Curious on Earth

22/11/2023

"The hi-tech that allows us to have a relatively high life expectancy, we paid for by selling our forests. We turned our biodiversity into money to buy a good health system and a good school system."

A civilization whose foundation is built on unsustainable grounds will, by definition, not survive. This defines several aspects of the ways humans currently live on this planet, and of course doesn't exclude Finland. Huck Middeke is one of the many people who are working hard to figure out what it takes to live in ways that don't destroy life and thus lead us towards the termination of civilization. Huck is a survival expert, wilderness guide and an all-around fascinating human. He's known for, amongst other things, his lower impact living experiments, including his past four years of living year-round in a yurt in Joensuu (which he, somehow, doesn't consider especially interesting).

I got the honor of having Huck on as guest number seven of my Curious on Earth podcast. This is the second CoE episode that I've done live – those familiar with my Ihmisiä, siis eläimiä podcast will recognize the setting. I find this approach infinitely more enjoyable than video calls!

In our long conversation, Huck shares the backstory of the yurt, of his interest in activism and sustainable ways of living, and of how he started to question the wisdom and even viability of things we tend to take for granted. He talks about the importance of being able to pass on sustainable – really sustainable, not just "more sustainable" – ways of living to our offspring, which most of us don't really know how to do or even learn. We discuss "normal" lifestyles as a form of addiction. We talk about whether the drive to spread and push limits is a fundamental and innate human (or animal) need. Huck describes his relationship with the wild, and gives us a view into the wilderness retreats that he offers. Amongst other things, we discuss barefoot walking, resilience hubs and, both being parents, fatherhood.

We also talk about Huck's ventures in what someone might consider a surprising interest for him – the super yacht scene, i.e., people spending fortunes in gigantic luxury boats. Furthermore, we talk about how, if living in overshoot is by definition unsustainable, we're still able to carry on doing it. We discuss the tension between sustainability and increasingly omnipresent complex technology. I present Huck with challenging questions regarding whether a hi-tech civilization is unsustainable on principle, and whether some kind of hi-tech civilization may still exist on this planet a hundred, a thousand or a million years from now.

And what about... how much time do you have to get out of a car sinking in a lake? This is one of the questions we talk about as Huck shares his wisdom regarding survival. What are survival situations? What are the six most relevant survival priorities? Huck also describes the STOP tool (stop, think, observe, plan) that can be useful for navigating such survival situations (which he understands us to currently exist in) with a level head, and the related "full moon full stop" ritual/practice that he's developed based on this tool.

Huck is not just a theorist; I'd say he's definitely a practical guy that happens to have a strong understanding of the theoretical side, too. Though the topics he deals with have their grim dimensions, Huck engages the world with a spirit of curiosity. He talks about how he doesn't want to push anyone to follow his lead or accept his conclusions: he's much more interested in leading by inspiring, trying out new (and old) things and remaining open to the ever-unfolding mystery of life.

A quote by Nancy Newhall that Huck paraphrased during our conversation seems like a nice thing to end with:

"The wild holds answers to questions we have yet to learn to ask."

Youtube: https://youtu.be/y3iB_zHRE4o
Soundcloud: http://soundcloud.com/curiousonearth/7-huck-middeke
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3G9TQHZ
Apple podcasts: https://apple.co/3MTqly2

Patreon: http://patreon.com/curiousonearth
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Twitter: https://twitter.com/curiousonearth
Instagram: https://instagram.com/curiousonearth

18/09/2023

Suspecting he was a cop, they made him strip naked and humiliated him. He got beaten up in a public bathroom and was chased around by a lunatic armed with a knife. Totally unprepared, he had to snort an enormous amount of speed in order to avoid blowing his cover. By utilizing the "unpredictable madman" strategy, he just barely escaped being run over by a car. And he manipulated vulnerable people to get his job done, one of whom considered him the only friend he had in this world. Eventually, he realized that he was making things worse for all parties involved and realized he was suffering from complex post-traumatic stress disorder – with scars that still haven't healed.

For years, Neil Woods worked as a pioneering undercover cop in the UK. Having put people behind bars for a total of over a thousand years, he was very skilled in what he was doing. However, as years went by, he started to have doubts about the impact of his work. As the police got more innovative and efficient, the criminals got ever more brutal. Fighting the war on drugs also seemed to have the effect of increased corruption of both the police and, more broadly, the whole of society.

