Stealing Fire

by Steven Kotler

  The Molecules of Desire

  In 2010, chemist Lee Cronin31 saw a demonstration of 3D printing while attending a conference in London. The technology caught his attention. At his own lab, he was always having to fabricate equipment. So, he wondered, could 3D printers solve this problem?

  Cronin returned to the University of Glasgow, where he was a professor, and organized a feasibility workshop. It didn’t take long to discover that bathroom sealant—the kind available in any hardware store—could be used as raw material, letting him print test tubes and beakers in any size or shape. He also found that the printer could be used to create simple molecules. By filling it with “chemical inks”—the reagents from which molecules are built—Cronin prototyped a rudimentary “chem-printer.”

  Since then, Cronin has moved past formulating simple molecules and into more complicated compounds. His short term goal is to figure out how to print over-the-counter medicines like ibuprofen. His long-term goal is to create a set of universal inks capable of making any drug from scratch. “Almost all drugs are made from simple molecules like carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen,” Cronin explains, “as well as easily available materials like paraffin and vegetable oil. With a 3D printer it should be possible that with a relatively small number of inks you could actually make any organic molecule.”

  This discovery would make prescription drugs downloadable, allowing anyone anywhere access to the medicines they need. But it will do far more than that. “Of course,” says Cronin, “this printer will also lead to new frameworks for discovery and increase the possibilities of new kinds of mind-altering drugs.”

  While all manner of psychoactive plants are available online, allowing the adventurous to distill potent psychedelics with little more than a Crock-Pot, some Mason jars and a turkey baster, the DEA and INTERPOL can still shut down these gray market suppliers. But Cronin’s 3D drug printer renders that kind of oversight almost impossible. After all, how can you regulate access to controlled substances when the raw materials have become as pedestrian as paraffin wax and vegetable oil?

  What’s more, 3D printers have user-friendly interfaces, so all that’s required to work one is the ability to point and click a mouse. And they’re inexpensive, so using them doesn’t require big grants or costly labs. Their combination of simplicity and affordability puts every step of the chemical formulation process within reach of anyone with an internet connection and a power outlet. So, for those interested in taking one of the formulas from Shulgin’s cookbooks and modifying it to create the next great alphabetamine? Simply hit print.

  And Cronin’s 3D chem printer isn’t the only development reshaping pharmacology. By treating the four letters of the genetic alphabet like the ones and zeros of computer code, synthetic biology gives us the ability to program living cells with the same ease that we program computers. And once the code looks right? Send it to a DNA synthesizer and within a few days you’ll receive a freeze-dried vial in the mail, filled with your genetic creation.

  Not surprisingly, synthetic biologists have already figured out how to use this process to produce psychoactive substances. In August 2014, researchers at Stanford32 announced they had genetically engineered yeast to produce the painkiller hydrocodone. Conventionally farmed, poppy plants take about a year to grow enough opium to make this drug, but this new yeast can do the work in days. The Canadian company, HyaSynth Bio,33 meanwhile, is engineering a different yeast to produce THC and cannabidiol, two of the active ingredients in marijuana.

  “This is really just the beginning,”34 explains Autodesk distinguished researcher and synthetic biologist Andrew Hessel. “Pretty much any substance made by a plant, tree or mushroom, including all the neuroactive substances, is within reach of synthetic biology. We’re not there yet, but within a decade or so this one technology should be able to tickle all the same receptor sites in the brain that mind-altering substances impact.”

  Author Michael Pollan argued that the botany of desire—the idea that intoxicating plants shape us as much as we shape them—has played an unsung but important role in the evolution of culture. But, no matter how influential these plants may have been, historically our ability to use them has been held in check. If the plant didn’t grow nearby, if it wasn’t on the list of socially sanctioned substances, potential explorers were out of luck.

  Pharmacology is such a potent force for ecstasis because it changes the nature of this game. With chemical cookbooks, rigorous neuroscience, crowdsourced lexicons, and now, democratized means of production, we’re freed from the geographic and cultural limitations we inherited. By giving us access to not just the botany of desire but the molecules of desire, we can continue to shape these compounds even as they inevitably shape us. It’s coevolution compressed from millennia into minutes.

  Chapter Seven

  Technology

  Dean’s Dark Secret

  The why was never in question. What happened? How it happened? Those answers remain unclear. But the why? For Dean Potter1—it was never in doubt.

  It was May 16, 2015, in Yosemite Valley, California, a nice spring evening, right on the edge of dusk. Potter, a record-breaking rock climber, slackline walker, and wingsuit flier, got ready for the evening’s adventure. He was 3,500 feet above the valley floor, standing on the summit of Taft Point. Alongside his friend and fellow flier Graham Hunt—considered one of the best young pilots around—their goal was to leap off the edge, zip across the canyon below, and sail through a V-shaped notch in a neighboring ridge, above an ominously named cliff, Lost Brother.

