Stealing Fire

by Steven Kotler

  And that’s 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 year7 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’s specialty, at somewhere north of $250,000 per. All in, those couple dozen men under Rich Davis’s command, the SEAL unit charged with capturing, not killing, Al-Wazu, were an exceptionally well-oiled $85 million machine.

  So what are U.S. taxpayers getting for their money?

  A decent place to start is with the job description itself, or rather, the lack of one. SEALs are multitasking multitools. As their official website 8 explains: “There is no typical ‘day at the office’ for a Navy SEAL. SEALs constantly learn, improve and refine skills working with their teammates. Their office not only transcends the elements of Sea, Air and Land, but also international boundaries, the extremes of geography and the spectrum of conflict.”

  The technical term SEALs use to describe these conditions is VUCA—Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. Prevailing over this type of chaos requires an astounding level of cognitive dexterity. As Rich Davis explains: “the most expensive part of these already expensive warfighters is the three pounds of gray matter resting inside their skulls.”

  Of course, this isn’t how we normally think of SEALs. What we know best about these special operators is how hard they train their bodies, not their minds. Hell Week, for example, the kickoff to their infamous selection process, is five and a half days of nonstop physical exertion and radical sleep deprivation that routinely breaks world-class athletes. But even this crucible is more about brain than body. As SEALFit founder Mark Divine9 recently told Outside magazine, “[T]raining is designed to find the few who have the mental toughness needed to become a SEAL.”

  “Grit” is the term psychologists use to describe that mental toughness—a catch-all for passion, persistency, resiliency, and, to a certain extent, ability to suffer. And while this is accurate—SEALs are gritty as hell—it’s only part of the picture. Grit only refers to individual toughness, and the secret to becoming a SEAL has everything to do with team. “At every step of the training,” says Davis, “from the first day of BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEALs) through their last day in DEVGRU, we are weeding out candidates who cannot shift their consciousness and merge with the team.”

  On the surface, of course, this seems ridiculous. “Ecstasis” is the antecedent for “ecstasy,” which, if you can get beyond the club drug references, 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. It certainly doesn’t show up in the recruiting brochures.

  Yet everything we consider SEAL training is actually a brutal filtration system that, beyond the obvious tactical skills and physical perseverance, sorts for exclusively one thing: Does an operator, with his back against the wall, retreat into himself, or merge with his team? This is why they relentlessly emphasize “swim buddies” (the partner you can never leave behind, no matter what) in basic training. Why, even on deployment in Afghanistan—where there’s not a body of water for thousands of miles—they still have “swim buddies.” It’s also how 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.

  “When SEALs sweep a building,” says Rich Davis, “slow is dangerous. We want to move as fast as possible. To do this, there are only two rules. 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. The second is trickier: the person who knows what to do next is the leader. We’re entirely nonhierarchical in that way. But in a combat environment, when split seconds make all the difference, there’s no time for second-guessing. When someone steps up to become the new leader, everyone, immediately, automatically, moves with him. It’s the only way we win.”

  This “dynamic subordination,” where leadership is fluid and defined by conditions on the ground, is the foundation of flipping the switch. And, even back when team leaders understood it far less than they do today, establishing this foundation was a top priority. “The Navy’s caste system,”10 Team Six’s colorful founder, Richard Marcinko, wrote in his autobiography, Rogue Warrior, “has the reputation of being about as rigid as any in the world.” To get past those divisions, Marcinko broke ranks with strict naval protocols. He had the SEALs forgo standard dress codes and divisions between officers and enlisted: they wore what they wanted and rarely saluted each other. He also employed a time-tested bonding technique: getting drunk. Before deployment, he’d take his team out to a local Virginia Beach bar for one final bender. If there were any simmering tensions between members, they’d invariably come out after a few drinks. By morning, the men might be nursing headaches, but they’d be straight with each other and ready to function as a seamless unit.

  Whether it’s Marcinko’s ad hoc methods for flipping the switch back in the eighties, or Davis’s more refined approaches today, one critical issue remains: 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.”

