A prelude to “Wyrd Work”

Note: this has been spawned by AI. It’s lightly edited but I’m not the most reliable editor so... enjoy!

What-o hello! It's Jason here. And you're listening to Wyrd Work with Doctor Fox.

A podcast in which we ostensibly offer wit, wisdom, and wiles to help you live and lead in this time betwixt worlds. Or at least that's the that's the line I'm going with with this new season. Now this is a preview episode. This is a prelude before the season itself. It has been a while since I have shared a podcast. I've been on a few, but it's been a while since I've shared one here. And so in this podcast I'm going to do some housekeeping before we usher in a new season.

Wyrd Work with Doctor Fox. Thank you for joining me.

Hey friends. Alright, so: I'm back. And we have a new season about to come upon us. I'm going to try to tie this with the coming of the equinox. The spring equinox here in the southern hemisphere. It'll be the autumnal equinox, I guess, for the northern hemisphere. Of course, seasons don't always fit The Neat Four but I like the division of four. It works with the four directions in magic.

Well, six directions if you clue include above and below. Seven if you include void, I guess. But let's see. Anyway, it's I like seasons. I hope you like seasons too. I like any excuse to mark the passage of time, particularly ones that are attuned to the texture and dynamism of Life Itself And so, you know, here in Naam in Victoria we have many more Indigenous seasons than the —in fact we don't actually have autumn because

we don't have deciduous trees here natively within Australia, but of course the colonial imports have a lot of deciduous trees here, which in my particular suburb, Fitzroy, there are plane trees that have been planted. Plane trees have these kind of like they look like little little hand grenades filled with seeds that cause asthma and allergens and all sorts of trouble.

But it was reasoned that this would be good for productivity, the cleanup of the plane reasoned will give people work and things to do. And so our suburb is littered with plane trees that around springtime create all sorts of hay fever for folks and it's good for the economy. Just like how GDP goes up when we have war and conflict and ill health within the population. And so nations compete to boost GDP. Doesn't make sense. This is one of the themes that we may be exploring in Wyrd Work with Dr. Fox.

What is Wyrd Work? Well, that's going to be the first episode. Come the new season. What is Wyrd Work? What is a liminal agent? What is Mythic Mode? What is Machine Mode? What are sensibilities? What are more-than-rational sensibilities? What does it mean to take the oblique, surreptitious approach to emergence and change?

I find I've I found that, over time, I just cannot mask myself to to do the work that I used to be able to do back when I was love — back when I was I was about to say in love. Back when I was utilizing a behavioral science frame for motivation. These things have a face validity. They work, at least at the start, until they don't. They are good for folks that want to

view the world through the lens of a complicated, closed system. But as soon as you open yourself truly to complexity, to the entanglement, to emergence, to nonlinearity, to animism, to the living intercontextual, interrelational, transperspectival, metamodern and more-than-rational sensibilities that come from the quickening of realizing that the hyper-rational, Machine Mode frame that many of us have become accustomed to in this

individualist, materialist, capitalist, reductive society doesn't actually serve. And so what are we to do? Well, there are a range of sensibilities. I this particular thing that I want to do with this podcast, Wyrd Work with Dr. Fox, is help folks to develop the savvy and sensibilities of working obliquely, particularly when it comes to this time betwixt worlds. How do we effectively sense make and attune

with the acuity for anomaly so that we can orientate towards relevance realization. How do we have the wit, wisdom, and wiles to be effective agents of and for change, amidst and with change, as we attempt to make sense and orientate ourselves towards a world more curious and kind (and a future less grim)? This this mantra of mine, this kind of bumper sticker purpose, “A world more curious and kind”

has been with me for a decade or so, maybe a dozen years now. I love it. “Towards a world more curious and kind.” How wonderful. We do seem to be moving towards a world more certain and cruel. And this desire for certainty, this desire for order, for linearity, for control, means that there's an almost like

obligate sociopathy that comes with it. You have to choose what you do and do not care about. You get narrow in your focus. You become a little bit more utilitarian and calculated in what you will and will not tolerate within this vision that you seek to promulgate. And that leads us deeper into the Machine Mode, of which Mythic Mode is a viable alternative option that I shall be unpacking. Mythic mode being

the working title of the next book for you, the one that I've been working on for the last nine years, the one that's been whooping my ass and humbling me and breaking me down and remaking me into the vehicle that can be the one that can write this book for you. So I'm going to be sharing a bit about that. I also have “The Skulk” opening up very soon. A hideaway school and guild for liminal agents. Heh, what is a liminal agent? Well, that's happening in episode two, I believe, of the new podcast. But

suffice to say, if you are of the presence of mind to know that the systems that have served us in the past during the relatively metastable times that we've all enjoyed together, if you're aware that those systems aren't necessarily going to serve for the future that we're emerging into, or the futures, I should say, because nothing is certain and set, then it doesn't behoove us to optimize for systems that may well be irrelevant. But at the same time, we don't know.

