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Another World is still Possible. The old system was never fit for purpose and now it has gone- and it's never coming back.
We have the power of gods to destroy our home. But we also have the chance to become something we cannot yet imagine,
and by doing so, lay the foundations for a future we would be proud to leave to the generations yet unborn.
What happens if we commit to a world based on generative values: compassion, courage, integrity?
What happens if we let go of the race for meaningless money and commit instead to the things that matter: clean air, clean water, clean soil - and clean, clear, courageous connections between all parts of ourselves (so we have to do the inner work of healing individually and collectively), between ourselves and each other (so we have to do the outer work of relearning how to build generative communities) and between ourselves and the Web of Life (so we have to reclaim our birthright as conscious nodes in the web of life)?
We can do this - and every week on Accidental Gods we speak with the people who are living this world into being. We have all the answers, we just (so far) lack the visions and collective will to weave them into a future that works. We can make this happen. We will. Join us.
Accidental Gods is a podcast and membership program devoted to exploring the ways we can create a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations yet to come.
If we're going to emerge into a just, equitable - and above all regenerative - future, we need to get to know 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 work together to lay the foundations of a world 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.
Find the membership and the podcast pages here: https://accidentalgods.life
Find Manda's Thrutopian novel, Any Human Power here: https://mandascott.co.uk
Find Manda on BlueSky @mandascott.bsky.social
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mandascottauthor/
On FaceBook https://www.facebook.com/MandaScottAuthor
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 still time to lay the foundations for that 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 still slightly afflicted by the Covid virus, so I apologise for the fact that my voice is not quite what it could be, but I do hope I've got the tech right this week. With sincere apologies for last week's less than perfect recording. This week we are talking to a friend of the podcast, someone else who is genuinely dedicating all of his life to the concepts that will take us forward to a future we would be proud to leave behind. This is the absolute core of Thrutopian thinking; it's what this podcast is all about. And it is always a pleasure to speak to Jeremy Lent. We've recorded two previous episodes with Jeremy; the first was number 38 when we talked about his award winning book, The Patterning Instinct; A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for meaning. And then we came back in episode 102 with his second book in the series called The Web of Meaning, integrating science and traditional wisdom to find our place in the universe. His third book is Eco Civilisation; Making A World That Works. This is the third book in his trifecta, and it's due out in May of 2026.
Manda: And I was privileged to read the pre-approved draft, so I can tell you that it is one of the few genuinely thrutopian books I have read. It lays out in exquisite and quite terrifying detail, the iniquities and downright horror of the imperial colonial system of the trauma culture, which in the book is called Wendigo Inc. Similar to the wetiko that we talk about often on the podcast. And then it brings Jeremy's trademark meticulous research and beautiful, flowing prose, to bear on the ways through to a system in which everybody, all of humanity, lives and thrives and works towards the well-being of the entire ecosphere. Which is what we're all about, which is what we keep talking about on the podcast. But we don't often have somebody who's going to map the routes through. And because the book is coming out in six months time and because there is such depth in it, I wanted to have two conversations. One now, where we framed the book, where we look in some depth at the horror of business as usual, and why the concept of TINA (there is no alternative) resonates so strongly with us, even though it's wholly untrue. There is an alternative. There are many alternatives. And being able to dismantle the narrative that says there isn't is critical to how we get forward. So I wanted to talk about that, and then to look at the broad frame of Jeremy's theory of change. And then we'll come back and look at more detail, at the flow of how he sees things working and the explicit details of things like economics and politics and food and farming and technology and governance and all the things that we need to change to achieve the total systemic change that will take us towards an eco civilisation.
Manda: So very briefly, his bio for those of you who don't yet know him: Jeremy was born in London, has a BA in English literature from Cambridge (that is Cambridge, England), an MBA from the University of Chicago, and was a former internet company CEO. Now, as we said, he's an author, a speaker, he's founder of the Deep Transformation Network. There is a link in the show notes to that. This is a global community exploring pathways towards an ecological civilisation. He is also the founder of the non-profit Liology Institute, which is dedicated to fostering an integrated worldview that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on the Earth. So everything Jeremy does is aimed towards the same focus as this podcast and everything that we do on Accidental Gods. So this was a genuinely heartwarming conversation. And so people of the podcast, I am delighted to reintroduce you to Jeremy Lent.
Manda: Jeremy Lent, welcome back to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you on this fine October afternoon?