  Unfortunately, screening is expensive and not that efficient. Nearly 80 percent of SEAL candidates wash out. They lose a 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. Sure, some candidates fail to execute tactically—they shoot a cardboard hostage in the Kill House or drop a weapon out of a helicopter—but far more fail to synch up collectively. And this isn’t surprising. 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.

  But to the SEALs charged with capturing, not killing, Al-Wazu, it wasn’t beyond the ken. It was just what happened out there. And, on that late September night, it happened quickly.

  “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.”

  But it wasn’t.

  The patrol was quick. In less than twenty minutes they reached the compound: four buildings surrounded by a high concrete wall. They stopped 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. The final two groups launched the main assault. Everyone knew his job. Silence was key. Radio calls were prohibited. “Talking is too slow,” says Davis. “It complicates things.”

  The assault teams were over the wall and into the buildings, blazingly fast. The first room was empty, the second was crowded and dark. There were 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 brea
k, and the subconscious takes over. As this occurs, a number of performance-enhancing neurochemicals flood the system, including norepinephrine and dopamine. Both of these chemicals amplify focus, muscle reaction times, and pattern recognition. With the subconscious in charge and those neurochemicals in play, SEALs can read micro-expressions across dark rooms at high speeds.

  So, when a team enters hostile terrain, they can break complex threats into manageable chunks. 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 shape in a far corner—that may or may not be a threat. With their minds and movements tightly linked, the entire team executes simultaneously, chunking and disarming without hesitation or error.

  That night in Afghanistan, there was no hesitation. The SEALs cleared those rooms in moments, left a couple of men behind to watch their prisoners, then moved into the next building. That was when they spotted him: Al-Wazu was there when they entered, sitting in a chair, an AK-47 slung over his shoulder.

  Standard rules of engagement say an armed enemy is a dangerous enemy, but there was nothing standard about this situation. The man in front of them had escaped prison, trained other terrorists, and conducted brutal attacks. He had killed and, if given the chance, would again. 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 bloodless capture. None wounded, none killed. Absolutely perfect.

  Of course, this isn’t your typical war story. It’s unlikely to make the news or get turned into a movie. Hollywood studios prefers lone heroes to faceless teams, and their accounts romanticize drama and disaster. But what the SEALs accomplished on that raid comes much closer to illustrating the true core of special operations culture: at their best, they are always an anonymous team. “I 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.” And this ethos is reinforced every time they flip that switch, when egos disappear and they perform together in ways that are just not possible alone.

  The hardest part of a SEAL’s job is knowing when not to shoot. Al-Wazu was hauled back to prison alive, and not one round had been fired. SEAL training is one of the most expensive filtration systems ever constructed, and it’s largely designed to make ecstasis possible. So what’s its real value?

  “Well,” says Davis, “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.”

  Google Goes Fishing

  In a high desert valley, on the other side of the world from the SEALs’ Afghan hunting grounds, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the young founders of Google, realized they needed a better filter for “ecstasis” themselves.

  And fast.

  It was 2001, three years before Al-Wazu’s rude awakening, and Page and Brin faced the biggest personnel decision of their start-up lives. Despite creating one of Silicon Valley’s more notorious hiring gauntlets, where candidates were ruthlessly vetted for GPAs, SATs, and their ability to calculate MENSA-like brain-teasers, the founders realized they couldn’t crack this next hire with metrics alone.

  After several years of rocket ship success, Google’s board had decided that the company was growing too big for Larry’s and Sergey’s twenty-something britches. The investors felt a little “adult supervision” was needed and initiated a search for what would prove to be one of the more pivotal CEO hires of the high-tech era.

  The process wasn’t easy, on anyone. After nearly a year of interviews, as Brin later told the press, “Larry and I [had] managed12 to alienate fifty of the top executives in Silicon Valley.” Time was running out. If they couldn’t get it right soon, they’d prove the board’s point: they were in over their heads.

  In choosing their CEO, Page and Brin came to the conclusion that they had to look beyond their normal screening process. Resumes were all but useless. The technical part was more or less a given—there were plenty of sharp guys in the Valley who could run a stable of code monkeys. But, in a town full of outsize personalities, they had to find someone who could set ego aside and get what Google was trying to do. Someone who could, in the New York Times’ John Markoff’s assessment,13 “discipline Google’s flamboyant, self-indulgent culture, without wringing out the genius.”

