Stealing Fire

by Steven Kotler

  3. The Greeks had a word: Obviously you can find translations of this word everywhere, but author Jules Evans does a particularly good job explaining it on his website, Philosophy for Life,” writing: “Ecstasy comes from the ancient Greek exstasis, which literally means ‘standing outside,’ and more figuratively means ‘to be outside of where you usually are.’ In Greek philosophy, in Plato and Neoplatonists like Plotinus, it came to mean moments when a door opens in your mind or soul, you feel an expanded sense of being, an intense feeling of joy or euphoria, and you feel connected to a spirit or God. Its closely connected to another word in Plato, enthousiasmos, which means ‘the God within.’ So in moments of ecstasy, according to Plato, you stand outside of yourself, and God appears within you.” See http://www.philosophyforlife.org/modern-ecstasy-or-the-art-of-losing-control/.

  4. Keith Sawyer in his book Group Genius: Keith Sawyer, Group Genius (Basic Books, 2008), p. 4.

  5. It costs $25,000 to turn: There are a number of different ways to calculate this number and we blended a few different stats to come up with our total. See Diana Olick, “An Army of One Carries a High Price,” NBCNews.com, October 21, 2002, available at http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3072945/t/army-one-carries-high-price/#.V-0OhDKZO50. Also see Jared Hansbrough, “An Activity-Based Cost Analysis of Recruit Training Operations at Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego, California,” Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, 2000.

  6. Estimates for eight weeks: Stephanie Gaskell, “Three Navy SEALs Freed Capt. Phillips from Pirates with Simultaneous Shots from 100 Feet Away,” New York Daily News, April 14, 2009, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/navy-seals-freed-capt-phillips-pirates-simultaneous-shots-100-feet-article-1.360392.

  7. As it costs about $1 million a year”: Thomas Smith, “Money for American Commandos,” Human Events, April 23, 2008.

  8. As their official website explains: See https://www.sealswcc.com/navy-seals-benefits.html.

  9. As SEALFit founder Mark Divine: T. J. Murphy, “The World’s Most Intense Fitness Program,” Outside, December 16, 2014.

  10. The Navy’s caste system: Richard Marcinko, Rogue Warrior (New York: Pocket Books, 1993), p. 8.

  11. “I do not seek recognition”: Posted by Mark Divine, “The Navy Seal Code,” NavySeals.com, 2016.

  12. “Larry and I [had] managed”: Gregory Fernstein, “How CEOs Do Burning Man,” Fast Company, August 27, 2013.

  13. . . . New York Times’ John Markoff’s assessment”: John Markoff, “In Searching the Web, Google Finds Riches,” New York Times, April 13, 2003.

  14. The company that set the bar: For a complete breakdown of Google’s involvement at Burning Man, see Fred Turner, “Burning Man at Google,” New Media & Society 11 (2009): 73–94.

  15. Eric was the only one: Gregory Ferenstein, “How CEOs Do Burning Man,” Fast Company, August 27, 2013; John Markoff, “In Searching the Web, Google Finds Riches,” New York Times, April 13, 2003; and the original citation, Doc Searls, Harvard Berkman fellow, 2002, http://doc.weblogs.com/2002/12/10.

  16. Stanford sociologist Fred Turner: Turner, ”Burning Man at Google.”

  17. Attending festivals like Burning Man: Author interview with Molly Crockett, 2016.

  18. In those states, all of the neurochemicals: For a complete breakdown of the neurochemistry of flow, see Kotler, The Rise of Superman (Boston: New Harvest, 2013), pp. 65–69.

  19. The whole point of taking Schmidt to Burning Man: Author interview with Salim Ismail, 2016.

  20. When Google hired Schmidt: Markoff, “In Searching the Web, Google Finds Riches”; Quentin Hardy, “All Eyes on Google,” Forbes, May 26, 2003. Revenue numbers were privately held for Google in 2001 but were reported at around $100 million, tripling the following year to $300 million. By 2011, when Schmidt stepped down, revenues were $37.9 billion.

