The Leading Edge

This is a presentation given at Leading Edge's New York Summit 2026. Bubba vulnerably and generously agreed to make it public.

Dan Lawrence is a former futures trader turned Jungian analyst and writer. This is the remarkable story of his silent childhood, precognitive dreams, work in high-security psychiatric units and a near-death experience in a Malaysian ICU.

He did a pretty mind-blowing lecture about dreams for Leading Edge’s Accelerating Wisdom series. He’s someone who let his curiosity guide him from a very young age, and it took him through a traditionally successful path into a world filled with mystery and intuition. Obviously he would never say this, but listening to him speak, particularly towards the end of his story, I was really struck by the fact that this is what a successfully integrated life looks like.

Adam M. Curry is an inventor and tech entrepreneur in San Francisco. He thinks the idea that consciousness and reality may be interconnected is really cool. He was fascinated enough by the idea to organize the Collective Consciousness app project. Technology advances by trying something new, and he’s very excited to explore the horizons of “consciousness technology.”

He was the recipient of the MIT Ceres Connection Prize at age 17 for an invention that converted electro-gravitational phenomena into signals that can help forecast seismic events, such as earthquakes. Adam has been featured in the Discovery Channel’s Through The Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, and is on the board of the Society for Scientific Exploration. He has worked at the Princeton’s PEAR Lab and Psyleron.

Bill Plotkin, Ph.D., is a depth psychologist, wilderness guide, and agent of cultural evolution. As the founder of the Animas Valley Institute he has spent nearly 45 years guiding thousands of women and men through nature-based initiatory passages.

Plotkin describes an essential developmental process that is missing from modern culture. Beyond merely diagnosis, he also provides a map and mechanism to reincorporate greater meaning into our lives. Our conversation is an introduction to his work

Leading Edge member Allison Paradise holds degrees in neuroscience from Brown and Harvard. Based in Los Angeles, she’s the founder of The Epicenter. They work with children aged 7-22 on the cultivation and recovery of their intuitive capabilities. She’s a dear friend, and one of the most remarkable people I’ve ever met, something I think comes across in our conversation.

Dr. Christopher Bache is Professor Emeritus in the department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), Emeritus Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), and on the Advisory Council of Grof Legacy Training.

Dr. Bache is perhaps best known for his remarkable 2019 book LSD and the Mind of the Universe. It relates his insights and experiences from 73 therapeutically-structured, massive-dose LSD sessions over the 20 years from 1979-1999. Upon revisiting the book for this interview I was struck by how remarkable it is. I am not aware of anyone else who underwent such a sustained exploration of the outer limits of consciousness, especially one who returned able to lucidly articulate exactly what they experienced. Bache also maintained a high-level teaching career throughout his sessions.

While he admits his adventure was perhaps foolhardy, and he strongly dissuades anyone else from attempting it, his commitment to travel to the very edges of human experience offers an unparalleled vision of our present reality and maybe even our collective future.

For our conversation I was joined by my friend Devin Martin, an experienced transformational and psychedelic coach

One of my spiritual mentors has called Tara Springett his favorite teacher for anyone seeking a path to higher consciousness. He also describes her book Stairway to Heaven as life-changing. I recently interviewed Tara, along with Leading Edge’s Chief Mystical Officer Jeff Williams. Our conversation is also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Tim Freke is the author of thirty-five books on hermeticism, mysticism, consciousness and spirituality. Freke has spent the last ten years developing his new “Unividual” worldview, and he has released it as a free “podbook” online called “Why Your Life Really Matters.”

This interview is an introduction to his ideas.

According to decades of studies, and basic common sense, wisdom is one of life’s most desirable attributes. Wisdom means knowing exactly what to do, and when. Perhaps the single most surprising concept that has emerged from the last few years of my studies of wisdom has been the importance of “subtle power.” For example, acting with a precise sense of your energetic relationship with the world appears to be critical to living a flourishing life.

Our nervous system, our internal energy grid, is essential to detecting and holding this subtle power. And yet the West pays scarcely any attention to deliberately upgrading it. My guest Andrew Markell has discovered through three decades of direct practice and teaching that Yiquan, a Chinese fighting and healing art that traveled through Tibet and was later refined by master Wang Xiangzhai, provides a systematic method for developing this capacity. You can listen to our interview on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

I interviewed Peter Merry, Author, Co-founder of Ubiquity University and Wyrd Technologies and and expert in Spiral Dynamics. He gave us a relatively quick guide to developmental frameworks and then a deeper discussion of where we are now, as well as what a new kind of leadership might look like.