what patterns will hold in this new time— (well actually there are some timeless ones that we can attune to)— but this time betwixt, this sense of hmm, being at the nexus between emergence and decay, be between the midwifing of the new world whilst we hospice the old. This is this is a role that I myself I feel called to, but there are many bridge workers. There are many folks that are heeding this call. The rise of

...at least what I've noticed, the rise of more-than-rational sensibilities. And by that I mean mythic sensibilities, mythopoetic sensibilities, developmental sensibilities, like meta-rational sensibilities, magical sensibilities, like occult, Wiccan, like animist. So many of these things are coming back to the fore because I think intuitively more of us are realizing that the the default ways that we have become so accustomed to

only leading to a rich delusion of progress. It's eating away the very substrate that Life depends upon. And as a result, we see the perpetuation of a mass extinction event, the reduction of biodiversity, the worsening of inequality, and a lot of the things, if you actually care to look and you care about where things are going, things aren't universally going well. And in fact, the trajectory looks grim. Factor in climate and a bunch of other things. What are we to do? This is the metacrisis. This is

the metacrisis that gives rise to the polycrisis. The polychrisis being the interlinked crises, where it's never about one thing in particular. It's not ever just climate change, it's not ever just inequality, it's not ever just refugee or food or biodiversity or whatever it is. It's all of them interconnected. And then the metacrisis looks at the polychrisis and tries to discern the underlying generative functions, which tl;dr are rivalrous dynamics,

and multipolar traps and Power Laws that end up with this omni-lose scenario where everyone attempts to optimize for individual gain, and as a result, we all lose. And the pathways to viable alternative options for this, the pathways to meaningful progress, as I wrote about in How to Lead a Quest, the book that spawned the blursed question, the blessed and cursed question: “what is meaningful progress?”

Meaningful progress is that which moves us closer to future relevance. What is future relevance? It's a state in which whatever we're doing makes sense given the context that we're in. And this brings back questions of value as distinct from profit. Like what is truly valuable? What are we here to do? Which comes into distinctions between ambition and vocation, questions of calling, of roles to play, of purpose, of

Mythic pattern and other things that we can align ourselves to if we're ready for Mythic Mode. So lots of great things coming up ahead, but this is a housekeeping podcast. Now, for long-term followers of the podcast and of my writings over at foxwizard.com, you may know that you know, I had this very successful chapter of life as a global thought leader and speaker and best selling author, and I have and I continue to play the role of leadership advisor.

I facilitate many senior leadership teams off sites. I work intimately with senior leadership teams, particularly those from public good organizations and those that are pioneering through uncharted, unprecedented, complex domains. And it's very enlivening. I'm also noticing that in amongst all the client work, you know, as a practitioner, I sometimes just get

pulled into their worlds and absorbed into their worlds. And that's great. That's what I do. I love being a practitioner, but I'm of I'm entering a chapter of life in which having surfaced from the protracted dark forest chapter of my own dissolution and something akin to

let's not say depression, but a dark, you know, a grim reckoning with the trajectory of Life and where we're going, and that being such fertile soil for the reawakening of mythic and magical sensibilities and more, I find myself now orientating to wanting to teach and to cultivate the conditions in which conviviality betwixt liminal agents, you know, fellow complexity practitioners and folks who work

to cultivate this world more curious and kind. I'm thinking about coaches and speakers and facilitators and authors and public/private intellectuals, folks that understand where we're going. And we might not always agree exactly on the trajectory and some of the things, but we share a disposition towards a world more curious and kind. I want to serve these folks. I know a lot of these folks, some of them are sleeper agents within organizations. They have had this realization.

They've had the Oh Shit moment. They think about their kids or their grandkids, and then they they're in a position where they can actually influence things quite wondrously. We all we all are. Our influence is non-zero. How do we go about doing this? Well, the pathway is Wyrd. It’s Wyrd with why. Wyrd refers to the art of shaping “that which is to become.” It's a reference from old Germanic mythology involving The Norns, and it’s a word

that has since gone through its own syncretic path. It's also associated with The Morrígan. It’s very entwined with fate, but not in terms of a fatalistic predetermined sense, but more in a shaping and creating the conditions which influences the affordances that you have. But if you are attuned to this, Wyrd itself is very congruent with what we know from complexity science. It's

It's kind of like if you're a woodworker, it's working with the grain of the wood, not against it. When we look at the threads of fate itself, which is a metaphor, of course, when we start to have the fae-like disposition, F-E-Y or F-A-E, the the kind of faery, the kind of magically inclined lens that we overlay into our decisions, we start to see different opportunities come about. We have different ways of relating to

circumstance to Necessity, to optionality, to relationality. And the Wyrd Work, and Wyrd, by the way, you can say a few ways. You can pronounce it as “word,” you can say it as “weird,” you can say it as Wyrd, as I like to do. The Wyrd work itself is that of a complexity practitioner. It's attunement, acuity, alignment, the

presence of mind and the openness of heart as a sensing organ to attune to what might be the adjacent possibilities within a situation or context. I'm finding personally this draws together so many threads of my work. I'm as you might know my PhD was in motivation and behavior change. Goal setting was a big focus and the the irony is goal setting works, but we don't see what we don't measure.

