Mapping Cloud 9: Part 4 - Steven Kotler | Flow Research Collective Radio

All the psilocybin subjects rated their— all the mystical qualities of the experience much, much higher than the control group. And 6 months later, the psilocybin group had all kinds of persistent beneficial effects to their attitudes and behavior. They all said that the experience had deepened their faith. In fact, the crazy part, out of the 20 subjects, 9 of the 10 who got psilocybin actually went on to become priests. None of the people in the control group did, which is really, really, really profound.

Hey there. If you are a leader, a knowledge worker, or an entrepreneur, and you want to take your professional success to the next level while reclaiming time, space, and freedom within your personal life, then Zero to Dangerous may be a fit for you. Zero to Dangerous is our flagship peak performance training. You'll work one-on-one with our coaches. You'll go through our whole curriculum. You'll join a community. Of peak performers from all over the world.

This was like a really weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2. So then somewhere in Sort of Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them, which is, you know, entrepreneur for 23 years, it never occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I had gotten all my work done. Like, it never occurred to me to do that. It was really, really weird. I enforced the deadline, like it had to be real. I had to create the output to really have the experience be valid. And I was watching my productivity go up and up and up. And I was like, what do I do now? It's 2 o'clock. And it was just so weird. Like when you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that and you can put them in a way that somebody can kind of scan through those, allows somebody to self-identify and be like, oh God, that's really meaningful to me. Because some person's going to be like a 40-year-old dad who's going to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

Go to getmoreflow.com, getmoreflow.com, pop an application through, takes 30 seconds. We would be excited to speak with you to see whether it's a bit. So that's getmoreflow.com.

What does it take to do the impossible? What does it take to level up your game like never before? What does it take for individuals, organizations, for even institutions to achieve paradigm shifting? Nothing is ever the same again. Breakthroughs.

Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance, access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Ryan Dorris, and together with bestselling author Steven Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio. Hey there, Rhian Dorriss here with Flow Research Collective Radio, and welcome to today's episode, which is from Stephen Kotler's book Mapping Cloud Nine. Now, Mapping Cloud Nine, of all of Stephen's books, has, for me personally, the coolest subtitle. And the subtitle really is going to describe the essence of what this episode is focused on. The subtitle is Neuroscience, Flow, and the Upper Possibility Space of Human Experience. And that's what Steven in this book today is going to be talking about. It's a chapter from Mapping Cloud Nine. You're going to hear Steven's voice going deep on the topic Steven knows best and is most passionate about. So, with that, enjoy today's episode. It's a fantastic one and a real treat to get a sample of Mapping Cloud Nine, one of Stephen's books which came out a couple of years ago. So, enjoy. And until next time, all the best.

Hey, welcome to session 4, The Psychedelic Detour, where we're going to walk back through the science of spirituality and the science of high performance along the pharmacological pathway, which started out when both of those were still joined together, then sort of splintered apart. And seems to be coming back together. The place I want to start is actually in nature with a really fundamental fact, which is animals are hardwired to shift their consciousness across the board. Psychopharmacologists, people who study the psychological impact of pharmacology, have spent the past few decades cataloging the consciousness-altering techniques of animals in the wild. And there is a ton to catalog. Dogs are known to lick psychedelic toads for the buzz. Horses go crazy for locoweed. Goats gobble magic mushrooms. Birds chew on marijuana seeds. Cats love catnip. Wallabies will go crazy for poppy fields. Reindeer, as people famously know, like fly agaric mushrooms. Baboons prefer the incredibly powerful hallucinogen ibogaine. Sheeps like hallucinogenic lichen. Elephants get so drunk on fermented fruit that they've been known to raid breweries to get at booze. In fact, so commonplace is this behavior in nature that UCLA psychopharmacologist Ronald K. Siegel pointed out in his book Intoxication, quote, drug seeking and drug taking are biologically normal behaviors. In a sense, pursuit of intoxicating drugs in animals is the rule rather than the exception. As a result of these findings, researchers now believe, as Siegel also writes, the pursuit of intoxication with drugs is a primary motivational force in organisms. And by primary motivational force, what he is talking about is our fundamental drives, the drive for food, water, and sex. This is the basic level of Maslow's pyramid. And what Siegel is saying is there's a fourth drive, the drive for intoxication, that is is as fundamental. So the question is, the hell's going on? Why would this be fundamental? 'Cause you gotta know that when animals get messed up, they face all the same problems that humans do when they get messed up. When monkeys get messed up on drugs, they ignore their kids. They wander away from the safety of the troop and they get killed, right? Cats pay for their addiction to catnip with brain damage. Cows poisoned with rangeweed, they may eventually die. Carcasses of drunken birds, you can find them all over the highways. The point is that intoxication in humans as in animals, not always the best strategy for survival. So the question is, what the hell is it still doing in nature? Why is it everywhere? Right? If these substances are so dangerous, why would we risk it? Why roll those dice? Right? Anything that tends to take away from either our survival function or our sexual function, right, the two things that tend to drive evolution forward, tend to get edited out of the genome and of species very, very quickly. Animals who behave this way tend to die out. Their lineages don't continue. Which is to say, if every animal on Earth is hunting out ways to alter their consciousness to get fucked up, Getting fucked up must be good for us somehow. So what is it? Well, it was the psychologist Edward de Bono who first solved it, and the answer is known as depatterning. The problem is that in nature, just like, you know, in your daily life, animals get stuck in ruts. They will repeat the same actions over and over and over with diminishing returns, right? But interrupting behavior is not easy, right? This is what we learn We learned from James, from Freud, from Jung, these deep, instinctive, unconscious behaviors are really hard to get rid of. They're really hard to de-pattern, right? But it turns out that the use of mind-altering substances is a de-patterning incident. It increases creative decision-making. It increases innovation. To use the technical term that is used by Italian botanist Giorgio Samoroni, in his book Animals and Psychedelics, he uses the more contemporary term lateral thinking. Remember we talked about how anandamide, the same psychoactive that's inside of THC that also shows up in flow and other altered states of consciousness, how that promotes lateral thinking, outside-the-box thinking, far-flung connections between ideas, what psychologists sometimes talk about as divergent thinking. The lateral thinking is usually at farther flung. It's problem solving through indirect and creative approaches. These are the big intuitive leaps between ideas. These are really hard to come by in the natural world for animals. And so when they need to break behavior because the old behavior is not working and they need a new behavior, one of the ways, one of the fastest ways nature has found to go A to B is to deploy a mind-altering substance. It is survival of the trippiest. Now let's roll our story all the way back. We're going to start with William James again, and I just want to give you a little bit of background on where James stumbled upon nitrous oxide. He had been reading the writings of a philosopher named Benjamin Blood, who is not revered as a philosopher at all and was a little bit controversial back then. But he was the first major philosopher to really laud the benefits of nitric oxide. And what Blood argued is that nitrous