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This is really not the first time in history people have come along and said, hey, I think non-ordinary states of consciousness can massively improve performance, right?
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This has happened before.
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And historically, it s gone horribly wrong.
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Welcome to the Art of Charm.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Today, we re talking with my friend Stephen Kotler, author of The Rise of Superman and his new book, Stealing Fire.
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We re going to talk about, well, altered states and who uses them, from Navy SEALs to the elites in Silicon Valley.
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We re going to explain a lot of what goes on in the brain, backed, of course, by science, what s going to be able to happen
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in your brain when some of this stuff becomes legal or more accessible.
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There s a lot of human performance in here.
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It s not just psychedelics, it s not just meditation, it s not just altered states.
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There s a fair bit of futurism in here as well, from 3D printing custom medication to concepts of why the mind follows the body and the body follows the mind.
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There s a whole lot in this episode with Steven Kotler, so please enjoy.
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And by the way, if you re new to the show,
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I d love to send you some top episodes as well as the AOC Toolbox.
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That s where we discuss concepts like reading body language and having charismatic nonverbal communication.
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We ll also discuss the science of attraction, negotiation techniques, networking and influence strategies, mentorship, persuasion tactics, and everything else that we teach here at the Art of Charm.
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Check that out at theartofcharm.com and also at theartofcharm.com slash podcast.
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You can find the full show notes for this and all previous episodes of the show.
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All right, here s Steven Kotler.
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Stephen, I did read this whole book.
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I loved it.
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I was devouring it.
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I was a little skeptical at first because it started off as altered states, the deep now, ecstasis and all this stuff, and I thought like, alright, how does this fit into the AOC?
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How does this fit into psychology other than
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drug use or something along those lines, which I have no moral qualms with, but you do go into the science and you talk about how this is ancient, and so I d love to kind of start there, because objection handling in a topic like this, I think, is of paramount importance.
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Yeah, of course, it s a great question.
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So let s start with the science.
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100 years ago, Harvard psychologist, the godfather of American psychology, William James, noticed that a whole slew of not ordinary states of consciousness
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And this was everything from meditative and contemplative states to mystical experiences, things like trance states, speaking in tongues, out-of-body experiences, to flow states, right, those end-of-the-zone moments of peak performance that I wrote about in The Rise of Superman, and psychedelic states.
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She thought they were all roughly the same experience, but they made you feel the exact same way, and more importantly,
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they seem to have very powerful effects.
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You notice that they did everything from kind of healing trauma and anxiety and depression to unblocking really heightened levels of creativity and cooperation and inspiration.
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And the truth of the matter is it was just too weird, right?
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Psychology basically took a hundred year detour around this idea.
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And just to kind of put that in context for you, over the past 30 years, there have been 46,000 studies run on depression.
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Only 400 have been run on joy, but
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Positive psychology started to turn a corner around the early 2000s.
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Neuroscience started accelerating exponentially, meaning it became kind of an information technology.
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It jumped on the backs of Moore s Law, started really accelerating.
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As a result, what we ve learned is James was actually right.
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Under the hood, all these experiences share very common neurobiology.
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The knobs and levers being tweaked in the brain are remarkably similar.
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and we re also realizing that the impacts James noticed, whether you re talking about healing trauma and anxiety to unlocking really heightened levels of creativity and cooperation and inspiration, all of those things are true as well.
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And now we re starting to know why.
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And what this does is it kind of unites a whole bunch of people who have no idea they re all doing the same things, right?
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If you go
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Spend time with the Navy SEALs, for example.
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You will meet a group of people who spend most of their time trying to train up group flow, that shared merger peak state of consciousness known as flow.
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Or Wall Street traders who are zapping their brains with electrodes to kind of knock out the prefrontal cortex and make better decisions faster.
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The Dave Asprey biohacking and neurohacking crowd who are going to festivals like Burning Man, even soccer moms, yoga practices.
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These people don t think.
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They re doing the same thing.
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They don t think they re members of the same tribe.
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What the science shows is very clearly, they are all trying to change the channel on normal waking consciousness to off-level performance.
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Yeah, we ve actually had DevGuru, SEAL Team Six guys come through AOC, along with other SEALs, Rangers, Green Berets, all these SOF guys, and they all kind of have this insatiable quest to learn everything that could possibly give them an edge for obvious reasons.
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In the book, you even talk about how SEALs moving like a school of fish, reading micro-expressions across the room in the dark.
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This stuff sounds almost impossible when you just look at levels of training that even sports teams has.
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Yes, they might be in flow state some of the time, moving like a school of fish, but the idea that you can
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process more information subconsciously was fascinating to me.
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And you wrote that the conscious mind, of course, is a potent tool, but is slow and can only manage, was it 120 bits of information at once, whereas the subconscious can do so much more.
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Can you tell us about that?
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Yeah, yeah, let s put a little science behind it and go right at your question.
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So, 21st century normal.
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has a neurological signature.
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It s hyperactivity in the prefrontal cortex, which is the front of your brain behind your forehead that governs most of your higher cognitive functions, executive functions, critical thinking, that sort of thing.
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We see brainwaves in the beta range, which is where our brainwaves are right now.
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It s a very fast-moving wave.
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And we see a steady drip-drip of stress hormones like cortisol and norepinephrine.
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In all the states we re describing, and you mentioned earlier, you used the term ecstasy, and that s a term we actually took
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from the commander of SEAL Team Six, and he used it.
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And we were looking for, like, altered states was a weird word.
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It s got all kinds of, as you pointed out, druggie connotation, non-ordinary states of consciousness, a little bit of a weird word.
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Yeah, I m thinking, like, grateful dead when I hear, you know, altered states.
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That s what I m thinking of.
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I m not thinking SEAL Team Six.
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You re not thinking up-level performance Navy SEALs or any of that stuff.
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So we looked up, it caught our attention, it s the root of the word ecstasy, but if you actually go back to the Greek,
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You know, in the writings of Plato and others, what it meant was something very specifically.
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It was a state of consciousness, ex-death.
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It means to step beyond yourself.
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So it s a state of consciousness where we re beyond our normal waking self, our normal rational mind, and it is a state where we tap into a heightened level of
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I would say information, intuition, inspiration.
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They would call it divine inspiration, right?
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But either way, that s what you re tapping into in these states.
