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The old paradigm is breaking apart. The new one is still not fully shaped.
If we're going to emerge into a just, equitable - and above all regenerative - system, we need to meet the people who are already living, working, thinking and believing at the leading edge of inter-becoming transformation.
Accidental Gods exists to bring these voices to the world so that we can all step forward into a future we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.
We have the choice now - we can choose to transform…or we can face the chaos of a failing system.
Our Choice. Our Chance. Our Future.
Join the evolution at: https://accidentalgods.life
Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the podcast where we believe that another world is still possible and that if we all work together, there is time to lay the foundations for that flourishing future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I'm Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility, and I am just back from a month's holiday, fresh and sparkly, and really looking forward to a whole new set of conversations, as we in the Northern hemisphere move away from the long days and towards the long nights. My first guest after this break is Tim Frenneaux. I first met him in his role as source for the Pivot Project, which is a thoroughly engaging and inspiring new concept that he describes as a people powered movement for regenerative transformation. Tim is a bookseller, a regenerative business designer, and a rebel economist on a journey to understand his role in the great system of life. Through his practice, he cultivates an emotional connection with this pivotal moment for life on earth, to create change and transformation that come from the heart, not just the head. Because of this work, the Doughnut Economics Action Lab have called him a thought leader, though he prefers to think of himself as a thought weaver. He also works as a design consultant, facilitator and public speaker on regenerative design.
Manda: And as you'll hear, he runs a monthly book subscription called Adventurous Ink, which helps people reconnect with themselves and the wider world, and which has a Kickstarter up and running as we speak. So if you have time and the means, please do head off and find the link for that in the show notes. That apart, we had a really wide ranging, broad, deep conversation where we moved from ideas of how to bring the UK's water companies back into genuine public ownership, to how we could build political consensus around bioregions, to what it is to walk the doughnut of doughnut economics. And one of the things that struck me most in this conversation with Tim, was how engaged he was with his own feelings, with how willing and able he was to step into heart mind and speak from there, with all of the grief and joy and despair and hope that this brings. This was a really encouraging, enlivening conversation to start our new season, and I hope you find that it takes you further in your own journey. It certainly helped me to move along the path. So people of the podcast, please welcome Tim Frenneaux of Pivot.
Manda: Tim, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast on this beautiful sunny September morning. How are you and where are you in the world just now?
Tim: Thank you for having me, Manda. I'm fabulous. I'm working out what shape I am and aligning myself with myself. That's how I am. We might talk a bit about what that means. And where I am? Well I'm in North Leeds, and I'm looking out and it's a beautiful sunny day here. There's some clouds coming in, there were parakeets flying over our house early this morning, which is very strange.
Manda: How does that happen in Leeds?
Tim: We've only just had parakeets arrive in Leeds. Yeah.
Manda: Feral parakeets. Wow.
Tim: These are the times that we live in. But they are a flash of beauty, so I did quite like them. I know some people don't like those things.
Manda: Now we need to get the ecologist to tell us what it is that they're displacing by coming in. Are these ones that moved up from London? Lots of people in London let parakeets out, I guess.
Tim: So we've had them in Leeds for a little while, but they've only just arrived in my neighbourhood over the summer. We came back from our hols and there they were, parakeets in North Leeds. So there you go.
Manda: Wow. And I also want to ask the ecologist what predates on parakeets. Because the sparrowhawks will have a field day if they recognise. Because it'll be dead easy to see because they're not really as camouflaged as sparrows.
Tim: No, no.
Manda: Okay. Back to the podcast. So you are a bookseller, a regenerative designer, and a rebel economist. And as you said, you're getting back into the shape of yourself. Tell us a bit about how all of those three arose and how they feed into Pivot, which is how I found you, of which you are not the founder but the source. And we'll talk about that too. So pick any of those and run with it. Over to you.
Tim: Let's start with the books. So I am the founder and curator of a online book subscription called Adventurous Ink, and I've been running it for the past eight years. And I started that business while I was still working as head of economic policy and head of business in an economic development agency, a local enterprise partnership. And I think I was digging my own escape tunnel from my career and eventually the tunnel was shored up sufficiently by selling books about travel, nature and adventure that I was confident enough to leave that role, which was a big step.
Manda: How long ago are we talking?
Tim: It was 2020.
Manda: So well into the Amazon period. So you manage a book subscription service at a time when people can just log on to Amazon and pick something up off Kindle Unlimited for nothing.
Tim: Yeah. I started out, I tried to disrupt the retail industry, so I came up with this great idea, like library of Things and applying that to retail. So I was selling high end folding kayaks, which were beautiful, and you could fold them down to the size of a suitcase and these amazing tree tents that you could hang in the trees. And I was selling them to groups of people rather than individuals. So I'd say, look, get three mates together and this amazing kayak that costs £2000 or £1500 is yours for a quarter of the price. And so that's what I was trying to do. I was trying to find a way to be in business in a way that is what the world needed, rather than kind of constantly pushing that consumerist aspect. And I've got to be honest, I didn't have the skills to do that at that particular point. I've got no retail background. I was a policy wonk. But I took the learning from that and applied it to the other stuff that I do. And one of the fundamental things I learned is that people don't make rational decisions. I was yeah, people want to go kayaking, they would love this kayak and therefore they would like it four times as much if it costs a quarter of the price. And what I learned was that I was running in the face of emotional connection with buying things. And that was a big learning for me. So it was really useful. But after a couple of years, I switched into the book subscription, because in the end, the sharing retail thing hadn't worked. I started selling sustainable outdoor clothing and equipment.
Manda: Does that exist? Because even Patagonia is still PFAS filled until next year.
Tim: Yeah, as sustainable as we could make. So I was both selling other people's stuff, so I was selling Finistere stuff, desperately trying to get into Patagonia but they're quite selective about who they have in and I was a new up and coming.