During his last visit to Finland last spring, I got the opportunity to do a podcast with this captivating storyteller. Today, I'm proud to present the first Curious on Earth episode that was recorded face-to-face instead of virtually. In our discussion, Neil tells the story of how he got started as an undercover cop. He talks about the 90s and the waves of moral panic in that led to an escalation of the war on drugs. He talks about the everyday experience of doing undercover work, the highs and lows, the secrets he had to keep from family and loved ones – some of whom abused him. He also talks about street people, the addicted souls who tried to survive on their life's stage that was often set up by years of childhood neglect and abuse.

And he talks about weaponized empathy and the moral injuries he inflicted on himself by taking advantage of some already very disadvantaged people, and by not being honest to the realities and effects of what he was doing. He talks about his encounters with mortality and the effects that the militarization of police and society has on safety. He also recounts an experience where a weird hunch told him not to allow a cop to join his team: that particular cop was later revealed to be a mole working for a local cartel.

During our conversation, I also ask him whether he thinks that the effects of cannabis legalization have so far been a disappointment; about his thoughts about Prince Harry's use of psychedelics; and how he eventually decided to quit his job and focus his attention on changing society – and, in some people's eyes, became a despicable traitor and a public enemy.

In addition to writing captivating books with JS Rafaeli, Neil is now working with The Law Enforcement Action Partnership, an organization for current and former police, judges, and other criminal justice professionals, who advocate for drug law and criminal justice reform. This was not the first conversation that I've had with him, and I've heard some of his stories several times, but somehow, they never seem to get old. Often, they're simultaneously sad and hilarious. But they're always very human – and very powerful.

Youtube: https://youtu.be/kBokFgQ6gP4
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/curiousonearth/6-neil-woods
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3PFz5JZ
Apple podcasts: https://apple.co/44UarK4

Patreon: http://patreon.com/curiousonearth
Twitter: https://twitter.com/curiousonearth
Instagram: https://instagram.com/curiousonearth

16/08/2023

New episode out – with a whopping length of five hours!

Preventing minor forest fires easily leads to major ones eventually breaking out. Barbra Streisand suing a photographer for posting a snapshot of her home online ended up drawing hundreds of thousands of people to view the photo, instead of the handful that had seen it before.

Even good plans tend to bring unintended and unexpected consequences. Some of them will be black swans that are impossible to predict but some you can prepare for.

As I imagine most of you know by now, I find psychedelics a thoroughly fascinating yet also tricky subject. As their contact with our cultural mainstream keeps intensifying, one of the most important questions to ask is "how to think constructively about the inevitable unintended consequences of psychedelic mainstreaming". This is one of the starting points for the work of Jerónimo M.M. who works as a social innovation director at the ICEERS Foundation (International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research and Service).

I first met Jeronimo back in 2019 in the Breaking Convention conference in London. Hearing his lecture, I was instantly impressed by his brave and challenging approach to the topic. He's not afraid to ask hard and provocative questions that he has no definite answers to.

In addition to his work with ICEERS, Jeronimo is a documentary filmmaker who has traveled extensively through South America, researching a broad range of ayahuasca practices. He's an independent researcher and lecturer. He's also got work experience in user interface design, which makes sense here: the contexts in which psychedelics are used can also be thought of as interfaces between them and the people who interact with them.

On topics related to the wiser handling of the hard-to-categorize phenomenon of psychedelics, he's become one of my favorite thinkers. Back in March, we had a long podcast discussion on the present and future of ayahuasca, psilocybin and other psychedelics, initiation rituals and what we can learn from previous encounters with things that don't really fit our pre-existing concepts. Since my summer holiday is now over, I finally got around to finishing production on the episode.

