Over the Mountains

"You say you want a revolution": How Authoritarian Regimes like Iran Can Fall | Over the Mountains #10

Over the Mountains by Seeds of Renaissance — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 13:30:57 GMT

This episode of Over the Mountains was recorded on the 21st January 2026 whilst the situation in Iran was unclear. The conversation begins with the protests in Iran and widens to include inequality, climate disruption, and AI. We explore what history suggests about how regimes actually change—often requiring both mass dissatisfaction and fractures within elites, especially around control of the military and media. We engage in a deep sensemaking dialogue about whether real systemic change is still possible in an age of authoritarian resurgence, technological acceleration, and global instability. We’re happy to share episode number ten on: Mass Protest, Elite Fracture, and the Long Arc of History: Can Authoritarian Regimes like Iran Truly Fall?

Will change ever happen? Are we entering a dark renaissance? Does history shows a long arc of progress?

We grapple with cycles of progress and regression, the pressure of deep structural forces, and the fear that our technological power is outpacing our collective wisdom. Rather than offering easy answers, this conversation invites a grounded practice: stay engaged, keep thinking rigorously together, and hold faith in humanity’s long arc—even when the present moment feels like a dark age before renewal.

Chapters :

00:00 Protests in Iran and Global Context

06:09 Historical Perspectives on Change

11:48 Conditions for Systemic Change

17:58 The Role of Elites in Regime Change

23:46 Navigating Darkness Towards a Renaissance

25:47 Navigating Change and Groundedness

27:30 Hope Amidst Chaos

29:55 Cultural Shifts and Democratic Progress

31:46 Historical Patterns of Change

33:12 The Dangers of Modern Technology

35:31 Inequality and Social Unrest

39:21 The Role of the Elite in Change

42:49 Cultural Norms and Freedom of Press

45:20 Intervention and Sovereignty

49:34 The Ethics of Intervention

51:25 Holding Difficult Conversations

Speakers

Sylvie Barbier is a co-founder of Life Itself, a performance artist, entrepreneur, and educator.

Rufus Pollock is a co-founder of Life Itself, an entrepreneur, activist, an author, as well as a long-term zen practitioner.

Resources

Thich Nhat Hanh - Impermanence Teachings - https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Thich+Nhat+Hanh+Impermanence

History of Iran’s Protest Movements - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-63294516 Jack Goldstone

Regime Change Theory - https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/cid/programs/building-state-capacity

Peter Turchin Historical Cycles - https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Peter+Turchin+Historical+Cycles

Iain M. Banks - Culture Series (Science Fiction) - https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Ian+M.+Banks+Culture+Series

About Over the Mountains

Over The Mountains by Life Itself is a podcast and blog exploring the understandings and system shifts needed to bring forth a Second Renaissance, to live within a metamodern reality that works for everyone.

The title Over The Mountains is a metaphor for the long and often difficult journey humanity must take together. In a time when many seek shortcuts — especially through technology — this podcast reminds us that those shortcuts can lead to greater destruction. To truly reach the other side, we must climb over the mountain: facing the complexity of collective action, institutional change, and the reimagining of our shared reality.

Over the Mountains focuses on the societal, political, economic, and ontological transformations required for such a world to emerge. Featuring conversations with sensemakers and the builders of tomorrow such as Rufus Pollock, Liam Kavanagh, Sylvie Barbier, Jonah Wilberg and many others, this series shares knowledge from sociology, economics, political philosophy, history, neuroscience, and ideological science, making these insights accessible to a wider audience. The ideas that we will share with you set out some of the reasoning and ideas for the creation of Life Itself and the Second Renaissance initiatives.

Twitter - https://twitter.com/forlifeitself

Website - https://lifeitself.org

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit overthemountains.substack.com

The End of a World as We Know It : On Endings, Ruins and the Work Worth Doing | Over the Mountains #14

Over the Mountains by Seeds of Renaissance — Thu, 21 May 2026 07:08:23 GMT

What does it mean to live at the end of a world — not the end of the world, but the end of a world, the one we built around us? In this rich, wide-ranging conversation, Rufus sits down with Dougald Hine — writer, social thinker, and co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project — to trace a life spent following what he calls, in deeply unfashionable language, a calling. From turning down a BBC staff job at 25 to co-writing a manifesto that split the environmental movement down the middle, Dougald's story is about what happens when you trust your gut before you can explain it to your head.

The conversation goes deep into the ideas behind his book At Work in the Ruins — including why he found himself, mid-pandemic, with nothing left to say about climate change, and what that silence revealed. He argues we have been asking too much of science: outsourcing judgment, values, and politics to something never designed to carry that weight. What COVID exposed, he suggests, is not just a virus but the structural brittleness of modern societies that have quietly lost the distributed capacity — in families, communities, culture — to look after themselves.

But this is not a conversation that ends in despair. Dougald offers a quietly radical map for what he calls "the four tasks for an age of endings" — saving, grieving, leaving, and weaving — and closes with Hannah Arendt's idea of natality: the newborn's first cry as the source of all genuine political possibility. The thing no algorithm can produce is the thing that has never been said before. If you've ever sensed that the story we've been living inside has run out, this episode will feel like finding people who noticed the same thing — and kept walking anyway.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit overthemountains.substack.com

A New Pilgrimage: John Vervaeke on Finding Practices that Build Meaning | Over the Mountains #15

Over the Mountains by Seeds of Renaissance — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 07:51:34 GMT

John Vervaeke argues that the meaning crisis isn’t a personal problem or a cultural preference. It’s a civilisational crisis — rooted in how the West, beginning with the Reformation and accelerating through the Scientific Revolution, has progressively severed itself from the forms of wisdom that once made life feel real, connected, and sacred. In this conversation with Rufus Pollock, he turns from diagnosis toward something harder and more important: what we can actually do.

What’s needed is an ecology of practices — a coherent set of complementary disciplines that together cultivate meaning, wisdom, and genuine contact with reality. Not a single technique or belief system. Something more like what Buddhism or Neoplatonism built at their best: interwoven practices that correct and support each other, held within communities, and embodied in people worth emulating.

