Curious Humans: Recent Episodes

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Hello Curious Humans 👋

Jonny here—I’ve just landed back from an interesting trip to Colombia & absurdly excited to share this firecracker of an episode with one of the most interesting and radical thinkers of our generation (listen to the full conversation on Spotify / Apple / Other).

Jamie Wheal is a genuine 21st Century Renaissance Man. He's world-renowned for his work writing Stealing Fire and creating the Flow Genome Project—and as you'll hear in our conversation, the book he has just published is unlike anything else you'll ever read.
I see him as being a bridge between the spiritual + the scientific (bringing a much-needed lightness to both) with a deep commitment to his craft.

He is pioneering studies with Johns Hopkins and MAPS whilst wading deep into questions of how do we evolve and mature as humans or in his words:

How do we “Stay awake. Build stuff. And help out."

In this conversation which felt more like a science-fiction rhapsody we bounce around between:

☄️ Why we're facing a new Meaning Crisis and the looming pitfalls of the rise of 'Rapture Ideologies'

🧘‍♂️ The Hedonic Yoga of Becoming experiment he dreamt up and ran with after a conversation with Roland Griffiths at MAPS.
💔 We talk about what it means to ‘Grieve Globally + Thrive Locally’—to move from tragic to post-tragic worldviews and the real need for cultivating a culture of post-traumatic growth.
🤯 Finally, something I don’t believe he has yet shared elsewhere—how he's planning on launching a post-modern religion in hyperspace taking the form of an alternate reality game called Y-ANON(not kidding).
🎧 Truly this has been one of my favourite & mind-bending conversations to date. If some of the ideas resonate, I’d absolutely recommend buying his book and would also love to hear any reflections that arise.

ENJOY!

p.s. if you know any fellow humans who might appreciate this podcast episode please forward this email on or share thelink on Twitter—I believe these ideas need to be out in the world!

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Kon'nichiwa (こんにちは) from Kyoto 👋

🇯🇵 Less than 12 hours ago I landed in the home of geisha, tea ceremonies, kimono and 2,000 temples. Already, I love the juxtaposition of it’s calm stillness with the endearing earnestness of the people. I’m giddy with intrigue to explore this Shinto universe, the zen gardens, onsen and seemingly entirely new ways of orienting in the world (I also have no clue what I ate for dinner last night but it was delicious).

🤯 But in the meantime, I could not be more enthused to share this mindmeld of a podcast conversation with you. I've been listening to Cory's podcast the Astral Hustle for years now. As well has being one of the deepest thinkers I’ve come across— I tend to think of him as the Alan Watts of the 21st century.

🔥 This conversation with Cory really lit me up. We bounced between the role of humour in spiritual exploration and what he calls the 'upside of impermanence':

"To have that level of understanding about consciousness or being you must inherently have the same, you must have a grow sense of humor about it because like that level of macro comprehension is not possible without seeing the absurdity of it all and in the natural elicited response from that is laughter."

📝 We also dive into some of the more practical aspects of meditation—how it changes the way we experience the world and allows us to get out of our own way and begin to author our own future:

"The fragments of the self that are shattered you know the different pieces of you that exist within they’re the broken pieces of the mirror that been through the meditation or through creating the space they have the space to start to reconnect into one singular piece of mirror of yourself so that you can look into it and quote-unquote reflect and then begin to understand what you are and then begin to author your future."

📚 We didn't have time to cover it in this episode but Cory has a background in music and produces Binaural Beats, which I've been using daily for the last few months to both meditate and focus at work. You can find these, as well as the lowdown on his superb new book 'Now is the Way' – which is available as of today over at nowistheway.com

🎧 You can find our full conversation by searching for Curious Humans in any good podcast player or clicking the play button above. The full transcript is also available on Medium here.

❤️ If you enjoy this conversation or if these updates bring any joy to your days please consider sharing this newsletter with a friend who might also enjoy it, or you can become a supporter of all things Curious Human by clicking below.

🙏Thank you. I appreciate you.

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What is this Jonny, two emails in three days?!?

Don’t worry… consider this is less of a multi-course feast and more of a bite-size, snackable morsel in the form of the latest curiosity-inducing podcast episode—which is one of my favourite conversations to date with productivity polymath Tiago Forte.

🤯 We had a wide-ranging conversation on everything from the connection between external brains & intuition... to Tiago's experiences using meditation & breathwork to process anger and a vision for one day building a new type of school in Brazil.

🍄 You wouldn’t imagine that productivity systems and psychedelics usually pair well in a conversation, but it turns out that they do!

❓ Tiago's parting question for you was: "What would you do if your freedom and pleasure were essential to the freedom and pleasure of the world?"

🎧 You can listen on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, Castbox, and now directly from this email in the player above thanks to the Substack wizards. Enjoy!

📝 You can also find a full transcript of the conversion here

🤔 Tiago is one of the most interesting people I follow on Twitterand I would encourage you to do the same if you spend time in the Twitterverse.

🙏 I’m so grateful to those of you who have already left a rating + review over on iTunes. As I’m mustering up more courage to invite future curious humans onto the show, these ratings + reviews really make a big difference for enticing more interesting people to join.

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