nitrous oxide seems to stimulate mystical experiences. And when James tried nitrous for himself, as we pointed out, he was not disappointed, right? He experienced the heights of revelatory insight, divine union, became one with the universe. And what's really key here and what's really interesting, and this seems to be the case again and again and again and again throughout this story, is These substances helped James understand religion. And more importantly, James was— there's a term for him in the psychedelic community, which is a hardhead, which means you need a lot of whatever it is— meditation, yoga, psychedelics, whatever— to produce any kind of reactions. James was something of a hardhead himself. It was really hard for him to change his consciousness, which is probably why he was such a good researcher and psychologist. I have similar problems, which I think makes me me a very good flow researcher. So while some of these insights were only available to James through mind-altering substances or really high-risk mountaineering activity, he felt there were a lot of people who were capable of generating the same effects without help from intoxicants. Now, one of the reasons James really was only experimenting with nitrous oxide is even though we know sort of that shamanic use of psychedelics goes back at least 7,000 years— there are cave paintings in Algeria that have mushroom shaman in them. In India, there's stories of soma, which many people think is a psychedelic mushroom drink that date back 1,700 years. The Greeks had kykeon, which is a psychedelic made with a rye ergot fungus, the same fungus that makes LSD psychedelic, right? Even those things had been going on for a long time, not really a huge part of Western culture. Western culture had nitrous oxide, and then in 1887, they got mescaline, right, which is the psychoactive substance peyote, and it took them 20 years to figure out how to create it synthetically in the laboratory. But by 1908, it's finally synthesized. So now we've got another psychedelic in the psychedelic canon that Westerners start playing with. That really gets a big upgrade, right? 1938 is when the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman— he's looking for a circulatory system stimulant, and he accidentally creates LSD-25, but he shelves And he doesn't think about it, and then in 1943, he has a hunch that this compound he synthesized some 5 years ago might be good for something, might be interesting. So he resynthesizes it and accidentally gets a little bit on his fingers. And he trips a little while and says, "Wow, this is really interesting." And then he goes back for his famous retest, his bicycle ride, where he takes 2.5 times the normal recreational dose, trips out of his mind, and— This is really interesting, 'cause it's really hard to wrap our heads around it, 'cause we grew up in a culture where drugs were already part of the culture, where psychedelics were already part of the culture. This was a brand-new experience. And he starts tripping his brains out. He has no idea if he's ever gonna be normal again. He's freaking out that this is a permanent error, and that he's gonna be crazy from here on out. Which is why, by the way, the first medical use for psychedelics was as a psychomimetic, a drug that appears to mimic schizophrenia, which was one of the reasons it was so hard for scientists to understand and to help treat patients and help people with, is they had no experience of the disease. So now they thought, oh wow, LSD mimics the disease. They were totally wrong. But the fact remains that the fact that people still believe this, by the way, is one of the reasons that psychedelic research managed to rise from the dead again back in the 1990s. This faulty idea. Anyways, Hoffman's discovery kicks off 20 years of wild and weird experimentation, and some of it is done during World War II. And rumors start to surface that the Nazis have been trying to use mescaline as a truth serum at Dachau. And there's other rumors that the Russians are also using psychedelics for mind control experiments. And the CIA— God bless them, decides to pick up where the Nazis left off, which is always a good thing, always a good thing. And they found MKUltra. And MKUltra was the CIA's mind control program where they were technically using, quote unquote, the use of biological and chemical materials and altering human behavior. So the CIA, they literally buy an ungodly amount of LSD, 10 kilograms of LSD, which is enough to dose half of the population of the United States. And they all kinds of crazy stuff. They hire hookers to pick up johns and bring them back to a CIA safe house where they dose them with LSD and then see the CIA personnel watch what happens through a one-way mirror. They dosed housewives and soldiers and criminals, and all without their knowledge. It was a huge program. It was very, very, very ethically questionable. And in one of my very favorite books on the subject, Storming Heaven, by a guy named James Stevens, he talks about about what was going on within the CIA itself, and this is what he says. Within the CIA itself, agents were taking LSD regularly, tripping at the office, at agency parties, measuring their mental equilibrium against those of their colleagues. Turn your back in the morning and some wiseacre would slip a few milligrams in your coffee. It was a game played with the most exalted of weapons, the mind. And sometimes embarrassing things happened. Case-hardened spooks would break down crying or go all gooey about the brotherhood of man. Once or twice, things went really awry with paranoid agents escaping into the bustle of downtown Washington, their anxious colleagues in hot pursuit. After one spectacular chase, the quarry was finally run aground in Virginia, where they found him crouched under a fountain, babbling about those terrible monsters with terrible eyes. So, yeah, things got a little out of control. So, all the rumors you hear about the CIA and MKUltra, most of them are pretty true. There have been a bunch of really good books written about this era. Most of the original MKUltra papers, they tried to burn them. And they did manage to burn more than half of them. But then a stack turned up, I want to say in the '80s or '90s, I'm not exactly sure. So we have some of the original data, and a lot of this has come to light. And it, it sounds funny now, it probably wasn't then. They obviously made the movie The Manchurian Candidate about it. So this is going on, MKUltra is going on, and MKUltra— the CIA didn't do a lot of the work themselves, they farmed it out to existing mental institutions and psychological institutions and colleges. And so Ken Kesey is then a graduate student in the Stanford writing program, studying writing, and he's trying to earn a little extra money, and he's trying to do research for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which is set in a mental institution. So he starts volunteering nights at this local VA hospital in Menlo Park, which, unbeknownst almost anybody involved was part of MKUltra. And to earn a little extra money, a grad school friend of his turned him on to these $75 per session volunteer experiments where the docs were running with psychomimetic drugs, right? LSD, right? And chemicals like LSD that mimic this mental breakdown. There's this really funny quote where Kesey was later talking to Stanford Magazine, and he said, "The scientists didn't have the guts to do it themselves," meaning take the drugs, "so they hired students." And when they came back, When they came back out of the sessions, they took one look at us and said, "Whatever they do, don't let them go back into that room." So over on Perry Lane, which is the Bohemian enclave where Kesey is living, right, he starts stealing the drugs from the VA hospital and running experiments, right? As Tom Wolfe recounted in the electric Kool-Aid acid test, volunteer Kesey gave himself over to science at the Menlo Park Vet's Hospital, and somehow drugs were getting up and walking out of there and over to Perry Lane. Half the time Perry Lane would be like some kind of college fraternity row with everybody out on a nice autumn Saturday afternoon on the grass playing touch football. An hour later, Kesey and his circle would be hooking down something that in the entire world only they and a few other avant-garde neuropharmacological researchers even knew about. And of course what happens next becomes huge countercultural lore. Kesey moves the experiments into the hills of Palo Alto, the Hells Angels show up, Hunter Thompson shows up, Neal Cassady from Jack Kerouac's On the Road The Road fame shows up, weird little band called the Warlocks that becomes the house band that later becomes the Grateful Dead. They paint a bus