2 • What is a Liminal Agent?

What is a “Liminal Agent”?

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Welcome to the second episode of “Wyrd Work with Dr Fox.” This was... this was a big one. I got swept up in one of my favourite topics—liminality—and, well, here we are.

This is an episode that attempts to answer the question “What is a Liminal Agent?”

Here’s a working definition:

A liminal agent is someone who works on the deciding conditions from inside a transition whose far side they cannot see—shaping that which is to become, with and within the becoming.

I shan’t make a habit of solo episodes that span more than two hours—so enjoy it whilst it’s here. 😅

⟠ The transcript (lightly edited)

00:00 Opening the liminal space

Hello friends, this is Jason here, and you’re listening to Wyrd Work with Dr Fox: a podcast ostensibly offering wit, wisdom and wiles to help you live and lead in this time betwixt worlds.

In this episode we shall be exploring the question: what is a liminal agent? What is a liminal agent?

In the last episode, episode one, we talked about what wyrd work is. It was a big episode, and I’m not sure I nailed it. But I enjoy these wending episodes. So strap in: we’re going to have another solipsistic, wending yarn as we explore what it is to be a liminal agent. This episode itself will be a liminal form. Here we are, opening up the liminal space. Who knows what will happen—but I say, just enjoy the journey.

In Japan, when rain falls whilst the sun is shining, it’s called a fox’s wedding: kitsune no yomeiri. I like the idea of a fox’s wedding. The sun shining, and yet it’s raining. Two things at once. Liminality often refers to the in-between, and also to the both-and. And if we were to go metamodern with this, it’s both/and, and either/or, and neither/nor. There’s an everything-is-everything kind of vibe to the liminal, at least as I perceive it—or at least through the transperspectival lens I’m bringing to this.

I relish in words, and I share this podcast with kindred spirits. One of the main pieces of feedback I get from a subset of folks who listen is something along the lines of, “I feel so dumb when I listen to this.” And that is the last thing I wish for you. My relishing in words is something of an affliction. I love it. I really love it. There is something so apt to the exquisiteness of finding the right word—of articulating the right word at the right moment in time. One might call this hermeneutics: the ability to aptly distil and translate the infinitely complex phenomena we experience into words that are timely, relevant and apt.

That is wit itself. That is hermeneutics, which is a function of Hermes, of course: the trickster god of crossroads, of boundaries and transgressions (more transgressions than boundaries), of exchange, of mercuriality, of Mercury. And I love it. I’m a Mercury-retrograde-combust, along with my sun sign, so me and Hermes are probably quite fused in some respects. I’m trying my best to exist in spaces beyond the thinkerly, cerebral space, but I still relish in it. So if you find yourself not quite understanding what is being articulated, that’s my failing.

My hope, though, is that there might be some embrace of the warm data, as Nora Bateson describes it: the contextual texture and tonality and warmth; all the nonverbal elements of a communication that we can’t really see, but that you could perceive with your heart. I’m hoping that’s conveyed too.

So even if I say some word you don’t understand, chances are I may have just made it up. I do that quite a lot. In fact, one of the moves I often make is to dispense a cloud of terms, because my main thing is that I want you to be alive to the dynamism of what is being communicated. There’s always a risk, when a particular term is expressed, that there is too much coherence—too much reification of that term. Reification is what we might call misplaced concreteness: we take something that ought to be nebulous and concretise it. We make it too solid, too real, too graspable. In doing that, you can hold on to it; you can feel it; it’s real. And yet it’s no longer moving.

A lot of the concepts here brush up against complex adaptive living systems. We’re also entering into a current that one could say is magical. And so the sensibility I try to maintain is to keep the dynamism—to keep the aliveness alive. That can sometimes translate to bafflement. It can sometimes leave you in a… hmm. I wouldn’t say confused. There’s another term I’ll introduce in this episode, aporetic. But let’s say a state in which you are not settled, if that makes sense.

I get it, we all want to be settled. But this is not the comforting litany of affirmations to keep you exactly as you are. I’m hoping this episode will be affirming for liminal agents, particularly. But I’m trying to share two things at once. One: I’m not likely to change my proclivity to wax loquaciously, and to surreptitiously, obliquely perambulate around particular points. Nor am I likely to give up my penchant for using words that I love, and making some up. At the same time, I want you to know that you are already, always enough. And whatever feeling arises in you, my wish is for your patience and forgiveness as I do my thing.

The landscapes we’re going to tour through in this podcast are so wondrous—but it’s also taken me decades to get to this point. My early training was in living systems, ecology and environmental sciences. I was one of those rare cases that went straight through into PhD land, and so the scholarly aspect has its own immaturity to it. I’d like to think I’ve matured and weathered a little, but there’s still this romantic notion within me of collectively participating in the noösphere: the sphere of human thought, the collective knowledge we share. And I don’t know—mayhaps I get possessed by some spirits that like to frolic about these linguistic domains.

Actually, I’m going to pause here. I want to share a particular aspect of this. We’re going to be talking about what a liminal agent is in this episode.

07:57 What is a liminal agent?

It’s the crux of who I’ve realised I love working with and for: the liminal agents of this world.

Let me give you a quick tl;dr. Liminality is the middle phase of a transition. When we are changing, it’s the process of the changing itself: the old form has been loosened, and the new one has not yet set. We’re in that fertile field of possibility, where everything is open and as yet uncollapsed.

And so here’s a working definition of a liminal agent:

A liminal agent is someone who works on the deciding conditions from inside a transition whose far side they cannot see—shaping that which is to become, with and within the becoming.

I’ll say that once more. A liminal agent is someone who works on the deciding conditions from inside a transition whose far side they cannot see; shaping that which is to become, with and within the becoming.

Liminality is something many of us experience, and the default response for most is to collapse it, or close it down as quickly as possible, because this time in-between is not necessarily comfortable. I don’t always enjoy it. But a liminal agent is someone who can inhabit this space and express choicefulness and agency. And thus they’re better placed to affect the underlying conditions: to attend to and gently perturb the underlying conditions that quicken and catalyse development, emergence and change, to hearken back to my description of wyrd work from episode one. And so liminal agency, liminal leadership and wyrd work overlap quite significantly.

But I’m going to pause. This is not in my notes at all, but I want to articulate why I so often inelegantly stumble and sprout forth so many words. I swear it’s not only to baffle and vex you—although, as Nassim Taleb says, difficulty awakens the genius. There’s something to be said for creating enough perturbation that things aren’t settled. When things settle, you can start to see the layers. Shake up a glass that contains various liquids, give it time, and things will settle into layers. And that’s great, because then we can clearly demarcate; we can categorise, optimise, reduce and be quite analytical. There’s definitely a time and place for that. I’d say the time and place for that is most of the time, in most of the places.

But not all. And this logic—I think it’s Aristotle’s law of the excluded middle—this intolerance for this and that (it’s either this or that); this intolerance for the in-between, for the both-and, for paradox, for ambiguity, for complexity even—is the very thing that keeps us stuck where we are. It’s the very thing that gives rise to the anguish and the angst and the tension and the stagnation we find ourselves in. And so it gives rise to the conditions that behove liminal agency and wyrd work.

11:33 Apt words

So let’s take a bunch of words that sound similar, yet are subtly—exquisitely—distinct: accuracy, aptness, truth, precision, honesty and fact. Six terms.

Accuracy is a precise correspondence between perception and reality. Aptness is the quality of being particularly suitable or fitting for specific circumstances or roles: something might be accurate, but not apt. Truth—and there are some interesting distinctions here around capital-T Truth—is that which endures exposure. It can’t be fully denied, covered over or simply explained away, and it’s distinct from accuracy and honesty. There’s also some utility in true enough, which is more of a metarational term: it doesn’t have to be totally, absolutely true; it just needs to be true enough to function. Precision is the fineness of resolution with which something is specified, measured or expressed. Honesty is the alignment of speech with your own inner perception: you’re saying what you actually believe to be so. And fact is a state of affairs taken to be established—what is the case, independent of anyone’s caring about it.

So even though fact, accuracy, precision, honesty, aptness and truth are all clustered in the same cloud, they’re each expressing something a little different. Truth is what endures exposure. Aptness asks: does this fit, here and now, for this? Honesty asks: are we articulating what we actually perceive and experience? Precision: how attuned, how precise is this? Accuracy: does the account actually match the reality? And fact is simply what is the case.

There are many people who peddle in mere fact, as I like to say. We are not such folk. We do not peddle in mere fact.

So what I’m trying to articulate is that there is something to relish in the aptness of words—and in the acuity you have: the presence of mind to recognise your choicefulness amongst the myriad words you can choose to articulate and express. That is powerful. To fellow spellcasters, to fellow wizards listening to this: language is how we shape the world. Language is the sea in which we swim; it’s to us as water is to a fish. And when you have perspectival acuity, as I wrote about in a previous newsletter, you can recognise the perspective you’re in. You can recognise the language you’re using and the words you’re choosing, and understand that these have their own affordances and limitations—and that the perspective you take is just one perspective you can take. Things may look very different from other perspectives.

All of this is very much alive in me. This podcast is one of the trickiest things for me to do, because I’m without a discernible audience. So much of the work of a liminal agent—and we shall be getting into this in depth—is always already attunement. There’s this ongoing, active attunement in which we pay attention to the context we’re in and to our own inner worlds, and orientate accordingly: situationally adjusting our disposition so that we may maintain as much optionality as we can. But it’s not simply about preserving optionality. Sometimes we need to oscillate into action and enact things. All of this is part of a dynamic dance. That’s probably the best way to think of it: it’s a dance. We’re co-creating an emergent process, actively engaging in a surrendered participation within an unfurling process. This is what it looks like when we’re in the transition—when we’re in the in-between.

All right. We’ve already gone much deeper than I’d intended. My gosh. I’m trying my best—the last thing I want to do is create some academic podcast so obscure it makes people’s minds hurt. I don’t want that. My heart is so warm, and I’m so keen for you to come with me on this journey.

I get it. Long COVID is a thing. We’re in a distraction economy, in a world that is overworked. People are fatigued; people are seeking sweet relief—the salvation of a nice, easy, familiar, safe, predictable answer with precedents, that can be easily implemented and measured and optimised. I get it. But there are some of us—some special few—who can see beyond this, or at least seek beyond this.