  Get it right, and they’d own the search engine space for a decade or more. Screw it up, and they could lose control of their company. Game over. Back to grad school.

  So, in a stroke of desperate inspiration, Page and Brin found themselves turning to an unusual selection process, a brutal filtration system both strikingly similar to BUD/S and as wildly different as it could get.

  Like the SEALs’ infamous Hell Week, a finalist for Google’s CEO job would have to spend five nearly sleepless days and nights enduring oppressive sun, freezing cold, and a 24/7 barrage of VUCA conditions. Pushed to physical and psychological extremes, the prospective leader would have nowhere to hide. Would he retreat into himself? Or could he merge with the team?

  Of course, there were a few differences. Unlike the San Diego beach where BUD/S prospects prove themselves, the beach Page and Brin had in mind hadn’t seen flowing water in nearly fifteen thousand years. It was now a bone-dry lake bed in the middle of Nevada’s Black Rock Mountains. The site of Burning Man, one of the stranger rites of passage in modern times.

  And rite of passage is the right phrase. This teeming, temporary carnival of tens of thousands has its own quirky customs, exotic rituals, and a fiercely dedicated following. It’s a modern-day Eleusis, a Bacchanalian blowout, the Party at the End of Time—take your pick. But there’s no denying the truth: something happens out there.

  And Page and Brin were regular and enthusiastic attendees. The company that set the bar14 for catered perks ran free shuttle buses to the event. For many years, the two-story atrium of Building 43, Google’s main headquarters, wasn’t decorated with industry accolades or stock-ticker flat screens. Instead, it showcased pictures of loincloth-wearing, fire-spinning Googlers and their eclectic Burning Man art projects.

  In fact, the very first Google Doodle, posted in the late summer of 1998, was a crude stick figure of the Burning Man himself. Made from two commas set back to back, centered over the second yellow “o” in “Google,” that cryptic icon signified to those in the know that Page and Brin were turning out the lights in Palo Alto and lighting out for the Nevada badlands, uptime be damned.

  So, when the founders heard that Eric Schmidt, the forty-six-year-old veteran of Sun Microsystems and a Berkeley Ph.D. computer scientist, was the sole CEO finalist who had already been to the event, they rejiggered their rankings and gave the guy a callback. “Eric was . . . the only one15 who went to Burning Man,” Brin told Doc Searls, then a Berkman Center fellow at Harvard. “We thought [that] was an important criterion.”

  Stanford sociologist Fred Turner16 agrees, arguing that the festival’s appeal to Silicon Valley is that it brings that hive mind experience to the masses. “[It] transforms the work of engineering into . . . a kind of communal vocational ecstasy.” One of Turner’s research subjects, a Googler himself, explained his experience on a pyrotechnic team: “[We were] very focused, very few words, open to anything . . . no egos. We worked very tightly. . . . I loved the ‘feeling of flow’ on the team—it was an extended, ecstatic feeling of interpersonal unity and timelessness we shared throughout.”

  And like the SEALs flipping the switch, the Googler’s “communal vocational ecstasy” relies on changes in brain function. “Attending festivals like Burning Man,”17 explains Oxford professor of neuropsychology Molly Crockett, “practicing meditation, being in flow, or taking psychedelic drugs rely on shared neural substrates. What many of these route
s have in common is activation of the serotonin system.”

  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.

  That heightened cooperation, that communal vocational ecstasy, was what Page, Brin, and so many of Google’s engineers had discovered in the desert. It was an 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. Maybe, if Schmidt could endure the blistering heat, the dust storms, the sleepless nights, and the relentless don’t-give-a-shit-who-you-are strangeness of Burning Man, just maybe, he’d be the guy who could help them grow the dream without killing it.

  Did it work? Did a bash in the boonies filter for critical talent better than any algorithm they could code? “The whole point of taking Schmidt to Burning Man,”19 explains Salim Ismail, global ambassador for Singularity University and a Silicon Valley fixture, “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 really flexible, even in difficult conditions. He adapted his management style to fit their culture without bleeding out their genius and turned Google into a monster success.”