Watch now on YouTube.

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.

In this episode, I’m joined by Homa Tavangar and Will Richardson. Homa is a best-selling author of Growing Up Global: Raising Children to Be At Home in the World and Global Kids. Homa advises and trains K-12 schools and Boards around the world. She was born in Iran, has lived on four continents, speaks four languages, and has heritage in four world religions.

Will Richardson has spent over 40 years in education, the last 20 of which have focused on sparking global conversations around educational change in response to the growing challenges and opportunities that our complex times present. He is the author of six books, and most recently published "Confronting Education in a Time of Chaos, Complexity and Collapse."

Together, Homa & Will co-founded the Big Questions Institute (BQI), which challenges educators to develop personal and institutional capacity for addressing the confounding problems of our time. It aims to help educators of all stripes build their capacity to see and accept this unique moment for what it is and to peer into the future with skill, grounding that work in "fearless inquiry," a disposition of deep questioning and truth-telling.

Homa and Will explore what it means to truly educate children in a rapidly changing world, focusing on the importance of relationships, connection, and the sacred elements of learning. The conversation delves into the roles of community, power dynamics in schools, while also highlighting the beacons of light in small, startup schools, many of them nature based, that are doing things radically different from mainstream education. We discuss the community-and-child-empowering frameworks that can help bring about desperately needed shifts in our education system by beginning with asking, “What is sacred?”

Watch now on YouTube.

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.

In this episode, I am joined by 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.

Samantha’s divine feminine wisdom offers a perspective that is urgently needed as our world undergoes a profound phase shift.

Whether this episode is new to you or a chance to revisit it, I hope her words provide space for reflection and inspiration as we step into a new year.

Watch now on YouTube. 

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. 

In this episode, I’m joined by Alex Randall from the Civilization Research Institute to discuss Development in Progress, a recent paper released by The Consilience Project, an initiative of the Civilization Research Institute.

I highly recommend taking the time to read it—this paper sheds new light on the widely accepted progress narrative, the idea that technological innovation, markets, and institutions have unambiguously improved our quality of life. While modernity has undeniably brought many benefits, such as medical advancements and technologies that connect us globally, this paper challenges us to question the costs of progress as we define it today. It argues that the overlooked side effects of our pursuit of progress have accumulated to a point where they now pose existential risks to life on our planet.

The good news is that there are relatively simple ways we can start making changes that reduce these downsides. Alex emphasizes that progress itself isn’t inherently harmful, but by expanding our view of what progress encompasses, we can better recognize and address its unintended consequences.

We delve into some innovative frameworks developed by the Civilization Research Institute, like prudent problem-solving and yellow teaming—approaches that can immediately enhance how we take meaningful action in both our organizations and our personal lives.

For those of you who understand the metacrisis and are eager to know how you can make a difference, this episode is especially exciting!

Watch on YouTube.

Today I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Elizabeth Sawin, Director of the Multisolving Institute, which she founded in 2021 to develop tools and share research on "multisolving." This innovative approach addresses equity, climate change, health, well-being, and economic vitality as interconnected issues, helping to create solutions that tackle multiple problems simultaneously. Elizabeth developed this concept after studying successful "bright spots" around the world—places where people brought about systems change by breaking down silos and building connections.

Elizabeth’s background is rooted in system dynamics and computer simulation, a field in which she was mentored by the renowned Donella Meadows at the Sustainability Institute. She has a forthcoming book titled Multisolving: Creating Systems Change in a Fractured World. It’s an inspiring and practical guide that I highly recommend to anyone interested in systems change work.

In our conversation, we explore Elizabeth’s groundbreaking work in multisolving, where she shares real-world examples of how this approach works in practice—such as bringing together asthma advocates and environmentalists to craft holistic solutions for communities. These collaborative efforts not only address environmental concerns but also improve public health and community resilience, highlighting the power of integrated action.

