Indians and slaves and everything else.
But generally speaking, that was the American experiment.
Now, listen to this part.
In this book, Tribal Leadership, it talks when there's a stage five company, and I'm making this into a country.
When there's a stage five country, If the founder of the company leaves, it's not uncommon that it falls to a stage two company.
And you will hear people in the company say, well, this place used to stand for something, but it doesn't anymore.
Back in the day, we would have done it this way, but we don't anymore.
And you add that to, this place sucks because the people who are running this place, they just don't get it.
I could fix this company, but nobody will listen to me.
As I'm reading this book about companies, let's turn that into citizens.
What are the citizens saying?
The citizens are saying, in a stage two company, the problem is everybody feels like no one's listening to me.
In a stage two country, which I contend we're at, everybody's saying nobody's listening to me.
I can fix this if they would just listen to us.
Why did that guy, why did that guy mow everybody down yesterday or the day before in England at the mosque?
You see him get out of his car?
He practically took a victory lap.
He thought he was a hero.
He mows all these Muslims down and he gets out, waves his hands up like, yeah.
Why did that happen?
Gang, you just witnessed the Bubba effect in England.
That was the Bubba effect.
He thought he was doing a good thing.
Why?
Because no one in the government is listening to the people.
They're making excuses for Brexit.
What Brexit is all about is the same feeling we have here in America.
I feel like we're losing our culture.
I feel like we're losing who we are.
I feel like we're losing the West.
And you're bringing people in that we know are dangerous.
We just don't know who's dangerous.
But you won't even admit that anyone is dangerous.
That's not right.
And so the people feel like I could fix this damn thing if people would just listen to me, but nobody's listening to me.
Now here's the real problem.
You get to stage two.
And a stage two company can only, and this explains Donald Trump.
Stage two companies can only be brought up to a stage three company by someone who speaks the language of stage two people.
What did everybody say about Donald Trump?
He speaks the language of the guy sitting next to you in the bar.
He's the guy who's looking up at the TV and saying, This is all stupid crap, right?
He was speaking the language.
I wasn't.
I wasn't.
He was.
No one else was.
And at least according to this book about management, you can't bring a stage two person up.
You can't bring a stage three up to four.
You can't bring a four up to five unless you're speaking their language.
You have to understand where they live, what's happening in their life, or you're not going to be able to bring it up.
And the problem is, if you don't bring it up, stage two can go down to stage one.
And stage one, listen to this, are where you find theft, envy, greed, avarice, danger, violence, fights, lies, accusations, recriminations, because, and suicides.
I contend that we are currently a stage two country and we are quickly spiraling into a stage one country.
And we are being helped into that position by people like the guy that Tucker Carlson had on last night.
And by just talking about those things and not offering any other new path, we are almost guaranteeing that we will go to a stage one.
And if you speak the language of a stage two person who says, my life sucks because I can't get health care, my life sucks because it's dangerous outside and you guys aren't doing anything about it.
And somebody from that speaks the language of that tribe says, I'm going to help you, and then you violate their trust, it only makes things worse.
It has to be authentic, or the tribe grows more disillusioned.
A stage five country or company, an Apple, a Google, An America, when the founder dies, goes to a stage two.
Not always, but it's not uncommon.
Our founders have died.
Our founders died when we stopped reading and listening to them, when we stopped honoring what they wrote, when we stopped listening to what they advised us to do.
It's clearly official that our founders play no role in this country anymore.
It's why people our age feel this country used to stand for something.
But you have to understand: people who are 17 now were a year old when 9-11 happened.
People who were 23 really have no memory of America the way we do.
People who were 30 were kids when it happened.
It won't be repaired unless we teach the principles of the founders again.
We must restore those things in our own home.
But people like me need to learn how to speak the language of the people in Ohio, of the people in Arkansas, the people in upstate New York that are really, really hurting.
Everybody's just trying to survive right now.
And everybody, you know, it's the hierarchy of needs.
If you're worried about food and housing and education and health care, you're not caring about anything else.
You don't have the privilege to worry about anything else.
Fascinating Conversation On Flow00:15:07
And I failed to listen to that.
And for that, I need to say to you, the listening audience, I am sorry.
I get it, I think.
Next week, I'm going to do a show.
Just you and me.
Might do one, might do two, depending on how the first day goes.
But I just want to do it with you, and I want to listen to you.
I have several questions I want to ask you.
