Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Steven Kotler & Jamie Wheal 1825<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some revolutions begin with a gunshot, others with a party. This one kicked off on a Friday night in downtown Athens, in 415 BCE. Alcibiades, a prominent Greek general and politician, had invited a small circle of friends to his villa for what was to become one of the more infamous bacchanals in history. Hooded in the stolen robes of a high priest, Alcibiades swept down his marble staircase, recited a forbidden incantation, and produced an ornate decanter. Carefully, he poured a single shot of a dark liquid into each guest\u2019s glass. A few more words, an exuberant cheer, and everyone drained their cups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Accidental Prometheans<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/u><\/strong>\u201cWe founded the Flow Genome Project in an attempt to solve this problem. Our goal was to take a multidisciplinary approach to mapping the neurobiology of flow, and then open-source the results. But to do this, we had to establish a common language around these states. So Steven wrote The Rise of Superman<\/em>, a book about the neuroscience of peak performance and action sports.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On too many occasions to count, people would pull us aside to tell us about their clandestine experiments with \u201cecstatic technologies.\u201d We met military officers going on timemonthlong meditation retreats, Wall Street traders zapping their brains with electrodes, trial lawyers stacking off-prescription pharmaceuticals, famous tech founders visiting transformational festivals, and teams of engineers microdosing with psychedelics. In other words, everywhere we went, someone was trying to steal the kykeon<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Switch<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/u><\/strong>The Greeks had a word for this merger that Davis quite liked – ecstasis<\/em> – the act of \u201cstepping beyond oneself.\u201d Davis had his own word as well. He called it \u201cthe switch,\u201d the moment they stopped being separate men with lives and wives and things that matter. The moment they became, well, there\u2019s no easy way to explain it – but something happened out there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Plato described ecstasis as an altered state where our normal waking consciousness vanishes completely, replaced by an intense euphoria and a powerful connection to a greater intelligence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The High Cost of Ninja Assassins<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n It costs $25,000 to turn an average Joe into a combat-ready U.S. Marine. SEALs, meanwhile, cost a lot more. Estimates for eight weeks of Navy basic training, six months of underwater demolition training, six months of advanced skills training, and eighteen months of predeployment platoon training – that is, what it takes to get a SEAL ready for combat – total out to roughly $500,000 per head. Which is to say, the Navy SEALs are among the most expensive collection of warfighters ever assembled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And that\u2019s just the cost of training garden-variety ninja assassins. Making it to the elite DEVGRU unit requires first rotating through several other SEAL teams (there are nine in total). As it costs about $1 million a year to keep a frogman in the field, and these rotations take a couple of years to complete, add roughly another $2.5 million to the tally. Finally, there are additional months of hostage rescue training, which is DEVGRU\u2019s specialty, at somewhere north of $250,000 per. All in, those couple dozen men under Rich David\u2019s command, the SEAL unit charged with capturing, not killing, Al-Wazu, were an exceptionally well-oiled $85 million machine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second [rule to moving as fast as possible] is trickier: And like the SEALs flipping the switch, the Googler\u2019s \u201ccommunal vocational ecstasy\u201d relies on changes in brain function. \u201cAttending festivals like Burning Man,\u201d explains Oxford professor of neuropsychology Molly Crockett, \u201cpracticing meditation, being in flow, or taking psychedelic drugs rely on shared neural substrates. What many of these routes have in common is activation of the serotonin system.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Mind Gym<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n When that meeting was over, they walked us through their newest facility, the Mind Gym, which was their best guess at how to train for ecstasis and not just screen for it. Sure, it cost millions to build, but if it could help them flip that switch reliably – if it could help more good men learn this invisible skill – it would be worth much more than that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By using the tanks to eliminate all distraction, entrain specific brainwaves, and regulate heart rate frequency, the SEALs are able to cut the time it takes to learn a foreign language from six months to six weeks. For a specialized unit deployed across five continents, shutting off the self to accelerate learning has become a strategic imperative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Right after our presentation, we pedaled a couple of the ubiquitous and colorful Google bikes to the other side of campus to attend the opening of their new multimillion-dollar mindfulness center.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s going well,\u201d explained Adam Leonard, one of the leaders of \u201cG Pause\u201d (their name for the mindfulness training program).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Ambassador of Ecstasis<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The Atlantic<\/em> ran a long profile, anointing [Jason Silva] \u201cthe Timothy Leary of the Viral Video Age.