Day-Glo, nickname it Further, and, you know, West Coast psychedelic culture is essentially born. Now, at the same time all of this is going on, there is some real research going on. In fact, a lot of real research. By the end of the 1950s, people are starting to use LSD to treat psychological disorders, neurosis, anxiety, '52 is the first study on LSD and depression. And then in '53, at the Saskatchewan Mental Hospital in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, which is like 25 miles north of the Canadian border, a guy named Humphrey Osmond, who's the same doctor who administered mescaline to Aldous Huxley, about which he wrote The Doors of Perception, begins giving LSD to alcoholics. And the thinking here is that it has been really clear out of the work done in Alcoholics Anonymous that for alcoholics to quit drinking, they need to hit bottom, and they need to go through the DTs and all that horrific stuff. And the idea was maybe LSD mimics the DTs, right? And maybe it mimics the hitting bottom experience for alcoholics. And so they end up dosing 2,000 alcoholics. Huge, huge, huge research subjects. This is the crazy part. 45% of them stay sober. This is enormous. Most treatment facilities today, they have 5% to 10% sobriety on the back end, long-term. They were getting 45% sobriety, and this was long-term. This was also— you've probably heard the term set and setting before in psychedelic research and psychedelic therapy. If you've experimented with the drugs yourselves, Set and setting means that your mindset and the environment with which you consume the substance have a huge impact on your experience. So this was learned way, way, way back when, 1953, this idea is born. In fact, and we'll talk about this a little bit later as we advance this, I'm currently involved in some of the research that's trying to actually figure out what do we really mean by set and setting? 'Cause we learned back in '53 that it's fundamentally critically important, especially to therapeutic outcomes, for psychedelics, but what it actually means, open question, and we'll come back to that later. But there are two different forms of psychedelic therapy that emerge here. One, high dose and low dose. Low dose is what we would today call microdosing, right? You have to know that before this stuff gets criminalized in '68, 40,000 patients have undergone some form of psychedelic therapy for neurosis, for schizophrenia, for alcoholism. 6 major international conferences are held, and 1,000 psychedelic papers have been written. And I will say, as much as I am super impressed that we're having a psychedelic renaissance and all this research is coming back, a lot of what has gone on to date is people reproving what the hippies proved because they don't believe the hippies. So we're doing the same experiments over and over again to reprove what we already know. So So are we wasting our time or not? Depends on how much you trust that original research. But it is what's going on. Tim Leary famously sets up the Harvard Psilocybin Project in 1960. He's fired from Harvard by '63, by the way, for failing to attend classes. Richard Alpert, who later became Baba Ram Dass and wrote Be Here Now, he gets fired one year after Leary for giving psilocybin to undergraduates. In— over in Prague, a doctor named Stanislav Grof famously will go on to invent holotropic breathwork, start studying LSD in Prague at the Psychedelic Research Institute. And by the way, he does 4,000 LSD therapy sessions. So disavow yourself of the notion that these are new ideas. And some of the cool stuff also shows up in the '60s. So 1962, a guy named Howard Lotsoff He's a heroin addict, and he's a jazz musician. And all of his friends are heroin addicts, and they're jazz musicians. And they're really junk shows. They will pretty much take any substance they can get their hands on. And they get their hands on this weird African bark psychedelic known as ibogaine. And 6 of them take ibogaine just for the high. All of them are junkies, and they take ibogaine. And the thing about ibogaine is it produces a 24- to 48-hour high. An hour trip, and most people report experiencing a whole life flashback during that period. And when you come out the other end, gone is your desire to do heroin. In fact, 5 of the 6 in that original study group quit using heroin immediately afterwards, saying they lost their desire. What we now know, by the way, is that the part of the brain that makes addicts crave heroin and the part of the brain that make detoxing so horrific from heroin get shut down by ibogaine. So what it does is it gives people a reprise window with which they can get their life back together again. And we'll see ibogaine coming back for treatment and addiction. So when we come out of all this, right, there are a couple key findings, right? One we talked about already, which is set and setting being hugely important. The second is what we're learning again today, which is for the treatment of anxiety, for the treatment of trauma, and for the treatment of addiction, psychedelics show a tremendous amount of progress.

Hey there, just going to interrupt. If you are a leader, a knowledge worker, or an entrepreneur, and you want to take your professional success to the next level while reclaiming time, space, and freedom with in your personal life, then Zero to Dangerous may be a fit for you. Zero to Dangerous is our flagship peak performance training. You'll work one-on-one with our coaches. You'll go through our whole curriculum. You'll join a community of peak performers from all over the world.

This was like a really weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2. So then somewhere in Zero to Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category category of things to do just because I enjoy them, which is, you know, entrepreneur for 23 years, it never occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I had gotten all my work done. Like, it never occurred to me to do that. It was really, really weird. I enforced the deadline, like it had to be real, I had to create the output to really have the experience be valid, and I was watching my productivity go up up and up, and I was like, what do I do now? It's 2 o'clock. And it was just so weird. Like, when you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that and you can put them in a way that somebody can kind of scan through those, it allows somebody to self-identify and be like, oh God, that's really meaningful to me. Because some person's going to be like a 40-year-old dad who's going to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

Go to getmoreflow.com, getmoreflow.com. Pop an application through, takes 30 seconds. We will be excited to speak with you to see whether it's a good fit. So that's getmoreflow.com.

Interestingly, for the spirituality high-performance side, we also see that these substances are really potent aids for personal development, for expanding perspective, for heightening creativity, and they show a ton of promise. And I want to talk about two really key experiments, what they mean, and what they mean to the science of high performance and what they mean to the science of spirituality. And the first is the very famous Good Friday experiment. So 70 years ago, a very influential University of Chicago historian named Marcia Eliade coins the phrase "archaic techniques of ecstasy." And these describe all the things shamans do to change their consciousness— singing, dancing, chanting, meditation, right? He quote unquote, "These were all the original and pure," quote unquote, "techniques that shamans used to alter consciousness." Eliade leaves out a critical category. Even though shamans in every continent have long used psychotropics and psychedelics to alter their consciousness, to shift states, to access insight, this fact gets ignored. And instead, he writes, narcotics are only a vulgar substitute for the pure trances, an imitation of a state that the shaman is no longer capable of attaining otherwise. What Eliade is demonstrating here is what is known as the skin bag bias. The idea here is that we are very, very, very suspicious of any consciousness-altering technique that originates outside of the skin bag, outside of the body. So technology, pharmacology, these things are not pure. But internal meditation, contemplation, dancing, singing, chanting, ah, these are very, very pure. And the spiritual experiences produced by psychedelics These obviously have to pale in comparison to these natural ways. This is known as the skin bag bias. And about a decade after Eliade declares this, Walter Ponke, who is at the Harvard Divinity School, decides to test this idea. It's 1962, and it's Good Friday. And he recruits a group of seminary students, people who were religious by By nature, right? 