Manda: You're not a big enough store, I imagine.
Tim: Yeah. And then I made some stuff myself, so I didn't make them myself I got a shoe manufacturer in the north of England, Walsh, to make me some beautiful ventile trainers. So it was a natural product that was waterproof and kind of fit that bill. But eventually I realised that I was just pumping up the consumer bubble. I was just perpetuating this thing of, to get outdoors, you need some more kit. And hey, guys, it just so happens I've got some kit for you. Would you like to buy it? And I realised that it wasn't the reason I wanted to be in business. I wanted to be in business to do something more. And I latched on to this idea of of what people really needed was a way of making more of that experiences while they're outdoors. And that the books and spending time in the company of nature writers, of adventurers, of people going places and doing interesting things under their own power would be really interesting, and would be something that people wanted. And it turned out, thankfully, that it was.
Manda: Right. Okay, so vicarious travelling for when you can't actually do the real thing.
Tim: Well, so I actually left my job, right at the start of lockdown, my final role as head of economic policy was to predict the impact of the coronavirus. And based on government predictions, it looked like we were going to have the biggest recession, the highest levels of unemployment. But even so, I still left my job to go and pursue this, what could have been a pipe dream. But it turned out that selling books about travel, nature, and adventure to people who've all of a sudden had their horizons locked down and have huge amounts of time, was actually quite a good time to be selling to those folks. So it helped me through.
Tim: So when I was working as head of economic policy, I wasn't just pursuing economic growth. Technically, that was what our organisation was there to do, but what I was trying to do was do that in a sensitive and sustainable way. So the last thing that I did there, the last big thing, was establish England's only carbon negative industrial strategy.
Manda: How?
Tim: And government didn't say off you go. All organisations like mine, there are about 30 of them across the UK, and we sort of receive policy direction from government. And they said off you go, go and prepare this local industrial strategy which shows how you're going to grow your local economy.
Manda: Because this was under the Tories and growing the economy... Mind you, growing the economy is still a thing.
Tim: Anyway, we'll come back to that. So they said go off and tell us how are you going to grow your economy? So I brought all our partners together, business and private sector and third sector, and we held this big strategic consultation and conversation about the future that we wanted to see for our area, which was York and North Yorkshire. And and just by changing the frame of that conversation and not saying how can we have as much growth? But by saying, what future do you want to be part of? It completely changed the outcome of the strategy.
Manda: Right. Yes.
Tim: And where we ended up was an aspiration to be carbon negative. And that was partly because of the huge peatlands that we've got. We've got two national parks in the North Yorkshire Moors and the Yorkshire Dales. So England's biggest area of peatlands, which obviously well managed is a is a carbon soak and a carbon sink. We also had Drax with big bioenergy carbon capture and storage plans.
Manda: Yes but we've just had a podcast on Drax and it's definitely not carbon negative or even carbon net zero. Drax is bad.
Tim: So here's the thing. So I was trying to do my best in the constraints of the system which is geared around growth. And I struggled with that. And when I say struggled I had mental health problems. I couldn't believe it. I started from suffering with anxiety, all sorts of things, that I was like, how are you possibly experiencing this? And I came to realise that it was a dissonance, in that I was wanting to do one thing and stuck in a different system. So I had to leave. So it was fortuitous, but not accidental, that I'd been digging my own escape tunnel.
Manda: A part of you had known a long time that you were going to need to get out.
Tim: Yeah. And so selling the books was an opportunity to step out of that world, with a little bit of financial security, not very much at all. But it was enough of a stepping stone to take me out and to do the work that I needed on my own personal philosophy and practice. And so that was transformational. So now I can very much look back on that time and understand that green growth paradigm that I was locked in. And now I have a completely different perspective on that. But all this experience, I guess who I am now is the sum total of all my experience. And for all the things that I would do different now, it's still a good thing to have done.
Manda: Can I ask a brief question? You didn't, as far as I can tell, go through Schumacher's regenerative economics program. And yet you got to a place that sounds very like where we got to, which is the current system is not working; how can we create something that actually creates a future that's liveable? Can you tell us a little briefly edited highlights of your economic growth? Or are you going to get to that when we get to being a rebel economist?
Tim: No, no, I think that's a perfect way in. So one of the big things was Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics. So when she published Doughnut Economics, I soaked it up. I brought it into the day job, so we put the UN Sustainable Development Goals as a key part of our decision making and appraisal process for all the work that we were doing. So for me it was doughnut economics, because I'm a geographer by training, I'm not an economist by training. And that was the systems view that started to align everything that was happening. And obviously I'm reading a lot of nature books as well. So the nature connectedness part of it was quite prominent. And so I started to piece all these individual bits together. But it was only after I'd left when, the Climate Action Leeds, which is where I'm based, they launched, I think it was the UK's first doughnut city portrait. So they crunched all the data and launched the Leeds Doughnut Collective. And because I was active on the Doughnut's national platform, they went this guy he seems to know a bit about doughnut economics. Let's bring him along to the launch. So I went along to the launch of Doughnut Economics and it was brilliant. And they'd crunched all the data for Leeds, and guess what? We're overshooting and undershooting.
Manda: Right. You're not in the doughnut at all.
Tim: Not in the doughnut at all. Apart from fresh water, we're all right for fresh water. That's the only bit. But it was a real transition point for me, because during this launch event, we had Rob Shorter from DEAL who came along.
Manda: A friend of the podcast.
Tim: And he did an exercise where we made the doughnut. So there were like 70 of us there in this massive room, and we made the doughnut on the floor with some big bits of ropes. So we made the inner social foundation and the outer planetary boundary and then we stepped into it and walked through it. As you can tell, it affects me every time I think about it.
Manda: Yeah, clearly.