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Selflessness<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n When you think about the billion-dollar industries that underpin the Altered States Economy, isn\u2019t this what they\u2019re built for? To shut off the self. To give us a few moments of relief from the voice in our heads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, when we do experience a non-ordinary state that gives us access to something more, we feel it first as something less<\/em> – and that something missing is us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Timelessness<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n A quick search on Google yields over 11.5 billion hits for the word \u201ctime.\u201d<\/em> In comparison, more obvious topics of interest like sex and money rank a paltry 2.75 billion and 2 billion, respectively. Time, and how to make the most of it, appears to be about five times more important to us than making love or money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And there\u2019s good reason for this obsession. According to a 2015 Gallup survey, 48 percent of working adults feel rushed for time, and 52 percent report significant stress as a result.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wicked Solutions to Wicked Problems<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n As of late 2016, with the initial phases of the research completed, the study came to two overarching conclusions. First, creativity is essential for solving complex problems – the kinds we often face in a fast-paced world. Second, we have very little success training people to be more creative. And there\u2019s a pretty simple explanation for this failure: we\u2019re trying to train a skill, but what we really need to be training is a state of mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Pale of the Body<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In the late 1990s, University of Edinburgh philosopher Andy Clark was researching cyborgs when he realized we were closer to that man-machine merger than anyone wanted to admit. If you have a pacemaker, cochlear implant, or even a pair of eyeglasses, you\u2019re using technology to upgrade biology. What Clark found strange was that no one seemed to notice these developments. Type \u201ccyborg\u201d into a search bar and the first thing that pops up is \u201ca fictional or hypothetical person whose physical abilities are extended beyond normal human limitations by mechanical elements.\u201d But there\u2019s nothing fictional about eyeglasses or smartphones (or, for that matter, artificial hearts and bionic limbs). So why, Clark wanted to know, haven\u2019t we acknowledged that we\u2019re already becoming cyborgs?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Pale of the State<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n After meeting that woman, he\u2019d done a back-of-the-envelope calculation comparing the injuries and deaths caused by horseback riding – which he dubbed \u201cequasy\u201d – to those produced by MDMA. But even when he discounted the downstream costs of drug use such as addiction, violent behavior, and traffic accidents, his numbers showed the dangers of equasy <\/em>and ecstasy<\/em> several orders of magnitude apart. For every 60 million tablets of MDMA consumed, Nutt found 10,000 adverse events, or one for every 6,000 pills popped. He then compared that number to the 1-in-350 tally for horseback riding and published the results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Headlines across the country read: \u201cBritish policy doctor claims ecstasy is safer than riding a horse.\u201d Tabloids had a field day. …Yes, for Nutt, what he was saying wasn\u2019t incendiary, it was simply the facts. \u201cEcstasy is a harmful drug,\u201d he explained in his 2012 bestseller, Drugs–Without the Hot Air<\/em>. \u201cBut how harmful? As harmful as drinking five pints of beer? As harmful as riding a motorbike? David Spiegelhalter, a professor of risk communications [at Cambridge University], has calculated that taking an ecstasy pill is as dangerous as riding a motorbike for about six miles or a [pedal] bike for twenty miles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In very simple terms, the states of consciousness we prefer are those that reinforce established cultural values. We enshrine these states socially, economically, and legally. That is, we have state-sanctioned states of consciousness<\/em>. Altered states that subvert these values are persecuted, while the people who enjoy them are marginalized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No one dances sober, unless he is insane. –Cicero<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mad Men<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Nowhere did this urge for raw self-expression show up more visibly than at Esalen, the Big Sur, California-based institute that the New York Times<\/em> once called the \u201cHarvard of the Human Potential movement.\u201d So central was Esalen to the evolving identity of that generation that the popular TV show Mad Men<\/em> ended with its main character Don Draper experiencing an epiphany on its oceanside front lawn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So Erhard repackaged an assortment of Esalen-inspired practices into a business-friendly format, creating EST, short for the Erhard Seminars Training. The seminar deliberately reproduced Price\u2019s accidental transformation, engineering a \u201cbreakdown-to-breakthrough\u201d experience via a series of marathon, fourteen-hour days, without food or breaks, and with lots of yelling and profanity – the fabled \u201cEST encounter.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Margin note: Tony?