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

by Steven Kotler

Michael Michaels, one of Burning Man’s original founders2 (and known as “Danger Ranger” at the event), explains it this way: “At Burning Man, we’ve found a way to break out of the box that confines us. What we do, literally, is take people’s reality and break it apart. Burning Man is a transformation engine—it has hardware and it has software, you can adjust it and tweak it. And we’ve done that. We take people out to

this vast dry place, nowhere, very harsh conditions. It strips away their luggage, the things they’ve brought with them, of who they thought they were. And it puts them in a community setting where they have to connect with each other, in a place where anything is possible. In doing so, it breaks their old reality and helps them realize they can create their own.” In other words, it’s a transformation engine tailor-made to invoke the selflessness, timelessness, effortlessness, and richness of STER.

But today, the ranks of Burners, as attendees call themselves, include members of a high-powered subculture, a tech-nomadic glitterati that have access to capital, markets, and global communication platforms.

“So embedded, so accepted has Burning Man become4 in parts of tech culture,” wrote journalist Vanessa Hua in the San Francisco Chronicle, “that the event alters work rhythms, shows up on resumes, is even a sanctioned form of professional development—all signs that the norm has adopted parts of the formerly deviant happening.”

Recent research conducted on Burning Man sheds some light on that “something.” In 2015, a team of scientists led by Oxford neuropsychologist Molly Crockett7 joined forces with the Black Rock City Census to take a closer look at the festival’s power. In their study, 75 percent of attendees reported having a transformative experience at the event, while 85 percent of those reported that the benefits persisted for weeks and months afterward. That’s an incredibly high batting average: Three out of four people who attend the event are meaningfully changed by it.

The wildness of the event, the radical self-reliance it requires, the ability to create and inhabit larger-than-life alter egos, all combine to create a temporary autonomous zone8—a place where people can step outside themselves and become, if only for a brief week, whatever they desire.

“I like going to Burning Man,” Google founder Larry Page9 said at the 2013 Google I/O conference. “[It’s] an environment where people can try new things. I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out things and figure out the effect on society, the effect on people, without having to deploy it to the whole world.”

As Burning Man cofounder Will Roger recently wrote: “I would argue that the proposal is part of a large strain of utopian separatism that can be found in the modern-tech boom: Peter Thiel’s Sea-steading efforts or Tony Hsieh’s attempt to build a start-up city in Las Vegas. But a Burning Man permanent community would arguably be the most interesting and achievable manifestation of it.”14

In the summer of 2016, they achieved just that, closing on the purchase of Fly Ranch, a parcel of nearly four thousand acres a few miles north of the festival site, filled with geysers, hot springs, and wetlands. “This is all part of the evolution of Burning Man,”15

Since that time, Burners without Borders has become an international organization, active in disaster zones from Peru’s 2007 earthquake to Japan’s Fukushima disaster to New Jersey’s Hurricane Sandy. And the relationships they’ve forged with locals in those areas have come full circle—with leaders from those communities coming to Burning Man in subsequent years to learn where all of that capability and enthusiasm comes from.

“I’ve been amazed at the depth of interest,” Von Lila says. “[T]raditional organizations are realizing the limitations of top-down mobilization and are seriously studying how bottoms-up community mobilization—the core lessons of the Burning Man community—can be deployed in critical environments.”

Burning Man

“demonstration projects” can be seen everywhere from23 solar power installations on rural Indian reservations (Black Rock Solar) to experimental community spaces in blighted metropolitan areas (The Generator, in Reno, Nevada) to smartphone apps (including Firechat, which was designed as a peer-to-peer communication network at Burning Man, but then played a critical role in protest movements in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Russia). And because Burners vigorously defend an open-source, noncommercial approach, their efforts are easy to share and hard to censor. Bu...

At least as far back as the Eleusinian Mysteries, which counted notables such as Plato and Pythagoras among its members, ecstatic culture has often been spread by an educated elite. In Europe, we saw this with the Rabelaisians25 of the sixteenth century, and the Club de Hashish in the eighteenth century—both of whom explored altered states, open sexuality, and libertine philosophies in pursuit of inspiration. In the 1920’s socialite Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Taos home26 served as a mescaline-fueled salon for everyone from D. H. Lawrence to Georgia O’Keeffe and Carl Jung. In the

1960’s Esalen’s founders and faculty infused bohemia with academia,27 drawing heavily from the ranks of Stanford, Harvard, and the European intellectual community. Yet, even though these movements all began with a select few, they ended up having a disproportionate impact on philosophy, art, and culture.

“If someone has the grit and presence of mind required by the sport, then it shows a lot about their character and how they show up more broadly in life.” And the parallels aren’t just conceptual. Over the years, MaiTai members have founded and led companies with an aggregate market value of more than $20 billion,33 making them one of the more influential (and athletic) groups of entrepreneurs in the world.

