Stealing Fire

by Steven Kotler

  29. “We wanted a permanent home”: Author interview with Jeff Rosenthal, June 21, 2016.

  30. The series, which has been called “TED crossed with Burning Man”: Andy Isaacson, “Summit Series: TED Meets Burning Man,” Wired, February 27, 2012; Steven Bertoni, “Summit Series Basecamp: The Hipper Davos,” Forbes, January 26, 2012.

  31. MaiTai Global: Author interview, August 22, 2016.

  32. “We curate our experiences very strategically”: Author interview with Jeff Rosenthal, August 15, 2016.

  33. $20 billion”: Richard Godwin, “How to Network like the One Percent,” Sunday Times, June 18, 2016; Kim McNichols, “Kiteboarding Techies Generate $7 Billion in Market Value,” Forbes, December 7, 2011.

  34. We experienced this firsthand: Jamie Wheal, “Five Surprising Ways Richard Branson Harnessed Flow to Build a Multi-Billion Dollar Empire,” Forbes, March 25, 2014.

  35. Carbon Warroom,: See: www.carbonwaroom.com

  36. “That’s where I had the idea for Virgin Galactic”: Wheal, “Five Surprising Ways.”

  37. In his seminal book: Geoffrey Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers (New York: Harper Business, 2006); Everett Rogers, Diffusion of Innovation (New York: Free Press, 2003).

  38. Eighteen million Americans now have a regular practice: T. C. Clarke et al., “Trends in the Use of Complementary Health Approaches Among Adults: United States, 2002–2012,” National Health Statistics, No. 79, Hyattsville, MD, National Center for Health Statistics, 2015; “Uses of Complementary Health Approaches in the U.S.,” National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health.

  39. 44 percent of all U.S. companies will offer mindfulness: “Corporate Mindfulness Programs Grow in Popularity,” National Business Group on Health and Fidelity, July 14, 2016.

  40. Since rolling out their program, Aetna estimates: Joe Pinsker, “Corporations’ Newest Productivity Hack: Meditation,” Atlantic, March 10, 2015.

  41. the meditation and mindfulness industry grew to nearly $1 billion: Jan Wieczner, “Meditation Has Become a Billion-Dollar Business,” Fortune, March 12, 2016.

  42. At Harvard, Professor Tal Ben Shahar’s: Craig Lambert, ’The Science of Happiness,” Harvard Magazine, January–February 2007.

  43. By college, many Millennials have reached: Pfaffenberger, ed., The Postconventional Personality, p. 60.

  44. researchers began finding the practice did everything: N. P. Gothe and E. McAuley, “Yoga and Cognition: A Meta-Analysis of Chronic and Acute Effects,” Psychosomatic Medicine 77, no. 7 (September 2015): 784–97; N. R. Okonta, “Does Yoga Therapy Reduce Blood Pressure in Patients with Hypertension? An integrative Review,” Holistic Nursing Practitioner 26, no. 3 (May–June 2012): 137–41.

  45. As of 2015, some 36 million Americans: Marlynn Wei, “New Survey Reveals the Rapid Rise of Yoga—and Why Some People Still Haven’t Tried It,” Harvard Health Publication, June 15, 2016.

  46. more popular, in terms of participation, than football: 2016 Yoga in America Study, Yoga Journal and Yoga Alliance, http://www.yogajournal.com/yogainamericastudy/.

  47. Bulletproof has grown into a nine-figure company: Author interview with Dave Asprey, 2015.

  48. the fastest-growing industry: Will Yakowicz, “Legal Marijuana Blooms into the Fastest Growing Industry in America,” Inc., January 27, 2015.

  49. The whole of the cannabis economy: The State of Legal Marijuana Markets, 4th ”ed., Arcview Market Research, 2016.

  50. As Peter Reuter: Eliott McLaughlin, “As Haze Clears, Are Americans’ Opinions on Marijuana Reaching a Tipping Point?,” CNN, August 30, 2013.

  51. Thirty-two million Americans use psychedelics: T. S. Krebs P. Ø. Johansen, “Psychedelics and Mental Health: A Population Study,” PloS One, August 13, 2013.