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Prior to Erhard, most spiritual seekers skewed anti-establishment and antimaterialist – which is fine if you\u2019re living in a monastery or off a trust fund, but problematic if you need to make a living. And even more problematic if you\u2019re trying to sell seminars. In the same way that Henry Ford realized his workers had to be able to afford one of his Model T\u2019s for his company to thrive, Erhard understood that seekers needed to be financially successful enough to afford his next workshop. So he hitched the human potential movement to the wagon of the Protestant work ethic. Napoleon Hill\u2019s Think and Grow Rich<\/em> replaced Bhagavad Gita<\/em> as seminal text. Mandalas were out. Vision boards were in. And the American spiritual marketplace has never been the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you\u2019ve ever hired a personal or executive coach (professions that didn\u2019t exist before the late 1970\u2019s), heard someone say they \u201cjust needed space,\u201d been encouraged to \u201ctake a stand\u201d or \u201cmake a difference,\u201d or engaged in a journey of \u201ctransformation\u201d around your \u201cpersonal story\u201d – you\u2019ve come across terms coined or popularized by Erhard and his trainings. And with this expansion of vocabulary and emphasis on material success, what had been formerly \u201cother,\u201d that is, couched in the esoteric language of Asian religions and incompatible with the American dream, became us – part of our everyday vernacular, and accessible to all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While EST itself made an impact, with almost one million people going through those original seminars, Landmark, the latest incarnation of Erhard\u2019s teachings, pboasts corporate clients including Microsoft, NASA, Reebok, and Lululemon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Taking the Kink Out of Kinky<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Justin Dawson, the CEO of OneTaste<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet, in 2015, OneTaste notched a placement on the Inc. 5000 – an annual ranking of high-growth companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ane momentary erotic transcendence can bring lasting change. A 2013 Dutch study found that kinky sex practitioners \u201cwere less neurotic, more extraverted, more open to new experiences, more conscientious, less rejection sensitive, and had higher subjective well-being.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Good for What Ails You<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Since then, the program has been formalized, and more than a thousand soldiers have taken part. Hundreds of veterans and surfers have volunteered their time, including eleven-time world champion Kelly Slater. And their investment paid off. In a 2014 paper published in the Journal of Occupational Therapy<\/em>, Rogers reported that after as little as five weeks in the waves, soldiers had a \u201cclinically meaningful improvement in PTSD symptom severity and in depressive symptoms.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n And surfing isn\u2019t the only non-pharmacological intervention to show promise. A recent study done by the military found that 84 percent of PTSD subjects who meditated for a month could reduce or even stop taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). In contrast, the control group – who didn\u2019t meditate and stayed on antidepressants – experienced a 20 percent worsening<\/em> of PTSD symptoms during that same period.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I Can\u2019t Feel My Face<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In study after study, when seriously depressed patients received Botox injections in their frown lines, they got significant and sometimes instantaneous relief from depression. But when Botoxed subjets were asked to empathize with other people, to feel their joy or share their sorrow, they simply couldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And now we know why. Our facial expressions are hardwired into our emotions: we can\u2019t have one without the other. Botox lessens depression because it prevents us from making sad faces. But it also dampens our connection to those around us because we feel empathy by mimicking each other\u2019s facial expressions. With Botox, mimicry becomes impossible, so we feel almost nothing at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Precognition Is Here (But You Knew That Already)<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2015, we were invited to Southern California to host an event for Nike\u2019s innovation group. Every year, to help spark new insights in their own design work, this group goes on creative field trips to learn more about the cutting edges of other fields.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And the armed forces aren\u2019t the only ones interested in finding better ways to predict what\u2019s around the bend. In a related study run in Barcelona, Spain, researchers at the ESADE Business School (twice ranked the top business school in the world by the Wall Street Journal<\/em>) wanted to know if they could identify \u201cemergent leadership\u201d long before their students graduated. So Berka and her team took thirty-five MBA students, hooked them up to EEG and HRV monitors, and gave them a case study to solve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once again, by examining the neurophysiological profile of these students, Berka was able to identify \u201cemergent leaders\u201d – those individuals who would have an outsize positive impact on the team and its decision making – in as little as thirty minutes. While there was no correlation between emergent leadership and how much students talked or even what they said, there was a direct relationship between their neurophysiological responses and those of their classmates. Transformational leaders not only regulated their own nervous systems better