Topics we cover include:

* The tension between preserving and adapting cultural practices
* The challenges of integrating ethnobotanicals in new cultures
* The dark side of glamorizing indigenous traditions
* "Ayahuascas" instead of "ayahuasca"?
* Abuse in the psychedelic scene
* Ayahuasca as an adaptogen
* Innocently disrespectful psychedelic tourists and scifi author William Gibson's starfish parable
* What comes after the psychedelic renaissance?
* How does ayahuasca compare to other risky activities?
* Wise responses to moral panics
* The dangers of "ayahuasca told me"
* Santo Daime, União do Vegetal and other ayahuasca churches
* Why psychedelics are hard to fit in a box

As a culture, we really don't know how to handle psychedelics yet. It's easy to start squeezing round pegs into square holes without even noticing you're doing it. We need to keep asking better questions.

Youtube: https://youtu.be/4NRy2fQQi2A
Soundcloud: http://soundcloud.com/curiousonearth/5-jeronimo-mm
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3OD1IG3
Apple podcasts: https://apple.co/44jXKbe

Patreon: http://patreon.com/curiousonearth
Facebook: https://facebook.com/curiousonearth
Twitter: https://twitter.com/curiousonearth
Instagram: https://instagram.com/curiousonearth

04/11/2022

How does drug prohibition make organized crime more violent and cops stupid?

As Germany is currently going through the process of legalizing cannabis, I think it's an appropriate moment to put out the fourth episode of the podcast. Featuring Ethan Nadelmann, the founder and former executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance and one of the most important architects of global drug policy reform, our conversation runs over two hours and covers drugs and drug policy from a variety of angles.

Some of the topics that we discuss: What's the relationship between the US Constitution and drug policy? What does freedom of religion have to do with drug use? What's the deal with religious organizations that legally use psychedelics in their rituals in the States? What are the effects of dehumanizing drug war rhetoric? What is the role of stimulants in war? Why does society seem to need a bogeyman onto which to project its fears? Why has the availability of snus led to a collapse in smoking rates in Sweden? Why is there still black market cannabis after legalization? What can we learn from alcohol prohibition? What's the relationship between prohibition and corruption? What enables bipartisan support for reform? Should all drugs be legally regulated? Why is the idea of "a drug-free world" a form of totalitarianism? How do we learn to live with drugs?

We also talk about the rise of authoritarianism around the world and its implications for American and global politics. Furthermore, Ethan talks about how his early drug experiences shaped him, and the role of his Jewish roots and the holocaust in why he became a drug policy and freedom activist.

Youtube: https://youtu.be/c0_X6qdVgic
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/curiousonearth/4-ethan-nadelmann
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3fxHaRL
Apple podcasts: https://apple.co/3sZy6bi

Patreon: http://patreon.com/curiousonearth
Twitter: https://twitter.com/curiousonearth
Instagram: https://instagram.com/curiousonearth

27/08/2022

"Once grief has informed your understanding of love, I think that's when you begin to love for real. Because all of the limits to your love are present now. You're not pretending. You're not loving like a seven-year old. You're loving like a grown-up. That's the beginning. That's the ability that grief gives you to fully inhabit your days."

After a long wait, here's the third episode of Curious on Earth, featuring worker, author, musician, storyteller and culture activist Stephen Jenkinson of Orphan Wisdom. He deals with themes such as death, grief and elderhood. Stephen spent part of his life working in palliative care, witnessing the dying processes of hundreds if not thousands of people and their loved ones, and therefore has quite a bit to say about our relationship with dying.

Other themes we discuss include the difference between handmade tools and machines and their implications on hand and will, the essence of elderhood and wisdom (as Stephen says, a wise elder is not the same as an old person – there's a lot of crazy people), what it would mean to parent in a sane culture, raising children with village-mindedness, syntytieto, slowing down in a culture that treats slowing down as regress, the alchemy of crafting wine, what it means to become an ancestor, embracing temporariness, the reluctance of people working with dying people to actually talk about dying without euphemisms, and the art of loving when there's no forever.

The episode was shot some time after the birth of my lovely daughter Elna who, as many of you have heard, had quite a rough start and spent the first weeks of her life in emergency care. Before she was born, I had been reading Stephen's book Die Wise as a preparation for the podcast, and continued reading it throughout the time of the hospitalization. Somehow, reading a book on dying at a time where we were faced with the very real possibility that our daughter might not survive – or if she did, it might be with a heavy price – ended up strengthening my trust and appreciation in this precious life. Today, Elna is four and a half months old, full of life and, to the best of our knowledge, healthy and well.

