Shamanism may be humanity’s oldest religion – a tradition found across cultures, where healers slip into unseen realms, speak with spirits, and bring back knowledge from beyond the visible world. But in a modern, scientific age, these practices can seem like little more than superstition. But what if they reveal something deeper in human experience?

Anthropologist Manvir Singh set out in search of answers. On a remote island in Indonesia, he lived with the Mentawai people, watching as their shamans — the sikerie — drummed, danced and entered trance, their tattooed bodies painted in turmeric. In these altered states, they appeared to move between worlds.

How does an empirically-minded scientist make sense of such experiences? Singh combines immersive fieldwork with cross-cultural research into shamanic traditions, past and present. He calls shamanism a “timeless religion,” one that may go back to our earliest ancestors — and still lives on in the world’s major religions.

Along the way, he asks a provocative question: Was Jesus a shaman?

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• Manvir’s book, Shamanism
• Manvir’s article in The Guardian on the debate over the history of psychedelics in indigenous cultures

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0:00 The Macumba Exorcism in Brazil
4:35 Meeting the Sikerei of Siberut
8:30 Inside a Shamanic Healing Ceremony
17:05 Psychedelics and Altered States
22:10 Shamanism as the First Religion
29:25 Was Jesus a Shaman?

For thousands of years, flowers have threaded themselves through human life—into our rituals, our art, our language, even our names. We decorate our homes and altars with them, distill their scents, celebrate them in poetry and song. But what if we’ve misunderstood them entirely?

In How Flowers Made the World, biologist and writer David George Haskell invites us to see flowers not as delicate embellishments, but as one of the most powerful forces in Earth’s history. When flowering plants emerged more than 200 million years ago, they didn’t just adapt to the world—they transformed it. Through strategies of beauty, attraction, and reciprocity, they turned rivals into partners, reshaping ecosystems and making possible the rich diversity of life we know today.

In a lyrical, science-rich conversation, we explore:

— Why Haskell calls flowers “nature’s revolutionaries”
— How beauty, pleasure, and desire function as evolutionary strategies
— The deep interdependence between flowers, animals, and humans
— What flowers can teach us about resilience in a time of ecological crisis
— How re-centering flowers might change the story we tell about life on Earth

We live on a floral planet, Haskell says—and more than that, we are a floral species, utterly dependent on flowering plants for food, habitat, and survival. The lessons flowers offer—about creativity, cooperation, and transformation—may be exactly what we need to navigate a rapidly changing world.

What would it mean to tell the story of life not through predators and conquest, but through seduction, partnership and bloom?

• David's book: How Flowers Made Our World: The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries
• To the Best of Our Knowledge (2020): David George Haskell on the forest unseen
• To the Best of Our Knowledge feature (2021): Listening to trees as fellow citizens

00:00:00 Introduction
00:03:50 Flowers Remade the World
00:12:40 The Scent of Ancient Flowers
00:22:00 The Language of Perfume
00:30:30 Belonging to the Living World

What if a river is alive–but we’ve forgotten how to recognize it?

This is the radical idea at the heart of the global “rights of nature” movement, which seeks to grant rivers, forests and ecosystems legal standing. Rooted in ancient traditions and emerging in modern law, it challenges the notion of nature as property and a resource to be exploited.

In “Is a River Alive?”, acclaimed writer and explorer Robert Macfarlane travels to remote waterways in Ecuador, India and Canada, meeting mycologists, Indigenous river-keepers, and activists who see the natural world as animate and ensouled. Known for celebrated books like “Underland,” “The Old Ways,” and “Mountains of the Mind,” Macfarlane blends storytelling, natural history and philosophy in an invitation to reimagine our relationship with the living Earth.

If rivers have rights—and perhaps even a kind of consciousness—how would that change the way we see the world?

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• To the Best of Our Knowledge – Macfarlane describes the allure and our fascination with the underground world of caves, mines, catacombs and glacial shafts beneath the earth's surface.
• To the Best of Our Knowledge - Macfarlane offers a book recommendation: “The Living Mountain” by the Scottish poet and writer Nan Shepherd.
• University of Cambridge – Robert Macfarlane’s faculty page

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00:00:00 Introduction

00:03:00 Is a River Alive?

00:10:50 Ecuador's Cloud Forest

00:19:40 Chennai's Dying Rivers

00:24:15 Wild River in Quebec