Jamie Wheal on Cults, Con Artists and Collapse

Also, membership changes and announcements on upcoming films and events

This week, we skirted the edges of implicit and explicit perception. Trish Blain and Schuyler Brown delivered beautiful sessions, and an emerging theme was how we can adapt and thrive in complexity by waking up to our subtle senses.

Next week, we’re welcoming author Minna Salami and YouTuber Michael Phillip (Third Eye Drops). Looking ahead, we have sessions with poker pro and YouTuber Liv Boeree, and polymath futurist Jordan Hall.

Next week’s sessions are the most eclectic to date. Minna Salami is a Nigerian-Finnish author, speaker, and feminist thinker known for her writings on African feminism, culture, and social change. She founded the award-winning blog MsAfropolitan, and her new book Can Feminism Be African? comes out in a few days.

Michael Phillip is the creator and host of Third Eye Drops, a brilliant podcast exploring the intersection of philosophy, science, and mysticism. His conversations with thought leaders and creatives delve into topics like consciousness, meaning, and the human experience. You can check out one of our conversations together on Third Eye Drops here.

As with all our conversations through February, we’ll be asking the question ‘where do we go from here?’ So far, we’ve asked it through the lenses of culture, politics, religion, economics, spirituality and complex systems. Next week we’re adding African, feminist, Jungian, occult and mythic lenses.

Strange things start to happen when you combine perspectives like this. You light a fire under a bubbling cauldron of mystery and possibility, emitting strange scents that draw you ever closer to the edge of what you know…so you’ll need to keep your wits about you if you’re joining in.

Thanks to everyone who’s attended to date, both in the Zoom rooms and the live streams. As we mentioned in our launch piece, from now on the live sessions will be a benefit for Founding Members. If you want to join a group of people from around the world creating a field of collective intelligence and deep inquiry into the zeitgeist, subscribe below. If you’d prefer to try it out for a month and cancel at any time, you can do that on our swanky new website, studiokainos.com, as Substack doesn’t offer that functionality.

Regular paying members get early access to all the recordings, along with exclusive films and articles. We’ll occasionally live stream these conversations to members or to everyone, and if you aren’t a paid subscriber, don’t worry - the majority will end up on the Kainos YouTube.

I’m aware that we’re now sending out more emails than before and want to avoid flooding your inbox every time we release a film. Instead, I’m encouraging everyone to subscribe to our YouTube channel and turn on notifications. We’d love to hit 1000 followers in our first month, and we’re already at around 500. The moment we hit 1000, we’re going to do a raffle to give away a free Founding Member subscription to one lucky YouTube subscriber.

Our session with Daniel Pinchbeck will be available for members this weekend and release on YouTube early next week, and Jamie Wheal is already live and embedded below.

Finally, there are just five tickets left to the London premiere of our first documentary, Crossroads on the 14th of March. We’ll soon be announcing an event with Josh Schrei in London in June, and Crossroads screenings in Australia, so stay tuned for those.