Diving into Stephen's mind brings challenge. His thinking is rich in expression and meaning, and he's not the most easily approachable crafter of words. But allowing his passionate soul time to speak to you is well worth the effort. I hope you enjoy my conversation with him.

Youtube: https://youtu.be/t_EiXnzMR9U
Soundcloud: http://soundcloud.com/curiousonearth/3-stephen-jenkinson
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3TkhZRw
Apple podcasts: https://apple.co/3dUESLb

Patreon: http://patreon.com/curiousonearth
Facebook: https://facebook.com/curiousonearth
Twitter: https://twitter.com/curiousonearth
Instagram: https://instagram.com/curiousonearth

25/02/2022

It'll be a while till I get to release the next episode (we're expecting a baby soon), but in the meanwhile, here's my video interview with neuroscientist Christopher Timmermann who does fascinating work on psychedelics such as DMT and L*D. I did this for Psykedeelitutkimusyhdistys ry (Finnish Association for Psychedelic Research). It was shot back in 2019 but only released now.

Interview with neuroscientist Chris Timmermann who researches psychedelics such as DMT and L*D at Imperial College London. Conducted at the Breaking Conventi...

19/01/2022

Patreon Zoom tomorrow at 6PM UTC+2!

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26/11/2021

How do we build lasting things together, or even survive, in our increasingly digital time that incentivizes tribalization, the demonization of our fellow humans and zero-sum games, and where the rate of everything changing seems to accelerate on an exponential curve?

Parts of the solution likely lie in learning to deal with and integrate paradoxes and a multiplicity of perspectives – to hear, understand and bridge between people from all walks of life in an ever more connected world. In thinking hard about wisdom and growth and how to serve them. In thinking really hard about the tomorrow we want our children to know, and in planting trees in whose shade we ourselves shall never sit.

Back in 2017, I started feeling a weird pull towards something called "metamodernism". I was first introduced to the term through the work of digitalization researcher Lilja Tamminen. Metamodernism is hard to explain or even describe, but it can be understood as a cluster of ideas, a metameme, perhaps an attractor, that affects our ways of framing and relating to the world. Originating in the fields of art and literary theory, metamodernism has expanded into many stimulating directions.

Especially when it comes to political strands of metamodernism, one of its central visionaries is theory artist Emil Ejner Friis, who along with sociologist Daniel Görtz is strangely involved with Hanzi Freinacht's very inspiring books The Listening Society and The Nordic Ideology. Encountering their intense work on whatever it is that might transcend the modern and the postmodernism has helped me refine my thinking on several questions that I find to be of high importance:

How's the future of democracy? How do we learn to deepen our appreciation of disagreement and diversity? How can society support the growth and flourishing of its citizens regardless of their ideological and temperamental stances? Why and where do capitalism, communism and all the other ideological systems fail and what do they eventually get outcompeted by? How do we keep on loving on a planet populated by intelligent machines?

Metamodernism brings together many approaches and processes that I find resonating and worth cultivating. Instead of asking what it "is", it might be better understood by asking what it does. To elaborate on the above, here's some angles that I find compatible with metamodernism (and to some extent, with postrationality, game B, integral theory and similar, eh, attractors):

• Embracing both "both/and" and "either/or" thinking ("Free will or determinism? How about both and neither?")
• Reaching beyond the alienating effects of cynicism, nihilism and irony ("I'm not /really/ touched by their music, I'm just nodding my head from afar and playing cool") towards an area of (possibly embarrassing) honesty and vulnerability ("this song makes me cry in public")
• Learning to appreciate uncertainty ("It's not possible for me to know what it's like to have a child before it happens. It's a leap of faith.")
• Making an effort towards understanding people with stupid- or even delusional-seeming viewpoints and resisting the urge to constantly polarize ("they are the epitome of everything that's wrong in current society!")
• Learning to steelman disagreeing viewpoints and allowing oscillation and arguments between them ("Lab leak, natural origin, something in between?")
• Bridging between the subjective and the objective and related polarities (art/science, myth/truth, self/world)

I know that much of this might seem a bit vague. Grasping metamodernism is a slow process. But as many other people have said, getting more intimate with has felt a bit like installing a new operating system, a new interface for making sense of the weird intricacies of the world and all the complex problems we're currently facing. I'm therefore very grateful to have Emil Ejner Friis as the second guest in my podcast Curious on Earth. At an hour's running time, this is hopefully just the beginning of a more in-depth discussion.

https://youtu.be/g8CBgfvkjv4

Also available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud etc. Links in comment!