Also, this week for members of the Blaze, I'm doing a show on Thursday live, 5 p.m. Eastern, 4 o'clock Central, doing a show live in just you on the phone or you on Skype, and we'll give you all the details, but it'll be the regular number that you call in on here, 888-727-BECK.
If you found anything worthwhile in what I just said, may I suggest that you read the book, Tribal Leadership.
It's a New York Times bestseller.
I don't even know when it came out.
It's not a new book.
Tribal Leadership.
And look at this not only for your company, but also look at this for the country.
And like I said, I have four or five books that I would like you to read that are really important, especially if you're just running a company.
Friction is another one we'll talk about.
But it ties directly in to saving our country.
And I think I have a pathway out.
And I'd love to join you again on a mission to do just that.
And now this.
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Glenn Beck Program.
888727BA.
Mercury.
888727 Back.
This is the Glenn Beck Program.
Hello, America.
Welcome to the program.
Glad you're here.
Coming up next, we have a really fascinating, really fascinating book called Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley and the Navy SEALs and Maverick Scientists are revolutionizing the way we work and live.
It's all about chemicals.
Can we naturally produce an LSD?
Believe it or not, it's coming up next.
The Glenn Beck Program.
Mercury. The Blaze Radio Network.
On demand.
This is going to be a fascinating conversation.
There is a new book out by Stephen Kotler and Jamie Wheel.
Stephen is on with us.
It's called Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists are revolutionizing the way we work and live.
This is about getting into the flow, and it takes you to places that are very unexpected.
And I'm not sure I really understand here.
But it's going to be a fascinating conversation.
The idea that Tim Ferriss says that the billionaires that he knows in Silicon Valley are following Steve Jobs' advice and they're all taking LSD or micro doses of mescaline.
And that's why they're able to change the world and see solutions.
Stealing fire.
Where do you get that fire?
We begin right now.
I will make you stand.
I will raise my voice.
I will hold your hand.
Cause we are one.
I will be my job.
I have made my choice.
We will overcome.
Cause we are one.
The fusion of entertainment and enlightenment.
This is the Glenn Beck Program.
Steve, welcome to the program.
Glad you're here.
I have to be honest with you.
I've only read 50 pages of the book, and I'm not sure I understand.
Let me just ask you one question before we get into it to make sure I do understand what the point is here.
Is James Valentine, he was not taking any drugs.
He was just, he had a different kind of experience, but the same effect.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, okay.
Okay, so I just wanted to know that.
So now you can start at the beginning because now I think I got it.
Absolutely.
Let me just put it in historical context for you because it's the, thank you for having me, by the way.
But it's the easiest way to frame this up.
Back at the turn of the century, 1902, William James, who is a Harvard philosopher and psychologist and physician, he's sort of kind of considered the godfather of Western philosophy.
He makes the observation that a whole slew of experiences, what all the experiences that are sort of found north of happy.
So these are states of awe, certain kinds of mystical experiences like trance states or states produced by prayer or yoga or meditation or even in some cases psychedelic states or flow states, which is what we study at the Flow Genome Project, myself and Jamie Wheel, who I wrote the book with, which are those states of kind of optimal states of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform.
But you notice that all these states were really, really similar.
They produce very similar psychological changes in us.
They seem to heal anxiety, heal trauma, and they seem to lift us up to incredible heights and they produce very similar kind of physical experiences in us.
And we sort of turned our back on it.
Like we weren't really interested in altered states of consciousness at that point.
Freud came along.
He said, hey, pathological problems are much more interesting.
Let's try to fix people.
And that's what psychology did for about 100 years until the late 90s when somebody went, hey, you know, there's this whole upper realm of experiences we haven't looked at.
And now we have, and as it turns out, using high-powered brain imaging technology, James was right.
There's very, very little difference in the brain of kind of a skier in the zone moving down a mountain face, or say, as you pointed out in the beginning, a billionaire micro-dosing with psychedelics or somebody meditating.
Very similar things happen in the brain.
They produce very similar feelings in us and they have similar benefits.
Okay.
So let's get into this because I've read 55 pages this morning just trying to get ready for this.
And I wish I would have picked the book up earlier because I think.
And I got to tell you, by the way, 55 pages, you're doing well compared to a lot of people I talk to.
Well, I'm embarrassed that I've said that.
I'm embarrassed that I've only read 55.
