We’re standing in new territory. The old world order shifts beneath our feet as our minds twist and turn in virtual worlds. We’re connected, but can’t connect. Taught by centuries of history to walk to the horizon in search of something better, we’re faced with the question of whether we know what progress is. Our civilisation is stuck, yearning for transformation.
In a time of upheaval, Kainos tells stories that help people make sense of chaos and imagine new futures. An alternative media platform and studio, we create films, articles and experiences that blend cultural sensemaking with hope, imagination and impact.
Kainos was born from a longing I have to combine sensemaking with artistry, and a frustration with the notion that we can think our way out of the crisis we’re in. We’ll also have to dance our way out. To sing our way through, and release the wild potential we all hold in our bodies.
We won’t find lasting solutions to environmental collapse, the meaning crisis, institutional decay and the other wicked problems we’re facing by relying on old perspectives. We need new ways of seeing and being that help us to move with a world that is rhythmic and unpredictable, intense and gentle, dark and alive.
Kainos is a gathering point for different perspectives. Heterodox sensemaking and systems theory. Academics and occultists. Artists and intellectuals. Bringing these perspectives together is fun, but it’s also vital. If we try to detach from popular culture and the gritty reality of human expression, we come up with ideas that don’t survive in the real world. And if we can’t see beyond culture, or escape the confines of our own minds, our ideas become limited and parochial.
The stories we’re going to be telling here will feel both new and familiar. Familiar in the sense that Kainos is focused on sensemaking and impact just as The Bigger Picture was. It will feel new because we’ll be experimenting with new formats, particularly film, and because it is going to involve many more perspectives, including yours.
The first question we’ll be exploring is “Where do we go from here?’ and it’s a question at the heart of the first Kainos documentary, Crossroads, which will premiere on March 14th. Crossroads is a combination of sensemaking, art, myth and big ideas. As well as diagnosing where we are in 2025 with the help of some brilliant guests, it will take you on a journey beyond diagnosis into hope and imagination. If you’re in the UK and would like to attend the premiere in London, we have a limited number of tickets available here.
Live Sessions
We’ll be releasing a number of bigger films like Crossroads each year, and they form the heart of our output. Our next documentary has the working title Men and Women in 2025 and will explore modern gender dynamics and how to move toward partnership and union.
We’ll also be publishing regular films and articles to help make sense of what’s going on in the world, platforming perspectives that aren’t found in either the legacy or alternative media.
To begin, I’m hosting a series of conversations with some of the most interesting people I’ve come across in the last decade. These sessions will be recorded with a live audience of Kainos members, beginning with that same question ‘Where do we go from here?’ and ending with an audience Q&A and group discussion. Here’s who’s coming on in the next month:
Jamie Wheal: Monday 27 Jan
Nora Bateson: Wednesday, 29 Jan
Daniel Pinchbeck: Thursday, 30 Jan
Trish Blain: Monday, 3 Feb
Schuyler Brown: Wednesday, 5 Feb
Minna Salami: Monday, 10 Feb
Michael Phillip (Third Eye Drops): Thursday, 13 Feb
Liv Boeree: Monday, 24 Feb
Jordan Hall: Thursday, 27 Feb
All members can participate in these live sessions in the first two weeks, and they’ll be released here on Substack and our YouTube channel for everyone eventually. Members will receive Zoom invite links for all the sessions above in the next couple of days, and the links for Jamie Wheal, Nora Bateson and Daniel Pinchbeck are all in the paid Substack chat now.
From February 10th onwards, these live sessions will become part of our revamped Founding Member tier. This will be a more intimate community focused on collective sensemaking and transformational practices.
After Crossroads premieres in March, we’ll be hosting two different types of sessions a month. To explore ideas, we’ll have a monthly Knowledge Session with a guest from one of our films. To engage in practice, we’ll also have a monthly Wisdom Session with a teacher to explore modalities like breathwork, inquiry and embodiment. Founding Members will also have a WhatsApp group for connection and collaboration, and discounts on courses and live events.
All members will get access to additional films and articles, including early access to the recordings of those Knowledge and Wisdom sessions, most of which will be published on Substack and our YouTube channel. We’ll also be creating short-form content and live conversations on our Instagram.
Kainos is member-supported, so if you want to get involved, join today.