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Now, your question is, where does this heightened state of information come from?
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And what we see in all of these states, these ecstatic states, is that information processing in the brain gets jacked up.
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We take in more information per second, and we find connections between that incoming information and older ideas far more quickly.
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We process information also more thoroughly using more parts of the brain to put numbers around it.
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Conscious bandwidth, and this was Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi s calculation from the University of Chicago in his book, Flow, can basically handle about 120 bits of information a second.
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Now, to put that in perspective, 60 bits is what you re using to listen to me talk.
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So if we both start talking at once, your listeners are maxed.
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That s it.
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Now, the subconscious, the adaptive unconscious, which is what psychologists call it now, and that s sort of like to separate the unconscious from the Freudian unconscious.
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This has nothing to do with your mother.
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Are you sure?
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That said, the adaptive unconscious is really fast and can process a ton of information.
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The estimates, and they re still rough, you know, there s a bunch of different ways to measure it, but at the upper end, the estimate is that we can take in 400 billion bits of information a second.
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Also, speed of conscious thought is about 100 to 150 miles an hour.
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speed of subconscious thought is about 100,000 miles an hour, much, much faster.
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More importantly, with conscious thought, one of the things about the conscious mind is it has a very difficult time making sort of far-flung connections between, you know, disparate regions in the brain, which is why aha insights are so rare.
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The subconscious is much better at it.
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We have lateral thinking capabilities.
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We can link up very disparate ideas together.
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So this is, for example, why you see inspiration go up, why in studies of creativity.
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In simplistic terms, does this mean, alright, we re turning off certain parts of our brain, and because those parts are off, their bandwidth is available to other parts of the brain, in terms of our senses plugging into those parts, or paying attention to those channels, so to speak?
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It s a great question.
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What is happening, on a certain level, is, let s talk about flow.
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And meditate is also true for meditation.
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when your brain has a fixed energy.
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It has only so much to work with in every second.
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So the first order of business for the brain is always efficiency.
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It s only, you know, 5% of your body weight uses 25% of your energy.
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It s an energy hog, so it s always trying to conserve.
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As we move into states of really focused concentration, flow states, meditative states, the brain performs an efficiency exchange.
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It shuts off non-critical areas.
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and it funnels that extra energy towards attention.
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So let s talk about kind of one of the commonalities in all these states is your sense of self being an I disappears.
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Why does that happen?
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Self is calculated all over the prefrontal cortex.
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It s a bunch of different structures working together.
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It s actually a network.
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As parts of this start to wink off because energy is being funneled in a different direction, we can no longer perform that calculation.
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This is huge for performance because self
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also contains your inner critic, right?
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That nagging, always-on defeatist voice in your head, the inner Woody Allen.
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When you move into these non-ordinary states of consciousness, Woody shuts up, because the part of the brain that is producing that turns off for the exact reason you got to.
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It is an efficiency exchange.
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I hate hyperbole, but in this case, this is very much like activating superpowers.
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So, I dislike hyperbole as well, especially here.
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And by the way, I m the guy who wrote Superman, so I m the one who created this frickin  trope.
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My real point is this, right?
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Evolution shaped our brain to solve certain problems certain ways.
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And when it comes to massively up-leveling certain key performance skills, whether it s accelerated learning, increased motivation, creative problem solving, situational awareness, which is so critical to the SEALs,
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altered states, not ordinary states, are literally the tool evolution shaped our brain to use.
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And we don t know this.
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300 years ago, Descartes comes along, he says, I think, therefore I am.
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And he privileges the rational mind.
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And it s a great innovation, kicks off the French Enlightenment, we ve got technological revolutions, we ve got political revolutions, and we end up where we are today.
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But where we are today is so-called 21st century skills, things like creativity, cooperation, collaboration,
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all these skills that are critical for thriving in the 21st century, and we suck at training people up in them.
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And the reason is really simple.
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We are trying to train up skills, and what we need to be doing is training up states of mind.
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So everybody is hardwired for this.
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So yes, this is how we get to Superman, but it s ubiquitous.
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It s in all of us.
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It s the tools that evolution gave us to do these certain things.
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Over the past 300 years, when we put the rational, logical mind at kind of the forefront of our toolbox, this is the only tool
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in the box that we can use, we ve forgotten that we have these other tools, right?
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That s why William James introduced this idea a hundred years ago, and we took a hundred year detour around it.
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We are all built for this.
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We ve just been ignoring it.
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Yeah, this makes sense, right?
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As distinguished from superpowers, these are powers that we have that we simply freaking ignore because our brain says, look, I m doing other stuff right now because I gotta survive.
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And society says, well, we re focusing on this for now.
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So not only are we not trained to really look for this, but we haven t been training the skill or the mindset, I should say, to access this in the past anyway.
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Absolutely correct.
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When we re talking about ecstasis as different from flow state, what are the differences here?
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These are not the same thing, and I don t want people to get confused and think, oh, this is another word for flow.
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Now, in Rise of the Superman, I talked about flow, which is one non-ordinary state of consciousness.
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There are a whole suite of altered states, right?
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Altered states range from psychedelic states to schizophrenic states to sleep, lucid dreaming, et cetera, et cetera.
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There is a particular bandwidth of experiences, all the experiences that are north of happy.
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So awe, all the meditative states, contemplative states, flow states, psychedelic states, and the like that share common neurobiology.
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Same kind of thing is happening in the brain when we experience these states, right?
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Kicks us out of 21st century normal into the effect I described, and they make us feel the same way.
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In all of these states, our sense of self disappears.
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disappears as well.
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We get a sense of effortless.
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Motivation goes through the roof and we feel like we re being pushed by forces beyond our control, right?
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And these states are information-rich.
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So the extasis, the bandwidth, states where we turn off normal waking consciousness and we access this deeper level of information, those are the states we re talking about.
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So flow is one of this larger category of extasis.
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Now, we re talking about meditation for a couple decades, a lot of intense prayer, maybe some LSD or some types of external substances.
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There are different modes to get to these altered states.
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Flow, extreme sports is one of them, the natural ones, yogic practice leads to this type of stuff.
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And I wanna be clear as well that we re not advocating either drug use or any sort of practice, any specific practice.
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In particular, we re merely talking about the effects
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Well, that s the critical point here because we understand that they share underlying neurobiology and they get us to the same place.