Tim: Because I stepped outside the planetary boundaries and was scared. For the first time, I was scared. And then I stepped below the social foundation, and it was a place of sadness and despair. And I had this incredible embodied experience of what this system meant. How this system felt. And I realised that up until this point, four years, I'd been working with Doughnut Economics all the way from up here. And it hadn't touched here. And when it touched here, everything changed. And that really shaped the rest of my approach. So in everything that I do in helping people and organisations become more regenerative and develop more regenerative and redistributive practices, I always emphasise the importance of the I, of the self, of feeling it, of connecting with it. As well as the 'we', as well as the organisation. So that was my big thing.
Tim: And I guess that's mapped out the journey that I've been on ever since. And it's taken me to here. So with the books right now what I'm doing is I'm actually relaunching the subscription Adventurous Ink on Kickstarter at the moment, with a campaign that runs until the end of September. Because reading this book, Miles Richardson's Reconnection, which is amazing. He's the pioneer of the science of nature connectedness at Derby University. And reading that, he refers to Maslow, Abraham Maslow and his famous hierarchy of needs, which sticks self-actualisation right at the top. And he tells the story of how Maslow spent time with the indigenous Blackfoot tribe, as he's finalising his thesis. And so what he saw was this tribe supporting the personal growth of all of its members. And so he put this on a pedestal because of his western individualistic perspective. But what he didn't realise was that they weren't placing the individual at the peak of this pyramid. They saw it as part of their community actualisation, which would enable them to exist in cultural perpetuity. And all of a sudden, I had this realisation that for all the focus on adventure and nature connectedness, it was all coming from a very individualistic perspective. That Western paradigm. What do I get from this? What do I get?
Manda: Yeah. Colonising our own land.
Tim: And I realised that that was what I was doing with the books as well. So although we've never featured that hero adventurer who conquers everything, it was still done with an individual perspective or an overly individual perspective. And so I realised I needed more 'we' in the books as well as the me. So it's taken me a while because I've had things happening in my life. My mum was quite ill for a long time before she passed away at the end of last year. So I wasn't able to do it when I had the realisation, but this is what I meant at the start about working out what shape I am and aligning. So now I'm bringing my books back into alignment and that's what the relaunch and the Kickstarter campaign is about; is about relaunching the business, yes to feature all those beautiful natural philosophers and the adventurers, the ecologists who've got so much to tell us; but making space to bring other people in. People like you, Manda. So this one, this is here for a reason.
Manda: You are kind. For those not looking at the video, he's just pointed to Any Human Power. I am very grateful. Thank you Tim, I'll pay you later.
Tim: Because that's what we need. We need to have more authors who help us reflect on this moment that we're in and our connection to each other.
Manda: We sure do.
Tim: So we're shifting to a seasonal approach as well. We used to do it every month and it's a lot. So as part of my understanding of what business needs to be, it's recognising that you don't just go all out all the time, that you have cycles. And for me, a big one is a seasonal approach. So we're shifting from a book per month to two books every season, to get a nice cadence. And then for those who want it, there's an extra deep read, which is where Any Human Power comes in. And that's going to be our deep read for the autumn season, along with Jenny Odells How to Do Nothing, because that was a game changer for me. And there's a beautiful, slim volume of poetry that we're going to be featuring called The Wilderness That Bears Your Name. And we don't do a lot of poetry, but I just think that poets have this way of capturing the essence. And James Pearson, who's written this, has got this real knack of capturing what the essence of life is. So that's why we're changing and that's why I talk about being in alignment with my with myself. Because I felt slightly out of kilter. And I guess all of what I'm doing is trying to make sense of it all and consolidate it.
Manda: Brilliant. Can I take a step back and ask, in the Doughnut Economics Leads meeting, where you walked the doughnut and stepped outside and stepped inside, and it was clearly profoundly moving for you, and still is. And you said there were 70 people in the room. Do you think others were similarly moved? Did you see other people come to the same realisation as you?
Tim: Yes.
Manda: Okay. And is Leeds now a doughnut city or heading that way?
Tim: Um, there is a Doughnut collective in Leeds, of which I'm a core member. But is it a doughnut city? I don't know. I don't think so.
Manda: It takes a while to move to that, though. It's taken Amsterdam many years. So is there an intention to head that way, or is the political will not yet there?
Tim: There's a political interest in it, but it's so hard for politicians to get the radical nature of it. And I think that's the other reason why I wanted to step away from the public sector and start doing the stuff that we're doing through Pivot. Which is to demonstrate that actually people do get this. People do want a different way. But not necessarily trying to do that through political process. So I know there's lots of people who are working very hard to get councils on board in Leeds and around the UK. And I think it's a tough ask. I think it's a really tough ask. Because they're pulled in so many different directions, you know, they're so constrained. They've had such a long period of austerity. And people are kind of doing what the Labour government is doing, in lockstep with this idea that we just need to find a way to get some more growth. We need to get more growth into the system. And that's...
Manda: Yes, functionally insane.
Tim: I think that's the real challenge for them. So Leeds, to be fair, is doing great stuff. You know, from the time when I was doing that economic development type stuff they've shifted wholesale. So now they talk about, I think they call it their inclusive growth strategy. But it really is growth with inclusion tacked on, rather than inclusion that has growth where it needs to have it. And I think that's where we are. That's where we are in this great transformation from being our industrial society to our ecological civilisation. It's at different stages. And all credit to them, to the council and the public sector, for getting the bigger picture and trying to move in the right direction as far as they're able, within their constraints. But it is a constraint system.