Past and Future
The underlying intention of all these films and experiences is to create something new and beautiful together. In ancient Greece, there were two words for new: Neos and Kainos. Neos is something new in time. Kainos is something new in substance, different to what has come before. As Donna Haraway interprets it in her book Staying with the Trouble:
“Kainos means now, a time of beginnings, a time for ongoing, for freshness. Nothing in kainos must mean conventional pasts, presents, or futures. There is nothing in times of beginnings that insists on wiping out what has come before, or, indeed, wiping out what comes after. Kainos can be full of inheritances, of remembering, and full of comings, of nurturing what might still be.”
Haraway’s description stirs something in me, because I can’t name Kainos without also naming Rebel Wisdom. In the aftermath of the Brexit vote and the 2016 Trump election, David Fuller and I created Rebel Wisdom to host conversations and experiences we didn’t see happening anywhere else. The first phase explored the phenomenon of Jordan Peterson and the Intellectual Dark Web.
As the project evolved, we drew on Integral Theory, the therapeutic work we were training in, wisdom traditions, psychedelic science, academic theory and embodied experiences to explore the question ‘what kind of people do we need to become to thrive in this era?’ We took a ‘yes and’ approach to the culture wars, ruffled feathers on all sides, and tried to point a way beyond polarisation.
A lot has changed since then, and while Kainos picks up some of the threads we followed at Rebel Wisdom, we are in new territory now. The stakes are higher, and the opportunities for transformation are greater. The hyper-relativism and identity politics that defined the culture wars might be behind us, but we may be entering a post-truth authoritarianism supported by Big Tech that creates a whole new set of problems.
If there is a gap to fill today, it is a platform providing in-depth sensemaking that isn’t ideologically captured. A place that instead of lamenting what isn’t working, looks forward and points to what could. This gap feels particularly wide right now, because progressive politics is failing around the world. In the last decade, countless organisations and groups have been captured by a form of activism as narcissistic and self-satisfied as it is childishly ineffective. Its failure is undeniable now, and a lot of people I’ve spoken to in the change-making space are doing some intense soul-searching.
But that doesn’t mean the progressive spirit should be ditched. We all have an opportunity to redefine activism, and we need action now more than ever. What I feel most in the zeitgeist is a deep yearning for transformative beauty. I see beauty as the way the sacred expresses itself in daily life. It can take us beyond ourselves like nothing else, and right now we’re trapped in our own minds. A question on my mind at the moment is how we might use the essence of beauty to create a new kind of activism, one that is rooted in the world, connected to the body, and fearless in its expression.
Meaningful Partnerships
This isn’t a question any of us can answer by ourselves, and Kainos is a storytelling platform first and foremost. We’re not setting out with the idea that any of our collective problems can be solved by stories alone, or by anything less than collaboration and co-ordinated action.
With that in mind, we’re launching with some partnerships already in place. The first is with Small Giants Academy. It’s run by my friends Berry Liberman and Danny Almagor, and is “a community of leaders and change-makers committed to creating a just, inclusive and sustainable future where people and planet can flourish” with a focus on what they call “the Next Economy.”
Danny and Berry have spent two decades at the forefront of impact investing, and helping others to transition their wealth into investments that lead to a more prosocial world. Finding out about their work last year gave me a rare moment of hope that it’s possible to change broken systems from within. There are far more people than I thought divesting their wealth from self-exterminating industries and moving it into impact, from regenerative agriculture and re-wilding projects to depolarisation and peace-building initiatives.
I’m joining The Small Giants Academy as its CSO (Chief Sensemaking Officer) and we’re collaborating on a number of projects this year. They are fully aware that I don’t always make sense and seem to be OK with that, which is a relief. The academy runs a popular course called Mastery of Business Empathy, and I’m part of the team crafting a new course called Mastery of Systems Leadership which we’ll announce soon.
As the Kainos community develops, I also want to offer a more intensive form of personal growth work, one that is aimed not just at self-development, but impact in the world. Trish Blain, who many readers will know from the courses we’ve run and my frequent references to her work, is launching her own platform to create a next-level community of practice, drawing on frameworks she’s developed over the last 30 years. Kainos will be partnering with Trish in the future to offer an intensive form of inner growth work that expands personal growth into a much wider frame than just working on ourselves.
I hope these will be the first of many collaborations as Kainos evolves, so please get in touch if you have interesting ideas.
