Indy Johar (founder of Dark Matter Labs, systems designer) closes this 12-part series on the life-enhancing “what comes next” that we need (and want) to be creating. Indy is one of the world’s most original voices on redesigning societies and he has a radical thesis that brings together most of the themes we’ve discussed so far. He calls it “civilisational optionality”. Our job is not to save civilisation or to know what comes next…. It’s to preserve or expand the capacity for life (that is, humanity and the living world) to adapt to whatever comes next.

Indy is an architect and Professor of Planetary Civics at Melbourne’s RMIT and the University of Sheffield. He has advised organisations including the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, and governments across Europe and the UK, helping them solve all kinds of complex, entangled problems.

In this very wild conversation, Indy returns to Wild to loop together many of the themes of this series – emergence, fascism, steering AI to a pro-human future and, importantly, wrestling with what it means to be human. An expansive, fun and very real finale, to be sure!

SHOW NOTES

• You can listen to our previous conversation: The Starkest Collapse Prognosis I’ve Heard
• We discuss game theory, and I point to a former Wild interview that explains this, specifically “Moloch”. Catch up here.
• I reference Indy’s Substack essay on the collapse of the self.

---

Watch on YouTube or Substack

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations, subscribe to my Substack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Let’s connect on Instagram

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sarah Stein Lubrano (neuroscientist, political scientist, former obituary writer!) is an expert in how to change people’s minds most effectively and for the betterment of all beings. In this chat, we talk through why the techniques that dominated the “old world” – debate, reason, bludgeoning people with facts – no longer serve us. We then go through how persuasion and change will need to work going forward, as we find ourselves needing to cooperate and communicate more effectively than ever before.

We cover the role of third spaces, why fascist governments always want to shut down cafes, the “gateway” rituals, practices and spaces that get people to open into change as well as how to talk about collapse with people still stuck in a linear mindset (essentially the content of her new book Don’t Talk About Politics, How to Change 21st Century Minds).

Sarah is the head of research for The Future Narratives Lab, which focuses on narratives about social and political change, and serves on the Institute of Imagination’s Global Imagination Board. She was previously the head of content at Alain de Botton’s School of Life.

SHOW NOTES

• You can get your copy of Sarah’s book Don’t Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st-Century Minds here. You can also follow her work on socials.
• Here’s the Substack post that Sarah mentions toward the end: "Don't Talk About Politics"
• Alain de Botton was also a Wild guest, and you can listen to his episode here.

----

Watch on YouTube or Substack

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations, subscribe to my Substack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Let’s connect on Instagram

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

John Seed (Deep Ecology OG, global rainforest steward) says we can’t save the world. And that the planetary crisis is not a failure of information or awareness; it’s a failure of human identity. We have the story, the mindset, all wrong. And we need to change it (from human chauvinism to deep ecological connection) if we’re to keep spinning in the Earth’s embrace.

John is a globally respected Australian rainforest activist and one of the foundational figures of the global Deep Ecology movement. He collaborated for decades with the late Joanna Macy – they co-wrote How To Think Like a Mountain and developed a “re-earthing” technique called Council of All Beings. John’s activist work - via the Rainforest Information Centre he founded - has seen rainforests around the world receive various forms of protection status, including World Heritage listings.

In this chat, John and I get to “the work that reconnects”, how to use our despair and numbness to lift into action and how to get around our fear of “woo woo”.

SHOW NOTES

• Here is the Features of Narara Ecovillage that John mentions at the end of the episode.
• You can subscribe to John’s Substack
• Learn more about the Rainforest Information Centre here, and follow him on Instagram and YouTube
• You can catch up on my episode with Meg Wheatley (in which we discuss “islands of sanity”) here

---

Watch on YouTube or Substack

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations, subscribe to my Substack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Let’s connect on Instagram

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jeremy Lent (author, systems thinker) is a leading authority on civilisations and has just created a manifesto on how to shift from the current crumbling one to what he calls an Ecocivilization. He joins me to discuss how we can actually get there, drawing on real-life, tangible examples and a bunch of concepts that tend to get people excited. In this chat, we cover: fractal flourishing, phase transition, mutually beneficial symbiosis and the Basque self-governing cooperative Mondragón.

Jeremy is the founder of the Deep Transformation Network, an online discussion community, and convenes the Ecocivilization Coalition. He has been described by George Monbiot as “one of the greatest thinkers of our age”. Lent’s latest book, Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All, follows two previous award-winning books, The Patterning Instinct and The Web of Meaning.

SHOW NOTES

• You can learn more about Jeremy Lent’s work via his website.
• Get your copy of his book Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All here.