“What we have to do is fall in love with wisdom and fall in love with reality — the way we have been talking about here.”

Vervaeke introduces a new kind of pilgrimage, a contemporary form that preserves what made the ancient practice genuinely transformative. He describes his own recent Neoplatonic pilgrimage across Europe, visiting places connected to thinkers and traditions that shaped his inner life — the equivalent, he suggests, of what medieval pilgrims were really doing when they walked toward what they most deeply revered. It’s not about the destination. It’s about what the journey does to your senses: sharpening insight, renewing contact with reality, and opening you to what he calls voluntary necessity — the felt pull of something worth orienting your life around.

We’re exploring this territory as fellow travellers. We don’t have the full map of what a Second Renaissance ecology of practices looks like — nobody does yet. But conversations like this one feel like genuine steps toward it: rigorous enough to trust, open enough to surprise us.

“Put on my tombstone: neither nostalgia nor utopia. We can’t go back before the scientific revolution and we can’t go back from global awareness.”

We’ll be diving deeper into pilgrimage as a meta-practice to break out of our fixed framings and renew our spiritual senses in another John Vervaeke podcast episode coming soon. Stay in touch, fellow travellers.

00:00 Introduction01:43 John Vervaeke’s Journey to Wisdom06:48 The Role of Socrates and Personal Inquiry11:10 Understanding the Meaning Crisis22:29 The Genealogy of the Meaning Crisis34:34 Cultivating Wisdom and the Sacred41:37 The Nature of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty42:04 The Interplay of Subjective and Objective Realities48:39 Revisiting Historical Philosophical Errors56:47 Practices for Cultivating Wisdom58:41 Dialogical Practices and the Search for Meaning01:05:26 The Quest for Certainty and Self-Correction01:11:17 Ecology of Practices and Role Models01:12:13 Pilgrimage as a Meta-Practice01:19:49 The Return of the Sacred and the Really Real01:26:42 Religion Beyond Religion: Structures for the Sacred

Speakers

John Vervaeke, Ph.D. is an award-winning professor of psychology, cognitive science, and Buddhist psychology at the University of Toronto.

Rufus Pollock is a co-founder of Life Itself, an entrepreneur, activist, an author, as well as a long-term zen practitioner.

About Over the Mountains

Twitter - https://twitter.com/forlifeitself

Website - https://lifeitself.org

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit overthemountains.substack.com

When Gifts Become Shadows - Understanding the End of Modernity | Over The Mountains #6

Over the Mountains by Seeds of Renaissance — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 06:45:51 GMT

“Renaissance” means rebirth, and rebirth requires both death and birth. We’re living through the decline of modernity, a civilizational paradigm that brought genuine gifts: equality, reason, individualism, material progress, and secular tolerance. Before critique, we must honor these achievements. Women can vote. We can question without persecution. Modern medicine saves lives that would have been lost centuries ago.

But each gift has calcified into shadow. Reason became narrow rationalism and reductionism, where only what’s measurable is real. Progress became endless growth, now cancerous to our planet. Individualism created epidemic loneliness and made collective action nearly impossible when our greatest challenges demand it. Equality morphed into aggressive leveling that rejects expertise. Secularism hollowed out meaning, leaving nihilism, while technology and capitalism became our unacknowledged religions.

The path forward isn’t defending the dying paradigm or retreating to pre-modern forms. When no positive spiritual path exists, people react backward toward fundamentalism. Instead, we must consciously midwife something new, integrating modernity’s gifts while transcending its shadows.

Each generation lives the dreams of those before. We’ve inherited modernity’s dream and now see its costs. The question becomes: what will we dream for those who come after us? This is the work of the Second Renaissance.

This is episode #6 of a new sub-series Over the Mountains: Finding a Path to the Second Renaissance.

Chapters

00:00 The Journey to the Second Renaissance

02:25 Understanding the Concept of Second Renaissance

04:25 The Cycle of Death and Rebirth

07:19 Honoring Modernity’s Legacy

11:44 The Dream of Progress and Its Costs

14:10 Requiem for a Dream: Acknowledging the Past

18:10 The Values of Modernity and Their Shadows

22:24 Navigating Shadows and Values of Modernity

23:19 The Bright and Dark Sides of Reason

27:01 Material Progress: The Double-Edged Sword

28:58 Individualism: The Cost of Freedom

30:55 Equality: The Subtle Complexities

33:16 Secularism: The Need for Vision

46:10 Envisioning a New Renaissance

Speakers

Sylvie Barbier is a co-founder of Life Itself, a performance artist, entrepreneur, and educator.

Rufus Pollock is a co-founder of Life Itself, an entrepreneur, activist, an author, as well as a long-term zen practitioner.

About Over the Mountains

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit overthemountains.substack.com

Art at the Edge of the Unknown: Sylvie Barbier on the Art of the Second Renaissance | Over the Mountains #18

Over the Mountains by Seeds of Renaissance — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 07:00:00 GMT

In this episode, Amanda Zamparo, friend and fellow member of the Art of the Second Renaissance Collective, moves Sylvie back through her own journey: from her childhood dancing on tables as a small child, to being absorbed in the paintings of naked women, to founding Life Itself alongside Rufus Pollock. A portrait appears of an artist who has always been searching for the same thing — a practice that connects, that comes from beyond the self yet returns there.

Amanda and Sylvie discuss what it actually means to make art at the service of something greater than the individual artist, a living practice of collective reconnection. Sylvie traces the arc from her early fascination with Marina Abramović, through her encounter with Butoh dance and its shamanic currents, to the question that now drives the Art of the Second Renaissance Collective: what would it look like to make art that arises from a shared field rather than a single creative ego? It is, she admits, deeply experimental. Nobody has a full map yet.

“What is truly new — never seen before — cannot come from what is known. It can only come from the unknown.”

The conversation closes with an invitation to sit with not knowing long enough for something genuinely new to emerge. In a culture addicted to output, to making, to having answers, Sylvie offers a different kind of practice — one rooted in trust, in relational depth, and in the belief that belonging begins with following your longing. This is a conversation about art, but it is also about how to be alive at a moment when the old world is ending and something not yet named is trying to be born.