17:04 Sensing the shift

So, before we get into liminal agency: you might be the kind of person who notices that shifts are happening. Have you ever walked into a room and felt the vibes? I love this expression: the vibes are off. There’s great perspectival acuity there. There’s great sensing—probably with your heart as the sensing field, and your body as a sensing field. There’s a non-conceptual knowing, an intuition, that makes itself known to you before you can actually articulate and conceptualise it. Usually it’s a sense that there’s something here: a potency, or a criticality.

By criticality, I mean this. Imagine a bunch of sand piling into a pyramid. Any single grain of sand dropped onto that pyramid could set off a big cascade of change. Another grain goes on; nothing changes. Another grain goes on. But criticality is building up within the system. It’s the straw that breaks the donkey’s back. (It’s really unfortunate. I feel sad for the donkey.) And you have a sense—almost a premonition—of change that is about to come, or a sense that we’re already in the process.

Not everyone has this readily available to them. I’m trying to avoid hierarchies of development here; I think these are sensibilities we all have access to. But that access is influenced by our physiological state, our wellbeing, how well rested we are, our context, what’s going on in our worlds, how resourced we are. So, assuming you are well rested and well resourced, it may well be that you can sense these changes.

You may sense it in your own world, too. It may be that the work you do has lost its charm. It may be that you’ve reached a plateau, and none of the existing patterns in your life—your habits, your behaviours, the trajectories you’re on, the goals you have—are quite working to inspire you. There’s a sense that something has to change for you to continue to develop and flourish, to unfurl and deepen and grow. This is very much at the crux of the Ritual of Becoming, which I’ve been running for about a dozen years now. It’s not a glorious feeling most of the time. It’s a premonition. It’s ominous, a lot of the time. It’s like: shit.

And this kind of omen—ominous omens; paying attention to signs and symbols; perspectival acuity; the acuity for anomaly; the sensing of what’s going on within your inner landscape, and what’s happening beyond, in a more-than-rational sense—is what liminal agents are attuned to.

20:16 The liminal web

So this is the domain of the liminal agent. Liminality exists. Whether we express agency or not: that is the key question here.

In the future, I’m hoping to have a conversation on this podcast with my dear friend Joe Lightfoot. (I haven’t actually asked him yet, but I’m quite sure he’ll be up for it.) Joe is the author of A Collective Blooming, and he has The Lightfoot Podcast. He coined the term the liminal web: an apt descriptor for an emergent blend of metamodern, integral, Game B, neo-shamanic, more-than-rational, complexity-congruent folk—a cohering network of practitioners that was emerging around the world. My sense is that it was coined in maybe early 2020; I’m not sure. [It was 2021.] But Joe coined the term, and then, along with Peter Limberg of The Stoa, they put it to rest. They had a death ceremony for the term the liminal web, which was a beautiful thing to do. It freed the term. And to my sense of things, liminal web remains one of the best descriptors for this fertile and emergent collection of warm-hearted, bright-minded, largely odd and weird folk attuned to this time between worlds.

So yes, hopefully we’ll have a chat with Joe at some point.

22:05 A time between worlds

But let’s talk about this time between worlds. You’ll often hear me talk about living and leading in this time betwixt worlds. I do like betwixt. (We’ll be referencing an essay, “Betwixt and Between”, soon.) This “time between worlds” really came onto my radar because of Dr Zak Stein’s book Education in a Time Between Worlds.

Prior to that, there’s Antonio Gramsci, who was imprisoned under a fascist regime about a hundred years ago. You may have heard the quote. It’s one of those quotes with its own syncretic quality: this is not actually the translation, but I like it, and it’s the popular one that has held. I believe it was Slavoj Žižek (is that how you say his name?) who tweaked it a little. The quote is:

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”

A time between worlds is a period in which the systems, the stories and the institutions that have held our civilisation together have stopped working, and nothing has yet replaced them. The old world’s rules still shape daily life, but they no longer make sense of what’s happening, and they will no longer serve for what is to become. The new world isn’t a destination we can quite see yet. It’s being shaped now, by how we move through this space: the liminality, the in-between.

By the way, we’re going meta at the moment—we’re at the civilisational scale. We’ll zoom in to the personal scale later. But at the civilisational scale, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (who has also published as Vanessa Andreotti) wrote a wonderful book, Hospicing Modernity. There’s this blend of hospicing that which was, whilst midwifing that which is to come.

And so this is the space of wyrd work. This is the fertile domain: the transition betwixt decomposition and composition, rot and renewal, collapse and emergence. I agree with Nate Hagens that collapse is perhaps too dramatic a term. It evokes the Tower card in tarot: the lightning, the gods striking us down for our hubris and folly in building so great. It’s probably going to be experienced more like a combination of enshittification—of things decomposing and just not quite working—whilst also, as Báyò Akómoláfé speaks of, attending to and feeding the leaks.

You can’t be anti-capitalist, because any anti-stance feeds its opposition. This is part of the principle of polarity, which us pseudo-Hermeticists will know of: to be anti-something is to strengthen the thing you’re against. And so the move here is sideways. Hence why you’ll hear me talking about a broadening of the senses—a widening of the field of more-than-rational sensibilities. We’re opening our hearts and our minds. We’re recognising our own allergies, our own cognitive biases, our own predilection for easy answers, for that which can be measured, for that which is safe and familiar: the defaults we’re so accustomed to. We’re recognising all of that, and choosing to inhabit this space betwixt and between. This behoves negative capability: the ability not only to function within paradox and ambiguity and complexity, but maybe even to be effective within it.

25:53 Ecotones

When we say liminality, one of my favourite examples is the notion of ecotones. If you’ve ever hiked between different ecosystems, you may have appreciated ecotones first-hand.

One of my favourite walks is the Bibbulmun Track in the south-west of Western Australia. There’s a particular route I’ve done with friends quite a few times, where you start off in deep karri forests along the Frankland River: huge karri trees, in an area with incredible caves. It’s wet sclerophyll forest, lush and wondrous. And then, as you’re hiking, it opens up into coastal heathlands, and eventually to the ocean itself. Along the way, the trees start to thin out; different species occur; the soil type changes; there’s the effect of the sea spray from the ocean winds. You go from these deep karri forests to the succulent, waxy cuticles of the coastal vegetation and shrubs, with the open skies. And gosh, it feels so good after being in the deep forest. I love forests, but the sky opens up, and the south-west of Western Australia has these incredible cold fronts you can see coming through kilometres away. And there’s the sheer elemental power of being atop tall sand dunes with the Southern Ocean resplendent before you. My gosh. It’s a thing.

But the thing I like about this is the ecotones. Think about any transition zone: estuary, mangrove, intertidal, riparian, forest margin. The edges, where you get overlapping ecosystems, are some of the most diverse places. The edges hold species from both sides, plus specialists that can be found nowhere else. And this is why a lot of living-ecology metaphors are so apt, particularly in this time betwixt worlds. We want to look to the edge spaces.

Now, liminal has its etymological roots in threshold. I like threshold, but I feel threshold is much more at the local level. A threshold is a doorway, an archway, a decision moment, a crossroads: a place in which a choice is being made. Do I proceed—and if so, how? Or do I continue as I was? This threshold, this kind of demarcation, is an important element of liminality. But I like to extend it, particularly at the civilisational scale, to the transitory phase we’re in.

Think back to episode one, when I talked about cymatics: the sand on the speaker, adjusted through various frequencies, creating different patterns. The phase shift—the transition from one stable pattern to another—is a liminal transition. Even though that happens within a split second, in a civilisational context it can look like hundreds of years. We’re in that right now.

So, from an ecosystem perspective, these edge spaces—these ecotones—allow for a rich diversity.

29:30 The opportunistic generalist

And they also allow for the emergence of opportunistic generalists.

Our society has heavily indexed on specialisation, and so we have experts—specialised experts. And of course artificial intelligence is pulling the rug out from under a lot of domain expertise and knowledge. Those who have the sensibilities and not merely the skills—the metarationality to complement the skills—will do okay in this transition. There’s a fluid competence, a wise discernment, a choicefulness and a taste that is very difficult to replicate via large language models. They’ll be okay. But those who haven’t cultivated more-than-rational sensibilities—perspectival acuity, developmental sensibilities, and many of the things we shall be talking about in Wyrd Work—may not do so well.

The opportunistic generalists, though, will. And one of the best examples of an opportunistic generalist is the fox.

I have nominative determinism here, so of course I see fox in many things. This is a consequence—this is part of the wyrd—of having a last name that is Fox. As a young child I would recognise the fox in fairy tales and stories. When I saw a fox I’d get very excited. People would give me gifts with foxes on them. From a very young age, it seems encoded within me and engrammed that I have a proclivity for noticing fox. I’m just confessing my bias here: I have a love of fox. I love what fox represents.

I know the fox doesn’t have the best reputation in Australia, but the fox is a textbook edge species. Foxes thrive betwixt forest and field. They do particularly well in disturbed areas, and since much of civilisation disturbs the natural world, foxes tend to flourish. Farmers don’t like foxes. Foxes were brought here to Australia, where this podcast is being recorded, primarily to be hunted—so fair enough if foxes don’t like humans so much; they’ve been part of humans’ blood sport here. Foxes are very good at adapting across different zones. They also tend to be most active at dusk and dawn, the temporal edges of day and night.

So foxes are very liminal creatures. And mythologically, foxes are often seen as messengers—as folk who walk between worlds. The fox is often associated with the trickster archetype; and Trickster makes this world, and Trickster crosses boundaries. And so you have all the folk tales about the fox and the hens, and the fox having wit, wisdom and wiles.

32:33 Mētis: practical cunning

And a kind of mētis: a practical cunning. There are many qualities of fox we can bring into this. (There’s a distinction I shall return to regarding fox and the levels of trickery we talk about.) But I really do like this practical cunning.

There’s an old book—I can’t pronounce the names—Detienne and Vernant’s Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, published in 1974 [in French; the English translation followed in 1978]. It reconstructs mētis: an oblique, polymorphic intelligence suited to shifting, ambiguous situations. Traditional Western philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle onwards, marginalised mētis in favour of abstract, static truths. So for a long time, cunning intelligence has been seen as something hidden and untrustworthy—even though it’s vital to human survival and success.