---

Watch on YouTube or Substack

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations, subscribe to my Substack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Let’s connect on Instagram

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Francis Weller (psychotherapist, bestselling author + “soul activist”) believes we have entered a “Long Dark”, a multi-decade (century?) period of collapse and psychological pain that will demand we learn to grieve deeply, messily, fully.

In this episode, I ask Francis whether grief is the missing piece of the impasse we’re at. If we finally drop into our grief, will we wake up, will we finally let ourselves move into a new way of being that ditches the destructive soul-sucking paradigms, and prioritises our aliveness? Because that’s what I think we all know we’re aching for.

Francis has worked for more than four decades, bringing together psychology, anthropology, mythology, alchemy, indigenous cultures and poetic traditions to educate communities on how to metabolise loss and grief. He’s also written a bunch of books, including The Wild Edge of Sorrow, which Anderson Cooper repeatedly raves about.

As he is famous for saying, “The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them.”

SHOW NOTES

• You might also enjoy one of my all-time favourite episodes, this one with James Hollis: The Jungian take on 2021
• I really loved this chat with death walker Stephen Jenkinson, too. It covers similar, still and deep themes.
• You can find links to grief circles run by therapists who were trained under Francis here.

---

Watch on YouTube or Substack

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations, subscribe to my Substack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Let’s connect on Instagram

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat (historian of fascism +NYT bestselling author of Strongmen) is an internationally recognised expert in how psychologically unstable men come to power and use corruption, sexual predation, staged victimhood and violence to rule. She’s recently, however, turned her focus to how societies subjected to such tyranny have survived and fought back…using moral authority.

Ruth is an American history professor at New York University and a political commentator with an expertise in fascism and authoritarian leaders. Her 2020 book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present was a global bestseller. She publishes the hugely popular Substack Lucid, a newsletter on threats to democracy and will publish her next book, Resisting Autocracy: What History Teaches About Fighting Back, next year.

SHOW NOTES

• Be sure to check out her Substack Lucid
• Purchase Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present here
• You can catch up on the Ece Temelkuran episode here
• This episode with Lindsey Stonebridge on Hannah Arendt’s ideas on resistance might also interest you

-----

Watch on YouTube or Substack

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations, subscribe to my Substack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Let’s connect on Instagram

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Zak Stein (Harvard philosopher of education, AI + kids expert) is worried that we are not raising and educating our kids for the kind of wobbly, harsh future they will be inheriting. Zak is a Harvard philosopher of education and co-founder of the Centre for World Philosophy and Religion. He is also the co-founder of the Civilisation Research Institute and the Consilience Project, and the author of Education in a Time Between Worlds.

I asked Zak to join me to answer the kinds of questions parents and teachers everywhere are asking. What kind of education matters now? Is it about being keyed into AI or radically rejecting it? What should young people be studying at college/university if entry-level jobs are now being wiped? Should we be pushing success or adaptability onto kids? What should be done with the social media bans?

SHOW NOTES

• Learn more about Zak's work here.
• Get your copy of Education in a Time Between Worlds: Essays on the Future of Schools, Technology, and Society
• If you want more ideas about raising kids amid…all of this…you might enjoy this chat with Anya Kamenetz: AMA: How do I parent in the face of so much existential crisis?

--

Watch on YouTube or Substack

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations, subscribe to my Substack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Let’s connect on Instagram

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Michael Muthukrishna (behavioural scientist, cultural evolution researcher) has a unified “theory of everyone” that says we evolved as a species, surviving crises and collapses, through cooperative norms that made sure inequality did not blow out, in conditions of energy abundance.

Michael is Professor of Economic Psychology at New York University (NYU) and the London School of Economics, co-founder of London School of Artificial Intelligence (LSAI), technical director of The Database of Religious History and co-founder of the London School of Artificial Intelligence (LSAI). He’s also the author of A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We Are Going, and in this episode I ask how everyone – humanity – can survive this multi-crisis pile-up when energy is running out. The answer is…complex.

Show Notes

• Get your copy of A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We Are Going
• Learn more about Michael’s work here and his video trailer here

You can catch up on my episode about Moloch I mentioned: LIV BOEREE: Explaining Moloch, the mysterious game theory force breaking the world (plus a fix!)

And these episodes on how we’re fundamentally more cooperative than we tend to get told might be of interest, too.

• ADAM MASTROIANNI: Do we need to make the world great (and kinder) again?
• RUTGER BREGMAN: Author of Humankind on how to trust each other

--

Watch on YouTube or Substack

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations, subscribe to my Substack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Let’s connect on Instagram

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.