  52. a 2013 study: Ibid.

  53. fewer than four hundred patents for neurotech: “New Gold Rush for US Patents: Brain Technologies,” TRTWorld, May 7, 2015, http://www.trtworld.com/business/new-gold-rush-us-patents-brain-technologies-819.

  54. “They stay up all night dancing”: Harold Bloom, The American Religion (New York: Touchstone, 1992), p. 59. Bloom’s’ book is a fascinating contexualization of American religiosity, with an emphasis on tracing the unique through-lines of the direct and experiential traditions. For additional scholarly assessments, see Jon ’Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), and Nathan Hatch’, Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989).

  Chapter Nine: Burning Down the House

  1. It was 1953 and the Pentagon had a problem: Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon’s Brain (New York: Little, Brown, 2015), p. 103.

  2. So the Secretary of Defense demanded: Ibid, p. 104.

  3. But the CIA had been discreetly testing: Ibid, p. 105.

  4. got wind that a brilliant young neuroscientist: John Lilly, The Scientist (Berkeley, CA: Ronin, 1988), p. 90.

  5. Lilly had solved the two biggest technical problems of mechanically inducing ecstasis: Ibid, pp. 87–88.

  6. In primates, Lilly had discovered: Ibid, p. 90.

  7. “Anybody with the proper apparatus”: Ibid, p. 91.

  8. To guard against this, Lilly detailed: Ibid, p. 92.

  9. Not long after that initial presentation: Ibid, p. 93.

  10. A few years later, Harper’s Magazine: Ibid, p. 96.

  11. History shows a typical progression of information technologies: Tim Wu, The Master Switch (New York: Knopf, 2010), p. 6.

  12. All these disconnected communities and houses will be united through radio: Ibid., p. 37; Bradford Science and Technology Report, No. 8, August 2007.

  13. Before any question of free speech: Ibid., p.13.

  14. As W. B. Yeats put it: This is apocryphally attributed to Yeats, who was an initiate in several mystery cults; it’s also as likely a variant on Eden Phillipot’s 1919 book, A Shadow Passes: “The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.”

  15. consider that elite athletes”: Matt Slater, “Has the Biological Passport Delivered Clean or Confused Sport?,” BBC Sport, November 12, 2014. This is really only the tip of the iceberg. As ethnopharmacologist Jon Ott has noted, the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 specifically prohibits any possession of DMT in any amount, which, given that it is produced endogenously in humans, means that “any human being is guilty of such possession.” In Graham St. ’John, Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural History of DMT (Berkeley, CA: Evolver, 2015), p. 8.

  16. slip Fidel Castro an LSD-soaked cigar: Fabian Escalante, Executive Action: 634 Ways to Kill Fidel Castro (Ocean Press, 2006).

  17. “Within the CIA itself, [agents] were taking LSD regularly” Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream (New York: Grove Press, 1998), p. 82.

  18. a chemist at Fort Detrick’s Biological Weapons Center: James Rissenov, “Suit Planned Over Death of Man C.I.A. Drugged,” New York Times, November 26, 2012.

  19. Stegner dismissed him as a sort of highly talented illiterate: Jackson J. Benson, Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), p. 253.

  20. “The scientists didn’t have the guts”: Joshua Fried, “What a Trip,” Stanford Alumni Magazine, January/February 2002.

  21. “Volunteer Kesey gave himself over to science”: Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968), p. 45.

  22. Half the time”: Ibid., p. 46; Richard Strozzi-Heckler, In Search of the Warrior Spirit: Teaching Awareness Disciplines to the Green Berets (Berkeley: Blue Snake Books, 2007), p. 17.

  23. Armed with speakers mounted in the redwoods: John Markoff, What the Doormouse Said (New York: Viking, 2005), p. 122.

  24. A round of post-Vietnam soul-searching”: FrankRose, “A New Age for Business?,” Fortune, October 8, 1990.

  25. “I just made it my weekend duty”: Jim Channon, interview, Goats Declassified: The Real
Men of the First Earth Battalion (Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2009).