than most; they also regulated other people\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the same way that multiple clocks on a wall end up synchronizing to the one with the biggest pendulum, emergent leaders can entrain their entire teams and create a powerful group flow experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n OS to UI<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Choices like these are available not just in our personal lives, but in our professional lives, too. Instead of nervously waiting for a job interview and obsessing about all the things that could go wrong, we can take a page out of Amy Cuddy\u2019s book and stand up, breathe deeply, and power-post our way to lower cortisol, higher testosterone, and more confidence. Instead of using trendy leadership books and a new mission statement to fire up employees, we can follow ESADE\u2019s lead and use neurofeedback to heighten group coherence and prompt more productive strategy sessions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Johnny Appleseed of Psychedelics<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Published in 1991, PiHKAL<\/em> was divided into two parts. The second book, TiHKAL<\/em>, came out in 1998.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Things That Go Boom in the Night<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n To track how much music people listened to at home (on average, four and a half hours a day) and what happened while they listened, they rigged thirty homes with Sonos speakers, Apple watches, Nest cams, and iBeacons. When tunes were playing, the distance between housemates decreased by 12 percent, while the chances of cooking together increased by 33 percent, laughing together by 15 percent, inviting other people over by 85 percent, saying \u201cI love you\u201d by 18 percent, and, most tellingly, having sex by 37 percent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Digital Shaman<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n His most recent project, appropriately named MicroDoseVR<\/em>, is an immersive VR game offering an atom\u2019s-eye tour through many of Shulgin\u2019s alphabetamine compounds. Zooming through that digital world, surrounded by deep trance music and the actual \u201cmolecules of desire,\u201d the simulation is more than enough to knock you out of regular awareness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Flow Dojo<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n As powerful as these advancements are independently, when blended together, their impact is amplified considerably. It\u2019s why, over the past several years, we\u2019ve been collaborating with some of the top experience designers, biohackers, and performance specialists to help develop the Flow Dojo – a training and research center explicitly designed to merge these technologies in one place. Equal parts Cirque du Soleil, X Games, and hands-on science museum, it\u2019s a learning lab dedicated to mapping the core building blocks of optimum performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the fall of 2015, we had the opportunity to bring a prototype of the Dojo to Google\u2019s Silicon Valley headquarters and engage in a joint-learning project. For six weeks, a handpicked team of engineers, developers, and managers committed to a flow training program, and then capped that off with two weeks in a beta version of the training center.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The premise was simple: if you train your body and brain, and manage your energy and attention, you\u2019ll be able to get into flow more frequently and perform better at work and at home. Each day, participants engaged in a range of activities, from sleep tracking, to diet and hydration, to functional movement (designed to undo the imbalances of deskbound lives), to brain entraining audio and respiration exercises. With just those basic practices, subjects reported a 35 to 80 percent increase in incidents of flow during their workdays. The bigger surprise for the engineers was that they also experienced more flow at home, where family dynamics were frequently less rational and predictable than the algorithms they played with at work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once that foundation was in place, we got to the interesting part – the Dojo itself. In our research for The Rise of Superman<\/em>, we had interviewed more than two hundred professional and elite adventure athletes to figure out their secret to getting into flow so readily. Time after time, they told us it came down to two things: the right triggers and gravity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And that\u2019s where the team began the design of the Flow Dojo. Was it possible to use technology to simulate those conditions in a safer and more accessible way? Could we take a page out of Alan Menti\u2019s iFly book and re-create the embodiment, and consequences that the world\u2019s best flow hackers relied on, to give regular folks a taste of the state? By combining Tony Andrew\u2019s sound design, Android Jones\u2019 digital imagery and Mikey Siegel\u2019s brain tech, could we construct a novel and interactive environment? If so, we could guide users into peak states, and researchers could capture invaluable data along the way. This would provide a unique opportunity to study the impact of wearables, experience design, and user biometrics, all in the same place. We could literally start reverse-engineering the genome of peak performance states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, we brought together a team of engineers to develop kinetic training gear that could deliver those experiences – think extreme playground equipment built for grown-ups. Giant looping swings that send you upside down and twenty feed off the ground, and pull more than three g\u2019s when you push through the arc\u2019s bottom. Momentum-powered gyroscopes