Flow Radio

High-performing teams are said to have chemistry. What's happening is synchrony—measurable patterns in brains, bodies, and behavior.

In this episode, Steven Kotler speaks with Dr. Michael Mannino and Erwin Valencia about team synchrony—the biological alignment that underpins trust, psychological safety, and team flow. They explore why teams routinely overestimate their effectiveness, how synchrony predicts performance under pressure, and why remote work makes these signals harder to sense but more critical to measure.

The conversation goes beyond theory, examining new tools that reveal the gap between perception and reality and help teams close it through subtle behavior-level shifts—without surveillance, micromanagement, or killing flow.

At scale, cooperation is a serious competitive advantage.

This episode shows how to build it deliberately.

Guest Bios:
Michael Mannino, PhD
Dr. Michael Mannino is a neuroscientist, co-CEO of Syneurgy, and Chief Science Officer at Flow Research Collective. He works at the intersection of applied neuroscience, human performance science, and AI. Michael holds a PhD in neuroscience, has published research on cognition, consciousness, flow, and intuition, and brings a systems-level perspective shaped by work across academia, technology, and research institutions including NASA.

Erwin Valencia
Erwin Valencia is a behavior designer, executive coach, and co-CEO of Syneurgy. He integrates behavior design, applied neuroscience, flow science, and embodied learning to help teams improve trust, coordination, and performance. Erwin is one of only five hundred Executive and Organizational Coaches worldwide certified by Columbia University and an alum of Stanford University’s Behavior Design Lab.

In This Episode:
00:02 From Wall Street to Applied Neuroscience
02:39 The Accidental Amazon Security Guard
05:42 What Is Team Synchrony?
10:20 The Remote Work Crisis
14:30 The 75% Delusion
21:04 19% Performance Boost in Six Weeks
30:26 The Future Is Already Here
36:11 What Kills Team Synchrony
45:03 Small Changes, Big Results
51:04 The One Thing Leaders Can Do Tomorrow

Episode Resources:
In their new book, We Are as Gods, Steven Kotler and Peter Diamandis explore a simple but urgent question: What cognitive skills do we need to survive—and thrive—in an age of abundance?

The book is a practical guide to making better decisions, navigating uncertainty, and scaling opportunity in a world moving faster than human intuition evolved to manage.

Pre-ordering the book includes an invitation to an exclusive no-holds barred AMA with Steven and Peter.

→ Pre-order your copy here.

Syneurgy is an AI-powered platform that reveals how teams communicate, align, and perform—turning hidden dynamics into actionable insight. By illuminating patterns of collaboration and interpersonal synchrony, Syneurgy helps teams build deeper connection, stronger alignment, and sustained high performance.

→ Explore Syneurgy here.

Flow Radio Is Presented By Steven Kotler’s Flow Research Collective

Flow Research Collective is a leading neuroscience research company. ‍

Follow Steven Koter:
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Website: ⁠https://www.stevenkotler.com/
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Flow Research Collective was founded by Steven Kotler, one of the world’s leading experts on human peak performance. He is an award-winning journalist and author with over ten bestselling books.

Why do the smartest people get stuck the fastest?
Recorded live in New York at the closing panel of our Alliance mastermind, this conversation brings together three of the sharpest minds in human performance—Steven Kotler, Dr. Sarah Sarkis, and Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman—to dissect the moment when learning quietly becomes procrastination.
They break down why high performers regress to old habits, how emotional load hijacks working memory, and why urgency feels like motivation but burns dirty on the backend. The result is a rare, inside-the-room masterclass on flow, intuition, and the subtle ways brilliant minds delay the work that matters most.
Takeaways:
Why learning often replaces doing—and how to break the cycle
The neuroscience behind procrastination, urgency, and energy management
How intuition, emotion, and identity shape performance
Practical tools to stay consistent, start sooner, and protect momentum
A rare, unscripted conversation straight from the Alliance—now yours.

