Subscribe: Spotify | RSS | More

Jim talks with Rufus Pollock—entrepreneur, activist, Zen practitioner, founder of Life Itself and the Open Knowledge Foundation, and author of Open Revolution—about the metacrisis, the wisdom gap, and what a Second Renaissance might look like. They discuss Jim’s own early belief that accessible information would produce a renaissance of democracy, the realization that “open knowledge does not make open minds,” the printing press and Gutenberg as a historical parallel to today’s breakdown of sense-making, why today’s epistemic crisis is exponentially harder than 1520 because any formulation you want is on offer, the breakdown of trust in science and rational bureaucracy as parallel to the collapse of Catholic epistemic authority, Christopher Alexander’s work as the best analogy for wisdom and his claim that beauty and wholeness are real, Rufus’s three elements of wisdom—”valuception,” discernment, and the capacity to act—applied both individually and collectively, how humans have solved collective action problems by culturally hijacking kin-care genetics to imagine a larger we, culture as scaffolding for people who can’t or won’t do inner work themselves, Joseph Henrich’s framing of humans as the imitation ape rather than the smart ape, the distinction between surface culture and deep civilizational paradigms, Life Itself’s conscious co-livings as experiments in new cultural practices, the personal-institutional spiral and why retreat benefits evaporate without external scaffolding, the three layers of the metacrisis, distinguishing the polycrisis from the metacrisis using the HIV/AIDS analogy, modernity’s core assumptions and how in the endgame the light becomes a shadow, the five features of a Second Renaissance worldview compared to modernity, technology as the de facto religion of modernity, the Buddhist distinction between waking up and growing up and the aspiration for an awakening society, AI as a case study in the multipolar trap at the company, capital, and geopolitical levels, the historical engine of group enlargement and why war can no longer serve that function, and much more.

• Episode Transcript
• Open Revolution, by Rufus Pollock
• Rufus Pollock’s Website
• Life Itself
• Life Itself Hubs for Conscious Community
• A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander
• The Nature of Order, by Christopher Alexander
• The Timeless Way of Building, by Christopher Alexander
• Open Knowledge Foundation
• Second Renaissance
• Second Renaissance White Papers
• Introduction to Developmental Spaces (information and paper)
• Metacrisis: An Introduction

Rufus Pollock is an entrepreneur, activist and author as well as a long-term zen practitioner. He is passionate about finding wiser, weller ways to live together. He has founded several for-profit and nonprofit initiatives including Life Itself, Open Knowledge Foundation, and Datopian. His book Open Revolution is about making a radically freer and fairer information age. Previously he has been the Mead Fellow in Economics at the University of Cambridge as well as a Shuttleworth and Ashoka Fellow. A recognized global expert on the information society, he has worked with G7 governments, IGOs like the UN, Fortune 500s as well as many civil society organizations. He holds a PhD in Economics and a double first in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge.

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS | More

Jim talks with Samantha Sweetwater about her book True Human: Reimagining Ourselves at the End of Our World and the question of what it means to be human at this moment in planetary history. They discuss her verb-based rather than noun-based self-identity, Lisa Feldman Barrett’s construction theory as a framework for understanding the entanglement of body, brain, mind, and relationship as the fabric of lived experience, Samantha’s identity as a “Gaian” and humans as a creator-destroyer class of organism, the Fermi paradox and the gigantic moral freight of potentially being the only general intelligence in the universe, the meaning of the sacred and John Vervaeke’s formulation that “sacred is how the world is to us when we see it through the eyes of love,” Jim’s own definition of the sacred as the appropriate stance toward things too complex for reductionist analysis, the metacrisis as fundamentally a crisis of separation, the four generator functions of separation including stories of separability, structures of separability, win-lose game-theoretic dynamics, and dominator ideologies, the forager operating system and Chris Boehm’s account of how egalitarian societies historically defeated hierarchy, the hinge of agriculture and henchmen enabling dominator systems, Luke Kemp’s Goliath’s Curse and the contrast between fluid civilizations and Goliaths, role-based non-hierarchical leadership in forager societies and whether it can scale, Audrey Tang as an emergent archetype of life-centric coordination, psychedelics as allies and teachers rather than mere tools, Samantha’s personal healing path through sacrament, community, and prayer, the neuroscience of heightened neural entropy and the brain’s wash cycle, the ontological reframe of one’s own importance, the hard problem of machine consciousness and the California Institute for Machine Consciousness, the space of minds and the n=1 problem of one planet and one biochemistry, the MoltBook experiment of AI inventing languages and religions, relationality as the core practice available to people in their actual lives, humans as a custodial species and co-orchestrators rather than dominion-holders, Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk, and much more.

• Episode Transcript
• True Human: Reimagining Ourselves at the End of Our World, by Samantha Sweetwater
• Goliath’s Curse, by Luke Kemp
• Sand Talk, by Tyson Yunkaporta
• JRS Currents 010: Tyson Yunkaporta on Humans as a Custodial Species

Samantha Sweetwater is the author of True Human: Reimagining Ourselves at the End of Our World, a meta-relational educator, leadership mentor, and the founder of One Life Circle, a ministry of remembering. For over three decades, she has facilitated individual and collective transformational experiences across diverse cultures and communities on five continents. As the founder of Dancing Freedom and Peacebody Japan, she pioneered a global movement of embodied awakening and trained hundreds of facilitators worldwide. Her work bridges ecology, complexity, spirituality, and technology with lived experience, inviting a re-imagining of what it means to be human in a time of planetary techno-cultural transformation. Through teaching, writing, and attuned presence, she helps people restore relationship with their bodies, each other, and the living world as a foundation for wise action in uncertain times.