We see this play out in how Western society has treated its witches, its herbalists, a lot of women, a lot of folk remedies, a lot of cunning folk. Anyone attuned to pagan or animist sensibilities—anyone partaking in practices and arts and magic that couldn’t be readily explained away—was pushed to the edge. And that tends to be where we flourish anyway.

33:58 Liminality itself

But, liminality itself. Let me do a little tour of the classic foundations of liminality. As I say, this podcast shall be a wend. I hope you’re comfortable right now. One of the charms of podcasts is that you can pause and come back. I just genuinely hope you are well, and I’m so glad you’re here, listening.

If you get a moment: with any budding new podcast, it’s always helpful to get positive reviews. If you’re on Apple Podcasts, you can simply tap the five stars and—voilà—one more rating. I’d really love for this to be accessible to more folks, so if so inclined, that would be greatly appreciated. If you’re in the middle of something—a workout, driving a car, a long walk—all good. It’s all fine.

So: van Gennep, 1909 (I may have pronounced that wrong). In Les rites de passage, this anthropologist looked at three-phase patterns across birth, initiation, marriage, death, seasonal festivals and crossings of territory. Effectively, there’s a separation, where you no longer identify with the established context you’re in. There’s the margin—the liminal—where you begin to explore that. And then there’s the aggregation—the post-liminal—where there’s integration. Limen is Latin for threshold, as I explained before. And the main thing van Gennep brought to this, from my perspective, is that liminality refers to this in-between space, and that the person in transit is a passenger. They’re a traveller; they’re in motion; they’re making passage.

35:55 The liminal and limbo

And this is interesting, because one of the degraded states of liminality could be considered limbo. Limbo is suspension without passage. You’re cut off from the old state, but you can’t access a new one, and you don’t have agency. There’s only waiting. That’s not what we’re talking about here.

Liminality can feel like limbo a lot of the time, because one of the sensibilities of a liminal agent is—believe it or not—procrastination. The act of not intervening is itself a wise action. Not doing is sometimes an action: an active state of intentionally holding the tension of the ambiguity, of the complexity, of the liminal state; holding it open longer so as not to prematurely foreclose what is possible, nor preclude options that may yet reveal themselves. It may look like procrastination. And the feeling may be a kind of limbo.

Many of us who have gone through a midlife crisis, or something like it, may have experienced this sense of limbo. I don’t know who I am anymore. I don’t know what to do. I don’t even know what I’m doing. I don’t know what the point of this is anymore. I don’t know where I’m going. I just don’t know. That’s not an easy place to be. These things have their oscillation, and liminality can sometimes oscillate into a feeling of limbo. But they’re quite distinct. Limbo is suspension without passage. When you’re in the liminal, you are in passage.

37:45 Betwixt and between

So: Victor Turner, a Scottish cultural anthropologist who died about eleven days before I was born, and who wrote a book you might know, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. He also wrote an essay titled “Betwixt and Between”. He moved the focus of van Gennep’s work to this transitory state—this middle phase—and this has given liminality most of its modern texture.

Now, as we know, anthropology is a somewhat flawed science. There is no such thing as an objective observer. A lot of anthropology was done in a manner that, I’d suggest, probably occluded 80% of the actual warm, contextual, inhabited, situational wisdom and knowing. Working with the remaining 20% probably abstracted a bunch of things that may not match the actual situation. Nevertheless, “Betwixt and Between” was a formative contribution to the space of the liminal. And remember: in this podcast we’re asking, “What is a liminal agent?” So we’re understanding what the liminal is.

Victor Turner identified the sacra: the cultural components of liminal situations within ritual. He highlighted exhibitions (what is shown), actions (what is done) and instructions (what is said). That’s all well and good. I’ll be talking a little about the importance of thresholds—of creating intentional liminal spaces—as we dip down into the medium and micro levels: the local and group contexts. I believe the civilisational context is too big for any one of us to hold, and so we don’t really have agency over the sacra at that scale.

But one of the other points that he—

40:00 Convivial communitas

Well, there are three more points Victor Turner made about the liminal that I think are quite apt.

He used the term communitas to describe the unranked comradeship of those of us in transit. To quote directly from the essay:

“In this betwixt and between period, in this fruitful darkness, king and people are closely identified. There is a mystical solidarity between them, which contrasts sharply with the hierarchical rank-dominated structure of ordinary life.”

This is very congruent with finite and infinite games. It’s very congruent with Ivan Illich’s sense of conviviality. And this sense of communitas is very congruent with Adlerian psychology, where there is no verticality betwixt folks. This is how I operate. This is the role of infinite players—like all of us. You’re listening to this: we’re all infinite players here. Some of us have forgotten this. Some of us have self-veiled our own infinite nature so as to enact our roles seriously, to the point where we have to remember to forget—or we forget to remember. But we are all infinite players, and so any kind of title is theatrical. There is no greater-than-thou. There’s only horizontal relating.

This is why it’s so weird in friendships when verticality is imposed—when someone starts giving you unsolicited advice. (It’s fine. Everything’s forgiven, of course.) This is where the book Impro by Keith Johnstone is really quite helpful: you get a sense of the status games. And you can play with status, of course; that’s part of the infinite play. You still need to engage in finite games, and to understand the function of roles and titles and the theatre and all of those things. But the liminal agent recognises these as constructs that have utility and function, without getting so swept up in them that it changes how we relate to each other.

What I really like about Victor Turner’s take on the liminal space is that we’re all in this together. Indeed, this is why—as cliché as it may sound—a leadership offsite where everyone hikes up a hill together, camps together, cooks together, breaks bread together, sleeps together (not literally, necessarily) works so well. Sharing in the passage—the travel, the transit—has a great way of levelling the field. We’re all in this together.

Of course, in the work we do, we may inhabit different roles. But at heart we are all wondrous, complex beings, unfurling as functions of life itself. And we relate to each other. We are who we are in how we relate to each other. And so the sense of communitas is such a beautiful revivification. It’s one of the main elements I alluded to in the first episode of Wyrd Work: most of the work of a strategy or leadership offsite is actually created in conditions in which people remember the communitas—remember the togetherness, remember the sense of liminality in passage.

If we don’t establish this, we’ll have the expert—the fragile or brittle expert in the room who has all the answers—or the person with the title and the position of authority who feels they need to be the clever person in the room, or who may feel threatened by change. This stuff needs to be dissolved.

We’ll be talking about temperature in this episode, too: the effect of warmening; of using temperature well as a liminal agent. You want to warm things to dissolve things. You want to heat things to catalyse things. You want to cool things to integrate things. These are all part of your powers as a liminal agent with magical sensibilities.

44:16 The liminal and liminoid

But let me go into another element Victor Turner identified: the term liminoid. This is very apt for today.

By the way, not everyone likes the term liminal. It’s getting overused at the moment. Everything seems “threshold”. Unfortunately, Claude and other large language models seem to love the word liminal. They seem to love the word threshold. And they love the word quietly, too. It’s so irritating.

Gosh. Part of the syncretic cunning—the canny, mercurial, shapeshifting fluidity that allows for the kind of constancy liminal agents express—is knowing when capitalism has come to commodify a term. Sometimes words mean something, and then you have mimetic drift, and the meaning no longer means what it once meant. If you’re still using that word, you need to find another word to articulate what you mean.

This is partly why I’ve really warmed to wyrd work: weird, with a why. Folks stumble on it, and when you explain that it’s got a Y in it, people think that’s weird.

My main worry is that all of these terms can be adopted politically. I’m generally orientated to co-creating a world more curious and kind, and a future less grim. My disposition is egalitarian, and largely sympathetic to—let’s say—progressive, inclusive, integrative politics, although I can understand the perspectives of conservatives. My worry is that wyrd itself will become co-opted by the right. We saw that happen with metamodernism.

This whole left–right thing is so tiresome. In a generative sense, progressives and conservatives ought to be in a generative paradox that alchemises new ways of doing things. You don’t want folks to be too rapidly progressive, because there may be some time-tested, hard-won wisdom lost in that. At the same time, you don’t want things to be so conservative that stagnation sets in, power starts to corrupt, and things that need to change can’t, because they’re stifled. So we need a dynamic betwixt the two. It’s just unfortunate that social media has polarised us and inflamed things. Everyone’s fiery about it.

What I’m trying to say, ultimately, is that liminal is on its way to becoming commodified and corrupted. Before you know it, everyone will be running liminal leadership workshops—and we may already be there. I still love the word. I really love the word. I don’t really like the word leadership. I don’t like innovation. I don’t like strategy. I don’t like motivation. But I still love liminal—possibly because, when I was doing ecological sciences, I worked in liminal ecosystems, particularly wetlands. So enlivening for me. I just love it.

But I also know that Pádraig Ó Tuama, of the Poetry Unbound podcast, doesn’t seem to like the word liminal. And Dr Martin Shaw, the mythologist, doesn’t seem to like it either. These folks will often bring up liminoid, a term Victor Turner coined in 1974. (I don’t like the term coined, by the way. It seems imperialistic, in a sense—literally imprinting your stamp upon something. So let’s just say the term liminoid emerged.)

Liminoid names the modern, optional, individualised aspect of the liminal: passive entertainment, festivals, retreats. It’s where you can engage in liminal-like activities but not be changed. These things have the characteristics of liminal experience, but they’re optional, and they don’t involve the resolution of any crisis. For many of us, when we find ourselves in a liminal space, it’s not entirely optional. Or once we’re in it, it’s not entirely comfortable. And there are things you can come to know in the liminal space that you can’t unknow. So liminoid refers to these other things.

I’d say a lot of the offerings out there have the aesthetic of the liminal. It’s a good aesthetic. I love it. And hey, whatever—I’m down for the liminoid. It’s just that it doesn’t actually carry the transformative and generative magic—the deepening, quickening magic—that a genuine liminal experience has.

Let’s pause for a moment on liminoid. It’s a cool term. It has -oid in it: oid, like void. If you think about the etymology of liminoid, the -oid kind of voids the liminal element of it. Dweeb-a-zoid is a term I’ve used sometimes; I think I got that in primary school. I don’t know. But -oid, droid, android: -oid words are interesting.