Jeremy: Well, I'm just so delighted to be looking at your face, Manda, and talking with you again. It's been a while. And I am in Berkeley, California. So it's morning, my time. And well, I'm the way I usually am at the beginning of each week nowadays; I've got equal measures of feeling absolute horror and despair at what's going on in the world around, and a feeling of, yes, this is so alive and life feels so incredibly filled with so much energy right now and possibility. So I'm always holding those kind of roughly in balance, but hopefully a little bit more on the hope and possibility side, but they're always both present. Ever present.
Manda: Yeah. And we're recording this on the Monday after the most recent No Kings demonstrations in the US. And I was so impressed by the creativity and the courage and the resilience and the peacefulness. I saw somebody posted that one guy in their town was standing on a corner with a sign saying, I support Trump. And everybody just waved and said hi and walked past, and he was completely safe. And it was, you know, we are here so that everybody has a right to say what they think. And, and I struggle to imagine, much as I don't like othering people, somebody with a sign saying I support whatever, I don't know, progressive stuff, or I am woke or something, surrounded by a hundred thousand MAGA supporters, might not have been quite so safe. So it felt like a really amazing testament to the resistance that's happening in the US. It's glorious to watch.
Jeremy: Yes, and I was delighted to have the opportunity to join thousands of people there in Berkeley, on the streets, with my partner and with some friends who are visiting and with a little two year old baby, who was already joining his second demonstration in his life there, for freedom and democracy and for to respect human dignity for all.
Manda: Yeah. What a thing to be able to say. Well done that man. And did it feel as uplifting and coherent as I imagine it did? That you're there with friends and there's so many of you that it it gives you that sense of solidarity. Was that the case?
Jeremy: Oh, absolutely. And I think that's why these movements, these demonstrations are so important. Because, you know, people will critique and say, yes, but that's not a movement. And of course, all that's true. It's one day. But it's the deep level, people seeing everyone around them and getting the courage to actually stand up and know that there's things we can do about it. Absolutely crucial. Yeah.
Manda: Yes. And when Trump and the others are going, oh, a mere few thousand turned out and people are watching literally hundreds of thousands walking down the street, it has to undermine their credibility. And somebody posted, again on I think Substack, pointing out that for everybody marching, there are at least ten who would like to have but for reasons couldn't. Maybe more.
Jeremy: Absolutely.
Manda: And if it was 8.1 million, and if that ten figure is right, then you've got 81 million really wanting something different. And that's beginning to head towards tipping points that even you and I could believe in. Because having read your book, which we're going to talk about in a second, 3.5% is fine if what you're doing is changing the franchise of the existing system. You need a lot more if what you want is total systemic change. But it's heading towards those numbers, which is inspiring. Anyway, let's get to that. Because you have written the most spectacular book, but it's not out until May. So today, for people who are new to the podcast, of which there are many and don't know your background, let's introduce you and let them know how Jeremy Lent came to write The Patterning Instinct, The Web of Meaning, to found the Deep Transformation Network, and then came to write a book about Eco Civilisation. Tell us your potted history, please.
Jeremy: Oh, sure. Thank you Manda, yeah. Well, I guess in a more sort of potted way, I guess what's relevant is I spent the first half of my life really embedded in the system, even though I grew up actually rebelling against the system and I left England in 1981 because I couldn't stand being in Margaret Thatcher's England. And I thought I was coming at age 21 to join the hippies at Woodstock in America. Little did I realise that Ronald Reagan had taken over. But that's a whole other story. But I ended up actually sort of going into what you might think is the belly of the beast, in a way. I did an MBA and I raised a family and went into management consulting, started an internet company during the dotcom craze, took it public. At first it was a great success, then it all crashed because I had to leave the company to look after my wife, who was very sick at the time and who passed away a number of years back. And then everything crashed around me. So the company crashed, my relationship with this person I'd loved, the only sort of love of my life, had crashed also because unfortunately, she went through years of sort of borderline dementia.
Jeremy: So everything was like, what the hell is life about? And I sort of made the decision I wasn't going to just give up and feel the sense of despair and get all cynical. I was going to make sure that whatever I did with the rest of my life was truly meaningful, and I realised I had no idea where meaning came from at that point. I didn't want to take somebody else's word for it, which I felt I had done that first half of my life. So I just went into this deep, deep, years and years of my own investigation for meaning. And it was a cognitive, like I read everything I could about history and about science and these concepts like God or what makes humans unique or anything else. Where do they come from? What is the underlying thought processes behind them? So it's like peeling the onion. And I went from history books or popular science books, like one of the first ones I read was Richard Dawkins Selfish Gene.