But the idea here I'm fascinated by because I believe, as long as we're not talking about a drug-only state in the flow, I really truly believe that from 2007 to about 2012, I experienced that.
And just being in the flow, and it was a very different feeling and real high, high clarity.
Mine was not drug-induced, but I could explain it to you.
And I think it's the way John Valentine would have to say that.
James Valentine would explain that as well.
So I think there is something here to people who can't.
Do you mind if I ask you a question?
What triggered that experience in you?
At the front end of it, what was going on in your life that brought that on?
It was a deep spiritual connection of profound gratitude and service.
So interestingly, you had an experience, and it's very long-lasting.
It's known as helper's high.
It was discovered by Alan Luke's, founded Big Brother, Big Sisters back in the 90s.
It's essentially a flow state, right?
And let's just define flow for your listeners who don't know what exactly it is.
Flow is a fancy term for being in the zone, being unconscious.
If you play a lot of basketball, it's those moments of rapt attention and total absorption where you get so focused on what you're doing, everything else vanishes.
So your sense of self goes away.
Time passes strangely.
It slows down or it'll speed up.
It's what SEALs and people describe when they're at their height of going into kill Osama bin Laden.
Time slows down, everything else disappears.
So there's a, now that's a very acute, like when time slows down, that tends to be very acute.
There's a lot of additional brain processes being involved a little bit.
Essentially, Helper's High is a flow state produced by altruism.
You even can get a little taste of it.
If you've ever donated to Kiva or an online charity or anything like that, you'll get a little flush of that kind of feel-good feeling on the back end.
You just got it for a very long time.
My wife and I run a dog sanctuary.
And so we do hospice care and special needs care, and we live in a very poor community, and we work here intentionally and live here intentionally to do this work.
And she runs on Helper's High.
So the difference between that and just the dopamine that you get from the, you know, the bling of your Facebook or your email.
Exactly.
What is the difference?
So the differences are, as we move into flow, a couple of things happen.
First of all, you get, so most of what they call 21st century normal, you and I, where our brains are right now, there's a lot of activity kind of behind our forehead and what's known as the prefrontal cortex, which is your executive function, your attention, your sense of morality, your sense of will, language function, all that stuff.
That's going crazy.
And we, most of us, live with like the steady drip, drip, drip of stress hormones like cortisol and norepinephrine.
That's what psychologists talk about as 21st century normal, essentially.
As you move into all of these states, this happens in meditation.
It happens in contemplative states like yoga.
It happens in flow states, whether they're triggered by action adventure sports or by music, James Valentine's experience was he got into these deep trances playing music.
Chess is, you know, Josh Waitskin talks a lot about chess and flow.
Very, very common in a lot of different things that require intense focus in the present moment or altruism in your case.
And so what happens as you move into those states is activity in the prefrontal cortex gets really quiet.
It dies down.
That's why your sense of self disappears, right?
The inner critic, that nagging always on to feed his voice in your head, goes quiet in those states because the inner critic is basically calculated in your prefrontal cortex.
And as that part of the brain starts to shut down, we can't perform the calculation.
So your inner critic goes away.
Time passes strangely because time's calculated all over the prefrontal cortex.
And when it goes away, we can't separate past, present, from future.
It all blends together into what researchers call the deep now.
And to your question, the stress hormones, norepinephrine, and cortisol, they get flushed out of our system and they get replaced by not just dopamine.
Dopamine itself is a very powerful, you know, feel-good neurochemical with a lot of performance-enhancing benefit.
But you also get endorphins and serotonin and andemine and oxytocin.
And it's the cocktail that is so powerful.
And what that cocktail does, you talked about the clarity, does besides it, you know, it makes us feel selfless, it makes us feel timeless.
It also gives massively, it massively boosts motivation.
Flow States Boost Productivity00:04:09
So McKinsey, for example, did a 10-year study of top executives in flow, and they found that top executives were 500% more productive in flow.
A huge boost.
And it's because all of these same neurochemicals, they're feel-good drugs.
Some of the most addictive pleasure chemicals the brain can produce.
Flow's the only time we get all at once.
And it's produced this huge spike in motivation, a positive spike, right?
Like a positive addiction.
And so your job now is to try to figure out how to trip us into this flow?
Yeah, so over the past, you know, flow science is stretched back 150 years, but recently, past 10 years, we've been able to look under the hood for the first time.
Where are these experiences coming from?
And we've been able to work backwards.