One of the words Layman Pascal uses is shamanoid. Layman is an integrative theorist and scholar, the author of Gurdjieff for a Time Between Worlds, and a wonderful metamodern polymath who is very interested in metashamanics. Shamanoid describes the proclivity and propensity for more folks to be attuned to more-than-rational sensibilities, animist sensibilities, things we might describe as magic: shamanic-adjacent. I like shamanoid as a term. There’s something a little bit pathetic about it, in a self-aware way. It kind of voids shaman, and yet shaman is still expressed; it’s still kind of there. Someone calling themselves a shamanoid seems much more trustworthy than someone calling themselves a shaman.

Although trust itself is really contextual. My friend Simon van der Els, I would call a shaman. He would perhaps call himself a shamanic healing practitioner. Calling yourself a practitioner sidesteps the title and the acclaim, because most of us are working in a bricolage of the detritus, amidst an absence of elders or any intact cultural system. Titles like shaman used to be bestowed after quite significant initiation, and long engagement in ritualised liminal spaces. We don’t have that in this demented era we share. And yet we’re still seeing life itself—nature itself—respond to the times with a greater emergence of those of us who have, let’s just say, a renaissance of more-than-rational sensibilities.

Yet we need to be mindful of the words we use. One of the perils of all this, which I’m acutely aware of, is that there can be many traps for the ego: many traps where people feel like they’re special. The nature of a podcast is that this is me chatting with you, but both you and I are in context here. Specialness is a transitory function of shared, entangled experience. We are all entangled here. We’re all entangled in this time between worlds, and in our own lives we sometimes find ourselves in the liminal intentionally, and sometimes not.

52:44 A subjunctive mood

The final thing Victor Turner articulates that I thought was good to share here is the notion of the subjunctive mood. Liminality is culture in the as-if and the might-be: the feeling tone of as if, or of what might be. This is set against the indicative of ordinary structures. In ordinary social structures, the categories are taken as given. In the liminal, they are held up and played with.

So here we’re effectively alluding to poetic sensibilities—the sensibilities of the infinite player. Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries. And in this sense of playing with established categories, we’re brushing up against trickster.

And this is where we’re going to go down a couple of different paths with regard to trickster.

53:43 Permanent liminality

Now, I’m not going to pronounce this name correctly: Árpád Szakolczai. I should know this. I should be able to pronounce these kinds of words. But anyway: Árpád Szakolczai is a Hungarian sociologist who argues that modernity is a kind of permanent liminality.

Do you know what I mean when I say modernity? Let’s think of it as a descriptor for the epoch we live within. The pre-modern would have been very influenced by the church and religion; church and state would have been fused. With modernity, we have the separation of church and state; we have science; we have a belief in rationality, in meritocracy, in the individual, in grand narratives. If you’re a millennial—well, I’m an elder millennial—if you were born pre-internet, you grew up in a time in which the world was officially good and getting better: we were solving all the issues, everything was getting great, blah blah blah. And yeah… now, not so much.

What’s emerged after modernity is postmodernity, which brings apt and accurate critique to many of the structures of modernity itself, asking questions like: why is it only white men who seem to win most of these awards and occupy positions of power? Why does power tend to centralise? Why does wealth seem to accumulate amongst only a few? And hence an articulation of the polycrisis comes about.

Metamodernism comes after postmodernism, and tends to synthesise both modernism and postmodernism. I fell in love with metamodernism maybe a dozen years ago—no, maybe ten—with The Listening Society by Hanzi Freinacht, a political metamodern book I really loved at the time. I then fell out of it for a while, because it reeked a little of Eurocentricity and developmental bias. Whilst I first liked it, I came to see the implications and limitations, and the offence that many developmental models cause without necessarily knowing it.

But in recent times I’ve fallen somewhat back in love with metamodernism, as a useful term to describe this time between worlds and the attempt to integrate and synthesise all that’s emerging. There’s a sincere-ironic, post-tragic disposition that metamodernists adopt that is congruent with emergentism, with Game B, with co-creating a world more curious and kind and a future less grim. So metamodernism is back in my good books—except that this time, I’d be putting Indigenous knowledge systems and wisdom, the wisdom of the ancients, and a lot of the classic scholars on a more equal footing than I previously did. I naively adopted a linear developmental model of civilisation, and it’s much more entangled and messy than that. When I look to the longest continuous culture on this planet, and its ability to live in right relation throughout this time, it is humbling. It makes us realise we have so much to learn and unlearn if we are to rise to the moment these times call for.

But—the subjunctive mood. This Hungarian scholar, responding to Victor Turner’s work, talks about permanent liminality: a transition with no aggregation phase, no integration. I believe this aptly describes the time between worlds we’re in. Because each of the elements that were once stable in life is being dissolved, we’re also losing the things that would uphold the islands of salience: the conditions for meaning.

As I record this, it’s the eleventh of October 2026, and I believe President Trump has sanctioned officials of the International Criminal Court. You have American politicians saying that no American can be held accountable by the International Criminal Court. And this is three years into a livestreamed g▩▩▩▩▩▩e we’re all witnessing, against a backdrop of ecocide and climate catastrophe. I say this as someone who studied in the School of Environmental Sciences and did my PhD there before social media, when it was literally just: this is the science. And yet here we are, in this weird, “post-truth” world.

Because all of these things are dissolving, this Hungarian sociologist—whose name I really should have looked up beforehand—is effectively saying that this permanent liminality is the habitat for tricksters, theatricality and schismogenesis (Gregory Bateson’s term for escalating differentiation).

59:34 The bracketed threshold

The subjunctive mood Victor Turner speaks of is generative because it is bracketed. When there are no brackets, you get this permanent liminality, and as a result you get the domain of tricksters and trickster logic—lowercase-t trickster. I shall talk about that in a moment. But let’s look at this bracketing of liminality.

Stepping down the ladder of abstraction, from civilisation to the individual or group context, bracketing liminality is a very good idea. And one of the figures who comes to mind for this is Hekate. Hekate is the goddess often associated with crossroads, with thresholds, and with the liminal. She’s a psychopomp; she’s a patron of magic, respected—and sometimes worshipped—by many occult practitioners. She’s often symbolised as holding two torches. Thinking symbolically: hold two torches in front of you, and create a space between them. That is the liminal space. And much of magical practice involves proper attendance to thresholds: the opening and closing of liminal spaces.

Now, we don’t have much of this in modern life. Everything blurs and blends. As I often say, every generation believes it’s busier than the previous one, but what everyone has in common now is the internet, and the boundaries between work life and home life have all but disappeared. The pandemic accelerated this. We’re now always on. There’s an attention-slash-distraction-slash-surveillance economy. Everything is listening to us. All our data is being surveilled, observed and harvested. And we’re increasingly living in a warped simulacrum of reality. Some people are now having intimate relationships with synthetic egregores—large language models. It’s a strange time to be in.

And whilst all this mass delusion is happening, the very substrate we depend upon for life—good soil, living forests, food, water, the ecosystems that support life itself—is being subsumed by the superorganism, to quote Nate Hagens: the collective organism we are substrate to, running on the logic of capitalism, feeding on the substrate of life itself. You might call this Moloch, and a bunch of other things. We won’t go into that just now. But this is the time we’re in. We don’t have many rites of passage, and we don’t have much sensibility when it comes to intentionally creating liminal spaces.

Again—I’m sorry I keep using these corporate examples. This is the work I do, would you believe? In fact, most of the work I do is speaking at events. Events themselves are liminal contexts: catalytic containers, ripe for quickening. With the right intervention—with attunement, orientation and the right perturbations—we can bring about a quickening: a rapid development and realisation of latent or dormant potential; a shift in how things are collectively seen and felt and experienced. It can be transformative. The same logic applies to strategy and leadership offsites, which are the other large component of what I do. That’s why I’m always emphasising, where possible, that we need to go offsite. We need to travel to a place. When we arrive, we need to share a meal and go for a long walk together. All of this creates the conditions for liminality and conviviality: the communitas of shared passage.

Events do this. But events are bracketed. And Hekate represents an intentional evocation of the liminal passage. I’m only alluding to magical practices here, because there’s a sensitivity to when and where such things are spoken of. But I’ll just say that a lot of the practice of engaging earnestly with magic involves intentionally attending to these liminal spaces: the opening and closing of thresholds. That’s all I’ll say on that.

1:04:20 Base trickster “logic”

Let’s go with this condition that this Hungarian sociologist says creates trickster logic.

Now, as you know, I’m a big fan of Trickster, and trickster thrives within liminal spaces. But what he describes is what I would call lowercase-t trickster, as opposed to capital-T Trickster. Lowercase-t trickster is the base representation of it. It’s similar to how we might distinguish between philosophers and philosophists. A philosophist is a sophist: they’re into sophistry, which is rhetoric—the clever use of language. A philosophist will help you win an argument, irrespective of whether it is honest, apt, accurate, precise or true. They relish the wordplay. (I think I relish it too.) But the philosopher has a love of wisdom: philosophia, the love of Sophia. And so philosophers and philosophists—lowercase-t trickster and capital-T Trickster—are very different.

I’m sharing this with you because trickster logic is part of the wiles that liminal agents need to be aware of. These logics are often more appropriate to the liminoid, but I think you’ll see why they’re useful to be aware of. There are six things identified as trickster logic.

Insertion. The lowercase-t trickster places themselves between parties: the middle person, the go-between, the interpreter whose position depends on the gap staying open.

I have a great relationship with a couple of speaker bureaus—or individual agents within speaker bureaus—who have integrity, who do wonderful work, who look after me as a speaker and look after the clients who come to bureaus to find speakers. But there are a lot of speaker agencies out there that are opportunistic, lowercase-t tricksters. I’ve had my image and my name used as lead magnets. People search for a speaker, and there’s my picture and my stuff: That’s Jason—click here. They get in touch. These agencies have scraped the data and listed me on their website without my permission. They’ve taken my videos and top-and-tailed them themselves. And when people ask whether Jason is available: Sorry, he’s booked up on that date, but we have these speakers, if you’d be interested. And then they push their exclusive speakers. This is trickster logic. There’s an ecological niche to occupy, and that’s how some bureaus go about it: they insert themselves as the middle person.