  21. A very specific range of nonordinary states of consciousness (NOSC): Walter Mead interviewing Stan Grof, “The Healing Potential of Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness,” see: http://www.stanislavgrof.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Healing-Potential-of-NOS_Grof.pdf

  22. Regular waking consciousness has a predictable and consistent signature: For a look at the absolute basics of consciousness, See Christof Koch, Marcello Massimini, Melanie Boly, and Giulio Tononi, “Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Progress and Problems,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 17 (2016): 307–21. Also see Angela Clow, Frank Hucklebridge, Tobias Stadler, Phil Evans, and Lisa Thorn, “The Cortisol Awakening Response: More than a Measure of HPA,” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews (2010); doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2009.12.011.

  23. During the states we’re describing: There’s obviously a ton of information on this one, but especially relevant are Arne Dietrich, “Functional Neuroanatomy of Altered States of Consciousness,” Conscious Cognition, June 12, 2003, pp. 231–56; Matthieu Ricard and Richard Davidson, “Neuroscience Reveals the Secret of Meditation’s Benefit,” Scientific American, November 1, 2014; J. Allan Hobson, The Dream Drugstore (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); Kotler, The Rise of Superman; and C. Robert Cloninger, Feeling Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Also see Arne Dietrich’s excellent TED talk, “Surfing the Stream of Consciousness,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syfalikXBLA.

  24. The knobs and levers being tweaked in the brain: See www.flowgenomeproject.com/stealingfiretools.

  25. “We’re a very high-performing club”: Author interview with Rich Davis and other team leaders (who have likewise needed to remain anonymous), 2013.

  26. researcher and neuroscientist John Lilly: Float tank histories are everywhere, but to hear John Lilly tell it, see John Lilly, The Scientist (Berkeley, CA: Ronin, 1996), pp. 98–108.

  27. “It’s going well”: Author interview with Adam Leonard, 2013.

  28. Unlike those of many other firms: Turner, ”Burning Man at Google,” p. 78.

  29. The Altered States Economy: In putting this together, we used the ‘“knobs and levers” of ecstasis as our guide. If a particular item in our tally pushed brainwaves out of the normal beta band of waking consciousness, triggered the release of at least two of the big six state-shifting neurochemicals (dopamine, norepinephrine, anandamide, serotonin, endorphins and oxytocin), or deactivated/hyperactivated the prefrontal cortex and/or the default mode network to produce the experience of STER, we included it in our tally.

  We decided to focus our attention on four main categories: Drugs, Therapy, Media and Recreation. In assembling our numbers, we also took the most recent data available, but made no attempt to translate these figures into 2016 dollars. This means most of our global numbers are probably lower than they would be today. Similarly, in a few instances, only U.S. numbers were available. In those cases, we took only the U.S. numbers and did not attempt to scale things up for the rest of the world because there are asymmetrical adoption of many of these economies—especially personal growth, action sports, etc. (unless otherwise noted, all numbers reflect global numbers). That makes this estimate initial and rough, in the spirit of Enrico Fermi’s guesstimates. We encourage scholars who’d like to take a crack at a more refined tally to do so, updating the ASE to global numbers in current-year adjusted dollars. And let us know, at flowgenomeproject.com/stealingfiretools.

  In our accounting, we started with the assumption that the price tag of ecstasis should include all psychoactive pharmaceuticals. We didn’t consider drugs intended to address a physiological conditions—like blood pressure, or cholesterol—only those that specifically targeted and shifted states of consciousness in the user. That meant the broadly prescribed pain, depression, anxiety, attention, and insomnia meds, along with long-tail drugs used to manage more serious mental disorders. This totaled out to $182.2 billion.

  See for mental health drugs: BCC Research, “Drugs for Treating Mental Disorders: Technologies and Global Markets,” January 2011, PM074A. For prescription pain management drugs, see BCC Research, “The Global Market for Pain Management Drugs and Devices,” January 2013, HLCO26D.
For sleep aids: BCC Research, “Sleep Aids: Technological and Global Markets,” June 2014, HLCO81B.

  We also included all licit and illicit substances that helped people get out of their heads”—from alcohol and tobacco and marijuana on the licit side to cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines, and marijuana on the illicit side. We further included all of the prescription drugs of abuse (like Ritalin and OxyContin) that are prevalently used off-prescription or resold on gray and black markets. We also focused only on the production and consumption of these substances and didn’t take into account any collateral costs, like law enforcement, incarceration, political lobbying, and judicial processes. This added up to roughly $2.3 trillion.