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We can start making comparisons.
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And let me give you an example, trauma, healing from trauma with PTSD as our kind of case study here.
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So PTSD is a mostly untreatable condition.
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The two accepted modes of treatment are talk therapy
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and SSRIs like Prozac and Zoloft.
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And what the research shows is that talk therapy can entrench the trauma and actually make it worse.
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And SSRIs, they don t work for everyone.
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And for the people that they do actually work for, you have to keep taking the pills.
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So they re immediately much more than transformative, right?
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You stop the pills and you re pretty much back to where you were.
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So 10 years ago,
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Rick Doblin and the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Research, MAPS, teamed up with a psychologist named Michael Mitterhofer, and they tested MDMA, a substance that increases empathy and positive mood on soldiers with PTSD, on victims of child abuse with PTSD, and victims of sexual trauma with PTSD.
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And what they discovered is that one to three
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MDMA therapy sessions with blends talk therapy with MDMA therapy was enough to significantly decrease symptoms of PTSD or completely cure it all together.
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Now that study has been running for four years so that they ve stayed in remission for up to four years and it s so robust
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that the FDA is now moving into phase three trials with PTSD as a treatment for MDMA, and they ve approved phase one trials of MDMA therapy for those lesser traumas of anxiety and depression.
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So that s psychedelic therapy, and right now, there s no way to do it legally, and you have to enroll yourself in a government study, or you have to do it illegally, and you still have to take risks.
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You know, MDMA is an amphetamine, gonna speed up your heart rate, still, there s a risk there.
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A couple of years after they did the MDMA study, they redid the study, but this time they replaced the psychedelic, the antipathetic MDMA with surfing.
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So Carly Rogers, an occupational therapist for UCLA working with over a thousand soldiers at Camp Pendleton, this is the exact same protocol except they use surfing as a trigger for flow and talk therapy.
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And they found that five weeks of surfing and talk therapy can significantly reduce or completely cure PTSD.
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Last year, the Defense Department redid that study with meditation instead of surfing for flow or psychedelic, and they got the same results in four weeks.
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Interestingly, by the way, in their control group, so people who didn t meditate and stayed on their SSRIs, 40% of them had to increase their medication over the same time that the other group was getting off their medication completely.
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So the point is,
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three separate ways to handle trauma.
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You re using three different non-ordinary states of consciousness.
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You can pick your poison depending on your risk tolerance and how quickly do you need to go A to B. That s the real difference here, right?
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If you need an overnight healing from trauma, MDMA is probably your bet.
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If you can wait a little longer, you can go with surfing or meditation.
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Meditation might not be for everybody,
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People have a tough time sitting still, counting their breath, doing all that stuff.
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So maybe they have an easier time being active and paddling out in the waves.
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But what we re seeing is three similar effects, three different techniques for ecstasis, but all proving William James s point that he made way back when, that these states seem to heal trauma.
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Now, this is super interesting, of course, because this is not all new stuff.
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In fact, it s deliberately, like, really ancient tradition here.
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Prayer, yoga, meditation, of course, LSD coming around in the 60s and things like that, but how come as soon as this stuff was discovered, it wasn t like, whoa, we all gotta do this, right?
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Because the benefits are so clear.
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Tell us about the pale of the body, pale of the church, and the pale of the state.
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So before we even get into the pale, let s just start with
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statement you made, which is the really obvious and important point, which is, hey, folks, this is really not the first time in history people have come along and said, hey, I think non-ordinary states of consciousness can massively improve performance, right?
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This has happened before.
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And historically, it s gone horribly wrong.
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Ken Kesey sneaks LSD out of a Stanford research lab in the 60s.
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All sorts of tight end outbreaks loop.
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In the 70s,
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they discovered that sex, and especially what we would call kinky sex, can actually alter consciousness and produce this ecstatic state, just like these other techniques.
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So people start pursuing, you know, liberation through sexuality.
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We have a huge arm in the sexual revolution, and the end result, spike rates of marital dissatisfaction in relationship, dissatisfaction in divorce.
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So we ve done this before.
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We ve done this before fairly recently.
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It has not worked out so well.
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As a result,
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One of the reasons we can t see that there s this giant revolution going on, right, is it s hidden beyond the pale of bright society.
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And when we talk about the pale, we say, hey, this pale, pale is a fancy word for a fence, by the way.
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So this fence has three major pickets, and the pale of the church, the pale of the state, and the pale of the body.
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And these are sort of prohibitions against the use of non-ordinary states of consciousness.
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And the Pale of the Church is pretty clear that, you know, these kinds of revelatory, mystical, wild experiences, they re great for the founders.
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The person who, you know, founded most of our world, our religious traditions, somebody who went up a hill, had some mystical experience and came down, their hair on fire and told people about it, right?
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That s just how it works.
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But after that, if you try to reproduce that same effect in yourself, you re usually a heretic.
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it doesn t often go so well.
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So we call this the pale of the church.
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It s that ecstasy metered out, like access to divine inspiration metered out every piecemeal bit at a time in the confines of the church is a time-hour tradition for kind of bureaucratic control among other things.
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But, you know, when anybody can gain access to these revelations, it tends to devalue the church.
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So we have a whole side that doesn t even pay attention to it.
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The pale of the state
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is this idea, and it sounds, right, when I say what I m about to say, it s gonna sound like I need a tinfoil hat, we re talking conspiracy, but we re really not.
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So we have what are called state sanctions, states of consciousness.
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And the story we tell in the book, the best way to explain it is the story of David Nutt.
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David Nutt is the British drug czar.
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He s a psychopharmacologist, he advises the government, he sets drug policy in Britain, and he decides he wants to actually measure
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the harms various substances do.
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So he takes the 20 top substances that we re most afraid of and most used, and he ranks them using the data.
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And what he realizes is that alcohol is number one, and tobacco is number five or six, and the stuff that is schedule one that we re really scared of, like LSD, ecstasy, and mushrooms, are 17, 18, and 20 respectively.
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As he put it in the book, he said, your chances of getting injured horseback riding are one in 350.
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That s ridiculous.
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That s insane.
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Nobody should do that sport.
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Like as a guy who grew up, I rode horses a little bit as a kid and I, like my first concussion, I think one of my first broken bones, like I get that.
