Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal || On Ecstasis and Extraordinary States of Consciousness

Stephen Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author and award winning journalist and the co founder director of research for the Full Genome Project. Jamie will is an expert on peak performance and leadership, specializing in the neuroscience and application of flow states. Together, they have written the awesome book Stealing fire House Silicon Valley. The Navy Seals and Maverick scientists are revolutionizing the way we live and work.

Thanks for chatting with me today, guys, Thanks for having us. Scott really appreciate it absolutely. Yeah, what a really cool look. It like really really flows nicely and is really engrossing. Where did you guys meet, Like, how did you guys like find each other. I'd love to know that. You know, Jamie and I independently had each put in over a decade probably more studying flow stags, right, those states of

optimal performance. When I got convinced by a bunch of my academic friends that there was no way to start a flow research project inside of academia, that you know, the conditions just weren't right yet. When I decided to kind of move it outside of academia and had sort of like qut to get you know, it, was looking for people to build this research project with. One of the very first people I was introduced to was Jamie

and it just started there. We realized we had both probably been holding each had a half of this project in our head and when you put together, you know, it really worked. Yeah, and Jamie, what were you doing at the time. I was actually working in management consulting, so doing a lot of high performance leadership for sort of mid market CEOs, so a lot of kind of folks in the YPO and WPO community Young President's Organization.

SO had spent yeah, five to ten years working on how do you try and create long term adult or vertical adult development in impact entrepreneurs and leaders, and before that had had a background in sort of expeditionary leadership, so mountain guiding, surf rescue, wilderness, medicine, all those kinds of things. And so between those two worlds it had a lot of cycles. Here's the theory, here's how it sounds in practice. How do you put it on the

ground in really challenging and dynamic situations. So it was a great combination. Stephen brought a ton of the neuroscience and perspective, and I was kind of coming more from the sort of performance psychology and execution side. So were you like the Steve jobs and he was the laws? Who's the jobs and who's the was an ongoing question for us. We need to leave to Rochambeau for that one. I think, yeah, I don't think it's quite a clear cut. By the way, let's just be clear, nobody is building

the Lisa right right, right right exactly. I hope not. That didn't do too well that system. So Steve, I want to circle back Westling. You said that you've been studying the fast Day for ten years. Can you tell me what you mean by study it? Now? You don't have like a PhD. In cognitive science or something like that. I don't have a PhD in anything, right. My background

is as a writer. But there's been two questions that well, one question that has sort of been at the center of all my work as a writer as a journalist, you know, thirty some years of work, which is how do people do the impossible? And it doesn't really matter, you know, whether we're talking about athletes pushing the boundaries of kinestetic performance to people building the fastest, most powerful

companies in history. Everywhere you look, whatever domain, and you keep coming back to, you know, the same result at Abraham Matt that I discovered back in the fifties, which is every successful person you find anywhere has found a way to alter their consciousness, put themselves into the state of flow, and use that state to increase productivity, creativity, performance, innovation, you name it. So that was one side. And the other thing that happened to me is I got very sick.

I spent three years in bed with lime disease, and through a long, weird series of events, ended up sort

of surfing my way back to health. And when I was sort of dragged at the ocean and put into the ocean, at a time I could barely walk and got dropped into a flow state on the first wave that I sort of caught and felt amazingly better, really a lot better, and over the course of kind of six to eight months, but the only thing I was doing differently in my life besides kind of lying on a couch and moaning, was occasionally going to the beach

and having these very powerful flow experiences. And they started to bleed over into the rest of my life. But I started to get massively better. And I had an autoimmune condition. The first question I had is the hell is going on? Right? Like surfing and these strange mystical experiences I was having while surfing, I didn't yet know they were called flow states. It's not a common cure for autoimmune editions. So like my first question was the

hell is going on with me? And once I started to realize what was going on with me and that these states of consciousness and a lot of this is Herbert Fence's work at Harvard have a really big impact on health, and it started to explain what was going on. I started to realize that the same state of consciousness that was helping me go from kind of seriously subpar back to normal was helping all these people who I've been kind of studying, who are doing impossible go from

you know, normal all the way up to Superman. So my world sort of collided, and from that point on I just dove into the science, and more specifically the neuroscience. You know, this was right at a time when we started peeking under the hood of the brain for the very very first time. So we started, I'm fascinated by mechanism. I want to know how do things work? And you know, something is a magical and mysterious as flow. I really

wanted to understand that. And you know, over the past fifteen years, we've made tremendous progress in understanding, you know, the first bits and pieces about how consciousness and altered states of consciousness work in the brain. And so it was an incredibly exciting time to dive into that. Yeah, we sure have. And I think you're right about flow being a very understudied topic in science. You know, obviously

me High chickset. Me High's pioneering work on the topic has not really people within science haven't taken up the mantle too much. We study other things in positive psychology of like optimal states and altered states of conscious but flow itself is definitely understudied. So yeah, I think it's a great thing that you guys have really taken this and particularly long into the field being the real world and looking to see how flow operates in the real world.

And now this book though, this latest book, Stealing Fire, is not specifically about flow, right, it's about ecstasis. Yeah, yeah, exactly, So, I mean, you know, who knows. I mean, it's ancient Greek, so we've at least chosen to mangle it as extasis. But take your pick and the idea there is really something that we found in our research was, first of all,

what's the neurobiology of the flow state? You know, what's happened to the near electricity, Where are the brain wasts, what's happening neuroanatomically, what parts of the brains are turning on or off during these different states, what's happening with the endocrine system, what's happening with your cardiac system, How coherent are your heart rates, posture, breathing, all whole host of correloids that seem to show up and flow. That's what we really based what we call the genome a flow.

