Podcast
Exploring crisis and rebirth in this time between worlds.
Rufus Pollock and Sylvie Barbier, the co-founders of Life Itself, talk with thinkers, artists and practitioners about why our civilisation is coming apart and what might grow in its place. Long, unhurried conversations on meaning, technology, love, faith and how change really happens. For anyone who senses the old world is ending and wants to help seed the new.
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New here? Start with one of these
Top three
The three conversations listeners come back to most. Each one stands alone, so pick whichever pulls you.
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1Episode 16 · 1 h 49 min
How the West Lost Its Mind
With Iain McGilchrist
The emissary takes the throne: how the modern world came to trust only one kind of knowing and what it cost us.
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2Episode 15 · 1 h 39 min
Finding Practices That Build Meaning
With John Vervaeke
The meaning crisis in plain words, and something you can actually do about it.
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3Episode 1 · 58 min
The Devil's Trick and Techno-Oligarchy
Rufus Pollock and Sylvie Barbier
Why we stopped believing politics and collective action can work.
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19 episodes · newest first
All episodes
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What do you do when the facts are undeniable and the system you were trying to save is the problem?
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On longing, belonging, and the art of sitting with not knowing.
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Episode 17
The Pragmatic Visionary: Fifty Years of Asking the Questions Nobody Wanted to Fund
With Michael Lerner
Integrative medicine, the polycrisis, and cosmic consciousness.
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On what we owe to life, and why the most important work begins inside.
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How an ecology of practices, and the ancient art of pilgrimage, can reconnect us to meaning, wisdom and the sacred.
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Episode 14
The End of a World as We Know It: On Endings, Ruins and the Work Worth Doing
With Dougald Hine
What it means to live at the end of a world: not the end of the world, but the end of the one we built around us.
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What are the stories we're told about AI, and what other stories can we offer?
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Episode 12
When Culture Stops Evolving: Civilisational Drift and the Death of Adaptive Culture
With Robin Hanson
Evolution, governance, and what it means to build something worth surviving for.
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Episode 11
Playing With Dynamite: The Ethics of Questioning Monogamy
Rufus Pollock and Sylvie Barbier
Why the way we love may hold the key to a new society.
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Episode 10
You Say You Want a Revolution: How Authoritarian Regimes Like Iran Can Fall
Rufus Pollock and Sylvie Barbier
Mass protest, elite fracture, and the long arc of history.
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A civilisation in crisis needs a story big enough to live inside. What would it take to renew religion?
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Episode 8
Grieving to Give Birth: What Trans and Cis Bodies Can Teach Each Other
With Uriel (Freak Daddy)
A conversation on gender, grief, rebirth, and choosing love across difference.
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Episode 7
Becoming Ancestors: What Will We Dream for Those Who Come After?
Rufus Pollock and Sylvie Barbier
An invitation to sense what wants to be born beyond modernity's long night.
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Episode 6
When Gifts Become Shadows: Understanding the End of Modernity
Rufus Pollock and Sylvie Barbier
Modernity gave us freedom, science and prosperity, and also ecological crisis, runaway technology and a loss of meaning. What comes next?
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Episode 5
Together We Are More Powerful: Why Real Change Takes Movement Building
Rufus Pollock and Sylvie Barbier
The victories of the past took persistence and collective action. Real change will take a movement again.
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Episode 4
Why Hard Work Won't Make You a Billionaire: The Invisible Rules
Rufus Pollock and Sylvie Barbier
Why meritocracy feels like a lie: invisible rules about information created winner-takes-all markets.
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Episode 3
Infinite Copying, Infinite Greed: The Tech Monopoly Playbook
Rufus Pollock and Sylvie Barbier
Why are there so many tech billionaires? Monopoly rights on technology you already paid for.
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Episode 2
Silence Before the Avalanche: Why Transformation Is Closer Than We Think
Rufus Pollock and Liam Kavanagh
Why we keep seeking technological shortcuts instead of collective action, and why the avalanche of change is closer than we think.
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Episode 1
The Devil's Trick: The Invisible Ideology Behind Techno-Oligarchy
Rufus Pollock and Sylvie Barbier
How fifty years of invisible ideology convinced us politics and collective action can't work, and why the pendulum is about to swing back.