The Kainos Podcast

Join Alexander and Ari on 28 August at 6pm London time for a private community session on AI filmmaking, the aesthetics of the future and the role of art in shifting culture by signing up as a founding member. Each month, we host group sensemaking sessions, invite guests like Iain McGilchrist and Nora Bateson, and learn new practices together.

A year ago, my friend Ari Kuschnir produced an AI film of Donald Trump drinking Ayahuasca. He sent it to me and it blew me away. It was funny, nuanced and beautifully crafted, and we teamed up to promote...

Stephanie Lepp is an award-winning producer, storyteller, and speaker, whose work strives to expand hearts and minds. She’s the former Executive Director at the Institute for Cultural Evolution, a non-profit think tank that addresses political polarization at its cultural roots. Before that, she was the Executive Producer at the Center for Humane Technology, the organization at the heart of the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. Today, she leads Synthesis Media, a non-profit production studio devoted to expanding hearts and minds.

Stephanie recently delivered a TED Talk about her project Faces of X, which uses a ‘thesis, anti...

To help us make more films like this, and to gain access to the full interviews with ‘Leviathan’ guests, our ‘Sensemaking Companion’ and an extensive archive, become a Kainos subscriber for just $6 a month.

Synopsis

Why is social trust breaking down, and how do we find it again? This is the question at the heart of Leviathan. Directed and produced by Alexander Beiner, it draws on sociology, myth, psychology, economics and systems theory to delve into the deep code of culture and make sense of the times we live in. It’s a journey that invites th...

Join Helena Norberg-Hodge, Douglas Rushkoff, John Vervaeke, Nora Bateson, Josh Schrei and more in Sensemaking 102. Navigate complexity and embody new narratives around Tech, Economics, Myth, Power, Systems and Meaning. The live cohort begins on Wednesday, June 11 and the content only option is available throughout the course.

McDonalds in the desert. Coca-Cola in the mountains. The International Monetary Fund. The World Bank. The same clothes, the same thoughts, the same ideas recycled through different cultures again and again.

Anger at globalisation is one of those rare forces that unites people across the political spectrum. As modern...

Journey into the deep code of culture in our new online course: Sensemaking 102. Expand your view on what’s happening and why with the help of an amazing faculty and new practices. Connect with like-minded travellers to inquire, question, and embody. Myth. Power. Economics. Tech. Systems. Meaning. Register on studiokainos.com/sensemaking-102

What matters most, what we do or how we do it? Which is more real, a relationship or a rock? Our focus at Kainos throughout the spring has been on the polarities driving our cultural, political and spiritual upheaval.

Our recent conversation with ps...

I’m on my way to Australia for a tour hosted by Small Giants Academy! We’re kicking off with a preview screening of the upcoming Kainos documentary ‘Crossroads’ and a talk at the Byron Bay Theatre on Saturday 22nd of March - get your tickets here.

Having been ‘woke critical’ since 2016, in recent years I’ve felt increasingly vindicated as mainstream culture has pushed back against the institutionalisation of social justice theory.

The publication of the Cass Report in 2024 felt like the straw that broke the camel’s back here in the UK, and I wrote a piece...

Thank you Tom Morgan, Ed Prideaux, Chuck Lynd, j juniper, Will hodgins, and many others for tuning into my live video with Abi Millar! Join me for my next live video in the app.

For the first month of Kainos, Alexander Beiner is having conversations with some of the most important and heterodox voices exploring how to build a more beautiful world. In this conversation with systems theorist, poet and filmmaker Nora Bateson, we explore the new capacities we need to develop to navigate a time of upheaval when we don't know where we're headed.

There are just two places left for our breathwork and sensemaking course ‘Breathing in Culture’ which begins on 13 November - join here. Trish Blain and I are also offering a free ‘NonOrdinary Sensemaking’ session around the US election on 14 November which you can sign up for here and read more about at the end of this page.

In my recent pieces, I’ve been making sense of the US election through the lens of where we get our news from, exploring the growing split between the legacy and alternative media. This has been a big focus of my work si...

In this episode I speak with Nicola Price who runs the breathwork school Inspirational Breathing. Breathwork has exploded in popularity in recent years, with some people calling it ‘the new yoga’. But what is it exactly, and how can we reconnect to ourselves, come up with new ideas and process emotions just by breathing?

I’ve been training as a breathwork facilitator with Inspirational Breathing for the past year, and in November we’re launching a new course, Breathing in Culture, where you’ll have the opportunity to dive into this practice, working with a trained facilitator in small gr...

In this podcast episode, I speak with Trish Blain about her concept of ‘consciousness agility’ and why it can help us move into new territory in our lives. We also talk about what it takes to turn wisdom into action, why collaborating with others can be so difficult, and why creativity isn’t just about artistic expression, but a force that lies at the heart of reality. 

Trish and I have designed a new process called NonOrdinary Impact, and we’re running a free taster session on Monday 20th of May, which you can sign up for here. <...

The best conversations unravel new threads with every turn of phrase. You’re left with a tapestry, not of answers but of new possibilities. I had a feeling that a dialogue with Josh Schrei might weave that kind of tapestry, and I wasn’t disappointed.

If you haven’t heard of his podcast The Emerald, I’d highly recommend it. It’s gained a dedicated following over the last few years, and is as much an endeavour in ‘mythic sensemaking’ as it is an artistic expression. The Emerald “explores the human experience through a vibrant lens of myth, story, and...

There are only 6 live tickets remaining for my course New Ways of Knowing, which kicks off in less than a week. Join a collective inquiry into the ideas and practices that help us thrive in a time of upheaval, with a world-class faculty and participants from more than 20 countries.

Where’s the vital edge in culture today? How do we find art to shove us into the abyss, taboo conversations to open our minds, and shards of wisdom to open our hearts?

For Peter Limberg, this is a question we have to take seriously, but a...

In the 1960’s, communications theorist Marshall McLuhan famously wrote ‘the medium is the message’. Thousands of years before he lived, we were already expressing this idea through our creation myths; myths in which the universe is spoken into being, or danced into form. At a deep level, we’ve always known that how our world is created tells us about what has been created.Today, advanced AI is forcing us to ask what it means when the medium is disconnected from the embodied world; held in distant servers and immortal algorithms. It’s a question that one of the godfathers...

Everything in our lives, from our relationships down to the cells of our hearts, is a process of combining. Things connect to other things to form relationships that create more than the sum of their parts, and in this way the world emerges. As Nora Bateson puts it in her new book, Combining, nothing we see is ‘just that and nothing more.’ 

This piece is a combination of words and sound, as I recently recorded a conversation with Bateson, which you can find as an audio podcast above, or on Apple Podcasts and most other podcast platforms. Nora...