That's the name, you know, why we call our organization

what we have, what are the core building works. And once we built that out, based on her Benson's work, based on Red Bull's work with doctor Andy Welsh, based on lots of different folks contributing both in the theory and the practice, we've found ourselves almost with a kind of accidental Rosetta stone, which was letting us translate a whole bunch of other non ordinary states and realizing, wow, meditations, smart tech enabled states, sexually provoked states, actions and adventure sports,

artistic states, you know, a whole much, much broader spectrum of just anything but twenty first century normal all seem to share remarkably similar mechanisms under the hood, and each of these different subdisciplines never talk to each other, so you know, you had meditation was for kind of you know, saints and monks, and flow states for artists and athletes, and psychedelic states were for sort of hippies and ravers and very little cross pollination, both in the communities of

practice but also in the communities of research. And as soon as we pop that open, we realized, oh, wow, we need a bigger voat we need a broader category of which flows a subset but also includes a host of other non ordinary states of consciousness that appear to share similar mechanisms. And for us, that's the big story. It's not that there's a psychedelic renaissance. It's not that mindfulness based stress reduction is a cool new thing you

know in businesses in Silicon valleys. Is not any of those things so much as it is all of those things put together. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You call the altered state's economy, is that right? Yes? So when we Fire first started, you know, we were running around the country training people up and flow and

everywhere we met. When people would come up to us after the presentation, and as Jamie alluded to, they would say, oh, the flow stuff is great, but we're also going to silent meditation retreats, or the whole teams of engineers are microdosing with psychedelics to anands creative. We kept seeing stumbling upon kind of these other things going on, and eventually we decided that this felt really big and we wanted

a way to quantify it. So first we came up with the term e stasis, which literally means ex stasis to stand outside oneself. And if you go back to the Greek, its states of consciousness where we kind of change the channel on normal waking consciousness, we get rid

of the self, the self pends do vanish. Neurobiologically, of course, what that really means is the parts of the brain that generate our sense of self tend to turn off in these states, and we tend to tap into these realms of inspiration or information, you know, heightened information processing in the brain. So that became that neurobiology and that definition sort of became a roadmark, and we said, let's just take a look at what we call the altered

state's economy. How much money do people spend globally trying to shut off the self, trying to get out of their head, trying to change the normal channel of consciousness and mind you you know, with ecstasis, we're really speaking about positives, right, good things things that a bet performance with the authors did economy, we were you know, we went everywhere. It was just anything anybody does to try

to turn off the waking self. So this, you know, ranged from legal and illegal drugs to the whole kind of category of self help and psychology all that sort of stuff to activities range and from gambling to social media to action, sport whatnot. That changed our state of consciousness when we were done doing the math in the most conservative, conservative conservative way possible, which is to say, I think we're probably you could probably double our number

and be close to the truth. But the reason we didn't is because what we came up with was four trillion dollars one sixteenth of the global economy, larger than the GDP of Britain or India or Russia. I mean, a massive, staggering number, twenty five percent of the US GDP if you were to just make it a local number, and that's insane, and no one's talking about it. So not only you know, as Jama pointed out, we're all these different disparate groups of people doing the same thing

and not aware of it. We were all doing it to the tune of four trillion dollars a year, this incredible amount of energy and time, and nobody is talking about it. So that's where the altars did economy came from? Right? How did you drive that number? Well, if you go to stealing firebook dot com, you can get pd apps that that break it down. We break it down entirely. Wow, that way, it's a long It was a long category. But we literally just took categories how much do we

spend an illegal pharmaceuticals? How much do you spend on illegal pharmaceuticals? And then we looked at you know, we were very careful. And when I said, we were very careful. For example, you could make the argument right that a lot of entertainment, for example, theater films, yeah, is to get shut off the self. Turn that off. And we said, okay, but people go to the movies for other reasons. But let's just take IMAX, where you know, you drive out

of the way. Theaters spend a lot of money for tickets, and why do you do it? So you can have the amazing state change experience provided by a huge wide screen surround sound. All the tricks that they use for IMAX are all about turning off the cell and taking you someplace else. When I said conservative, that's what I met, we took. We were as cautious as we could. Obviously, the real number probably has a lot more of film in it than just IMAX, but we wanted to do

that conservative cool. That sounds like a really neat analysis. So what is that paradox of selflessness then that you talk about in the book and when you say paradox, which specific Well, so you're talking about the fact that you have to get out of yourself to find yourself. Yes, that's exactly. Yeah, that's a great question, Scott. I know

it dovetails in with your research. And by the way, you pooh pooh academia for not taking up the flow mantle, but I just got a pause give you your kudos because you really have taken up the plow mantle in academia and I love I love what you're contributing to it. So first of all, thank you, and you know, don't help downplay your own contribution here because it's amazing. And second, well, actually, before you jump in back into our stuff, I got I've got to pile on Scott as well, because I

was even just talking with someone this weekend. I mean, the biggest contribution from your work that's affected me is just your bifurcation of the default mode network and the idea that sometimes some people sometimes end up in excess rumination neurotic loops, it drags them down, and that correlates with all the other work that I'd seen on the default mode network, but then you've I feel like, have contributed something invaluable, which is for some people super productive, creative,

generative daydreaming is deeply pleasurable and positive and so and that's clearly more much more matches my experience. I'm a crap meditator because I've never I've never actually been that that driven to empty my mind. I enjoy a lot of what goes on in there. So you can be permission to own my hyperactive default mode network. So thank

you for that as well. Thank you. I actually like to call it the imagination network when I'm in public, because I think it's it's more just it's what's first of all, it's about sexier than the default mode network, right and easy and yes, so I'm going to I'm going to take your nomenclature from here on out. Okay, cool, a paradox of self to get back to that. Yeah, what you know, this is not obviously just to our research.

