This Year's Best Bits

Highlights from 2024

[5 minute read]

Firstly I want to thank YOU. I launched The Leading Edge this year and it has exceeded all of my expectations. But I couldn’t have done it without a supportive and loving community of friends, readers and members.

I spent much of this year working on the Accelerating Wisdom Series. I wanted to specifically thank each of our 8 expert contributors, as well as the gifted collaborators that have help us since.¹

Here’s my annual rundown of some of the things I enjoyed the most this year:

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Favourite Podcast:

The Telepathy Tapes by Ky Dickens

My New Year’s resolution is to turn down the hyperbole. But this is simply the most interesting podcast I’ve ever heard. After the last few years of digging into frontier phenomena, this is the first time I have gone from suspecting psi abilities exist, to believing they do. Its currently one of the world’s top three podcasts, which serves as compelling anecdotal evidence for the woo-verton window opening (see Thinking the Unthinkable below).

Assuming it holds up to subsequent scrutiny, the series claims that some non-speaking autistic children exhibit close to 100% accuracy on telepathic tests. Even more radically, as their interviews progressed, the researchers claimed that some children have a much more comprehensive range of psi abilities. These included non-local communication, precognition and mediumship. Episodes 1-5 set up the story and experiments. Episode 6 explores scientific explanations and Episode 7 simply blew my mind (start there if you’re short on time). Episode 9 had me nearly crying into my morning coffee. Here’s a 1 minute clip to whet the appetite:

Honourable mentions:

• Near Death Experience by Spirit Seekers. This is an easy 11/10 on the woo scale but the positive reactions it generated in people I shared it with were second only to The Telepathy Tapes. It’s a compelling and beautiful story of Vincent Tolman’s near-death experience.

• (Why Mindfulness Isn't Enough) by The Emerald. The last 30 minutes in particular are a searing indictment of the modern tendency to take spiritual practices out of lineage, love and context. With potentially catastrophic results.

• Rick Rubin with David Whyte. It’s perhaps weird that a poet and a music producer strike me as two of the people with the most valuable insights into today’s world. But we’re moving into the kind of environment where the wisdom and intuition offered by these two contemporary sages more valuable than the dry analysis from most intellectual experts.

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Favourite Article:

Are We Too Impatient to Be Intelligent? By Rory Sutherland (20 minute read)

Most articles have one, maybe two insights. The unusual depth of this piece reflects Rory Sutherland’s unique place as one of the best “right hemispheric” thinkers in the business world.

“The general assumption driven by these optimization models is always that faster is better. I think there are things we need to deliberately and consciously slow down for our own sanity and for our own productivity. If we don’t ask that question about what those things are, I think we’ll get things terribly, terribly wrong.”

• Self-promotion alert: My piece Thinking the Unthinkable was my best attempt to articulate what’s going on in the world right now. It’s the most popular essay I’ve ever written.

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Favourite TV Show:

Industry- Season 3 (HBO)

My fondness for this show is such that I actually made it into a feature in the Wall Street Journal (talking about the sex I wasn’t having, sorry mum!). The show is extra resonant for me as someone that started on a London trading floor in the mid-2000s. Season 1 was fun but gratuitous, Season 2 thankfully made the finance plotlines more central. Season 3 really nails the payoff on the writing and characterization groundwork laid throughout the earlier parts of the series.

• Honourable mention: Colin From Accounts. It has a slow start, but this is a genuinely funny, 30 minute episode Aussie comedy. The writers’ ability to create realistic but abhorrent side-characters is truly remarkable.

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Best of the rest:

• Favourite DJ Sets: I really enjoyed Christian Löffler’s Mayan Warrior set at Burning Man for chill melodic vibes. It was closely followed by a set in Long Beach from my current favourite DJ, Luttrell. And finally here’s a quick 38 minute mix of some 2024 faves from my alter-ego DJ Dadbod.

• Favourite Movie: yet another dry year. I guess it was Dune 2, even though it has the now-standard 40 minute’s of bloat. I also enjoyed the subversively subtle All We Imagine as Light about the unspoken stories of Indian women.

• Favourite tweet of the year: "It's pronounced "jaslighting," you've been saying it wrong this whole time."

The best part of this exercise is you sharing all your favourites- please let me know what you loved!

Happy Holidays to you and your families,

Love

Tom

1. Love and thanks to Cedric Chin, Dr. Anne-Laure Le Cunff, River Kenna, Devin Martin, Dr. Stephen Larsen, Allison Paradise, Dan Lawrence and Dr. Mona Sobhani. Thanks also to Roshni Daya, Brian Whetten, Lucy Martens, Ervin Laszlo, Ulisse Di Corpo, Nadja Taranczewski and Isik Tlabar.