Manda: Whoa. Which you critique quite interestingly in your book, but you read it.
Jeremy: But honestly, the first time I came across it was like, oh, well, maybe if this is true, I'm going to accept it. Because whatever I did, I wanted to make sure my my rational brain could buy into it as much as my heart and soul. I didn't want any bypassing, so look, if this is reality, so be it. And then I came across Fritjof Capra's work and all about systems thinking, and oh, this Richard Dawkins thing is bunk! So all these were discoveries I made all the way back to evolutionary biology and how humans evolved. And from that, I ended up writing a book that was kind of the book that I had been looking for when I started this investigation, which is like mapping out where do all these ideas come from? So that was a book called The Patterning Instinct, A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning, and really it just kind of traced how these different ways in which humans have made meaning all the way from early hunter gatherer times to the present day, and how that's affected history from those times to the rise of agrarian civilisations and hierarchy and possessions and patriarchy. How the splits between East Asian thinking and dualist thinking in the West with Christianity, and how that led to modernity. And that book took us all the way to the present. And it was only through that that I began to start realising we live in a modern world that is absolutely screwed up. It's a modern world based on a worldview that makes no sense, and it's destructive and it doesn't have to be this way.
Jeremy: And the follow on book I wrote was really the result of the similar investigation I'd been doing, more embodied, around discovering things like meditation and Taoist practices.
Manda: And qigong.
Jeremy: Qigong. Absolutely. That's really become a central part of my life. And along with that was this realisation there's a different way of making meaning that's possible. One that's scientifically rigorous, but is also deeply connected with these best spiritual traditions; Buddhism, Taoism, indigenous wisdom and Neo-Confucianism, which very few people know much about but a light bulb when I discovered it. And that book is called The Web of Meaning; integrating science and traditional wisdom to find our place in the universe. And that was a book that basically looked at the big questions we ask: who am I? Where am I? Why am I? How do I live? And in each case shows how the dominant worldview gives us answers that are not just dangerous and driving us to destruction, but plain wrong; incoherent scientifically. So anyway, so that was another book that I wrote, but that led me to this present moment. That book ends up with this vision, that I discovered from others around the time that I was doing this, of what the world could look like if we actually lived in it based on a worldview of deep interconnectedness. Which is what this book, The Web of Meaning, offers as a possibility. And this realisation that there was a possibility of actually a different kind of future, a different kind of civilisation available to us. And now that's where I've spent the last few years of my life diving into.
Manda: Right. And Eco Civilisation is an astonishing book. And the level of research, the pages of references and the sharpness of it, you must spend your entire life reading really quite detailed; you go down a lot of rabbit holes, but you come back with the essence of what's there, and then you frame it all in something that is, for me, genuinely thrutopian. This is one of the most coherent theories of change I've come across. I spend my life looking for other people's theories of change. So thank you. But before we get into the structure of this and what the theory of change is, you started the Deep Transformation Network around the time that the Web Of Meaning came out, I think. Can you tell us a little bit about that and what it is and where it goes?
Jeremy: Yeah, sure. So basically after I completed that book, The Web Of Meaning, I created a course with Gaia Education, and I'm sure a lot of people know it's a wonderful institution dedicated to offering these different ways of thinking around the world. And it's a ten week course with basically 20 of these pre-recorded video sessions, going through all the themes of these two books. And the course was called Principles and Practices of Deep Transformation. And what would happen, at the end of each course people would want to stay connected. We've just built this community with all these ideas, how can we keep it happening? So I created, with the help of a few people who were sort of core to these ideas around that, this online community called the Deep Transformation Network, which is free for anyone to join. And we now have about 5000 people have joined it over the years. And we have these live monthly meetings where usually I'm bringing on some real leading change maker or a group talking about what they're doing. And we all get together as a global community, to break out rooms and really build community. And we have these active feeds with lots of discussions taking place. So there's real deep transformation happening in this community. And it's a real special feeling of actually living the talk, sort of thing, with community.