This is I think research that goes all the way back to William James at the turn of the century. But you know, what we consistently find is that when you can you know shut off the self through whatever method, and you know, as I said earlier, meaning kind of deactivate the parts of the prefrontal cortex that you know, generate our sense of self. Amazing things happen because when your shelf shuts off, the inner critic goes away, right, that nagging always on to feed this voice in your

head is suddenly silent. And as a result, creativity goes up, risk taking goes up. And you have and I know Jamie hates this term, but I don't have a better one, but you have what I've been calling the high perch experience. Right with all that clutter out of the way, it seems like you have a higher vantage when you can see farther in the distance over your life. So you have gain massive amounts of perspective into who you are. You also gain the ability to hold multiple perspectives at once.

So it's not a fixed sense of self anymore. Right, as Jamie likes to say, you get to unzip the monkey suit of our every day lives, right, and you get to step into a bigger version of yourself. So when you come back, you know, out of this non ordinary state of consciousness, whether it's a meditative state, or a flow stata or a psychedelic experience, take your pick. You're no longer as tightly bounded by who you used to be. You are on the path to be coming.

And this is why. You know, if you look at the all the adult development work that's come out of Harvard, that kind of Bob Keegan's work and down the line, one of the things that shows up is that the

kind of you still have to do the homework. This does not exclude, excuse the really hard work of adult development, but you can actually, you know, move yourself up the adult development scale, gaining more perspective, more empathy, and all really the traits that we now associate with wisdom by having more frequent access to non ordinary states of consciousness. So when we say you have to lose yourself to find yourself, that's really we're talking about. It makes a

lot of sense. And you actually have an example in there of our mutual friend Jason Silva, who has talked about how he kind of needs to get into these altered states in order to be seen. Is that right, by the way, Jason was amazing and wonderful, and yes, but it's not just Jason. I will flat out tell you that one of the reasons I'm so committed to this work is left to my own devices. It's bad upstairs, right, it can get bad upstairs for me as well, right,

But I mean Jason speaks to it his experience. He really essentially coming out of high school, growing up in a very turbulent time in Venezuela, with everybody in his family being assaulted at gunpoint, including his grandmother and his father being kidnapped, and you know, he really developed essentially post traumatic stress disorder, and you know, started organizing these philosophical salons as sort of a last ditch attempt to like he he became a shut inning. He wouldn't leave

his house, We had no social life. So he was trying to bring people to him, and he was trying to like rEFInd his sanity. And at these salons he would go off on these philosophical rants, the same rants that he's famous for now that have made him one of the best media artists in the world and the host of national geographics and I May Award winning brand games and all that other stuff, you know, that emerged out of these salons, and at first he couldn't believe it.

He didn't know. A couldn't believe it was feeling so good, and B couldn't believe he had access to like you know, if you've ever seen Jason, his creativity is wordsmithing, his spontaneity, all of it is astounding. It's all imagination network. Yeah, it's all fired it's all fired up for him. And

that's what these flow states were given him. And so they gave him back his life, right Like, over time, his fear, his neuroticism, his shut in nature, his PTSD diminished significantly and all these positive attributes came on and you know, interestingly, of course, and we make this point of the book, it's not just Jason Silba who fought back PTSD when not in ordinary stitch we've seen it,

you know, station hacking. The results in research done all over the place using meditation, flow and psychedelics to treat post traumatic stress disorder with incredible you know proficiency basically and being the SSRIs and talk therapy neither of them work very well for you know, post traumatic stress disorder. Seeing that we have these other tools and the toolkit and they really I mean, think about where Jason Silva came from and where he went and that seems to

be you know, he says it in the book. He says, every super successful person I've met has learned how to do this, and that's what I found, as Maslow found. So you know, I think you start to see what these states really open up for us. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, you certainly do. And I like this idea that it can help produce anxiety as well, kind of get you out of by getting you outside of your ordinary consciousness. That's a really cool theme as well. So do you mind if I jump into the four

forces of exocists? Is that cool? Yeah? For sure. So yeah, let's do you guys want to like do one each? Sure? Sure, So I'll start with psychology. I mean, you know, in a nutshell, the whole working concept of the four forces of extasis is to say, Okay, if there's this big, giant, four trillion dollar underground economy and no one's talking about it, why is it happening now? What intersection are we standing at?

Sort of you know, socio politically, economically, culturally, That makes it now and not ten years ago or fifty years ago. And so that's where we came up with the idea of these four forces, which is that in the last half century we have really been unlocking critical elements in distinct disciplines that are now sort of reaching a catalyzation point. And those four forces are psychology, neurobiology, technology, and pharmacology. And I'll just you know, just to give you a

sense of the first one. With psychology, if you think back to kind of post World War Two, you know, everybody came into the fifties with a pretty buttoned down sense of norms and what was permissible as far as a full range of human expression. You sort of had Betty Homemaker and you had organization man. And it's leave it to be if there are my three sons and all those kind of classic cliches now grounded. There were tons of people that didn't fit those models. But they

didn't they didn't have a seat at the table. They

weren't reinforced as cultural norms. And if you were outside of that, if you were gay, if you were depressed, if you had a whole range of just alternate behaviors or expressions, you either medicated them or repressed them, you know, compared to today, So jump forward through the sixties and seventies, jump through escellin and the human potential movement and pillow thumping gestalt sessions and getting in touch with your inner dolphin, and you know a whole range of much wider experiments

and explorations to today where you can have a transgendered Victoria's secret model walking down a runway to a standing ovation. And so the realm for us to see that non ordinary states of consciousness, non order, were you less than lock buttoned down. Typical ranges of psychological expression are okay permitted that there's resources, that there's communities, that there's workshops,