Guest Bios:
Dr. Sarah Sarkis is a licensed clinical psychologist and certified executive leadership coach. After 20+ years running her own practice, her focus shifted to working with CEOs, athletes, and executives pursuing moonshot goals in the psychological game of greatness. She provides coaching, keynote speeches, and leads multi-day training workshops. Dr. Sarkis has been featured in The New York Times, Women's Health, Huffington Post, and CNBC. Her approach is science-backed and bullshit-free.Explore Dr. Sarah Sarkis’s work: https://drsarahsarkis.com/

Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman is a cognitive scientist, professor, and best-selling author known for redefining how we understand intelligence, creativity, and human potential. One of the most cited psychologists in the world, he teaches at Columbia University, where he directs the Center for Human Potential, and hosts The Psychology Podcast, with over 30 million downloads.
His research has appeared in The Atlantic, Scientific American, Psychology Today, and Harvard Business Review. He's authored 11 books, including Rise Above, which explores how limiting beliefs hold us back.
He holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon, Cambridge (as a Gates Scholar), and Yale, where he completed his PhD in cognitive psychology.
Explore Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman’s work: https://scottbarrykaufman.com/

In This Episode:
04:12 The Smallest Viable Dose: The Secret to Consistency
09:20 The Hedonistic Hack: How Rewards Drive Momentum
12:45 Stop Before You Crash: The Flow-Saving Strategy You're Not Using
17:18 Why We Freestyle Our Lives—And How to Break the Pattern
22:04 Overcommitment Is Killing Your Flow
28:36 Emotional Hijacking: How to Reclaim Your Working Memory
34:55 When Learning Becomes Procrastination
41:28 Intuition, the Unconscious, and the Brain's Pathfinding System
48:30 When Your Best Qualities Become Your Worst
51:45 The Flow Productivity Trap: Why Success Makes You Overcommit

Episode Resources:
Over 300,000 readers get Steven’s weekly newsletter, translating neuroscience research—like how to build high-speed creative teams—into practical strategies for flow, focus, and performance.
→ Subscribe here

The Alliance is a high-flow think tank disguised as a mastermind—designed specifically for creative leaders, visionary entrepreneurs, and thought leaders.
→ Head here to apply.

Follow Steven Koter:
YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@TheStevenKotler
Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/stevenkotler/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenkotler/
Spotify: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/6RQY0d5rdlEiinHEtfWy6A⁠
Website: ⁠https://www.stevenkotler.com/
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When I think about the fastest, most creative teams I’ve ever seen, they all share the same blueprint: trust creates safety, safety fuels risk, risk sparks creativity, and flow binds it all together.
That’s why I brought two of my favorite creative leaders into this conversation—Ivy Ross, VP of Design at Google, who has reshaped the look and feel of fifty-plus products and won hundreds of awards, and Jody Levy, serial entrepreneur and former CEO of Summit, the legendary community of creators and change agents.
What I love about this episode is that Ivy and Jody don’t deal in abstractions. They talk about how they actually build cultures where people move faster, see further, and flow together.

Here’s what you’ll learn in this episode:
Kill fight-or-flight before it kills creativity. Most companies live in survival mode. Ivy and Jody show how trust and psychological safety pull people back into the “green zone,” where creativity thrives.

Rehearse the future until it feels inevitable. Strategy isn’t just a plan—it’s a story rehearsed so vividly that people can’t help but believe and move toward it.

Intuition is compressed expertise. Our best calls don’t come from spreadsheets. They come from years of pattern recognition surfacing as a hunch you can trust.

—Steven

P.S. Over 300,000 readers get my weekly newsletter translating neuroscience research—llike how to build high-speed creative teams—into practical strategies for flow, focus, and performance.Join them here: https://www.stevenkotler.com/yt

Guest Bios:

Ivy Ross is the Vice President of Design for the Hardware organization at Google. Over the past six years, she and her team have launched 50+ products, winning over 240  global design awards. This collection of hardware established a new Google design aesthetic that is tactile, colorful, and bold. 
A winner of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, Ivy’s innovative metal work in jewelry is in the permanent collections of 12 international museums.  
Ivy has held executive positions ranging from head of product design and development to CMO and presidencies of several companies, including Calvin Klein, Swatch, Coach,  Mattel, Bausch & Lomb, and Gap. 
Ninth on Fast Company’s list of the 100 Most Creative People in Business 2019, Ivy  believes the intersection of arts and science is where the most engaging and creative  ideas are found.  

