Entangled World

Beyond the Superorganism | Nate Hagens

My guest today is Dr. Nate Hagens. Nate is the Executive Director of The Institute for the Study of Energy & Our Future (ISEOF), an organization focused on educating and preparing society for the coming cultural transition. 
Nate is also a fellow podcaster as the host of The Great Simplification, in which he has conversations with experts in energy, ecology, human behavior, geopolitics, technology, and the economy to provide a systemic view of the world around us, inform more humans about the path ahead, and inspire people to play a role in our collective future.  As a backdrop for The Great Simplification podcast, Nate also produced a short animated film by the same title that you can find on YouTube. And he has also co-authored two books Reality Blind - Integrating the Systems Science Underpinning Our Collective Futures - Vol 1 and The Bottlenecks of the 21st Century.
In this episode, we talk about our current collective predicament, especially, a way of life built on unsustainable energy consumption, also known as the energy dissipating “superorganism” of humanity. One core aspect of our current predicament is the climate crisis and many people believe that all we have to do is get off fossil fuels and transition to renewable energy but this is an ecology-blind view that ignores the fact that the minerals that power our EVs and solar panels are finite and their extraction has devastatingly complex environmental and human costs.
Nate emphasizes how our cultural values, goals, and aspirations must evolve if we want our technological advancements to affect positive change rather than accelerate our current unsustainable extractive way of life. Nate paints a picture of the bifurcations between technology and ecology, masculine and feminine, right brain and left brain, and how these forces have fallen out of balance throughout human history.
We also talk about Nate’s recent visit to India, where he experienced firsthand some of the differences between Eastern and Western cultures, and close our conversation by honoring ancient traditions and opening an inquiry into how we might both remember the wisdom that was hard earned over thousands of years by our ancestors and apply it to our modern-day metacrisis predicament.
Watch the full video episode on YouTube.
Nate Hagen's Links & Resources:
The Institute for the Study of Energy & Our Future 
The Great Simplification (Nate’s podcast)
The Great Simplification (short film)n
Reality Blind - Integrating the Systems Science Underpinning Our Collective Futures - Vol 1 - Nate Hagens and DJ White
The Bottlenecks of the 21st Century - DJ White and Nate Hagens
Economics for the Future: Beyond the Superorganism
University of Minnesota Reality 101 course videos
Reality 101 short course overview
 
Other Resources Mentioned:
The Ministry For The Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
Josh Farley, ecological economist and Nate’s PhD advisor
Sir Ian McGilchrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher and literary scholar
Geoffrey West, theoretical physicist at Santa Fe Institute
 

Regenerating Civic Engagement | Indy Rishi Singh

My guest today is Indy Rishi Singh. Indy is a cultural creative with Cosmic Labyrinth, a collective of edutainers producing biocultural ecorestorations and collective care events in public and at conferences and festivals. Indy is also a co-developer in a technology cooperative designing a bioregional citizen based communication platform that serves as both a tool for effective mutual aid and improving civic literacy. He recently joined the California Doughnut Economic Coalition, focusing on policy change and grassroots cooperation to create an economy that cares for both people and nature. And he’s also a board member with Cultivating Self, a nonprofit transforming and reimagining healthcare by focusing on the education and empowerment of caregivers, and regularly shares Neuroplasticity and resilience techniques with corporations and organizations around the world.
This was a wide-ranging conversation and we explored many topics of a personal nature as well as what responses to our entangled global crises might look like. Indy talked about his experience in medical school where he witnessed many contradictions and found that an integration of different perspectives was lacking, which then led him on a journey to explore ancient practices of healing like Ayurveda, a 5000 year old practice originating in India through which knowledge was embedded within stories as a way of transferring information in case some of it got destroyed.
Indy also talks about how “systems doing” is very different from “system thinking”. He says when you’re engaged in “systems doing”, you have to go to those places, you have to ask questions, you have to humble yourself and be willing to learn and let what you learn change you. You have to allow emergence to happen rather than having a strict agenda for what YOU want to have happen.
We also talk about the importance of sacrifice, that IF we truly want things to change, we have to be willing to sacrifice something. He says oppression and tyranny take advantage of our fear of sacrifice. We also talk about ancient practices for sensemaking and how in Samkhya, in the Sanskrit tradition of philosophical debate, you actually take on your opponent's perspective and then you take on other perspectives beyond just those two polar perspectives. You attempt to look at things from multiple angles and even then you can just grasp a small portion of reality.
I’ve been thinking about questions like, “Where does our knowledge come from?”, “How has it evolved?”, “What can we learn from ancient civilizations that lived sustainably in relative harmony and balance with all of life?”, “How might we incorporate ancient wisdom into new civilizational design?”
Indy and I used some terms in the conversation that I understand because of my South Asian heritage, which may be unfamiliar to you, so I've included them below.
Terms Mentioned:
Desi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desi
Bhangra: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhangra
Ayurveda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayurveda
Rig Veda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigveda
Dosha: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dosha
Pranayama: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pranayama
Karma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karma
Dharma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dharma
Sikh: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikhs
Kali Yuga: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali_Yuga
Satya Yuga: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Yuga
 
