Yeah, joint podcast. It's going to be fun. So from the Accidental Gods side, inquiring of you, how are you and particularly where are you? This interesting Wednesday morning. We are recording, it's worth saying to everybody two days after the US inauguration so we are now two days beyond the end of democracy and into what might be techno feudalism or might just be techno Christo something fascism we don't know yet so how are you and where

are you as the world turns over absolutely no strange times thank you I love the question. I've been listening lots to the Accidental Gods podcast since we met. And yeah, I love the question. I think it's great grounding at the beginning. So I am. Yeah, I'm feeling really good and excited to be talking with you. I feel like it's been a really special meeting, actually, since I met you with our previous conversation with Ginny and Riza and Will on Collapse, our little pre-Christmas festival that we had. And where am I? Interestingly, I am sitting in an empty barn in the middle of Bordeaux in France. So we've just bought a big empty stone barn, which is quite an adventure for us. I've got three kids and a dog and we're all sleeping in one room right now and trying to stay warm. But yeah, on the way in a few years time to getting, doing it up, seeing what happens, making it as eco as we can. Composting toilets, perhaps, as we discussed off air. Exciting. So thank you.

Yeah. What temperature is it outside? Because I hadn't quite realised you'd moved in when you said you'd bought it. I assumed and we're living somewhere with full amenities while we do it up. But you're... Would be lovely, wouldn't it would be sensible we

tend not to do sensible things and we can't afford to do the sensible

things

so we're yeah we're in it and we're just we're doing it it's been cold i mean it's but not cold like uk or moscow or kiev or wherever but or post the amok collapse but it's cold like minus two or three in the mornings it has been so yeah no good fun staying warm yeah yes

yes goodness all right so so thank you in our joint podcast it seemed to me that a useful kicking off point because we are in very turbulent times and yet i think a lot of us on whatever we call those of us who are really interested in the continuation of complex life on earth which isn't necessarily everybody's focus I am feeling along with the square-eyed horror at the things that are happening in a lot of places around the world not just the US is also that sense of okay we can stop pretending that the world is working now and accept that it really isn't. And that there is therefore a chance for something to emerge that would take us towards a continuation of complex life. Are you feeling that in your educational sphere of the world?

Yeah, it's no, it's an interesting question. In a way, yes. Personally, I've been feeling it. And I think, you know, this is something we discussed previously. There's been, I've shifted the focus of the podcast over the last few years very much more towards in a way the big more philosophical questions of what are we doing and you know how is this going to be sustainable over any any kind of medium or long term i still feel that there are a lot of people and this was um other people's frustration I know too, that are not even thinking about these questions. So maybe, I mean, that's my hope for this kind of strange and beautiful year, that maybe that it throws into sharp relief, as you say, the fact that there is something very strange happening and that really might help people just sit up and take a bit more notice of the things that we have just taken for granted. I think my worry is people are so busy with just continuing and surviving right in institutional settings for example you know I work with schools and school leaders and networks of educational you know systems and they're just kind of busy looking after the things that are in their gift at this moment right and that's a holding that's really challenging when there's these huge undercurrents or increasingly visible currents of collapse change you know radical movement whatever you want to call them. So it's always a weird paradox for me. Yes.