00:52 Amanda introduces the collective03:02 Sylvie’s origin story as an artist10:15 Dance, music, and performance as one practice14:15 Collective spirituality and the sacred16:32 The first ritual that changed everything21:36 How Life Itself began26:06 Learning across disciplines and building belonging30:00 Why the name changed to Life Itself35:00 The Second Renaissance and rebirth39:09 Feminine wisdom and the birth of the collective42:49 Trust, care, and depth in relationship46:03 How people can join the movement49:39 Relational art as the core practice

Speakers

Amanda Zamparo is a relational artist, facilitator, and member of the Art of the Second Renaissance Collective. She brings a rare combination of artistic rigour and heart intelligence to her work. She is drawn to the edges where art, ritual, and collective wisdom meet.

Sylvie Barbier is a co-founder of Life Itself, a performance artist, entrepreneur, and educator.

Resources

Art of the Second Renaissance Collective

Art of the Second Renaissance Manifesto

Art of Ritual Retreat Reflections

About Over the Mountains

Instagram - http://instagram.com/seedsofrenaissance/

Website - https://lifeitself.org

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit overthemountains.substack.com

Together We Are More Powerful: Why Real Change Takes Movement Building | Over The Mountains #5

Over the Mountains by Seeds of Renaissance — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 21:48:50 GMT

Movements transform collective conditions in ways nothing else can, making them one of the most powerful forces for change. So why don’t people believe movement building works when women’s suffrage, civil rights, and environmental protections all came through decades of organizing? Technology created a category error—email crosses the world in milliseconds, convincing us that shortcuts working in communication must work for democratic governance too. But every major victory came through patient, persistent collective action.

Not coming together is choosing to let our historic crises worsen. We cannot remain disconnected, pursuing only individual success. So the question becomes: how do we build movements well? By building movements that embody the future we want. The journey itself transforms us. Alone we won’t survive, but together we find both power and joy.

This is episode #5 of a new sub-series Over the Mountains: Finding a Path to the Second Renaissance

Chapters

00:00:00 – Convincing Young People Movements Work

00:03:09 – No Shortcuts Over the Mountains

00:10:53 – From Width to Depth: Reimagining Progress

00:13:05 – The Evidence: Movements Transform Collective Conditions

00:23:26 – The Valid Fear of Harmful Movements

00:29:03 – The Dialectic of Discernment and Faith

00:33:05 – Good Movements: Where Spirit Meets Politics

00:42:30 – Both/And: Holding Urgency and Patience

00:47:09 – The Joy of Climbing Together

Speakers

Sylvie Shiwei Barbier is a co-founder of Life Itself, and French-Taiwanese performance artist, entrepreneur and educator.

Rufus Pollock is a co-founder of Life Itself, and an entrepreneur, activist and author as well as a long-term zen practitioner.

About Over the Mountains

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit overthemountains.substack.com

Infinite Copying, Infinite Greed: The Tech Monopoly Playbook | Over The Mountains #3

Over the Mountains by Seeds of Renaissance — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 09:11:08 GMT

Why do tech billionaires dominate today’s wealth inequality? Imagine a magic apple tree where each apple instantly regrows—this is digital technology: once you have one copy, you can replicate it infinitely at effectively zero cost. Costless copying should mean abundance for all. But combine it with monopoly rights and you create an inequality bomb. Platform effects amplify this: once everyone uses a platform, switching becomes nearly impossible, creating planetary-scale monopolies that suppress threatening innovations. Eight of the top ten Forbes billionaires are from tech for this reason.

This isn’t just about wealth—it’s about power. These platforms control information access, can swing elections, and shut down content without warning.

Here’s the deeper injustice: most fundamental tech research came from publicly funded universities, where researchers worked for curiosity and contribution, not profit. Society paid for the information revolution, then handed these discoveries to private companies and granted them monopoly rights. Yet we’ve accepted this as inevitable by transplanting property rules designed for exclusive physical goods onto infinitely reproducible digital ones—an ideological choice, not natural law. Alternatives already work: the open internet, companies with mixed worker-community-shareholder governance. We need to expand our institutional imagination.

This is episode #3 of a new sub-series Over the Mountains: Finding a Path to the Second Renaissance

Chapters

00:00:00 - The Billionaire Question

00:04:23 - The Magic Apple Tree: Welcome to the Age of Infinite Copying

00:08:17 - The Second Ingredient: How Monopoly Rights Weaponize Abundance

00:11:01 - The Inequality Bomb

00:33:30 - The Platform Trap

00:39:07 - One Platform to Rule Them All

00:47:24 - Kronos Eats His Children

01:08:06 - The Great Heist: You Paid for It, They Own It

Speakers

Sylvie Shiwei Barbier is a co-founder of Life Itself, and French-Taiwanese performance artist, entrepreneur and educator.

Rufus Pollock is a co-founder of Life Itself, and an entrepreneur, activist and author as well as a long-term zen practitioner.

Links

* The Open Revolution and Remuneration Rights

* TEDx talk on inequality and tech

About Over the Mountains

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit overthemountains.substack.com

The Pragmatic Visionary: Michael Lerner on fifty years of asking the questions nobody wanted to fund - and being right | Over the Mountains #17

Over the Mountains by Seeds of Renaissance — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 08:00:00 GMT

Some people have a gift for seeing what matters before the world is ready to hear it. Michael Lerner — founder of Commonweal, pioneer of integrative cancer care, and one of the early architects of the polycrisis framework — has spent fifty years making bets that frightened his colleagues and proved to be right. In this conversation with Rufus Pollock, he traces a remarkable life: from a New York childhood steeped in political philosophy and psychology, through the counterculture of the early seventies, to the founding of Commonweal in a dilapidated radio transmitter facility in California with no money and a vision he couldn’t fully articulate yet. What emerges is less a biography than a kind of living map of the last half-century’s most important questions.