that there's pop psych books. There's a whole sort of permission to be more more along the lines of that old Whitman you know quote, whereas that I contradict myself, Yes, so what I contradict myself? I'm lodge. I contain multitudes, you know, And so those contradictions and those multitudes, we just have much more permission these days to explore an experiment within them without sort of going off the reservation

or being left in a pet itself. And I think this takes us right to neurobiology very cleanly, which is our second force. You know, two things before I dive into it and even make that connective tissue. Jamie spoke about the why now right, these four forces are emerging right now, and that's why it's happening. The I I think that's really important to know about these four forces is this is, of course not the very first time in history people have said, oh wow, non ordinary states and

consciousness can help performance. Right, this goes all the way, as we document in the book, it's a trend that goes all the way back into the Greeks and probably you know, goes a lot farther into prehistory than that. But historically when these things show up, they tend to go horribly wrong. Right, there's a dark side, there's a

downside to all this stuff. And one of the core arguments in the book is that with these four forces kind of emerging, there's maybe a middle path available between kind of the hetonic excess that tends to derail these things and the backlash of massive societal control that is the result. There's a middle way where we're actually armed with a lot more information than we've ever had before,

and neurobiology is a great example. Psychology has given us more permission to explore and then the work you're involved in write a better kind of understanding of how to make meaning from this journey where we're going all those sorts of things. Neurobiology has really pulled back the veil, right,

What used to be mystical is now neurobiological. And you know, the easiest example is back in nineteen ninety seven, both our friend and Doug to Andrey Nuberg right, who was then at the University of Pennsylvania, use spec scans to decode cosmic unity, the feeling of being one with everything, which was in every religion or mystical system in history. It was sort of the most common mystical experience. And yet, like nineteen ninety six, you walk into a doctor's office

and say, Doc, I feel one with everything. You're going to a pad itself, right, Yeah, But Andy comes along and you know, suddenly realizes, hey, wait a minute, there's a part of the brain that separates self from other. This part of the brain turns off in meditation, and thus the brain can no longer tell where yourself ends and the rest of the world begins. Right, So this is nineteen ninety seven. We've decoded the most common mystical

experience in history and it's amazing. Right. Yeah, jump forward to where we are twenty years later exactly, and you know, pretty much every mystical experience you can think of, from various forms of meditation and chanting, through speaking in tongues, out of body experiences, near death experience, and the list just goes on and on and on, to the point that like my friend Shahar Arzi at Heubrew University in Jerusalem has decoded the Doppelganger experience, which is one of

the rarest mystical experiences in history. As far as I know, it only shows up in Kabbalistic Judaism. So this branch of Jewish mysticism called ecstatic kabbola, and it shows up in the thirteenth century, and you know, in Jewish mstism is using this precise technique, you can generate a Doppelganger, a second version of yourself that you can literally ask questions to about your life and your future and everything

else and get real answers. So Arsie gets curious about this and basically using the same techniques Andy Neuberg help pioneer and not only decades where it's coming from. Right, So we've gone from the best knownstical experience in history to one of the rarest. But then he figures out how to build a VR simulation that produces the same effect.

He basically takes Abraham Abolafia's kabbalistic formula by working back from that and says, Okay, you've got these head movements, and you've got these breath movements and these visualizations and all that stuff programs into a VR simulation. Now anybody can have this experience. Yeah years right, Yeah, it's a

massive amount of progress we have literally taken. You know, what is the whole history of evolution of mystical experience is one hundred and fifty thousand years of human spiritual history. And I don't think the mystery is out. I don't think we've answered any of the big cosmic questions. I don't think this means there is or there isn't a God or anything like that. I don't think you can make those statements, but you can certainly say that spiritual

experience is biologically mediated. Rare experiences, right, you had to be a punk, you had to be a seeker, a seer, a saint, or get lucky to have and now they're available to anyone oftentimes with of the neuro hacking technology at the flip of a switch. Yeah, DORO like tDSC and stuff like that, transcranial stimulation exactly. Yeah. So yeah, you make a lot of good points, and I really I'm glad you brought up Andy Nuberg, who is going

to be on this podcast as well soon. We recorded the interview recently and me and him are collaborating on looking at the brains of geniuses. We're trying to round up, like fifty the most imaginative people on this planet and study their brains and see what it looks like. And I think he's making some good progress on that project. So you're absolutely right that spiritual experience is biologically mediated. I don't want us to get too excited about it, though,

Like I think that everything is biologically mediated. So that statement is not as exciting as people would you think. No, I totally agree with you, But to me, it's really exciting because it suddenly says, you know, I met Andy in nineteen ninety eight. Really he first did you know?

He had to sort of risk his career and sneak that experiment in sort of the back end of PEN and there was a lot of pushback and blowback and all that stuff to where we are now, and there's dedicated kind of neurobiology department that study these things explicitly. So the neuroscience legitimate, Yes, you're seeing the nerves. Science legitimatized an area of investigation that was on the fringes of psychology, especially neuroscience. And I would agree with that.

I totally agree with that, and I think you make a really good point with that, But I don't want us to get too excited about it, because it was to get excited obviously, but not too excited, because these brain areas are reflecting. It's like it's holding up a mirror to our experiences. It's like reflecting. It's showing us what parts of the brain are involved in a psychological process. But it'll never tell us what that psychological process is.

