Stealing Fire

by Steven Kotler

  First, we hooked him up to a heart rate variability monitor to establish a cardiac baseline. Then he strapped into the kiteboard bindings and began pumping the looping swing higher and higher. Most people encounter two limits on this device. The first is when they reach the highest point they ever attained on a playground swing, typically about 50 degrees. If they can push past that last known safe zone, the next limit is actually when they’re straight upside down and needing to drive their weight forward (against all better judgment when you’re twenty feet off the ground) to push the swing through a full revolution.

  Brin pumped past both of those limits, looping the swing (only about 5 percent of subjects manage that feat on their first attempt), and then proceeded to stall the swing at its apex, and loop it blind and backward. When we compared his biofeedback data from his sessions to his baseline, he had lost coherence when he was initially exerting himself, but had regained an organized brain and heart rhythm once his body-knowledge figured out how to adapt and adjust. His only comment when he returned back to earth? “I want one in my backyard.”

  Brin’s instinct to keep training these skills is supported by the data. Embodied cognition research shows that we become more flexible and resilient when we train our bodies and brains together, and in increasingly dynamic situations. It’s why the SEALs say “you don’t ever rise to the occasion, you sink to your level of training” and then proceed to overtrain for every scenario possible. It’s a more advanced corollary to Amy Cuddy’s power-posing advice: Once you get the basics down, start upping the ante. Try remaining centered under more challenging conditions (like managing heart and brain activity while swinging upside down). If we want to train for stability in all conditions, the science suggests, it’s essential to practice with instability first.

  Later in the visit, Google’s other founder, Larry Page, gave one of Mikey Siegel’s newest creations a try: a mix of 3D surround sound and visual feedback designed to prompt connection between people. Sitting in an enclosed dome, he and his wife put on small backpack subwoofers (so they literally felt the bass through their bodies, not their ears). They then watched two digital flowers blossom and contract on the screen surrounding them. But there was a trick to the setup—Larry was feeling his wife’s heart beat and watching his flower pulse to her heart’s rhythms, and she was watching and feeling his. By deliberately crossing the feedback loops, the installation creates technologically mediated empathy, no talking required. So absorbing was the experience that when the nighttime sprinklers came on and accidentally sprayed them, they just assumed it was part of the simulation.

  While the field of immersive experience design and training is in its infancy, early results, like this project at Google, suggest that by combining all of the advancements in technology (movement, sound, light, and sensors) with an embodied hands-on training program, you can trigger a range of nonordinary states with far more precision and with much less risk. In the past, to get a glimpse of “no-self,” it might have taken a high-risk wingsuit flight, a decade of monastic isolation, or a heroic (and possibly reckless) dosage of an unpredictable substance. Today, we can use innovations like the Flow Dojo to skillfully tweak and tune the knobs and levers of our bodies and brains and get similar breakthroughs with a fraction of the breakdowns.

  “And really, that’s the true power of technology and the four forces in general: they give more people more access to ecstasis in safer and more approachable ways. Without the shift in psychology, the notion of harnessing altered states toward practical ends would have seemed crazy. But we now know they can heal trauma, amplify creativity and accelerate personal development. Without advances in neurobiology, mystical experiences would have remained just that, mystifying. But we now know the precise adjustments to body and brain function that let us recreate them for ourselves. Without the progress in pharmacology, our exploration of nonordinary states would’ve remained constrained by geography, church and state. But we now know that a wide range of compounds disclose potentially revelatory information and insight. Without the developments in technology, too few were forced to risk too much to glimpse the value inherent in altered states. But we now know how to prime and prompt these experiences safely and at scale.

  Driven by these changes, our understanding of ecstasis is now advancing at an exponential rate. Findings in one domain are informing and supporting developments in others. Research has been open-sourced, access has been democratized, and—as will become much clearer in Part III of this book—proof that these four forces are driving a revolution is everywhere you look.

  Part Three

  The Road to Eleusis

  “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”

  —William Blake

  Chapter Eight

  Catch a Fire

  The Sandbox of the Future

  If gizmos and gadgets are your thing, then the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is your pilgrimage. If it’s superheroes and graphic novels, then it’s San Diego’s Comic-Con. But if you’re stalking ecstasis, if you want to see the four forces cranked up and deployed for full effect, then head out to that same desert festival Larry Page and Sergey Brin used to screen Eric Schmidt—Burning Man.