  For illegal drugs, see United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “World Drug Report 2005,” vol. 1, Analysis. For marijuana, see Arcview Market Research, “The State of Legal Marijuana Markets,” 4th ed., 2016; “Alcohol: Research and Markets, Global Alcoholic Beverage Industry-Forecast to 2018,” February 21, 2014. For coffee: Wevio, “Global Coffee Industry Facts & Statistics of 2014–2015,” May 29, 2015. For tea: Transparency Market Research, “Tea Market-Global Industry Analysis, Trend, Size, Share and Forecast 2014–2020,” March 3, 2015. For energy drinks: “Global Energy Drinks Market: Insights, Market Size, Share, Growth, Trends Analysis and Forecast to 2021,” April 2015, http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/3161745/global-energy-drinks-market-insights-market. For tobacco: Euromonitor International, “Global Tobacco: Findings Part 1—Tobacco Overview, Cigarettes and the Future,” June 2014.

  Then we widened our net and tried to include all of those goods and services expressly dedicated to solving the same dilemma—how do I get out of my current state of awareness. How do I shake a lived experience that ranges from unsatisfying to insufferable? Enter the blended category of neurotech, psychology, psychiatry, counseling, and self-help. Here we wanted to include all therapies, personal development, book sales, workshops, and information trainings (discounting those geared toward some professional skill acquisition and focusing solely on those that promise some change of existential perspective—aka Help Me Get Happier!). Unfortunately, most of those numbers are not available. What we could get was the $$3.65 billion in neuromodulation (that is tech designed to shift states), the $11 billion Americans spend on self-help annually, the $869 million Americans spend on life coaches, the $2 billion spent on business coaches (of which we counted only 50 percent, assuming the other portion related to skills acquisition), and the $15 billion Americans spent on therapy and counseling. For certain, this number is significantly less than the actual size of the global market, but this totaled out to $31.52 billion.

  For neuromodulation tech: “Markets and Markets, Neuromodulation Market by Technology, by Application-Trends and Global Forecasts to 2020.” For self-help: Marketdata Enterprises, “The U.S. Market for Self-Improvement Products & Services,” November 2010. For personal coaches: IBISWorld, “Life Coaches in the US: Market Research Report,” February 2016. For psychology and counseling: IBISWorld, “Psychologists, Social Workers & Marriage Counselors in the US: Market Research Report,” February 2016. For business coaches: “Inside the Coaching Industry,” Success, June 30, 2015.

  Next, we turned our attention to media. We started with the video game industry. The combination of big screens and increasingly complex character-driven story lines has made video games so out-of-our-heads immersive that the industry has become bigger in size and value than the movie industry. More specifically for our purposes, games are built around a number of core flow triggers, including novelty, complexity, unpredictability, and very precise challenge and reward ratios. Add in another $99.6 billion. See Newzoo, “Global Games Market Report,” April 21, 2016.

  Virtual reality, which is specifically designed to be far more immersive than video games, also counts. What’s more, the extra burst of immersion makes VR exceptionally good at pulling more of flow’s triggers. So we added another $12.1 billion to our total. See “Virtual Reality Market Size Worldwide 2016–2020,” 2016, https://www.statista.com/statistics/528779/virtual-reality-market-size-worldwide/.

  We also took into account the social media market, estimated at $17.2 million in 2015. See http://trade.gov/topmarkets/pdf/Media_and_Entertainment_Top_Markets_Report.pdf.

  Out of the rest of more traditional film and TV, you can make the case that with the exception of documentaries (where we might actually be trying to learn something), virtually all visual storytelling serves to provide an escape. And there’s a reason for this. Our brains do a pretty crummy job of distinguishing the physical from the filmed. For 99.9 percent of human evolution, if we saw something with our eyes, that meant it was in our physical world. The brain regions for fear, love, and movement, along with our mirror neurons, spike our ability to imagine ourselves right up there with our screen heroes. The effect is, quite literally, intoxicating.