And we now know that flow states have triggers, preconditions that lead to more flow.
There are 10 individual triggers, what you or I could use on our own to drive ourselves into flow.
And then there's a shared collective version of a flow state known as group flow.
It's what happens if you've ever been in a great brainstorming session.
You've watched a band come together and the music just starts to soar.
Or for that matter, if you saw the Super Bowl last year, saw fourth quarter comeback, right?
It's the spectacular, what the Patriots did in the fourth quarter.
Everybody comes together and football looks more like ballet.
That's group flow.
It's what the SEALs rely on so heavily, too.
It's a team coming together and being able to kind of behave like a collective organism.
Okay, when we come back, I want to have you go through some of those 10 things that can trip us into it.
The name of the book is Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley Navy SEALs and Maverick Scientists are revolutionizing the way we work and the way we live.
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Steven Kotler, the name of the book is Stealing Fire.
Stealing Fire And The Zone00:15:50
And Stephen, if I understand you right, what you're saying is whether it's drugs, whether it's a spiritual experience, no matter how you get there, there's this place called the flow, and it makes you so much more focused and productive.
And however you get there, you're trying to figure out how to trip yourself into it, correct?
Yeah.
What we know about flow is that it, you know, in these states, all of the brain's kind of basic information processing machinery gets amplified.
We take in more information per second.
We process it more quickly.
We're able to link ideas together.
So creativity goes through the roof, motivation goes through the roof, cooperation, collaboration, all the so-called 21st century skills, skills that we need so badly right now.
Okay, so give me, we have about five minutes.
Give me the high points on how to trip yourself into it.
So, you know, some really kind of basic stuff is pretty simple.
First thing you need to know is that flow shows up when all our attention is focused on the right here, right now.
So at a very practical level, we go into companies.
One of the first things we tell them is if you can't hang a sign on your door that says, bleep off, I'm flowing, you are in trouble because flow requires 90 to 120 minute periods of concentration to really bring it out.
Which is, by the way, one of the reasons Montessori education is so effective.
It's built around 90 to 120 minutes of uninterrupted concentration periods, right?
They use this and is why Montessori kids, you know, see so much flow and end up testing better than so many other kids on any test you throw at them.
Very simple thing.
Want to get it, take it one notch up.
We'll go into a trigger that's often called the golden rule of flow, known as the challenge skills balance.
The idea here is really simple.
All of Flow's triggers are things that help drive attention to the present moment, right?
So we pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge of the task slightly exceeds our skill set.
So you want to stretch, but not snap.
And this is tricky because if you're sort of a shyer, more timid, maybe a bit of an underachiever, whatever, the sweet spot is outside your comfort zone.
You have to be pushing yourself outside your standard comfort zone.
For really super high-productive, top-performers, type A types, the problem here is they blow past the sweet spot.
They will take on challenges that are so much bigger than they need to be.
And so one of the things we always tell people is in this stuff, especially if you're type A, you've got to go slow to go fast.
There's a kind of neurobiologically regulated sweet spot as to how we pay attention.
And when you hit it, it really drives focus.
Okay.
Go ahead.
I mean, just a couple places to start.
All right.
So do you do you do this with, are you guys doing this work with companies coming in and saying?
Yeah, I mean, last week we spent a day with all the top senior management and top executives in Ameritrade.
And the bigger point is this.
And we learned this, you know, we've learned this over the years in our digitally delivered classes.
And for example, we did a six-week training at Google a couple years ago.
It was a joint learning exercise.
We were trying some of this stuff out.
And we trained them up in kind of four high-performance basics, like sleep hygiene, get enough sleep at night kind of stuff.
Real basic.
And then four flow triggers.
How do you deploy these in your life?
And after a six-week period, and they did about an hour of homework a day, spread out throughout the day, but it took some work, but not a ton.
They saw a 35 to 80% increase in flow.
Now, to put this in context, same McKinsey article I talked about earlier, the same study found that a 15% increase in workplace flow will double overall workplace productivity.
So what we've learned is not only does flow have triggers, this stuff is really easy to teach.
It's not, and it's funny because everybody's basically, we're hardwired the same.
We're wired for high performance.
So once you start understanding how this stuff works, you can really step on the gas.
So you don't have to do this through drugs through chemical means.
No, in fact.
I mean, you know, there are a lot.
You have to understand that what you're talking about is pharmacology today, which has a long history of strong reactions, lots of politics, lots of mess, goes back a long time.