You can't never get that by looking at brain activities. That's why I think the work you guys are doing as well that goes beyond neuroscience is really important. You'll never learn the stuff the kind of stuff you guys are learning behaviorally, You'll never get that from a brain scan. You know what I mean, of course, And that's I mean that's an important point. But right, I mean, for most folks out in the world, I mean, we're obviously

steeped in the kind of the disciplines of this. So the idea that inter your psychological experiences are neurobiologically mediated makes total obvious sense. But for folks who have mythologized quote unquote spiritual or mystical experiences and assume they come from a divine power, assume they come via grace or some other good works, or assume they come from adherence to religious protocols and prescriptions. So then say, actually, hey,

look here's the actual mechanisms of action. What that does is it cuts out the middleman. Yeah, it cuts out the priest class. It cuts out those who would presume to tell us what it means and how you get it or earn it or deserve it. And there's usually really convoluted sets of instructions and injunctions, right that you're supposed to follow it. Spin around three times, pray to Mecca out of the sun, you know, cut the head

off a chicken, whatever it is. That's what's been assigned in order to get you in front of having more of these experiences. Where Newberg's work, Arsie's work, all your work, all these are saying, hey, this is human birth right, this is not act I mean mystical experience, because can be demystified and we can actually go and recreate them, if not on demand, certainly a hell of a lot more often than when we were just bowing and scraping

our way towards Mecca. Yeah. Look, I love Andy's work, and I and Steve, I love that you brought that up. It's funny because there's this like there's a difference in like personality between like scientists I feel like and journalists I feel like scientists like it's our job to be critical of our own work. Like I'm criticizing my own work when I say that because I study this, I study the neuroscience of imagination, and I'm saying I don't want to get too excited where I'm not trying to

promote it. Do you know what I mean, I'm trying to be conservative about it. Well, I agree with you, but you have to, like so my standard filter for truth as a journalist like being trained this way. Right. One of the things I learned very very early on is if you're interviewing scientists on a topic, you have to interview on a particular question at least six people because the first five yeah, exact same thing, and the sixth person is going to tell you why they're all

wrong and lead you to five more people. You have to talk drive you crazy. As a turtles, I think it allows me because I don't have to defend a territory to get funded, right, you know, it allows for a wider perspective. And the other thing is also you know, we have a very the flowaging on project. One of our mantras is you know, but does it grow corn? And it's this quote from Sunbrriage that I care not

about a man's religion unless it grows corn. We take a very like we want to know enough about the neurobiology to start working backwards to mechanism, and then we want to test out those ideas. Right. The Floginal project is a giant open source research project, so we have a huge community to test out these hypotheses in and try to get better data. And you know, one of the ways you can now you know, also approach the subjective experience that makes it much more objective is a

big data approach. So that's also I think a bleedout of these developments. I think that's right, and you guys are doing a good service. Absolutely. I read your book and I got more excited about my own research than I was before I read your book. So look, that is I want to be. I want to be give

you guys a lot of problem. However, I will say that there's so much we don't know, and there's so much about, like, you know, the neurobiology of I mean, we're really at like a starting point, not an end point, of our understanding of the neuroscience of mystical experience in creativity, and I think that it's like there's so much that we would still want to know before we completely like get to the point where because you made a statement like, well, we're at a stage where now we know we can

just like press a you know, an area in your brain and induce this spiritual experience. But I don't know if we're quite there yet. Do you think we're there yet? Well, so, I mean that depends on for example, what experience you had wearing Michael Persinger's god helmet right, which stimulates the right parietal lobe, and you know with a we collectromagnetic current. I think two thousand people have worn the device and eighty percent have had some kind of out of body

since presence take your pick experience. Now, a lot of other people, Richard Dawkins most famously, have worn the device and felt nothing and thought it was all hope. Right. So I'm neither here nor there on that device. But what I am saying is we are starting to poke at that. But you're totally right, man, We are so at the front end of this stuff. I mean, you know what I like to say is we took one

hundred year detour. One hundred years ago, William James said, hey, there are all these north of happy experiences off flow state, psychedelic states, meditative states, but everything possibly imagine that really

seemed to unlock all kinds of abilities. And Freud came along, and he was interested in pathological problems more than psychological possibilities, and psias took one hundred year detour, and starting with Andy's work, starting with you know, Richard Davidson's work on meditation, starting with the positive psychology movement, and you know doctor Seligman's contribution to accept me high ast contribution. Suddenly, you know, by the late nineteen nineties, we were saying, Oh wait

a minute, he is nor the happy experiences. They seem to have, you know, amazing powers, right, They reduce anxiety to heal trauma, they unlock creativity and accelerate learning, Like, holy crap, we need to pay attention, and we just

started paying attention. And I mean, you know, I like, I think we are sort of maybe like where quantum theory was right like in the thirties or forties, meaning we had learned enough to begin to apply it technologically, but we had no clue what really was going on, hence the arguments that are still going on today on you know, nearly on hundred years later, right, I think that's where we are with this stuff cooling. And also, Scott,

I just want to tease it pot your inquiry. There are you suggesting, Hey, let's not rush to kind of an overtly reductionist materialistic descriptor of the vastness of the human experience, Like there's still a long way to go to connect all those dots. Yeah. Absolutely. Oh well, when we hear the auto, we hear the alternative peop Well yeah, well that's the other one. Well, we know what I'm picking again, or large amounts of money, spending drugs, and

a consequence free environment. No, actually, you know or were you questioning that the tools that we have available actually take you all the way there? That would be? That was that was what I was curious as to where are your where your your hesitations or queries may be? Well, yeah, I think it was more reductionistic. I think, you know, even Andy is quite careful in not being too reductionistic about it. But also we're you know, we're all explorers.

You guys are explorers. I feel like I'm in this journey with you guys. You know, what is it psychoastronauts? What's the expression? There's a term for those seconds? I mean we're is that what we are in a lot of ways? So I love that spirit of it, But there's so what's more exciting to me is just how many unanswered questions we have than the answered questions. You know, I could like start like, you know, like, okay, that's nice.