and surf swings, complete with Doppler sound effects and LED cues, that let you flip, spin, and twist without risking a hospital visit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The designers also integrated sensors and audio-visual feedback into the gear, so users get real-time data on physics (like g-force, RPM, and amplitude) and personalized biometrics (like EEG, HRV, and respiration). Taking that kind of data off smart watches and laptops – and away from the conscious mental processing of the prefrontal cortex – gets users out of themselves and into the zone with less distraction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even so, when Sergey Brin, one of Google\u2019s cofounders, stepped up to the looping swing, we were unsure how it was going to go. Brin is an action sports enthusiast, pursuing everything from BASE jumping to kitesurfing. At the TED conference a few years ago, he also topped the leaderboard on an EEG mindfulness training demo. So, while he already had some experience in both the physical and mental elements of this training, he had never put the two together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n First, we hooked him up to a heart rate variability monitor to establish a cardiac baseline. Then he strapped into the kiteboard bindings and began pumping the looping swing higher and higher. Most people encounter two limits on this device. The first is when they reach the highest point they ever attained on a playground swing, typically about 50 degrees. If they can push past that last known safe zone, the next limit is actually when they\u2019re straight upside down and needing to drive their weight forward (against all better judgment when you\u2019re twenty feet off the ground) to push the swing through a full revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Brin pumped past both of those limits, looping the swing (only about 5 percent of subjects manage that feat on their first attempt), and then proceeded to stall the swing at its apex, and loop it blind and backward<\/em>. When we compared his biofeedback data from his sessions to his baseline, he had lost coherence when he was initially exerting himself, but had regained an organized brain and heart rhythm once his body-knowledge figured out how to adapt and adjust. His only comment when he returned back to earth? \u201cI want one in my backyard.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Sandbox of the Future<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s Tony Andrews in purple paisley, bumping bass out of a Funktion-One art car. Mikey Siegel\u2019s around, too, demonstrating neurofeedback to the dusty and the curious. Android Jones has erected a giant dome to display his trance-inducing visionary art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When the Levee Breaks<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Over in Nevada, meanwhile, it was sunny skies and light winds and Burning Man was in full swing. Camp PlayaGon (a combination of \u201cplaya<\/em>\u201d and \u201cPentagon<\/em>\u201d) was bustling. A collection of high-ranking Pentagon officials, futurists, and hackers, PlayaGon had been charged with setting up and running the livestream broadcast and emergency Wi-Fi for the entire festival. But when news of Katrina reached them, they took a break from their duties to get a closer look.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOne of our guys took over a recon satellite<\/strong>,\u201d recounts Dr. Bruce Damer, a University of California biomedical engineer and NASA contractor. \u201cOur Pentagon wireless satellite phone rang, the general on the other side was saying \u2018what’s going on\u2019 and instructing our guy not to answer. We then had control of this thing and could watch Katrina come in.\u201d And never ones to miss an opportunity for a high-tech prank, the PlayaGon crew lit dozens of hydrazine flares (military-spec glow-sticks) around their camp and programmed the satellite to track the blaze from space, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A large man with long, graying hair and beard, Warner has a resume that reads \u201cformer U.S. Army drill instructor . . . PhD neuroscientist, technotopian idealist, dedicated Burner, dabbler in psychedelics, insatiable meddler and (weirdest of all) defense contractor.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Warner and a gang of MIT scientists, who called themselves the Synergy Strike Force, had posted up in Jalalabad to spread \u201cthe gospel of open information.\u201d Based on the Burning Man principle of radical inclusion, Warner insisted that all Synergy Strike Force projects remain unclassified and that the information be shared with everyone. \u201cI\u2019m dismantling the Death Star,\u201d he told a war reported, \u201cto build Solar Ovens for Ewoks.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, Warner opened a \u201cBurner bar,\u201d where he traded free drinks for terabytes of information. It was more of a Tiki hut, really – covered in bamboo, a simple cooler with some Heineken and the odd bottle of liquor displayed, but also a sign that read \u201cWe share information, communication (and beer).\u201d Lots of people asked. The Pentagon relied on his data, but so did the United Nations, Afghan officials, aid workers, and journalists. In one of the most chaotic environments in the world, gifting, transparency, and radical inclusion saved lives and dollars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While Burners without Borders and Beer for Data mark two of the earliest examples of festival principles being exported into crisis zones, they\u2019re unlikely to be the last.