Indy’s Links & Resources:
www.CosmicLabyrinth.world interfaith eco-restorations & care-based collective
www.caldec.org Communications & Outreach for California Doughnut Economic Coalition
www.nola.chat/neuroplasticity organizational & community wellbeing coaching
www.cultivatingself.org nonprofit transforming healthcare
Political Hope podcast: Spotify, Apple
 
Other Resources Mentioned:
Hermes Trismegistus - The 7 Hermetic Principles
We Deepen founded by Christina Weber
The Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt

Collective Imaginings | Phoebe Tickell

Watch the video episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/EjhDCW12IAQ
My guest today is Phoebe Tickell. Phoebe calls herself an Imagination Activist to describe a new kind of activist she sees emerging worldwide. Her interest in different ways of perceiving the world informed (and was informed by) her studies in neuroscience, cognitive science, molecular structures, and plant science. It was this interest in perception that eventually led her to found Moral Imaginations in 2020. In her work, she seeks to reimagine our relationship with ourselves, each other, the planet, and the future. Moral Imaginations works with municipalities across the UK and Europe to cultivate and train imagination activists and has trained a thousand people in their methodology.
In this episode, we explore the word, “imagination”, what it means, and why it matters globally in THIS moment that we now find ourselves, in this time between worlds. We explore how shifts in perception change how we make sense of the world and how we can actively expand our perception, which is critical if we want to play a role in creating radical systems change in light of the metacrisis. Phoebe emphasizes the seriousness of imagination as a tool for change and she seeks to give people practices to leverage their imaginations to create freedom from within and to redefine the good life for themselves. 
Phoebe’s Links & Resources:
www.phoebetickell.com
https://www.moralimaginations.com 
Multispecies governance practices: https://phoebetickell.medium.com/towards-complex-governance-systems-cfd79c4ecf1
Phoebe’s imagination activism in Camden: https://issuu.com/moralimaginations/docs/camden_report_200623_digital_
Tool for Regenerative Renaissance course: https://niafaraway.com/tools-for-the-regenerative-renaissance/
Other Resources Mentioned:
Joanna Macy: https://www.joannamacy.net 
The Consilience Project: https://consilienceproject.org
The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley
New School of the Anthropocene: https://www.nsota.org  
Imagination: A Way To Remake The World (Phoebe’s talk with Ian McGilchrist): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c9vyj_0zSs
Joanna Macy on shifting from an Industrial Growth Society to a life-sustaining civilization: https://www.ecoliteracy.org/article/great-turning
Lynn Margulis’ work on endosymbiosis: https://evolution.berkeley.edu/the-history-of-evolutionary-thought/1900-to-present/endosymbiosis-lynn-margulis/
Warm Data: https://warmdatalab.net/warm-data
UNDP Labs: https://www.undp.org/acceleratorlabs
Club of Rome: https://www.clubofrome.org/
Pat McCabe: https://www.patmccabe.net/
Bronte Velez: https://weavingearth.org/staff/bronte-velez/
Lead To Life: https://www.leadtolife.org/
Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/675703/hospicing-modernity-by-vanessa-machado-de-oliveira/
Peter Wall Institute (Vanessa Andreotti’s page): https://pwias.ubc.ca/community/vanessa-andreotti/