  Dean Potter played an important role in the writing of Rise of Superman. He was a good friend of the Flow Genome Project, a member of our advisory board, and as big-hearted and thoughtful as any professional athlete we’ve met. In 2013, when we were filming the Rise of Superman video series,2 Dean told the story of how he nearly died while BASE-jumping into a deep cave in Mexico. He finished tellingly: “This year, twenty-something wingsuiters have lost their lives. Dying’s not worth it. I’ve been struggling with that a lot. I don’t want to be that guy who got lucky. And I’ve been that guy who got lucky for a lot of years. I want to be that guy that’s such a wizard of strategy and knows myself and am comfortable enough to say, ‘Na-ah, I’m not going. I want to live.’”

  But, that early evening in Yosemite, he went anyway.

  Graham and Dean launched off Taft Point. Forty seconds later, their flights were over. Both men came into the notch low, possibly because the colder, denser winds that arrived with the setting sun had cost them altitude. Potter never wavered, but Hunt—as far as anyone can tell—jerked left, then swerved right, putting him on a diagonal path and directly into the canyon’s far wall. Potter made it through the notch, but didn’t have the height he needed and crashed into the rocks on the other side. Both men died on impact.

  And to this day, the details of the accident remain mysteries. No one knows what caused Hunt to swerve; no one knows exactly how Potter lost so much altitude. But the why was never in question.

  “Look,” Potter once explained, “I know the dark secret.3 I know my options. I can sit on a cushion and meditate for two hours and maybe I get a glimpse of something interesting—and maybe it lasts two seconds—but I put on a wingsuit and leap off a cliff and it’s instantaneous: Whammo, there I am, in an alternate universe that lasts for hours.”

  And for flow junkies who get their fix through action sports, this has always been the dark secret. Ecstasis only arises when attention is fully focused in the present moment. In meditation, for example, the reason you follow your breath is to ride its rhythm right into the now. Psychedelics overwhelm the senses with data, throwing so much information at us per second that paying attention to anything else becomes impossible. And for action and adventure athletes seeking flow, risk serves this same function. “When a man knows he is to be hanged in the morning,” Samuel Johnson once remarked, “it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

  By 2015, wingsuiting was providing
exactly that kind of dangerous focus. “I start to shiver and wonder if what we’re doing is right,” Dean wrote in an essay just a month before his death. “Wingsuit BASE-jumping feels safe to me, but [so many] fliers have lost their lives this year alone. There must be some flaw in our system, a lethal secret beyond my comprehension.”

  The lethal flaw is that, for many, using high-risk sport to explore ecstasis is so compelling and rewarding that it becomes an experience worth dying for. Steph Davis,4 Potter’s ex-wife and a professional climber and wingsuiter herself, has lost two husbands to the sport, yet she keeps flying. The siren song of “hours in an alternate universe” that Dean sought has continued to beckon to pilots convinced they can dodge the rocks.

  But for the rest us? Those with lives and wives and things that matter? Are we shut out of these “alternate universes”? Do we have to make an impossible choice between dedicating decades to practice or accepting intolerable risks to get there faster?

  Thanks to inventors like skydiver Alan Metni,5 the answer, increasingly, looks like “no.” Metni began his professional life as a lawyer at Vinson & Elkins, a global firm that counts senators, U.S. attorneys general, and Fortune 100 CEOs as alumni. But the legal life didn’t do it for him, so he chucked it for his true passion: jumping out of airplanes. He pitched a tent at a local airport and began training relentlessly, logging more than ten thousand jumps and earning three U.S. national championships and a world championship in formation flying along the way.

  But Metni wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to find a way to train even harder, so he started tinkering with giant fans and wind tunnels. By the early 2000’s, he’d perfected an indoor skydiving experience indistinguishable from true free fall. Suddenly, competitive teams could log hundreds of hours training together in absolute safety. With this one innovation, the standard of excellence at the elite level changed nearly overnight. Even SEAL Team Six came to work with Metni. Not to learn how to jump out of airplanes—they had that part down cold—but to train teamwork, group flow, and the secret to “flipping the switch” while falling through space together.

  “Around the world,” Metni said, “it doesn’t matter what culture, language, or faith, everyone has the same dream: to fly.” So he built a company, iFly, and set out to fulfill that dream, one wind tunnel at a time.

  Today, iFly6 is in fourteen countries with over fifty-four tunnels and revenue nudging ten figures. Thousands and thousands of people who would never have considered jumping out of a perfectly good airplane or leaping off a cliff in a wingsuit have realized that dream, and done so safely. By taking out the risk, iFly has taken a sport once reserved for daredevils and made it accessible to everyone—ages three and up.

  And skydiving isn’t the only high-risk pursuit that has undergone a revolution in accessibility. Across the action sports industry, advancements in technology are providing safer and easier entry into the zone than ever before. Powder skiing, with its utterly magical sensation of floating down a mountain, used to be the rarefied domain of top athletes. Today, extra-fat skis make that float available to anyone who can link two turns together. Mountain bikes, which once offered bone-rattling descents to all but the best riders, now have supple front and rear suspensions, oversize balloon tires, and an ability to roll over the most daunting terrain. Even kitesurfing—best known on the Internet for its “kitemare” footage of people getting dragged by giant sails across highways—has mellowed. Better safety gear lets newcomers find the balance between wind and waves with a fraction of the exposure and learning time.