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I m totally with that.
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I understand that I ve had that experience, but it s one in 350.
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Ecstasy does damage to people one in 10,000.
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Like it s not even a comparison.
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I think the way he said it is taking a tab of ecstasy is about as dangerous as riding a motorbike for six miles or a pedal bike for 20.
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I mean, motorcycles are death traps.
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I m not sure if that s a good comparison.
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What I want to make is Nutt publishes this and people go crazy.
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They go absolutely nuts and he gets fired.
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He loses his job.
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The headlines are things like government minister claims LSD is safer than alcohol.
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which it is massively.
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He got fired for saying that out loud.
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And the reason is we have state-sanctioned states of consciousness.
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If you think about 20th century, what are the states of consciousness that are legal?
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Well, we have the coffee break, the smoke break, and half the hour drinks are literally enshrined into our work week.
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And there s a reason.
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It s not hard.
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If you have a market economy, you need people who are alert, awake, and can work as long and hard as they possibly can.
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And when they re all jacked up from that workday, they need a way to decompress quickly so they could start all over again, get to sleep and start all over again.
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SPEAKER_03
And thus, we have the coffee break, the smoke break, and happy hour.
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They re enshrined culturally.
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SPEAKER_03
They re protected legally, right?
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And states of consciousness, like psychedelic states that fall outside of this,
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you know, they re made illegal and their users are marginalized.
2
SPEAKER_03
So states of consciousness, the pale of the body is the last one.
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And this is built around what people talk about as a skin bag bias, which is we trust states of consciousness that we have to work really hard for.
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So if we have to put in 20 years of meditation to alter our consciousness in a particular way, we tend to say that as a valid and trustworthy experience.
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SPEAKER_03
But if I put, you know, e.g.,
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or a transcranial magnetic stimulation headset on your head, and I knock out your prefrontal cortex really quickly, you tend to think that s cheating.
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We tend to think psychedelics are cheating.
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SPEAKER_03
It happens inside the body, inside the skin bag, right?
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We trust it.
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It s a valid experience.
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We ve worked hard for it.
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We ve earned it.
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That was outside of the skin bag.
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If it s pharmacologically or technologically induced, we tend to distrust those experiences.
2
SPEAKER_03
So those three PAILs have kept a lot of this work
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hidden from view, right?
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I said William James noticed it in 1902.
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We took a hundred-year detour.
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One of the main reasons is these three pails were hiding these things from view.
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SPEAKER_03
They exist for good reason also, which is that, as I said when I started, every time we ve done this, it s gone horribly wrong.
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SPEAKER_00
You explain as well that it doesn t really matter what flavor our ecstasis comes in.
2
SPEAKER_00
They all share the same characteristics.
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STER, S-T-E-R.
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Can you explain what these four prongs of ecstasis are?
2
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Because I want to leverage that and then dive into personal growth is taking off the costume concept that you have here.
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STER stands for selflessness, timelessness, and effortlessness.
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When you get those three things, and so let s talk about the neurobiology behind these things.
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Selflessness and timelessness happens because self and time are both calculated in the prefrontal cortex.
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So when parts of it start to wink out, we can t perform those calculations.
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So we are plunged.
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The inner critic shuts up and we re plunged into timelessness-wise, what researchers call the deep now.
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Deep now is really critical.
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It s the here and now.
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It s the right here, right now.
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And the reason this matters so much is most of our fears,
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are in the past or horrible stuff that happened we want to avoid in the present, right, or things in the future that we re scared of happening.
3
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Very little, unless we re dealing with absolute immediate danger, right, takes place in the present moment.
3
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So when we can move into the deep now and we get this sense of timelessness, all kinds of good things happen.
3
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So a really good example is there was a bunch of awe research done at Stanford, and they found that not only does mood improve and all those things, but empathy
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capacity for empathy goes up, our ability to, you know, we start to value experiences over things, that also increases the more timelessness we have, and we re more generous, which is really interesting.
3
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So timelessness, effortlessness has a different cause.
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In these states, the steady drip-drip of stress hormones, cortisol and norepinephrine, they re flushed from your system, and they re replaced by some variance of
3
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serotonin, amandamine, endorphins, oxytocin, and dopamine, all of which they do a lot of performance enhancing things, but they re all really potent feel-good drugs, right?
3
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These are really pleasurable chemicals and you rarely get access to them all at once.
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So like to give you a comparison, romantic love, which a lot of people call, you know, one of those amazing feelings on earth is mostly dopamine and norepinephrine.
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So you re getting three to four other chemicals on top of those when we re moving to these states.
3
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So to put it tactically, motivation goes through a roof, right?
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Psychologists talk about this as the source code of intrinsic motivation.
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It s really just incredibly addictive neurochemistry, but our experience that neurochemistry isn t just, oh my God, this is intensely pleasurable.
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It s also, oh my God, this is deeply meaningful.
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So people who have consistent access to these states,
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One of the things that happens, they tend to start scoring off the charts on overall life satisfaction, which is different from moment-by-moment happiness, right?
3
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It s a grittier, thicker measure.
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And the last thing that happens, the R in STR stands for richness, which is short for information richness, which is all that access to the adaptive unconscious and the heightened information process that comes along with it, which is why
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You know, studies show that creativity spikes 400 to 800% in these states.
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So really important on that front.
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That stir is what these states all share in common, and it s a new sort of rating system.
3
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When we went into altered states of consciousness, there s a thick, thick literature here, and everybody s got their own definition of how these states make you feel.
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almost everybody s definitions.
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You go into the meditation stuff and it s really hard to separate out Buddhist or Hindu philosophy from what s actually going on, right, physiologically or phenomenologically or the same thing.
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Like you go into psychedelic stuff and, you know, back in the 60s, the early psychedelic researchers, they thought psychedelics did some really crazy, strange stuff like prenatal regression.
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You re going to regress back before your present life kind of thing that was very specific to their culture.
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may not have anything to do with anybody s experience on psychedelics these days, right?
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So we kind of put together this framework based simply on changes in the neurobiology and how we know they make you feel, and came up with a new category.
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We ve shared with a bunch of researchers, they found it really useful, and we re testing it further.
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But we wrote about it at Steel and Fire.
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Yeah, there s so much in here, especially with the religious and these sort of experiences where they re like, oh, we have past lives.
