Denizen

Donnie Maclurcan returns in this episode to discuss the radical, embodied practices he employs as Executive Director of the Post Growth Institute. Learn how PGI uses an asset-based approach, sociocratic governance, and lean processes to create trust, safety, and virtuous cycles. Recorded live in San Francisco, Donnie and Jenny discuss PGI's cutting edge practices such as silent meetings, a long hiring process, a policy of "no shit work", rest week, defining ones own pay rates, and much more. It's a provocative, eye opening conversation that should not be missed.

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Covered in this episode:

• Origin story of the Post Growth Institute [2:28]
• PGI's asset based approach [5:37]
• How PGI employs being over doing [11:53]
• Silent meetings [16:02]
• No shit work [19:33]
• Starting meetings [23:39]
• Embodied response [27:19]
• Defining one's own pay rates [30:35]
• Harmony restoration [34:44]
• Rest week [38:44]
• Sociocracy and decision making at PGI [30:05]

Resources:

• Appreciative Inquiry
• The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible, Charles Eisenstein
• Sociocracy for All

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This episode comes along side of the launch of Tobias Rose-Stockwell's book Taming The Outrage Machine: How Technology Amplifies Discontent, Disrupts Democracy -- And What We Can Do About It. Tobias is an author, designer, and media researcher who has been working at the forefront of this topic for many years.

By investigating media's role in information flows throughout history, Tobias' book brings clarity and fresh insights to the role social media plays in society today. In this conversation Jenny and Tobias distill the book's most salient points for the Denizen audience.

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Outline of the discussion:

• The role of outrage in democratic governance [4:00]
• Technological disruptions and the dark valley [10:04]
• Martin Luther and the printing press [10:52]
• The impact of the first advertising based newspaper [14:04]
• The advent of modern journalism [18:16]
• The relationship between distribution costs and editorial incentives [22:10]
• Television and the impact of repealing the Fairness Doctrine [23:45]
• The role of human psychology and cognitive biases [27:17]
• The three design features that changed everything: the algorithmic feed [31:09]
• The three design features that changed everything: social metrics [33:54]
• The three design features that changed everything: the one click share [37:13]
• Economic incentives and multi-polar traps[41:47]
• The role of government and design vs. content level regulation [43:41]
• Hope from a historical example: radio [48:54]
• Intervention points: the individual [53:52]
• Intervention points: social media platforms [56:06]
• Intervention points: policy [59:57]
• A word of caution about decentralized social media [1:01:41]
• The speed of technological progress vs. the speed of regulatory response [1:03:10]

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Our guest for this episode is Carla Fernandez, co-founder of The Dinner Party, a platform for young adults who have lost someone close to them. The Dinner Party now operates in over 100 cities around the world and has been featured in media outlets such as NPR, CNN, and the New York Times. Carla is also a designer, facilitator, and strategist whose work brings creativity, joy, and connection to the roots of our most intractable problems. She is also currently writing a book called Renegade Grief.

In this episode Jenny and Carla discuss:

• Carla's experience losing her father [4:53]
• Jenny's reflections on losing her parents [8:37]
• Grief, public heath, and policy [13:43]
• Grief vs. trauma when someone close to you dies [16:00]
• Lessons in self-compassion [18:23]
• The impact of the decline of religion on grieving [21:34]
• Death and forgiveness [22:06]
• The Dinner Party and its learnings [25:44]
• The importance of community and relationships as a foundation for systems change [33:20]
• Grief and growth [38:36]
• Accepting death and living intentionally [41:46]
• Discomfort with difficult emotional experiences [46:29]
• Interconnection and grief [47:17]
• Carla's upcoming book, Renegade Grief [53:22]

Resources

• The Dinner Party
• The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise, Martin Prechtel
• The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss, Mary-Frances O'Connor
• Walking Each Other Home: Conversations on Loving and Dying, Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush
• I'm Glad My Mom Died, Jennette McCurdy
• Limitless with Chris Hemsworth (final episode is about death)
• Facing the Climate Emergency: How to Transform Yourself with Climate Truth, Margaret Klein Salamon

Sign up for the Denizen newsletter at www.becomingdenizen.com to stay plugged into our work. There we share our latest content alongside community events, educational opportunities, and announcements from our many partner organizations.

Consciousness is one of the six themes of the Denizen podcast and the role of psychedelics is an important subset of that inquiry. It's an honor to bring Rick Doblin to the podcast with this episode; he has been at the forefront of the movement since founding the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in 1986. Rick is joined by Nirvan Mullick, filmmaker and founder of Interconnected Media, who has been working on a documentary about Rick and MAPS for ten years.

This episode extensively explores the role of storytelling in the psychedelic movement. Rick takes us back to the cultural context of his childhood and shares his own experience of awakening through experimenting with psychedelics as a young adult. We discuss MAPS’s strategy and how storytelling complimented their data-driven approach with clinical trials. We talk about MAPS's corporate structure and how it evolved over time, with its incentives slowly corrupted as MAPS was forced to bring in venture capital to continue its work.

Rick shares the story of the year leading up to the FDA's response letter, and how MAPS's leadership inhibited his ability to contribute to a more balanced narrative about the treatment of MDMA for PTSD. We then look forward to what comes next, and how storytelling is critical for the movement to succeed in bringing psychedelics to the mainstream to enable a global shift in consciousness. Throughout, Nirvan shares his insights as a filmmaker documenting Rick's story over the last ten years.

Sign up for the Denizen newsletter at www.becomingdenizen.com to stay plugged into our work. There we share our latest content alongside community events, educational opportunities, and announcements from our many partner organizations.

Melanie Rieback is a cybersecurity entrepreneur and the founder of Nonprofit Ventures, an organization dedicated to supporting post growth entrepreneurs. She runs an incubator to support post growth entrepreneurs and teaches a course at the University of Amsterdam on post growth entrepreneurship. Her lectures are available on YouTube, linked below.

This episode builds on a long series of conversations on this podcast exploring economic reform: stakeholder capitalism, steward ownership, co-ops, post-growth economics, to name a few. While it's called pot growth entrepreneurship, really this conversation is about non-extractive entrepreneurship. PGE rejects the typical silicon valley model of capital, scale, exit, in favor of bootstrapping, flat growth, and non-extraction.

In this conversation Jenny and Melanie discuss:

• Melanie's path from cybersecurity entrepreneur to post growth entrepreneurship
• Why not all forms of steward ownership ensure profit serves purpose
• Why Melanie believes business is one of the most effective forms of activism
• Defining post growth entrepreneurship (PGE)
• Why PGE is a leverage point for systemic change
• Issues with the Silicon Valley model of capital, scale, exit
• Issues with status quo social enterprise and impact investing
• Principles of PGE: bootstrapping, flat growth, non-extraction
• Asset locks and stable steward ownership implementation
• Policy initiatives in Europe to create a steward owned business entity
• How to think about fair compensation when implementing PGE
• Thoughts on the cultural component of this work
• Business as spirituality

Resources:

• Nonprofit Ventures website: https://nonprofit.ventures/
• Post Growth Entrepreneurship: three minute explainer video
• "Putting Post Growth Theory Into Practice" Medium post
• Melanie's post growth entrepreneurship course at the University of Amsterdam; 8 YouTube lectures

Sign up for the Denizen newsletter at www.becomingdenizen.com to stay plugged into our work. There we share our latest content alongside community events, educational opportunities, and announcements from our many partner organizations.