  This trend, of technological innovation providing wider and safer access to altered states, isn’t limited to adventure sports. As we’ll see in the rest of this chapter, it’s showing up across many disciplines, allowing more people than ever before to sample what these experiences have to offer. We’re shedding some light on Dean’s dark secret, sparing many of us the stark trade-offs that he and so many other pioneers were forced to make. Technology is bringing ecstasis to the masses, allowing us to taste it all, without having to risk it all.

  Things That Go Boom in the Night

  For nearly fifty years, Tony Andrews has been messing with your mind7. If you go out at night, to concerts or clubs, he’s been there, hidden from sight perhaps, but tinkering with your head. If you’ve ever visited the Grand Ole Opry or the Royal Albert Hall or, for that matter, Space—the iconic Ibiza club voted best in the world—he was in that mix too, fine-tuning your brain with incredible precision.

  Andrews’s trade is audio. Technically, he’s a sound engineer who makes loudspeakers. He’s the cofounder of the British speaker company Funktion-One, and while the name may not be familiar, it represents a half century of sonic innovation and the quest for what Andrews has come to call “the audio moment.”

  The audio moment is an instant of total absorption. “It’s the point,” explained Andrews in a recent talk, “when you get really involved in the music. [When] you suddenly realize that you’ve been somewhat transported to another place. . . . When you find yourself experiencing more of yourself than you realized was there in the first place.”

  Andrews’s original audio moment took place when he was nine years old. His mother had brought home a copy of Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog.” When she put it on, immediately, Andrews felt the shift. “I was feeling all this electricity8 in my body, and I didn’t understand what it was, but I knew it felt good—and I’ve been pursuing it ever since.”

  By the time he was sixteen, Andrews was tinkering, building his own tweeters and cabinets and testing out new ideas. One day, for instance, he placed a loudspeaker in the corner of their garage, with the speaker facing inward—so the sound shot straight into the intersection of the wall and floor. The high notes and the midrange vanished, but the bass was booming. So Tony designed a speaker surrounded by three walls, which looked a little like the bell of a trumpet. It was the discovery of “horn-loaded bass,” an invention that led to a significant improvement in the acoustic quality of live concerts and, by extension, the number of transformative audio moments concertgoers could experience.

  Andrews also realized that while a decent home stereo, what used to be called “hi-fi,” had more than enough sound quality to shift consciousness, there were only so many bodies you could pack into a living room. If Andrews wanted to have a real impact, he needed to figure out how to bring that same high-quality sound to more people, to build a system capable of reproducing the audio moment at a stadium level. “Then,” he says, “in my simplistic terms, people could have a common place to expand their minds.”9

  And when we had the opportunity to stand in front of a Funktion-One sound stack at a recent concert, we got a clear sense of how far Andrew’s had come in perfecting his “audio moment.” The experience was less like listening to conventional music and more like getting pressure-washed with a sonic firehose. The bass hit our chests like a concussion grenade; the high notes made the hair on our necks stand up. And throughout the experience, there was no room for thinking at all.

  Of course, Andrews is by no means the first to connect the power of music to its ability to shift consciousness. In recent years, scientists have found that a great many of the world’s oldest religious sites have peculiar acoustic properties. While studying the Arcy-sur-Cure caves10 in France, University of Paris music ethnographer Iegor Reznikoff discovered that the largest collection of Neolithic paintings are found more than a kilometer deep. They’d been intentionally located at the most acoustically interesting spots in the cave: the parts with the most resonance.

  “Reznikoff’s theory,”11 writes author Steven Johnson in How We Got to Now,” “is that Neanderthal communities gathered beside the images they had painted, and they chanted or sang in some kind of shamanic ritual, using the reverberations of the cave to magically widen the sound of their voices.”

  When musicologists traced this trend through history, they found that what began in prehistoric caves also showed up in medieval churches
. In Greece, churches12 were designed with narrow walls to produce a “slap echo,” sort of a threefold sound bounce meant to represent the flapping of an angel’s wings. In France, the Gothic arches of Notre Dame and Chartres13 cathedrals act as giant subwoofers for the pipe organs. For thousands of years, we have been engineering sound to shift consciousness.

  “[I]n all societies,"14 explains neurologist Oliver Sacks in the journal Brain, “a primary function of music is collective and communal, to bring and bind people together. . . . One of the most dramatic effects of music’s power is the induction of trance states. . . . . Trance—ecstatic singing and dancing, wild movements and cries, perhaps rhythmic rocking, or catatonia-like rigidity or immobility . . . [is a] profoundly altered state; and whilst it can be achieved by a single individual, it often seems to be facilitated in a communal group.”

  Scientists working in the burgeoning field of neuro-musicology15 have begun using high-powered imaging to decode these effects. When listening to music, brainwaves move from the high-beta of normal waking consciousness down into the meditative (and trance-inducing) ranges of alpha and theta. At the same time, levels of stress hormones like norepinephrine and cortisol drop, while social bonding and reward chemicals like dopamine, endorphins, serotonin, and oxytocin spike. Add in entrainment—where people’s brains synch to both the beat and to the brains of those around them—and you’ve got a potent combination for communitas.