Most recently, Ivy co-authored with Susan Magsamen Your Brain on Art: How the Arts  Transform Us. Jody Levy is an artist, a systems thinker, and a serial entrepreneur who’s built everything from WTRMLN WTR, a category-defining beverage brand, to NeuroPraxis, a platform bridging the gap left by one-size-fits-all approaches to brain and spinal cord injury rehab. She also leads large-scale recovery operations and is the former CEO of Summit—the legendary community of creators, builders, and change agents. Jody’s work lives at the intersection of wellness, innovation, and impact.

She has a rare ability to turn bold ideas into real-world systems for healing, creativity, and human optimization. 
In This Episode:
00:00  Unlocking the Blueprint for Team Flow
04:30  The Unexpected Partnership That Sparked Big Ideas
16:55  Reinvention Strategies from the Trenches
19:21  Why Trust Is the Ultimate Speed Hack
21:27  Rituals That Turn Safety Into Creativity
26:10  Rehearsing the Future to Accelerate the Present
30:59  What Navy SEALs Can Teach Us About Flow
41:14  The Hidden Costs (and Payoffs) of Collaboration
1:00:21  Training Intuition as a Leadership Superpower
1:10:13 How Great Leaders Sustain Creative Energy

Follow Steven Koter:
YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@TheStevenKotler
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenkotler/
Spotify: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/6RQY0d5rdlEiinHEtfWy6A⁠
Website: ⁠https://www.stevenkotler.com/
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Flow Radio Is Presented By Steven Kotler’s Flow Research Collective

Karl Friston is one of the most influential neuroscientists alive. He pioneered the methods that underpin modern brain imaging and developed the Free Energy Principle—considered by many neuroscientists to be the closest thing we have to a general theory of intelligence.

In this conversation with Dr. Michael Mannino and me, Friston explains why your brain doesn’t just record reality—it invents it. Perception is best understood as a “controlled hallucination”: the brain generates models of the world, then tests them against incoming data.

We dig into what this means for consciousness, resilience, and performance.
Why intuition works as your brain’s shortcut for reducing uncertainty

How flow states and psychedelics both relax rigid brain assumptions—unlocking clarity and creativity

Why mental health challenges like depression, PTSD, and addiction often stem from overly rigid neural networks.
How attention functions as a lever for healing, flexibility, and peak performance

Friston shows how predictive coding and metastability express ancient evolutionary mechanisms for creativity, resilience, and recovery—and how new science helps us apply these processes to amplify health and performance over time.

If you want a deeper grasp of how your brain constructs reality—and how to shape that construction through flow—this is the episode to watch.

Guest Bio: Dr. Karl Friston is a theoretical neuroscientist and one of the most influential figures in modern brain science. He invented statistical parametric mapping, voxel-based morphometry, and dynamic causal modeling—methods that have become foundational to brain imaging. He also developed the Free Energy Principle, a unifying framework for action and perception that’s been called the closest thing we have to a general theory of intelligence.
Across his career, Karl has earned nearly every major accolade in neuroscience, from the Minerva Golden Brain Award to the Glass Brain Award for lifetime achievement in human brain mapping. He’s a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Biology, the Academia Europaea, and EMBO.
And he’s also a collaborator with us here at the Flow Research Collective. Together we’ve published two recent papers—just last week in Nature: Communications Biology on Pathfinding: a neurodynamical account of intuition, and earlier in Neuroscience of Consciousness on Flow and intuition: a systems neuroscience comparison.

In This Episode:
05:38 Birth of the Free Energy Principle
09:09 Theoretical vs. Computational Neuroscience
11:06 What the Free Energy Principle Actually Means
17:42 Intuition as Inference
24:15 Flow, Uncertainty, and Prediction
29:39 Flow, Psychedelics & PTSD
38:12 Cognitive Bias & Relaxing Priors
49:55 Flow as Neuroprotective
1:03:20  Metastability: The Brain’s Flexibility Principle 
1:12:36  From Theory to Practice 

Episode Resources:
Join 300,000+ members on our weekly newsletter for more neuroscience-based tools delivered straight to your inbox: → ⁠⁠Subscribe here⁠⁠

Check out a few of the papers featured in this episode below:
Pathfinding: A Neurodynamical Account of Intuition: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-025-08612-9
Flow and intuition: a systems neuroscience comparison: https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2025/1/niae040/7942876

