Three Ways to Change Your World. Right Now.
Launching the Network of Networks.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
- Buckminster Fuller
Look at what’s happening in our current corporate, technological, and geopolitical world. Now ask yourself if that’s the place you still want to be spending most of your time. Thankfully there is a new positive-sum system forming in parallel as the current zero-sum one collapses. Because both sides benefit from the exchange, a cooperative system always has more energy in it than a purely competitive one. That makes this new system much more fun and exciting to be a part of. You can either plug yourself into a grid that recharges you or drains you.
This isn’t some mystical ascension to another dimension. It’s simply making a conscious choice to connect yourself to a more energising kind of person, practice or purpose. This network already exists right now, and is evolving rapidly. This is how to be a part of it, and how you could play a pivotal role in its growth.
There are 3 paths from here:
Join the Network of Networks
Start or join a Leading Edge Network
Start or support a “Steward School”
1. Join the Network of Networks
At the end of 2020, I started talking more publicly about consciousness, life transitions and finding your life’s purpose. This led to hundreds of 1:1 conversations over the next three years. I realized there were barely any communities helping successful mid-career professionals with these topics. So in early 2024 I founded The Leading Edge. In the two years since, I have met an increasingly large number of other network founders. Then I realized there was no connection between them all. So, along with Jeff Williams, we have just founded the Network of Networks. And now things are moving incredibly fast. In only a few weeks we’ve connected 20 communities across 11 countries.
For individuals, this page shows you which communities have joined the network so far, what their membership costs (if they are open/invite-only) and who they are aimed at. Episodic in-person retreats are essentially a solved problem. Most people can now go and take psychedelics or have spiritual experiences on a one-off basis. But it’s then hard to integrate those experiences and stay in touch with the community when you’re back to your busy professional lives. So I would recommend that you look for a strong online structure, because it’s a surprisingly neglected feature of these communities.
While there have been these kinds of groups before, to my knowledge they have never had the potential to be networked together at this speed and scale. I recently met someone who has been connecting conscious communities for decades. He said that, up until now, there have been plenty of bricks but very little mortar. So, for network stewards, the near-term intention is to openly and lovingly share resources across the communities. There are at least five clear ways this can happen, outlined below.
If you are a network steward and want to join the Network of Networks, your community should ideally resemble a Leading Edge-style network. What does that mean?
2. What is a Leading Edge Network?
“The leading edge is where absolutely all the action is. The leading edge contains all the infinite possibilities of the future.”
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
What makes a Leading Edge network different from either a purely spiritual community or transactional club? The broad definition I’m using is: a ~150 person digital/physical network where members are “wise-agency,” in terms of skills, resources, executive function and motivation. Beyond that, me and our members still struggle to articulate precisely what a Leading Edge network is. However, this is actually a good sign that you’re close to the evolutionary frontier. You know you’re about to make a developmental leap when you hit a paradox. I have therefore come to realize that the success of Leading Edge style communities will be determined by their ability to hold the tension between two forces.
Here are five core tensions held by a Leading Edge community, and how each can be enhanced by connection to the Network of Networks:
I. Individual/Collective.
Individual. The primary intention of The Leading Edge is to help its members find and deepen into their life’s purpose. This is an entirely unique niche for each person. The community therefore offers an alchemical container within which each individual can experiment with new identities, practices, and frameworks that resonate the most with them, while also being supported by everyone else. There is no central guru with the answer or a one-size-fits-all solution.
Collective. When each person truly inhabits their unique niche and deepens into their soul’s purpose, it massively benefits the collective. This is the fundamental paradox: that everyone pursuing their own individual integrity will have an disproportionately positive effect on the whole.
The Network of Networks win-win: The vast majority of the content we produce and the practices we pursue are aimed at helping people find their purpose in the world and execute on it. If there is anything you’ve found that can facilitate this transition, let us know. These could be content or experiences, but they could also be high integrity startups, jobs or investments.
II. Material/Spiritual.
Material. Leading Edge members tend to be coming to us after having achieved a degree of material success. They also have the ability and desire to make real world impact with their consciousness journey. I believe one role of these communities is to healthily integrate money, not reject it.
Spiritual. Our members are also increasingly understanding that their own material achievements were a necessary stage. This then needs to be transcended and included as we integrate our consciousness. Ironically, a more integrated consciousness makes us even more effective in the world, just in very subtle ways
The Network of Networks win-win: the simplest reconciliation we’ve found for the tension of material and spiritual within Leading Edge so far has been mystical budgets. Those members with significant resources are increasingly spending more of their money on transformational practitioners, both inside and outside of the community. An effective way is to set aside a comfortable percentage of your income, and then decide how to allocate it afterwards. This has the added benefit of raising demand and prices for the most aligned practitioners, who often struggle to be valued for their gifts. We obviously also have people building aligned businesses and other members funding consciousness research and cutting edge studies. Money remains by far the most complicated and thorny issue within all of these communities, so we are curious to have discussions with other groups that might have creative approaches.
III. Intellectual/Experiential.
Intellectual: Using Leading Edge as an example, our private WhatsApp and my writing and interviews are typically aimed at a left-brained intellectual understanding of these topics. I typically produce a public interview and article with a leading thinker. I then host a private Q&A session for the community.
Experiential: We host private group experiences such as somatic sensing, or breathwork. We also have a pod structure that allows small groups of six to seven members to settle into a practice for as long as six months. So far, we have covered fundamentally right-brained experiences like breathwork, intuition, embodiment meditation and money-focused IFS. The idea is that each member can find a practice that really resonates, that they can incorporate into their daily routine. This year, we have also been particularly focused on perhaps the greatest teachers: our relationships and our children. The most exciting part of The Leading Edge has been finding mystics and teachers from all over the world who can help us with our own spiritual growth.
