Show Notes
Hello, dear wild friends! I'm taking a short break, but I wanted to share some of my previous interviews with guests who delve into themes of collapse, the meta-crisis, and the decline of the systems we've always known to grow—like GDP, technology, population, and prosperity.
Many of you have joined my book serialization project on Substack, where we're navigating the collapse awareness journey together. These interviews provide valuable context for our journey. You can join us here if you're not already part of the project. I release one chapter of my book at a time, and we discuss its contents in the comments, tackling this big, beautiful, hard thing as a community, step by step. In the meantime, enjoy this wild conversation with Jonathon Rowson.
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Jonathan Rowson (chess Grandmaster, metamodernist philosopher) is one of Britain’s biggest minds and I have invited him onto Wild to talk, well, what’s been dubbed the “meta-crisis” – the fundamental “meaning” crisis at the heart of “all the things” going on in the world today.
Jonathan is a theoretical psychologist with degrees from Oxford and Harvard and a Ph.D on what it means to become wiser. He has worked on “complex collective action” problem solving, was Director of the Social Brain Centre at the Royal Society of Arts and has run events with David Attenborough and Jordan Peterson (not on the same stage!). Jonathan now runs Perspectiva, a research institute that seeks to understand the relationship between systems, souls, and society. This is a big chat, but I think you’ll find this new and wild idea a helpful navigational tool for, well, “all the things”.
SHOW NOTES As I flag, my UK friends can preorder This One Wild and Precious Life here. Follow the Perspectiva community and their various events here. Jonathan is also on Substack and Twitter. His latest book The Moves that Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life is out now.
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If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page For more such conversations subscribe to my Substack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most! Get your copy of my book, This One Wild and Precious Life Let’s connect on Instagram and WeAre8 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from Wild with Sarah Wilson
Indy Johar (founder of Dark Matter Labs, systems designer) closes this 12-part series on the life-enhancing “what comes next” that we need (and want) to be creating. Indy is one of the world’s most original voices on redesigning societies and he has a radical thesis that brings together most of the themes we’ve discussed so far. He calls it “civilisational optionality”. Our job is not to save civilisation or to know what comes next…. It’s to preserve or expand the capacity for life (that is, humanity and the living world) to adapt to whatever comes next.
Indy Johar (founder of Dark Matter Labs, systems designer) closes this 12-part series on the life-enhancing “what comes next” that we need (and want) to be creating. Indy is one of the world’s most original voices on redesigning societies and he has a radical thesis that brings together most of the themes we’ve discussed so far. He calls it “civilisational optionality”. Our job is not to save civilisation or to know what comes next…. It’s to preserve or expand the capacity for life (that is, humanity and the living world) to adapt to whatever comes next.
Sarah Stein Lubrano (neuroscientist, political scientist, former obituary writer!) is an expert in how to change people’s minds most effectively and for the betterment of all beings. In this chat, we talk through why the techniques that dominated the “old world” – debate, reason, bludgeoning people with facts – no longer serve us. We then go through how persuasion and change will need to work going forward, as we find ourselves needing to cooperate and communicate more effectively than ever before.
John Seed (Deep Ecology OG, global rainforest steward) says we can’t save the world. And that the planetary crisis is not a failure of information or awareness; it’s a failure of human identity. We have the story, the mindset, all wrong. And we need to change it (from human chauvinism to deep ecological connection) if we’re to keep spinning in the Earth’s embrace.
Jeremy Lent (author, systems thinker) is a leading authority on civilisations and has just created a manifesto on how to shift from the current crumbling one to what he calls an Ecocivilization. He joins me to discuss how we can actually get there, drawing on real-life, tangible examples and a bunch of concepts that tend to get people excited. In this chat, we cover: fractal flourishing, phase transition, mutually beneficial symbiosis and the Basque self-governing cooperative Mondragón.