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s for this reason that Rosie von Lila, a former head of community affairs for the Burning Man organization, has been invited to the Pentagon three times and the United Nations twice to discuss infrastructure and disaster planning. Disrupting the Brahmins<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe find the right mix of really interesting people and subject them to powerful state-changing experiences that accelerate social bonding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And getting innovators into their \u201cright minds\u201d is what Summit, MaiTai, and Branson have done so well. By realizing the non-ordinary states are more than just a recreational diversion and can, in fact, heighten trust, amplify cooperation, and accelerate breakthroughs, a new generation of entrepreneurs, philanthropists and activists is fundamentally disrupting business as usual.<\/p>\n\n\n\n High Times on Main Street<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In one twenty-four-hour beta test, more than thirty thousand people volunteered to contribute their personal data to Alzheimer\u2019s research, making it four times the size of the next-largest study overnight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Atomic Donkey<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/u><\/strong>In primates, Lilly had discovered that the pleasure system – what could be called the brain\u2019s basic ecstatic circuitry – correlated directly with the sexual arousal network. Male monkeys trained to use his device for self-stimulation would choose to orgasm non-stop for sixteen hours, followed by eight hours of deep sleep, after which they would get right back to it. Pleasure, Lilly had discovered, was an endlessly motivating and potentially all consuming pursuit (at least in males).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Long before Linus Torvalds gave away the source code to Linux, or Sasha Shulgin <\/strong>published his chemical cookbook, or Elon Musk shared all of Tesla\u2019s car and battery patents – long before there was even a term for it – Lilly took a stand for open-sourcing ecstasis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Spooks to Kooks<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n It turns out that more than a few of those Pentagon officials who came knocking on Lilly\u2019s door were funded by the CIA. They were part of MK-ULTRA, arguably the largest and most notorious brainwashing project in U.S. history. Some eighty institutions, including universities, colleges, hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies, took part. Their goal was to find chemicals that could control and confuse enemy combatants, civilian populations, and heads of state – including on Spy vs. Spy<\/em>plan to slip Fidel Castro an LSD-soaked cigar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWithin the CIA itself, [agents] were taking LSD regularly, tripping at the office, at Agency parties, measuring their mental equilibrium against those of their colleagues,\u201d Jay Stevens recounts in Storming Heaven.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n As background research for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo\u2019s Nest<\/em>, which was set in a mental institution, Kesey had been volunteering at a U.S. Veterans Administration hospital (which, unbeknownst to the young author and many of the administering doctors, was part of MK-ULTRA). To earn a little extra money, a friend of his had turned him onto the $75 per session experiments the docs were running there on \u201cpsychomimetic\u201d drugs – meaning chemicals like LSD that mimicked the mental breakdown of psychosis. The scientists \u201cdidn\u2019t have the guts to do it themselves,\u201d Kesey later told Stanford Alumni<\/em> magazine, \u201cso they hired students. When we came back out [of the sessions], they took one look at us and said, \u2018Whatever they do, don\u2019t let them go back in that room!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Over on Perry Lane, the bohemian cottage enclave where he lived, Kesey and his growing band of pranksters took things out of the lab and into the field. \u201cVolunteer Kesey gave himself over to science at the Menlo Park vets hospital,\u201d Tom Wolfe recounts in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test<\/em>, \u201cand somehow drugs were getting up and walking out of there and over to Perry Lane.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHalf the time,\u201d Wolfe continues, \u201cPerry Lane would be like some kind of college fraternity row with everybody out on a nice autumn Saturday afternoon on the grass\u2026 playing touch football\u2026 an hour later Kesey and his circle would be hooking down something that in the entire world only they and a few other avant-garde neuropharmacological researchers even knew about.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n What happened next became the well-documented subject of counterculture lore. Kesey moved the experiment into the hills above Palo Alto, Hunter S. Thompson, the Hells Angels, and Neal Cassady (from Kerouac\u2019s On the Road<\/em> fame) all showed up, as did a strange little band called the Grateful Dead, led by a chinless but oddly magnetic guitarist named Jerry Garcia. Armed with gallons of day-glo paint, strobe lights, and the prototypical art car, a tricked out 1939 International Harvester bus named \u201cFurther,\u201d Kesey and his Merry Pranksters birthed West Coast psychedelic culture. Control of the Master Switch had been wrestled away from the spooks, and neither Silicon Valley nor the wider world would ever be the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A couple of years later, the Pentagon commissioned the Trojan Warrior Project, an intensive six-month training in mind-body-spirit practice for Green Berets. The program included meditating with a Tibetan lama, neuro and biofeedback sessions in a cutting-edge computer latb, praying with a Benedictine monk, and training in aikido, a Japanses martial art dedicated to universal peace.It was a frontal assault on the neurophysiology of ecstasis (and the direct progenitor of the SEAL\u2019s Mind Gym).