And so much of life has become hooked on the addiction to measurement, which narrows our focus and blinds us to the subtler realms, the nonlinear realms, the avenues that offer surreptitious ways of circumventing the otherwise complex challenges that we continually mire ourselves within.

So this podcast shall venture into that. I'm also going to be having conversations with friends. I I find this all very fascinating. I know it will go over the top of most folks' heads, but for those of you who listen, I think there is so much to glean. I have a bit of a map for how these episodes may go. I'm going to do my best to slow things down and to wend through the conversation. I'm a personal fan of private podcasts. I'm the recipient of some private podcasts from dear friends of mine. There's

something about well, Yancy Strickler from the founder of Kickstarter and the pioneer of the Dark Forest Operating System, which is a private internet community platform that I've been looking into for “The Skulk”, the hideaway school and guild for liminal agents that will be coming out very soon. I've been looking into that. I don't know if it's quite ready for my purposes yet, but I'd love this sensibility that Yancy brings. He

says that everything on the open web is an ad, every utterance, every appearance. And I've come to see this too. It's very hard to find genuine authenticity in the open web these days. The internet used to be fun. And the thing is, that it it can still be fun, but the fun happens in private pockets throughout it all. As much as possible, I've tried to resist the temptation of audience capture.

Of becoming captured by the commercial interests and the optimization strategy strategies that go with that. Hence my relative obliquity. Purity in obscurity. It’s not quite obscure, but you know, this wizard has a hut at the edge of the village. I'm not making my I'm not going to build my build my offerings within the rented land of the Walled Gardens of Empire. So for those of you who are listening to this, well done. You ventured outside

and into the wilds a little bit, and you are welcome company in this little squat wizard tower with its stone and moss and little fire through which I'm going to be brewing you a nice cup of coffee or tea. Anyway, housekeeping, as I say. the main thing is Kindred Spirits. If you've been wondering where Kindred Spirits has gone, it has its own podcast now. I've mentioned this a few times in my museletter and in the previous podcasts on this series, but

just in case you missed it, John Anthony and I, my dear friend John Anthony and I have had wonderful conversations, and they continue to be alive at kindredspiritspod.substack.com That’s kindredspiritspod.substack.com Now, Substack, you say? Yes. The walled garden of Substack. I'm still conflicted about Substack. Most of my friends seem to be on the platform. I was very early on the platform. I like what they were doing.

But then once I saw that they were going down the path of becoming a social media I know how this game plays out. I know what enshittification looks like and smells like. And so I left to join the independent web hosting my work on Ghost, which is a not-for-profit open source platform. there are many such. Bear blog is also great too. And there's something so

well, personally, I find charming about the independent web finding folks with their own independent websites where they're not hustling. And every time I go to Substack, I love it, but whenever I attempt to write there or share there, it just feels like I'm performing. It's like there's this grand competition with their leaderboards and their rankings and all the all the things that we know centralized social media platforms do to farm engagement. And

I just don't like who I become when I'm on those platforms. By necessity, I need to dabble in the dark, soulless territory of LinkedIn because that's where unfortunately a lot of my clients choose to be. And this it comes again to the inexonerable gravity of network effects. It's hard to escape. It's really difficult to escape. Hence why whenever I find a practitioner that's not doing the cheap tricks, that's not selling out, that's staying relatively authentic and pure...

I love what they do and and and what you know, I think about Josh Schrei with The Emerald Podcast. I think about well, quite a few creators and it really comes down to an understanding of protocols and power and sovereignty. RSS, which is how podcasts are distributed, are wondrous. I mean there's a big push right now for audio podcasts to go video.

The Blind Boy podcast, Blind Boy was talking about this. It's because video is easy to hijack with ads and to monetize. And so hence the big push for video. I know that folks when it comes to listening to podcasts like to listen in audio mode only. I am one such person. I love audio podcasts. It's it's awkward when an audio podcast you're listening to actually has video and then the hosts start referring to things on the screen that you can't see.

