Sylvie Barbier & Rufus Pollock are the co-founders of Life Itself – a collective of pragmatic utopians committed to practical action for a radically wiser, weller world.

Sylvie is a French-Taiwanese ritual artist whose work synthesises Eastern and Western philosophies and aesthetics. Her performance art pieces are contemporary rituals, where the audience is invited to take an active and interactive role.

Rufus is an entrepreneur, activist, author, and long-term Zen practitioner who has founded several successful for-profit and nonprofit initiatives. His 2018 book Open Revolution is about making a radically freer and fairer information age, and has been translated into multiple languages.

Rufus and Sylvie’s lives come together both as a couple and through the work they are doing with Life Itself, which includes creating practice hubs and developmental spaces, driving research on the meta-crisis and pathways towards a Second Renaissance, and building partnerships across disciplines by connecting thinkers, artists, communities, and organisations exploring post-conventional ways of life.

In this conversation, we explore how Sylvie and Rufus’s inner work paths converged and led them to co-found the Life Itself collective. We get into the real difficulty and vulnerability of walking a post-conventional path and why shadow work remains criminally underrated. We dig into Game A vs Game B, two fundamentally different ways of seeing reality (Wisdom vs Power), and how framing the meta-crisis through the lens of symptoms, diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment might be our clearest map yet for navigating it. We also explore which seeds of culture we’re choosing to nourish, what actually makes people change their minds, and the surprising role art may play in collective transformation.

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