Manda: Yeah. And it came out around the time that Jem Bendell was setting up or triggering the Deep Adaptation concept. Jem Bendell's lovely, and I think some of his ideas on collapse are perfectly right. And I loved in your book someone suggesting that collapsology, probably don't say it quite like, but the study of collapse should be a scientific pursuit. But it's also very hard, I think the cognitive neuroscience of telling everybody we're all doomed and not giving anyone anything other than basically your options are learn to farm and die with grace. It's not not going to help anyone. Whereas what you've got is transformation of this is the moment. This is the bottleneck. And with all the epistemic humility we can muster, we don't know where we're going. There are an infinite number of possibilities, but we can shape a future that might actually flourish. And wouldn't it be a useful idea to give that some time? And that seems, feels to me when I've been in it, that's exactly what everyone in the Deep Transformation Network is working towards. Is let's open the doors to possibility and see where we get to. So thank you. I will put a link to that in the show notes and people can come and find you there.
Jeremy: Yeah that's great, Manda. I love how you're describing that. And that's pretty much very consistent with my own way of thinking about Jem Bendall's work and a similar way of relating to it. And like you, I'm sure, I feel like a generative, warm relationship with Jem, and I respect his deep caring and his deep insights. And really, I agree with the vast bulk of what he says, with the exception of the inevitability, versus the openness to what is actually possible. And that's where basically, to me, what it all comes down to, is having immersed myself in systems thinking and recognition of non-linearity, of complex systems; I think you called it epistemic humility; we cannot ever really know what is going to happen in all these multiple intersecting parts, that we even from one week from now we can't predict, never mind years into the future. And this is where what matters is not even, I mean, honestly, if you ask me, am I an optimist or a pessimist? I'm much closer to Jem Bendell. There's this part of me on my left shoulder goes, you've got to be kidding, this is fucking hopeless. But there's another part of me, like, you don't know. And when enough people actually begin to get that vision of what's possible, any kind of future is available to us. So that's where it becomes almost this moral imperative. This is our choice: the future is not a spectator sport. It's not something happening where we're on the stairs going, yeah, we're on the side of the good guys. It's like something we're actually playing in ourselves; every single conversation we have, every choice we make. And that, to me, is the key.
Manda: Yes. I had a conversation recently with Victoria Hurth, who has written a book called Beyond Profit, and at the end of it she had a quote from Chief Arvol Looking Horse of the Lakota, which says: Each of us was put on this earth at this time to personally determine the fate of humankind. Do you think you were put here for something less? And I'm in awe of Victoria that she put that at the end of her book, frankly, because I would have had that as the opening page. But it's that, the moral imperative of it might be that we're all doomed, but there's a window, and if we sit back and twiddle our thumbs, then we are all doomed. But we might not be. So it feels to me exactly that: we go for it. So one of the things that Donella Meadows said, of the many amazing and wonderful things she said, was that the way to change a system is to continually, explicitly and clearly critique the old system and build the visions of the new system. And that takes it a step further from Bucky Fuller, who said that you build the new system that makes the old system obsolete.
Manda: And what you've done in your book, Eco Civilisation, it seems to me, is savagely and very accurately, and in ways that made my blood run cold; honestly, this is the world I swim in, and I thought I knew the iniquities of imperialism and Colonialism. And I still believe we're in the dying days of the Roman Empire and Nero was doing a lot of this stuff 2000 years ago. But some of the things that you've got here, of the cold blooded nature of the decisions that are made, that are quite deliberately condemning millions to misery and death, is horrible. So shall we go to the top and you can unpick for us the impact that Tina has had on the world. Because I loved that. And that was one of the reasons that you left the UK and then did an MBA. But let's go from that and let's have a look at what's not working, so that then we can look at our theory of change for what might work.
Jeremy: Yeah, sure. Thank you. Yeah. Big topics Manda; I so appreciate it. So actually this book begins with this person Tina and like about how Tina's had more impact on the world than almost anybody in the modern history. And you go, who the hell is Tina? So, Tina, and some people are probably in the know as they're hearing this, is an acronym of There Is No Alternative, which is this famous phrase that Margaret Thatcher put out, right as she was wresting control. She and Ronald Reagan bringing neoliberalism into our world. And this idea of there is no alternative, that has become the sort of water we all swim in. That's the thing that almost all of us take for granted without even realising it anymore, after decades of this takeover of neoliberalism. It used to be in the 20th century there was capitalism on one side and socialism or communism on the other, and there was a battle between them and it seemed somewhat balanced. And then the Cold War arose, and the Soviet Union collapsed and China transformed. And there was this famous book by Francis Fukuyama called The End of History, saying, it's all over now; the free market wins and now it's just a matter of how much better we make things or whatever. And of course, that is not the case whatsoever. But the sense that even people who care passionately about the world, spend years of their lives, devoting their lives to trying to make things a better place for the earth, for humanity, they're almost always nowadays doing it within capitalism.
