The Unfolding with Olivier
On Belonging, Ritual, and What AI Can't Replace | Carolin Goethel
Carolin Goethel wears many hats. Facilitator, community weaver, bridge builder and nature based guide. She co-founded the Wild Minds Collective, a trio of deep ecologists and nature guides who run retreats and vision quests. She has spent years building things from the ground up: she helped launch the UK arm of the Food Assembly, worked on a universal basic income experiment in Berlin, organised citizens assemblies to bring everyday people into the conversation about AI and has been stewarding the Church of Interbeing, a non religious Sunday community ritual in a refurbished Berlin church, since 2021 and was the Germany Activation Lead for The Week, a project mobilising courageous conversations about the climate. She trained as a rite of passage guide with the School of Lost Borders, where she learned to hold twelve day containers in which people go out on the land alone for four days and four nights, without food and without shelter, to mark a threshold in their lives. This conversation is about what technology cannot give us, why she believes the world is stuck in a domination paradigm, and what she found when she stopped looking for wisdom elsewhere and went searching for her own roots instead. Chapters 00:00 Intro 01:49 What do you do? 05:07 Democratising AI 10:22 What she learned organising citizens assemblies 15:27 Is AI something to be afraid of? 20:46 Outsourcing yourself to a machine 25:57 AI as an idea generator, not a replacement 28:11 Other ways of organising society 36:55 The stories underneath our systems 41:51 Remembering that she is also indigenous 44:00 Cyclical living and the seasons 48:38 What are rites of passage? 1:00:24 How to create a rite of passage for someone you love 1:06:58 What does a facilitator actually do? 1:09:23 A Sunday community ritual in Berlin 1:13:41 Where it all started 1:22:17 Family, roots and being a generalist 1:27:02 Navigating power in groups 1:32:53 Do you lose power by sharing it? 1:35:09 Is there hope for the world? 1:41:01 What is a vision quest? 1:54:33 Guiding vision quests today Follow Carolin on Instagram @carolin_goethel and visit carolingoethel.com Follow me on Instagram @olivierpassebecq and visit olivierpassebecq.com