20 seminary students from Boston University, and they all go to Marsh Chapel on Good Friday in 1962. And the question is, can mind-altering drugs produce authentic mystical experiences? So half the group gets a psychedelic, the other half get an active placebo, which is niacin, which produces physiological changes a little bit without any cognitive impairment. And then everybody goes into the Good Friday service. Afterwards, subjects rated their experience for a variety of mystical qualities: sacredness and affability, distortion of time and space, sense of oneness with the divine. So the results were really, really, really significant. All right, these were all students chosen out of the Div School, Harvard Div School, because they were originally spiritual. They were people who you would expect to have deeply powerful spiritual experiences going to Easter Mass. And yet all the psilocybin subjects rated their— all the mystical qualities of the experience much, much higher than the control group. And 6 months later, the psilocybin group had all kinds of persistent beneficial effects to their attitudes and behavior. They all said that the experience had deepened their faith. In fact, the crazy part, out of the 20 subjects, 9 of the 10 who got psilocybin actually went on to become priests. None of the people in the control group did, which is really, really, really profound. In other words, what Ponke discovered is that the skin bag bias is completely incorrect. As a matter of fact, it seems that psychedelic experiences were as deeply spiritual, if not more spiritual, and more long-lasting in their impact than a traditional spiritual experience. And yet Yet people still hate this finding so much that we've gone back on two different occasions. So first, Rick Doblin, the founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Science, went back and he did a long-term follow-up. He's the one who found that 9 of the 10 who got psilocybin became priests. And he later wrote in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology The experimental subjects unanimously described their Good Friday psilocybin experiences having had elements of a genuinely mystical nature and characterized as one of the high points of their spiritual life. Most of the control subjects could barely remember even a few details of the service. Even this isn't enough. So in 2002, in one of the most important contemporary psychedelic studies, Johns Hopkins psychopharmacologist Roland Griffith, who is one of the most august and esteemed people in the profession, reruns the original experiment, this time with full modern double-blind standards. And Michael Pollan asked Roland Griffith about this in a 2015 New Yorker article and, you know, asked him what the results were. And what Griffith's answer was, it sort of speaks for everything. He said, there is such a sense sense of authority that comes out of the primary mystical experience that it can be threatening to existing hierarchical structures. We end up demonizing these compounds. Can you think of another area of science regarded as so dangerous and taboo that all research gets shut down for decades? It's unprecedented in modern science. His point is these experiences from a mystical perspective are very, very, very real. In fact, my buddy Andrew Newberg, who we heard about earlier, did that fantastic brain scan work on Tibetan Buddhists and Franciscan nuns and then went on to study every mystical experience known to man. He, in 2016, did the most comprehensive study I've seen yet where anybody did anything like this. He interviewed 739 people who had had either spiritual or mystical experiences. Half of those were psychedelic experiences. Half were non-psychedelic. And then he rated them for reduced fear of death, increased sense of purpose, increased spirituality, and intense mystical experience. And it wasn't even a contest. The psychedelic states massively trumped the non-psychedelic in every category that he looked at. So that's the Good Friday experiment. That is on the science of spirituality side, right? And you have to know that— remember, we go back to James— they don't— psychedelics are just another spiritual technique like every other, right? They don't start getting split apart at all until really the '60s. And they get split because the Good Friday Experiment is the science of spirituality. And then a man named James Fadiman, who is a researcher at the International Foundation for Advanced Study in Menlo Park, California, They are looking at low-dose microdosing of psychedelics for creativity. And in this very famous study— was literally the last study run in America before the research was shut down. They completed it the day before. He brings together 27 test subjects, and these are mainly engineers, architects, mathematicians, folks like from places like Stanford and Hewlett-Packard. And he gets them puts these people together for one specific reason. All of them have been struggling for months to solve a highly technical problem. So he divides the test subjects into groups of 4, and they get 2 treatment sessions. And some are given 50 micrograms of LSD, others get 100 milligrams of mescaline, and both are well below the dosages needed to produce psychedelic effects at all. And then they take a test designed to measure 9 categories of cognitive performance enhancement. And this is everything from heightened concentration to the ability to know when the right solution presents itself. And they spend 4 hours working on their problem. So everybody in the study group reports a boost in creativity, some as much as 200%. But what gets the most attention, what is amazing, is the list of real-world breakthroughs that emerges. And this is from Fadiman's research: design of a linear electron accelerator, beam steering device, an improvement to magnetic tape recorders, a mathematical theorem regarding NOR gate circuits, a new design for a vibratory microphone, a space probe designed to measure solar properties, a new conceptual model of a photon, on and on and on. Now, none of these are the kinds of practical technical achievements anybody associates with psychedelic drug use. This is not how we think about psychedelic drug use. It's not how we think about high performance, for that matter. And it's the last study run in 1966. LSD becomes illegal in California, so research shuts down. '71, Nixon— President Nixon calls Timothy Leary the most dangerous man in America. And LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, peyote, cannabis, DMDA, which is a precursor to LSD, MDMA or ecstasy, DMT, they're all classified as Schedule I drugs, which means there are no medical uses. They are extremely addictive. Now, it turns out that both of these are total lies, but it takes us 30 years to figure that out. So the government shutdown of psychedelic research lasts until about the 1990s. In between, some interesting things happen that I want to point at. One is a man named Alexander Alexander Shulgin, who I wrote extensively about with Jamie Wheal in our book Stealing Fire. So I'm not going to retell that story, but Shulgin synthesized so many new psychedelic drugs and did so much psychedelic research along the way, all with the government's blessing. It was a really amazing thing. But one of the things he did is he resynthesized MDMA, Molly, or ecstasy, and it had been discovered way, way, way back when And he resynthesizes it, and he did it because one of his students had played with it and told him it had stopped him from stuttering. So, Shulgin decides to resynthesize it, and it kicks off the entire MDMA therapy craze. And then that leads into rave culture and hipsters doing MDMA, and pretty soon, by 1988, it's a Schedule I substance. Substance, but not before a lot of research had been done. In fact, tons of psychologists wrote letters begging the government not to make it a Schedule I substance because it was so powerful as a marriage counseling drug and as a relationship counseling drug and possibly as a therapeutic aid. All right, but it didn't matter. It got shut down. But along the way, one of the guys who got really interested in this stuff was Rick I mentioned him earlier. He founds the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Research, and alongside a handful of other people, really, really becomes one of the principal lobbying organizations trying to drive this forward. Then something really interesting happens in 1990. So a guy, a psychiatrist named Rick Strassman, is at the University of New Mexico. And the University of New Mexico is one of those places that scientists go if they want to hide their research from the rest of the world. It's a really good place to do that. And Strassman is looking for— he's sort of a