Introducing Jamie Wheal on Collective Insights

We’d like to re-introduce a long time friend of Qualia, Jamie Wheal, as a new regular host on the Collective Insights podcast. He is Executive Director of the Flow Genome Project and author of the Pulitzer nominated global bestseller, Stealing Fire. Jamie is an expert on peak performance and leadership, specializing in the neuroscience and application of Flow states. He’s currently writing the sequel to Stealing Fire which is Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That's Lost Its Mind. He’s joining us on Collective Insights to discuss the topics in his upcoming book, the intersection of neuroanthropology and culture architecture, in what he describes as the HomeGrown Humans Movement.

Helping us wake up, grow up and show up for a world that needs us all.

New Episodes to Stimulate Thinking

Hundreds of thousands of listeners have enjoyed Collective Insights for its health and wellness content hosted by Dr. Heather Sandison. In addition to Dr. Sandison’s episodes, we’ll have new Collective Insights episodes with Jamie Wheal to explore, 'where have we come from?', 'where are we going?', and 'why are we here?'. HomeGrown Humans is a series of video shorts and in-depth podcast conversations dedicated to exploring the intersection of the Timely (politics, existential challenges, trends) and the Timeless (culture, human nature, belief). Jamie Wheal has been a guest on Collective Insights and is a longtime friend and collaborator of Qualia. He will now be a regular host on the Collective Insights podcast. You, the qualialife.community, have been asking us to address the intersection of culture, philosophy and neuroscience, and asking the increasingly critical question on all our minds-- “what do we do now?”

In these episodes Jamie combines rigor, skepticism, humility, curiosity and hope to ask the most brilliant minds of our time the questions they are asking themselves in order to offer an early glimpse of the Adjacent Possible.

These episodes have guests who are transcendental humanists, who believe that post-conventional thinking requires more precision rather than less. Jamie has chosen guests who themselves are not wed to an entrenched position––but are more interested in the interplay and nuance of context.

Our viewers deserve concision and precision and for us to get to clarity within an hour episode. Guests are invited to the show because their thinking and contributions are more durable than a given news or sales cycle. It is about the quality and integrity of the conversation we are able to have, and the depth of insight our guests have to offer. These episodes of Collective Insights move our collective conversation forward. 

HomeGrown Humans Movement

The HomeGrown Humans movement is actualizing human potential in the rapidly changing world we’re in. Jamie Wheal will host episodes on the Collective Insights podcast with today’s most brilliant minds and hearts in a true spirit of inquiry, to engage in generative dialogue and perhaps break through to new levels of understanding and sensemaking about our changing world and the place of humanity within it. 

All of the pitfalls and potentials forecast for 2030—from drones to AR to viral outbreaks to surveillance states to climatic crisis—are arriving ahead of schedule and packing a punch. 

At the same time, yearning for transcendence—from Michael Pollan and the psychedelic renaissance to Kanye West’s Sunday Sermons, to Burning Man as a cultural touchstone, to evangelicals tracking the coming Apocalypse—is skyrocketing.

There’s virtually no one in the mainstream who can make sense of and integrate both currents into a coherent whole. -Jamie Wheal

Jamie Wheal has noticed a collapse in Benevolent Authority—from academia to mainstream press to the medical, financial and political worlds. This causes our population to be adrift in competing and confounding narratives as to who to trust about What’s Really Going On.

Episode 01 with Sue Phillips

Jamie Wheal and Sue Phillips discuss how to design spiritual practices to support human flourishing to wake up, grow up, and show up for a world that needs us all.

Tune in to Care for Your Soul: Designing Sacred Practices that Work

About Guest:
Sue Phillips is relentlessly delighted by liberating ancient wisdom to help solve gnarly problems. An ordained minister and former denominational executive in the Unitarian Universalist tradition, Sue is passionate about inspiring spiritual flourishing, equipping people for meaning-making, and witnessing the transformation that happens when we get all up in life’s biggest questions.

She is part business strategist, part design geek, and part monastic. A graduate of Colgate University and the Episcopal Divinity School, Sue has taught at Harvard Divinity School, where she is a Ministry Innovation Fellow. She lives in Tacoma, WA with her wife Tandi Rogers.

Episode 02 with Daniel Schmachtenberger

Jamie Wheal and Daniel Schmachtenberger explore why we need better sensemaking and not more impassioned action. The solution lands on education to wake up, grow up and show up for a world that needs us right now.