And so I just want to assure you that if I ever do video, which I might do with some guest podcast you know, guest interviews, video watchers will be distant second-class citizens compared to audio only. There's an intimacy and warmth and depth that comes from audio only podcasts. My intention with this podcast is to do it fortnightly at least. I want to share with you more often. I have this proclivity to write very long newsletters that

I'm not a hundred percent sure how many people actually managed to get through them all in this demented distraction era where there are so many demands on everyone's attention. And also I just know personally, I like listening to podcasts and I like the the parasocial, you know, sense that I'm actually close to this person because you know, they've been in my head and heart as I've listened to them many times.

Nate Hagen's The Great Simplification is a podcast that I really admire. Gosh there's so many out there. Podcasts are just such a beautiful form. And I'm also finding that you know, if I was to choose my two favorite mediums, it'd be podcasts and books. Give me a physical book, give me an audio podcast, and I am so happy. That is such a delightful medium. And the third would be in-person events. Like I love a good lecture in person.

It doesn't feel the same watching it on screen. Yeah, it's still good, but it's not quite the same as being there. Notebook out amidst the thrum of fellow attendees as they're attending; tending to the unfailing experience. Yeah. So anyway, housekeeping. Podcast, Kindred Spirits Pod. You'll find it at kindredspiritspod.substack.com So, you know, I'm a I'm a man full of hypocrisy.

I contain multitudes and all sorts of contradictions. So you'll find that on Substack. Am I good at Substack? Not really. Most of my friends are there, but not all. And we have our podcast there. So find it. As is much as with much of the work that I do, because I'm not getting drunk on search engine optimization or anything like that, and John Anthony shares a similar disposition, it might be tricky for you to find this if you're looking in your podcast

app, be it Spotify or Apple or whatever it is. The Kindred Spirits podcast, you can you can find it, but it may not show up in the first, I don't know, half a dozen or so, but just have a good look. But on that, on that note, I have a request. And that is given that I'm relaunching this podcast, season two, with a new a new name, a new album cover, new intro, new intention, I wonder...

If you are a person who's been with me for some time, if you follow my museletters, you will know that I don't make requests that often. I have the philosophy that it's better to hear from someone once a month than four to ten times a month with lots of emails. So my philosophy has always been to never bother you, to always share as much value as I can and to try to keep the ask either

to nothing or as minimal as possible. I do not like asking things of folks. I think all of us have things asked of us too often, all the time. But in this instance, I'm going to squirm and do the awkward thing and just ask for you— if you feel so inclined— one of the best things you can do is leave a kind, positive review for the podcast on wh wherever you're playing it. This helps immensely when people go to search for the podcast.

We've had a few friends do this for the Kindred Spirits podcast. And I haven't yet asked people to do that for this podcast. I know it's been a long time, but if you feel so inclined, I'd only want you to spend, you know, a minute on this, max. A quick five star review and something nice to say would just make my make me yeah, would be very encouraging for me and make it easier for other people to find. Or you can just wait and see how the

the thing unfurls. But if you do so so feel inclined, it would be such a boon to me and I'd be very grateful. Thank you. Now, other housekeeping. hmm

I can't help but filter everything through this career-limiting authenticity. I find this is increasingly important in the world of large language models, in which everyone washes their own insight and character and sensibilities through the respectability and reasonableness of the vortex of homogenization that large language models bring. And so as a result, everything kind of emerges

clean and neat and polished and mid. And I don't want to do that. And so these will be meandering, career-limiting, and they will they will wend their own path. But I shan't I shan't take your time for granted. Just suffice to say that I genuinely believe we are in a time betwixt worlds. And the default response to this

for many folks, is understandably to find what the “best” approach is. What do we do? What's the what's the new hack, the new formula, the new fix? And this desperate need to fix and solve things is what keeps us perpetually locked in a frame that is nowhere near as conducive to meaningful progress as it could be.

This is what poet John Keats would refer to as negative capability. This is what we need to cultivate if we are to survive these times. Negative capability is the ability to stay within the discomfort of ambiguity, of paradox, of uncertainty, to stay within this longer and to become almost accustomed to it, which is where this is where the trickster-like disposition of a liminal agent and complexity practitioner comes into the fore.

You hold in suspension multiple options and you have the wisdom to resist the allure of premature foreclosure. This is what happens when people seek the quick answer, the quick fix, the neat solution based upon precedence that has worked before. This is where we start to question the fluent expert with the ready answer, the confidence, charisma, certainty, and clarity that the market doth.

love to venerate and instead we look to those that are staying in the trouble, staying with the trouble, in the entanglement, to slightly borrow Donna Haraway's phrase, staying in amidst of all, open, curious, you know, folks whose curiosity eclipses their conviction. And from there, whole new pathways may yet emerge. This is Wyrd Work, a facet of Wyrd Work, and I can't wait to share more with you. Thank you for joining me.

New season starts very soon. Cheers.