We grow up believing there’s a formula for success: work hard, follow the rules, chase the right goals, and happiness will follow. I built a career this way, as a software engineer.
But somewhere along the way, life shows itself to be messier, more complex—and a lot more fragile than we were led to believe. Beneath the rhythms of everyday life and the buzz of innovation and career goals, we’re facing profound instability, from personal burnout to destabilizing democracy, destruction of ecosystems and the unfolding of the planet’s sixth mass extinction.
This podcast is my journey through that realization. Through wide-ranging conversations with historians, philosophers, ecologists, scientists, and even posture experts, I explain how my worldview shifted once I found the courage to question the stories and rules I grew up with.
Each episode invites you to step back, rethink what we value, and consider how a clearer understanding of ourselves and our world might help us navigate the future with more wisdom—and more heart.
I’m your host, Vicki Shaw.
Biosphere 2: The painstaking project to build a miniature earth
In a conversation with Linda Leigh, we learn about Biosphere 2, the massive project in the 90's to replicate Earth's functions in a materially sealed glass dome. Linda was the biome design manager and one of eight Biospherians to be sealed inside—for 2 years. She elucidates the intricacies and complexities of building a biological support system from the ground up, species by species. From plant reproduction to soil microbes, from why biodiversity matters to how we treat wilderness, our conversation raises questions of how we've defined our societal values, which don't account for the cost of the infinite services Earth provides.
16 Jun 2026
Big History and a Path to Reconnection
This episode borrows audio from the Big History Project curriculum and its eight thresholds of increasing complexity to tell the expansive, 13.8 billion year story of humanity. We also hear additional reflections from David Christian on the morals of this big origin story, and how it provides me a path toward reconnection with the rest of the world and the community of life.
9 Jun 2026
How to Tell a Human Origin Story
It's late 2023, I've finally quit my job and shed many inherited and outdated narratives. In order to find what's next, I spend time exploring the world through literature and stumble onto an article titled, "We need a modern origin story." It's by David Christian, the historian behind Big History, and reading it feels like it was written to me, about my own life. In this turning-point episode, I trace how a British boy raised in Nigeria, haunted by the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis, spent his career as a Russian historian questioning self-imposed boundaries and identities. We learn about how David's questions pushed him back and back, past nations and species and life itself, all the way to the Big Bang. The result was Big History: an attempt to use our vast scientific knowledge to tell one coherent story of where we all came from. This is a story big enough for all of us.
20 Apr 2026
Part 2: Valuescience and Identity
In this episode, an old friend sits down with me to tell me about his three separate leaves of absence from Stanford. With each break, Andrew interrogates narratives ranging from the personal, to the societal, and the institutional, and each time re-discovers himself with more clarity. In his most recent break as a PhD student, he comes up against the institutional rules of epidemiology, and challenges the department to expand their definition of public health. This story brings together personal anecdotes of applying valuescience (introduced in part 1), molds a path forward after confronting a narrative, and brings me to finally quit my tech job and get on with my own break!
5 Mar 2026
Part 1: Unraveling Values and Narrative
Where do our values come from? Can we evolve them to live better? And why does "value" mean something totally different from "values"?
In this episode, we meet an intentional community called Magic that explores those questions through a scientific lens, in a philosophy called valuescience.
David Schrom, the community's founder, tells his story of challenging the narratives we inherit, which culminates in estrangement from his father.
Personal reflections on valuescience and David's story help me reconcile past moral questions of working in tech, and grapple with how difficult it is to examine the ideas we become attached to.
Trigger warning: This episode contains mentions of suicide that some listeners may find upsetting.
28 Jan 2026
Back Pain and the Thread of Kinesthetic Wisdom
A horrible bout of back pain creates curiosity about the underlying societal influences on our bodies, and causes me to take a leave of absence from my tech job.
For this story, I interview a posture guru, Esther Gokhale, about how pain may arise from influences beyond our physical bodies, including speculation of a break in the thread of what she calls kinesthetic wisdom.
We glimpse examples from indigenous cultures, antique art, and vintage clothing stores to see how postural averages change, and what that might mean for our own bodies.
In uncovering these hidden layers, questions arise about what else by might be more improvised than previously thought.
18 Oct 2025
Who Wrote The Rules, Intro!
What's this narrative podcast all about anyway? In this introduction, you'll get a taste of how big a scope we're taking on through Vicki's (flustering) experience learning to play a video game called Civilization. Through this story, we'll begin to encounter the seminal questions of the series: Why are we obsessed with dominance, and is there another way to thrive? Where did we get our ideas about what is good or valuable? Can we adapt and expand our identity and worldview to embrace more sensible values?
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Apple Podcasts (US)
4.8 / 5
16 ratings
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