In this episode, Rufus and Michael discuss the through-line that has connected all of Lerner’s work: the conviction that personal healing and planetary healing are not separate projects. That thread runs from his early work with children with neurodevelopmental challenges whose behaviour changed when their diet did, through Commonweal’s landmark contributions to integrative cancer care and whole-person medicine, to his role in naming and shaping the global polycrisis movement. Michael presents a combination of spiritual depth and strategic precision — he describes himself as deeply pragmatic, and means it.

“A new world is opening of the exploration of super-consciousness — and it makes sense that it’s taking place when the earth itself, and the people, and all other species, are experiencing intense trauma.”

The conversation closes on the question of how consciousness itself — not just spiritual practice, but the fundamental nature of what we are — is relevant to how the polycrisis unfolds. Consciousness, he notes, carries no moral code. It can be weaponised like any other advance. But it may, he suggests, be truer than what we currently accept as real. And in a time when the world as we know it may be ending, that matters.

00:00 Introduction

01:50 Michael’s spiritual biography and early influences

04:26 Family roots in philosophy and psychology, and their guiding influence

12:09 The integration of Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, Sufi and yogic traditions into Michael’s worldview

17:06 The societal and personal shifts in the late 1960s fostering alternative paths

33:20 The origins of Commonweal and its initial vision for healing self and earth

41:35 The complex challenges faced during the 1980s, including organizational crises

48:00 Major bets on environmental health, social justice, and policy reform

52:10 Reflection on the accelerated crises since the 1990s and the shifting global outlook

1:08:00 The emergence and importance of consciousness studies in addressing the polycrisis

00:144:22 The potential role of collective consciousness and spiritual awakening in societal change

01:22:03 Exploring super consciousness, psychedelics, and their relation to societal crises

01:33:30 The limitations and potentials of consciousness in resolving the polycrisis

Speakers

Michael Lerner is the founder of Commonweal, a center for healing ourselves and healing the earth based in Bolinas, California. A Harvard and Yale-trained psychologist and political philosopher, he pioneered integrative cancer care and whole-person medicine, was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, and has been one of the early architects of the global polycrisis framework. He is now exploring the relationship between consciousness and civilisational crisis.

Rufus Pollock is a co-founder of Life Itself, an entrepreneur, activist, an author, as well as a long-term zen practitioner.

Resources

Commonweal

Jeffrey Kripal

Commonweal Foundation

The Phenomenon (documentary)

The Age of Disclosure (film)

Sri Aurobindo

About Over the Mountains

Instagram - https://instagram.com/secondrenaissance.is/

Website - https://lifeitself.org

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit overthemountains.substack.com

Can Religions Be Reborn? | Over The Mountains #9

Over the Mountains by Seeds of Renaissance — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 17:00:00 GMT

In this episode of “Over the Mountains,” Sylvie Barbier sits down with Liam Kavanagh, co-founder of Life Itself and co-director of The Climate Majority Project, for a conversation about why religion is suddenly “back,” why so many modern minds can’t swallow Christianity as-is, and why we may still need its root system to nurture a civilizational renaissance.

Exploring the historical tension between mythos vs. logos, we look at what modern reason helped us see, what it stripped away, and the “God-shaped hole” left behind. We examine how the “calcification” of traditional religious dogma has created a spiritual vacuum in the West, leading many to seek refuge in Eastern traditions or, more precariously, to project religious impulses onto technology, ideology, and AI.

If humans are inherently religious animals, what happens when technology, ideology, or AI quietly becomes our new God?

Along the way, we look at how religions have always evolved (texts shifting, meanings being reinterpreted), looking at Christianity as a case study in civilizational resilience, but one which struggles to renew itself today.

Humans are fundamentally “mythical animals” and our current global (meta)crisis requires a similar era of spiritual creativity, without sliding into dogma, ego, or violence—rather than a return to rigid authority, we need a “grafting” of new wisdom onto our ancestral lineages.

Humans are fundamentally “mythical animals” and our current global crisis requires a similar era of spiritual creativity,

The episode concludes with an exploration of prayer, the discomfort of spiritual discernment, and the necessity of reclaiming the sacred to find a path over the mountains to civilizational renaissance and a wiser future.

Chapters

00:00 Exploring Personal Relationships with Religion

05:59 The Conflict Between Mythos and Logos

09:23 Childhood Questions and Adult Reflections on Christianity

13:00 Evolving Christianity: The Need for Renewal

22:57 Historical Context: Judaism and the Birth of Christianity

32:08 Religion’s Role in Addressing Modern Crises

36:01 Navigating the Crisis: Finding a Path Forward

36:18 Innate Moral Sense: Bridging Wisdom Traditions

38:40 Ego vs. Divine Guidance: The Inner Dialogue

40:27 Rediscovering Prayer: A Personal Journey

42:17 The Imperfection of Forms: Embracing Uncertainty

43:43 Spiritual Creativity: The Need for Renewal

46:11 Cultural Compost: Death and Renewal in Spirituality

48:57 The Discomfort of Spiritual Independence

51:33 Mysticism in Religion: A Comparative Perspective

54:56 Renewal of Christianity: Key Dimensions for the Future

58:40 Voicing Misgivings: The Need for Honest Dialogue

01:01:50 Cultural Exchange: Bridging Eastern and Western Spirituality

01:04:28 Non-Self and Its Implications: A Deeper Inquiry

01:06:40 The Role of Religion in a Second Renaissance

01:08:44 Looking Ahead: Future Conversations and Topics

Speakers

Sylvie Barbier is a co-founder of Life Itself, a performance artist, entrepreneur, and educator.

Liam Kavanagh is a Cognitive & Social Scientist devoted to using his understanding of human motivation, ideology, and economics to aid more effective responses to the climate crisis. Liam is a co-founder of Life Itself, the co-director of the Climate Majority Project, and has written a book on how Western ideology contributes to climate change inaction.

Why Hard Work Won't Make You a Billionaire: The Invisible Rules | Over The Mountains #4

Over the Mountains by Seeds of Renaissance — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 19:21:18 GMT

Episode 3 explored how tech monopolies work. This one asks: why don’t the people who benefit from them ever challenge the system—even when millions of lives depend on it?