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This is one of my favorite things in the book, which is ignoring the past life stuff for a second.
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Neurotheology, which is essentially the neuroscience of mystical experiences.
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The very first time this was a science was 1997.
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when a guy named Andy Neuberger at the University of Pennsylvania decided he wanted to see if unity, which is the feeling of being one with everything, which is common to almost every religious tradition on earth, I ll put it this way, called the perennial philosophy, because it s everywhere.
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In 1996, before he came along, if you go into a doctor s office and say, Doc, I feel one with everything, you are going straight to this thing, right?
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And Neuberger studied at the University of Pennsylvania.
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They, he worked with a guy named Eugenia Quilley, and they really sort of backed it in and did it secretly and slyly, and he was risking tenure.
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And it was a big deal.
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Nobody thought this shit was real or should be studied with fMRI.
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But he imaged the brains of Tibetan Buddhists and Franciscan nuns at moments of ecstatic meditation when they felt one with everything.
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And he discovered there s a part of our brain called the right parietal lobe.
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that performs another one of these efficiency exchanges.
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As attention goes up, right, this portion of the brain starts to shut down.
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The right parietal lobe does a bunch of things, but one of its most important jobs is to help separate self from others.
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It says, this is where you end and the world begins.
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And this is critical if you want to walk through a crowded room.
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And people who have brain damage or a stroke to this area, they can t tell, like they can t sit down.
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because they don t know where the couch is going to end and their leg begins.
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They re unclear, right?
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So when this portion of the brain shuts down, you ve got to conclude, your brain concludes, oh my God, at this moment, you re one with everything.
3
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Now that was the birth of neurotheology, right?
3
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Since that time, it s 20 years old.
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We have now looked at everything you could possibly imagine, trance states, speaking in tongues, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences,
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sense presences, visions of God, flow states, awe states, the list goes on and on and on.
3
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And in fact, this past year, a friend of mine, Shahar Arzi, who s the head of neuropsychology, neuropsychiatry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, took one of the rarest mystical experiences in history, the doppelganger effect, which shows up in Kabbalistic Judaism and says, if you do this particular meditation, you can produce your double.
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Just read it like a soothsayer and ask it questions about the future and it will give you answers.
3
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And working backwards, he not only did he decode it, figure out where it was coming from, used fMRI to then validate it, then even a virtual reality simulation where anybody can have this experience.
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And that s what s starting to happen now.
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It s not just, hey, we ve decoded some of the rarest and strangest and most interesting experiences in history.
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It s we re now starting to figure out how to reproduce them in you at will on demand.
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which is nuts, right, because we re talking about people in history who ve been praying hardcore at a convent or monastery for years, having these occasionally, and now you re talking about, hey, look, in five or 10 years, you might be able to go to the laboratory equivalent of a flotation tank center somewhere in San Francisco or New York, pay your 100 bucks, and sign a couple of waivers, and there you go, here s a crazy,
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ecstasis experience and of course people right now are going, but it s not the same.
3
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And then we come full circle to the pale of the state, the pale of the body and the pale of the church.
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You got it solved.
3
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It s not the same thing for yourself.
3
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The reason I can confidently talk about this book at a personal level, something that s not in the book.
3
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I tried everything in the book.
3
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I dropped out of college.
3
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I lived in ashrams.
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I lived in monasteries.
3
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I did a tremendous amount of psychedelics.
3
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I never got access to a mystical anything.
3
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I started surfing on a regular basis and suddenly I was having crazy mystical experience.
3
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I had no idea what the hell was going on, right?
3
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I backtracked those and started to realize that we were looking at flow and that led me to what is the neurobiology and the flow genome project emerged out of that.
3
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But I can comfortably say, oh wow, it s a one for one substitution because I ve got 25 years of yoga under my belt and 15 years of meditation.
3
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I ve run these experiments, every last one of them in my own body.
3
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And I can vouch say for all this stuff on top of all the research that I ve layered on top of it.
3
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But I really think you have to sort of, you know, you can t really take my word for it or the book s word for it, right?
3
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Like what we are advocating for in this book, we re advocating for anything is that let s take an open source approach to this stuff and let s make it experimental and experiential.
3
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All right, we ve got our brain releasing norepinephrine, dopamine.
3
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Our heart rate is up, our focus is tightened.
3
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Information we ve normally tuned out is now becoming readily available.
3
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We re starting to increase our ability to recognize patterns and things like that because we re in ecstasis here.
3
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We re making connections between disparate ideas because our inner Woody Allen is turned off here, so to speak.
3
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Let s leverage this for personal growth.
3
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You ve got a lot here from Robert Keegan about, let s say, unzipping the costume.
3
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Let s go down that road, because this is super interesting.
3
SPEAKER_00
This is Kabbalah plus Art of Charm, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
I love it.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, well, these are the most interesting findings.
3
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So, Bob Keegan studies adult development, and adult development is literally like, we know through kids go through kind of set growth stages.
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You have the terrible twos.
3
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You go through your teenage years, right?
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They re fixed.
3
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Adults also have stages of development and the difference is you can sort of get into early stage adult
4
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adulthood and stay there.
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It s not mandatory.
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It becomes elective from that point on.
4
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Now, what happens as you move up the adult development scale is you gain all sorts of interesting attributes, but essentially what you do is you take your old version of who you are and you replace it with something totally new.
4
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Your perspective widens.
4
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You start to be able to see things from 360 degrees,
4
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Rotman School of Business Dean Roger Martin called the opposable mind, which is sort of the Hegelian dialectic.
4
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It s the thing that humans are unique at having, which is the ability to take thesis, antithesis, and turn into synthesis, right?
4
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And the reason that happens is because you can see 360 degrees around an object and empathy expands, et cetera, et cetera.
4
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And you gain basically all the traits we associate with the term wisdom, right?
4
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That s what happens as you move up the adult development scale.
4
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Now the question is, how do you do that?
4
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And for a very long time, the only real answer was, suffer a deep personal tragedy to move into some of these higher levels and higher levels.
4
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Most of us would take a pass on that.
4
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If I had a choice between higher consciousness, but in order to do that, I need to suffer some super intense personal tragedy, that s a high barrier.
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SPEAKER_00
I don t wanna do that.