  But again we wanted to err on the side of conservative. So we limited our accounting to two categories of screen viewing that are especially and purposely escapist: IMAX/3D films (where the record-setting film Avatar serves as the exemplar) and binge watching of streaming shows (where Netflix’s House of Cards practically invented the term). We thus get a good sample of media consumption specifically designed to prompt a loss of self. In the case of IMAX, revenues hit $1 billion. See “IMAX Corporation Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2015 Financial Results,” Imax.com, February 24, 2016, http://www.imax.com/content/imax-corporation-reports-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-2015-financial-results.

  Add to that the more recent phenomenon of binge-watching entire TV seasons in one sitting, where the magic of “maybe” dopamine makes season-ending cliffhangers compel otherwise reasonable couples to stay up way past their bedtime. This number is tricky to come by, but a recently released Deloitte study 70 percent of TV watching is binge watching, so we took 70 percent of the digital streaming market size, or $21.20 billion.

  For binging overview: Claire Gordon, “Binge Watching Is the New Normal,” Fortune, March 24, 2016. Also, Digital Democracy Survey, fielded in 2014, https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/global/Documents/Technology-Media-Telecommunications/gx-tmt-deloitte-democracy-survey.pdf. For the size of video-streaming market: “Markets and Markets, Video Streaming Market by Streaming Type (Live Video Streaming and Non-Linear Video Streaming), by Solution, by Service, by Platform, by User Type, by Deployment Type, by Revenue Model, by Industry, and by Region—Global Forecast to 2021,” May 2016, http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/video-streaming-market-181135120.html.

  We also added in the $6.2 billion EDM industry and the $97 billion porn industry. For EDM: Kevin Watson, “A Study of the Regional Electronic Music Industry,” IMS Business Report 2015: North America Edition, p. 12. For porn, see Chris Morrow, “Things Are Looking Up in America’s Porn Industry,” CNBC, January 20, 2015.

  There’s also the realm of recreation: those pastimes, sports, and activities whose central function is to get us out of ourselves. Certainly, low-skills/high-thrills activities like bungee jumping and roller coasters qualify—for those moments of self-inflicted terror we are most definitely not worrying about our taxes, or our last breakup. So too with action and adventure sports where the rush, the stoke,” is the thing that drives people to come back for more. Here’s we’ll discount bat and ball and team sports and focus on those “gravity games” with strong movement and high consequence, like skiing, climbing, mountain biking (classic triggers for driving people into what researchers call the deep now). We also included the $27 billion yoga industry and the $1 billion meditation. Lastly, we included the category of ‘“adventure travel,’” where the rigors of the journey are all but guaranteed to get you out of your head. That’s another $319.4 billion.

  For $44.3 billion on amusement/theme parks, see Global Industry Analysts, “The Global Theme/Amusement Parks Market: Trends, Drivers & Projections,” November 2015. For $12.1 billion in retail sales of action sports products in the United States, see
Active Marketing Group, “The Action Sports Market,” 2007. For $263 billion spent on adventure travel, see Adventure Travel Trade Association, “Adventure Travel: A Growing, but Untapped Market for Agents,” February 17, 2015, http://www.travelmarketreport.com/articles/Adventure-Travel-A-Growing-But-Untapped-Market-for-Agents. For meditation: Jan Wieczner, “Meditation Has Become a Billion-Dollar Business,” Fortune, March 12, 2016. For yoga: “2014 Outlook for the Pilates and Yoga Industry,” SNews, December 16, 2013, http://www.snewsnet.com/news/2014-yoga-pilates-studios/.

  Finally, we added in casino gambling. For sure, we could make the argument that much of this industry is motivated by the heavy dopamine spikes produces by gambling, but we needed to discount sports betting and a few other categories where there are other reasons (profit) for betting. But everything about a casino—from the lack of clocks to the pumped-in oxygen—is designed to get us out of our heads and immersed in the game. This put in an additional $159.71 billion. See Statistica, “Statistics and Facts About the Casino Industry,” 2015, https://www.statista.com/topics/1053/casinos/.

  Thus the current grand total is $3.99 trillion.

  30. Galaxies in the entire universe: Henry Fountain, “Two Trillion Galaxies, at the Very Least,” New York Times, Oct. 17, 2016.

  Chapter Two: Why It Matters

  1. In 2011, an out-of-work television host named Jason Silva: All the details of Jason Silva’s life that appear in this chapter come from a series of ’author interviews conducted between 2014 and 2016.