And I'm remembering, this brings up a lot. I really do want to continue down the education line with you because I think it's so vital. But it seems we recently, a group has put in a grant application for an R&D sprint to create a feature film. And the remit was to explain the climate emergency better, specifically to explain the climate science. And I put quite a lot of effort in that application to very kindly, insofar as I could, reminding them that it's the knowledge deficit model was debunked a very long time ago. It's not that people don't know the science. It's that they have got no options. don't have anywhere to go or any sense of empowerment or any agency to make things or they don't understand that they could have those things and and absent those frankly why would you burden your sympathetic system with something you can't do anything about before we started as you said we were talking about the amok switching off the atlantic meridian overturn current which we used to call the gulf stream which is much easier to say and and it is in the process of switching off which is absolutely expletive deleted terrifying but there's nothing that we can do about stopping that unless we have total systemic change and if we don't have the roots to total systemic change it's just another thing to lie awake screaming about, frankly. And so I'm also aware, I follow Stephen Spoonamore on Substack. And he was the one right after the American election who was pointing out, he was harvesting a lot of Reddit threads with people going, oh, whoa, hang on, this is not right. and here's how it looks as if this election was massaged because they have electronic voting machines which run as far as i can tell on windows 97 which is pretty easy to hack and donald trump said at the inauguration you know elon's really good with computers he knew what he was doing he got us the election so you know down there and they're not pretending not to but there was a really interesting post that stephen cross posted and I'm just going to read a tiny little bit of it because I think it's worse. So this is written on the 10th of January. To whom it may concern, I am writing this with a heavy heart and no small amount of fear. As a former ex, brackets, formerly Twitter employee on an H1B visa, I cannot reveal my identity without risking everything. But I can't stay silent any longer about what I saw and was made to do. When Elon Musk took over, everything changed. What started as a social media company became something much darker. I was part of a team that was directly ordered to manipulate Twitter systems to influence the 2024 US presidential election. It wasn't subtle and it wasn't ethical. We completely changed how the algorithm worked, pushing pro-Trump and right-wing posts at the top of people's feeds. To make it look balanced, we also boosted some left-wing critics of Democrats, but it was all carefully calculated. These changes didn't just affect Americans, they impacted users worldwide. There's a whole lot more, but basically he goes on to say that having done it in the US, they are now doing it around the world. I am terrified writing this, but I had to speak up. I just hope someone with the power to do something sees this letter. And they've put a whole bunch of stuff onto GitHub. He says, if you understand coding, we put breadcrumbs in there. We left breadcrumbs so you can see it. You can find it. You can understand what we did because we understood what we were doing and he signs off you're sincerely a former employee who can't sleep at night and wow we know that we live in a the best democracy that money can buy and we have known this for quite a long time it's been obvious around the world that the people with the money are the people who get to call the shots and now the people with the money are doing actual fascist salutes in public at the US inauguration and in the UK we have the Guardian arguing whether it was a Mussolini salute or a Hitler salute as if that were relevant please anybody out there just stop buying the Guardian now and tell them why you're doing that, because that's not how the media ought to be working. So we live in a world now where money buys democracy, and this is happening. And not only are people just struggling to keep the wheels and the bus turning, whatever they're doing in schools, they're having to feed the kids. They're having to buy their books for them. They're just having to hold people together as the social net breaks down. And they're being forced to teach stuff that, as far as I can tell, is institutional gaslighting of children, because we're all pretending that they're going to have jobs and a social net and a world worth living in. And here you've got to get an engineering degree because it's going to be very useful as the Ammox shuts down. No, sorry, it isn't. And I wonder, in the networks that you're in, there are the people we need to reach who genuinely don't know what they could be doing. What kinds of agency are people seeing and taking so that we can build, let's say, social media networks that are not toxic and communities of place, purpose and passion that are generative? What do you see?