Flow Radio Is Presented By Steven Kotler’s Flow Research CollectiveFlow Research Collective was founded by Steven Kotler, one of the world’s leading experts on human peak performance. He is an award-winning journalist and author with over ten bestselling books.
Flow Research Collective is a leading neuroscience research company. ‍

Follow Steven Koter:
YouTube:⁠ ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@TheStevenKotler⁠
Instagram: ⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/stevenkotler/⁠
LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenkotler/⁠
Spotify: ⁠⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/6RQY0d5rdlEiinHEtfWy6A⁠⁠
Website: ⁠⁠https://www.stevenkotler.com/⁠
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AI is moving faster than most of us can comprehend. But what if our edge isn’t in outthinking machines—but in outflowing them?

In this episode, Steven Kotler sits down with two of the sharpest minds shaping our technological future: Peter Diamandis, founder of the XPRIZE and a pioneer of exponential thinking, and Mo Gawdat, former Chief Business Officer at Google X and bestselling author of Scary Smart. Together, they unpack how artificial intelligence is changing everything—from productivity and purpose to risk, resilience, and what it means to stay human at speed.

If you're feeling overwhelmed by the pace of change, this episode offers tools rooted in neuroscience, performance psychology, and hard-earned experience at the bleeding edge of innovation.

You'll Learn:
Why intuition, context, and creativity are still uniquely human superpowers.

How to use flow states to outperform exponential tech (instead of being crushed by it).

Why training risk tolerance and recovery are essential survival skills in a synthetic world.

How AI mirrors our attention patterns—and what that means for your daily habits.
The difference between linear and vertical evolution—and why most people are stuck in the wrong model.

Guest Bios:

Peter Diamandis: Recently named one of Fortune’s “World’s 50 Greatest Leaders,” Peter Diamandis is the Founder and Executive Chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, which has launched over $500 million in incentive prize competitions. He also founded Singularity University and has started more than 25 companies in healthtech, space, venture capital, and education.
Diamandis is Co-founder and Vice-Chairman of Celularity and Vaxxinity, and Chairman of Fountain Life—a platform for predictive, preventative, and data-driven health. He also co-founded BOLD Capital Partners, a $500 million fund investing in exponential technologies and longevity companies.
A four-time New York Times bestselling author, his books include Abundance, BOLD, The Future is Faster Than You Think, LIFE FORCE (with Tony Robbins), and LONGEVITY: Your Practical Playbook.

Mo Gawdat: Mo Gawdat is the former Chief Business Officer of Google [X]; host of the popular podcast, Slo Mo: A Podcast with Mo Gawdat; author of the international bestselling books Solve for Happy; Scary Smart; That Little Voice in Your Head; and Unstressable; founder of One Billion Happy; and Chief AI Officer of Flight Story.
After a 30 year career in tech and serving as Chief Business Officer at Google [X], Google's 'moonshot factory' of innovation, Mo has made happiness his primary topic of research, diving deeply into literature and conversing on the topic with some of the wisest people in the world. In recent years, he has focused on the dangerous implications of rapid AI development.

In This Episode:
02:15 The False Promise of AI Productivity
06:41 Why Flow Beats the Busy Trap
11:02 Synthetic Intelligence, Human Reflection
17:48 You Can’t Outthink AI—But You Can Outflow It
23:05 Risk Tolerance: The Real Cognitive Upgrade
29:17 The Burnout Feedback Loop
36:44 Training Your Brain for Warp Speed
42:10  How AI Mirrors Your Attention Patterns 
48:19 Peak Performance as an Existential Choice
55:31The Human Advantage: Intuition, Context, Creativity

Flow Radio Is Presented By Steven Kotler’s Flow Research Collective.

Follow Steven Kotler:
YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@TheStevenKotler
Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/stevenkotler/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenkotler/
Spotify: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/6RQY0d5rdlEiinHEtfWy6A⁠
Website: ⁠https://www.stevenkotler.com/
‍
Flow Research Collective was founded by Steven Kotler, one of the world’s leading experts on human peak performance. He is an award-winning journalist and author with over ten bestselling books.

Join 300,000+ members on our weekly newsletter for more neuroscience-based tools delivered straight to your inbox: → Subscribe here