  Every year, some three hours northeast of Reno, on a vast alkali flat known as the Black Rock Desert, you’ll find all the major players from Part Two of this book. There’s Tony Andrews in purple paisley, bumping bass out of a Funktion-One art car. Mikey Siegel’s around, too, demonstrating neurofeedback to the dusty and the curious. Android Jones has erected a giant dome to display his trance-inducing visionary art. There are workshops by world-renowned sex therapists, lectures on neurotheology by Ivy League scientists, and every head-bending alphabetamine Sasha Shulgin ever dreamed up. Off in the distance, you might even spot the Red Bull Air Force, dressed up in flaming costumes and wingsuiting into the city. Whatever else can be said about the event, Burning Man holds the undisputed title as the world’s largest ecstatic trade show.

  “Burning Man aggressively extends the tradition of hedonic ecstasy,”1 writes Erik Davis. “[Wild] visuals, disorienting sonics, and a self-conscious excess of sensory stimulation . . . all help undermine stabilized frames. . . . [It’s a] full-sensorium brain machine designed to bring us in tune with our mind’s ongoing construction of real-time on the fly.”

  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.

  Increasingly, that transformation engine has been producing real change in the world. And that’s the point of this chapter. If the past section examined the emergence of the four forces, this one asks the next obvious question: is the radical inspiration the forces provide leading to practical innovation? Earlier we explored studies that demonstrated nonordinary states can meaningfully boost creativity and problem solving under controlled conditions. Here, we want to step outside the lab and see if ecstasis is helping solve wicked problems “in the wild.” And Burning Man is perhaps the best place to begin this inquiry.

  The first thing to note is who’s showing up at the festival. Unlike in the Woodstock era, attendees are no longer just countercultural bohemians who have “tuned in, turned on, and dropped out.” For sure, there are stil
l plenty of punk anarchists, industrial artists, and warehouse denizens for whom life in the mainstream is a sometimes awkward fit. 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.

  When Tim Ferriss mentioned that nearly all of the billionaires he knows in Silicon Valley take psychedelics to help themselves solve complex problems, Burning Man is one of their preferred locations to step out and go big. “If you haven’t been [to Burning Man], you just don’t get Silicon Valley,”3 serial entrepreneur and longtime attendee Elon Musk noted in Re/Code. “You could take the craziest L.A. party and multiply it by a thousand, and it doesn’t even get fucking close.”

  Among certain circles, mention of “the playa” or “Black Rock City” gains you instant camaraderie with those who have shared that baptism by fire. Participation in successful Burning Man camps has morphed from countercultural street cred to career-building material. “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.”

  Over the last decade in particular, the festival has become a regular stop for those whose calendar might include Davos, TED, and a slew of other high-profile gatherings. In 2013, John Perry Barlow, a fellow at Harvard Law School5 and former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, casually tweeted from Burning Man: “Spent much of the afternoon in conversation with Larry Harvey, Mayor of Burning Man and Gen. Wesley Clark, who is here.” At one of the more infamous parties on the planet, countercultural royalty are hobnobbing with a former Supreme Commander of NATO turned U.S. presidential candidate.

  Three years later, the actual president,6 Barack Obama, joked about the event at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner, saying: “Just recently, a young person came up to me and said she was sick of politicians standing in the way of her dreams—as if we were actually going to let Malia go to Burning Man this year. Was not going to happen. Bernie [Sanders] might have let her go. Not us.”

  If the President of the United States is moved to comment on the event, and Elon Musk is claiming it’s central to Silicon Valley culture, then perhaps there’s more going on than just a weeklong party. And that’s the second thing to explore in our assessment—why so many creative and talented people go so far out of their way to congregate there once a year. By simple elimination, it can’t just be the sex, drugs, or music. Those indulgences, however tantalizing, are little more than commodities in any major city. There must be a pretty compelling something that inspires people to take a week out of their calendars to wander around an inhospitable salt flat in the middle of absolute nowhere.

  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.

