Stealing Fire

by Steven Kotler

  Just check the numbers. When Google hired Schmidt20 in 2001, their revenues were rumored to be about $100 million. A decade later, when Schmidt finally handed the CEO reins back to Page, the company’s revenues were nearly $40 billion.

  That’s a return of almost 40,000 percent.

  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. Even for a company like Google, dedicated to unassuming goals like “10x moonshots” and organizing the entire world’s information—a 400x return?

  As close to priceless as they’ll ever get.

  Hacking Ecstasis

  What’s really going on here? 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? After all, Page and Brin were two of the smarter Ph.D. students to come through Stanford in years. The team they gathered at Google was handpicked for its ability to quantify the inscrutable. Even back in 2001, the company was awash in cash. If there was a way to build or buy a better talent mousetrap, they would have used it to find their next CEO.

  DEVGRU, meanwhile, has a blank check to pursue the cutting edge. In ammunition alone, annually, these guys spend as much as the entire U.S. Marine Corps. So for them to acknowledge, as Commander Rich Davis did, that an altered state of consciousness was both essential to mission success and elusive as hell—something they had to screen for by attrition, but couldn’t train for by design? That doesn’t make a lot of sense.

  That’s because, any way you slice it, ecstasis doesn’t make a lot of sense. It remains a profound experience, a place far beyond our normal selves, what author Arthur C. Clarke called a “sufficiently advanced technology”—the kind that still looks like magic to us.

  In light of this, it’s easy to see why Google built their talent map around the reliable and observable: grade point averages, standardized tests, and IQ scores. It’s what engineers know; it’s how they think. SEALs, too, are famously empirical. If it doesn’t work first time, every time, they find something better that will. And theirs is a macho culture where feelings get short shrift. So a feeling like ecstasis? No one’s going to touch that one. Not, at least, until DARPA builds an implant for it.

  So, ten years ago, this is where we found Google and the SEALs: two high-performing organizations hunting an odd set of skills that neither of them could name or train. And it’s not that they were looking in the wrong place—they were just a little ahead of the curve.

  Over the past ten years, science and technology have come round that bend. Empirical evidence has started to replace trial and error. And this is giving us new ways to approach ecstasis. But, before we dive into some of those stories, we first need to define our terms.

  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.”

  Out of this broader inventory, we focused on three specific categories. First, flow states, those “in-the-zone” moments including group flow, or what the SEALs experienced during the capture of Al-Wazu, and the Googlers harnessed in the desert. Second, contemplative and mystical states, where techniques like chanting, dance, meditation, sexuality, and, most recently, wearable technologies are used to shut off the self. Finally, psychedelic states, where the recent resurgence in sanctioned research is leading to some of the more intriguing pharmacological findings in several decades. Taken together, these three categories define our territory of ecstasis.

  Admittedly, these three may seem like strange bedfellows. And for most of the past hundred years, we’ve treated them that way. Flow states have been typically associated with artists and athletes; contemplative and mystical states belonged to seekers and saints; and psychedelic states were mostly sampled by hippies and ravers. But over the past decade, thanks to advances in brain science, we’ve been able to pull back the curtain and discover that these seemingly unrelated phenomena share remarkable neurobiological similarities.

  Regular waking consciousness has a predictable and consistent signature22 in the brain: widespread activity in the prefrontal cortex, brainwaves in the high-frequency beta range, and the steady drip, drip of stress chemicals like norepinephrine and cortisol. During the states we’re describing,23 this signature shifts markedly. Instead of widespread activity in the prefrontal cortex, we see specific parts of this region either light up and become hyperactive or power down and become hypoactive.

  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.

  So no matter how varied these states appear on the surface, their underlying neurobiological mechanisms—that is, the knobs and levers being tweaked in the brain24—are the same (see the endnotes for a thorough description). And this understanding allows us to tune altered states with newfound precision.

  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.

  Instead of following the breath (or chanting a mantra or puzzling out a koan), meditators can be hooked up to neurofeedback devices that steer the brain directly toward that alpha/theta range. It’s a fairly straightforward adjustment to electrical activity, but it can accelerate learning, letting practitioners achieve in months what used to take years.

  For organizations like the SEALs and Google, these developments are allowing them to take an entirely different approach to high performance. They’ve moved beyond their earlier explorations, and are now pursuing ecstasis with a degree of precision that was simply not possible even ten years ago.