One benefit we’re finding in some of this AI stuff is that a lot of bullshit work is evaporating, and a lot of the middle-person industries that have emerged over the past couple of decades are rapidly losing value. So that’s something. But yes: one trickster logic is inserting yourself between things. If you’re between things, you’re the messenger, you’re the interpreter, and you have some power within that.

Imitation without generation. Here we copy the forms of rituals, authority, sincerity and knowledge without being able to produce the substance that gave them weight. We see this a lot on social media platforms. It’s very easy to imitate sophistication at the moment. You can simply ask a large language model to come up with something pithy for you, and flood channels with pithy content.

This calls to mind the worst advice I’ve ever received—and it’s the worst advice precisely because it’s true: it’s better to be a better marketer of what you do than a better doer of what you do. I forget who said it. [It was Australian business speaker Winston Marsh.] I wish I didn’t know the quote. What it means is that it’s much more effective to be top of mind and visible and present, and to spam everyone with superficial sophistication—what I alluded to in the last episode of Wyrd Work as the peak of the midwit curve: the performance of sophistication at high levels of intellectual abstraction. Unfortunately, that’s also where the greater total addressable market is.

So base trickster logic rewards people who are very good at leaping from one Dunning–Kruger peak to another—learning and translating and sharing new things, but never staying long enough to realise that the more you know, the more you know you don’t know; never encountering the epistemological humility that comes with wisdom, and with deepening into a domain. Those folk thrive in this liminality.

This is why I’m such a fan of long-form: of podcasts, particularly unscripted interview podcasts; of live events with open Q&A, where you can actually see the depth of someone’s response. It’s why I’m a fan of the newsletter I share with folks: it’s an epistolary form, in which I write as if to a friend, and it lives on my own independent website. For me, there’s something of a filter in that. Is this honest? Am I comfortable with this being on my website? Not necessarily—there’s always a kind of authenticity hangover that accompanies sharing newsletters and podcasts. But there’s something about the intellectual honesty of it. Even though I cringe looking back at most of my writing—particularly my earlier stuff, which was very performative, in my midwit era—and even though I’ve literally gone and deleted most of my previous work, to set fire to it all and clear the pathway for new beginnings, I like the form.

But I also know there are a lot of folks doing very well who live on LinkedIn. Every day they’re publishing a new thing on LinkedIn, and I’d suggest they’re potentially subject to audience capture, because they’re increasingly catering to what the algorithm wants. But they’re doing well for it. That’s base trickster logic.

Substitution. One thing can always stand in for another: tokens for value, performance for character, metrics for the thing being measured. This Hungarian sociologist talks of the infinite substitutability of market logic. It’s like a circus, almost.

As someone who is weathered: I was ideologically quite inspired by the notion of decentralised, transparent, open-source, publicly owned finance protocols. I was also quite swept up in the romance and possibility of regenerative finance, in which we could go beyond carbon-credit tunnel vision and start to value that which is supportive of life itself—increasing soil quality, biodiversity, watersheds—all coupled with satellite imagery, so it’s verifiable and decentralised, without double-counting and scams and stuff like that. But that dream hasn’t yet held, and increasingly it seems susceptible to greater powers.

So any time things are substituted—as when real value is substituted by tokens, which is exactly what we have with the fiat dollar (as you know, dollars are created by private banks when they loan money to businesses or individuals, so more and more dollars are being created)—we lose sight of real value. Real value is clean air, clean water, fertile soils. It’s the land; it’s the community; it’s the quality of life we have around us. When you travel and get to experience different countries and different ways of being—which I think is a great thing to do—the contrast with your own domains can show you that we could certainly do better in these areas.

But as Goodhart’s law has it: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. And this is why base trickster logic works so well right now. A lot of organisations are drowning in metrics that miss the point entirely. We have whole economies swept up and infatuated with—well, we have social media vanity metrics. It’s just the world. We need to keep our wits about us, and be aware of base trickster logic, so that we don’t get hoodwinked by it.

Manufactured mystery. Here, folks promise to dispel a mystery or solve a problem, but in doing so, they install a substitute mystery that keeps you dependent. Yeah, I know. This is one of the classics. In complex systems, someone with the confidence, the clarity, the charisma comes in with a confident solution, backed by measures taken from other contexts that, to me, look like utter bullshit—but that are convincing to most people. And because they’ve got the metrics and the confidence, and because the person hiring them is simply looking to have a win within the next quarter or financial year, they’re hired. They achieve the thing. They achieve the thing! But in doing so, they introduce new second- and third-order effects: new challenges.

And here’s the thing about base trickster logic: they’ll often be the people who fix those things too, because they’re familiar, they’re comfortable, they’re a known quantity. I remember listening to Cory Doctorow in conversation with Nikhil Suresh—a friend of mine here in Melbourne, who wrote the viral piece “I Will F▩▩king Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again”. (I’ve got to make a note not to swear on this, because Apple picks it up and puts an explicit tag on it. I’ve done so well: an hour in before swearing. That’s not too bad.) Cory Doctorow—who was behind the term enshittification, and who has a book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, which is about where we become slaves to the AI—was saying that the people making money selling AI will also be the people making money dealing with the problems that AI causes. It’s part of the nature of their disposition. It’s the difference, again, between philosophers and philosophists: between lowercase-t trickster, which is the trickster logic I’m sharing here, and capital-T Trickster, which I’ll talk about in a moment.

Divide and profit. Second-last of the trickster logics: stirring up schismogenesis—setting parties against each other, escalating rivalry, and harvesting from the conflict. I know consultants who do this. I know folks who hire consultants who do this. This is part of the dance, unfortunately. Within any organisational enterprise there’s a socio-political context, because power and resources are limited, and so folks jostle to attain power. Part of the jostling can mean pitting teams against each other. You’ll get teams to white-ant other teams. Or—here’s another term from corporate land—you’ll get folks to rat-f▩▩k other folks, which means effectively sabotaging them from within. I can’t stand it.

God. This is partly why I’m doing a podcast. This is why Wyrd Work with Dr Fox is emerging: I don’t have the requisite tenacity to persist in such domains. My heart just won’t allow it. I want to co-create a world more curious and kind and a future less grim, and these tactics do not behove such an orientation.

No home, no stake. The final lowercase-t trickster logic. This trickster belongs nowhere, and thus carries no lasting obligations. They never bear the consequences of any disruptions they cause. Again, consultants can do this. Their whole strategy is to impregnate organisations with as many of their consultants as they can. And if something goes wrong, well, they symbolically fire the consultant—but that consultant goes and works for another consulting firm, and repeats the pattern. And it’s all incestuous anyway.

Anyway: all this trickster logic is symptomatic of the times we are in. But this is not the true form of Trickster.

1:18:50 Do not mistake Trickster

Do not mistake Trickster. As Lewis Hyde says in Trickster Makes This World:

“Most of the travelers, liars, thieves, and shameless personalities of the twentieth century are not tricksters at all, then. Their disruptions are not subtle enough, or pitched at a high enough level. Trickster isn’t a run-of-themill liar and thief. When he lies and steals, it isn’t so much to get away with something or get rich as to disturb the established categories of truth and property and, by so doing, open the road to possible new worlds.”

Everything I’ve talked about so far when it comes to trickster logic has been what I call lowercase-t trickster.

When we are not in right relation with Trickster—when we’re not microdosing chaos; when we’re not inviting renewal and disruption and change into the work we do; when we don’t have a sense of humour and play, an adaptability and generativity about what we do; when things are fixed and too mechanical and precise, too unchanging, too intolerant of diversity—that invites Trickster in. And so, maybe, capital-T Trickster could be creating the conditions for great renewal and change. Who knows?

This permanent liminality we’re in does allow trickster logic to flourish. But I sense people are getting tired of it. And I also want to say: you don’t put Trickster in the centre. You don’t make Trickster leader.

What is a liminal agent? A liminal agent may adopt the role of leader temporarily, but they’re not centring themselves. In leadership development, in adult development, in mythopoetic development, in magical development, most of it comes down to an orientation towards decentralisation. That doesn’t mean dissolution or diffusion. It just means you recognise you have a centre—but it’s not all about you. We are part of a much greater, infinite, unfurling entanglement of life itself: this beautiful unfurling, all together, that is much bigger than any one of us. So I think it’s a really important distinction: lowercase-t trickster, and capital-T Trickster.

Trickster is not revered by all, and I get that. But I think it behoves us to be in right relation with Trickster. I love Trickster. In my earlier days—back in my hubris days, my midwit days—I had the proclivity to call myself Trickster. I think that was a step too far, and so Trickster came and humbled me for quite a few years. Really? says Trickster. So: don’t get carried away. We might appreciate Trickster, and Trickster sensibilities, and we might even deploy some lowercase-t trickster logics. But let’s not confuse this. Let me repeat that quote from Lewis Hyde:

[Repeat of the Hyde passage above.]

1:22:51 Finite and infinite games

Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries. Finite players play to win; infinite players play to continue the play. I’m quoting from James P. Carse here: Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility, in which he argues there are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning; an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.

And here’s a beautiful thing: the book actually concludes that there is only one infinite game. So if you, fellow infinite player, are playing in a context where it’s a finite game, but you’re like, This is too good—I actually don’t want to win, because winning will create losers, and winning will conclude the play… at this point, the infinite player playing a finite game will often change the rules. They’ll play with the boundaries. Kids do this naturally all the time. There’s a dynamic of finite and infinite play, and the boundaries—the conditions—are reshaped so as to continue the play. Trickster. Capital-T Trickster. Trickster makes this world.

When we go down a path that starts to lead to stagnation—and I think it’s fair to say that the trajectory humanity has been on, particularly in the last two hundred years, particularly the last twenty, and particularly the last five, is arguably a self-terminating path… I know some people say, Everyone always talks about the end of the world. The difference is that we now have world-ending technologies. We’ve had them since the nuclear bomb, I guess. But now we’ve got weaponised disinformation and algorithmic influence at scale. We have artificial intelligence that is effectively shaping our very desires, and most folks aren’t even aware of it. So it is a different time. But I don’t want you to panic. It’s not all good—but it’s also all good.

Some of us are alive to this. I’m speaking as someone who has gone through the descent of the metacrisis insight cascade, which led to a protracted period in the dark forest. You may not be there yet, and the goal of this is not to convince you of the metacrisis or polycrisis or anything like that. I want to help you be an effective liminal agent in this time betwixt worlds.