The Indigenous Worldview | Four Arrows

My guest today is Four Arrows also known as Wahinkpe Topa or Dr. Don Trent Jacobs. Four Arrows is internationally respected for his expertise in Indigeneity and applications for living life in balance. He is a prolific author of many books and writings about the vital necessity of restoring our pre-colonial worldview. I first came across his work when I read the most recent book he co-wrote with Dr. Darcia Narvaez, Restoring the Kinship Worldview: 28 Precepts for Rebalancing Life on Mother Earth. It is absolutely worth the read, it is a thought-provoking exploration into how we’re living and what we can learn from Indigenous and ancient cultures that have lived in harmony with all of life for centuries before colonization and industrialization became the norm. The book was selected as one of “the most thought-provoking, inspiring, and practical science books of 2022” by U.C. Berkeley’s Science Center for the Greater Good. In September of 2023, Four Arrows presented before the 9th annual Sustainability Summit at the 76th General Assembly of the United Nations in New York.  He is truly a unique human being, he’s a former world-class equestrian, a horse whisperer, a world champion old-time piano player, holds two Ph.D.s and lives next to and surfs on the Costalegre waves of Jalisco Mexico.
In this episode, Four Arrows takes me on a journey exploring the Indigenous worldview, non-duality, and origin stories and myths. We talk about anthropocentrism, this idea that humans sit atop the pyramid of life and that everything else on Earth is inferior to and here for humans to use and then discard as they see fit. This human-centric worldview lies at the root of our entangled crises and we explore some untraditional ways that worldviews and ultimately culture, might shift.
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/qi4OPdVQ4X8
Four Arrow’s Links & Resources:
https://www.fourarrowsbooks.com
The Indigenization Controversy: For Whom and By Whom? 
The Red Road: Linking Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives to Indigenous Worldviews 
Unlearning the Language of Conquest
Primal Awareness 
Differing Worldviews in Higher Education - Don (Four Arrows) Trent Jacobs & Dr. Walter Block
Hypnotic Communication in Emergency Medical Settings - Don (Four Arrows) Trent Jacobs & Bram Duffee
Critical Neurophilosophy & Indigenous Wisdom - Don (Four Arrows) Trent Jacobs, Greg Cajete & Jongmin Lee
Other Resources Mentioned:
Yanatin and Masintin In the Andean World - Hillary S. Webb
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution - Peter Kropotkin 
https://provensustainable.org/
A Time Before Deception - Thomas Cooper 

Restoring the Evolved Nest | Darcia Narvaez

My guest today is Darcia Narvaez. Darcia is Professor Emerita of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame. Born in Minnesota, U.S., she grew up living around the world as a bilingual/bicultural Puerto Rican-German American but calls Earth her home. Her earlier careers include professional musician, business owner, music teacher, Spanish teacher, and seminarian, among other endeavors. Darcia uses an interdisciplinary approach to studying evolved morality, child development, and human flourishing.
Her most recent books include Restoring the Kinship Worldview, and The Evolved Nest: Nature’s Way of Raising Children and Creating Connected Communities both of which I’ve read and highly recommend.
Darcia explores how compassionate morality in humans unfolds and what we can do to nurture it. In our conversation, we talk about how early life experiences are SO critical because they shape and mold our personality, our desires and values, and our capacities. Darcia says when you undermine early experience, you’re setting up the brain to be a dominator brain because you don't develop all the social skills that naturally emerge from an immersed and nested experience early in life. 
Darcia and I talk about how we’re living in ways that are very disconnected from the Earth and that the disconnection starts at birth.
We actually evolved for cooperative child raising with kin AND non kin (meaning animals, plants and other living matter) all actively participating in raising our children, not just one or two parents as is the case in many industrialized nations.
And if you think about it, there’s no society unless you’re taking care of mothers and children. Imagine if we created a society around caring for mothers and children? What might that world look like? How might we act today to support the emergence of that world?
Each one of us has a gift to give the world and in this episode, Darcia and I invite you to consider what your unique gift might be and how you might share it with the world.
I think this episode will resonate particularly if you’re a parent who feels like you’re struggling day to day, just trying to survive. Human history tells us we’ve actually evolved to live a very different way than the way many of us who are caught in the web of modernity are living.
I invite you to listen to this episode with an open mind and an open heart.
Watch the video episode on YouTube 
Darcia Narvaez’s Links & Resources:
EvolvedNest.org & KindredWorld.org
Restoring the Kinship Worldview, Darcia Narvaez & Four Arrows
The Evolved Nest: Nature’s Way of Raising Children and Creating Connected Communities, Darcia Narvaez & G.A. Bradshaw
Entangled World is a labor of love, I am deeply grateful for the generosity of my listeners and fans. Please consider making a donation at patreon.com/entangledworld.