When 1990s trade agreements forced countries like India to adopt strict patent protections, medicines costing a dollar daily to produce suddenly sold for thousands—killing millions who couldn’t access affordable HIV treatments. Activist Jamie Love and others worked to break these barriers and saved countless lives. But philanthropists like Gates Foundation, though spending billions to buy drugs within the system, weren’t going to support work to change the system. Why? Because the foundation was built on software copyright, and there’s a human tendency not to critique systems you’ve benefitted from. Here’s what ideology does: it shapes not just which policies we choose, but which solutions we consider permissible.

Young progressives build apps instead of organizing politically. The Gates Foundation buys expensive medicine but won’t question why medicine is expensive. Meanwhile, the “meritocracy” myth legitimizes extreme inequality, even though the janitor waking at 5am works just as hard yet will never make billions. As we show here, these rules governing information—from software to pharmaceuticals—aren’t natural laws but human choices made largely invisibly in Geneva in the 1990s. And they can be changed.

This is episode #4 of a new sub-series Over the Mountains: Finding a Path to the Second Renaissance

Chapters

00:01:34 – Big Philanthropy’s Blind Spot: Funding Everything Except System Change

00:05:08 – When Your Government Signed Away Your Access To Affordable Drugs

00:13:22 – Jamie Love: How Systems Change Can Save Millions Of Lives, But You Need An Ideological Change

00:17:29 – Deconstructing Meritocracy: Why Hard Work Doesn’t Explain Billions

00:27:15 – Information Monopolies and the Winner-Takes-All Economy

00:29:25 – The Trap: How “Change the World” Became “Build a Startup”

Join us at Second Renaissance Conference this Friday

Speakers

Sylvie Shiwei Barbier is a co-founder of Life Itself, and French-Taiwanese performance artist, entrepreneur and educator.

Rufus Pollock is a co-founder of Life Itself, and an entrepreneur, activist and author as well as a long-term zen practitioner.

About Over the Mountains

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit overthemountains.substack.com

When Culture Stops Evolving: Robin Hanson on civilizational drift, the death of adaptive culture, and what it would take to survive | Over the Mountains #12

Over the Mountains by Seeds of Renaissance — Tue, 05 May 2026 10:00:00 GMT

In this episode of Over the Mountains, Rufus is joined by economist and futurist Robin Hanson, who reshapes our understanding of cultural evolution and civilizational collapse, highlighting the importance of curiosity and original thought.

Hanson argues that culture is humanity’s true superpower — a Darwinian process that has historically kept our values and norms fitted to reality. But over the last three centuries, the four key conditions that make cultural evolution work have each quietly shifted into failure: diversity has collapsed into a global monoculture, selection pressures have weakened as wealth insulates us from consequence, the pace of change has outrun our ability to adapt, and internally driven cultural shifts now steer us away from fitness rather than toward it.

"Cultural evolution is the thing that gave you everything you value."

The result, Robin suggests, is a civilisation drifting back toward its default human state, as he puts it plainly, “lazy, selfish, and myopic.” Low fertility, rising mental illness, drug deaths, and the cultural rejection of transformative technologies like nuclear energy are not isolated crises. They are symptoms.

Robin points toward Futarchy as a solution — a radical reimagining of governance built on prediction markets and the principle of “vote on values, bet on beliefs” — and argues that what civilisation ultimately needs is a sacred goal: something vast enough and serious enough to demand real sacrifice.

This is a conversation about evolution, governance, and what it means to build something worth surviving for.

00:00 Introduction to Robin Hanson

01:58 The Journey of Curiosity

06:38 Early Questions and Intellectual Development

09:03 Civilizational Collapse: A Historical Perspective

10:40 Understanding Cultural Evolution

16:44 The Parameters of Cultural Evolution

27:31 The Impact of Globalization on Culture

35:41 The Future of Cultural Evolution

40:24 Egalitarianism and Cultural Evolution

42:34 Navigating Cultural Change

44:51 Global Cooperation vs. Cultural Diversity

45:24 Cultural Adaptiveness and Fitness

48:01 Cultural Drift and Maladaptive Trends

52:26 Reversion vs. Spiral Models in Culture

54:48 Identifying Solutions to Cultural Problems

56:44 Three Levels of Cultural Change

01:01:25 Concrete Solutions for Cultural Trends

01:05:59 Fragmenting Culture and Governance

01:13:38 Adaptive Changes in Shared Culture

01:17:38 Cultural Maladaptation and Mental Health

01:20:18 The Role of Government in Problem Solving

01:20:56 Introducing Futarchy: A New Governance Model

01:28:44 Conditional Markets and Decision Making

01:34:08 Sacred Goals and Civilization’s Future

Speakers

Rufus Pollock is a co-founder of Life Itself, an entrepreneur, activist, an author, as well as a long-term zen practitioner.

Robin Hanson is an economist, futurist, and associate professor of economics at George Mason University. He is the author of The Elephant in the Brain and The Age of Em, the inventor of the governance system known as Futarchy, and the founder of the long-running Substack blog Overcoming Bias.

About Over the Mountains

Twitter - https://twitter.com/forlifeitself

Website - https://lifeitself.org

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit overthemountains.substack.com

Playing With Dynamite: The Ethics of Questioning Monogamy - Rethinking Love Beyond Possession | Over the Mountains #11

Over the Mountains by Seeds of Renaissance — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 12:03:21 GMT

In this episode of Over the Mountains, Sylvie and Rufus open up about the intimate side of their relationship as part of a wider exploration of what it means to “walk the talk” of social and cultural transformation. They argue that building a new paradigm is not only about politics, ideas, or collective vision, but also about how we live in our closest relationships.

The conversation focuses on one of the major taboo areas that often destabilises relationships and communities: sex. Drawing on their ten years together, marriage, and family life, they reflect on: monogamy, openness, jealousy, trauma, freedom and love. Sylvie shares how monogamy initially gave her a deep sense of safety and healing, especially in light of family wounds around betrayal and abandonment. At the same time, she began to see how exclusivity could also become a kind of prison if it was rooted in fear rather than genuine choice.