We know that the parietal lobe is correlated when you have a spiritual experience, but like, how is that personalized? You know, how like that you know your own like the meaning that you know that your cultural environment when you raised with all these, you know, like your death experiences, for instance, are very personalized. Even though they have these general features, there's still a tinge of what you earned in your childhood, about what God is and what the

afterlife is. And you never will see that in a brain scan. Yeah, and I hope that we bracket that a bit in the book. You know're saying, hey, you know, a Mexican president might see the sort of version of Guadalupiadalgo. You know, an Indian farmer might see Ganesh and a Rice Patty, right. I mean, the cultural films or layers on all this stuff is highly subjective and context bound.

But you know, I mean you asked how Stephen and I first came together the very first phone call we ever had when friend mutual friends put us in touch. Was where does the information come from? You know, if we've got the neurobiology, we understand the mystery and all this stuff that's happening, how is it that there appears to be such potentially startling coherence to the information and connections that we appear to make in these states that

to me remains a honking great mystery. You don't totally, by the way, That's the great question. Of my life. I think, I think, you know, to me, that's the ballgame, and I don't think we're any We're close. Yeah, but it's fun, right, it's fun like trying to figure that out. So tell me about the other two forces then, yeah, So where where we were on we'd done psych We've just done neurobiology, so then you know, the next one

would be pharmacology quite possibly. And the interesting thing about pharmacology is it's the sort of easiest place to start, obviously. I think Oliver Sachs famously said, you know, like you know, people can meditate, they might have a mystical experience, but say what you will about them. Drugs work. And the interesting thing about that is it gives people a non ordinary state of consciousness, more or less on demand, so they don't have to die wondering. You can get out

of all that out and incremental. I'm flailing, blindfolded towards an indefinite target, and in this kind of era where everything's just in time delivery. You know, give me con academy and give me a YouTube how to video. Don't

make me sit through a year long certification. I won't bother right, the notion of having access to different states of consciousness, different information feeds via pharmacological priming is super helpful in sort of democratizing epiphanies, right, And so that's one interesting area, and we tell the story of, you know, the difference between like Joseph Smith who found in Mormonism, you know, supposedly these golden tablets, but then they conveniently disappear.

Moses comes down with the Ten Commandments but smashes them and has to create new copies. Right back in the day, there was always a singular epiphany from one charismatic founder and all the other Porschemarks just had to take their word for it. And these days you have lots of people having non ordinary experiences, and you even have sort of crowdsourced scripture or wikis on exactly what they're all experiencing. And what's happening is you just get the law of

large numbers. You're having many, many, many more people contribute to what they're experiencing in non ordinary states. So in that respect, just democratizing the epiphany is one part and the other part that's I think equally or even more powerful. And you probably know Robin Kart Harris right, Imperial College of London. You know, he was interested in studying the subconscious, but you know, all they had was after the fact, dream reports, kooky sort of subjective interviews. It was kind

of crummy as far as data collection. And so he combined the use of LSD and psilocybin with fMRI scanners because obviously, by the time you put somebody in a million dollar machine, you want to make damn sure you're

able to measure the thing you're trying to measure. So he combined pharmacology with neurobiology and technology high tech measurement, and was able to precipitate non ordinary states on demand in the proximity of high end measurement devices, and that led to total breakthroughs on the nature of consciousness, the nature of unconsciousness, and how our minds actually work. So farmer Clery kind of does two things to get more experiences of to more people and allows them to be

kind of a collective intelligence developing around these states. And it also allows researchers to specifically fine tune states of consciences they want to measure and otherwise unwieldy device recording devices and what's the hyperspace lexicon, Well, that is actually that is a wiki based on the experience of you know, global user community of the compound dimethyl trip to mean which is naturally occurring in the brain, hot and lungs,

but when ingested and you know, exogenously, meaning from outside yourself, it seems to as far as Rick Strassman's work at the University of New Mexico, you know, some wild and hair raising, far out experiences. It's also the active psychoactive in ayahuasca, which some people are probably familiar with from

that GEO and various other press on it. And what's been happening there is enough people, you know, tens of thousands of people are contributing to this thing that anybody with their hair on fire coming down the mountain saying I've seen the truth in block caps is just getting trolled. There are so many other people contributing and saying, hey, by the way, you may have an experience that it feels like the end of the world. You may have an experience you feel like the missade. You know, it

may not be true at all. And so there's this combination what we would sort of call an agnostic gnosticism emerging, and a gnosticism is that direct experience of the mystery, which more and more people are having. But then it's also bracketed with this agnosticism of you know, and who the hell am I to judge? Who they am I to know? There's seventeenth VA and that I think is is a potentially game changing breakthrough in how we create

spiritually infused culture. Wow, that's so cool. I've never seen that discuss before, so that was really interesting for me to read about. Do you want to talk about the fourth one? Technology? Yeah, I'd love to thank you. So technology really, simply put, is bringing these experiences to scale.