  26. He penned: Jim Channon, First Earth Battalion Operations Manual ([N.p.]: CreateSpace, 2009), p. 64.

  27. “Beam Me Up Spock”: John Alexander, “Beam Me Up Spock: The New Mental Battlefield,” Military Review, December 1980.

  28. Almost as an afterthought’: Channon, First Earth Battalion Operations Manual (CreateSpace, 2009), p. 66.

  29. In May 2003, Newsweek: Adam Piore, “PSYOPS: Cruel and Unusual,” Newsweek, May 19, 2003; Alex Ross, “When Music Is Violence,” New Yorker, July 4, 2016.

  30. In heavily redacted documents: Seth Richardson, “Vegas FBI Investigated Burning Man in 2010,” Reno-Gazette Journal, September 4, 2015. Muckrock is the organization that originally published the findings: https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/sep/01/burning-man-fbi-file/.

  31. More likely, the FBI was taking a page: David Cunningham, There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

  32. And while it’s hard to tell if it’s an anomaly: Sarah Maslin Ner, “Burning Man Ends, and an Event for Law Enforcement Begins,” New York Times, September 11, 2015. Original citation in Reno Gazette-Journal is no longer retrievable, cited at https://burners.me/2013/08/23/pershing-county-cops-and-federal-agents-integrated-and-synchronized/.

  33. In 2007, a collection of the world’s biggest brands: Martin Lindstrom, Buyology: The Truth and Lies About Why We Buy (New York: Crown Business, 2010), p. 12.

  34. discovered that product placement: Ibid., p .14.

  35. no discernible way’: Ibid., p. 126.

  36. At the tail end of the twentieth century: Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Bantam, 1984), p. 221.

  37. It’s how Starbuck’s: Matthew Dollinger, “Starbucks, ‘The Third Place,’ and Creating the Ultimate Customer Experience,” Fast Company, June 11, 2008.

  38. were at the Advertising Research Foundation: B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011), p. 255.

  39. You may or may not get as lean as those models: Thu-Huong Ha, “New Ads from Equinox Show Gym-goers at Peak Absurdity,” Quartz, January 13, 2016.

  40. That’s a positive transformation”: For a fascinating take on “reverse brands” like CrossFit and Ikea, which strip out presumed amenities in favor of delivering on a different set of consumer desires, see Youngme Moon’, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd (New York: Crown Business, 2010).

  41. Consider a recent Jeep campaign: Presentation at Advertising Research Foundation by Omnicom agency responsible for campaign. Additional details at http://m.jeep.com/jeep_life/news/jeep/stick_in_the_mud.html and http://media.fcanorthamerica.com/newsrelease.do?id=1919&mid=46.

  42. a multibillion-dollar industry that employ the best neuroscientists: Seth Ferranti, “How Screen Addiction Is Damaging Kids’ Brains,” Vice, August 6, 2016.

  43. In their study, a trained storyteller: Author interview with Chris Berka, Advanced Brain Monitoring, the company responsible for conducting the study, January 27, 2015.

  44. It’s very easy to imagine: Kevin Kelly, “The Untold Story of Magic Leap, the World’s Most Secretive Startup,” Wired, May 2016.

  45. This comprehensive tracking”: Ibid.

  46. “all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects”: Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932), p. 54.

  47. “In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting”: Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (New York: Penguin, 2005), p. viii.

  48. all power that derives from the control of information: Tim Wu, The Master Switch (New York: Knopf, 2010), p. 310.

  49. The Cycle is powered by disruptive innovations: Ibid., p. 20.

  Chapter Ten: Hedonic Engineering

  1. Sasha Shulgin used to say:” Dirty Pictures.

  2. First identified back in the 1930s, Jerusalem Syndrome: Yair Bar-El et al., “Jerusalem Syndrome,” British Journal of Psychiatry 176 (2000): 86–90.

  3. It’s why Burning Man advises people: This essay is one the more frequently reposted and entertaining articles on “decompression” or coming back to regular life after the event, by “The Colonel” of Arctic Monkey Camp: “Do Not Divorce Your Parakeet Yet,” New York Burners Guide, original date and publishing location unknown. Here’s a look at the first paragraph:

  “DO NOT MAKE CHANGES TO YOUR LIFE FOR AT LEAST THREE WEEKS AFTER YOU COME BACK FROM BURNING MAN.

