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Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work
304Overview
CNBC and Strategy + Business Best Business Book of the Year
It’s the biggest revolution you’ve never heard of, and it’s hiding in plain sight. Over the past decade, Silicon Valley executives like Eric Schmidt and Elon Musk, Special Operators like the Navy SEALs and the Green Berets, and maverick scientists like Sasha Shulgin and Amy Cuddy have turned everything we thought we knew about high performance upside down. Instead of grit, better habits, or 10,000 hours, these trailblazers have found a surprising short cut. They're harnessing rare and controversial states of consciousness to solve critical challenges and outperform the competition.
New York Times bestselling author Steven Kotler and high performance expert Jamie Wheal spent four years investigating the leading edges of this revolution—from the home of SEAL Team Six to the Googleplex, the Burning Man festival, Richard Branson’s Necker Island, Red Bull’s training center, Nike’s innovation team, and the United Nations’ Headquarters. And what they learned was stunning: In their own ways, with differing languages, techniques, and applications, every one of these groups has been quietly seeking the same thing: the boost in information and inspiration that altered states provide.
Today, this revolution is spreading to the mainstream, fueling a trillion dollar underground economy and forcing us to rethink how we can all lead richer, more productive, more satisfying lives. Driven by four accelerating forces—psychology, neurobiology, technology and pharmacology—we are gaining access to and insights about some of the most contested and misunderstood terrain in history. Stealing Fire is a provocative examination of what’s actually possible; a guidebook for anyone who wants to radically upgrade their life.
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780062429650 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins Publishers |
| Publication date: | 02/21/2017 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Sales rank: | 260,935 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
Jamie Wheal is the author of the global bestseller Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, Navy SEALs and Maverick Scientists are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work. Wheal is an expert in peak performance and leadership, specializing in neuroanthropology––the intersection of culture, biology and psychology and the founder of the Flow Genome Project, an international organization dedicated to the research and training of ultimate human performance. Wheal is a mountaineer who’s guided the North Face of Mount Everest, trained Navy Seals, Olympians and RedBull extreme athletes and advised everyone from the U.S. Naval War College and Special Operations Command to the executives of major corporations including Google, Goldman Sachs and Cisco, among others. His work and ideas have been covered in The New York Times, Financial Times, Wired, Entrepreneur, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, INC, and TEDx. Wheal lives in Austin, TX.
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Never-Ending Story 1
Accidental Prometheans 4
Part 3 The Case for Ecstasis
Chapter 3 What Is This Fire?
The Switch 9
The High Cost of Ninja Assassins 12
Google Goes Fishing 18
Hacking Ecstasis 22
The Mind Gym 25
The Altered States Economy 28
Chapter 2 Why It Matters
The Ambassador of Ecstasis 33
Selflessness 37
Timelessness 39
Effortlessness 41
Richness 44
Wicked Solutions to Wicked Problems 46
Chapter 3 Why We Missed It Beyond the Pale 51
The Pale of the Church 52
The Pale of the Body 56
The Pale of the State 60
Pipers, Cults, and Commies 65
Part 2 The Four Forces of Ecstasis
Chapter 4 Psychology
Translating Transformation 73
The Bell Tolles for Thee 75
Mad Men 77
Taking the Kink Out of Kinky 81
Good for What Ails You 86
Altered States to Altered Traits 90
Chapter 5 Neurobiology
Outside the jar 95
I Can't Feel My Face 96
The Al Shrink 100
Precognition Is Here (But You Knew That Already) 103
The Birth of Neurotheology 106
OS to UI 111
Chapter 6 Pharmacology
Everybody Must Get Stoned 115
The Johnny Appleseed of Psychedelics 119
This Is Your Brain on Drugs 124
The Hyperspace Lexicon 126
The Molecules of Desire 132
Chapter 7 Technology
Dean's Dark Secret 135
Things That Go Boom in the Night 139
The Digital Shaman 142
Enlightenment Engineering 146
The Flow Dojo 148
Part 3 The Road to Eleusis
Chapter 8 Catch a Fire
The Sandbox of the Future 157
When the Levee Breaks 163
Disrupting the Brahmins 168
High Times on Main Street 174
Nothing New Under the Sun 178
Chapter 9 Burning Down the House
The Atomic Donkey 182
He Who Controls the Switch 185
Spooks to Kooks 187
Soma, Delicious Soma! 193
Ecstasy Wants to Be Free 199
Chapter 10 Hedonic Engineering
"Known Issues" of STER 201
Selflessness: It's Not About You 202
Timelessness: It's Not About Now 203
Effortlessness: Don't Be a Bliss Junkie 205
Richness: Don't Dive Too Deep 206
The Ecstasis Equation 209
Hedonic Calendaring 212
There is a Crack in Everything 216
Conclusion
Row Your Boat or Fly Your Boat? 219
An Afterthought 221
Acknowledgments 225
A Quick Note on Inside Baseball 227
Notes 233
Index 277
About the Authors 294
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