Manda: Okay, so I'm thinking of a number of things. First is we had a conversation with Georgia, who was at Schumacher the year after me and is now working with Net Zero Cities, who are very clear that it's not all about the carbon. So one of the core cities in that group, their question was, what does it take for you, the people who live here, to feel pride in your neighbourhood? And as a result of working through that, they're building towards something really regenerative. And it seems to me that changing the narrative, as ever, is at the core. That politicians worldwide are constrained by the narratives within which they work, and those narrative constraints are quite tight. They have to talk about freedom and democracy and growth and building jobs. You are someone who's got a lot of hats, some of which are economic and some of which are policy based and some which are design based and some which are narrative based. If you had the freedom, the finance, the support, maybe just a basic income, how would you go about changing the narrative at a larger scale, so that politicians were not so constrained?
Tim: It's one of the things that we're actually trying to do through the Pivot project. And so I'll talk about that in a minute.
Manda: That's handy, eh?
Tim: Just to say that within the Leeds Doughnut Coalition, one of our prime objectives is to do that, though. Is to change the narrative, is to find alternate ways in, that don't feel threatening, that paint a picture of the more beautiful future that we know is possible, rather than overdo the 'you can't do this and you can't do that and you can't do the other'.
Manda: Exactly. Yes.
Tim: Because I think as a movement, either we've been bad or we've been characterised as being really bad, at painting the positive picture.
Manda: We've been really bad. We just keep telling people the really bad data points and think that that'll change behaviour. And if we don't give them options of what they could do instead, then they can't change behaviour. So yes, we've been really bad.
Tim: So I think we need to really address that and help give... I sometimes talk about it in terms of help people emancipate themselves from their mental slavery. You know that Bob Marley, that Marcus Garvey thing that we're so locked in, for obvious reasons. Because this is the structure and this is the mindset that's perpetuated for generations, hundreds of years, you know, millennia.
Manda: Thousands of years.
Tim: In the Western world.
Manda: In our culture for sure.
Tim: So it's that emancipation is difficult, but it's not impossible. So through the pivot project, one of the things that we're doing is a project called the Forked Futures. And we've got some funding from the Joseph Rowntree Collective Imagination Practice Fund, to imagine forks away from the future. And it came from the conversation that we had months ago talking about Audrey Tang.
Manda: Right. And forking government.
Tim: Yes. And forking government. And so what we're doing is we're going to identify some forks, where we can go, look, this is the direction we took. This is the direction that we could have taken. And use that to craft a narrative of what could be.
Manda: Okay, retrospective forks.
Tim: So that we start to to recognise the choices that we're not taking. And the funding doesn't allow us to do lots of stuff, but we're going to imagine three different forks and three different futures and then get those animated, so that we can we can really bring it to life in a way that engages people. And the first one that we're going to start off with, is about the Labour government coming in and pursuing growth. And saying, well, this is what we're going to do. And if instead of coming in and saying 'well, you know, we haven't got enough money to go around'; if they'd have said 'we need to find ways to increase wellbeing' and said, right, we're going to abolish Mondays. So no one ever has to work on a Monday again, and it becomes a new sort of secular Sabbath. And imagine all the things that you could do if you got your Mondays back and you didn't have to work. So that's the first of our forks, is we're going to abolish Monday.
Manda: Four day week. Woohoo!
Tim: As an alternative to saying that we're in a bit of a hole, to get ourselves out we need to find this elusive growth. Let's find an elusive connection that we've lost. What would you do with that Monday that you've suddenly got back? Would it be developing your connection with friends and family? Would it be spending more time in nature? Would it be volunteering as part of your community? It would be something completely different, which would help us transition to the world that we need to be and see that there are other ways through, that don't rely on ever increasing productivity. And searching for this mythical thing which doesn't exist anymore. It clearly existed for a long time and served a lot of people very well.
Manda: Well, it existed while we had a carbon pulse with the oil, and we didn't care about the impact downstream of everything else. I would say that you need to build into that story, that we're cancelling Monday's AND you're still going to earn the same amount of money. It's not that you're losing 20% of your income. Because that's what killed it when Corbyn suggested a four day week and people assumed he was then meaning that he was going to cut everybody's income. Because it was politically expedient for them to assume this. But you have to make sure that that's really clearly not going to happen.
Tim: Yeah, absolutely.
Manda: Good. Well done. I look forward to seeing the animation. That's going to be really exciting. Do you know what the other forks are yet?
Tim: No, no. So we're putting it out through the collective and we're going to see who comes up with others. It's been surprising actually, even amongst this loose arrangement of radical thinkers and regenerative thinkers. When you say, pick a fork, choose the thing that you're going to walk away from, even we have struggled to go, oh gosh, what would that be?
Manda: Can I make a couple of suggestions in real time?
Tim: Oh, yeah please do.
Manda: Alrighty. So the Labour government wishes to build 1.5 million homes, and at current averages, we use 40l of water per day, drinking water, to flush the toilet. And that's daily. If they made 1.5 million new homes with composting toilets, which is possible, there are entire apartment blocks in Geneva now that have composting toilets. Composting toilets are not a hole in the ground that they used to be in our great, great, great great grandfathers time when earth closets and water closets were two distinct things. Composting toilets and there's 1.5 million homes; I did the arithmetic, you'll need to redo it because I don't have it to hand, but 40l by 1.5 by 365 gives you a serious amount of drinking water. Because it's not just that we're not flushing the water down the loo, it's that the water then goes and joins with the industrial effluent, and then has to be sorted so that we can recycle the water for you all to drink. But now it's full of hormones and reproductive control pills and antibiotics and stuff that we cannot get out. And the sludge that comes off is so toxic that when you spread it on fields to grow things, if you then want to build houses on those fields, you can't because it's considered too toxic. But you're okay growing food there. So that would be one of my big ones, is every new house has to be fully resilient and has to be within your net carbon targets. I don't know how you build 1.5 million homes and maintain Labour's net net zero targets, even accounting as even Drax built in. And I would take Drax out. That would be my other thing, get rid of Drax. Cutting down old growth forests in North America, pelleting them, shipping them across the world in order to pretend that your zero carbon when really, if you burned coal to produce the same power, you would release less CO2. It's not an option. So that would be another one.