06/10/2021

You can now find the podcast on iTunes, and through that, on many of your favorite podcast services. If there's a particular one you'd like to listen on, please let me know!

04/10/2021

Hello, curious earthlings! There's a small favor I'd like to ask: When the Youtube channel of Curious on Earth reaches a hundred subscribers, I'll be able to get a short URL instead of the current, horrible one (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3WowHfrzDog7EYiZAQFUfg). If you want to help – and of course, if you use Youtube and want to get notified of new episodes – you can do so by subscribing to the podcast there.

You can also follow the podcast in Soundcloud (https://soundcloud.com/curiousonearth) or Spotify (https://spoti.fi/3uAw41n). I'm also working to get the podcast on iTunes soon, which will make it available in many of your favorite podcast apps.

On social media, you can follow the show on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/curiousonearth/) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/curiousonearth).

I'll be recording the next episode in a couple of weeks. Stay tuned!

Driven by a deep thirst for understanding, Curious on Earth is a slow enough podcast by Henry Soinnunmaa, Finnish musician, writer and amateur generalist. So...

27/09/2021

I (Henry Soinnunmaa) am turning 37 today. To celebrate this, I'd like to announce that the first episode of my new podcast, Curious on Earth, is now out! My guest is the mindblowing Marcia Bjornerud, professor of geosciences and environmental studies from Lawrence University, Wisconsin.

In her book Timefulness, Marcia lays out some of the ways in which thinking like a geologist can help us perceive and think about the world in a saner way – by placing humans and human experience in the context of the billions of years that have built our wonderful planet into what we now witness. Over the course of my life, I hadn't really thought that much about geosciences, but encountering Marcia's work has kindled a new kind of curiosity towards them – and helped me relate to natural objects like rocks, mountains and even continents with a new kind of appreciation.

The concept of timefulness can be contrasted with mindfulness, and these two ways of orienting towards the world and time complement each other. Where mindfulness is all about focusing on the now, timefulness is about polytemporality – the different time scales and cycles that shape our world, the weight of slow history they carry with them and the impact this has on us.

Something strange can happen when you start thinking about rocks and other similar phenomena as verbs instead of nouns – dynamic, changing timeful processes instead of static objects. For the last couple of centuries, geoscientists have been piecing together the amazing stories that natural objects and formations of all scales tell to those who listen, resulting in what's called the map of the geolocial timescale – the deep history of events that have taken (and are taking) place on our planet.

Thinking about deep time – hundred of thousands, millions, even billions of years – is hard but necessary. One of the rare areas in our society where this kind of thinking is in the limelight is nuclear waste storage. If the aim is to survive through all the current crises our civilization is facing, we really need to expand this kind of long-term perspective to all areas of life and society.

Some of the most important questions driving Curious on Earth are the same ones that affect everything I do: ones of short- and long-term human and non-human flourishing. How do I live a meaningful life on this planet in a way that respects both the currently living and future generations across species? Having Marcia on as my first guest feels like the perfect choice for setting the tone of my new series.

Some technicalities: I'll be recording most of the episodes in my new podcast by video call, but not with the sh*tty compressed quality of your average video conference call. Apart from the foreword and afterword of this episode (which I somehow recorded with the wrong mic input), the audio quality should be quite pleasant since I use a service that records audio and video locally for both speakers. Please forgive my occasional awkward English in the episode – my related muscles seemed to need a bit of oiling up.

Curious on Earth is available in Youtube, Soundcloud and (hopefully in a couple of hours), Spotify, iTunes and most of the usual podcast providers – if you want to keep updated on future episodes, please follow the podcast in your favorite ones, and also follow on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

If you'd like to financially support the podcast or my work in general, I also have a new, English Patreon page out. Links for all of these in the comment section.

And yeah, just... wow.

I feel such a deep gratitude for being able to focus on, and learn about, things that I find valuable and am most curious about. Looking forward to where this new adventure will lead. I am so thankful for being born and for still being alive in these weird times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpoRLcPD-gU