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

by Steven Kotler

The Greeks had a word3 for this merger that Davis quite liked—ecstasis—the act of “stepping beyond oneself.”

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.

Contemporary scientists have slightly different terms and

descriptions. They call the experience “group flow.” “[It’s] a peak state,” explains psycholog...

single entity, a hive mind.

“SEALs rely on this merger of consciousness. Being able to flip that switch—that’s the real secret to being a SEAL.”

eight weeks6 of Navy basic training,

six months of underwater demolition training, six months of advanced skills training, and eighteen months of predeployment platoon training—that

total out to roughly $500,00...

$250,000 per.

SEALs constantly learn, improve and refine skills working with their teammates.

SEALFit founder Mark Divine9 recently

“Grit”

is the term psychologists use to

describe that mental toughness—a catch-all for passion, persistency, resiliency, and, to a certai...

we are weeding out candidates who cannot shift their consciousness and merge with the team.”

describes a profoundly unusual state, an experience far beyond our normal sense of self, and definitely not a term traditionally associated with elite special forces.

brutal filtration system that,

Does an operator, with his back against the wall, retreat into himself, or merge with his team?

“swim buddies” (the partner you can never leave behin...

they separate good from great in the fabled Kill House, their specially designed hostage rescue training facility, where they measure a team’s ability to move as one by the millimeter, where success requires an almost superhuman collective awareness.

“slow is dangerous. We want to move as fast as possible.

The first is do the exact opposite of what the guy in front of you is doing—so if he looks left, then you look right.

second is trickier: the person who knows what to do n...

entirely nonhier...

When someone steps up to become the new leader, everyone, immediately, automatically, moves with him. It’s the only way we win.”

“dynamic subordination,” where leadership is fluid and defined by conditions on the ground, is the foundation of flipping the switch.

SEALs forgo standard dress codes and divisions between officers and enlisted: they wore what they wanted and rarely saluted each other.

time-tested bonding technique: getting drunk.

simmering tensions between members, they’d invariably come out after a few drinks.

nursing headaches, but they’d be straight with each other and ready to function as a seamless unit.

the ability to shut off the self and merge with the team is an exceptional and peculiar talent.

“If we really understood this phenomenon,” says Davis, “we could train for it, not screen for it.”

80 percent of SEAL candidates wash out.

ton of capable soldiers to the process. While it costs $500,000 to successfully train a SEAL, the cost of failure is tens of millions per year.

Navigating ecstasis isn’t in any field manual. It’s a blank spot on their maps, beyond the pen of most cartographers, beyond the ken of rational folk.

“The switch flipped as soon as we moved out,”

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 r...

Never walking backwards, bu...

turning, scanning, then quickening the pace to catch up with the group, ...

To look at it from a distance it would seem ...

for a moment, final checks, a slight reorganization, then lit out again in five groups of five. One group covered the west and north, another the east and south, a third stayed behind to watch their backs.

final two groups launched the main assault.

Silence was key. Radio calls were prohibited. “Talking is too slow,” says Davis. ...

armed guards mixed in with unarmed women and children. Under these conditions, false positives are more the rule than the exception, and knowing when not to shoot becomes the difference between a successful mission and an international incident.

The conscious mind is a potent tool, but it’s slow, and can manage only a small amount of information at once. The subconscious, meanwhile, is far more efficient. It can process more data in much shorter time frames. In ecstasis, the conscious mind takes a break, and the subconscious takes over.

performance-enhancing neurochemicals flood the system, including norepinephrine and dopamine. Both of ...

muscle reaction times, and pattern...

SEALs can read micro-expressions across dark room...