  The Mind Gym

  In the summer of 2013, we got a chance to meet with both the SEALs and Google, and see for ourselves how far they’ve come. We visited the SEALs because Rich Davis and several of DEVGRU’s team leaders had read The Rise of Superman and noticed a considerable overlap between the flow described in the book and their own experiences on the battlefield. For Davis, that Al-Wazu raid was only one of dozens of missions where he’d found himself in the zone, doing the impossible. These moments changed his life. He began hunting for experts who could tell him how these states worked and how to get more of them. And while we were uncertain that we would have anything new to teach these guys, we got an invitation to the SEALs’ Norfolk, Virginia, headquarters to observe the men in action and offer any insights we had on “flipping the switch.”

  After wading through several layers of background checks and byzantine paperwork, we spent a morning presenting to the teams and a few hours watching live-fire, hostage rescue training from an observation deck in the rafters of the Kill House. Then, during the debrief, we found ourselves sitting in a windowless conference room talking to team leaders about the high cost of screening for ecstasis. The issue wasn’t just financial—the $500,000 it took to train a SEAL, the $4.25 million it cost to get them to DEVGR
U, even the tens of millions wasted along the way; what concerned them more was the human cost. Again and again, we heard how emotionally devastating their screening process can be. How failure ruins careers and lives. “We’re a very high-performing club,”25 explained one SEAL team leader, and “some guys can’t bounce back from failure.”

  When that meeting was over, they walked us through their newest facility, the Mind Gym, which was their best guess at how to train for ecstasis and not just screen for it. Sure, it cost millions to build, but if it could help them flip that switch reliably—if it could help more good men learn this invisible skill—it would be worth much more than that.

  Equal parts CrossFit sweat and DARPA wizardry, the Mind Gym is a collection of some of the best tools and tech for training body-brain performance in the world: EEG brain monitors, medical-grade cardiac coherence devices, motion-tracking fitness stations, all kitted out with sensors, scanners, and screens designed to drive the SEALs into the zone faster than ever.

  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. Invented by National Institutes of Health researcher and neuroscientist John Lilly26 in the 1960s, these tanks were specifically designed to help people shut off the self (since the brain uses sensory inputs to help create our sense of self, by removing those inputs, you can dial down this sense). After Lilly began using these tanks to explore the effects of LSD and ketamine on consciousness, they fell out of favor with the establishment and devolved into a countercultural curiosity. But here they were again, in the red-hot center of the military-industrial complex, being used to train supersoldiers.

  And the SEALs have been iterating on Lilly’s original technology. Working with researchers at Advanced Brain Monitoring, in Carlsbad, California, they’ve hotwired neural and cardiac feedback loops, digital displays, and high-fidelity sound into the experience. 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.

  It’s not just the Navy that is studying this domain in more depth. A few months after our visit to Norfolk, we crossed the country for a trip to the Googleplex. We were there to talk flow states with engineers, and learn more about what the company is doing to harness the “communal vocational ecstasy” they’d first glimpsed at Burning Man in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada.

  Right after our presentation, we pedaled a couple of the ubiquitous and colorful Google bikes to the other side of campus to attend the opening of their new multimillion-dollar mindfulness center. Outfitted in soothing lime green with bamboo accents, the center features a vitality bar offering fresh-squeezed juices around the clock and a suite of meditation rooms decked out with sensor suits and neurofeedback devices similar to what we saw in the Navy’s Mind Gym. Google had realized that when it comes to the highly competitive tech marketplace, helping engineers get into the zone and stay there longer was an essential investment. But like the SEALs, they hadn’t completely ironed out all the variables.

  “It’s going well,”27 explained Adam Leonard, one of the leaders of “G Pause” (their name for their mindfulness training program). “We’ve got active communities around the world, but the bigger challenge is getting people who aren’t already meditators to start. The folks that already sit [in meditation] understand the benefits. It’s the ones that are too busy and too stressed to slow down and need it the most that are the hardest to reach.”

  Not for lack of trying, though. In talking to Google’s human performance team, we learned that many of the company’s legendary efforts to create a seamless live/work environment—from Wi-Fi enabled commuter shuttles to farm-to-table dining rooms to pre-booked tickets for weekend adventures—were also attempts to minimize interruptions and keep employees in flow.

  “Unlike those of many other firms,”28 Stanford’s Fred Turner points out, “Google’s managers have subsidized the . . . explorations of its engineers and administrators and have promulgated relentlessly an ethos of benevolent peer production.” By doing everything possible to keep people out of their heads and absorbed in their projects, Google is trying to make that same vocational ecstasy they found in the desert a permanent part of their on-campus lives.