<\/p>\n\n\n\n And it\u2019s still churning today. Consider the government’s clandestine role at Burning Man. On the surface, the festival – a one week gathering on an utterly forgettable patch of U.S. Bureau of Land Management desert – is not what you\u2019d consider a \u201chigh-value target.\u201d But for the short few days of its existence, the even holds the dubious distinction of being one of the most surveilled cities in the country. Despite experiencing less violent crime than most midsize suburbs, it draws over a dozen separate state and federal agencies equipped with millions of dollars of high-tech spy gear, infrared goggles, tactical vehicles, and undercover agents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In heavily redacted documents recently released through the Freedom of Information Act, it turns out that the FBI has conducted a multiyear intelligence program at Burning Man. The official reason was to scout for domestic terrorists and track potential threats from Islamic extremists. More likely, the FBI was taking a page out of their old COINTELPRO playbook, the one used in the 1960\u2019s to infiltrate and destabilize the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, and the American Indian Movement. If that were the case, then one would expect increased surveillance of the event, heightened policing, insertion of agents provocateurs, and aggressive prosecution of nonviolent crimes. And while it\u2019s hard to tell if it\u2019s an anomaly or the beginning of a trend, in 2015, plainclothes and undercover agents spiked, and arrests at the festival were up 600 percent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It seems safe to say that the intelligence community knows something big is happening out in the desert, they just can\u2019t quite figure out what. That\u2019s because, other than the obvious external cues – the fiery explosions, wild costumes, and all-night dance parties – what\u2019s really going on is happening in people\u2019s minds. To the rank-and-file law enforcement monitoring, \u201cthe festival, it must seem like a rowdier Mardi Gras, or a Times Square New Year\u2019s with fewer drunks and more hugging.\u201d But not so for the top brass. In some instances as we saw when Camp PlayaGon commandeered a spy satellite, and the Supreme Commander of NATO attended the event, they\u2019re in on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And this repeated pattern of the \u201cspooks lying down with the kooks,\u201d from hippie float tanks at the SEALs\u2019 Mind Gym, to Kesey\u2019s misadventures at the V.A. hospital, to Lieutenant Colonel Channon hottubbing at Esalen, to the Pentagon at Burning Man, clearly highlights the back and forth contest for control of the Master Switch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Soma, Delicious Soma!<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n A global consortium of just about every major brand you can think of – from Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, and Procter & Gamble to creative agencies like J. Walter Thompson, Ogilvy & Mather, and Omnicom, to tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Twitter – the foundation wanted to learn about the use of flow in advertising. COuld this state of consciousness play a role in prompting buying behavior? Could the mechanics of ecstasis be used to drive market share?<\/p>\n\n\n\n To understand this possibility, it\u2019s helpful to understand a few of the developments that have led to today\u2019s marketplace. At the tail end of the twentieth century, we started moving from the selling of ideas, the so-called information economy, toward the selling of feelings, or what author Alvin Toffler called the \u201cexperience economy.\u201d This is why retail shops started to look like theme parks. Why, instead of stocking ammo on the shelves like Wal-Mart, the outdoor retailer Cabela\u2019s turns their stores into a hunter\u2019s paradise of big-game mounts, faux mountainsides, and giant aquariums. It\u2019s how Starbucks can charge four dollars for a fifty-cent cup of coffee: because they\u2019re providing that cozy \u201cthird place\u201d between work and home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But we were at the Advertising Research Foundation to discuss the next step: the move from an experience economy to what author Joe Pine calls the \u201ctransformation economy.\u201d In this marketplace, what we\u2019re being sold is who we might become – or as, Pine explains: \u201cIn the transformation economy, the customer IS the product!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the surface, the idea that we would favor products that could help us become who we want to be doesn\u2019t sound bad. Take the fitness industry. In the experience economy, one of the undisputed leaders is Equinox Gyms, which blends state-of-the-art equipment, boutique lobbies, and eucalyptus steam baths to create a luxury workout. You may or may not get as lean as those models in the black-and-white photo spread, but you\u2019ll certainly feel like a million bucks while you\u2019re there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the transformational economy, CrossFit charges almost as much but offers none of those perks. Instead, what you get is the promise that after three months of sweating in their stripped-down boxes (as CrossFitters call their workout spaces), you\u2019ll become a radically different person. You\u2019ll look different, for certain, but because of their emphasis on embracing challenge and pushing boundaries, you\u2019ll stand a chance of acting and thinking differently as well. That\u2019s a positive \u201ctransformation\u201d that many are willing to suffer and pay a premium for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet, it doesn\u2019t take much to bend this desire for personal change in more commercial directions. Consider a recent Jeep campaign, where