Navigating Free Will and Effortless Action

Tom Morgan (X, Substack) is a "curiosity sherpa," writer, and podcaster who runs The Leading Edge, a community for leaders focused on personal transformation and authenticity.

I first encountered Tom and his ideas during his talk at Sohn on Iain McGilchrist, left vs. right brain, and curiosity. Tom writes about complexity, curiosity, and consciousness, and wades into the deep end of various topics that most of us would place in "woo," mystic, and spiritual territories. He spent most of his career on Wall Street and brings a scientifically-inclined, rationalist approach to researching and amplifying some of the most surprising modern and ancient ideas about the nature of humanity and the universe.

With this conversation, I aimed to create a primer on Tom's writing, approach, and the ideas he returns to most. We discuss following your energy, how curiosity is a guiding force, complexity and emergence, and why the world is overrated toward left-brain rationalism. We explore practical questions—How do you know your gifts? When should you pivot or persevere? What does real exploration look like when the world offers no safety nets? And then we wade into much stranger, or even heretical ideas—at least for a modern, intellectual, western audience—including the notion that consciousness is much vaster than what we've come to understand, and how we are just a small part of a much bigger whole.

I hope you enjoy the conversation and consider some ideas that are much more fringe than you're used to. I definitely left it with more questions than answers. And more than that, I hope you are inspired to attune yourself to your curiosity. Perhaps, you may even have the faith to follow that thread pulling you toward what appears today only to be a wall.

Episode transcript.

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This episode is brought to you by Hampton, a private, highly vetted membership for founders. Hampton surveyed over 100 members with net works of $1M-100M to create its 2024 Wealth Report.

They asked about financial goals, spending habits, how much founders themselves, investment portfolio breakdowns, risk tolerance, estate planning and philanthropy, and more. Visit https://joinhampton.com/community to access the report.

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Timestamps:

• 2:03: Following Your Energy and Positive-Sum Games
• 6:04: Curiosity and Complexity: Differentiation and Integration
• 8:12: Entropy & Syntropy: Unpacking Curiosity, Love, and Desire
• 12:34: Emergence and What All the Mystics Point to: Integration
• 15:14: Left Brain & Right Brain: A Primer on McGilchrist's "The Matter with Things"
• 28:58: Hampton
• 30:34: Discovering Your Gifts
• 37:35: Creativity and Sustaining Curiosity
• 43:12: Life Pivots, Especially When You Aren't 22
• 50:24: A Challenge vs. A Grind: When to Keep Going or Try Something Else
• 56:19: Synchronicities
• 1:00:58: Openness and Wisdom
• 1:04:19: Error Correction, or Something Else?
• 1:06:02: Tom's Mission and The Meaning-Mortgage Question: Can you really do what you love?
• 1:08:45: Fear, Faith, Love, and Seeing Reality
• 1:12:59: "Minimum Viable Woo" and Exploring Out There Topics with a Pragmatic Lens
• 1:16:10: Stories
• 1:18:51: Love, Emergence, and Intelligence Beyond Us
• 1:22:52: A Looming Meta-Crisis, Global Consciousness, and Earth School: Blowing Out the "Woo" Rating
• 1:33:41: Lightning Round: Pseudoscience as the Streisand Effect, Mystics, What Would Rattle Tom’s Worldview Most, Joseph Campbell, Fred Again
• 1:40:41: Tom's Encouragement for His 20 Year Old Self

Select Links

• Thinking the Unthinkable - Tom
• Exploring Gurdjieff's Mysteries - Tom
• A Transformational Heresy? (Syntropy) - Tom

• The Matter With Things - Iain McGilchrist
• Test Your Network - Tom
• Our Unspoken Future - Tom

• Fred again.. Boiler Room: London

Transcript and all references linked at https://dialectic.fm/tom-morgan.

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