About Guest:
Daniel’s central interest is civilization design: developing adequate capacities for collective values generation, sense-making, and choice-making, in service to coordinated conscious sustainable evolution.

Daniel has participated in projects to survey the landscape of existential and catastrophic risks, advance forecasting and mitigation strategies, and develop capacities for the kinds of multi-agent coordination needed to implement sufficient solutions. Associated work has been done to synthesize and advance civilizational collapse and institutional decay models, insofar as they are useful in both scenario modeling and designing more resilient systems.

Advancing those models for long term viability, along with advancing the capacities for sense-making, design, and coordination needed to support the necessary nearer term transitional and protective work is Daniel’s mission and focus.

Episode 03 with Amy Cuddy

Jamie Wheal and Amy Cuddy explore the reverse engineering needed in order to study embodied cognition. Since holding expansive 'power' poses is a felt experience, Jamie and Amy reveal their methods for testing what works to get into peak states.

About Guest:
Amy Cuddy, Ph.D. is a social psychologist, bestselling author, award-winning Harvard lecturer, and expert on the behavioral science of power, presence, and prejudice.

Cuddy earned her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2005 and was a professor at Harvard Business School from 2008 to 2017, Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management from 2006 to 2008, and Rutgers University from 2005 to 2006. She continues to teach at Harvard Business School in executive education.

Episode 04 with Dr. Gabor Maté

Jamie Wheal and Dr. Gabor Maté explore how to heal trauma and addiction. They reveal their methods which involve a hefty dose of awareness and compassion for oneself and others

About Guest:
A renowned speaker, and bestselling author, Dr. Gabor Maté is highly sought after for his expertise on a range of topics including addiction, stress and childhood development. 

Rather than offering quick-fix solutions to these complex issues, Dr. Maté weaves together scientific research, case histories, and his own insights and experience to present a broad perspective that enlightens and empowers people to promote their own healing and that of those around them.

After 20 years of family practice and palliative care experience, Dr. Maté worked for over a decade in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side with patients challenged by drug addiction and mental illness. The bestselling author of four books published in over twenty-five languages, Gabor is an internationally renowned speaker highly sought after for his expertise on addiction, trauma, childhood development, and the relationship of stress and illness.

Episode 05 with Helen Fisher, Ph.D.

Jamie Wheal and Helen Fisher sexuality and relationships from an anthropologists viewpoint. They reveal the methods that young people use to date which is increasingly savvy and using a method Helen coined 'slow love.' They share how we can all create more loving and stable relationships that are better for ourselves, our partners, our families and our communities.

About Guest:
Helen E. Fisher, PhD biological anthropologist, is a Senior Research Fellow, at The Kinsey Institute, Indiana University. She has written six books on the evolution, biology, and psychology of human sexuality, monogamy, adultery and divorce, gender differences in the brain, the neural chemistry of romantic love and attachment, human biologically-based personality styles, why we fall in love with one person rather than another, hooking up, friends with benefits, living together and other current trends, and the future of relationships-- what she calls: slow love.

Fisher maintains that humans have evolved three core brain systems for mating and reproduction: lust, romantic attraction, and attachment.

Episode 06 with Douglas Rushkoff

Jamie Wheal and Douglas Rushkoff explore how to play on team human. They imagine a world we won’t need to escape from, where we unite instead of hiding in billionaire bunkers. They also explore thoughts around social media and psychedelics.

About Guest:
Douglas Rushkoff is the host of the Team Human podcast and author of Team Human as well as a dozen other bestselling books on media, technology, and culture, including, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, Present Shock, Program or Be Programmed, Media Virus, and the novel Ecstasy Club. 

He is Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY/Queens. He wrote the graphic novels Aleister & Adolf, Testament, and A.D.D., and made the television documentaries Generation Like, Merchants of Cool, The Persuaders, and Digital Nation. He lives in New York, and lectures about media, society, and economics around the world.

The Host: Jamie Wheal

About the Host:
Jamie Wheal, Executive Director of the Flow Genome Project and author of the Pulitzer nominated global bestseller, Stealing Fire, is an expert on peak performance and leadership, specializing in the neuroscience and application of Flow states.

 Jamie has advised everyone from the U.S. Naval War College and Special Operations Command, the athletes of RedBull, to the executives of Google, Deloitte, Goldman Sachs, Cisco, The Bohemian Club and the Young Presidents' Organization.His work and ideas have been covered in The New York Times, Financial Times, Wired, Entrepreneur, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, INC, and TEDx.