We also dive into the essential worldview shift that Elizabeth believes is necessary for meaningful change. The dominant worldview, particularly in the Western world, treats the world as a "collection of objects," where safety comes from domination, power is gained through control, and causality is viewed as linear. In contrast, the relational worldview, often associated with indigenous traditions, sees the world as a web of interconnected relationships. In this worldview, safety comes from partnership, power is built through consent, and boundaries are fluid and permeable. Elizabeth emphasizes that to transform the physical world, we must first transform our mental models, learning to recognize and act within this web of relationships.

One of the most thought-provoking aspects of our discussion is the idea of fractals—how patterns that repeat in nature also appear in societal structures. Elizabeth explains how the "collection of objects" worldview manifests fractally in systems like supremacy, patriarchy, colonialism, and extractive economics. Conversely, the relational worldview gives rise to fractals of rights for nature, gender and racial equity, and sustainable economies. These patterns reinforce each other, so our work involves breaking harmful patterns and forging new relationships through which healthier, more sustainable fractals can emerge.

Entangled World is 100% independent and will never take advertiser money. If you value it, and have the means, please consider subscribing on Patreon.

Watch now on YouTube. 

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 supporting the project at https://www.patreon.com/entangledworld

Today on the podcast, I talked with Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti. Vanessa is the author of Hospicing Modernity: Facing humanity's wrongs and the implications for social activism, which is a beautiful and critical read for our times in which we must all navigate the global crises we face. 

In this episode, we discuss the implications of modernity and what is required of us today, to plant the seeds for a more just, beautiful future for all. Vanessa shares insights from her work in Brazil and with Indigenous communities, highlighting the artificial divide between humans and nature and modernity's impact on our neurobiology.

We discuss cultivating a sense of relational maturity, emotional sobriety, and intellectual discernment and why a move from narrow boundary intelligence, or “either/or,” thinking to wide boundary intelligence, which considers “both/and,” is essential to perceive and then appropriately and morally navigate our actions.

We also discuss how the pattern of modernity is to project an image of the future with fixed form and fixed meanings, so that we can engineer a perfect world. But this is actually a trap that keeps us bound in problematic ways of thinking that have resulted in the existential crises we face. So rather than trying to imagine objective forms, such as what does the future we want look like, we can focus on the vibrational field, how do we want it to feel and how do we work backwards from that? What does it require of us today? What control and certainly must we give up?

This was a thought-provoking conversation about what it means to live more consciously in our paradoxical world and the role that each of us can play as we navigate from modernity to relationality.

00:00 Introduction to Entangled World

01:03 Meet the Host: Najia Shaukat Lupson

02:07 Guest Introduction: Vanessa's Story

02:34 Vanessa's Background and Family History

04:11 Challenges and Paradoxes in Vanessa's Upbringing

06:25 Vanessa's Journey in Education and Indigenous Work

10:55 Exploring the Root of Global Crises

13:12 The House of Modernity: A Metaphor

19:43 Navigating the Meta Crisis

23:54 The Role of Education in Addressing Crises

30:36 Imagination and Relationality

34:09 The Concept of Entanglement

35:33 The Role of Imagination in Creating the New

36:07 Wisdom and Intelligence: A Southern Perspective

37:25 Navigating Modernity: From Narrow to Wide Boundary Intelligence

38:27 The Complexity of Wisdom

41:53 Educational Challenges and Breadcrumbs of Wisdom

48:45 The Seven A's and E's of Modernity

57:12 Neurobiology and Modernity's Impact

01:03:36 Final Thoughts and Future Conversations

Vanessa’s Links:

Portfolio of Vanessa’s work

Hospicing Modernity: Facing humanity's wrongs and the implications for social activism by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira: 

Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective

Art-Life Rituals for Radical Tenderness 

Watch now on YouTube.