And that's a really big deal. If you just take sound, right, and there's you know, great research on this now that sound very easily drives us into altered states, which is why sound has played so heavily in so many kinds

of spiritual traditions. But it used to be there's you know, only so far the human voice is going to carry only so many people you can fit around a campfire, right, But now we have tons and tons of amplification equipment that is specifically designed to basically all use sound to

altered consciousness. We have great research on what exactly is going on under the hood, and these things are all coming together, and suddenly, you know, instead of it being thirty people around a campfire who are having a transformative experience, you know, it's seventy thousand people at Burning Man or a quarter of a million people at some of these bigger festivals. That's a very new development. And sound is

of course only one example. Another one that we talked about in the book is flow states right produced by action and venture sports were very, very kind of rarefied experience. You really had to be if you wanted to have a deep flow experience. While powder skiing back in the nineties, you had to be an expert skier because the equipment

demanded it. Now we have huge fat skis that basically let anybody who can link two turns together experience that mystical floating sensation of a powder skiing, which we know from our research is loaded with flow triggers pre conditions that lead to more flow. So suddenly something, a state of consciousness that was reserved for a select view is

available to the masses. And this is showing up kind of everywhere you look in technology, and you know, I think, you know, we're starting to see this, you know, bleed into mainstream populations as well, and just to show how these all kind of stacked together, Scott, because that's obviously the interesting thing. I mean, we've teased these a pot as an instructional device saying, hey, there's four forces, but

obviously they co arise and they intermingle. And what you're having happen now is you're having you know, let's just take for existance to the presence of kind of the consciousness hacking community with MIT media labs alum Mikey Siegel, who's a friend of ours, And what you have is you have this overlap between psychology and pharmacology. So let's just say people are going to burning men and tripping balls, smart people, they're coming back and they're building shit, and

they're coming back and then they're building shit. So the very same people that are having these psychological tech pharmacological expansive experiences are then coming back and building technology. So we're having the de materialization of this process. So back in the sixties, it used to be you know, Timlary one oh one, right, take a hit of acid and see what's what, and maybe somebody at the Grateful Dead show with pouring colored oils on the back of a

light projector you know, and projecting it onto a wall. Right, that was as good as it got. Now you've got immerssive vau with digital palettes, and your people are being you know, and biofeedback loops, and they're mashing all this

stuff up together. So at some point, I mean, who's to say whether pharmacology will ever be irrelevant, But it's becoming less relevant because as we migrate, we're sort of dematerializing the techniques of ecstasy and we're creating increasingly sort of slim, scalable, applicable interactions because the creators have had the experience of that full stack. Yeah. I like that. The full stack is like a supplement analogy. You put the technology the pharmacide. Yeah. I like that. Yeah, so

the stack. Man, Like, I wish we had another four days to talk about this on the podcast. I want to be very respectful of your time, but man, there's so many things we could discuss. There's one quote that I want to discuss. You say, ecstasy wants to be free. Can you tell me what that quote means and how does that relate to orgasmic meditation. That's okay, I'm going to take the first half of it. I'm going to

leave you the orgasmic meditation and bonut. But the idea of ecstasy wants to be free is this is not a super quick answer, but essentially, because these states of extasis, right, these nor the happy state, fire up all the brains, information processing we you know, equipment, We take in more information for a second, we find links between that information much faster than before. Right we talk about we talk about extaca. This is sort of like a big data technology,

and it's an information technology. And historically doesn't matter what information technology has shown up in the world. In the beginning, they're all symbols of freedom. Radio shows up and suddenly everybody's going to get to talk to each other. We'll all, you know, share the airwaves. And one hundred years later now it's actually a couple of corporations that own the airwaves. So the whatever that And this is Tim Wu's thesis

of Columbia uh. And you know, essentially, whenever an information technology shows up, it starts out free and democratized and ends up tightly controlled and scripted. And if you know, these non ordinary states of consciousness are an information technology.

As we argue, then very much the same thing could happen, and we're already you know, seeing this that you know, the military has been actively kind of pursuing these states of consciousness for all kinds of you know, reasons since the very first kind of consciousness altering technologies were invented back in the fifties, and we documented this in the book. These states can also really be you know, applied by marketers, like people who want to use these states to sell

us more stuff, right, that can happen. So in order to kind of stay out of the hedonic pitfalls like the hedonism that normally develops, and stay out of the militarization and commercialization pitfalls that are ongoing, you know, our argument in the book is for an open source movement around these states of consciousness so it can remain kind of in the hands of many, and hopefully we will get kind of the law of large numbers, as Jamie alluded to, and actually get better data out of it

as well. So that's what we mean by ecstasy wants to be free. I love that phrase, absolutely love that. Did you coin that it's a riff on information wants to be free? All right? Right? I get it. I get it. I get it. Which is Stewart Brand or Jaron Lennam Stuart Brand. And by the way, we didn't point it. That's a jamieism. I give credit where credit is due. That one came out of Jamie's brain. No, that's really cool, Jamie. I yeah, And I love that cool.

And then I know, because times you don't explicitly link it to our gasmic meditation. You do talk about our gasmic meditation in the book, and I think we'd be remiss not to talk about that in this podcast. Sure, well, I mean, just fundamentally, just to state the obvious, right, I mean, from wine women in song back in the old old days to sex drugs rock and roll, we felt absolutely obliged to discuss sexuality as a technique of ecstasy.

It's pretty much one of the originals. So what is interesting, You know, as we're seeing all these rising trends due to the four forces of extasis that we're seeing within that, we are also seeing this massive uptick in curiosity, involvement, and engagement around sexuality as a state shifting practice. And you know, you need to look no further than fifty shades of gray, right, which was an absolutely utterly crap work of fiction, but sold more copies than the entire

seven Harry Potter's combined. So you think, dear God, like, what is that an indicator of because clearly it wasn't

plot driven character development. It was the idea that this became a sort of you know, erotic user manual for ekstasis, and it sort of took edgy sex, which lots of research at you know, at pen Indiana, lots of you know, lots of institutions, including from the universities in the Netherlands as well, have been determining, wow, kinky sex for instance, just to take one subset of a subset is actually

producing flow states, is producing non ordinary states. And actually, you know, congruent with the other research that Stephen was just citing on trauma and MDMA therapy or surfing therapy or you know, or meditative therapy that people who experienced those sexual states have They're better socially adjusted, they have less anxiety, they're more actually higher extraversion, all kinds of