Tim: I love it, and you've leapt straight into another one of the avenues that that Pivot is examining, actually. So we're looking at water companies and you know, we think we know what a water company is. And it's an overly leveraged sphere of can I say shit? Is that all right? Sphere of shit. Because of the way that they've been embedded into our into our economy and been seen as a....
Manda: It's an atm for investors.
Tim: Exactly. So a big part of pivot is recognising that business is yes, it's tremendously damaging. And really it's business that's the agent of the Anthropocene. It's ushered this in. And yet that's just the way we conceptualise business at the moment, because business is actually one of the most effective ways, well THE most effective way that we've ever found of collaborating. I mean, that's what a company means. It's people that you break bread with; Compagnon, people that you break bread with. So we need to take the best of the old world and transform it for the new world. So one of our projects that we're working on, I've got a meeting about it this afternoon actually, is to look at, well, could we reimagine water companies as community owned enterprises that are the basis of a bioregion? And then you can start to look at managing the stuff of life, the water. Managing the nutrient flows in a place. So looking exactly at effluent flows and how it gets into the system and how you manage it within the system. And all of a sudden, when the emphasis changes from how much investment can we extract from this? How much dividend can we get this cash cow to pay? Because people are always going to need water. You know, people are always going to live in this place, they need the water.
Manda: And they're going to need sewerage facilities.
Tim: So that's such a valuable a valuable thing. It shouldn't be handed over to the market. It needs to be owned by the local communities.
Manda: Yes. And if you do it as a riversimple global governance model, are you familiar with that? It's in the book.
Tim: Yeah
Manda: And Riversimple have a template for that. Riversimple has six people on the board, so there's the shareholders (they still exist), the workers, the local community, the global environment, the supply chain and the customers. Add in future generations; someone to speak for future generations. Then that whole business becomes a community business model. And as soon as you start going upstream, then you are going to be looking immediately at industrial farming and then everything spreads. It would be really useful. You're very near to Sheffield where Opus has the River Don project. Are you familiar with that?
Tim: No.
Manda: Okay, so very briefly. We're going to have someone from the River Don project come onto the podcast. But it's not till early next year because I'm booked way, way, way, way ahead. So for everybody listening very, very briefly; 146km of the River Don is being, as we speak, mapped at the highest resolution Google will allow, which is pretty high, to create a map across space but also through time. So if you had fished there with your granddad when you were a wee boy and you've got a picture of, here's me with this fish, that goes on.
Tim: I did actually, I did fish in the River Don as a boy.
Manda: There you go. In the Don. There we go. They want your picture. And then everybody else who's got a picture and all the newspaper articles and anything about the Don, together with, for instance, real time oxygen indicators and rainfall for the whole of the bioregion, which happens to map onto the political area, whatever it is, North Yorkshire? I don't know.
Tim: South
Manda: But anyway, whatever that political area is, it happens to map quite closely to the bioregion of the Don. It'll have cameras focussed on. And if the cameras think if, the AI thinks it sees, let's say, sewage outflow, it will then text people who are self-defined river stewards who it knows are within reach, because the AI knows exactly where you are. Scary, but never mind. And if one of you goes, yeah, I'm right there, I'll get it. And the other dozen are stood down. You go and you go yes, that is a heap of faeces, you know what that looks like, thank you. Or no, that isn't actually; that's a bunch of leaves - don't worry about it. And the river can then issue its own currency: river coins. Which at the moment have no value, but when enough stewards or people doing good stuff have got enough coin, they can decide what it's worth. And maybe you get to, I don't know, go swimming in the local Freshwater swimming bit, at a time when nobody else is there because you've got a couple of river coins.
Manda: It's then worth what they want it to be worth. And Audrey Tang, our hero, who has agreed to come on to the podcast for our fifth anniversary edition, I am very happy. Has given them the AI that talked to a river in Taiwan, but that river didn't have access to all of this data. The scientists are really dizzily happy about this, because they're going to get access to huge amounts of data in real time. And anyone can interrogate the river. The AI, as if it were the river. The river will then appear to have sentience. I'm talking to ChatGPT at the moment about how we build resilient culture, and I know it's reflecting my language, but it's like having a conversation with a very smart person. So you'll be able and if the river, if some company somewhere dips a load of effluent in and everything's dying, the river will scream, in real time to everybody and it will be immediately obvious what's happened. So even if we don't have actual legal personhood for that river yet, the argument for having it will be massively, limbically, highly accelerated. And so bring that into the conversations around water and I think we have a game changer. I was so excited talking to the Opus people about this.
Tim: That's beautiful. And this is the thing. So I was on a panel last week and someone said, and I suppose they were sort of speaking to the green growth agenda and they were saying, well, we've got to do this. We haven't got any other choice because we don't have an alternative to capitalism. And this conversation just proves that we do have an alternative. And it's not some overly radical thing that is a threat to everyone. It's not an autocracy.
Manda: No, that's the thing. It's better. It's actually a better world.
Tim: Exactly. And it it can actually help people with the things that we want as people. Which is belonging, safety and connection.
Manda: Did you say this on the panel? Please tell me you said this after you had finished exploding.
Tim: Gently. Yes.
Manda: Oh well done. You're very good. Because I would just explode.
Tim: I don't like to get into these things. But yes, you know, we do have the alternative models. And I guess this is what Pivot is about, is if we recognise that the political system just is too scared to do something about it, then how do we put people power behind that? And I think for me that's the key. And because, you know, we've got the research that says 56% of people think that capitalism does more harm than good. That's a global figure. In the UK it's 53%. But people get that the system doesn't work.
Manda: They don't know that there are alternatives.
