Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work

by Steven Kotler

“a group performing at its top level of ability. . . . In situations of rapid change, it’s more important than ever for a group to be able to merge action and awareness, to adjust immediately by improvising.”

the ability to shut off the self and merge with the team is an exceptional and peculiar talent. That’s why the SEALs have spent several decades developing such a rigorous filtration process. “If we really understood this phenomenon,” says Davis, “we could train for it, not screen for it.”

This was one of the disappointing parts of the book. It starts this way leading you to believe that there has been some discovery so that you can train for it, but ultimately it seems the answer is no.

“The switch flipped as soon as we moved out,” says Davis. “I could feel it, but I could also see it: the invisible mechanism locking in, the group synchronizing as we patrolled. The point man looking ahead, every man behind alternating their focus: one left, the next right, with rear security covering our six. Never walking backwards, but stopping, turning, scanning, then quickening the pace to catch up with the group, before doing it again. To look at it from a distance it would seem choreographed.”

Everyone knew his job. Silence was key. Radio calls were prohibited. “Talking is too slow,” says Davis. “It complicates things.”

I distinctly remember this feeling from when I played competitive paintball. At the speed you need to move, needing to vocally communicate added a lot of information latency. You have to learn to anticipate what others will do and trust they will react to certain situations in a way that you expect. When this happens everything works seamlessly.

But it’s not only serotonin that makes up the foundation of those collaborative experiences. In those states, all of the neurochemicals18 that can arise—serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, endorphins, anandamide, and oxytocin—play roles in social bonding. Norepinephrine and dopamine typically underpin “romantic love,” endorphins and oxytocin link mother to child and friend to friend, anandamide and serotonin deepen feelings of trust, openness, and intimacy. When combinations of these chemicals flow through groups at once, you get tighter bonds and heightened cooperation.

When we say ecstasis we’re talking about a very specific range of nonordinary states of consciousness (NOSC)21—what Johns Hopkins psychiatrist Stanislav Grof defined as those experiences “characterized by dramatic perceptual changes, intense and often unusual emotions, profound alterations in the thought processes and behavior, [brought about] by a variety of psychosomatic manifestations, rang[ing] from profound terror to ecstatic rapture . . . There exist many different forms of NOSC; they can be induced by a variety of different techniques or occur spontaneously, in the middle of everyday life.”

Consider one of the simplest and oldest ecstatic techniques: meditation. Historically, if you wanted to use meditation to consistently produce a state where the self vanished, decades of practice were required. Why? Because your target was nothing more than a peculiar sensation, and hitting it was like throwing darts blindfolded. But researchers now know that the center of that target actually correlates to changes in brain function—like brainwaves in the low-alpha, high-theta range—and this unlocks all kinds of new training options.

As we rounded one corner in the facility, we spotted four egg-shaped pods in a small alcove. They were sensory deprivation tanks, where users float in salt water in pitch blackness for hours at a time.

I always knew Gus was a lot like a Navy SEAL.

But here they were again, in the red-hot center of the military-industrial complex, being used to train supersoldiers.

They’re deploying these upgrades for a practical purpose: accelerated learning. 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.

I really wish the book would have dove deeper into this rather than just make a passing reference to it. How do they study in the tanks? What is it about the tank that accelerates learning? Have there been studies on this? Are there takeaways here for the rest of us to build on?

Category by category, we followed Drucker’s advice, seeing what our calendars and our bank accounts said about how much we really value stepping outside ourselves. And what we found was staggering. (see endnotes for a detailed workup of these numbers and www.stealingfirebook.com/downloads/ for a worksheet where you can calculate your own personal tally).

No one built an off switch for the potent self-awareness that made it all possible. “[T]he self “is not an unmitigated blessing,”6 writes Duke University psychologist Mark Leary in his aptly titled book, The Curse of the Self. “It is single-handedly responsible for many, if not most of the problems that human beings face as individuals and as a species . . . [and] conjures up a great deal of personal suffering in the form of depression, anxiety, anger, jealousy, and other negative emotions.”

To quote Ryan Holiday: Ego is the enemy.

In a series of experiments, subjects who tasted even a brief moment of timelessness “felt they had more time available, were less impatient, more willing to volunteer to help others, more strongly preferred experiences over material products, and experienced a greater boost in life satisfaction.”

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’s a pretty simple explanation for this failure: we’re trying to train a skill, but what we really need to be training is a state of mind.

Wicked problems are those without easy answers—where our rational, binary logic breaks down and our normal tools fail us. But the information richness of a nonordinary state affords us perspective and allows us to make connections where none may have existed before. And it doesn’t seem to matter which technique we deploy: mindfulness training, technological stimulation or pharmacological priming, the end results are substantial. Consider the gains: a 200 percent boost in creativity, a 490 percent boost in learning, a 500 percent boost in productivity.