Jeremy: And they're trying to look at, well, finance is so powerful; how can we sort of try to incent the big banks and the big billionaires to actually invest in good things and make and fix this? And maybe technology can be used carefully to fix this and fix that. And really, this is what the book is about. In simple terms, it's this notion that actually for all those people who are trying to fix the system, the news is, hey, the system isn't broken. The system is actually doing exactly what it was intended to do. And the first part of the book looks at how the system was developed over centuries, many centuries, to actually be a wealth pump, to suck the wealth of human activity and human lifeblood and and human spirit and the wonderful abundance of all the earth; to suck all of that into this pump, going up to the elites and a very, very small number of elites who then get to do what they want with it. And essentially, most of all, reinforce that wealth pump so it keeps going for generation after generation. And that really is the sort of top story of the first part of the book, that looks at why it's not just a simple statement; why it is true that this system is doing what it was intended to do.
Manda: Yes. And even then, there's places I want to take this. I think there's a couple of statistics that I think are worth nailing. Again, because they were new to me. And one of them was, I can't remember, you will probably remember, the researcher who did this, it may have been Jason Hickel; but that for every dollar earned by somebody in the bottom 90% of the world, one of the billionaires earns or makes or accrues $1.7 million. I mean, once you hear that, it's like, why are there not pitchforks in the streets? And then the book explains why there are not Pitchforks in the streets. It's wholly unacceptable. I listen to Gary Stevenson, who's an interesting working class former trader in the UK, and he set up Gary's Economics podcast, which is well worth a listen. And he did an episode with Zack Polanski recently, and he pointed out something that I hadn't really got my head around before, which was if one were to have $1 billion and it was just accruing at an average rate of 5%, then that's 1 million a week for doing nothing. You're just sitting there and your bank account goes up by a million a week.
Jeremy: Right, exactly.
Manda: And so, of course, he says if we leave that for the next 10 to 15 years, they will own everything. It will all have flowed to the top. And exactly as you said, this is what the system is for. But the system is not fit for purpose if that purpose is the continuation of complex life on Earth.
Jeremy: Exactly.
Manda: And as you pointed out, way down at the foot of your book, again, I can't remember who it was, that this is our one chance for ever in the evolutionary history of this planet, to develop a technologically literate civilisation. Because if we go down, if the sixth mass extinction wipes us out, and there have been five before, there's no reason why we are supposedly so special. The next evolution of intelligence will not have access to easy fossil fuels or easy minerals or anything that we've had, which feels big.
Jeremy: Yes, exactly. That's an astronomer called Fred Hoyle, who is the one who pointed this out some years back. And that's the thing, the stakes could not be higher. We're not even talking about, oh, this is another phase we're going into. No, we're talking about the potential for a civilizational collapse that puts all the civilizational collapses of the past into like a little micro speck of history compared to what we'd be looking at and the amount of suffering, along with that, the amount of human suffering. This is what sometimes gets me, my sort of hackles go up a bit, when I hear in conversations people say, oh yeah, yeah, we just need collapse; let's just let it happen, start all over again. And it's such a casual way, and oftentimes it's just people haven't thought it through. But the thing is the vast bulk of people are so far from the sources of simple food and sustenance that it would instantly lead to massive breakdown of society and absolute devastation, death, fear and disaster, violence. And that's something that we all need to try to do everything we can to protect against. And I think that the thing is, again, it's not trying to keep the system the way it is, but to build the new possible system in the detritus and compost of the old. So that as it unravels, there's something possible to put in its place.
Manda: Yes, yes. Thank you. There are so many ways we could take this. Let's dig a little bit more deeply into the history of how we got here and the fact that the system is designed to do this. Because I think not everybody is aware; I think I know this stuff and I wasn't aware, of how very deliberately, over the last half millennium at least, I mean, I think the Romans were doing it, but you've got a quote here from Patrick Calhoun who said: 'Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilisation. It is the source of wealth, since without poverty there could be no labour, there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth'. And this guy was not strung up from the nearest lamppost at the point when he published this. And to be fair, it was back in 1771 or thereabouts. But they're absolutely not hiding this. This is: we the rich exist to exploit the poor. And we had better do it by whatever means necessary. Further down in the book, you look at the kind of soft power and the hard power. The soft power is the narratives that keep people self controlling. I noticed that Timothy Schneider said from the moment Trump was elected, do not capitulate in advance.