Today on the podcast, I had the distinct honor and pleasure of speaking with Fritjof Capra. Fritjof is the lead teacher of the Capra Course and Systems View LAB. Fritjof is a scientist, educator, and activist who has written and lectured extensively about the philosophical and social implications of modern science. He was a founding director (1995-2020) of the Berkeley-based Center for Ecoliteracy and serves on the faculty of the Amana-Key executive education program in São Paulo, Brazil. He is a Fellow of Schumacher College and serves on the Council of Earth Charter International.

He is also the author of several international bestsellers. including The Tao of Physics (1975), The Turning Point (1982), and The Web of Life (1996). He is coauthor of the multidisciplinary textbook The Systems View of Life (2014).

Fritjof is the rare person who has engaged in not only a tremendous amount of research, theory and writing, but also actuation in the world through his activism and bringing ecology education into public schools.

In this episode, Fritjof talks about 4 key principles that summarize the culmination of his life’s work and what he calls the “systems view of life”:

1. Life organizes itself in networks of processes (chemical, biological, communications, etc.).


2. Life is inherently regenerative down to the molecular level.


3. Life is inherently creative.


4. Life is inherently intelligent.

We discuss how the mechanistic worldview which originated from Renee Descartes who viewed the mind (which he called the “thinking” thing) as separate from matter (which he called the “extended” thing) and which has been the dominant worldview is now finally being upended by a network-based worldview. The network worldview acknowledges that all of life is interconnected, co-evolving and complex and therefore cannot be controlled.

We explore how the mechanistic worldview is still espoused by many technologists leading AI development who view intelligence as solely residing in the brain, discounting the embodied, felt ways of knowing that reside in the body.

Ultimately, we discuss the importance of putting life at the center of everything we do, of everything that is worth doing in this time of metacrisis.

Fritjof’s Links:

https://www.fritjofcapra.net/

https://www.capracourse.net/ (Fall 2024 course starting Sept. 18, 2024)

Other Resources Mentioned:

Robert Reich

Owning Our Future by Marjorie Kelly

Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

When Corporations Rule the World by David Korten

Ecological Civilization: From Emergency to Emergence by David Korten

The Social Dilemma by the Center for Humane Technology

The AI Dilemma by the Center Humane Technology

Watch it now on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKcb4D7qEfU

My guest today is Schuyler Brown. Schuyler is a strategist, futurist, facilitator, and coach. She founded The Art of Emergence and her gifts include executive coaching, corporate shamanism, navigating spiritual awakening and crises, and hosting online and in-person retreats centered around embodiment, emotional intelligence, and leading from the heart. She has a rich history as a futurist and is sought out for her intuitive and empathic gifts and her ability to guide people into opening into their own full potential. 

In this episode, Schuyler and I talk about the relational aspect of living in a time of metacrisis, the balance of masculine and feminine energies, the impacts of generational trauma, and the role non-human consciousness can play in our journeys. 

We talk about how the important emotional content of our lives is often ignored in our existing systems, partly because it’s inefficient and messy. We explore how even amongst people working to address the metacrisis, there’s an extreme focus on productivity, efficiency, speed, and results, and with good reason, you only have to open your eyes to see the many entangled, existential crises we face. But we also need to feel the pain, it cannot just be an intellectual exercise. Emotions aren’t a distraction, they’re useful bits of information meant to guide our actions. To actually feel them helps us to know what to do about our current predicament.

We talk about how humanity’s survival is not guaranteed and how that means we are in a time we’re each one of us that’s alive today, young or old has a deep responsibility to current and future generations of all human and non-human life on this planet to do whatever they are able to shift our trajectory. How do we walk through this world as ensouled beings and simultaneously create “heaven on Earth”? 

We end our conversation discussing how it’s only non-human sentience that can see humanity’s blind spots. In the upcoming weeks, how can YOU listen to the non-human world? What messages are meant to be coming through to you and uniquely only you? What are you meant to do at this time? What are you meant to sense into, not intellectually figure out?