It's very unclear how this was measured.

Or consider three substances that sit squarely inside the state’s pale: caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol. The coffee break, smoke break, and happy hour are the most culturally enshrined drug rituals of the modern era, even though two of the three are top-ten offenders in Nutt’s rankings. There’s hardly a single workplace in the Western world that doesn’t, at least informally, support this triad. And for good reason. An optimally tuned market economy needs alert employees who work as hard as possible for as long as possible. So dedicated time-outs for stimulant consumption (that is, the coffee break and, these days, the e-cigarette break) are institutionally sanctioned and socially reinforced. Which is where the cocktails come in. Without the soothing effects of alcohol, the cigarettes-and-coffee workforce would become jittery wrecks within a fortnight. Add in some booze from time to time and you’ve got a finely tuned cycle of stimulation-focus-decompression that dovetails with broader economic goals. “In the competitive environment of the firm,” explains Intel researcher and author Melissa Gregg in the Atlantic,25 “it is little wonder that workers resort to performance-enhancing drugs. . . . When so many jobs require social networking to maintain employability, these mood enhancers are a natural complement to the work day after 5 p.m.

As Nietzsche said: “madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, political parties, nations and eras, it’s the rule.”

‘Western scientists have an underlying assumption that normal is absolutely as good as it gets and that the exceptional is only for saints, that it is something that cannot be cultivated.’”

“Daddy,” she said, “I want to talk with you. From the time I was three until I was five, I whined a lot. But I decided the day I turned five to stop whining. And I haven’t whined once since. . . . If I could stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch.”

Much easier said then done, but when you find the inner desire to change a behavior its much easier than trying to work against yourself.

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’s.

“To diagnose . . . yourself while in the midst of action31 requires the ability to achieve some distance from those on-the-ground events,” Harvard Business School professor Ron Heifetz maintains. “‘Getting on the balcony’ . . . [provides] the distanced perspective you need to see what is really happening.”

And for flow junkies who get their fix through action sports, this has always been the dark secret. Ecstasis only arises when attention is fully focused in the present moment. In meditation, for example, the reason you follow your breath is to ride its rhythm right into the now.

It’s why, over the past several years, we’ve been collaborating with some of the top experience designers, biohackers, and performance specialists to help develop the Flow Dojo— a training and research center25 explicitly designed to merge these technologies in one place. Equal parts Cirque du Soleil, X Games, and hands-on science museum, it’s a learning lab dedicated to mapping the core building blocks of optimum performance.

It’s why the SEALs say “you don’t ever rise to the occasion, you sink to your level of training” and then proceed to overtrain for every scenario possible.

One of Bob Kegan’s graduate students recently determined that by college, many Millennials have reached stages of adult development43 (with all their associated increases in capacity) that took their parents until middle age to attain.

I'm extremely skeptical of this finding.

Armed with knowledge of our deepest longings, and an understanding of exactly how to prime them, large corporations are at a distinct advantage in the influence game. In the same way that Google tailors searches based on our past histories and targeted ads follow us around the internet until we buy, we are entering an era where our cravings for transcendence can be used to co-opt our decision making.

And that’s the ultimate paradox of these states: all that liberation comes with an unavoidable dose of responsibility. While these states provide access to heightened performance and perspective, the upsides come at a cost. Between our own wayward tendencies and the dangers of militarization and commercialization, it’s easier than ever to fall asleep at the Switch.

In 2009, Swiss neurologist Peter Brugger discovered that people4 with more dopamine in their systems are more likely to believe in secret conspiracies and alien abductions. They’re suffering from apophenia, “the tendency to be overwhelmed by meaningful coincidence,” and detecting patterns where others see none.

I have to imagine there has huge implications for regular Facebook users, especially given the last election cycle. Facebook and other social media are known dopamine hits, which if this discovery is true leads Facebook users to be more susceptible to the "fake news" being shared.

As Buddhist teacher and author Jack Kornfield6 reminds us, “after the ecstasy, the laundry.”

"Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water."

“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year,”11 Bill Gates once said, “and underestimate what they can do in ten.”

Hedonic calendaring provides a way to hack the ecstatic path without coming undone. It gives us a method to integrate hard-and-fast approaches like extreme skiing and psychedelics with slow and steady paths like meditation and yoga. It’s one way to turn ecstasis into a sustainable long-term practice. And for anyone interested, there’s a free downloadable Hedonic Calendaring PDF at www.stealingfirebook.com/downloads/

Long answer: Once a year, set your indulgences up on a shelf, go thirty days cold turkey, and use this time to recalibrate. Attach the hiatus to traditional seasons of forbearance—Lent, Yom Kippur, Ramadan—or impose your own.