  And this doesn’t just happen by accident. Wandering out into the middle of that intentional chaos at 2 a.m., surrounded by fire-spewing dinosaurs, giant neon-lit pirate ships, and the throbbing beats of galactic hip-hop, you’re ripped away from all familiar reference points, totally unstuck in time, and well beyond normal awareness. 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. It’s the single greatest concentration of state-altering technology on the planet, designed by everyone together and no one in particular.

  Which brings us to the final and most important category in our assessment: the astonishing amount of innovation this event consistently inspires. Attendees treat the playa as an oversized sandbox—a place where ideas can be dreamed up, tested out, and, as often as not, shared freely with everyone. “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.”

  In 2007, Elon Musk did just that, debuting an early prototype10 of his Tesla electric roadster at the event. He also came up with the ideas11 for both his renewable energy company SolarCity and his superfast transit system Hyperloop while on the playa. And true to the Burning Man principle of gifting, he gave both away. SolarCity went to his cousins; Hyperloop, published online in a white paper, was an offering to the world at large (that has since inspired two different companies).

  Zappos founder and CEO Tony Hsieh12 told Playboy that the experience of collective awareness, what he calls “the hive switch,” is the reason he attends. That “feeling of unity with the other people in the space, unity with the music and with one another . . . that’s why I go to Burning Man.” For Hsieh, the festival has had such an impact that he’s built its ideas into the corporate culture of Zappos, reorganizing the company to make flipping “the hive switch” as easy as possible. Similarly, he’s also spearheaded the Downtown Project, an attempt to revitalize central Las Vegas with radical inclusion, interactive art, and other core elements of the festival.

  While much has been made of the fact that Hsieh’s efforts have faced setbacks13 and challenges, it would be surprising if things went differently. Hsieh has taken ideas pioneered at Burning Man and is attempting to reinvent the culture of a Fortune 500 company and to reinvigorate (to the tune of $350 million) a blighted urban core. That’s structural change in the real world, with all the risks and complications it entails.

  Musk’s projects too, aren’t without their complications. But reinventing transportation and pioneering a new energy grid (to say nothing of his efforts to colonize Mars) are wicked enough problems that they’ve stymied all prior efforts to solve them. What these examples make clear is that the perspective provided by nonordinary consciousness and culture offers a different path forward—a way to reconsider intractable challenges with fresh eyes.

  All of these practical applications have, in turn, inspired the Burning Man organization itself. “A few years ago, we attended the event to speak at their annual TEDx series and then got invited to a small salon hosted by Danger Ranger. And it wasn’t just Silicon Valley tech titans in attendance. Senior vice presidents from Goldman Sachs, heads of the largest creative ad agencies in the world, and leaders of the World Economic Forum, were all discreetly there, using fanciful assumed names, far from the flashbulbs and scrutiny of the media and the markets. Their goal was to forge a future based on the shared experience of communitas writ large: a permanent Burning Man community, a place where experiments with the four forces could be conducted year round.

  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 the organization announced, “from an ephemeral exper
iment into a global cultural movement having an impact on social, economic and artistic norms and structures. Burning Man’s culture is becoming more recognized and influential around the world.”

  When the Levee Breaks

  One of the more interesting parts of this story isn’t simply that Burners are trying to establish a homeland for ecstasis. It’s that some of the hardest and grittiest lessons of building a city from scratch are showing up thousands of miles beyond the Nevada desert. So, if we want to continue our exploration of how nonordinary states are helping to solve wicked problems “in the wild,” then we should head to some of the wildest places on earth—those ravaged by natural disasters and protracted war.

  To better understand how a weeklong gathering could have such far-reaching impact, it’s important to understand that in preparation for the event, all the central Burning Man organization does is survey the streets and put out port-a-potties. Everything else about the makeshift city—the camps, the giant art, the generators, the medical facilities, and the peacekeeping—is organized by volunteers. In coming together to create a city of seventy thousand, Burners are pioneering fundamentally different ways of organizing and mobilizing people in the face of some of the harshest conditions on the planet—and they’re using the bonding power of communitas to do it.

  One of the first times those skills truly got put to the test was in 2005. It was August 29, and over on the Gulf Coast Hurricane Katrina was less than an hour from making landfall. By the time the storm was over, it would spread $108 billion of damage16 from Florida to Texas, and earn the dark honor of being one of the five worst hurricanes in U.S. history.