  The Altered States Economy

  After those visits, and seeing how much time and money these two organizations were willing to put into maximizing the benefits of altered states, we couldn’t help but wonder about the rest of us. Was it possible that deliberately seeking ecstasis went beyond high-performing organizations? Did any of this matter to regular folks? And if so, how much?

  “Tell me what you value and I might believe you,” management guru Peter Drucker once said, “but show me your calendar and your bank statement, and I’ll show you what you really value.” So we decided to take Drucker’s advice and follow the money.

  First, we dubbed the amount of cash and coin people spend each year trying to get out of their heads the “Altered States Economy.”29 And we didn’t mean this metaphorically; we meant it literally. “Getting out of our heads” requires a precise biological signature in the brain. Specifically, a slowdown in neuroelectrical activity, a deactivation of the network that supports self-consciousness, and the presence of at least a couple of the “big six” neurochemicals we mentioned earlier. If an experience produces this signature, then we could credibly include it in our tally.

  With neurobiology as our filter, we were able to spot similarities between otherwise disparate experiences. By paying attention to a singular category—like flow states or contemplative states or psychedelic states—it would have been easy to miss the larger trend and deeper patterns. But, with the knobs and levers serving as a “Rosetta Stone” for nonordinary consciousness, we could decode commonalities and measure impact in ways that were simply impossible before. In other words, we could start to put some hard numbers around the Altered States Economy.

  Now, to be clear, we are not implying that all of the categories we are about to consider reflect deliberate, healthy, or intentional approaches to cultivating ecstasis. In fact, many are the exact opposite: impulsive, destructive, and unintentional. But that very fact—that we are driven to pursue altered states often at a steep cost—underscores how large and sometimes hidden a role they play in our lives.

  We began our tally with the fairly uncontroversial assumption that any accounting of ecstasis should include all the substances people use to change states, from alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine on the licit side to cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamines on the illicit side (and if you’re not sure that coffee should qualify as a state-changing drug, just look at the Starbucks line at 7 a.m.). We also included the legal and illegal markets for marijuana, psychopharmaceuticals like Ritalin and Adderall, and mood-shifting painkillers like OxyContin and Vicodin.

  Next, we widened the net beyond substances that change our state of mind to experiences that do the same. We assessed therapeutic and personal development programs designed to “get me out of my head and help me feel happier,” from psychological and psychiatric counseling to the massive online self-help market.

  We also considered a wide range of high-flow pursuits like action sports, video games, and gambling—that is, activities that are primarily engaged for intrinsic reward, rather than external recognition.

  Then we took a conservative approach to the broader categories of media and entertainment. While one could argue, for example, that much of the live music industry reflects a desire for state-changing collective experience, we zeroed in on an ascendant and uniquely qualified genre: electronic dance music (EDM). In EDM, leading DJs earn eight figures a
year for showing up in a club and pressing “play” on a laptop. So it’s not about the appeal of the band. There isn’t one. And it’s not about the lyrics, either. There aren’t any. What is it about? Thunderous bass, tightly synchronized light shows, and, typically, lots of mind-altering substances. Other than the state-shift it produces, there is little reason to seek out the experience. And those states have become increasingly popular. In 2014, EDM represented almost half of all concert sales, attracting a quarter of a million concertgoers at a time and drawing the attention of Wall Street investors and major private equity firms.

  We were equally focused in our assessment of film and TV, narrowing our accounting to genres that are especially immersive and escapist, like IMAX/3D films and streaming pornography. In the case of IMAX, for instance, why go to see these movies at all? In a few months, we could catch the identical film in the comfort of our homes. Instead, we drive to faraway theaters and pay a premium for total immersion: surround sound that shakes our seats, forty-foot screens that swallow our vision, and the company of others who gasp, boo, and clap alongside us. We don’t pay extra to see more, we pay it to feel more—and think less.

  And then there’s pornography. Given that seven of the top twenty most-visited sites on the Web are porn sites, and that nearly 33 percent of all Internet searches are for terms related to sex, it’s safe to say that we’re sinking a ton of time and money into digital voyeurism. Unlike analog sex, viewing porn has no evolutionary payoff. So why do so many do it so often? Because, for a brief moment (and it really is brief—an average PornHub visit clocks in at seven and half minutes), we lose ourselves in a state of physiological arousal and neurochemical saturation. Put bluntly, we watch porn to get high, not to get laid.