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/

My guest today is Kathleen Rude. Kathleen is a shamanic practitioner, teacher and ceremonial leader and she fell in love with the natural world as a young child and found her voice for environmental activism at the tender age of 10.

She was raised liberal Lutheran in a household steeped in Jungian psychology. She was initiated by Blackfoot, Northern Ute, and Lakota elders into indigenous spiritual practices and studied core shamanism with Betsy Bergstrom and Sandra Ingerman. 

She was also mentored by Joanna Macy, internationally acclaimed eco-philosopher and root teacher of the Work That Reconnects. She serves as a Weaver in the Work That Reconnects Network. 

Kathleen shares how the teachings of indigenous elders have profoundly influenced her beliefs about humanity not being separate from nature but part of it and brought an added dimension to her activism and conservation work.

She also began to see how interconnected the issues she was working on were and how trying to solve them in isolation is not only not impossible, but also futile.

We dig deeper into Joanna Macy’s work so if you’ve been curious about that either as someone who wants to experience it or facilitate it, this episode will give you a great overview. Kathleen’s journey is a wonderful example of how allowing your passion, interest, and values to guide you opens the doorway for you to offer what you are uniquely and meaningfully here to bring into the world.

I hope you enjoy the episode, if you do please subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app or the entangledworldpod YouTube channel.

Kathleen’s Links & Resources:

Website

Facebook group

Redemption of the Red Fire Woman, Kathleen Rude

Books Mentioned:

We Are Water Protectors (Children’s book)

From What is to What If?, Rob Hopkins

Other Resources:

Work that Reconnects Network

Warm Data Labs led by Nora Bateson

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 couldn’t keep this podcast going without the generosity of my listeners and fans. Please consider making a donation at patreon.com/entangledworld.

My guest today is Rachel Donald. Rachel investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. A climate corruption journalist, she is the creator of Planet: Critical, a podcast & newsletter read in over 125 countries, which explores the intersection of the energy, economic, ecological and equity crises. She also regularly presents on the relationship between systems and narrative, and is currently writing a book on violence. 

Rachels speaks about her experience as a climate corruption journalist and how her reporting has revealed patterns of exploitation and extraction that are rooted in perverse economic systems. She talks about how she initially thought business was the answer to the climate crisis and came to realize that our for-profit economic system is directly opposed to a liveable planet. 

Rachel explores how our capitalist system commodifies everything and pulls us apart so we can no longer rely on the collective and are forced to meet our needs in increasingly individualistic ways. We talk about where our ideas of separation might have originally come from…could it have been back in the days of Plato and Descartes who talked about the split between the body and mind, could it have been the invention of the plow which required us to feel like separate and superior beings to animals because you couldn’t torture an ox all day to do your farming work for you and still believe in its sacredness? However, our ideas of separation emerged, our fragmented consciousness may underlie the global challenges we face and a return to wholeness is now needed to avoid civilizational collapse. To close, Rachel shares inspiring examples of incredible work being done by people around the globe co-creating a more flourishing future.

This is a wide-ranging conversation! I hope you enjoy it, if you do please subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app or the entangled world Youtube channel.

Rachel’s Links & Resources:

Planet: Critical

Planet: Critical at OST

Matt Leighninger, Planet: Critical podcast

Simon Michaux, Planet: Critical podcast

Ashish Kothari, Planet: Critical podcast

Books Mentioned:

The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow

Other Resources:

Mongabay: independent news site that covers what’s happening to vulnerable people around the world, particularly indigenous peoples.

Johan Rockstrum, Planetary Boundaries

Black Mountains College

Entangled World explores our greatest, interrelated social, economic, ecological, and technological global challenges, their underlying drivers, and how a more beautiful world might emerge.

YouTube

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Entangled World is a labor of love, I couldn’t keep this podcast going without the generosity of my listeners and fans. Please consider making a donation at patreon.com/entangledworld.

My guest today is Della Duncan, a Renegade Economist. Areas of her livelihood garden include supporting individuals as a Right Livelihood Coach, helping transition businesses and organizations as a post-capitalist consultant, teaching and facilitating courses and retreats on the Work that Reconnects and Regenerative Economics, and hosting the Upstream Podcast which challenges mainstream economic thinking through documentaries and conversations including most recently, The Green Transition: The Problem with Green Capitalism and The Myth of Freedom Under Capitalism. 