Tim: That's it. They just don't have an alternative. We need to offer people viable alternatives and ways that give them the agency to create the futures that they long for. You know, we long for a better future at an embodied level. We understand that we are not fulfilling our potential as unique, sentient parts of life's great system. We know that we're not fulfilling that. And that's why we've got all sorts of health problems; mental health problems, physical health problems. Because the system isn't working for us and we're not working for it. But finding that ecological niche and finding that that harmony that exists right within us, is the way forward.
Manda: You are singing our song.
Tim: We need to bring people into that space in ways that meet them where they are, rather than tell people 'you've got to change' because that's that's what people hear.And that's what they see.
Manda: Because that never works. And when you were on the panel and you were able, well done, very gently to say there are lots of alternatives and they're all better, in whatever way you said; did you feel heard by the person or people who'd said there was no alternative? Did you see lights going on?
Tim: Yes. But the interesting thing at the end of the conversation was there was a question from the audience which said, well, this has all been very good, but what's the solution? And I think again, in terms of meeting people where they are, we have to recognise that that's where people are. Is that our reductivist approach is conditioned to go, oh, right, there's a problem, let's go and find a solution. And actually we need to meet people there as well and take them by the hand and say, well actually there isn't a solution in the way that you understand it. The solution is a process.
Manda: Yeah, emergence is a process and we cannot predict where it goes.
Tim: Exactly.
Manda: Did you get that through, do you think to the audience?
Tim: Of course. Yeah.
Manda: Oh brilliant. So we've mentioned Pivot several times without actually really moving to Pivot. But I just want to check that of your three things that you said; that you were a bookseller, we covered that. Regenerative designer and rebel economist; we've kind of covered. If there's anything in those that you want to look at, then please do. But I would really like to look at the origin of Pivot, the source of Pivot even, and what else you're doing besides the forked futures, which I am extremely happy is happening.
Tim: So I sat with Pivot for a long time. Because there's a lot of noise and a lot of people get that something is wrong and rush to a solution. And I was really cautious of that. Really cautious of rushing to a solution. But I don't think it is a solution in those reductivist terms. It is a process and a community and a connection. But yeah, so pivoting emerged from my work as a regenerative designer. So I'd been using particularly the doughnut design for business methodology. So you go into a business and you help them map themselves onto the doughnut, and then think about regenerative and redistributive actions that they can take and how that can cascade through the organisation. And then you look at the the way the organisation is structured. You look at the ownership and the governance and the financing and the networks and something else that I've forgotten. And that bit was always the difficult bit. Because the mapping was enlightening and the coming up with ideas for being more regenerative and more redistributive is liberating, and it opens up possibilities within an organisation. You can see people getting turned on to it. And then you get to: right, let's talk about your organisation and how it enables this. And all of a sudden it closes down.
Manda: Because they're defensive? They just feel assaulted?
Tim: Not defensive, just because well we can't do that. Our expectations when we develop a new product, it's got to wash its own face within X number of quarters. Or all we're measured on is our next growth in each quarter. Or the board won't buy into this because of the shareholder expectations. All of those practicalities prevent all of that possibility, that the process had opened up. So doing this several times, I became frustrated. And I went back to my old approach, which is what I used to do, which was strategic thinking, working on policy, working at scale and went: how can we start to address some of those structural issues in a way that is enabling? And where are the levers for change in the system? You know, looking at the Donna Meadows things about, well, where are we stuck? And where can where can we get some leverage within the system? And eventually, it came from a conversation I saw with Satish Kumar, actually, where he just advised people to do the thing. If you think you've got a way forward to something better, then do it.
Tim: And so I overcame this immense amount of imposter syndrome that I had and started putting this out into the world and talking about it. And talking about, well, how can we bring a group of people together who understand this context, who get the strategic perspective? How can we bring those together in an emergent and agile way, to recognise opportunities to leverage the system, to intervene in ways that create change? So that's what pivot is. In looking for those opportunities it's looking to get people behind change and not just to get the finance sector behind change, or politics behind change. All those co-opted systems. It's really looking at, well, where are there other systems? Like cultural figures. How can we get cultural figures on board and give them an opportunity to speak to something. A bit like, you know, Taylor Swift has come out in support of Harris. It's brilliant. These people have got such an attentive audience. And because they're not constrained by the everyday system that most of us work in, they've got a freedom to understand the bigger picture. And how can we give those people an opportunity to do something?
Tim: So that's what Pivot is. So we launched at the start of this year and we started with a year of listening. It's a year of what is ours to do? Where can we best work in service? And so some of the things that I've talked about, the forked futures, the water companies as bioregions. And what's emerged from that, from that year of listening it's about really understanding that the times are urgent, that we need to slow down. And putting that space in, to breathe and reflect and see what connections emerge, what patterns emerge, what synthesis comes out of it. And so the water companies, it started with a conversation about financing the transition of businesses out of growth focussed capitalism and into alternative economic models or alternative enterprises. And then well, which companies would you work with? And looking at Dan O'Neill's work on provisioning systems and all that sort of stuff. And then realising that actually water companies, it's a real live issue that people can see and smell, you know, just what the impact of having life in service to finance is like.
Tim: That's what it is. And understanding that maybe this is a model for us to turn it around and have finance in service to life, in a way that people would get and go, oh, that's what this regenerative thing is about. It's about being able to swim in our rivers. It's about being able to connect. You know, like you were saying with the Opus project in the River Don, my agency and my awareness and my relationship to this place, in a way that gives people something more and helps them see, actually, you know, this is what we can be, this is what we could be. So I think that's why that's one of the things that's starting to emerge as a way forward. We're also looking at how else we can finance that transition, that phase shift that buys our businesses back, buys our cooperative capital, as in social capital, back from the extractive growth engine and puts it back in service of wellbeing and biodiversity and all the things that we know that we need.
Manda: Why do we need to buy it back? Why can we not just take it back? It was often sold for next to nothing.