religious spiritual scholar, and he's looking for a naturally occurring substance in the human body that could produce the kinds of mystical states that he's read about in the Bible, right? He wants to understand, like, the non-drug epiphanies that Moses and a lot of the historical prophets have had. So he's looking, is there anything Is there something in the body that could naturally produce this kind of crazy psychedelic experience? So initially, he's looking at melatonin, but he's disappointed in the results. So he decides he's gonna focus on its cousin, DMT. Now, DMT is pretty much everywhere in the body. It's naturally occurring. It's made in the lungs. It's made in the retina. It's maybe made in the pineal gland. But if you make it synthetically, if you vaporize it or inject it, it is incredibly, incredibly, incredibly, incredibly Powerful psychedelic. And it is a very different kind of psychedelic from LSD or psilocybin. It produces a much more potent experience. So one of the things about DMT, they always say you can't overdose on this drug because the person who could actually overdose is gone by the third hit. So very, very strange. Now, the interesting thing, when I say it's not like LSD, like all these other drugs, Here's a cool fact about psychedelics. We only trip— the visuals that we see when we're tripping, they follow 4 patterns, and researchers have known this for a long time. We see— the first one is grates, lattices, filigrees, checkerboards, that kind of stuff. We also see cobwebs. That's the second one. Third one is tunnels, funnels, alleys, cones, and vessels. And the fourth one is spirals, right? And we know this All of these happen because of breakdowns in our visual system. So for example, why do things spiral? Well, at V1— so there's 6 levels of the visual cortex, and V1 is the most basic. It's the simplest level of processing. And what happens here is edge recognition. So we see just the outline of an object, right? The lamp ends there and the wall begins between. And what we're really getting is like this straight line of maybe the lamp and the straight line of the wall or something along those lines. And but what happens is when they're pressed up right next to each other and the brain can no longer do edge recognition, which is what it does at V1, right? This object ends here, this object begins here. Sides of the objects begin to blur together. Everything swirls. That's why we get swirls, right? So DMT, first of all, it tends to produce grates and lattices and filigrees and checkerboards. And it tends to be infinity in every direction, right? And so that's a little bit familiar, but everything else done in the experience is not familiar at all. So Straussman is freaked out by what's going on. He's got 20 years of experience and training and study in a Zen monastery, and he's expecting Zen kind of white light Buddhist enlightenment experiences from DMT. That's what he's thinking he's going to get because he's looking for what he thought Moses got. And that's not what he gets at all. In fact, 50% of his research subjects blast off to distant galaxies. They got hair-raising encounters with multidimensional entities. A lot of what he discovered maps very, very much onto alien abduction experiences. A lot of people thought they were taken up by tall gray men, and a lot of people came back swearing these experiences were real or more real than waking So Strassman gets himself into a lot of trouble in the Buddhist community, publishes the results in Tricycle, and kicks off this giant crisis in the Buddhist community. But the results in the lab are so weird that he actually shuts down the experiment. He gets so freaked out, he shuts it down. He kitesails up to Taos to knit alpaca sweaters. And I know Rick, and he really does live in Taos, and he does knit alpaca sweaters. He does other experiments too, so he's not completely gone from this, but it was a little hair-raising for him. But it was the first psychedelic experiment post-drug war, and he got permission to do it because they thought DMT mimicked schizophrenia, and that's what he told the government he was researching. He wasn't. He was looking for Moses-like spiritual epiphanies, but he convinced the government he was looking at schizophrenia. It was also during this period that I got to know Rick Doblin a little bit, and this was— I really didn't come in through psychedelic research. As a journalist covering the drug war, which was one of the topics that I covered a lot, 'cause I had seen sort of the damage it had done on every side up close and personally, and really thought it was an important thing to cover. And I meet Rick, and, you know, I hear about him talking— This is early days, and he's telling me about psychedelics as a tool for social justice, as a tacit antidote to totalitarian movements, and genocides as an antidote to Hitler. Hitler. And if you've ever met Rick Doblin, he really means these things. It's very hard as a reporter. I'm cynical, and yet I'm believing him. And one of the reasons I'm believing him is he's starting to get data to back up some of the crazy things, right? There's a couple of studies on psychedelic therapy that are dribbling out. Psychedelic mushrooms seem to be able to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder. This guy named Francisco Dr. Raynow at the University of Arizona sort of figures it out. Rumors about ibogaine as a heroin treatment drug start leaking out, and treatment facilities, underground ones, start showing up in Canada and in Mexico, and they're actually starting to do research. And Rick is working very, very tirelessly to get the FDA to approve an MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder. Study, and he's working really, really hard and getting a little bit farther. But in 1999, Roland Griffith, who ends up redoing the Good Friday experiment, right, that's in 2006. But in 1999, he got there because he looked at psilocybin for smoking cessation, and he did a really small pilot study with 15 cigarette smokers. 80% were still quit 6 months later. 67% were still quit a year after that. This was way better than any other treatment option, which was in line with what people were saying back in the '60s, right? 45% of their study group stayed sober. Wow, these are incredible medical results. Rollin also looked at end-of-life anxiety and found— and usually in cancer patients, right, people who who could not really stop being panicked because they were dying, right? And there was nothing to be done about the dying. It was going to happen with or without the panic. But this is a really incurable condition that nobody had been able to, to get anywhere with, and suddenly there was hope, right? Then in 2006, he redoes the Good Friday experiment. 2006, we also get research that says psilocybin can treat cluster headaches. Cluster headaches are the far, far extreme version of migraine headaches. They're often called suicide headaches because people who have this disease will often kill themselves because the pain is so severe. So psilocybin to treat cluster headaches. By the way, there was also work with LSD to treat cluster headaches that was going on at Harvard at the time, and they couldn't finally get permission on on it, and it sort of jumped over to Switzerland. And I don't actually know where it is. I can just tell you that it sort of jumped over. But the really cool one was in 2011, Rick Doblin finally gets permission to do a very small MDMA for PTSD study. He does it with a South Carolina psychologist named Michael Mithofer, and they are looking at PTSD in victims of sexual abuse abuse, childhood trauma, and in soldiers coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq. And I wrote a lot of articles about this research, and I was lucky enough to talk to some of these original soldiers. And they talked about the experience as an absolute miracle, meaning, like, they had not slept in years. They had lost their jobs and their wives and their lives, and nothing was left. Left. And literally, they built a two-session protocol. And one of the guys I talked to, he was so completely cured by the end of the first session that in his second session, he was like, yeah, I don't want to talk about the fact that I got blown up in Iraq. Let's talk about my relationship issues and let's heal something else. Let's fix something else, right? And that pretty much opens the doors, right? In In fact, that original MDMA study went so well that they have since done follow-up studies. The FDA recently gave MDMA privileged drug status, and they are rushing phase 3 trials of MDMA through PTSD through right now because it's been so effective. In fact, the same thing is actually happening with MDMA and psilocybin. For depression and anxiety. They looked at