Studio Kainos
As well as the right partners, I’ve thought a lot about the right revenue model. In our current media landscape, if you want to retain editorial freedom, and avoid the bad incentive structures that have turned so many alternative media channels into parodies, this is a central question.
Kainos won’t tie its revenue directly to content via advertising, because I’ve seen how that can create incentive structures that force people to compromise their work, and the same is true of branded partnerships and sponsorship.
Instead, we will be funded by membership and courses, and through a new offering: a studio and consultancy for organisations or individuals who need help telling their own stories. We’ve gathered a brilliant team of filmmakers, designers, short-form content creators, AI animators, and event producers to offer a range of services including creative strategy, content production, film production, event production, design and branding services.
I spent 8 years working in top marketing and events agencies before creating my own media projects, and the idea for this studio offering came from asking what it would look like to combine those skill sets. Traditional agencies are products of consumer capitalism, and rarely if ever have an ethos of systems change at their core. There’s a need today for a studio that understands the new territory we’re in, and can tell compelling stories that cut through the noise without adding to it.
We’re offering a 15% discount for our first three clients, so if you want to create something or get the word out about it, get in touch on info@studiokainos.com.
Why We Need Stories
I’ve felt a lot of emotions writing this piece. It’s been an intense journey from the beginnings of an idea to this launch, and I’ve swung between excitement, fear, aliveness and overwhelm, often feeling the pre-trip ‘giddy terror’ Terence McKenna used to talk about. Launching anything is a pretty intense process, and because Kainos is so focused on novelty, it’s forced me way out of my comfort zone.
We all experience these moments throughout our lives, and it’s why so many stories begin with a protagonist pulled from the safety of the status quo by the promise of the unknown.
I was reflecting on this recently while scripting Crossroads and picked up Christopher Booker’s masterpiece about storytelling The Seven Basic Plots. Reading through it, I started wondering if our collective story at this time in history follows one of the plots he describes as universal and recurring throughout history. It surely has elements of all seven. Overcoming the Monster. Comedy. Tragedy. Rags to Riches. The Quest. Voyage and Return. Rebirth.
But it was Rebirth, more than any of the others, that really drew me in, so I re-read the chapter. As Booker points out, in a Rebirth story, “A hero or heroine falls under a dark spell which eventually traps them in some wintry state, akin to living death: physical or spiritual imprisonment, sleep, sickness or some other form of enchantment.”
In children’s stories, that ‘dark spell’ often manifests as an evil force on the outside, like the wicked magician in The Snow Queen, who creates a mirror in which “everything good and beautiful, when reflected in it, shrank up to almost nothing, whilst those things which were ugly and useless were magnified and made to appear ten times worse than before.” When the mirror breaks, tiny shards spread all over the world, finding their way into some peoples’ eyes and hearts, causing them to become cold and callous, or to see the world in a warped and twisted way.
This happens to a little boy, Kay, and the heroine of the story Gerda must go on a quest to rescue him. When she finally finds him, sitting alone and dissociated in a room of ice, her tears of love dislodge the shard from his eye and free him. Replace the mirror with social media and you have an allegory for the times we live in.
But, tempting as it may be, we can’t externalise all our problems. As Booker points out, in adult Rebirth stories the darkness doesn’t come from outside, but from within the protagonist. In stories like A Christmas Carol or Crime and Punishment, we start with a protagonist whose egotism has cut them off from the world. Scrooge cares only about himself and making money. He is a dark presence, disconnected emotionally from other people, and from reality. But through a process of redemption, he eventually reconnects to his soul and is able to feel other people again, and becomes a loving member of the community.
Collectively we’re living through both the child and adult version of a Rebirth narrative. We are blinded by our own egotism, and that of the technofeudal billionaires who own so much of the world. But we’re also trapped by self-annihilating systems around us that act very much like evil forces beyond our control.
New stories can help us move through these times, because stories are more than they appear to be. They are the expression of deep patterns of the human psyche. They are universal, powerful and undying.
And rebirth stories teach us that freeing ourselves is achingly simple.
We just have to open our eyes. To see we’re deeply entwined with one another. To remember that we aren’t strangers in the world, but vibrant expressions of nature. Above all, what our stories teach us again is that we are more capable, more empathetic and more beautiful than we let ourselves believe.
My deepest hope is that the stories we tell through Kainos will spark that kind of remembering, and I hope you’ll join us on the journey.
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