Tomorrow, you're going to be talking about EEG headset that zaps your brain in a particular way.
We're already getting there, right?
We have EEG headsets that can dial up a lot of kind of the underlying neurobiology of flow, and they're getting better.
Virtual reality is better, is really good at this as well.
So, like, you have feelings about, hey, I don't want to take a pharmacological route.
Totally fine, right?
Absolutely valid.
You know what I mean?
Like, not for everybody.
But, you know, it's an interesting bias because, you know, our idea that if this is internal and comes from us, it's pure and whole and sacred, you know, and drugs are drugs.
Drugs are a cheater's way there or they're bad or whatever.
Fine.
Okay, that's where we are right now.
But tomorrow, it's going to be an app on your phone.
That's where it starts to get really interesting.
Wow.
Well, I want to talk to you about that a little bit because you say this can be really, really good or highly destructive.
Well, so earlier I mentioned that you get all five of these really potent neurochemicals.
They're very addictive.
All, you know, I mean, there's no external drugs, cocaine, for example, most addictive drug on earth.
All it does is flood the brain with dopamine, right?
Dopamine is the drug that makes, you know, that underlies all addictive behavior, right?
Gambling addiction, sex addiction, shopping addiction, you know, cocaine addiction, doesn't matter.
So you're getting at the same endogenous neurochemistry.
So these states can be very, very addictive.
And, you know, one of the things, for example, creatives, I talk about this.
One of the reasons creativity is very.
Hold on just a second.
Stealing Fire is the name of the book.
in just a second.
Mercury.
The Glenn Beck Program.
We're talking to Stephen Cottler.
He and Jamie Wheel wrote a book called Stealing Fire.
And it's basically about how you can get into a super focused and productive state, like 500% higher than where you normally are, to be able to solve problems and see the world in a completely different way.
And it's surprising because when I first picked this up, it talks about Tim Ferris, who I respect a great deal, who has done crazy things to his body just to check it out.
You know, what foods am I really processing?
I'm going to put a little processor in my body to be able to really check blood sugar.
I mean, he's a crazy thinker in a good way.
And as I started reading this, and I haven't read all of it, It appeared as though it was going towards a place of, hey, you know, maybe, you know, LSD is the way to go.
That's not the point here.
The point can be, and I think you see it even in the Bible for anybody who's religious, where these guys have gone off and prayed all day and all night and they come back and they've got it.
They're in the flow.
They have concentrated and focused and found prayer does this to you.
To some people, it can totally change, I think, your body chemistry.
It does.
It does, right?
Yeah, for sure.
Absolutely.
So anyway, you were saying, I'm sorry we had to interrupt you with a break, Stephen.
Go ahead.
No worries.
You had asked about, is there a dark side here?
You know, this is a great upside.
And the dark side, I mean, historically, we talked earlier about group flow, right?
What happens when a whole collective group of people?
Well, great oratory, especially if you accompany that oratory with lights and sound and other things, can move people into this state, right?
Victor Turner from the University of Chicago, the anthropologist who talked about it, called it communitas.
And he was talking about it.
He was talking about Hitler.
He was talking about, hey, you know, great despots, great orators can move their people.
And it's, you know, the thing is, when the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that shuts down and flow goes away, there's great benefit.
There's phenomenal benefit.
But it also shuts down certain critical thinking faculties and certain long-term reasoning faculties, right?
We're not meant to live in these states, right?
Somebody comes up to me about once a month and says, hey, Stephen, oh my God, you should study me.
I'm in flow all the time.
And I used to not know, I used to get really uncomfortable.
Now I'm like, you know, I got to tell you the truth.
We got a word for that.
We call that schizophrenia.
You know, or bipolar disorder, or, you know, take your pick.
There's a whole bunch of those, you know, diseases that are right on the edge of these experiences.
Right.
I mean, the altered state spectrum starts on dreams on one end and goes to schizophrenia on the other.
We're talking about states that are sort of in the middle, right?
And they're, you know, very, very powerful, but there's downsides.
These states are addictive.
I said earlier that creatives have the highest suicide rate out of any profession, and creatives need flow to do their jobs.
As a writer, I can tell you this, right?
I had to get really good at this, mostly out of survival, right?
Like that's where a lot of it came from in the beginning for me, just as a writer.
If you can't trip into these states pretty quickly, you're not going to have a job for longer.