extreme anxiety and then they went, oh, does it work in lesser cases? And it turns out it does. And it's not, of course, just psilocybin or LSD or MDMA. People are looking at ayahuasca, at ibogaine, at ketamine, at LSD, at psilocybin. All seem incredibly promising to treat addiction, depression, anxiety, end of life or otherwise. And we're starting to figure out why. And one of my favorite studies about the why was done by a guy named David Olson at UC Davis. And he looked at LSD and DMT, and when he applied it to the neuronal tissue of both rats and flies, he saw an increase in the number of dendrites, their density, and the number of synapses. This is basically all the parts of the brain cell. Basically what it shows is that these substances, psychedelics, may repair circuits damaged in people with mood and anxiety disorders by overwriting them. And the mass of studies currently going on is insane. My favorite work on this topic is being done at Robin Carhart-Harris's lab at Imperial College in London. And what Robin and his team have been doing is fMRI imaging of what your brain looks like on psychedelics. They did MDMA, psilocybin, LSD, and DMT, And the results are kind of staggering. What's interesting, by the way, is Robin Carhart-Harris didn't actually start out interested in mind-altering substances at all. He was studying psychoanalysis at Brunel University in England, and he was really interested in the unconscious, right? He was interested in James and psychoanalysis as the Freudian tradition, and he wanted a better way to study the unconscious, really incredibly really difficult to study. And he was in a seminar where the class leader sort of was rattling off all the ways we study the unconsciousness. Free association, dream analysis, hypnosis, bungled action, slips of the tongue. And they all suck, right? With the exception of dreaming, they're all very indirect approaches. And dreaming takes place when we're asleep, so all you get is after the fact. And he was like, "God, if we're gonna ever get anywhere, we need a better way to explore the unconscious." conscious. And he happens to pick up Stanislav Grof's famous book, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research. And, you know, those 4,000 experiments that Grof ran, this is the book where he writes about it. And he talks about that in that book, Grof says, during psychedelic states, our ego defenses are so diminished that we gain nearly direct access to the unconscious. Suddenly it clicks. With tools like fMRI and tools like LSD, psilocybin, et cetera, et cetera, Carhart-Harris can possibly study this stuff. So he switches career. He joins a different university, starts studying psychopharmacology, and does his initial work on MDMA. And in 2009, jumps over to Imperial College in London, and he becomes the first person in history in history to use fMRI to look at LSD, the second to look at psilocybin. And what he discovers is everything that we found with all the other altered states of consciousness. Transient hypofrontality, the deactivation of large swatches of the prefrontal cortex. That is why our sense of self disappears while we're on psychedelic states. States, right? Same reason that our sense of self disappears in mystical states and in flow states, right? But what gets really cool is he also finds that psychedelics disintegrate the default mode network. So earlier we said that if we really want to understand how things take place in the brain, the two things we need to know are neural anatomy and networks. We talked about neural anatomy. Networks are interconnections between different brain areas, and one of the most famous ones is the default mode network. This is responsible for mind wandering and daydreaming, right? And when we discovered it, sort of solved this ancient puzzle. So it's been known for a really long time that the brain is an energy hog, right? It's 2% of our body weight, yet consumes 20 to 25% of our energy, and that's at rest. And we couldn't figure this out. And for a while, people were just trying to measure the energy budget of activities. I am writing, how much energy I'm using. I'm doing architecture, how much energy I'm using. And this one researcher started to notice that the brain was using a ton of energy while at rest. What the heck is going on? The default mode network is what's going on. And so your brain is constantly mind wandering. It's constantly daydreaming, right? This is the network that's active when we're awake, we're not focused on task. And what's interesting is this is a source of a lot of mind chatter and a lot of unhappiness. When researchers do studies and they sort of ping people at various times and say, what are you thinking about? Most of the time, people are fretting about something. Mind wandering, as a general rule, is negative. Now, mind wandering for creativity is fundamental and fantastic. So people associate the default mode network with unhappiness. That's not entirely true, right? But like any network in the brain, it's very, very fragile, and it is very, very, very easy to turn off. We're going to see in a little bit that meditation turns it off. Flow shuts down the default mode network. Psychedelics Psychedelics blow it to pieces. All you got to do is knock out a couple of nodes in the network to knock it offline. So this is interesting. Card Harris pointed out that early psychologists used terms like ego disintegration to describe the effects of a psychedelically altered state, and they were way more right than they knew, right? The ego is a network, and things like psychedelics, flow, and meditation comprise the connections connections inside that network. They literally, quote unquote— this is Grobman, Carr, and Harris— they literally disintegrate the network. The other thing that they figured out is that psychedelics birth new networks. The scans of people on psychedelics show highly synchronized connections between really far-flung areas of the brain. If you look at a normal brain scan, of your brain and the network connections, it's going to look like 50, 60, 100 lines between different points around the brain. If you look at your brain on psychedelics, it's a huge, huge network map with thousands and thousands and thousands of connections. And even kind of separating out the different lines and the different points from one from another is really, really hard. Really difficult. Literally, psychedelics destroy the networks that produce our sense of self, that produce all that internal negative inner chatter, and instead, they build these really far-flung connections between far-flung disparate regions in the brain. What this research has done, it has identified the biological basis for the mind expansion associated with psychedelic drugs in the literature. So what does all this mean? Well, one of the things it means is that the upper possibility space of human experience, right? Whether we're talking about psychedelics, whether we're talking about flow states, whether we're talking about mystical states, right? We see roughly the same thing. We see deactivation of large swatches of the prefrontal cortex and the default mode network. Work. And the TPJ, right, the temporal parietal junction, that's the part of our brain that causes out-of-body experiences and things along those lines. But here's what's interesting. A lot of the brain— so these seem like, oh my God, it's moving my body, or it's moving my consciousness outside the body, right? The doppelganger effect is moving my body. Out-of-body experiences, it's moving my consciousness. But the TPJ, under normal circumstances, is involved in empathy and perspective-taking. When you walk a mile in somebody else's moccasins, that's the TPJ that's helping you do that. So we see that part of the brain start to shut down. So perspective starts to shift, right? We see brainwaves down around the alpha-theta borderline, and we see roughly these same 5 or 6 big neurochemicals. Now, certainly in psychedelic experiences, we're We're getting, for example, way, way, way more serotonin than would show up in flow. And in flow, we're getting way, way, way more dopamine than would ever show up in meditation. But roughly, these are similar experiences. And because they're similar experiences, right, there's a phenomenology of the ecstatic. And William James was really close with his list. In Stealing Fire, Jamie Wheal and myself came up with our own list. And this was after doing— we started with James, but we basically looked at every single breakdown of altered states. And what we wanted to get at was one that was content-neutral. And the difficulty with a lot of this stuff, for example, if you go into the '60s literature where they're trying to measure altered states, you see a lot of rebirthing stuff.

Why?