4
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Well, okay, so Bill Torbert, who is at Boston College,
4
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Did a study of 500 managers and he was looking and what he realized is that 80% of the managers who occupied kind of upper management positions, C-suite positions.
4
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fell into the upper two phases of adult development despite the fact they only make up 10% of the broader population and all of these kind of upper stage development leaders were capable of engineering at least one organizational transformation in a four-year period and massively increasing everything from the company s reputation to their profits.
4
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So what he discovered is consciousness goes right to the bottom line.
4
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So there is a
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Yes, I hear you, nobody wants to go through great personal tragedy, but anybody who s been through great personal tragedy will tell you that you come out the other side a stronger person if you can.
4
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And that s really powerful, but here s the kicker.
4
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What you really need to do, the reason a great personal tragedy works so much is it kicks you out of your normal rational consciousness.
4
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You re so heart wrenched, you start taking in different kinds of information.
4
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It turns out non-ordinary states of consciousness do the same thing.
4
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In fact, if you kind of look into the studies, what you see is that people at the upper stages of development make frequent use of non-ordinary states, and often it follows a pattern, which is they start with some psychedelic experimentation.
4
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And that usually leads them into kind of more steady state practices like meditation or an action sport to produce flow or martial arts, which sort of gets you at both those sorts of things over time.
4
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So what we ve discovered is that non-ordinary states of consciousness can actually accelerate personal growth and development.
4
SPEAKER_00
I love this.
4
SPEAKER_00
This is so interesting, especially with the ethics and empathy and management and stuff like that.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I guess we re probably not looking at giving our boss some acid before asking for a raise, but we are hopefully going to find that we have a boss that is in that 5% that you mentioned where they re continually developing after college instead of settling for the usual.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that s so funny about the dabbling in ecstasis because I kind of thought
4
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This is a Silicon Valley thing.
4
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I m even helping a news outlet with a story about this type of thing.
4
SPEAKER_00
This is a Silicon Valley thing.
4
SPEAKER_00
Everybody s microdosing, or there s meditation going crazy.
4
SPEAKER_00
This seems to be a wider trend, which is great, depending on your morals.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, we call it a $4 trillion underground revolution.
4
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And the reason we have that figure, $4 trillion, is we calculated what we call the altered states economy, which is how much money do we spend globally
4
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trying to shut down the self, trying to turn off that voice in our head and maybe start to access some of these other skills, right?
4
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And we did the most conservative calculation we possibly could do.
4
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And the number we came up with was $4 trillion.
4
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It s probably a lot bigger than this.
4
SPEAKER_01
Now, mind you, this is the entire altered state economy.
4
SPEAKER_01
So we re not talking about just the good stuff.
4
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We re also talking about unconscious behaviors or addictive behaviors.
4
SPEAKER_01
There s a lot of things that we do to alter our consciousness that are not great for us.
4
SPEAKER_01
But the point is we re doing it.
4
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$4 trillion is 1 16th of the global economy.
4
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It s the GDP of Germany.
4
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It s bigger than the GDP of India or Russia.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s 25% of the U S economy per year.
4
SPEAKER_01
If you were to shrink it down, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
This is the amount of money we are spending pursuing the state.
4
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It means there s also $4 trillion worth of opportunity.
4
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Because the cool thing, what s happening now, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
I said earlier, there s a way to do this more safely this time, possibly without blowing ourselves up along the way.
4
SPEAKER_01
Four accelerating forces, psychology, neurobiology, pharmacology, and technology are giving us access to these states increasingly on demand, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
As we talked about with the VR doppelganger effect, we can tune them with ever-increasing precision.
4
SPEAKER_01
And we can start to experience them, by the way, at scale, which is really neat.
4
SPEAKER_01
And hopefully, because our knowledge base is expanding, we can sort of carve this middle path that avoids the hedonistic pitfalls before.
4
SPEAKER_01
And, you know, that s sort of, that s our hope.
4
SPEAKER_01
There s no guarantees.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s our hope that we can get it right this time, because the potential personal growth for just development of fundamental 21st century skills for kind of increased empathy, all of it just goes up and up.
4
SPEAKER_00
And once we move this beyond the laughter curtain of stoners and hippies, and we move what you call enlightenment engineering into more and more mainstream, we re gonna see a lot of changes in people getting contrast in their lives, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
We need to have...
4
SPEAKER_00
from the experiences that some people are talking about here, we need to have the white to see the black, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
We need that contrast, we need to be able to have those experiences, and you see these super successful entrepreneurs and people like that pursuing these altered states to solve complex problems.
4
SPEAKER_00
So basically, by periodically losing ourselves, we stand a better chance of finding ourselves, from the sound of it.
4
SPEAKER_01
Absolutely correct.
4
SPEAKER_01
And, you know, it s also, it s not just
4
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Silicon Valley, I mean, even the Flow Genome Project, you know, we ve been everywhere from Wall Street to Silicon Valley to countries throughout the middle, constantly training up executives in the use of flow.
4
SPEAKER_01
44% of companies are going to roll out meditation and mindfulness training programs to their employees this year.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I mean, you know, you ve probably seen the data, it s been everywhere, but like the Aetna study,
4
SPEAKER_01
Which is, you know, that s not your cutting edge company.
4
SPEAKER_01
If I were to say, Hey, what s those cutting edge company out there?
4
SPEAKER_01
You re not picking Aetna, but their data says that after they rolled out their mindfulness training program and went back and look, they started to realize that they were saving $2,000 per employee in healthcare costs.
4
SPEAKER_01
And they were gaining 3000 per employee in productivity.
4
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What s starting to happen is we re starting to see more and more and more attention.
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paid to these things, but it s really like, as we put it in the book, it s sort of high times on Main Street at this point.
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And it s just that most of these disparate tribes, as you pointed out, they don t recognize each other, right?
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Psychedelics for the past hundred years belonged to hippies and ravers.
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Flow states were artists and athletes, and meditative and mystical states were seekers and seers and saints, right?
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And these groups of people did not talk to one another.
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They had no idea they were all doing the same thing, pursuing the same thing, and for the same reasons.
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So now we re starting to come out of the closet in mass and we re starting to have these conversations out loud, which is wonderful.
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So is this, and this is an obvious sort of rhetorical question here, but is this more than a cool party trick?
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I mean, at what point do altered states lead to altered traits?
