Episode Details

Our guest for this week is Jamie Wheal, an expert on peak performance, the co-founder and executive director of the Flow Genome Project and co-author of “Stealing Fire”.

Jamie’s background is an amalgamation of expeditionary education, wilderness medicine, and surf rescue. He has over a decade of experience advising high-growth companies on strategy, execution, and leadership. His client list is a who’s who of top corporate executives including the owners of NFL, NBA, MLB, and Premier League teams, executives of Google, Goldman Sachs, Deloitte, Cisco. Jamie has also worked with the U.S. Naval War College and Special Operations Command and advised the athletes of Red Bull on the topic of peak performance.

In 2015, he co-founded the Flow Genome Project and he is leading an international team of world’s renowned scientists, athletes and artists with a goal of mapping the genome of peak performance state also known as Flow. Their vision is rooted in “taking a rigorous, multidisciplinary and supremely practical approach to the science and research of peak-performance.” As self-described “flow hackers” the end goal of the Flow Genom Project is to use this research to help more people level up in their actual lives.

Along with Steven Kotler, Jamie co-authored the global bestseller titled “Stealing Fire: Silicon Valley, Navy SEALs and Maverick Scientists are Revolutionizing the Way We Live”. In it, they explore the many ways how the world’s most successful people use altered states in order to unlock peak performance.

Connect with Jamie:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-wheal-887212a/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jamiewhealpage/
• Website: https://www.flowgenomeproject.com/

Altered States vs NOSCs

In order to further clarify the topic of Jamie’s studies, we start off our conversation by making a clear distinction between altered states of conscious and NOSCs which stands for ‘Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness’. This is a much more appropriate and precise term originally coined by Dr. Stan Grof. These states are one of the topics in Jamie’s book ‘Stealing Fire’ and they can be meditative, contemplative, states brought on by smart technology, psychedelic, sexual, athletic, kinetic or artistic.

“Basically all the positive non-ordinary states you can think of that seem to share an awful lot underneath the hood of the mechanism of action. What’s happening in our bodies and brains to get us there.” - Jamie Wheal

Monophasic vs Polyphasic Culture

We dive further and deeper into the exploration of these non-ordinary states and Jamie makes yet another key distinction which helps us understand this problematic from a historical perspective. On the point of recognizing and appreciating different states of consciousness, we differentiate between monophasic and polyphasic culture. Polyphasic culture accepts different channels of consciousness, while later, during the age of enlightenment in the 18th century, mainstream ideas shifted towards the monophasic culture, focusing exclusively on the basic sensory input, an approach that gave birth to the idea of the rational self-aware waking self.

Jamie points out that this shift has left a significant mark on our society and he argues that there’s a good chance this idea of being closed off to different channels of consciousness is causing all sorts of