Because that was really hot back then, and that was a a real big idea for whatever reason, so it shows up in a lot of our altered state experiences. This is more about set and setting impacting the experience than what's actually underneath it. So we have gone down to content-neutral definitions of the experience, and they're all linked to increases in brain function. So, and nothing here is going to be new, but across the boards, whatever we're talking about when we're mapping cloud How do these experiences make me feel? One, selfless. Our sense of self goes away. Why? Because the prefrontal cortex deactivates and the default mode network shuts down. All of these experiences are timeless, right? Why? Because time is calculated all over the prefrontal cortex. And in all of these experiences, that gets shut down. So we can no longer separate past from present from future. We're plunged into the deep now. All of these experiences are effortless, effortless effort, right? This means if you're on the spiritual side, you are being moved by forces beyond your control. And if you're on the high performance side, you're in a flow state and it's effortless effort. And every action, every decision flows seamlessly, effortlessly, perfectly from the last. Take your pick. And all of these states are information rich. Why? Because all of the neurochemicals produced by these states surround the brain's information processing machinery and jack it up, which is why we feel like we have access to information in these experiences that we don't normally get access to. We're going to come back to this point at the very end of this. We're going to talk about open lines of research and unanswered questions, and you will find I will talk about my core question, which has always been, where does the information come from? Come from? Because I will tell you right now, all of this neurobiology can explain 90 to 95% of everything going on. But there is a 5% where there is a big question mark. And I'll get into more specifics later. But let's just say there is still some mystery here. Now, this phenomenology of the ecstatic, selfless, timeless, effortless richness, it forms an acronym: STER. S-T-E-R. Easy way to remember Interesting thing about these experiences, by the way, is all of these experiences— and this, they could be being produced by meditation, by psychedelics, or by flow— they've got these big ups that we've just been talking about. They've all got built-in downs as well. And these downs are going to be familiar to you if you're on a spiritual path or a high-performance path. You've had these experiences. What's the problem with selflessness? Is that something about losing your ego in these states makes it come back ferociously when you're normal. This is guru syndrome. This is, I went to Burning Man and had a psychedelic experience and I came back and I changed my name to Rainforest. And let me tell you how to live your life, right? We've all had that experience. We've all met this person. This is, by the way, a lot of people in the high performance space who are playing guru, right? This is not just in the spiritual communities on both sides. That's ego inflation is the problem with selflessness. Timelessness is you seem to come back with apocalyptic visions. Oh my God, I saw this thing in the mystical state and it's going to happen now. This is Daniel Pinchbeck, who's a friend of mine, coming back from the Amazon and writing 2012 because he did so much ayahuasca. He thought the world was going to end, right? The immediacy of events in the altered flow state is illusionary. This happens to people in flow in a different way. They get themselves into horrific trouble to get into a flow state. You're a musician and you have a vision of a symphony that you're going to write and you think, oh my God, it's only going to take a week or 2 weeks and I'll have it done. And in real life, it takes 5 to 10 years. Time horizons, when you can't separate past from present from future, they're all messed up. So you can't believe what you're being told about how long things will take because the part of your brain that can judge that is shut The problem with effortlessness is we get bliss junkies. Ah, dude, I don't want to do anything unless I'm in flow, man. Right? We see this over and over and over again. And if it doesn't feel spiritual, I'm not going to do it. Right? This is why the high performance path and the spiritual path were conjoined 100 years ago. Right? So you can— these problems of spiritual bypassing and bliss junkiedness dumb go away when you combine these things. And the problem with information richness is that the information layer, to use my partner Jamie Wheal's terminology for this, it is endless. It is endless. This is John Lilly, the famous psychedelic explorer, used to take LSD and ketamine and get into float tanks. But you could do it for the rest of your life because you're never going to— the information doesn't stop. You don't ever on DMT get to a point and go, "Wow, there was nothing new and interesting there." You have to force yourself to come back, 'cause these experiences, even if— and this is interesting— psychedelics, even marijuana, these are not addictive substances at all. They have no addictive properties. From a medical perspective, in terms of the harm and the good they do, the only thing that we know for sure as a negative effect fact is that if you are prone to schizophrenia, if you are prone to some kind of psychological disorder, psychedelics and marijuana can bring it on very, very quickly. And I know this from close personal experience. I have a very brilliant uncle who was a phenomenal, phenomenal thinker who went to San Francisco at the start of the '60s and never came back. Can trigger psychotic breaks in people very, very quickly if that's going to come on. So what they are though is they're not addictive, and outside of this one problem that they can bring on mental illness— and by the way, my uncle would have had schizophrenia, it was going to happen anyways, it just happened sooner, right? So these substances don't seem to cause it, it can accelerate it. If you've smoked pot and haven't gone crazy so far, chances are you don't have to worry about it. But I am not a medical doctor, so don't take my word for it. What these experiences are though is very sticky because the information is so rich and people want to go back and get more and more and more. So STIR— selfless, timeless, effortlessness, and richness— these are really positive, fantastic experiences. They all have a shadow side, they all have a dark side, and you have to go in knowing that. But And here's the really cool point. Here's why all this matters. It matters because now we have options. We have lots of options. And let's just, let's stay on the healing side of things for just a second and talk about PTSD. All right. So the original MAPS research and a lot of follow-up research has said if I use MDMA or psilocybin or substances like that to go at PTSD. It takes 1 to 2 therapy sessions to produce either complete remission, meaning my symptoms are totally gone and I no longer seem appear to have the condition, or significantly reduce my need for medication, right? 1 to 2 sessions of MDMA. So a bunch of years after that study was done at Camp Pendleton 10. They wanted to redo that study, but they didn't want to use a psychedelic because they wanted to treat soldiers with PTSD at scale, and they didn't think they could do with the psychedelic. So instead, they replaced the psychedelic with surfing. And surfing is a very big flow trigger for reasons that we're going to get to in a little while. Surfing produces a tremendous amount of flow. They use the exact same protocol. So the MDMA protocol was MDMA plus talk therapy, right? 1 to 2 sessions. So they used flow plus— actually, they used group therapy in flow. And what they found is complete remission or significant decrease in drugs. 5 weeks of surfing plus therapy was enough to do it. They redid the study once again, and this time they replaced surfing with meditation. They used a mantra meditation, kind of a watered-down TM. And they found that daily meditation plus therapy, 4 weeks was enough to significantly reduce or completely cure PTSD. So same problem, post-traumatic stress disorder, 3 different approaches. Obviously the same thing. If it's true for PTSD, it's also going to be true for anxiety because this is a scale and a spectrum, right? So we have choices. We have the same thing. Thing on the high-performance side, right? We have 3 different approaches if you're interested in boosting creativity, right? So research done by James Fadiman, we talked about it already, right? He saw those 200% boost in creativity and, you know, the magnetic tape recorder, the math theorem regarding NOR gates, the new model of the proton, the space probe, right? So microdosing, this was 1 to 2 sessions of microdosing produced a 200% burst in creativity. Very, very cool. So in flow research, we recently conducted a flow and creativity study, and we found that in flow, creativity is boosted some 400 to 700%. There's another study that was run at the University of Sydney. I referenced it earlier. So one of the things when they want to test intuitive problem solving, they use the Nine Dot Problem and using a technique where they artificially induce flow. Not going to talk about it now. We'll talk about it later. Later, they gave people the 9-dot problem. Now, the 9-dot problem you're familiar with— it's connect these 9 dots with 4 lines in 10 minutes without lifting your pencil from the paper. And under normal conditions, less than 5% of people can solve this particular problem. It's hard, right? It's an insight problem, difficult to solve. And in the original study group, they found 46 people. 23 took the test, took the 9-dot problem out of flow, and 23 took it flow. The people who took it out of flow, none of them managed to solve it. The people who were in flow, 46% solved the problem in record time. That's an enormous boost in creativity, right? Actually bigger than Fadiman got from microdosing. But maybe flow isn't your thing, and maybe microdosing isn't your thing. Well, then there's meditation. 