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At what point can we pull something back from the great beyond inside our mind and use it in everyday life?
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Because the goal here is not to stay there forever in la-la land and be addicted to the bliss.
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We want to bring this back to work.
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We want to bring this back to our relationships, our personal lives.
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Well, on a certain level, you absolutely have to do the work.
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There s no shortcuts, right?
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Nobody can do your pushups for you.
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And one thing about these states is they all require deep integration periods.
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But the skills you re talking about, we know access to non-ordinary states of consciousness massively increases creativity, as I said earlier, 400% to 700%.
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We know you get accelerated learning.
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in these states of consciousness, 240 to 500%.
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Those things happen automatically as parts of the experience.
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Those skills are built in.
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And Teresa Amabile at Harvard, for example, discovered that the heightened creativity you get in a flow state actually outlasts the state by a day, sometimes two.
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More work needs to be done, but it suggests that flow doesn t just give you more creativity in the moment, but actually trains the brain to think more creatively over the
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long haul.
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If you look at kind of early studies that were run at Hopkins by Roland Griffith, they were testing psilocybin.
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Could it help with fear of death anxiety in terminal cancer patients, right?
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And what they found is that not only did it massively relieve the fear of death anxiety, most of the study group called it the most important experience of their life or one of the top five experiences of their life.
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And that feeling has persisted for years after the study of a few patients who have lived that long.
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So it seems like, and there s more data to back this up, these experiences can permanently rewire the brain.
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So the change, some of the stuff you re talking about actually just happens along the way.
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How we integrate them, you know, how do we deploy them on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis, on a yearly basis?
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That s a different story.
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And there are ways we cover this in the book to deploy these things skillfully, to stack them skillfully, to blend them together.
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and you turn them into a practice, right?
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Because as you pointed out, the peaks, they re great.
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They re neat.
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But what life really is, is everything that happens in the in-between.
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You know, we close the book pointing out that these things do not excuse you from the work, right?
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You cannot avoid the human condition.
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You re always going to have to do the work.
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They re really cool resources in the book.
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I often don t say, go to the website for the book.
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Often authors put a bunch of garbage in there that s just promotional, but you ve got this cool tool, the Hedonic Calendar, which allows you to put these things into daily, weekly, monthly, maybe even annual practices so that you re not just...
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sort of willy-nilly throwing yourself into these states, you re primed for it, as well as the ways to stay safe in these not diving too deep, not becoming a bliss junkie, not even believing everything you think, simply because then we end up with, wait a minute, I m Jesus, or whatever goes wrong when people really do have breaks when they do too much of this stuff, or when they lean into it, or just when the ego gets out of control with it.
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You re totally correct.
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Earlier we talked about the stir, right?
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Selflessness, timelessness, effortlessness, and richness.
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And it turns out that each of those categories can go horribly wrong, and horribly wrong in totally predictable ways, right?
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There s 50 years of research into how not only the fact that like these things are going to break down, you re going to have problems, but we know exactly the problems you re going to have.
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So hopefully we can use that information to kind of steer around some of these pitfalls.
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You re going to make mistakes, but at least you get to make less obvious mistakes.
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And the calendaring is really, really critical because, you know, in the beginning, if you don t know what we re talking about, if you ve not had, you know, a powerful, non-ordinary state of consciousness experience, you often need something heavy as your first gateway in.
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Now that could be a psychedelic experience, if that s what s interesting to you.
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It could be a two week silent meditation retreat.
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It could be a tantric sex workshop with your partner.
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It could be skydiving, right?
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Like all of those are very fast, higher risk, but fast, powerful entrances into this.
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Once you kind of have the somatic address of where these things are, you can use much quieter methods of getting there, right?
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Like skydiving can be replaced with, you know, skiing on a regular basis.
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The tantric sex work can be replaced with, you know, a calm or practice with your partner that s sustainable over time.
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The meditation, silent retreat can get integrated into a daily 20 minute, right?
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Start weaving these things together skillfully.
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And the most important point you alluded to it is
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Historically, the way we react to these states, we scare ourselves in them sometimes, and then we totally swear off them.
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They get a little too sticky for some, right?
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People start to become bliss junkies, and they love the high too much.
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Typically, when that happens, what we do is freak out, reactivate the prefrontal cortex, and abstain completely.
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We remove these vital parts of our lives from our lives completely.
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When in fact, what you really need to do is just change the way you re deploying them.
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What freaked me out a little bit in the book, and I m no tinfoil hat guy, but some of this stuff made me buy a couple rolls off Amazon, the CIA and LSD, and the government and the control of the master switch, this stuff was, at first I thought, okay, here we go, tinfoil hat time, or conspiracy theory time here, but tell us about this, because it s clearly going in this direction, given what we know about the NSA and Facebook, and even just monitoring our Gmail, for God s sake.
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Yeah, so there s three ways this stuff goes wrong.
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We ve talked about hedonism already.
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The other two ways are commercialization and militarization.
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Commercialization is that these states of consciousness feel extremely good.
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If I can get them produced in you and link that to a brand, I can create a very powerful brand experience.
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I can use
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these states of consciousness to sell you more stuff.
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Or as my partner in the Flow Genome Project and writing Stealing Fire, Jamie Wheal, likes to say, it s Maslow s pyramid scheme.
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And the second half is militarization.
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And this is absolute tinfoil hat stuff, except for the fact that it has been going on very classified, but now very openly acknowledged from the 1950s.
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The very first
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technological ecstasy invented by Dr. John Lilly long before he became known for what he later became known for.
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He s a National Institutes of Health researcher.
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He s studying pleasure and he basically finds a way to slip electrodes into the brain and stimulate the brain s pleasure centers.
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And no sooner does he come up with this, he s at the University of Pennsylvania, and every single three-letter agency in the world beats a path to his door and wants a briefing.
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And he goes to his boss and says, in his autobiography, The Scientist, he says, I got to tell you something.
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I m not sure we want to brief these guys.
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This gets into the wrong hands.
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You can basically use it to reprogram a human.
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That s what it can do.
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And so he demands that his research state declassified.
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He open sources it.
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briefs everybody.
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A couple months later, a guy from Sandia Labs comes to visit him and says, hey, I want to photograph and videotape your experiments.
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At this point, I think it was experiments with dolphins.