And so, back to Lewis Hyde, of Trickster Makes This World:

“Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists.”

So: Trickster, opening doors—thresholds. Yesterday I was listening to an old podcast from Gordon White of Rune Soup. Gordon was a chaos magician who lived in Tasmania, and who—quite suddenly, to my sense, and tragically, to my way of relating to it—passed away earlier this year. So I’ve been going through some of Gordon’s books, and I’ve been reading Ani.Mystic just recently, which is wonderful. He had a beautiful way of writing.

Anyway, in this podcast he was in conversation with academics—and us poor academics, myself included, are so bound up in certain conventions that it’s hard for us to access and inhabit ways of being and knowing that we know are true. We’re so bound up in a kind of scholarly disposition that it just makes it tricky. And Gordon’s advice was: you just need to barrel-roll out of it. I really like this concept of the barrel roll. You may be in a paradigm right now where you’re like, I get it, I get it, but—I don’t know—this talk of the magic stuff… I see what you’re saying, but part of me just feels embarrassed. And besides, I’ve got this and that to do, and I’ve got to optimise, and blah blah blah. Yeah: you just gotta barrel-roll.

I like it. I like this barrel roll. So if you’re not there yet—yeah, just barrel-roll. Easier said than done. In fact, unfortunately, most vertical development—the quickening of cognitive complexity, of interiority and depth and so on—is usually preceded by something tragic happening in life. I don’t wish that upon anyone. Yet should anyone find themselves in a period of disenchantment, disillusionment or disenfranchisement—if you find yourself lost and wandering in the dark forest—things get better. Things get better. Whatever’s going on for you in your disintegration, it will reintegrate in a more complex form: a metastability at a greater order of complexity. And you’ll have greater access to choicefulness, and to more-than-rational sensibilities. This is, unfortunately, part of the developmental quickening that many of us are blessed and cursed to go through.

So yes, I like Lewis Hyde’s line about Trickster as the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world. This is why I love bullshit artistry, and can’t stand bullshit. There are many practitioners in my profession who are great bullshitters: the thought leader; the keynote-speaking thought leader; the key opinion leader. And I’m like: gosh, just do better. Come on. That’s some fine bullshit you’ve got there—but it’s not art. Come on: bullshit artistry. And even within the bullshit artistry, why not smuggle in some sincerity, some earnestness—some benevolent kindling for that which is to become? But we’ll all get there. I was there in the past. Just a little bit of patience and compassion.

1:29:31 Into the bafflement

“Only that which can change can continue,” writes James P. Carse. “This is the principle by which infinite players live.”

So the role of a liminal agent is to venture into the liminal, and return—again and again. It’s not to stay in the liminal always. Part of what we need to do is oscillate. The liminal agent will often have a hut at the edge of the village. We’re not right at the centre of things, but we haven’t wandered off and left the village altogether. There’s a function to being a liminal agent—a function to leading within the liminal.

This means we venture into the bafflement. Now, you know my love of Wendell Berry’s lines about the mind that is not baffled, and the impeded stream that sings. I love it. Difficulty awakens the genius. When we’re confused, when things no longer make sense, when we no longer know which way to go or where to begin, it may be that we have begun our real work.

Dave Snowden—one of the grandfathers of complexity, along with Gregory Bateson and so forth—gave us the Cynefin framework, which is just an evergreen, beautiful model. I love it so much. I’m always scared to reference or evoke Dave Snowden’s name, because he has Welsh battler energy, and I just don’t want to spend that much time battling things out on LinkedIn. But I love his contribution to the field.

In the model itself, people often forget the space in-between. You have clear and complicated, which are effectively closed domains, and so they can be optimised; most conventional operational leadership works within this frame. Then you have complex and chaotic. Complex is open; there are no boundaries. Chaotic is also open—no boundaries—and there are also no governing constraints. [More precisely, in Snowden’s terms: complex contexts are held together by enabling constraints rather than governing ones, whilst chaotic contexts lack effective constraints altogether.] And in the middle, between them all, is confused. Confused is where you’re lost, and you don’t even know you’re lost. You don’t even know what context you’re in.

There’s a word Dave Snowden uses—aporetic—which means you know you’re at a loss. You know it’s legitimate, and that the sense of lostness is transitional. And when you’re lost in this way, suspending action is the most valid move.

1:32:16 Momentum inhibits reinvention

Suspending action. One of the sayings I like to share—which probably vexes a lot of the executives who hire me—is this:

Momentum inhibits reinvention.

Often, the default response for any organisation entering crisis—for any leader, any individual entering a crisis—is to keep doing what they’ve always been doing, but more and faster. So you have this acceleration, this extra effort: Come on, we can keep going! But it’s the conditions—the underlying default conditions—that are giving rise to the crisis. Simply doing more of that isn’t helpful. What we need to do is slow down, pause, take a beat. Momentum inhibits reinvention.

This is also why, when you experience disenchantment, it’s a window—an invitation. (That’s episode two of the first season of this podcast: “The Window of Disenchantment”.) Professor Randolph Nesse, a physician and scientist, has a theory that depression could be an adaptive mechanism that slows us down and protects us from blind optimism. And it could be—from my perspective, as someone who has gone through something we could call a depression—that the body knows the path you’re on will not serve you. And then the mind (I don’t know if this Cartesian split is helpful) takes a while to catch up: the ego and the mind. If you can start to listen to the body, heed the signs, slow down and take stock, new ways may reveal themselves to you. But it does require a bit of a descent, and that’s uncomfortable. And so, instead, many people just carry on. Momentum inhibits reinvention.

But I really like Dave Snowden’s term aporetic: knowing you are at a loss.

1:34:33 Wherever you are is called here

And it’s at this point I want to recite “Lost”, by David Wagoner.

So, being in the liminal is being in passage. That doesn’t mean we need to be in constant motion and activity. Things move, even when we stand still.

There’s a deeper thread here—with liminality, with wyrd work, with much of the thrust of this podcast—that I have to leak into this conversation surreptitiously and obliquely, because the materialist, reductive, individualist, optimiser mindset is so quick to dismiss the anomalous, and what I’m about to share. But: we are inhabitants of a living world. We are of and from and in and within and with a whole ecology of living entities, and the world speaks through each of us.

And sometimes, when things aren’t working, we think we just need to push on, move faster, and do things more productively. Well, as I say, life will keep dishing up its lessons to you in bigger and bigger doses until you take heed. All I can say is that I did not enjoy my descent, but in hindsight I see it as absolutely necessary, and I’m very grateful for it.

1:37:04 Disintegration and re-integration

Dąbrowski’s theory of positive disintegration is something I resonate with. Think of ourselves as intermittently continuous, coherent self-narratives: this kind of metastable conceptual organising force we call the ego. There are times when that is no longer congruent or coherent with context—when your very way of being no longer makes sense, and you can’t hold to it, because the world around you has changed. There are catalysts for this: the death of someone close to you; a disaster you’ve lived through; going through a divorce; being displaced; having to move country. There are big events that can shake the foundations of your very being.

Most developmental work is a combination of entropy and support. Your current form doesn’t hold; you disintegrate. And then, assuming you have the right time and support structures in place—time, nature, all the things—you can reintegrate. Positive disintegration, this theory is called. I like it. But it requires descent.

1:38:20 Pre-tragic, tragic, post-tragic

And I want to introduce one other element in this romp on liminality: the pre-tragic, tragic and post-tragic dispositions. Those who’ve been following my work—I’ve been doing the newsletter since, what, 2010? So about sixteen years—will have seen me go from pre-tragic, to tragic, to post-tragic.

The pre-tragic has not met tragedy, or denies it. And look, you wouldn’t wish tragedy upon anyone. There’s a blessed naivety that comes to those who have not yet known loss. And there’s something tragic about the tragic realisation. For me, this was the metacrisis insight cascade I’ve talked of, when a lot of ecological grief, a lot of familial grief, and a lot of stuff I had been denying all caught up with me during pandemic times. It resulted in what I call an insight cascade, which was ontologically destabilising, and led to what we might call an ego death. (Don’t worry: the new ego just springs up. Once you get rid of one, another appears.) But it’s a murky composting that takes a while.

And then there’s the post-tragic phase. The post-tragic lives within the tragic, but can still create; can still write. You know that tragedies are lived through rather than solved. I’d say I oscillate between post-tragic and tragic, depending on whether I’ve succumbed to doomscrolling or not. But there’s something about this time between worlds, and the role of a liminal agent, that means we need to be aware of this stuff.

1:40:24 Wandering in the cocoon

If you want to go deeper into this, I’d highly recommend the work of Bill Plotkin. The Journey of Soul Initiation is a great book. I love his articulation of soul as our ecological niche. We are the only creatures on the planet who can spend our whole lives having never found our ecological niche.

The metaphor of caterpillar to butterfly—or silkworm to moth—is very apt here: the cocoon or chrysalis phase, where you actually lose form; where you’re in the midst of transformation. That is a liminal phase. We don’t actually see what happens in the soup of that context. And yet that’s where some of us find ourselves. And if we deny it—if we don’t go there—then nothing changes, and things continue to get worse.

1:41:16 Hermes and Hekate; psychopomps

So this venturing into the descent comes back to Trickster. One of the main roles of Trickster—particularly Hermes—is as psychopomp. Psychopomps descend into the underworld and come back again. Hekate is a psychopomp too, lighting the way.

But what makes a psychopomp useful for thinking about liminal agency is what they don’t do. They don’t make the journey for anyone else. They don’t change the destination. They don’t rescue people in the midst of passage. They accompany. They have a sense of the way; they can see in the dark; and they can return—which you, or any traveller in passage, cannot yet do.

So Hermes brings the gifts of speed, wit and passage—language and so forth—that help get you across. Hekate brings light and attendance. She stays with you in the crossing, and afterwards, when you belong to two worlds at once.

The role of psychopomp is useful here. I don’t want to aggrandise this too much. I’m just saying that, as a liminal agent, you may be a friend to someone who is entering their own descent. That requires warmth and love and patience, and the ability to hold open that liminal space without inflicting advice, without collapsing the field, without inserting shoulds. There’s a different kind of presencing involved in being with someone as they do the dance of that chapter of life.