Jeremy: Yes.
Manda: And that feels like something that we could have been telling ourselves for the last several centuries. So take that wherever you want to go. The hard nosedness. If you can remember the Rhodes quote, that also blew my mind, but I can't find it at the moment.
Jeremy: Yes, I can quote that for you. I'm just pulling it up here on my own computer. So Cecil Rhodes, probably most people still know that name. He was basically one of the wealthiest, most powerful people in the world in the late 19th century. Like the ultra mega sort of colonialist, a little bit like the billionaires now, that we all know their names so well. And he owned the DeBeers diamond mine, he was Prime minister of the Cape Colony in South Africa and.
Manda: They named Rhodesia after him.
Jeremy: In fact, they even named a country after him, Rhodesia, which then became Zimbabwe. So what's amazing is he was there in London, this incredible super uber wealthy guy, and he went to this meeting of unemployed workers in the East End of London and he got terrified. Because they were saying, bread! Bread! We need a revolution! And he's going, oh my God, what happens if all these workers get together? And so he went back and wrote in his notes about we can have a bloody civil war. And then he got this idea. He said, I become more convinced of the importance of imperialism than ever before. He called it his cherished idea. He said, what we've got to do is we colonial statesmen, we've got to acquire new lands. Saddle those surplus populations, provide new markets for the goods and produce enough factories and mines. So we avoid civil war by becoming imperialists. And basically give just enough wealth, like suck wealth from elsewhere in the world where they're too weak to even stop us doing that, and just give just enough wealth to the workers here in England and places, so they won't have a revolution and then keep the rest to ourselves. We can keep this going forever. And this was his great cherished idea.
Manda: And it happened.
Jeremy: He did a great job of it, basically, because here we are, 130 years later, whatever and the billionaires are doing exactly the same thing as we speak right now. And so there's this great phrase for it, which is called structural violence. Because what is so crucial to understand is these are not like abstract ideas. And it's not like, oh, well, these billionaires, they get their wealth. Well, that's okay, we'll just work and get stuff done. There is actually violence that is being done. When that billionaire is on their super yacht, just like you say, with their money just earning more in an hour or a day than most people work in a whole lifetime, it's not a victimless crime. It's actually a crime against humanity and against the Earth, because that is happening at the expense, through a system of exploitation and extraction, which is pulling those resources, destroying people's lives and stopping them having access to health care, basic services, everything like that. So those few people can just enjoy their wealth. That is what's known as structural violence. And even though the structural violence is less direct than if you see somebody take a gun and shoot somebody right in front of you, that's direct violence.
Jeremy: But structural violence ends up killing, maiming, destroying the lives of way, way more people every day than the kind of direct violence that is more obvious to us. So that's just a really key concept to understand. And I guess, just to take one more point in terms of the themes that you're raising, is this notion of why aren't there pitchforks in the street? Why don't we all say this is screwed up? Because if enough of us did that, this wouldn't be happening. And I'll give you an example of that. Just a few years ago in India, there was this idea of revamping some of the rules around agriculture in order to make it more open to neoliberal takeover, basically. And this was one thing where the Indian farm workers said, no, we're not going to accept this. And all of a sudden, hundreds of thousands, I think millions of farm workers in the streets in Calcutta and Delhi, just basically blocking access to the entire city with their tractors and their carts and everything else. And the government just had to give in. It's like, oh, this isn't working, we'll do just what they said.
Jeremy: So when there's enough people getting together and saying, we're not going to let this happen, that's where change can happen. Why doesn't it happen? Because of what's known as cultural hegemony. And this key concept, that was first developed by Antonio Gramsci, who was an Italian Marxist thinker in the 1930s who got jailed by Mussolini, ended up dying in jail. But he managed to write these really deep philosophical reflections even while he was there in jail. And what he recognised is that the way in which the system maintains that wealth pump, is the elites themselves couldn't do it on their own, but they've got a whole slew of lieutenants, basically the colonels of their hegemony, who actually condition and brainwash the rest of society into believing that this is all for their benefit. Or at the minimum, that very concept of Tina; there is no alternative. But most people even think, well, it's okay anyway. This whole notion of the sort of breadcrumbs, the sort of drip that the wealthy people, the wealthier they get, they'll drip a little bit of wealth to all of us. So continual growth is good for us.