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And he says, yeah, sure.
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Same conditions.
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We can t classify this.
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It s open source.
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And, you know, whatever.
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And a couple of years later, Lily is reading Harper s Magazine.
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And there s a story about Sandia s Super Mule project.
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And it literally
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of mule with a brain impact.
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It is punished by pain if it veers off course and, you know, rewarded with pleasure if it goes in the right direction and it is carrying a suitcase nuke.
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So they literally, the very first exotic technology we have in history, and the government co-ops it to deliver a nuclear bomb.
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And it s a crazy story.
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You know, it s right there.
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It s shocking.
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You re like, what?
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And it goes from there.
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Right?
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I mean, like, it literally, you know, the whole idea of mind control and brainwashing starts out as a CIA plander campaign against the Chinese, don t ask.
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And they start believing their own bullshit.
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So they start creating their own brainwashing devices.
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We get MKUltra, which is literally the CIA and pretty much every other three letter agency you can think of in 800 institutions testing psychedelics as mind control devices.
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as ways to confuse entity combatants, and it goes on and on.
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It was an MKUltra hospital-facilitated research thing that was testing LSD, where Ken Kesey stole the LSD from this research project, brought it back to his home in Menlo Park, California, where he was a grad student going to Stanford, and starts introducing it to his friends and pretty soon the Hells Angels.
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Next thing you know, the psychedelic revolution has kicked off.
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Right.
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And now we ve got the flow dojo at Google and people are going to see shamans in Peru and billionaires are building ranches down there so they can do it in private.
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I mean, this is it s crazy stuff.
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And it was such a funny jump for me to go from.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Secret CIA program in the 60s to wait a second.
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People at the cutting edge of this, they re using these as a personal development tool.
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And I just think it s fascinating.
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John really freaks out after he sees the nuclear mule.
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He says, I m done.
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I m done with, you know, these kinds of technologies.
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I m going to find a way to study altered states harmlessly.
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He invents the float tank, right?
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Then he starts doing experiments on psychedelics in the float tank.
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And so everybody forgets about it, right?
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And it becomes this hippie curiosity for 50 years.
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And when we were working with the Navy SEALs,
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were got a tour their mind their mind jim is basically their best efforts to use technology to train up the states of consciousness and you know one of the things that we encountered was a float tank the very technology literally like created to get away from the military is right there back in the military and the SEALs have gutted it up to the lowest traditional float tank with like EEG and neural feedback and audio and a whole bunch of other things and they re using it for
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recuperation.
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It s allowing the SEALs to recover very quickly after missions because you could totally turn off the self in there and it really helps for healing.
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But more importantly, they figured out that SEALs, for example, need to be very fluent in foreign languages.
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They can be deployed in five different theaters of war kind of over the course of a year.
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And fluency really matters.
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They need to be able to understand what the enemy is saying, that behind enemy lines, there s an issue.
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So it normally takes the military
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six months at best to train somebody up in a foreign language.
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That s their most accelerated best learning case scenario.
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But by putting them into these ecstatic states in the float tanks, turning off the self, dialing people perfectly for learning, they can train them up in foreign languages in six weeks rather than six months.
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So these technologies are going back and forth from the kooks on the counter country to the spooks on the other side, but we re getting very good at that.
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and we re really being able to dial stuff in with precision, which is really neat.
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custom make these types of drugs specifically for military personnel and things like that.
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It s very cool.
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There s so much going on in the book that some of it s scary, such as using surveillance and VR, virtual reality, to track our eye movements and body temperature and galvanic skin response to find out what we re afraid of or what excites us.
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I mean, that kind of stuff just screams 1984 2.0, but the rest of it is
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Ultra exciting.
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There s a lot in this book.
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Stephen, thank you for writing it and thank you for coming on today.
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It s my absolute pleasure.
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Great big thank you to Steven for this.
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The book is called Stealing Fire.
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Of course, that ll be linked up in the show notes for this episode as well.
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There was a lot here.
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We didn t even get to cover everything.
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I mean, I love the flow states and the altered states and what s going on in the brain and how we can use ecstasis for human performance, of course, activate a little bit of superpowers or very, very human powers and how this makes us more creative and able to outperform or perform with other people, just like a school of fish, just like those Navy SEALs.
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Great big thank you to Steven for coming out.
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The book, of course, linked in the show notes as well.
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Stealing Fire.
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If you enjoyed this one, don t forget to thank Steven on Twitter.
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We ll have that linked in the show notes as well.
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Remember, you can tap your phone screen.
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That should pop right up.
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Those show notes, I mean.
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I m also on Twitter.
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at The Art of Charm, and I d love to hear from you there, whether it s good, bad, neutral, or maybe you ve got a suggestion for the show that I d like to hear.
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Our boot camps, our live programs are also at bootcamp.theartofcharm.com.
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To see people come through this live training is just nothing short of amazing.
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Like I mentioned earlier in the show, we ve had a lot of special forces and intelligence agents come through.
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We ve also had a lot of college kids,
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Divorced dads and married dads come through as well.
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So no matter what group you re in, you probably stand against something, a little something from AOC here in LA.
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We d love to see you.
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I d also encourage you to join our AOC challenge at theartofcharm.com slash challenge.
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In the USA, you can text charmed to 33444, that s C-H-A-R-M-E-D.
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And of course, this is open to everyone, no matter where you are.
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You can also check that out at theartofcharm.com slash challenge.
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It s about improving your networking skills, improving your connection skills, and inspiring those around you to develop a personal and professional relationship with you.
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We ll also email you the fundamentals toolbox that I mentioned earlier on the show.
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I ve got some videos in there with drills and exercises.
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Look, the whole point is to make you a better networker, a better connector, and a better thinker.
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That s theartofcharm.com slash challenge, or text the word charmed in the US to 33444.
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For full show notes for this and all previous episodes of the show, head over to theartofcharm.com slash podcast.
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This episode of AOC was produced by Jason DeFillippo.
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Jason Sanderson is our audio engineer and editor, and the show notes on the website are by Robert Fogerty.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Go ahead, tell your friends, because the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to someone else, either in person or shared on the web.
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So stay charming and leave everything and everyone better than you found them.
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Thanks for listening to the Art of Charm.
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Get more confidence, relationship skills, life hacks, and more at theartofcharmpodcast.com.