The Network of Networks win-win: On the intellectual side, I am always overjoyed to be recommended new under-the-radar teachers, alive or dead, that can enhance our understanding of this new emerging reality. We are also seeking to find where mystical traditions are consistent with emerging science. On the experiential side, we are always particularly keen to find master practitioners that can facilitate the experiential work, either for us as a group or as individuals. Whilst we obviously love to hear from the practitioners themselves, it’s even better when an individual, or ideally a whole community, has had a great experience with someone they want to recommend to us.
IV. Ordered/Chaotic
Ordered. Leading Edge has a clear structure and walls in the form of vetted membership, as well as membership fees to enforce commitment. I also monitor the group to make sure that the spirit of the community is being maintained.
Chaotic. Within this ordered structure of the container, aside from asking members to commit to proactively meeting each other, very little else is proscribed. Which is one reason the group remains hard to describe succinctly.
The Network of Networks win-win: if you are aware of ways that our current structure can be improved, please let us know.
V. Digital/Physical.
Digital: The bulk of our community’s communications are on Zoom, email, and WhatsApp. As we are currently spread across 21 countries and 5 continents, that is essential. We also use a stunningly useful bespoke community management app created by our member David Weinstein, called KayOS.
Physical: We have in-person dinners, events, and conferences all over the world. In the last year, The Leading Edge has taken me to the world’s oldest hotel in Japan, Chartres Cathedral, inside the King’s Chamber in Egypt, Amsterdam, and to the marvelous Retreat Costa Rica. In the next six months, we are hosting an event with Tim Freke in Glastonbury and a “Soul Initiation” experience in partnership with Animas in both Utah and South Africa.
The Network of Networks win-win: On the digital side, we are always looking for ways to enhance our tech stack. Our primary need is for something that can facilitate deeper one-on-one interactions with our members but also provide richer context than the WhatsApp chat. On the experiential side, we also want to expand the number of high-quality retreat centers or sacred experiences available to members of the entire NoN network.
It’s important to reiterate the North Star of each community. Our members overwhelmingly come to us out of curiosity, and stay for love and connection. I firmly believe that curiosity can represent a relationship with a benign force that guides us into an aligned niche. Because curiosity drives the community, as implied by the image, there’s a slight bias in the polarities towards whichever side is more open: in-person over online, the benefit of the collective over the individual or direct experience over intellectual understanding.
3. Start/Support the Network School
The clearest bottleneck to the formation of Leading Edge communities are schools to train stewards of these networks. This is one of the highest leverage uses of wealth I can imagine.
Here’s a thought experiment: a physical campus trains fifty stewards over a three month intensive. We bring together the best teachers and mentors in the world. Those stewards then return to centers of influence like Wall Street, Silicon Valley and the City of London. Possibly with a grant to get started (although you probably want founders who have already experienced some degree of material success). Each of them recruits 150 members from their high-agency tribes. Within a single year you’d have a community of 30,000 aligned individuals all networked together and sharing resources.
The impact of your our individual efforts, even combined with small communities of others, may feel insignificant relative to the challenges we face. But anyone who understands complex adaptive systems knows phase shifts start small and then explode fast.1
In my experience so far, it’s been slightly disheartening that many billionaires and foundations cannot see beyond a relatively narrow mandate. Some people would rather be the Messiah than Noah. And yet, a foundation or benefactor focused on systems change could fund this entire project for peanuts on the typical philanthropic scale and be the catalyst for a transformational movement. With technology increasingly ensuring material abundance, most of our problems are downstream of consciousness. And one thing that’s become abundantly clear to me over the last few years is that the more energy that flows through you in integrity, the more real power you actually have.
You must allow yourself to be transformed through your interactions with other agents and the knowledge that passes through you from them. This knowledge and energy will flow through the entire system in feedback loops, and you must be prepared to change so that those feedback loops are not blocked. An agent that is truly adaptive and changing is open to sudden eruptions of transformation, in which the agent may temporarily take on the role of strange attractor and facilitate chain reactions of creative events within the system.
-Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk
[If you match any of these descriptions above and would like to discuss any of this face-to-face, you can click the button below to contact me directly. My calendar has gone slightly nuts, as you can imagine, but I make every effort to speak to everyone].
The Fourth Way wrote a magical piece recently calling this “Catastrophic Success.” One relatively esoteric example is the Law of Squares, which claims that the impact of aligned individuals is sequential; one, two, three, four, each squared by the next number. So a Dunbar community of 150 deeply-aligned individuals would generate something on the order of 10^45 units of force. For 30,000 people it would be 10^9,030. The number of atoms in the observable universe is “only” about 10^80. The force being squared is the “strength of the call for help,” specifically, how urgently and sincerely a group of conscious beings is requesting aid, light, or higher wisdom to enter their reality.





This is 🤯🤯🤯 thanks Tom
I am grooving (and weirdly, almost certainly grokking too) all of this, Tom.
1. Our Embrace network is likely one of what you describe,
2. the dynamic tension (and non-dualism) of your five points feel so comfortably/eerily familiar, and 3. the school for stewards?
You’re ahead of us on all fronts, and yet that very concept is very much top of mind and heart for a good chunk of our Embracers.
I’ve shared this post with the stewardship council of WiseFools and will come back to you with any valuable, useful, or even entertaining/emergent contributions. For the now, all praise and all best to you and yours. Thank you