A central theme of the episode is the tension between rational beliefs and embodied emotional reality. Rather than presenting ethical non-monogamy as a fixed ideology or solution, they describe it as a slow, conscious, messy process of inquiry. They emphasize transparency, consent, dialogue, and responsibility — because wider relationships are also affected by intimate choices. For them, the key issue is not simply monogamy versus non-monogamy, but whether the relationship is rooted in ethics, love and trust.

"Am I in this relationship out of fear — or am I in this relationship out of love? Am I here because I'm scared of ending up alone... or because I actually love who we are together?"

Ultimately, the episode connects the personal and the political. Sylvie and Rufus suggest that transforming how we relate romantically may also be part of transforming how we relate to power, to each other, and even to the planet. They do not claim to have answers, but offer their relationship as a living experiment: imperfect, vulnerable, and in progress. Rather than a prescriptive “how-to,” this is a raw, real, and refreshingly honest take on the journey of love’s triumph over fear.

00:00 Introduction to a New Paradigm

01:29 Exploring Relationship Dynamics

05:27 Monogamy vs. Polyamory: A Personal Journey

15:21 The Complexity of Love and Possession

19:44 Navigating Personal Shadows and Relationship Patterns

29:04 Navigating Relationships with Mindfulness

31:55 The Complexity of Love and Parenting

35:11 Exploring Self-Identity and Body Image

38:05 The Journey of Dating and Self-Discovery

43:03 Empowerment and Autonomy in Relationships

46:04 Transforming Relationships and Societal Norms

50:18 The Ethical Dimension of Non-Monogamy

Speakers

Sylvie Barbier is a co-founder of Life Itself, a performance artist, entrepreneur, and educator.

Rufus Pollock is a co-founder of Life Itself, an entrepreneur, activist, an author, as well as a long-term zen practitioner.

About Over the Mountains

Twitter - https://twitter.com/forlifeitself

Website - https://lifeitself.org

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit overthemountains.substack.com

Writing Our Own Stories About The Future: Xavier Snelgrove on consciousness and AI | Over the Mountains #13

Over the Mountains by Seeds of Renaissance — Mon, 11 May 2026 06:25:00 GMT

In this episode of Over the Mountains, Sylvie is joined by tech and AI expert Xavier Snelgrove to explore how his experiences in tech shaped his unique perspective on AI and consciousness. Xavier shares insights from his time in the industry, revealing the pressures and narratives that drive technological advancement. The conversation delves into the stories we're told about AI and the potential alternatives. Xavier challenges the mainstream narratives, offering a vision of what a more thoughtful and reflective approach to technology could look like.

When someone tells you what AI will be in five years, remember that person doesn’t know. They are imagining a future, and you can imagine a different one.

He emphasizes the importance of stepping back and considering the broader cultural and ethical implications.Finally, we tackle the profound question: Is AI conscious? Xavier unpacks the complexities of consciousness, explaining why computation alone cannot account for the rich, subjective experience that defines being human. This episode invites you to rethink your assumptions and consider the deeper philosophical questions surrounding AI and our future.

00:00 Introduction

01:00 Defining Consciousness

02:30 AI and Human Experience

04:00 The Philosophy of Mind

06:00 The Role of Computation

08:00 Cultural Implications

10:00 Orbital Studies Overview

12:00 Future of AI and Humanity

14:00 Closing Thoughts

Speakers

Sylvie Barbier is a co-founder of Life Itself, a performance artist, entrepreneur, and educator.

Xavier Snelgrove is an AI expert and applied research scientist with an engineering background, currently working on Orbital Studies, a literary science magazine that publish writing, visual art, and poetry all in service of a more beautiful scientific culture.

See also

About Over the Mountains

Twitter - https://twitter.com/forlifeitself

Website - https://lifeitself.org

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit overthemountains.substack.com

I No Longer Have Hope: Sarah Wilson on Living Fully in a Collapsing World | Over the Mountains #19

Over the Mountains by Seeds of Renaissance — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 07:00:00 GMT

Journalist, activist, and bestselling author, Sarah Wilson, spent three years researching civilisational collapse and wrote her way through it on Substack with 65,000 readers, and ended up with a Penguin bestseller being translated into six languages. Working through her own grief, sadness, and frustration, we got a book that reads like a hand-held journey into the reality many of us have been avoiding.

In this episode, Rufus and Sarah discuss why no one is really to blame — and why that realisation, far from being a cop-out, is the beginning of something. Drawing on the game theory of Moloch, Sarah explains how we all ended up trapped in a system that serves no one, not even the tech bros building bunkers inside it. And she shares about her realisation that the truth, however heavy, brings a cognitive relief that false hope never could.

"No one is to blame and yet we're all to blame. And once that hit me, I developed this huge compassion for humans."

Sarah Wilson spent three years writing this book, going where most people wouldn’t, intellectually, but also bodily, running through forests, crying it through, learning to bear it. What comes out the other side is different to the forced hope the climate movement failed to deliver. It's steadier. What does it actually mean to be human at this particular moment in history? For Sarah, it’s an unexpected appetite for the life that's still possible inside it.

01:56 I Eat the Stars: Living Fully in a Collapsing World07:23 Why Write this Book14:41 Childhood, Curiosity, and an Unconventional Path20:31 Illness, Recovery, and Redefining Success27:44 Climate Activism and a Shift in Perspective33:12 “I No Longer Have Hope”36:21 Understanding Complex Systems Collapse47:29 Grief, Acceptance, and Learning to Bear Uncertainty55:00 Post-Blame, Accountability, and the Moloch Trap01:01:26 Islands of Sanity: Simplify and Build Community01:06:13 Homecoming, Meaning, and Sustainable Wellbeing01:12:06 Feminine Leadership and “Black Belt Aunties”01:16:32 What Comes Next: Being Available01:20:07 Love and Learn

Speakers

Sarah Wilson is a bestselling author, social philosopher, international keynote speaker, minimalist, and philanthropist. Her latest book, I Eat the Stars: How to Live Fully and Beautifully in a Collapsing World, was released globally in 2026. She leads global conversations on modern philosophy, creativity, and climate change through her Wild podcast, Substack newsletter, and speaking engagements.

