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

by Steven Kotler

when a team enters hostile terrain, they can break complex threats in...

They quickly segment the battle space into familiar situations they know how to handle, like guards that need disarming or civilians that need corralling, and unfamiliar situations—a murky sh...

With their minds and movements tightly linked, the entire team executes simultaneously, chunking and disarmi...

But there was one small detail that every SEAL who entered the room had, in milliseconds, seen, processed, and acted upon—or, rather, not acted upon. The detail was that, at this particular

moment, their target’s eyes were closed.

Wazu was fast asleep. It was a blood...

do not seek recognition11 for my actions . . . ,” reads the SEAL code. “I expect to lead and be led . . . my teammates steady my resolve and silently guide my every deed.”

ethos is reinforced every time they flip that switch, when egos disappear and they perform together in ways that are just not possible alone.

“when we shook Wazu awake, and he saw a group of steely-eyed, black-faced Navy SEALs in his living room—the look on his face? Priceless.”

“practicing meditation,

flow, or taking psychedelic drugs rely on shared neural substrates.

serotonin s...

serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, endorphins, anandamide, and oxytocin—play

Norepinephrine and dopamine

endor...

oxytocin link mother to child and friend to friend, anandamide and serotonin deepen feelings of t...

you get tighter bonds and heightened...

altered state of consciousness that suggested a better way of working together, and a feeling that anyone who presumed to lead them simply had to know firsthand.

strangeness of Burning Man, just maybe, he’d be the guy who could help them grow the dream without killing it.

“was to see how he could handle a wild environment.

Could he

deal with the volatile, novel context? The extreme creativity? Did he merge with his team or stand in their way? And that’s what they learned on that trip, that’s one of Schmidt’s great talents. He’s reall...

management style to fit their culture without bleeding out their genius and turned Googl...

100 million. A decade later, when Schmidt finally handed the CEO reins back to Page, the company’s revenues were nearly $40 billion.

Page and Brin have gone on to become numbers nine and ten on Forbes’s list of the world’s wealthiest individuals, while Schmidt is one of the only nonfounder, non-family-members to ever become a stock option billionaire in history.

organizing the entire world’s

informa...

Why did Google and the Navy SEALs, two of the highest-performing organizations in the world, have to resort to makeshift filters to find the next-level skills they desperately needed?

way to build or buy a better talent mousetrap,

“sufficiently advanced technology”—the kind that still looks like magic to us.

ecstasis we’re talking about a very specific range of nonordinary states of consciousness (NOSC)21—what

At the same time, brainwaves slow from agitated beta to daydreamy alpha and deeper theta. Neurochemically, stress chemicals like norepinephrine and cortisol are replaced by performance-enhancing, pleasure-producing compounds such as dopamine, endorphins, anandamide, serotonin, and oxytocin.