Alex Evans is Founder and Executive Director of Larger Us, a "community of change-makers who share the aim of using psychology for good – to bridge divides, build broader coalitions and bring people together" (Alex's Twitter).

Alex set up Larger Us to flip society from a breakdown dynamic and into a breakthrough dynamic. That means paying attention to hwo the state of world impacts our state of mind, how our state of mind how we show up, and how we affect others through our behaviour, especially in a primed and fast-hyper-connected world.

We were speaking a month on from Hamas attacking Isreal, adn the Isreali response. Alex had written a fantastic blog post on how to make sense and respond without just accelerating the conflict.

He says the real tussle of our times is between those two perspectives : zero-sum  ('for me to win, you must lose) or nonzero sum ('for me to win, you must win also'). If we want contribute to towards nonzero sum outcomes, and avoid feeding conflict, then it starts with managing our own mental and emotional states."

For Alex this part of a wider sense that the kind of moment humankind is now living through it is a sort of initiation threshold. We need a deep story that's capable of holding the immense difficulty and intensity and all the contradictions of this moment that we're living through.

Links

Alex's book: The Myth Gap

Rupert Read's Climate Majority Project

Larger Us: Climate Conversations

Deep Canvassing (on Wikipedia)

The Larger Us Podcast: How to change people's minds - with Dave Fleischer

Radical Love campaign in The Atlantic and The Alternative (I couldn't find the Book of Radical Love on the Larger Us website).

Confronting the Long Crisis of Globalization (2010)

The Long Crisis COVID scenarios

Alex's blog post on the Middle East.

Ways to Get Involved with Larger Us

The Age of Endarkenment essay by Michael Ventura

Timings

0:50 - Q1 What are you doing now? And how did you get there?

23:35 - Q2. What is the future you are trying to create, and why?

32:18 - Q3. What are your priorities for the next few years, and why?

38:40 - Q4. If someone was inspired to follow those priorities, what should they do next?

42:15 - Q5. If your younger self was starting their career now, what advice would you give them?

46:43 Q6. Who would you nominate to answer these questions, because you admire their approach?

51:11 Q7. Is there anything else important you feel you have to say?

Twitter: Powerful_Times

Website hub: here.

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Thank you for listening! -- David