FTP100: Jamie Wheal – Sense-Making In Chaos

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Our guest in this episode is Jamie Wheal, a researcher and writer in the field of human potential, peak performance, and flow states. He is the co-author of the book “Stealing Fire” and director of Flow Genome Project.

In this interview we talk about how to make sense in a world that is unraveling faster than we can keep up with, discuss the potential solutions to this crisis, and the challenges of building coherent and resilient communities.

The ability for us to accurately diagnose and act on what is happening in the world is constrained by three things: our capacity to understand complexity, our cognitive biases, and our ability to digest grief. - Jamie Wheal Click To Tweet

In This Episode Of Future Thinkers:

• The increase of complexity and consequence, and the state of overwhelm as a public health issue
• How the collapse of authority in the last 50 years contributed to the sense of abandonment and disenchantment
• What is the actual urgency for a systemic change in the world?
• How our ability to understand complexity, cognitive biases, and the capacity to process grief are affecting our understanding of what is going on in the world
• The pitfalls of transformational culture and why we are making the same mistakes as the hippie generation
• Weaponization, commercialization and hedonization – our most dangerous tendencies in using powerful transformational tools
• The importance of open-sourcing the tools for self-realization ahead of the efforts to co-opt them
• The challenge of creating post-conventional group flow
• What we need to build resilient communities
• The need for a Council of Women Elders in healthy communities

For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Click To Tweet

Links and Resources Mentioned In This Episode:

• Hacking Collective Intelligence, an interview with Jamie Wheal on Rebel Wisdom
• Rule Omega: Greenhall, Schmachtenberger, Wheal (excerpt from the conversation on Rebel Wisdom)
• Flow Genome Project
• Existential Climate-Related Security Risk: A Scenario Approach, a report by Breakthrough – National Centre for Climate Restoration
• Interview with Dr. Gabor Maté on Tim Ferris Show
• Reality Bites, a movie directed by Ben Stiller (1994)

We’re not done until we are utterly ordinary. - Jamie Wheal Click To Tweet

Recommended Books:

• Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Jamie Wheal and Steven Kotler
• The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu
• Upheaval, Guns, Germs And Steel and Collapse, a trilogy by Jared Diamond
• Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben
• The Hero’s Journey, the collected works of Joseph Campbell

Be joyful though you have considered all the facts. - Wendell Berry Click To Tweet

More From Future Thinkers:

• FTP098, 099: John Vervaeke – Overcoming The Meaning Crisis
• FTP097: Sovereignty vs. Identity
• Daniel Schmachtenberger Interviews on Future Thinkers Podcast
• FTP062, 063: Jordan Greenhall – Deep Code: Learning How To Learn