they built mud bogs at county fairs. With thumping music and flashing lights amplifying the joyride, Jeep let fairgoers hop into one of their stationary rigs, floor the motors, spin the tires, and send dirt flying. The novelty of the experience; the rapid shift in sensations; the lights, music, and cheering crows, was all more than enough to trigger the brain\u2019s pleasure machinery and get red-blooded twenty-somethings fixating over no-money-down leasing options for weeks to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That Jeep campaign worked so well because it effectively created a state of peak arousal for its participants and then sold them on an imagined transformation of their lives (starting with the purchase of a 4×4). Under those amped-up conditions, salience – that is, the attention paid to incoming stimuli – increases. But, with the prefrontal cortex down-regulated, most impulse control mechanisms go offline too. For people who aren\u2019t used to this combination, the results can be expensive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The video game industry may have gone further down this path than anyone. \u201cGames are a multi-billion dollar industry that employ the best neuroscientists and behavior psychologists to make them as addicting as possible,\u201d Nicholas Kardaras, one of the country\u2019s top addiction specialists, recently explained to Vice. <\/em>\u201dThe developers strap beta-testing teens with galvanic skin responses, EKG, and blood pressure gauges. If the game doesn\u2019t spike their blood pressure to 180 over 140, they go back and tweak the game to make it have more of an adrenaline-rush effect. . . . Video games raise dopamine to the same degree that sex does, and almost as much as cocaine does. So this combo of adrenaline and dopamine are a potent one-two punch with regards to addiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ecstasy Wants to Be Free<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s there in the democratizing effects of Mikey Siegel\u2019s consciousness-hacking meet-ups, it\u2019s why OneTaste has built an Orgasmic Meditation app downloadable anywhere in the world, it\u2019s what fuels the volunteers of the Burning Man diaspora.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hedonic Calendaring<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n According to the National Institutes of Health, 74 percent of American men and 33 percent of children are now overweight or obese.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Step One: <\/strong>List everything you love to do (or that you\u2019d like to do) that gets you out of your head. Action sports, yoga, live music, sex, brain stimulation, meditation, personal growth workshops, adventure travel, etc. This may seem simple, but if you consider the breadth of the Altered States Economy and the fact that we tend to compartmentalize the many different ways we modulate consciousness, putting it all down in one place can lend some fresh perspective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An Afterthought<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/u><\/strong>We also offer intensive trainings to unlock personal and organizational high performance<\/p>\n\n\n\n www.stealingfirebook.com<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work Steven Kotler & Jamie Wheal 1825 Introduction Some revolutions begin with a gunshot, others with a party. This one kicked off on a Friday night in downtown Athens, in 415 BCE. Alcibiades, a prominent Greek […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4369,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[238,240,140,7,239,5,10,19,242],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-booknotes","category-creativity","category-culture","category-development","category-health-and-wellness","category-ideas","category-leadership","category-productivity","category-psychology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4368"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4370,"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4368\/revisions\/4370"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mattwkane.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>Part One: The Case for Ecstasis
Chapter One: What is This Fire?<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
the person who knows what to do next is the leader.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/a>Chapter 2: Why It Matters<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>Chapter 3: Why We Missed It<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>Part Two: The Four Forces of Ecstasis<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>Chapter 4: Psychology<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>Chapter 5: Neurobiology<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>Chapter 6: Pharmacology<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>Chapter 7: Technology<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>Part 3: The Road to Eleusis
Chapter 8: Catch a Fire<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
In their intelligence gathering, no detail was too small: reconstruction projects, troop movements, construction plans, hydrology surveys, health clinic locations, polling sites, names of local farmers, even crops those farmers were planting. Warner took all the information from his \u201cBeer for Data\u201d program (as it came to be known) and plugged it into a data-visualization tool he had created. The results outperformed every three letter agency you can think of, and – because Warner had refused a security clearance – he could \u201cgift\u201d anyone who asked with these results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/a>Chapter 9: Burning Down the House<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>Chapter Ten: Hedonic Engineering<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>Conclusion<\/h1>\n\n\n\n