Tim: I agree. I guess the difficulty is, is that that leads to revolt and is an unmanaged process. I do think we need a managed process.
Manda: Okay. That's fair.
Tim: I guess I would compare it to the compensation that was made to slave owners at the end of slavery. I'm sure that wasn't something that the country really had the money to do.
Manda: It was ethically abhorrent. But you do it anyway. Okay.
Tim: It's a pragmatic thing.
Manda: Okay. That's fair.
Tim: And I suppose the other thing I would say on that, is that the activist taking to the streets is so valuable, it shifts the agenda, but it's not for everyone. And I think we need to give people agency in creating change. And I guess that's the sort of thing that I'm looking at, is how do we give people agency to affect their own futures and future generations futures, in a way that doesn't make them feel uncomfortable and doesn't put them out on a limb.
Manda: Okay. You're working within the system to change the system rather than just demolish it. That's very wise. You sound as if you're having some really interesting conversations within Opus North, and also you've been sitting on panels and talking to people. I'm interested in policy level and political level. It seems to me that there isn't political will to change much about the water companies at the moment, that they've managed somehow to promise they'll do better, and they've been believed by people who want to believe that. Motivated reasoning is a very powerful push. Do you have a sense of how you could get in at a policy level with a new story, a different story that could then change actual national and perhaps international policy?
Tim: It's narrative. That is the route back in. It is helping people expand their imagination of what's possible and seeing the beauty and the benefit that can emerge. I think that's got to be the way. And that's the social tipping point thing, isn't it? Is that actually those social tipping points are non-linear and those are the things that we need to be activating is those non-linear tipping points. And it does come from capturing a moment and capturing a mindset and a swell. I think that's the way in. I think you could spend an awful lot of time banging your head against an awful lot of brick walls, that won't get us there. What we need to find is the creative route to painting that picture of that better future and showing the way through. For me that's the really important thing; getting past the people who say, well, we don't have the alternative.
Manda: Yeah. Capitalism is it.
Tim: It's that leap of faith that takes people past it. So I think for me that's the route in is, to give people a sense of what better genuinely looks like.
Manda: And show people working, as you said, with the water companies. If we can show regeneration in action and you can see the river that was full of sewage now running clear, and feel a sense of community with all the people that live in your bioregion, then we've begun to get it through. Do you have a sense within Pivot or within any of the other places that you work, of the legacy media beginning to come on board and/or being supplanted by what we might loosely call a regenerative medium?
Tim: Unfortunately not. Because I think the legacy media is prone to the extremes, both sides of it. And and for all that there are new alternative media platforms, I think they're bubbles. I think we've got a big problem with bubbles and perpetuating the othering.
Manda: Yeah, totally.
Tim: You know, because that's what makes sense to us as humans, is this is my tribe and I love my tribe, and everyone else is... Because evolutionary that served as incredibly well, it just doesn't serve us well anymore.
Manda: Yeah. Palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions, the technology of Gods. Yes, but how do we expand our tribe to be the the whole world and the web of life? Yes. Because I'm not convinced, interestingly, I've recently, while I had my holiday read Tyson Yunkaporta's new book: Right Story, Wrong Story would definitely be good in your one of your seasonal things. And a lot of what he's saying is undermining a lot of our narratives of how people are. There was one point where he said, we don't have the Palaeolithic fight and flight that you speak about, because we know where the predators are at any given time. And so much of our colonising of our own mindset is based on the assumption that we know how people functioned in our ancestral lines, and I'm not sure we did, actually. And there's loads in Tyson's book. I am going to endeavour to talk to him on the podcast. But so much of what he's writing has, for me, overturned a lot of my innate assumptions of who we were. That the Palaeolithic mindset wasn't necessarily as limbic as we think it was, and that the tribalism wasn't necessarily about othering. That that's something that we took on whenever we got hit with the schism with a web of life. Because if you know yourself to be not separate, if you know yourself to be an integral part of the web of life, just because somebody speaks a slightly different dialect or has a slightly different family tree, they are still an integral part of the web of life and you know that. And I'm not suggesting that fighting didn't happen, but I'm suggesting it was probably much more stylised. I really want to explore whether people wiped each other out in the way that we do now, or whether there was: let's find whose young warriors are fittest and best. Yeah, that's perfectly fine. So that would be a very interesting explore.
Tim: Well, to carry on the inquiry there, you've anticipated where I was going to go, actually. This is why I love books. Because I think books are our most valuable form of media, actually. Because I think when you're reading a book, you're immersed in the context of it. You don't approach it quite so much with that confirmation bias. Obviously there is a bit of that, but you are more willing to be changed, because you're in the immersed in it, in a way that you can't be reading a blog or reading something in the news or viewing something on social media. This is the spirit that I try and capture within the books that I feature, is that opportunity for emergence; a much more reflective process that has the opportunity for emergence. And this is why I often say reading is a radical act. It's a radical act of resistance, because the system doesn't want us to reflect. And I know that sounds terribly conspiracy theorist, but but it doesn't serve the system well for us to dwell on things and think about things in the bigger picture and the longer term. We're stuck, we're mired in the present by a system that wants to keep us there so it can keep us hungry and keep us malleable.
Manda: And crushed.
Tim: Yeah, crushed. In a way that I don't think authors do that. They don't do that. And books don't do that.
Manda: Try not to. Some of them do, but the good ones don't. Rob Hopkins and his book From What Is to What If would be very good for your readers, he says capitalism is a disimagination machine. And I don't think individuals made a decision to crush our capacity for imagination, but the sense of separation and scarcity and powerlessness, that is the underlying value set of capitalism, inevitably leads to that sense of I am on my own and and I'm in a zero sum game where if I don't win by crushing other people and everything else that exists, then I will not survive. And exactly as you said earlier, the whole and healed cultures know that we are all an integral part of a much wider web, and that we're not on our own, and therefore we don't have that sense of individuation and and panic underlying everything.