markers of psychological health. So what we're seeing with Sasmik meditation, which is a female centric practice, you know, sort of phenomenally non sexual but still involving that neck of the woods to create states of clear mindedness as well as the fifty shades kind of phenomena. We're seeing more and more people exploring edgier and more progressive and you know, therefore sort of higher impact neuropsychologically techniques of sexual ecstasy,

and that that is spreading rapidly around the world. We've gone from sort of brown paper wrappers and trench coats, you know, and peep shows to you know, kindles and minivans, and that kind of democratization of broader spectrum of sexuality is totally congruent with what we're seeing in all the other domains. Yeah, Scott, the coorgasmic meditation, which comes out

of the One Taste community. One Taste earned you know a place where it was last year, I believe, maybe two years ago on the Ink magazine's you know Top five thousand, Yeah, the Ink five thousand, So you know it, like I think, more and more we're seeing that, you know, consciousness goes straight to the bottom line, doesn't really matter the vehicle in there. Yeah, And so that's a great point, and your book does a great job of bringing lots of different of these as my colleague David Aida would

call it self transcendent experiences together. I really am glad that you guys came on the show to get to talk about this. I hope that my colleague and I, you know, like people who are studying the science of fae, like Oron Davis and David Yiden and myself and others in the field of posychology, can really have closer integration with you guys, because you're really out there on the front lines and you're giving us insights as well as

us hopefully giving you insights. So thanks so much for the work you're doing and being on the show today. Thank you Scott for your work. Scott really appreciated as well. Thanks all. Thanks thanks for listening to The Psychology Podcast with Doctor Scott Barry Kauffman. I hope you found this episode just as thought for booking and interesting as I did. If you'd like to read the show notes for this episode or here past episodes, you can visit the Psychology

Podcast dot com. So, Jamie, I'm going to interview you since Scott has abandoned his post, and why don't you tell me a little bit about like where stealing fire came from. For you, what's the Jamie Wheal version of the origin story of this book? And why are you so unbelievably passionate about it? Yeah? No, I mean, for sure this is not just like a journeyman's you know, pulp fiction. When we definitely didn't just sort of crank this one out to crank it and move on to

the next one. For me, there was just this growing sense. I mean, my academic background was sort of historical anthropology, utopian social movements, all of these kind of things, so like I am wired to look for and perceive those kind of patterns and trends across culture. And the one that has been fascinating me in the last five to ten years has just been this kind of rise in i mean, for lack of a better term, sort of

ecstatic culture. And you know, compared to the kind of you know, hippie generation, the Baby Boomers, the sixties and seventies, all of that kind of stuff, the thing that really has been bowling me over recently has just been how many people with money, power, influence, access to markets, access to communications platforms, you name it, have been dabbling in

this space. And so as we were again you know, as you as you eluded, as we were kind of traveling around the country, traveling around the world, having conversations about flow and peak performance, we realized, actually we thought we were being you know, really edgy kind of smuggling you know, states of consciousness and performance into organizational stuff. We really felt like we were the ones, you know, kind of kind of cloaking, cloaking the transformation and bringing

it in. And we realized that most of the audiences we were speaking with were way further down that field than we'd ever dared or dreamed. And so, you know, a simple example is just Burning Man, where you have an incredible amount of influence. You've got Goldman, Sachs bankers, you've got World Economic Forum folks, you've got the usual suspects from Silicon Valley, You've got bicoastal folks from New York, San Francisco, in LA You've got it showing up in

Hollywood studio and movie shoots. You've got fashion design, this pioneered burning Man showing up in Paris and London and Tokyo. You know, there's this crazy thing, and just you know, to use that as one test case, what's the news coverage the news coverage was either naked hippies in the desert doing drugs, you know, the kind of salacious side, or the luky lou you know star stuff. Oh look there's Katie Perry on a segue or p Diddy or

you know, a Victoria's Secret model. And so it seemed like there was this massive underground, you know, true conspiracy, the breathing together right of a bunch of movers and shakers around the world that were on this global circuit throughout the year. That included Burning Man, but it included Dava,

It included Ted, It included South Buy and Coachll. It included all of these whizbang events where everybody got together again and swap notes, had a rocking good time and also did billions to trillions of dollars of high leverage deals.

And so that intersection and then and then, by the way, throw in the special operations community right in the military, and DAPPA and the high end action sports community and Red Bull and the biohacking communities, and you realized, Wow, everybody is on this roving circuit and no one is talking about her naming. What is what is the connective tissue between all those nodes and and and sort of you know calendar appointments that where where these folks were

all interacting. Jamie, that's really cool. I want to jump in and add one more thing just to tie it all together for people, which is a Molly Crocker Crockett who is a neuropsychologist. Is that right, Jamie? Yes, nurse right? I mean like she gives us a really good why is burning Man? Why? Why is Cochel? Why are these things called transformational best because they literally engender transformation? Right?

Her research shows that you know, going to Burning Man produces the same kind of state change that you get from action, inventory, sports, meditation, psychedelics, et cetera, et cetera. Now, mind you, those things also get woven into Burning Man. But seventy five percent of attendees who go to Burning Man have a transformative experience, and eighty five percent of those people say it lingers in consciousness for weeks and

months after the event. That's an incredibly high batting average for a party in the desert, right, Like, there's something much more going on than As Jamie pointed out, you know p Didy on a segue and you know he's doing drugs in the desert. That's some of the most powerful people in the world showing up to have a near guaranteed transformative experience that's going to carry into their daily lives. That's super interesting. Yeah, I love that example.

And I'm glad you brought Molly because she's a good friend of mine. That's uh, that's really cool.