Our current global capitalist economic system has provided many benefits to humanity AND the system was designed for those benefits to accrue to those at the top, which is one of the reasons we have such massive inequality around the globe. Della and I talk about how capitalism is more like modern-day slavery and a tool for white supremacy and patriarchy. It is fueling the destruction of the planet, from which it is compelled to extract and it’s a system that can’t last forever and will eventually topple under its own weight.

Della challenges the assumptions that are built into mainstream economics: that nature is commodifiable and we can objectify it and put a price on it, that humans are selfish beings out for our own self-interest, that work is something we don’t value or enjoy doing, that humans aren’t capable of collectively taking care of the land and that it must be privatized to be cared for, and the biggest assumption of all: that limitless growth on a finite planet is possible and even desirable. 

I hope you enjoy the episode, if you do please subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app or on the entangledworldpod YouTube channel.

Della’s Links & Resources:

Website

Upstream Podcast

Upstream Podcast, Ep 16: The Myth of Freedom Under Capitalism (Documentary)

Social Media handles: @upstreampodcast and @dellazduncan

Books mentioned:

Less is More, Jason Hickel

The Divide, Jason Hickel

Winners Take All, Anand Giridharadas

How on Earth: Imagining a Not for Profit World by 2050, Jennifer Hinton

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Persig

100 Years of Psychotherapy And the World’s Only Getting Worse, Michael Ventura, James Hillman

Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer

Other people and work mentioned:

Does Studying Economics Breed Greed, Adam Grant

Limits to Growth, Donella Meadows

Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System, Donella Meadows

The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance, Robin Wall Kimmerer

Entangled World explores our greatest, interrelated social, economic, ecological, and technological global challenges, their underlying drivers, and how a more beautiful world might emerge.

YouTube

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Entangled World is a labor of love, I couldn’t keep this podcast going without the generosity of my listeners and fans. Please consider making a donation at patreon.com/entangledworld.

My guest today is Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.). Bayo is rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea and Kyah, the grateful life-partner to Ije, son and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist, and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak, Bayo Akomolafe is the Founder of The Emergence Network and host of the postactivist course/festival/event, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’. 

This is a conversation about becoming. Bayo says “our culture sees growth and development as the only algorithm for creating sociality.” We discuss the gifts of disruption and the shackles of belonging. Bayo says, “we need to ‘dis-belong’ in order to become bodies…that disruption is how the world feels into itself.”

We talk about our challenges with parenting and how our children are our greatest teachers. What if we treated our children as cosmic disruptions?

We talk about racial inequality and what’s wrong with efforts to “bring marginalized people to the tables of power” because it still requires you to fit within the existing power regime, within the existing way of being. 

While we don’t discuss the metacrisis in detail in this conversation, everything we talk about is very much relevant to how we show up to do the work of addressing the metacrisis. In fact, this conversation is all about “how” we do the work which is just as important as “what” we do.

For those of us who are parents in particular working to address our greatest global challenges, I think this is a conversation you will love.

Links & Resources:

Bayo’s Website

What I Mean by Postactivism article

These Wilds Beyond Our Fences, Bayo Akomolafe

entangled world explores our greatest, interrelated social, economic, ecological, and technological global challenges, their underlying drivers, and how a more beautiful world might emerge.

YouTube

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Entangled World is a labor of love, I couldn’t keep this podcast going without the generosity of my listeners and fans. Please consider making a donation at patreon.com/entangledworld.

My guest today is Jeremy Lent. Jeremy has been described by Guardian journalist George Monbiot as “one of the greatest thinkers of our age”. Jeremy is an author and speaker whose work investigates the underlying causes of our civilization’s existential crisis, and explores pathways toward a life-affirming future. His award-winning books, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, and The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe, trace the historical underpinnings and flaws of the dominant worldview, and offer a foundation for an integrative worldview that could lead humanity to a flourishing future. He has written extensively about the vision and specifics of an ecological civilization and is founder of the Deep Transformation Network, an online global community of over 3,000 people engaging with others in facilitating a deep transformation toward a life-affirming future on a regenerated Earth.