3 open monitoring meditations, so Vipassana-style meditations, was enough to increase fluency, flexibility originally, and elaboration. These are fundamental creative skills. And the interesting thing that has come out of the meditation research, and we'll talk more about this in a bit, is certain types of meditation are really good for creativity. Certain types of meditation are really bad for creativity. Open monitoring meditation, open senses, vipassana meditation, we're just letting it all in and trying not to judge it. Much better for creativity than a focus meditation like counting your breath. Kind of meditation. So the point here, right, 3 different approaches to treating a problem, 3 different approaches to creativity. We're seeing on the high-performance side tons and tons of options. And what does all this mean in the context of this book? Well, one thing it means is that William James was right. He was absolutely correct, right? There is an ecstatic spectrum Flow states, states of awe, meditative states, contemplative states, trance states, psychedelic states, right? Technologically mediated states are true. Sexually provoked states, all the tantras, mystical states, even— check it out— the experience you have at transformative festivals. Going to Burning Man. This was research done at Oxford. Going to Burning Man produces the same changes in your brain as as doing psychedelics or being in flow or having a meditative practice. Similar changes in the brain. So all of these techniques under the hood, they are neurobiologically very similar. They do similar things to our brain. They produce similar experiences, the experience of stir. And long-term, as James pointed out, they are psychologically real. They have long-term permanent psychological benefits Or to use the phrase that my partner Jamie Wheal coined that has since sort of become common vernacular, altered states lead to altered traits. And this, by the way, explains why consciousness hacking is going mainstream. 44% of American companies are now offering a mindfulness training program. In 2016, yoga is a multibillion-dollar industry. Industry, right? 2017, psychedelics have shown promise in treating depression and addiction and end-of-life anxiety and PTSD and OCD. And the overall wellness and well-being industry is worth $3 trillion. And on top of that, when Jamie and I were writing Stealing Fire, it was actually— this story begins a little before that, when I was writing Rise of Superman, my big book on flow. I was talking to a man named Salim Ismail. Salim Ismail was the former head of innovation at Yahoo. He was then the founding president of Singularity University in Silicon Valley, where, as I mentioned earlier, they study technology and its application to kind of grand global challenges. And he's been a big flow geek for a really long time. Obviously, he's interested in innovation, so flow is really big in innovation. And we were talking and he makes an offhand comment. He's like, you know, I think every time you go to a sporting event, you're paying to watch somebody in flow. In fact, every time you go to the movies, you're paying to watch somebody in flow. In fact, when you go to a poetry reading or a concert, and he goes on and on, he's like, God, if you quantify this, I'll bet there's a big part of the GDP. I'll bet these numbers are a lot bigger than than anybody thinks. So that sort of stuck in my head, and it didn't— I just couldn't get it out of my head, and I couldn't get it out of my head. And when we started writing Stealing Fire, and we, you know, the research that says James is right, that all these states are very, very similar, only got done fairly recently. But what I realized is, if Salim is right that flow is a big part of our GDP, people actually trying to chase these so-called spiritual states or these so-called high-performance states, because they share the same underlying neurobiology. Let's quantify that, right? Let's use transient hypofrontality, these 5, 6 neurochemicals, and this alpha-theta borderline. And anything that people do in an attempt to get in that direction, let's take a look at this. Now, mind you, some of this is negative and addictive behavior, right? Some of this is crack cocaine, some of this is speed. These are not drugs that lead really anywhere positive other than for recreational fun, if you can keep them under control, I guess. But anyways, we calculated what we called the altered state economy. So we looked at drugs that change consciousness, both illegal and legal. We looked at the whole personal growth industry, right? Tony Robbins and those seminars. I don't think it's very ethical. First rule at the Flow Genome Project is is if we're going to alter somebody's consciousness, we never try to sell them something while their consciousness is altered. And that's exactly what Tony Robbins and a lot of these self-help gurus are doing. They're putting you in an ecstatic state and trying to sell you something at the point in time where your logical complex decision-making is offline and long-term planning is offline. Not exactly ethically correct as far as I'm concerned, but people get a lot of value out of Tony Robbins' work. And I've met the man, and in person I find him fascinating and interesting. And, you know, exciting. So I get it. I just don't think it's ethical. But anyways, we looked at, you know, that industry. We looked at recreation. Action sports, as I mentioned, put people into flow. And a lot of travel put people in flow. And then we looked at media and technology. And when I say we were as, as, as, as, as conservative as possible, it was beyond conservative. So, for example, You could pretty much look at the entire live concert industry and say, you know, pretty much anytime anybody goes to see a concert, they are going to change their consciousness. They are going to have— so flow, as we'll talk about going forward, comes in a number of varieties. There's individual flow, there's group flow, and then there's communitas, which is flow at scale. It's what happens when you go to a concert and everybody gets in sync together, right? So we looked at all this stuff, but when it came to live music, we said, no, no, no, let's just focus on the electronic the electronic dance industry, because there people are absolutely— a lot of the other reasons you might go to a concert, right? I like the song lyrics. Well, there aren't that many song lyrics in EDM. I like the this, or I like that. It's pretty much about altering your consciousness. At least it's a safer bet. So we took the much more smaller and conservative figure. And doing all this, when it was all said and done, our number for the altered state economy is $4 trillion. That is 1 of the global economy that we spend trying to alter our consciousness in this way. That is enormous. And the crazy thing, it's growing, and we're gonna talk about why a little bit later. But the most important thing I wanna leave you with as I close out this section, and it's sort of more proof that William James was right, and it comes out of Harvard. So they have been doing something called the Harvard Adult Development Project. Project. For 100 years, they have been studying different groups of people as they age. And what they've learned is that adults go through developmental stages much in the same way that kids do. And we're familiar with this in kids, right? The terrible twos, teenagers. These are developmental stages. Adults do the same thing. Now, as we move up, the difference between kids and adults, by the way, is that kids, it happens automatically. Automatically. Adults, it doesn't happen automatically. You actually have to do the homework, right? Nobody does your push-ups for you. And adults can get stuck at certain lines of development, right? And what you gain as you move up the adult scale is wisdom and insight and perspective. And really what you gain is empathy and the ability to see problems from alternate perspectives, right? Not just your own, right? And what they found is the farther up the scale you go, the wider your perspective goes. And now, originally they tracked ordinary states of consciousness. Now they're starting to look at non-ordinary states of consciousness at the upper levels, and so-called like enlightenment, satori, those kinds of experiences. That work is going on. But what we figured out is that there's wisdom at the upper end, and that wisdom goes directly to the bottom line. So 10, 15 years ago, a guy named Jim Collins wrote a book called Good to Great. This is one of the classic business books. And in it, he talks about level 5 leaders. These are the pinnacle of leadership, and these are people with enormously powerful powerful character strength and will, but incredible humility. They've got massive vision, yet they're enormously practical, et cetera, et cetera. And they run all of the top companies. And Collins said, look, man, this shit is a black box. We don't know how to create Level 5 leaders, right? We don't know how to get people to the upper levels of human development, what Harvard was studying. Right? Other than great personal tragedy, we don't know how to do it. But what came out of that research in Harvard is something really interesting. If you go into the footnotes, what you find is that there actually are ways to move yourself up the adult development scale. The more altered states of consciousness you experience or personal tragedy, those are the two ways it seems that you can move up the scale and altered states Could be psychedelics, could be through martial art flow experience. In fact, if you look into the research, what it seems like is most people start off, their first experience is with a psychedelic, and then it's through flow hobbies. They take up skiing or music or something along those lines. So that's what kind of primes it. But it's astounding. So 10 years ago, Bill Twardy Herbert. He's at Boston College and he's studying managers, and he finds that 80% of the adults in the top 2 stages of adult development hold senior management roles in all the big companies, despite making up 10% of the population. Over a 4-year period, these are the leaders that engineered at least one organizational transformation, right? Their firm's profits, their market share, and its reputation. And my point is that consciousness goes straight to the bottom line, and that's why all of this matters. So thanks for listening to the psychedelic detour. I'm going to see you in part 5, Hacking the Ecstatic.

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