So, Stephen, have you ever read Jonathan Haight's book, The Righteous Mind?
Yeah, absolutely.
I got a chance to meet Jonathan not too long ago.
Amazing guy, isn't he?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So in that, he talks a little bit about the elephant and the writer.
He talks about things shutting down and the hits that we get from all of these positive self-made drugs.
And he kind of uses that in a way.
And speaking to him off the air, I've said, Stephen, I mean, Jonathan, I think you've come up with part of a solution here to solve our nation's problems and being able to talk to each other.
Well, let me invert it for you.
I'm working on a conference right now.
So what happens in a terrorist training camp?
They put people into flow.
If you look at kind of cultic programming, right?
And we tell people at the Flow Genome Project, don't go shopping in a flow state.
Everything's going to look great.
And so I'm working with a lot of different people in the Defense Department right now to talk about, you know, there's a neurobiological addiction underneath all the sociopolitical stuff that generates terrorism.
You're dealing with an addictive behavior and really potent neurochemistry.
So you have to, if you're not, you know, people, for me, people always talk about if you're going to fight terrorism, for example, you got to get to the source.
Well, the source is neurobiological in all of us.
That's the source.
My wife must be in a constant state of flow every time she goes to Costco.
It's like, so Stephen, here is stop.
So let me take this a step further.
And this is probably a conversation I should have off the air with you, but I am looking, I am very concerned about, for instance, last week when the assassination attempt happened at the ballpark, you know, I immediately got on the air and said, look, there's going to be two kinds of people.
They're going to be those who are saying, see, this is what happened and you caused blah, blah, blah.
Or, see, now your side did this.
And that's going to feel good.
It's going to feel good to bash people and argue people and everything else.
And there's going to be other people who know that's not healthy.
And it's not healthy to read it.
It's not healthy to be part of it.
You got to stay away from that stuff.
And I explained on the air that, you know, when you see, quote, your side have a time of righteous indignation, you're going to get all kinds of hits of dopamine.
And I think Facebook and especially Twitter is just overloading us with dopamine of it's a double hit, right?
You get one hit.
So this is Robert Spolsky's work at Stanford, where one of the reasons is so other flow triggers, just for quick to back this into novelty, complexity, and unpredictability, all grab hold of the attention, drive into the present moment.
They massively spike dopamine.
In fact, when we look at Facebook and we may or may not have a message, somebody may or not may not have liked our post or whatever, right?
If there's a like there, we get a 400% spike in dopamine.
That's almost to cocaine levels.
Now, added to that, right, you've got to figure out first order of business of the brain is survival.
So the brain is constantly scanning the environment for danger, letting occasional positive things through, but it's really looking to make you feel safe.
So when you show up on Twitter and not only has somebody posted, you know, like your hate scree and they've seconded the motion to, you know, so you get that 400% dopamine spike from that, somebody agrees with you.
You're safer in the world.
We're safer in numbers.
It's fundamental kind of evolutionary biology, right?
So suddenly it's a double hit.
And that's, you know, you're absolutely correct.
We're looking at addictive behavior and it's spiral no place good.
So that's where that's where I'm stuck with with Jonathan Haight's work is he's got a way out, but we don't have the dopamine hit.
We don't have the thing that triggers us into the flow in a positive way.
It's interesting, though, because one of the things we know about flow, there's 50, 60 years of work done at Harvard and other places that kind of backs this up, is that the more access you get to the state, right?
You talked about how it can help you solve complex problems.
The reason it happens is in the state, not only is information processing totally jacked up, but empathy expands.
We take in different information so we can, right?
Like one of the problems, for example, the environmental movement has is people who live in the cities, and there's 50 years of ecopsychology that backs this up, don't even see nature because we stop having to process it.
It's not critical.
We don't even look at it.
So like when you're trying to have an environmental discussion with somebody who's living in New York, it doesn't matter how much they care about the planet.
They actually can't take in the raw data, right?
We have filters, biases, and confirmation bias is the strongest among them.
We get past those biases.
We expand beyond them in these states.
So these states, over time, they widen empathy.
Nature Disappears From Cities00:06:45
And this is kind of well shown.
And they give us the ability, the reason we can solve critical challenges is you start to be able to see multiple perspectives from all the way around the problem.
Why?
Because your sense of self, which normally drives the bus, which is all those filters, is turned off.
So in the summer, my family goes up to the mountains where there isn't light for 25 miles easy.