Here we want to take a moment to catalog signs of broader applications, focusing on the places where the chasm has been crossed and a critical early majority are starting to incorporate state-changing tools and techniques into their everyday lives.

This new version, known as mindfulness-based stress reduction, is gaining traction in places that would never have embraced earlier variants. Eighteen million Americans now have a regular practice,38 and, by the end of 2017, 44 percent of all U.S. companies will offer mindfulness39 training to employees. Since rolling out their program, Aetna estimates40 that it’s saved $2,000 per employee in health-care costs, and gained $3,000 per employee in productivity. This quantifiable return on investment helps explain why the meditation and mindfulness industry grew to nearly $1 billion41 in 2015. What had been the domain of seekers and swamis is now a staple of HR.

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.

Consider yoga. This five-thousand-year-old tradition was a countercultural pastime until the 1990s. But once researchers began finding the practice did everything44 from improve cognitive function to decrease blood pressure, the general public started to cross the chasm. As of 2015, some 36 million Americans have a regular practice.45 An activity that changes our state of mind by changing the shape of our bodies has become more popular, in terms of participation, than football.46

Bulletproof has grown into a nine-figure enterprise47 in less than four years and hundreds of other companies are flooding into the market.

Marijuana, once called a “demon weed,” has become the fastest-growing

growing industry48 in America. The whole of the cannabis economy49 (including legal and medical) is now worth roughly $6.2 billion, and slated to rise to $22 billion by 2020. As of late 2016, twenty-eight states have legalized medical marijuana, and eight of them—Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, California, Massachusetts, and Alaska, and the District of Columbia—have legalized recreational use as well.

Thirty-two million Americans use psychedelics51 on a regular basis (that’s nearly one in ten) and report considered reasons for doing so. According to a 2013 study published in a journal of the National Institutes of Health,52 the most common motivations are to “enhance mystical experiences, introspection and curiosity.” Transcendence, not decadence, appears to be driving use forward.

In one twenty-four-hour beta test, more than thirty thousand people volunteered to contribute their personal data to Alzheimer’s research, making it four times the size of the next-largest study overnight.

There was a time and a place when this all happened, but it wasn’t the present day and it wasn’t the Black Rock Desert. The date was 1801; the place was Cane Ridge, Kentucky. The occasion was the Second Great Awakening, one of the largest spiritual revivals in American history.

The Second Great Awakening gave birth to social justice movements ranging from temperance and women’s rights to abolition. It infused American politics with an activist conscience for years to come. Even Joseph Smith’s hilltop epiphany took place in one of those “burned-over” districts.

So as we consider the emergence of the four forces and where they lead, it can be helpful to realize that the revolution we’re experiencing today might be more the norm than the exception. American spirituality has always favored the direct over the inferred, the immediate over the gradual. It has always spilled over from the pews and pulpits into the towns and countrysides.

In this context, we could consider this current moment as a Great Awake...

examining the pitfalls that nonordinary states can pose for individuals and groups—namely, the dual issues of coercion and persuasion.

Here we’re going to expand that thread by focusing on two of the institutions with the most vested interest in coercion and persuasion today: the military and marketers.

Menticide, most in the Pentagon agreed, was a clunky word. But the CIA had been discreetly testing3 a more compelling tagline in New York Times op-eds: “brainwashing.” This one stuck. Brainwashing neatly encapsulated one of the deepest fears of the Cold War era—the idea that your very individuality, your own free will, could be hijacked by a totalitarian state.

Male monkeys trained to use his device for self-stimulation would choose to orgasm nonstop 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).

To guard against this, Lilly detailed a series of nonnegotiable8 conditions under which he would be willing to discuss his findings. Nothing he said could ever be classified and everything shared would remain experimentally repeatable by him or his colleagues. Long before Linus Torvalds gave away the source code to Linux, or Sasha Shulgin published his chemical cookbook, or Elon Musk shared all of Tesla’s car and battery patents—long before there was even a term for it—Lilly took a stand for open-sourcing ecstasis.

As W. B. Yeats put it,14 “The world is full of magic things patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”

If that sounds far-fetched, consider that elite athletes already submit “biological passports” to the World Anti-Doping Agency15 to confirm their unique baselines for hormones, blood profiles, and neurochemicals. If they fluctuate from that baseline without official permission, they are penalized and even brought up on criminal charges. Much in the same way that regimes used to declare certain books subversive, it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine a government declaring certain brain chemistry subversive. A telltale combination of neurotransmitters coursing through your bloodstream could be enough to get put on a watch list, or worse.