Rufus Pollock is a co-founder of Life Itself, an entrepreneur, activist, an author, as well as a long-term zen practitioner.

Resources

Website: sarahwilson.com

Substack (”This Is Precious”): sarahwilson.substack.com

Podcast: Wild with Sarah Wilson

Book (Penguin, 2026): I Eat the Stars

Prior books: I Quit Sugar, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful (2017), This One Wild and Precious Life (2023)

About Over the Mountains

Instagram - http://instagram.com/seedsofrenaissance/

Website - https://lifeitself.org

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit overthemountains.substack.com

Over The Mountains #2 | Silence Before The Avalanche: Why Transformation Is Closer Than We Think

Over the Mountains by Seeds of Renaissance — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 12:09:34 GMT

Apps to fix democracy, blockchain to solve coordination, AI to save us — we keep reaching for technological shortcuts instead of doing the hard work of collective action. Why? Because we think we’re alone. But private polls reveal 60%+ of people, including business leaders, already believe the system is broken and unsustainable. A ‘spiral of silence’ keeps these majorities invisible to each other. Drawing on cognitive science and social movement history, Rufus and Liam explore why we’re approaching a non-linear tipping point — and why the courage to go over the mountain, not through it, matters now.

This is episode #2 of Over the Mountains: Finding a Path to a Second Renaissance

Chapters

00:00:00 – Origins: Sensing the Avalanche

00:10:46 – Why Humans Miss Non-Linear Change

00:29:40 – The 90s: “The World Is a Vampire”

00:45:01 – The Meta-Crisis: It’s Worldview, Not Technology

00:58:48 – Over the Mountain, Not Through It

01:07:19 – The Silent Majority: Change Is Closer Than We Think

01:18:17 – Breaking the Spiral of Silence

Speakers

Liam Kavanagh is co-founder of Life Itself and Director of the Climate Majority Project.

Rufus Pollock is a co-founder of Life Itself, and an entrepreneur, activist and author as well as a long-term zen practitioner.

About Over the Mountains

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit overthemountains.substack.com

Over The Mountains #1 | The Devil’s Trick: Invisible Ideology Behind Techno Oligarchy

Over the Mountains by Seeds of Renaissance — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 12:00:48 GMT

This is episode #1 of a new sub-series Over the Mountains: Finding a Path to the Second Renaissance.

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was persuading you he didn’t exist.” In this conversation, we discuss how the greatest trick of the last 50 years was persuading us that the state doesn’t work, that government is dysfunctional, and that only individuals and markets can solve our problems — all while concealing that this narrative was systematically pushed forward. From the post-war era when government was trusted and tax rates on top earners reached 80-90%, to today’s world where young minds go into startups rather than public service, we’ve lived through a reactionary upswing driven by evangelical organizing and big business lobbying. But as the concentration of power in figures like Musk reveals the cracks in this dream, we stand at a moment when the pendulum is ready to swing — not back to the past, but toward something new that acknowledges our collective power.

Chapters:

00:00 – The Problem: Despair and Technology as Savior

00:03 – The Greatest Trick: Fish Don’t See Water

00:14 – When Government Worked: The Other Water

00:26 – The Shift: How We Changed Waters

00:38 – The Campaign: Evangelicals, Business, and Persistence

00:48 – The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

00:51 – Living the Dystopia

00:54 – The Pendulum Swings Back

Speakers

Sylvie Shiwei Barbier is a co-founder of Life Itself, and a French-Taiwanese performance artist, entrepreneur and educator.

Rufus Pollock is a co-founder of Life Itself, and an entrepreneur, activist and author as well as a long-term zen practitioner.

Over The Mountains is a podcast series exploring the understandings and paradigm shifts needed to bring forth a Second Renaissance — to live within a metamodern reality that works for everyone. It focuses on the societal, political, economic, and ontological transformations required for such a world to emerge. Through conversations with thinkers such as Rufus Pollock, Liam Kavanagh and Sylvie Barbier, the series shares deep knowledge from sociology, economics, political philosophy, history, neuroscience, and ideological science, making these insights accessible to a wider audience.

The title Over The Mountains is a metaphor for the long and often difficult journey humanity must take together. In a time when many seek shortcuts — especially through technology — this podcast reminds us that those shortcuts can lead to greater destruction. To truly reach the other side, we must climb over the mountain — facing the complexity of collective action, institutional change, and the reimagining of our shared reality.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit overthemountains.substack.com

Becoming Ancestors - What Will We Dream for Those Who Come After? | Over The Mountains #7

Over the Mountains by Seeds of Renaissance — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 16:11:42 GMT

Each generation lives the dreams of those before. We enjoy rights and medicines our ancestors could only imagine. Now it’s our turn to dream. But what?

Moving from diagnosis to vision, Sylvie and Rufus engage in collective dreaming, sensing what wants to be born beyond modernity’s decline. Sylvie shares how observing wealthy but unhappy people, contrasted with her wise mother’s capacity for forgiveness and generosity, revealed that wisdom rather than wealth produces flourishing. Yet our culture rarely encourages its pursuit.

Key elements of the emerging paradigm include wisdom as a cultivated path, interbeingness extending to Earth and across generations, economy at the service of life, comfort with complexity and non-duality, return of the sacred in non-dogmatic forms, inner growth replacing material accumulation, integration of feminine power, and safeguards of non-dogmatism and non-oppression.

No perfect form exists. Every system has birth, growth, and decay. But dreaming is a muscle that shapes reality. These are the first rays of sun before full sunrise, an invitation to join the dreaming while remembering that pursuing tomorrow’s vision must not make today a nightmare.

This is episode #7 of a new sub-series Over the Mountains: Finding a Path to the Second Renaissance

Chapters

00:00:00 Emerging Paradigms: The Second Renaissance

00:05:08 The Role of Wisdom in Happiness

00:08:29 Interbeingness: Connection to All Life

00:15:17 Complexity and Non-Duality

00:28:34 The Return of the Sacred

00:39:03 Feminine Energy and Future Paradigms

Speakers

Sylvie Barbier is a co-founder of Life Itself, a performance artist, entrepreneur, and educator.