1:42:54 Agency – actor, envoy, catalyst

So, what is a liminal agent? Well, we’ve talked about liminality quite a bit. Now let’s talk about what it means to be an agent.

Agentic, as a word, is having a moment. Everything’s agentic. Agentic is the new buzzword—at least as we share this, on the eleventh of October 2026—and so agency is getting a renewal. I like the word agent a lot. I actually like the word agentic.

I’m also entering my own chapter here. I’ve done my whole thing of trying the folkloric approach—beware, beware false promises and prophecy-speak—and that doesn’t seem to have changed things. Folks are getting so swept up at the moment. I’ve been almost like, No, don’t go into that dungeon! There are traps—you won’t get out! But then, seeing all my friends go down there, I’m like: well, I might as well go there with them, because I don’t want to just die out here on my own anyway. I may be of some use. So I’m trying to run alongside folks who are swept up amidst it all, because I need to be in the flux. I need to be in these liminal spaces.

The word agent, though. There are three senses of the word.

One is an actor: the one who has agency. I’d think of this in a Gestalt sense: even amidst the liminal space, you are not necessarily lost. Or, although you are lost, you’re aware that you’re lost. And you have choicefulness. You can still choose to enact things. You can choose to perturb things, to see what happens. You can attend to things. You can throw out weak probes, as Dave Snowden might say, to see what happens. So this agency means you’re not stuck; you’re not paralysed by the complexity, the ambiguity, the unresolvability and the openness. You’re not desperately seeking to close or resolve things. You have the negative capability to be effective amidst paradox, and you’re enacting things. You have agency and choicefulness.

Another sense of agent is envoy: one who acts on behalf of something else. Hermes is often envoy to Zeus and the gods. There’s Eshu. There’s Inari, whose kitsune foxes carry messages between worlds. The liminal agent acts for something that is not yet fully present. Back to that quote: the old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters. There’s another one—I forget the exact words—that our new world is being born, and if you listen closely, you can hear her breathing. [That’s Arundhati Roy, who said that on a quiet day she can hear another world breathing.]

There’s a sense of midwifing here; a sense of acting on behalf of a greater possibility—like co-creating a world more curious and kind, and a future less grim. It’s cute; it sounds lovely. But it’s actually something that enlivens me. I know that a more wondrous world is possible. And it is a blessing and a burden to be alive in this particular chapter of life. Yet here we are, and we have things to do.

The final sense of agent is catalyst. In chemistry, an agent is something that quickens a reaction without being consumed by it. I really like the term catalyst, as I like the term quicken. Quickening means the rapid development or realisation of latent or dormant potential: it’s where we bring something to life. Catalysing is much the same. And the catalyst doesn’t change the reaction [strictly, it changes the pathway and speeds things along, without changing what the reaction produces]; it just attends to that which is to become. So when I say wyrd work is the shaping of that which is to become, we’re not imposing an outcome. We’re working with the fates in the liminal; situating ourselves amidst the conditions that shape what is to become.

1:47:25 Master player, machine and liminal agent

It’s a delicate thing. We’re going to need some more episodes on this, I suspect.

This is contrasted, though, with the master player, as James P. Carse would describe. Think of the master player in the machine, and the liminal agent in the garden. The master player is the expert consultant with all the answers. And the liminal agent in the garden—well, they’re not trying to win the game.

The master player excels in the game. They’ve seen things before; they know which moves to make; they know what’s happening. I’m referencing James P. Carse’s master player concept here: you’ve played enough finite games—enough games of chess, enough games of tennis, enough contained games of whatever kind—to know most of the moves. And because you know most of the moves, you are prepared against surprise. Whereas a liminal agent is prepared for surprise.

Let me contrast this a little. A master player—the expert consultant working in the context—treats it as a machine. Their relationship to the frame is that you take whatever is there as given, and play within it. Whereas a liminal agent comes into a system, sees the frames, and works on the enabling constraints.

The reason poets and artists are often dangerous to society is that they see through the structures—the theatre, the stories and so on—and play with them. This is why art is generative, but also why it’s threatening to established power.

The master player considers winning to be what counts as success: winning by the game’s own measure. Whereas the liminal agent considers success to be keeping the play alive through the transition, and helping new forms settle. There is no real winning: it’s the infinite game, which we play to continue the play.

A master player responds to anomaly as if it were noise, or a threat to the goal. So anything anomalous—that’s odd, as I said in the first episode—is dismissed or eschewed. Whereas the liminal agent would be like, Ooh, that’s odd. That’s weird with a why. What’s going on there? They’ll be attuned, and have the wise discernment to distinguish signal from noise.

In terms of how we relate to identity, the master player—the expert consultant—has titles, which they defend. Whereas us liminal agents see our identity as a membrane, held loosely. The Ritual of Becoming is a practice of seasonal moulting: you want to be fluid in who you are, so you can be situationally apt, contextually relevant, congruent and coherent. As Alan Watts purportedly said, you are under no obligation to be the person you were five minutes ago. Only that which can change can continue: this is the principle by which infinite players live.

And so, as I said, in relation to surprise, the master player prepares against it—they are trained—whereas a liminal agent is prepared for it—they are educated, in Carse’s phrasing. The typical domains in which master players flourish are the clear and the complicated: closed domains. The typical domains in which liminal agents flourish are the complex and the aporetic: the boundary zones; the disturbed land the fox dwells within.

So you can already imagine there’s a tension here, right? There are established structures in place that benefit some folks, and they don’t want them to change, even though we can see they need to. The liminal agent doesn’t come in as an expert who proposes the answers from outside. That’s just an expert consultant. And the expert consultant is hired by the person who has the power within the existing structures—so the power structures will likely be maintained, and the transformation that’s needed will likely not happen. Things will shift, and the same dynamic will persist.

So there’s a dance, as I always say. And it takes a kind of developmental maturity to engage in the liminal. Not everyone has this—hmm, how do I say this? It’s understandable that not everyone wants this. If you’ve got a young family, if you’ve got stuff to do, this is a lot to take on, right? Just tell me what to do. And that’s totally legitimate. Not everyone can be a liminal agent. But this is the liminal time, and I think there are sensibilities we all ought to acquaint ourselves with, so that we’re better able to be agentic within liminal spaces when we find ourselves within them. But this disposition is not for everyone.

Let me just put it to you this way. The characteristic failure of a master player is that they optimise a game that is no longer relevant: you’re winning at something that no longer makes sense. That’s great, Grandpa. But let’s get you home. And the failure mode of a liminal agent is that you become the trickster—lowercase t. You never leave the liminal space. You’re always in that flux. You don’t return any gifts to the village.

There is a role for the default. We need the default at least 80% of the time. The issue is when it’s more like 99% of the time. That’s when Trickster comes in to f▩▩k things up.

I should point out that these two are not exclusive. In stable times, the master player looks wiser. We’ve had a relatively stable period in society for quite a while, since World War II—particularly in Australia, where we weren’t super affected by the global financial crisis. In these conditions, the expert with the answers—the master player—looks wiser. But in this time between worlds, where things are dissolving and changing, a different kind of wisdom is needed: the wisdom of capital-T Trickster, and of the liminal agent.

So, I have a suspicion I should start to wrap things up. Let me begin a summation arc here. Thank you for listening, by the way.

1:54:26 Seven qualities of liminal leadership

There are seven qualities of liminal leadership—well, at least seven.

Early attunement. A liminal agent notices shifts before they show up. This might be because of the heart-feel you have. It might be because you’re paying attention to anecdotes at the edge. You might have an acuity for anomaly. You just notice things early. You sense that a shift is required, or that you may be entering a change.

Intellectual honesty. This is where someone says: We don’t know yet. And here’s what we’re going to do to find out, or to learn more. This is very different from: We know. We have the answers. We can solve this in X days for X dollars, and 10x your outputs in that time.

Marking thresholds. This means we’re not just taking advantage of a forever-liminality, even though that may be the meta-context we share. We’re actually holding context. Again, I come back to the catalytic value of a good strategy or leadership offsite: there are containers. When I’m working with folks, I’m always asking: All right, what’s the next hill we need to get to? When are we rallying together, then? Cool—we’ve got a container. Let’s work betwixt that.

Regulating temperature. This is my favourite quality of liminal leadership. As I mentioned before, we need warmth to dissolve things. So when we gather folks together, how do we warm things up? Warmth, humour, relationality, warm data, connection, presence, being seen, being heard. This is so important. But it’s also important to be able to dial up the heat. A lot of people are so polite—so used to keeping things nice, and keeping things the same—that when we come up to these real threshold moments, we need to dial up the heat to catalyse and quicken the change. Otherwise, we end up in a lukewarm soup of niceness that can have us dwelling in the liminoid rather than the liminal. And the final aspect of regulating temperature is knowing when to cool things down: when to temper things, when to slow things down, when to integrate. We can’t be liminal all the time. We need to integrate these things.

Attending and perturbing. Attending, like being in a garden: making small experiments rather than declaring big goals; having a direction more than a destination; working with surreptitious obliquity; moving quietly and planting things.

Hospicing and midwifing. Hospicing is a caring role. You don’t abandon that which no longer serves, because it has served well, and there are still people involved. So there’s hospicing—you care—but you also know there’s transition; there’s midwifing. All of this has a nurturing disposition. You’re protecting the people; you’re protecting the systems of knowledge—the culture—and all the relationships the future will grow from.

Owning nothing. A liminal leader—a liminal agent—isn’t coming in with the answers, and isn’t owning the outcome. You cultivate others’ capacity; you help them flourish; you help tend to the conditions that are generative of a quickening, of emergence, of development and change. And then, when things have stabilised again, the liminal leader isn’t so needed. You need more operational leadership again.

So you see, there’s an ebb and flow. A lot of nature has this cyclic motion: you breathe in; you breathe out. There’s a time for the liminal, and a time for the normal. There’s a role for the comfort zone. It’s good to be comfortable. I like being comfortable. And I’m also okay in domains that others may find more uncomfortable. Liminal agents in particular are comfortable being uncomfortable, if that makes any sense.

1:58:57 Failure modes

The failure modes of a liminal agent.