And as far out (and dated) as this sounds, Channon’s manifesto took on fabled status among progressive thinkers in the military. In “Beam Me Up Spock: The New Mental Battlefield,”27 a 1980 article for the staid journal, Military Review, Lieutenant Colonel John Alexander argued that “a new battlefield dimension that may defy our general perceived concepts of time and space looms on the horizon. Clearly, psychotronic (mind/matter) weapons already exist; only their capabilities are in doubt.” Even the U.S. Army’s famous “Be All You Can Be” slogan sprang from Task Force Delta’s mission to unlock human potential.

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 lab, praying with a Benedictine monk, and training in aikido, a Japanese martial art dedicated to universal peace. It was a frontal assault on the neurophysiology of ecstasis (and the direct progenitor of the SEALs’ Mind Gym). For their coat of arms, they combined ancient and pop mythologies: a wooden horse sat above two crossed light sabers. Their motto? Vi Cit Tecum—“May the Force Be with You.”

But that afterthought got noticed. In May 2003, Newsweek ran a short blurb “PSYOPS: Cruel and Unusual,”29 revealing that U.S. military detention units were using a combination of bright light, disorienting sounds, and other consciousness-shifting tactics to break Iraqi prisoners.

What began as an attempt to infuse the military with the idealism of the human potential movement had devolved into a tool for psychological warfare—and the Cycle churned on.

In heavily redacted documents recently released through the Freedom of Information Act,30 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,31 the one used in the 1960’s 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’s hard to tell if it’s an anomaly or the beginning of a trend,32 in 2015, plainclothes and undercover

agents spiked, and arrests at the festival were up 600 percent.

The selflessness that is the hallmark of a nonordinary state is only a hop, skip, and a jump from the brainwashing the Pentagon so desperately sought in the 1950’s. Timelessness, devoid of reference points, can feel a lot like paranoid schizophrenia and has been a linchpin of solitary confinement for centuries. The euphoric neurochemistry of effortlessness, as John Lilly realized, can create dependency on whoever can administer that next hit of bliss. Information richness can be mined as a truth serum, as the MK-ULTRA docs attempted, or amped up to overwhelm the unwilling, as the military guards orchestrated in Iraq.

In 2007, a collection of the world’s biggest brands33—Apple, Coca-Cola, American Express, Nike, Samsung, Sony, and Ford—put up $7 million to fund a study into the neuroscience of buying behavior. They wanted to know if there were more effective ways to sell their products and joined forces to underwrite the largest neuromarketing study ever conducted—an attempt to replace misleading focus groups with straight-ahead brain scans. Marketing researcher and consultant Martin Lindstrom teamed up with British neuroscientist Gemma Calvert for the project. Over the course of three years, they used both fMRI and EEG to scan the brains of more than two thousand people as they made a variety of buying decisions. The researchers discovered that product placement34 in TV shows and movies rarely works, that warning labels of cigarettes actually prime the urge to smoke more, and that—most surprisingly—shopping and spirituality seem to rely on similar neuronal circuitry. When deeply religious subjects view sacred

iconography or reflect on their notion of God, brain scans reveal hyperactivity in the caudate nucleus, a part of the pleasure system that correlates with feelings of joy, love, and serenity. But Lindstrom and Calvert found that this same brain region lights up when subjects view images associated with strong brands like Ferrari or Apple. “Bottom line,” Calvert reported, “there was no discernible way to tell the difference between the ways subjects’ brains reacted to powerful brands35 and the way they reacted to religious icons and figures. . . . Clearly, our emotional engagement with powerful brands. . . . shares strong parallels with our feelings about religion.”

To understand this possibility, it’s helpful to understand a few of the developments that have led to today’s marketplace. At the tail end of the twentieth century, we started moving from the selling of ideas,36 the so-called information economy, toward the selling of feelings, or what author Alvin Toffler called the “experience economy.” This is why retail shops started to look like theme parks. Why, instead of stocking ammo on their shelves like Wal-Mart, the outdoor retailer Cabela’s turns their stores into a hunter’s paradise of big-game mounts, faux mountainsides, and giant aquariums. It’s how Starbuck’s can charge four dollars for a fifty-cent cup37 of coffee: because they’re providing that cozy “third place” between work and home.

we were at the Advertising Research Foundation38 to discuss the next step: the move from an experience economy to what author Joe Pine calls the “transformation economy.” In this marketplace, what we’re being sold is who we might become—or as, Pine explains: “In the transformation economy, the customer

IS the pr...

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 models39 in the black-and-white photo spread, but you’ll certainly feel like a million bucks while you’re there.

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’ll become a radically different person. You’ll look different, for certain, but because of their emphasis on embracing challenge and pushing boundaries, you’ll stand a chance of acting and thinking differently as well. That’s a positive “transformation” that many are willing to suffer and pay a premium for.40