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

Makenzie Darling spent over a decade building campaigns that reached millions of people, from anti-bullying programmes with Major League Baseball and ESPN to a global kindness campaign that touched 125 countries. She later became chief of staff inside some of the fastest growing organisations in the psychedelic and consciousness space, helping build the systems, governance and community structures that took them from a handful of people to national scale. But her own path here started somewhere much harder: she grew up the black sheep of a family marked by addiction, and within months lost both her parents, her job and her health all at once. She rebuilt everything from there, and now teaches leaders and founders how to build movements instead of businesses, with a sharp focus on power, accountability and what it actually means to lead with integrity. This conversation is about what she learned from the inside of organisations that lived up to their values, and the ones that didn't.

Chapters

00:00 Intro
02:04 What do you do?
03:12 Karmic assignment vs purpose vs passion
06:23 Psychedelic churches and the psychedelic renaissance
10:53 Becoming an entheogenic minister
12:10 From educational technology to movement building
14:58 It ends with me
17:28 The ayahuasca journey and the dam
21:15 Messiah complex and the ego in plant medicine
24:28 What is a movement maker?
26:46 Extraction dressed as devotion
28:37 Patagonia and corporate movements
32:54 Power literacy and decentralisation
37:59 Does power corrupt?
41:30 Inside the incubator
44:50 Ancestral healing and epigenetics
50:28 Her mother's addiction and death
51:44 Riches to rags and accessibility in healing
59:51 Community, loneliness and rebuilding
1:04:42 Designing for belonging
1:11:07 Cultural appropriation in psychedelics
1:13:58 The Enneagram
1:18:10 Faith, God and reclaiming the word
1:21:34 Cults vs movements
1:25:35 Being let down by spiritual leaders
1:32:17 Holding both the genius and the flaws
1:38:06 Closing reflections

Follow Makenzie on Instagram @global_movement_maker and visit globalmovementmaker.com
Follow me on Instagram @olivierpassebecq and visit olivierpassebecq.com

Sara Barnes is a published author, a Level 2 Open Water Swim Coach and one of the UK's most recognised voices on cold water immersion. Based in the Lake District for nearly three decades, she has written three books, The Cold Fix (Vertebrate Publishing), The Winter of Our Lives (HarperCollins) and Where the Beck Flows, the first release on her own independent press CROOKED LAKE. She has written for Outdoor Swimmer magazine and the Outdoor Swimming Society, made three short films including the award-winning Dear Heart and Skinny, and was featured on the 2021 BBC series The Lakes with Simon Reeve.

She has been swimming in cold water every single day for nine years.

In 2025, she nearly died twice. Her doctors told her that cold water swimming is the reason she is still alive.

In this conversation, Sara opens up about the surgery that broke her body and her identity, the moment she realised she could float when she could not walk, and how cold water became a daily practice that brought her back to herself. We talk about creativity, ageing, desire, body confidence, the loneliness of working from home, the courage to self-publish at 64, and what nearly dying twice taught her about being truly alive.

This episode is a love letter to anyone who has had to rebuild themselves from the inside out, and a reminder that the most powerful transformations often begin with one small act of saying yes to your own life.

In this episode:

• Growing up an island girl in Trinidad and swimming before she could walk
• The surgery that broke her body and stripped her identity
• The moment her kids drove her to the lake and she realised she could float
• Cold water as medicine, daily ritual and creative fuel
• Why one minute per degree and other cold water rules are rubbish
• The five archetypes that shaped her first book
• Falling in love in a frozen ice barrel in Norway
• Writing as a way of speaking to her younger self
• Self-publishing at 64 and refusing to be silenced by the industry
• Nearly dying twice and what it taught her about life
• The little girl called Silly Sarah and finding her voice
• What cold water, breathwork and nature can do together

Sara on Instagram: @bumblebarnes Her books and films: sarabarnesauthor.co.uk

Follow @olivierpassebecq on Instagram and visit olivierpassebecq.com