An Educational Metacrisis | Brad Kershner

My guest today is Dr. Brad Kershner. Brad is a school leader, independent scholar, and meta-theorist, currently serving as the Head of School at Kimberton Waldorf School. His research, teaching, and writing cover a wide range of entangled topics, including education, leadership, parenting, cultural diversity, technology, integral theory, meditation, complexity, and developmental psychology. His first book is Understanding Educational Complexity: Integrating Practices and Perspectives for 21st Century Leadership. Brad is also a longtime student of multiple Buddhist lineages, a practitioner of Zen meditation, and describes himself as a lifelong student of developmental psychology and early childhood education.
 
What’s so unique about Brad is that he’s a Waldorf educator who is also metacrisis-informed. As listeners of this podcast know, many of our conversations explore the metacrisis, or the entangled web of global crises that we’re facing and that have common underlying generative dynamics that we must navigate to support the continued emergence of life. Brad and I talk about why it’s so critical to not only work to deeply understand the metacrisis in all the ways we come to know and understand anything but to also have a contemplative practice alongside that often very cognitive exploration.
 
When referencing the metacrisis, Brad says, “...it's an educational problem. It's a consciousness problem. It's a cultural problem”...and Brad’s focus is on helping people to understand the psychological, emotional, and cultural roots of the technological and scientific challenges that we face.
 
We talk about the importance of slowing down, beyond the personal benefits, but highlighting how it's necessary to be able to engage with these wicked crises, in ways that veer towards the direction of more life and love and away from the direction of destruction and fear.
 
We talk about the Waldorf approach to education and human development, its roots, and why so many of the teachings of its founder, Rudolph Steiner, remain relevant for our modern world.
 
One thing to clarify is that when Brad says he is a “techno-optimist” he means he sees the value and potential in technology to improve our lives, not that he’s aligned with the “techno-optimist” movement whose adherents claim that market capitalism and technology will solve the world’s problems. This version of techno-optimism simply justifies elite power and promotes indifference to human suffering rather than the alleviation of that suffering.
 
If you’re a parent of any age child, I think this conversation will be well worth your time in your already very crunched schedule.
 
Watch the video episode on the entangledworldpod YouTube channel.
 
Brad Kershner’s Links & Resources:
Understanding Educational Complexity: Integrating Practices and Perspectives for 21st Century Leadership
Waldorf Education, Stolen Focus and the Crisis of Attention
 
Other Resources Mentioned:
Stolen Focus, Johann Hari
Rudolf Steiner
Waldorf Education
The Social Dilemma film
John Vervaeke
Entangled World is a labor of love, I am deeply grateful for the generosity of my listeners and fans. Please consider supporting the project at patreon.com/entangledworld.