  “Do not quit your job. Do not divorce your wife, husband, sister, dog, parakeet. Do not sell all your possessions and move to Tibet to be a monk. Do not ditch your car and travel the world. Do not found Hobbit Camp. Do not plan a giant zeppelin for next year’s Burn. Do not move out of your house, break up with your girlfriend, boyfriend, get married, move in your playa lover, sell your car, ditch your friends, or make other rash decisions after you come home. This is important, because the playa is still going to be in your brain, and the effects are like that of rarefied stupid sometimes. It will make total sense to have a threesome with your significant other and someone in an enormous rabbit costume at the Burn; in reality the ears get caught in the ceiling fan. Make sure if you have major life decisions to make, you make them AFTER you settle down and settle in. The emotions and the stress will still be in your system for some time; do not allow them to unduly influence your life.”

  4. In 2009, Swiss neurologist Peter Brugger: Peter Brugger, Christine Mohr, Peter Krummenacher, and Helene Haker, “Dopamine, Paranormal Belief, and the Detection of Meaningful Stimuli,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 22, no. 8, 2010: 1670–81.

  5. When the prefrontal cortex shuts down, impulse control: Julie A. Alvarez and Eugene Emory, “Executive Function and the Frontal Lobes: A Meta-Analytic Review,” Neuropsychology Review 16, no. 1 (March 2006). We have oversimplified the relationship between the PFC and executive function; as this meta-analysis suggests, there are more complex relationships between neuroanatomy and consciousness.

  6. As Buddhist teacher and author Jack Kornfield: Jack Kornfield, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry: How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path (New York: Bantam, 2001).

  7. In 1806, General Zebulon Pike: Zebulon Pike, Account of Expeditions (1806–1807)” (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society, 2003).

  8. Our ability to accurately estimate how close things are to happening: Burkhard Bilger, “The Possibilian”,” New Yorker, April 25, 2011. David Eagleman is a friend and advisory board member, and doing some of the more interesting work on time perception. This New Yorker article is a great introduction to some of the basics in his research.

  9. Popular religious movements, from the Seventh-Day Adventists: Leon Festinger, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964).

  10. Contemporary psychonauts have even coined a term: https://wiki.dmt-nexus.me/Hyperspace_lexicon#Eschatothesia.

  11. “Most people overestimate”: Bill Gates, The Road Ahead (New York: Viking Press, 1995), p. 316 (this is the closest documented source we can find for the more folksy variant we quote).

  12. In 2014, Ryan Holiday: Ryan Holliday, The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph (New York: Portfolio, 2014), p. xiv.

  13. Nick Mevoli: Adam Skolnick, “A Deep-Water Diver From Brooklyn Dies After Trying for a Record,” New York Times, Nov. 17, 2003.

  14. Water is acceptance: Nick Mevoli, “How I Got to 91 Meters,” freediveblog.com, See: http://www.freediveblog.com/2012/06/11/how-i-got-to-91-meters-by-nick-mevoli/

  15. The biggest problem with freedivers: “Blue Hole, Black Hole,” Economist, Feb. 27, 2016.

  16. One with the World, Skolnick, ibid.

  17. On one occasion the tank was too warm: Lilly, The Scientist, p. 158. All subsequent information from this section drawn from this and related autobi
ographical reports.

  18. “No sympathy for the devil”: Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (New York: Vintage, 1998), p. 89.

  19. If the North Face’: Hans Ludwig, “The Return of the Extreme Skier,” Powder, December 2010.

  20. “We got pinned on a 70-degree face”: Kristen Ulmer, author interviews, June 15–21, 2016. All subsequent information in this section is drawn from same.

  21. The meeting was dedicated to resisting Calvinistic attacks: Michael Moss, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (New York: Random House, 2014), p. 10. All subsequent quotes on this topic are from here.

  22. as UCLA’s Ron Siegel suggests: Siegel, Intoxication, p. 209.