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This week I speak with Rufus Pollock (Website | Twitter | Wikipedia), former Mead Fellow in Economics at the University of Cambridge, entrepreneur, activist, author of Open Revolution and Wiser Societies, RSA Fellow, and co-founder of Life Itself, Open Knowledge Foundation, Datopian, and Second Renaissance. Rufus is a key player in the so-called “Liminal Web” and active mapper of the ecosystem of emerging changemaking organizations who, along with his wife Sylvie Barbier and an extensive network of brilliant allies, strives to promote the shifts in consciousness and culture that we need to safely navigate our age of accelerating technology with wiser, weller ways of living together.
Together we get into the good, bad, and ugly of our nascent planetary culture — the tension between ecological consciousness and economic force, the demands placed on us to reclaim time-tested strategies for community and meaning in a brave new world, the intertwingling of religion and science, and why technological solutions alone are woefully inadequate (however necessary) as we face our crises of collective action. It’s an earnest, soul-searching, thoughtful, and far-reaching extra-long conversation and I hope that you find as much value in it as we did.
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Discussed
Second Renaissance Whitepaper & Theory of Change
Getting over our Allergy to Religion
David Sloan Wilson - Darwin’s Cathedral
William Irwin Thompson - Imaginary Landscape, The Digital Economy of W. Brian Arthur
Federico Campagna - Prophetic Culture
Alex Shakar - Luminarium
Arthur C. Clarke & Stephen Baxter - The Light of Other Days
Joe Henrich - The WEIRDest People in the World
Jessica Flack - Coarse-Graining as a Downward Causation Mechanism
Mentioned
Bayo Akomolafe
Sylvie Barbier
Liam Kavanaugh
Bret Easton Ellis
John Stewart
Carl Jung
Doug Rushloff
Karl Marx
Goethe
Jamie Wheal
Steven Kotler
Ken Wilber
Robert Kegan
Suzanne Cook-Greuter
Paul Levy
George W. Bush
Ursula K. LeGuin
Iain McGilchrist
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Naval Ravikant
Thich Nhat Hanh
W. Brian Arthur
Hazel Henderson
Jim Rutt
Christopher Alexander
Jamie Curcio
Jordan Peterson
W. B. Yeats
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