Akhil Puri

I strive to embody two ideals as I approach this work — the archetype of the Fool card in Tarot, and tantric optimism. The Fool inspires me to approach this work unburdened by past conditioning and fear, with a beginner’s mind, revising my understanding as often as reality demands it. I’ve changed my mind about what needs to be done several times in the last decade. I expect I’ll keep changing it for as long as I’m alive.

Tantric optimism inspires me to remain radically engaged and hopeful — to keep acting to improve the world while fully feeling the sorrow and fear that the state of the world brings up. Not dissociated cheerfulness. Not doomer despair. Grief and action as the same gesture.

Over a decade of working on climate, technology, community, and inner practice, I’ve found a lens that I think is useful for understanding and solving our civilizational crises:

We are living through a civilization-wide breakdown in our ability to self-correct and self-evolve — at every level, from the individual nervous system to planetary governance.

The examples compound:

• At an individual level, one definition of trauma is the inability of the nervous system to update based on new information. This inability can also stem from things like dogma, or something more daily and insidious like being hooked to the phone.
• At the interpersonal level, broken communication patterns — from trauma or simple lack of skill — keep relationships stuck in loops they’ve long outgrown.
• At the cultural level, the same pattern plus fake news and algorithmic incentives produces polarization, and polarization collapses the dialogue a culture needs to evolve.
• At the economic and political levels, markets don’t price ecological cost because they aren’t truly free, and governments don’t correct for it because they’re hijacked by lobbying and short-termism.
• At the global level, AI is being built inside an arms race where every actor knows the outcome is bad, and nobody can afford to stop first.

The breakdown manifests in a self-destructive worldview — that of separation from the earth, from each other, and from the parts of ourselves we’d rather not see. It is this worldview that leads us to treat the world, ourselves, and others as resources to be optimized, exploited, dominated, and controlled.

The specific crises we face are downstream. The upstream crisis is a failure of feedback — signal that should update the system isn’t getting through, or isn’t getting through in time, or is being actively suppressed by the system it’s meant to correct.

So the question I keep coming back to is:

How do we build or restore broken feedback loops so that our systems can self-correct and self-evolve — at every level, from the individual to the civilizational?

I like this framing for three reasons:

• It’s about what is right, not who is right. It prioritizes the process by which truth and course-correction happen, not any group’s current claim on truth.
• It focuses on mechanisms, not on imposing values. It doesn’t require any of us to force our value system on the rest — it requires us to repair the channels through which values can actually be negotiated.
• It’s adaptive. A process that self-corrects doesn’t have to be right about everything today; it has to be right about how to find out it was wrong.

This isn’t a radical idea. Democracy is supposed to be such a system. So is science. So is a free market. So is the common law. They’re all, in their different ways, civilizational feedback loops. The problem isn’t that we lack the concept — it’s that these systems have been exploited faster than they’ve evolved, and most of them now have captured sensors and muted signals.

I am building Earth 47, a single organization that operates as part media company, part think tank, part pro-social venture studio, part political movement, and part school for inner transformation. The throughline across those parts is the feedback-loop frame above, applied at different levels of the stack — with the inner and the outer work held as one thing.

Earth 47 began a decade ago, as a climate-tech startup where I experimented with many ideas — a solar energy marketplace, a crowdfunding platform for green projects, and developing solar rooftop projects. It is that work which made me realize that climate change was a symptom of our problems and not the problem itself.

Apart from Earth 47, I have held several product and business leadership roles. I led a 70-million-dollar consumer-goods sales portfolio for Unilever in India, built software for clinics and hospitals at Practo, and helped large enterprises plan their decarbonization at SINAI Technologies.

I was a Positive Deviants fellow in 2025. I hold a B.E. in Computer Science from BITS Pilani and an MBA from IIM Bangalore. I currently live in Toronto with my wife.