Tim: And that's I guess that's the other thing that I'm trying to do with the relaunch of the book club, is the club bit, is the community aspect of it. So I always had podcasts with the with the authors of all the books that I've featured. And I did them purposefully as live events, so we do it live on zoom, so that the community could come in and join us. But it still centred on me and the author thinking about things. And so with the relaunch, we're going to decentre that and centre the community's feeling about the books. Not their thinking about the books. Because I do think that book clubs can get a bit of a bad name because it becomes this intellectual one upmanship; who's got the best take on what this book means? So it sounds like a community, it sounds like something that would be nourishing and beneficial, but actually, because it turns into that who's got the most intellectual take on this? It reduces the opportunity for bonding with each other.
Tim: So what we're going to do is shift the attention not to what do you think about this book, but what did this book make you feel? And again, this is that thing about the alignment that I'm trying to centre in all of the things that I do. You heard from me how my shift from thinking about things to feeling about things was fundamental. It's now fundamentally in all the work that I do with people and organisations. And now, finally, I'm able to put it right at the heart of Adventurous Ink, the book subscription as well. Because I think it's what we really need. And that's all I'm trying to do really, I guess, is work out what is mine to do in this moment with the things that I've got as tools as forms of agency, and I'm just trying to work it out. I am an example of emergence, as we all are.
Manda: Yeah. But conscious emergence. And that's how we get conscious evolution, is consciously being at the leading edge of inter-becoming. That's so wonderful. And you seem to have found that intersection where your heart's greatest joy meets the world's greatest need, which I can't remember who said that. I was told it by Della Duncan when I was at college, and she got it from somebody else. But that seems to me, if everybody was able, if everybody had, in a way, the privilege and the agency to seek that out and then embody it, we would be in a different place. And you're there and you're leading by example. I think it's fantastic.
Tim: Thank you Manda.
Manda: We're heading towards being out of time. Is there anything else you wanted to say and I will put links in the show notes, but tell us anyway how people can find your Kickstarter and this amazing Adventurous Ink book club and anything else that you want to link to.
Tim: No, we've covered everything. And thanks for referencing Della there, that's beautiful. And you know, I am there. It's taken me a long time. I've been working on this since 2015. Sorry, the emotion is coming from I did it when my father passed away in 2015 and I turned 40.
Manda: It's good you're feeling it.
Tim: And the two things happened within a couple of months. And things like that change you.
Manda: They really do.
Tim: And so, this is nine years of trying to find that connection and that sweet spot. So thank you for that. All right. So Adventurous Ink it's www.adventurousink.co.uk
Tim: The logo looks something like that. For those of you who are listening, I've got a tattoo of the Adventurous Ink logo on my arm. Quite prominently.
Manda: Send us a picture of that. We'll use it on the website.
Tim: Yeah. And the Kickstarter is there. You can find me and my regenerative design practice at timfrenneaux.co
Manda: I will put it in the show notes.
Tim: And the pivot project is wepivot.today. And the V in pivot is upside down to represent a fulcrum.
Manda: It's glorious. Because you are a designer...
Tim: But the internet is not good at strange characters, so it's just wepivot rather than some strange upside down fulcrum.
Manda: Yeah. I will put links in the show notes people, so you can just go and click the link. Thank you. Brilliant. Well I really look forward to where Pivot is going. It feels really exciting. I think, give it another 18 months, we'll come back and explore where you've been and where you're going next because clearly you're right at the leading edge of inter becoming. You are Conscious emergence happening and I couldn't be happier that this is actually alive and real in the world. I write about these kind of things, but you're actually doing it, so, enormous thanks for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast. And let's talk again in a while.
Tim: I'd really welcome that. Thank you for having me.
Manda: You're more than welcome. And there we go. That's it for this start of the new after summer season. Huge thanks to Tim for his capacity to take ideas and run with them and make them happen. He really is right there at the emergent edge of inter becoming, bringing in ideas, feeding them out to the people who could make the change happen, building the visions of the new world, of the new way things could be, of the better replacement for capitalism. And as you heard, Adventurous Ink is up and running and there's a Kickstarter. There is a link in the show notes. It's also on Tim's website. If you have the means, please do go there and help support something that is genuinely bringing new ideas to the world and whatever else you do, please engage with the other possibilities. There is another world possible. It will, by definition, take us more deeply into our selves, into our sense of agency and sufficiency. Belonging, becoming, having meaning in our lives, which is what we all crave underneath the boxes from Amazon. What we really want is a sense of connectedness to ourselves, to each other, to the web of life. And the more we lean into this, the more we make it real, the more it spreads out into the world. As the value set that we're working from, this is how we replace capitalism. So please internalise these ideas. Create narratives of your own, in your own words that work for you and take them out into the world.
Manda: That is it for this week. We will be back next week with another conversation in our new season. In the meantime, if you liked this, please give us five stars in a review on whatever is the podcast access of your choice. It makes a real difference to us moving into the algorithms. I have spent some of my month off exploring those, and if everybody who listens were to subscribe and recommend us to friends, it would make an enormous difference to where we are in our podcast journey. We're heading to the wire of our fifth anniversary, and I have targets that I would like to meet. So if you can five stars review recommend, that would be grand. Thank you.
Manda: And then as ever, thanks to those who make this happen. To Caro C for the music at the head and foot. To Allen Lowell's of Airtight Studios for the production. To lou Mayor for the video that goes on to youtube. To Anne Thomas for the transcripts. And to Faith Tilleray, my partner in all of life, for making everything else happen and for the conversations that keep both of us moving forward. And as ever, as always, an enormous thanks to you for listening. We absolutely wouldn't be here without you. So thank you for being there, thank you for all that you are and that you do. And we will see you next week. Thank you and goodbye.