World of Wisdom

How do we realise a vision without losing each other along the way? And as the hardships of our world become harder to turn away from, how do we recognise what is ours to do? Tom Nixon (Website, EP120) returns to the podcast to explore source, power and the relationship between what makes us come alive and how we serve life.
We sit with two ideas that can seem contradictory: our deep equality as human beings, and the different relationships we each have to an idea. What happens when hierarchy is understood as a sacred order rather than a way of exercising power over others?
This brings us to “power with”. Not power as a scarce resource to divide, or something one person grants another, but the possibility of becoming powerful together. We explore how this changes the way we understand co-founding, roles and responsibility, and why mapping who is the source of what can reveal more than an organisational chart.
Along the way, we touch on complexity, AI and the limits of the models we use to make sense of our work. Governance, shareholdings and structures matter, but they can also distract us from something more fundamental: what wants to come into being, and have we actually taken the first step?
We keep returning to a simple inquiry. What makes me come alive?

Tree Willard joined me for a conversation about alignment, reciprocity and our capacity to transform the experiences we are living. We spoke of her work with Rewoven, making media about people already embodying these possibilities. We explored what balance means beyond our inherited ideas of masculine and feminine, and how slowing down can loosen the stories of scarcity, inadequacy and abandonment. We also spoke of joy, our responsibility to each other and what it looks like to co-create a reality where everyone gets to play their own game. “Alignment is the only assignment.” How do we make that tangible in the way we live? A deep and hopeful conversation about creating the conditions for grace, exactly where we are. Enjoy!

In this conversation with Lily Louis Starling, we explore what it would mean to move capital relationally, in alignment with what we find most beautiful and worth protecting. Lily’s work with wealth holders, DAF sponsors and wealth advisors begins with values, but quickly opens into a conversation about the whole portfolio: every investment has a material impact, whether we attend to it or not. With an estimated $124 trillion moving to the next generation, the question is not simply where capital goes, but how, through whom and on whose terms. We look at donor-advised funds as flexible sandboxes for rediscovering value, moving resources closer to communities and imagining new forms of risk and return beyond modern portfolio theory and scarcity. From Salmon Returns to the Collective Climate Justice Fund, this is a conversation about overcoming our alienation from the consequences of capital, rebuilding community around money and taking practical steps toward investing in what we genuinely care about.

Kristian Mjoen associate professor of sustainable development and community participation at NTNU (LI), CEO of Sustainbridge and Co-founder of the Sustainability Centre Norway Association. We spoke of why the local scale holds such transformative potential. We spoke of a very tangible way of relating to sovreignty and empowerment. We also touched on how starting in place allows one to unfold many value streams from a single offer and allows someone with that orientation to punch above their weight class. We also spoke of the construct of money as well as how arts holds an important role in our times. This is a very tangible and deep conversation on local participation. Enjoy!

Rudy de Waele (LI) and Alex de Carvalho (LI), co-founders of Voices of Emergence — a relational learning ecology bringing together conversations, community, learning journeys and gatherings — together with Samantha Sweetwater (LI, website), co-created The Invitation earlier this year: an intimate gathering of around 50 people exploring what becomes possible when we create the conditions for deeper relationship, collective learning and meaningful action. We spoke of archetypical patterns and synchronicities as well as the the principles and collaborations that need to be in place for a gathering like this to take shape. This is a topic of particular importance in our times as there is symmetry between how we gather and what we can discover. Remembering and adapting technology for gathering in new ways is crucial to move us towards different possible futures. This conversation touches that. Enjoy!