We could think of the first as premature closure. This is where I tease about my Ritual of Becoming: You can choose a word in three minutes, if you want. I thought I was being sincere-ironic, but people took me sincerely, and literally chose a word in three minutes. That’s premature closure. You quench things: like tempering steel, you just plunge it into the water. It’s done, right? It’s brittle—but it’s done.

The alternative is never cooling: permanent liminality. This is trickster-logic land, where everything’s chaotic and a mess. There’s no sincerity, no nobility, no centre, no hearth, no home. There are no values that can’t become commodified. No scruples.

You also potentially have capture. This is where you capitalise upon the liminality. You become the middle person. You could become a liminoid tour guide, creating passages that are consumed as experiences. I know a lot of folks who go on healing journeys, one after the other: When’s the next healing retreat? The next sound bath? The next yoga… blah blah blah. And that’s fine. I’m not trying to judge or besmirch. But the question is: is this serving transformation, or has it become a new comfort?

Yeah. God, I have more notes here. All right: second-last thing, and then I’m bringing it home.

2:00:33 Machine and garden

You heard me talk before about the distinction between machine and garden. This is a frame James P. Carse uses in Finite and Infinite Games, and I like it when we think about the distinctions between liminal work and machine work. [See also Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964), on the machine’s intrusion into the pastoral ideal.] Liminal is the garden; operational is the machine.

The core question of operational leadership is: How do we run this well? Whereas liminal leadership asks: What is trying to emerge? What does the system need?

From an operational perspective, an organisation is a machine to design and fix and upgrade and optimise. The liminal leader sees it as a living system to tend.

In planning, the operational leader looks to fixed goals, roadmaps, blueprints, targets. A liminal agent looks to direction of travel; to experiments; to how we adjust and effectively make things up as we go, integrating the wisdom along the way.

From an operational perspective, uncertainty is a risk. From a liminal leadership perspective, uncertainty is a condition to work within.

From a machine perspective, anomalies are errors to correct. From a liminal perspective, they’re signals worth exploring.

The leader’s role within operational, machine-like leadership is to architect, to control, to be the expert with the answers, to dictate what needs to be done. Whereas from a more liminal perspective, the leader is a convener, a gardener: move quietly and plant things. There’s no fixed role. There’s a fluidity—but there’s a constancy in attendance.

In an operational sense, change is designed and then rolled out. This is where someone comes up with the change management plan, the initiative. It costs a lot of money, has a lot of fancy PowerPoints and all this stuff, rarely works, and takes a lot of time. Whereas in a liminal leadership approach, change is cultivated by changing the underlying conditions. The approach is to attune, to orientate, to inscribe; to shift things and perturb the underlying conditions, to see what might emerge; and, when stable forms emerge, to operationalise them—but only after the fact.

Success, from an operational leadership perspective, looks like efficiency, predictability, targets being hit: you meet your key performance indicators. From a liminal perspective, it looks like adaptability and renewal, and people able to figure things out on their own. My favourite definition of leadership is this:

Leadership is creating the conditions in which people see what needs to be done, and choose to do it.

2:03:35 Bringing it home

So, just to reiterate: operational leadership is best for stable conditions, with known causes and effects. Liminal leadership is best for transitions—for complexity, for this time between worlds.

And that, my friends, is wyrd work—and why I’m talking about liminal agents. I believe we are in a time between worlds. And I believe that, increasingly, we are in the hangover of over-optimisation and over-specialisation, compounded by social media, algorithmic forces and audience capture. There’s a kind of rigidity in how people see themselves, and in how people treat the living, complex, adaptive, evolving, entangled, dynamic systems we work within—as if they were merely closed, machine-like, fixed, linear problems to be solved. And that is going to perpetuate.

And so what these times behove—what they call for—are what I like to call liminal agents. As I said at the start, liminal agents are the folks I love working with and for. And as I’ve got more white hairs in my beard, I see my role as partly helping to teach and train, or to create the conditions in which some of the qualities of liminal leadership and liminal agency may be learned.

There’s a counterintuitive quality to all of this, as I’ve highlighted. It makes more sense to be efficient, to optimise, to be an expert, to have ready answers and a quick fluency. And yet I just don’t see that holding—at least not for the times we’re in.

Liminal agents are not better or worse than anyone. It’s just that there are particular moments—in life, in societies, in groups—where there is liminality. And when we’re conscious of the liminality, there are different dispositions we might adopt that create better affordances, and thus greater optionality. These make us more likely to move towards relevance realisation swiftly, and with the least unnecessary suffering, rather than being in denial. And the recognition of all this—the aporetic recognition that we are in liminal times—is a quality liminal agents have. The work of shaping that which is to become is wyrd work, which is what liminal agents do.

I hope this has been helpful. I hope this succinct little two-hour podcast has been helpful in articulating what a liminal agent is. Together, we have toured liminality; we have briefly toured agency; and we’ve taken a little segue into lowercase-t trickster and capital-T Trickster. I’d like to think that, throughout it all, we have wended, and lived some of the dispositions apt for these times.

I’m still not sure whether I should write notes for these soliloquies. I never like to take people’s attention for granted. Hmm. But I don’t know—I hope this has been fruitful.

One of the frustrating things for me, as a complexity practitioner and liminal agent myself, is that you can rarely give people the kind of frameworks we’re so used to receiving in closed contexts. The expert can say: Here are the five things you need to do, in order: this, this, this, this, this. Or: Here are the seven hacks—blah blah. You don’t get that with liminal agent work. There’s a different order of complexity, which doesn’t reduce to these kinds of linear tidbits. And that’s just something we’re going to have to live with.

But as we continue in this podcast, the constellation will reveal itself. I’ve declared a few nodes: we’ve done “What is wyrd work?” and “What is a liminal agent?” In the next episode we might look at wit, wisdom and wiles—a shorter episode, on that. And we’ll continue to progress through. As we go through each of these nebulous “nodes” and then take a step back, we can see how the light cast on each of these beacons creates its own structure: its own constellation. Sometimes you can’t grasp something by grasping the node itself. But when you see enough of the pattern, you can situate where it is in the sky—and use it to orientate and navigate by, as we have used constellations for thousands of years.

2:08:49 The Skulk, and thanks

So: you are a liminal agent if you’ve listened this far. My God. Who does that? I’m very grateful for you. Thank you for listening.

And we shall proceed. In the next episode, we shall dive into wit, wisdom and wiles: three words that begin with W—five, if you include wyrd work. It’s gonna be fun to put on the World Wide Web. I look forward to hanging out with you then.

Again, I can’t wait until I no longer have to debase myself with this, but: two plugs. If you aren’t subscribed to the newsletter, foxwizard.com is how you do so. And I have The Skulk coming out soon: a hideaway, school and guild for liminal agents. I’ve expressed what liminal agents are in this episode, and if that has resonated with you, you’ll want to be subscribed to the newsletter at foxwizard.com. The Skulk is coming out soon. It’s going to have a course on keynote quickening: a kind of catalytic immersion in bardic savvy. If you’re looking to create a new presentation, I can show you how. And then I’m really hoping to open up The School of Fox Wizardry, where we shall go into the metamodern wizardry, the bardic savvy and the druidic sensibilities that behove a metamodern-adjacent liminal agent for this time betwixt worlds. That’s coming soon.

Finally, if you’ve got some value out of this, and have three or four seconds to spare, simply tapping five stars on Apple Podcasts—or wherever you’re listening—is greatly appreciated. And if you’re feeling super moved, a kind written review is always appreciated. It’s early days in launching this podcast, and I’d really like to make it a sustainable form. I’d like to be in conversation with some of the liminal agents and complexity practitioners I’ve come across. But in order to do so… they’re going to be like, Who the f▩▩k are you? So I show them the podcast, and they say, Okay, a few people like this; this seems legit—and then perhaps they’re more likely to accept the invitation. So that would be very helpful, if you’re inclined.

Thank you so much for listening. As ever, much warmth and gratitude to you, and we shall see you again soon.

Works cited

Here are some links to things mentioned in this episode, roughly in order of appearance.

• What is Wyrd Work?, episode 1 of this podcast (2026)
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s line that difficulty awakens the genius, from his book Antifragile (2012)
• Joe Lightfoot’s essay “The Liminal Web” (2021), his book A Collective Blooming, and The Lightfoot Podcast
• Dr Zak Stein’s book Education in a Time Between Worlds (2019)
• Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (written from 1929; the “interregnum” passage is in notebook 3, 1930), in the popular rendering via Slavoj Žižek
• Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s book Hospicing Modernity (2021)
• Báyò Akómoláfé, via the Rune Soup piece “What Escapes Capture”
• Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant’s book Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society (1974; English translation 1978)
• Arnold van Gennep’s book The Rites of Passage (1909; English translation 1960)
• Victor Turner’s essay “Betwixt and Between”, in The Forest of Symbols (1967); his book The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969); and his essay “Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow and Ritual” (1974)
• Keith Johnstone’s book Impro (1979)
• Layman Pascal’s book Gurdjieff for a Time Between Worlds (2024)
• Hanzi Freinacht’s book The Listening Society (2017)
• Árpád Szakolczai’s article “Living permanent liminality” (2014), and his books Permanent Liminality and Modernity (2017) and Post-Truth Society: A Political Anthropology of Trickster Logic (2022)
• Gregory Bateson’s book Naven (1936), where he introduces schismogenesis
• Nikhil Suresh’s essay “I Will F▩▩king Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again” (2024), on his blog Ludicity
• Cory Doctorow’s book The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI (2026)
• Lewis Hyde’s book Trickster Makes This World (1998)
• James P. Carse’s book Finite and Infinite Games (1986), and Leo Marx’s book The Machine in the Garden (1964)
• Gordon White’s book Ani.Mystic (2021), and his Rune Soup podcast
• Wendell Berry’s “The Real Work”, a passage from his essay collection Standing by Words (1983) that circulates as a poem
• Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework, especially the Cynefin domains and the aporetic turn
• Randolph Nesse’s book Good Reasons for Bad Feelings (2019)
• David Wagoner’s poem “Lost”
• Kazimierz Dąbrowski’s book Positive Disintegration (1964); see positive disintegration
• Bill Plotkin’s book The Journey of Soul Initiation (2021)
• Arundhati Roy’s speech “Confronting Empire” (2003)