A Spiritual Metacrisis | Jonathan Rowson

My guest today is Jonathan Rowson. Jonathan is the co-founder and Chief Executive of Perspectiva. A London-based charity that describes itself as "A collective of expert generalists working on an urgent one-hundred-year project to understand the relationship between systems, souls, and society in theory and practice". 
He was Director of the Social Brain Centre at the Royal Society of Arts from 2009-2016, where he authored a range of influential research reports on behavior change, climate change, and spirituality, and curated and chaired public events. In 2018 he was awarded an Open Society Fellowship to apply his philosophical and strategic approach to challenges faced by the human rights movement. 
Jonathan holds a first-class degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics from Oxford University and did his post-graduate work in theoretical psychology at Harvard and Bristol Universities, including a Ph.D. on what it means to become wiser.
He is also a chess Grandmaster and was the British Chess Champion for three consecutive years from 2004-2006 and worked as part of former World Champion Viswanathan Anand's analytical team in 2008. He is the author of five books, including most recently The Moves that Matter – A Grandmaster on the Game of Life which was published by Bloomsbury in 2019. 
Jonathan’s Links & Resources:
Perspectiva
Substack
Twitter 
Prefixing the World by Jonathan Rowson
Tasting the Pickle: Ten flavours of meta-crisis and the appetite for a new civilisation by Jonathan Rowson
Living in the Metacrisis with Jonathan Rowson short film by Katie Teague 
The Seven Deadly Sins of Chess by Jonathan Rowson
The Moves that Matter – A Grandmaster on the Game of Life by Jonathan Rowson
Other Books, Articles, Videos Mentioned:
Education is the Metacrisis by Zak Stein
The Psychological Drivers of the Metacrisis: John Vervaeke, Iain McGilchrist, Daniel Schmachtenberger
The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future by Milbank and Pabst
Rowan Williams Review of The Politics of Virtue
Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World by Timothy Morton
Eye of the Heart: A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal Realm by Cynthia Bourgeault
Economics for the future – Beyond the superorganism by Nate Hagens
The Great Simplification podcast hosted by Nate Hagens
The Politics of Waking Up by Indra Adnan
Zoom Conversations vs In-Person: Brain Activity Tells a Different Tale
 

A New World Combining | Nora Bateson

My guest today is Nora Bateson. Nora is an award-winning filmmaker, research designer, writer, educator, international lecturer, as well as President of the International Bateson Institute based in Sweden. She’s also the creator of the Warm Data theory and practices.
Nora’s work brings the fields of biology, cognition, art, anthropology, psychology, and information technology together into a study of the patterns in ecology of living systems. Her work asks the question “How can we improve our perception of the complexity we live within, so we may improve our interaction with the world?”
Nora has written two absolutely beautiful, thought provoking books, Small Arcs of Larger Circles and her latest book, Combining, where Nora challenges conventional fixes for our problems, highlighting the need to tackle issues at multiple levels, understand interdependence, and embrace ambiguity. 
Nora and I talk about double binds, which in some cases are similar to multipolar traps or predicaments that feel impossible to get out of, what we might call “lose, lose” situations. Nora says in these situations, the question becomes, “How do we move with our predicament in a way that allows movement?”
And so we discuss how we cannot solve our current global challenges or the metacrisis with direct correctives. Nora says you don’t meet something head on, you meet it around, you meet it within, you meet it totally. In ecological systems nothing is happening one thing at a time. There’s not A solution to A problem.
We also discuss that while we can point to aspects of the metacrisis with language and statistics and measurements, that the real issues are insidious and underground and in our baseline presumptions of our understanding of what life is.
I absolutely LOVED this conversation and I hope you do too.
Nora Bateson’s Links & Resources:
International Bateson Institute
https://batesoninstitute.org/
Warm Data Host Training (Next in-person training Feb 19th-26th 2024 in Singapore)
Books:
Small Arcs of Larger Circles by Nora Bateson
Combining by Nora Bateson
I hope you enjoy the episode, if you do please subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app or the entangledworldpod YouTube channel.
Entangled World explores the interrelated, existential social, economic, ecological, and technological risks we face, their underlying drivers, and how a more beautiful world might emerge. 
Entangled World is a labor of love, I am deeply grateful for the generosity of my listeners and fans. Please consider making a donation on Patreon.