Rufus Pollock is a co-founder of Life Itself, an entrepreneur, activist, an author, as well as a long-term zen practitioner.

About Over the Mountains

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit overthemountains.substack.com

The Emissary Takes the Throne: Iain McGilchrist on How the West Lost Its Mind | Over the Mountains #16

Over the Mountains by Seeds of Renaissance — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 07:00:00 GMT

Dr Iain McGilchrist, psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and author of The Master and His Emissary, joins Rufus Pollock for a wide-ranging dialogue that moves from the nature of the sacred to the crisis of AI, from neuroscience to the inner work that no institution can do for us.

In this episode, Rufus and Iain discuss what it actually means to know something — and how the modern world has impoverished itself by trusting only one kind of knowing, as set out in his landmark thesis: that the left hemisphere of the brain has seized dominance over the right. McGilchrist then sets out four pathways to knowledge — science, reason, intuition, and imagination — all of which are necessary, and none of which can be safely dispensed with. The great scientists, he argues, were right-hemisphere visionaries first; their breakthroughs came through intuition and image before they were ever formalised in equations. Niels Bohr’s notebooks, he notes, contain no words and no equations, only pictures.

McGilchrist then turns this lens on artificial intelligence — AI, he argues, is the pure expression of a world that has mistaken information for understanding. It can process vast data and produce fluent outputs, but it has no experience of suffering or death, no capacity for genuine relationship. It hallucinates when it doesn’t know — exactly like a brain with a damaged right hemisphere, certain of itself precisely because it lacks the depth to recognise its own limits.

“The most important thing is something everybody can do tomorrow — and it is to begin the work on yourself. You’re not asked to save the universe. You're asked to live up to and make good use of the gift that has been given you of a life.”

The conversation closes with the soul. McGilchrist speaks personally about the experiences that first opened him to the sacred — music at Winchester, Heraclitus, wandering alone through Italian churches — and offers a vision of the path forward that is at once modest and radical. Small communities. Inner work. A return to asking what we owe to life, rather than what life owes us.

00:00 Introduction01:27 - Ian McGilchrist's background and discovery of brain hemisphere differences08:50 - The call of the sacred beyond scientific materialism12:25 - The philosophical roots: Heraclitus, Taoism, and ancient wisdom23:10 - The systemic crisis rooted in hemisphere imbalance and worldview shifts36:04 - The decline of embedded values like beauty, truth, and goodness in modern culture53:08 - The role of metaphysics, ontology, and the relationship between matter and consciousness01:02:45 - The nature of value, purpose, and morality—are they inherent or subjective?01:16:27 - Communicating non-measurable truths and the importance of experiential knowing01:29:20 - The rise of AI and technological systems embodying left-hemisphere dominance01:35:59 - The pathway forward: returning to the sacred, community, and inner work01:38:13 - Practical steps individuals can take today for cultural and personal renewal01:40:22 - The importance of resonating with life and cultivating reverence in everyday actions

Speakers

Dr Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and philosopher whose work has reshaped how we think about mind, culture, and the modern crisis of meaning. His landmark book The Master and His Emissary — and its successor The Matter with Things — argue that Western civilisation has dangerously overvalued one mode of knowing at the expense of a deeper, more integrative wisdom.

Rufus Pollock is a co-founder of Life Itself, an entrepreneur, activist, an author, as well as a long-term zen practitioner.

About Over the Mountains

Instagram - https://instagram.com/secondrenaissance.is/

Website - https://lifeitself.org

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit overthemountains.substack.com

Grieving to Give Birth: What Trans and Cis Bodies Can Teach Each Other | Over The Mountains #8

Over the Mountains by Seeds of Renaissance — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 09:00:00 GMT

In this episode of Over the Mountains, host Sylvie Barbier engages in a conversation with Uriel, also known as Freak Daddy, a musician and performance artist. Uriel shares his journey from growing up in a Southern evangelical Christian home to embracing his identity as a trans man. He reflects on the challenges of navigating his gender identity in a society that often misunderstands and marginalizes trans experiences. Uriel discusses the importance of having open conversations about identity and the complexities of transitioning, emphasizing the need for understanding and compassion in these discussions.

The dialogue delves into Uriel’s artistic expression, where he uses performance as a means to explore and communicate his experiences. He articulate the emotional and spiritual aspects of his transition, including the grief associated with leaving behind his past identity while also celebrating the rebirth of their true self. Sylvie, a cis woman whose experience of giving birth connected her to the physicality and animalistic wisdom of motherhood, asks genuine questions about nature, technology, and bodily autonomy. Both find common ground: what matters is whether actions come from love.

The conversation highlights the intersection of art, identity, and societal norms, ultimately advocating for a world where diverse identities can coexist. The episode models the kind of good-faith dialogue across differences that building a new future demands.

Chapters

00:00 Welcome and Introductions

04:50 Journey of Self-Discovery

11:14 Understanding Gender Identity

15:17 The Complexity of Transitioning

23:49 Art, Performance, and Identity

32:12 The Intersection of Technology and Self-Expression

40:32 The Journey of Self-Acceptance

42:43 Navigating Grief and Identity

47:03 Rebirth and Motherhood

54:00 The Intersection of Creation and Identity

57:49 Conversations on Acceptance and Complexity

01:01:38 Art as a Reflection of Struggle

01:06:02 The Power of Authentic Expression

Speakers

Sylvie Barbier is a co-founder of Life Itself, a performance artist, entrepreneur, and educator.

Freak Daddy is a multi-dimensional trans-male performance artist and musician known for his debut album S.G.S.M. (Sorry, God. Sorry, Mom.), which chronicles his transition and self-discovery journey, pioneering a genre he calls "Darchnerve" by blending his pre- and post-transition vocals and influences from Hyperpop, metal, hip-hop, and grunge. Originally from Nashville, TN, he become a vocal advocate for trans rights and using his music, including a protest video at the Tennessee Capitol, to challenge anti-trans laws.

About Over the Mountains

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit overthemountains.substack.com