Yeah, no, I mean, it is the question. And I think the first thing that comes to mind is is the young people and the way that the young people are having to live through and with this when they see in their learning experiences in their classrooms they kind of feel this sense of disconnection with a lot of what they're learning right and they're kind of they're holding you know we eco-anxiety talking about eco-anxiety as a as a kind of a a catch-all term but you know mental health crises and all all over the world you're seeing this kind of i was talking with a colleague in beijing recently and you know you're seeing it everywhere these young people who are basically questioning the things that they're being given every day. And at the same token, many of the teachers are as well. But again, they're trapped in the institutional kind of hamster wheel, like, you know, they're keeping going. And the young people are kind of having to hold this, as you say, what's my future? You know, I was talking to some young people not that long ago in relation to AI particularly, but with regards to what is the future that they're working towards. And they're incredibly conscious of the fact that it is not guaranteed. All these success narratives that have been just the lifeblood of the education system forever are no longer resonant with them they just think well if i train to be a medic is that actually going to be the thing that i've been told it will be and therefore i've got to work i've got to do these subjects i'm going to work incredibly hard to get these grades to do the next thing the next thing the next thing with this promise of I mean what exactly but but really a prompt some kind of promise of life happiness and success yeah which was the narrative before and now they're just seeing everything that's going on in the world and thinking well that rings a bit hollow now right so so what do I do what do I do with that when I've got to go to my next lesson, you know, which I'm not loving, but you know, I've been told I've got to do and you know, there's this kind of such an interesting kind of trap that the young people are in and feeling very strongly. many of them are kind of feeling like there's more and more kind of bureaucratic performance management of you know accountability structures particularly in the UK I work internationally so you see very different pictures in different kind of systems but there is a you know this kind of new public management observation of teachers to performance manage to get outcomes I mean it's the thing that I find interesting is it's all the same kind of logic of optimization. And I don't know if you know Hartmut Rose's work, but I've been really interested in that recently. Just he talks about optimization versus resonance as two different kinds of logics in a way, right? And the logic of optimization is just, you know, how do we maximize how do we be more efficient how do we do more with less you know all of the stuff Keir Starmer was coming out with about AI last week about how it's going to revolutionize the efficiency of government so we can get more for people in the in the public services because we can do more with less I mean this these narratives bonkers exactly but it's these narratives of efficiency and optimization all the time, which is kind of soul destroying, right? For young people in school, they can feel that that's what's happening. It's like, do a bit more, get a bit of a better grade, do a bit more work so you can get a bit. then plus you know you've got then this outside of school college application university application kind of treadmill that they're also thinking about or should i be part of this club or this society so that i can show that i'm a well-rounded human like jesus you know you can't be a well-rounded human in an optimizing system that is basically the kind of treadmill of like just keep going keep keep improving and

keep competing against your peers the people you should be building community with you're all looking at each other sideways because if you get half a mark better than me you might get into a college that I don't get into and then my whole life falls apart exactly it's horrible exactly I was listening to Zach Stein a while ago saying that in, I think, North Carolina, there are schools where every single child has gastric ulcers. And I was listening on your podcast to a lady saying that in the US, the parents are taking their kids to five separate things after school to prove how well-rounded they are. Let's go to the violence lessons and then gymnastics. And then you go and play chess. This is a form of torture. And and it's it's it's insane and it is it has to stop absolutely

and but i would temper that with a kind of that's not everywhere i mean you know it's really easy to catastrophize i would say okay and in many of the schools i work with there are you know there are happy young people inquiring learning together So I think it's, this is partly my temperament, but I resist the catastrophizing blanket kind of description. It's not all like that, right? All right. And it needs to fundamentally change, don't get me wrong. Right. But there are spaces where committed, loving educators are trying to do the best with young people as our parents. But, and, you know, bringing in schoolishness, which is what you just did with Susan Bloom, the recent podcast I had. I mean, that concept of schoolishness has colonised so many spaces of life, right? It's the same kind of logic. Well, it's the optimising, isn't it? it's

just a word for optimizing within schools really yeah

and and then as a parent it's become you know she talks about it pedagogizes everything you know everything's a learning opportunity because i can teach my young person my child to be a little bit better so that they get the edge on the competition it's a very weird concept that has colonized most of the world. And we are on that path dependency of that schoolishness, which is almost everywhere now. So the question is, how, what do you do about that, right? When we're on that path, on that treadmill. And that's the holding that I do a lot with the podcast and with all of the networks and amazing people I get to speak to is, yeah, what do you do when we're in that? We're so far down that rabbit hole, you know, because we still want to do something with the young people that we care