An Education Revolution | Zineb Mouhyi

My guest today is Zineb Mouhyi. Zineb is the co-founder of both YouthxYouth & the Weaving Lab. YouthxYouth is a movement to radically reimagine the future of education with the goal of accelerating the process of young people influencing, designing, and transforming their education. The Weaving Lab is a global community of practice with the mission of advancing the field of weaving, understood as the practice of interconnecting ideas, people, projects, organizations, places, and ecologies to support systems change. Zineb is also a PhD candidate in Anthropology and Social Change where she explores the questions “How might we facilitate a planetary transition to a thriving planet? & How could education lead to a planetary transition?” 
Zineb and I talk about why education is one of the root causes of the many interrelated global crises we’re facing, also known as the metacrisis, as it is the core human-making function of society. Zineb believes that despite decades of adults working to reform public education, the system, on average, is producing dismal results and it's time for a youth-led education revolution! Her work with young people has confirmed her hunch that THEY need to be the ones leading the change.
We also talk about the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence (AI) in education and agree that it is of the utmost importance that those in positions of educational leadership work to deepen their understanding of AI and how it is and will impact children moving forward.
I hope you enjoy the episode, if you do please subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app or the entangledworldpod YouTube channel.
Entangled World explores the interrelated, existential social, economic, ecological, and technological risks we face, their underlying drivers, and how a more beautiful world might emerge. 
Entangled World is a labor of love, I am deeply grateful for the generosity of my listeners and fans. Please consider making a donation at patreon.com/entangledworld.
Zineb’s Links & Resources:
YouthxYouth
The Weaving Lab
Books Mentioned:
Education in a Time Between Worlds, Zak Stein
Other Resources:
Education is the Metacrisis, Zak Stein
Entangled World explores our greatest, interrelated social, economic, ecological, and technological global challenges, their underlying drivers, and how a more beautiful world might emerge.
Entangled World is a labor of love, I am deeply grateful for the generosity of my listeners and fans. Please consider donating at Patreon.

Conscious Evolution | Manda Scott

My guest today is Manda Scott. Manda started life as an equine veterinary surgeon and is now a novelist, host of the Accidental Gods podcast, (r)evolutionary and smallholder. Her Boudica: Dreaming novels were international best-sellers and led to her teaching shamanic dreaming for the past two decades. She is the co-creator of the Thrutopia Masterclass, aiming to furnish writers with the ideas and concepts necessary to create stories that will carry us through to a future we’d be proud to leave behind. 
Manda’s story is fascinating and she shares insights she’s gained through unconventional ways that expand how we think we come to know things. She talks about the need for a conscious evolution in human consciousness and how our current worldview paradigm is deeply rooted in a story of scarcity, separation, and powerlessness. But this is not a “true” story…and we can collectively re-write a new one. 
Manda says that it's time for humanity to evolve our consciousness and understand our place in the web of life and she believes we can play an active role in its evolution and that connecting to the web of life is HOW we do it. This is a wide-ranging conversation, we talk about shamanic practices, economics, artificial intelligence (AI), mass social movements, and much more. 
I hope you enjoy the episode, if you do please subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app or the entangledworldpod YouTube channel.
Entangled World explores the interrelated, existential social, economic, ecological, and technological risks we face, their underlying drivers, and how a more beautiful world might emerge. 
Entangled World is a labor of love, I am deeply grateful for the generosity of my listeners and fans. Please consider making a donation at patreon.com/entangledworld.
Manda Scott’’s Links & Resources:
Manda’s Site
Accidental Gods
Thrutopia Masterclass
Boudica Trilogy
Books mentioned:
The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow
Debt, David Graeber
The Eagle of the Night, Rosemary Sutcliff
The Patterning Instinct, Jeremy Lent
The Web of Life, Jeremy Lent
Building Tomorrow, Paddy Le Flufy
Other people and work mentioned:
Audrey Tang
Daniel Schmachtenberger, The Civilization Research Institute
Tristan Harris & Asa Raskin, Center for Humane Technology, Your Undivided Attention podcast
The Other Side of Eden, Hugh Brody
The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist
Zineb Mouhyi https://www.youthxyouth.com
Angharad Wynne https://www.angharadwynne.com/
Paddy Le Flufy https://paddyleflufy.com/