00:00 Introduction to Entangled World

01:37 Meet Schuyler: A Journey of Self-Discovery

09:51 Exploring the Metacrisis

24:07 Parenting in the Age of the Metacrisis

36:34 The Role of Trauma in the Metacrisis

45:05 Challenges of Addressing the Metacrisis in Organizations

49:58 Standing Outside the System

51:15 The Trap of Power and Status

52:39 Partnership Societies and Feminine Principles

54:42 Creating Balanced Organizations

56:31 The Sacred in Group Dynamics

59:33 The Dance of Masculine and Feminine

01:08:34 The Concept of Time and Urgency

01:24:21 Communion with Nature

01:30:53 Closing Reflections and Future Guests

Schuyler’s Links & Resources:

The Art of Emergence

Schuyler’s Substack

Tenacious Magic, Schuyler Brown (being readied for publication)

Other Resources Mentioned:

The Emerald podcast, Joshua Schrei, For the Intuitives episodes

Bonnitta Roy

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.

Watch the video episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/IsZaVuRktXY

My guest today is Olivia Lazard. Olivia is a research fellow at Carnegie Europe where her research involves investigating how to support a move towards regenerative foreign and security policy within the European Union. She also leads projects at the University of Exeter on the ecological costs of the energy transition. Essentially, Olivia works on the geopolitics of climate-disrupted futures and ecological breakdown. With a background in conflict resolution, and deep field experience in some of the world's most fragile contexts, she now focuses on preventing and mitigating the risks associated with a global competition over specific renewable and non-renewable resources. Her work tackles the decarbonisation-regeneration nexus, the core pillar for the future of global security and peace.

In this conversation, Olivia and I discuss the major “blind spots” of the energy transition and how competitive resource extraction is likely to lead to conflict, violence, ecological destabilization, and the dangerous potential of simultaneously compromising multiple major ecosystems for the sake of resource extraction. She describes how COVID and the Ukraine War revealed some important vulnerabilities in our interconnected systems and how resources can be powerfully weaponized by those who control them. She puts the Ukraine-Russia conflict in context as part of a larger story that has major implications for the future; a possible future in which Russia may be able to use its control over energy, critical minerals, agriculture, and other natural resources to threaten the stability of other increasingly dependent, destabilized nations.

We also talk about how China has perfected the verticalization of supply chains for several critical minerals needed for the advanced tech revolution, particularly the development of AI. China has become not only an industrial heavyweight leading in manufacturing but also a technological heavyweight, which has massive geopolitical implications for the global balance of power 

We explore the rationality behind different realms of human conquest throughout history, from colonialism to the nuclear age, highlighting how these revolutions came about in response to needs and threats in key historical moments. We discuss historical cycles of attempts to control, extract, expand, and conquer, and the resulting long-term consequences. In other words, how our current problem-solving approaches works to solve narrow goals while externalizing harm in other places. 

Olivia shares about her experience staying with an Indigenous community in the Amazon during which she had a profound spiritual experience in which she felt more connected to the natural world than she had ever felt before and it completely shifted how she thought about her place in the world. We end the conversation talking about how in reality, we are not separate from nature and to understand that is to come to view ourselves and the world in all its holistic beauty.

Olivia Lazard’s Links & Resources:

https://carnegieendowment.org/people/olivia-lazard?lang=en

The Blind Spots of the Green Energy Transition | Olivia Lazard | TED

https://www.iwm.at/europes-futures/fellow/olivia-lazard

https://x.com/OliviaLazard?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

https://muckrack.com/olivia-lazard/articles

Other Resources Mentioned:

Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by David R. Montgomery 

The Human Planet: How We Created The Anthropocene by Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin

Stockholm Impact Week (Olivia’s talk and others)

Benchmark Minerals

James Dyke (tipping points research and more)

International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services 

Emily Robinson, PhD Researcher in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, University of Exeter

The European Green Deal

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

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