Jeremy says culture shapes, values shape history, and our values will shape the future. He shares a fascinating story about Christopher Columbus and Admiral Zheng that points to why Europeans came to dominate the world and spoiler alert…it has to do with the differences between what these two different cultures valued.

We talk about the universal values that indigenous cultures around the world share such as looking at other species not as separate from us as humans, but as our relatives, seeing nature as one extended family. Western science has now validated this view by finding much of the genes of all species are shared. Jeremy believes we are in the process of undergoing one of the greatest transformations in human history and our work now is to transition to an ecological civilization that deeply understands humans are just one part of the web of life.

I hope you enjoy the episode, if you do please subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app or the entangledworldpod YouTube channel.

Jeremy’s Links & Resources:

Jeremy's website

The Patterning Instinct, Jeremy Lent

The Web of Meaning, Jeremy Lent

Principles of Deep Transformation, Gaia Education

Books Mentioned:

The Tao is Silent, Raymond Smullyen

The Art of the Warrior, Sun Tzu

The Kinship Worldview, Four Arrows and Darcia Narvaez

Other Resources:

The Great Simplification Podcast, Nate Hagens

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 couldn’t keep this podcast going without the generosity of my listeners and fans. Please consider making a donation at patreon.com/entangledworld.

My guest today is Samantha Sweetwater, an author, thought leader, ceremonial guide, educator, and executive coach. For over 30 years, Samantha has facilitated individual and group transformational experiences in diverse communities, cultures, and industries on five continents. Her work leading conversations about our relationship with the Earth, spirituality, and systems change is transforming the way we think about what it means to be human.

Samantha highlights that separation from the Earth that we are nested inside of has been our human predicament and that the next stage of evolution looks like a conscious reunion that organizes towards a purpose to co-harmonize and create abundance for all beings within the biosphere.

We also discuss the metacrisis, that we're reaching existential tipping points we've never reached before at a planetary scale. Samantha imagines a vision 300 years into the future where we’ve managed to co-orchestrate, through climate catastrophe, through the migration of billions of people, through massive cycles of famine and disease, a more regenerative way to live in harmony with all life. 

This was such an uplifting conversation! I hope you enjoy it, if you do please subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app or on the entangledworldpod YouTube channel.

Samantha’s Links & Resources:

Samantha’s website

Wisdom of WTF?!

Medium

Gaia Dharma: how indigenous wisdom can help us move beyond technological adolescence and orient towards planetary flourishing

Books Mentioned:

Nature and the Human Soul, Bill Plotkin

The Matter With Things, Iain McGilchrist

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 couldn’t keep this podcast going without the generosity of my listeners and fans. Please consider making a donation at patreon.com/entangledworld.

An introduction to the metacrisis, what it is, what its underlying drivers are, why it matters, and what we can do about it.

Welcome to entangled world, where we explore our interrelated, existential social, economic, ecological, and technological challenges, their underlying drivers, and how a more beautiful world might emerge.

Today I have a special treat for you all. Some of you might recall episode 10 on this podcast where I interviewed Dr. Sabba Quidwai who has a podcast of her own called "Sprint to Success with Design Thinking”, where she interviews researchers and practitioners about their stories and strategies for navigating change with design thinking.  Today I'm going to feature an episode Sabba did on her podcast called "Revolutionizing the Public School System: A Design Sprint Case Study" because it really gets into the nitty gritty of how to apply the design thinking methodology. Sabba interviews Daniel Andor, Founder and Lead Product Designer at Durran, where they run Design Spring workshops for their clients. He discusses a case study with an edtech company serving 650 schools and 100,000+ users and more broadly the role of design sprints in education.   AND, I can't believe we're already at episode 16! This is the last episode in Season 1 of the Education ReMade podcast! I hope you're finding these conversations valuable. Please email me at [email protected] and let me know what you think about the pod!   Links Mentioned: To read the full case study Daniel references in the podcast click here. To connect with Daniel visit his website where you’ll also be able to find links to all his social channels. Daniel’s “Startup Strategy Bundle” is really insightful and it’s a free download. Find Sabba at askm sq.com   Follow Najia on LinkedIn