about and work with every day. So we're on to the question that we bring on Accidental Gods, which is clearly we need total systemic change. And it's relatively straightforward to see a future where that what you're suggesting isn't happening. You were talking recently to your most recent podcast to someone in New Zealand about the Maori concepts of education. And that seemed very much to key into a binary that I don't really like binaries, but this concept that our culture is a trauma culture, this must optimise culture. And that, first of all, optimisation is good. Second, that it's essential. And third, that it's possible in the way the world is, which I think particularly in the UK, we've got a generation of political leaders who came of age in the 1980s and whose emotional world has not altered since then. So they're still thinking as if we're at peak fossil fuels and GDP acceleration and they haven't got their heads out of that. if we accept that optimization is not useful and not possible and not necessary and that there are other models and that what we need to do is to build a bridge from where we are to where we could be what does that bridge look and feel like are you what are you seeing in the educators that you talk to who are actively building bridges towards systemic change yeah

so just to slightly go back on what you've just said i would slightly disagree that optimization is not ever desirable and the fact that you invoke bridge building is i had a fantastic conversation a few years ago with an mit professor sanjay sama and we were talking about this then, that in certain contexts, you want to be systematic, you want to optimize, right? You know, when you're, if you're building a bridge, you want to make sure that the engineering spot on, right? You really do. And so there's something really important in that holding that, for me, that systematic optimizing logic has colonized everything it's not that it's not useful somewhere in some places so i just wanted to kind of again bring bring that in because it's i think that's an important point that we sometimes can sweep away the value that is in some of that when there is also clearly a fundamental imbalance where that logic has moved into spaces where it is completely violent and unreasonable and shouldn't be there right okay like bringing up children like you know being in right relationship in loving relationship with fellow humans with that that not a space where we should be thinking in an optimizing way, I would say. That's eugenics, right? For me, that's eugenics. For me, balance is a really, really kind of strong. Yeah, it's a strong concept because it just it. There is a sense that as we move away from the thing that we're in, there's a holding of the tensions of the cultural history and the tradition and the reason why we've ended up where we are. Yeah.

So can we unpack this? Because this feels I really still want to look at bridge building and green shoots, but this feels really quite core. So I start from a place where a fully realized human, and we have the potential for that, and it's our birthright, is heart connected to the web of life. And that if the web says you need to build a bridge, then you will be co-creating bridge building with other nodes in the web of life that might be beavers and the trees and the rocks and the wind. And what we would bring would be, here's my concept of my understanding of getting from one side of the river to the other. And let's see what we can co-create. And that's absolutely, I'm not suggesting that we don't optimize for bridge that actually bears weight, because clearly that's what we want in the long run but the impetus to do so would come from the hyper complex endlessly emerging system that is the web of life yeah and i wonder where in your world where does the impetus to build make grow come from does that make sense as a question it does make sense yeah

it does make sense of the question and i guess i think many people myself included have lost touch to some degree with that where with where that is coming from the source of that and i think that feels quite core to what's going on at the moment i and again personally as a reflection i would say over the last few years i've maybe come back to an awareness of where that is coming from or i've come to an awareness of i mean you know what different people call it different things right but ecological awakening i was listening to bill block in in preparation because i have yeah it'd be interesting to talk about that but he calls it ecological awakening right and i find that to be a bit of a an enlightenment type term but but actually at the core of the idea you've got a really interesting and important connectedness and interrelationship with each other the web of life as you're saying that i i actually don't i think a lot of people have completely lost touch with that sense right and i think that's that for me is a really interesting part of the problem problem in inverted commas because reconnecting with that is not something you can mandate for everybody it's not something you can put in a curriculum it's not something you can optimize for right so but there's but there's this deep kind of need yearning feels you know to reconnect with that and that's for me is where the impetus comes from but when people have lost touch with that intuition, you could call it, I guess, the heart mind, you know, as I love, you know, your description, there's something really important there about how do we reconnect with ourselves, with our bodies, with our connection to the web of life, all of those things that would allow us to then open up more of that impetus and more of the questions about where that's coming from so that we can then respond to how do we build the bridges you know yeah

yes