There's like nobody.
And we stand, and you can see the Milky Way is 3D and color.
And when I was living in New York, I remember I first went out and I stood out there for hours, and it was the first time in years that I had thought, wow, we are small and insignificant.
Did you get, did time slow down for you?
Yes.
Yeah, that's the front.
That's awe is essentially the front end of a flow state, right?
It's the prefrontal cortex going, holy crap, there's a lot of stuff up there.
I can't process it because the conscious brain is very limited.
It can only hold on to so many things at once.
It dumps it over to the subconscious, which is what happens in flow, right?
And the subconscious takes over, which can process much more information per second.
And time seems to slow down.
It's actually a measure of information processing in the brain.
The more you're processing, the slower it's going.
That's what's happening.
Are you in a constant state of flow?
No.
I mean, you know, I'm not.
And I mean, my life, I've reduced, I do six things.
Five of them produce flow.
Like, I've really, really whittled it down.
I'm very good at this.
So you can get into it pretty much anytime you want?
Well, yes and no.
I mean, I will tell you that Stealing Fire, for example, this particular book I've written, it's my ninth, eighth book.
It was a very challenging book.
It's massive amounts of information, massive amounts of data across six or seven disciplines, tremendous amounts of research, very hard to assemble, wasn't in flow through the entire book.
I've never had an experience like that.
It was really a struggle.
And I'm 50 years old and one of the best of the world.
And that was my experience.
So you get better at it for sure, and you can use it to do great stuff and level up your career, but that's not, you know, if there's expertise out there, you know, a sure thing, I don't know about it yet.
Would you say this is a little bit like, did you see the movie Timeless with Bradley Cooper?
Limitless.
A friend of mine limitless.
She's the bane of my existence.
I yell at my friend Leslie wrote it, and every time I'm around her, I'm just like, you have no idea.
Every conversation, I want the limitless pill.
This does sound somewhat like that, though, right?
Well, it's the search for it in a natural way.
Right.
And by the way, there is no limitless pill.
We barely have the brain imaging technology at this point to find the neurochemicals deep in the brain.
Like, we're a ways from that pill.
Let's just say we'll get there using optogenetics or something else first, long before we get there in a pill.
That's disappointing news.
I'm not saying you won't be able to turn it on and off like a light switch.
You will.
It'll just be using different technology than probably pharmacological.
Pharmacological interventions are just fairly crude in how they interact with the system, and we can get much more precise now.
Stephen, you are fascinating, and I would love to talk to you, spend some time off air, and also just next time you're in town and have you here.
This is just fascinating.
And I'm sorry that I didn't get to the whole book.
And we'll have you on again when I have finished the whole book.
Thank you so much, Stephen.
Awesome.
My pleasure.
Appreciate it.
Name of the book is Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley and the Navy SEALs and Maverick Scientists are revolutionizing the way we live and the way we work.
Did that fit on the cover?
That's a long time.
I'm not using the flow anymore.
I could read it 500 times faster than that when I'm in the flow.
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This is the Glenn Beck program.
Mercury.
The Glenn Beck Program.
I don't want to get it.
Here I am.
Here we go.
Hello, America.
And welcome to the program.
We're just screwing off at this point.
That was an amazing conversation.
I don't know how you might have related to that, but I found that fascinating.
Well, everyone's, I mean, you know, you, of course, didn't understand a sports reference at all, but when everybody's been in the zone, right?
I mean, everyone's been in the zone at some point in their lives, whether it's in sports, whether it's at work, whether it's, I mean, doing so many different things.
And it's like, if you could actually just turn that on, I mean, it would completely change your life and probably change the world.
Because if you could actually figure out how to do that among a large population.
Turning On The Human Zone00:01:00
Yeah.
Now, how do you, and like he said, the dark side is you be careful turning it on.
You know, turn it on before a great candidate's speech.
Ooh.
You might want to turn that zone off because that candidate, if that candidate has ill will, it can play right into your zone.
I mean, it's that's just, I mean, a ridiculous idea, though.
Like a politician would have ill will.
And what are the odds?
Oh, that's crazy talk.
Could never happen.
No.
Uh-uh.
Yeah, it's really interesting.
I mean, it's and it's funny because that's really what politicians do.
And, you know, with the red, white, and blue, and the balloons, and the band, and all of the excitement, they're trying to put you into that heightened position to, you know, it's old-fashioned propaganda, if you will.