Manda: Trickle down.
Jeremy: Basically the economists, the lawyers, thinkers, people who actually write these columns in the New York Times or most media in the world, people like Steven Pinker as a great example, you know, brilliant intellectuals who use the power of this intellect to come up with arguments that make ultimately their masters, these wealthy billionaires and academies that are funded by the billionaires, that make them happy, because it gets people to believe a whole mythos underlying the very system that is destroying them.
Manda: Yeah. I remember a very famous interview between Noam Chomsky and I think Andrew Rawnsley decades ago, where Rawnsley is going but nobody tells me what to think; I write what I believe. And Noam Chomsky is going, yes, and that's why you have your job. Because if you didn't believe what they wanted you to believe, they wouldn't employ you. And you are as complicit as everybody else. And Rawnsley was not happy (I think it was Rawnsley, if I'm wrong please let me know!). I want to move on from this, but there was something, this actually blew my mind, was George Kennan wrote a memorandum to colleagues; so he was a US diplomat, Cold War strategist, and he wrote: 'We have about 50% of the world's wealth' (So that's the US; we the US have 50% of the world's wealth) 'but only 6.3% of its population. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relations, which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming' (Which is to say, humanity and ethics and morals) 'and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives'. And then you go on to say the IMF and the world Bank were set up, and then we end up with the ISDS and all of the systems that maintain that disparity that he was talking about. And the bare faced, cold bloodedness of it. I know that these people are fundamentally broken, but I forget. I think they're just decent people who've just been subverted by the system. And then you read that and you go, no, actually, that's actually not true. And I think somewhere in the book you said that America has, one way or another, overturned the democratic governance of 71 other nations in an effort to make sure that they could continue to pump the wealth to the top of the US out of pretty much everywhere else in the world.
Jeremy: Yeah. And these are statistics and things that I uncovered in my own research. They were just as much a surprise to me over the last few years of researching this book as they have been to you as you were reading it. And I should just add, in every case, when I've come across one of these statistics, I wanted to make sure that this is really credible. I mean, there's too many books written where you get quotes that turn out to be apocryphal or some statistic that turns out, well, it's not actually true. Like there's examples, even statistics that I would have loved to rely on. Such as there's people who say indigenous people account for 80% of the world's biodiversity. And then you look at it and people have critiqued it saying, well, there's no such thing as 80% of biodiversity. How do you even measure it? And where did this number come from? And you realise people have quoted it from quotes from other people quoted it, and it's a whole self-referential thing and there's no basis.
Manda: Yes, that happens a lot.
Jeremy: And, you know, it doesn't take away from the incredible importance of indigenous people protecting diversity. But let's believe these quotes that we're relying on. And so every one of these things you said, every one of those quotes, every one of these statistics, I've double, triple checked. And you know, obviously I can't guarantee 100% every one of them. I've done my very best, but I think this is solid stuff is my point. This is what the world is actually been based on. And one of those chapters that you're talking about is called The History They Didn't Teach You At School. And I think this is the thing to understand is that we are conditioned. We're conditioned by people who themselves have been conditioned. And for every one of these George Kennans or Rhodes of the world, who were absolute hardcore, cynical, maybe even psychopaths or sociopaths, or certainly in Rhodes case, I don't even think that's the case. I think he thought of himself as a very humane person. Things like the Rhodes Scholarship, which exists now, that is really helping underprivileged people, and he set in place. But he was so much into that worldview, it didn't even occur to him there were these alternative ways of looking at things.
Jeremy: So it's important to realise this and important to realise that the vast bulk of people working in corporations and actually in the work they're doing doing the harm that is caused so much in the world. The vast bulk of lawyers and fighting on behalf of these illegal corporations or whatever; they're not bad people. In most cases, it's people who actually they care about their families. Maybe they've looked at things; this is really screwed up, but I've got to make my mortgage payment. And I don't feel good about what I'm doing, but I'm doing it anyway. And there's people who do feel good about what they're doing because they've been told by the corporation they're working for that the marketing they're doing is really helping people because it's getting people to have whiter teeth, or to have more access to whatever it is that the sales thing is about. And the point is that it's hard for people to actually face that and say, oh my God, all these years I've been working, I've actually been helping this kind of Windigo monster, as we call it, like this monster of of extraction.
Manda: Just coming on to that. Yes.
Jeremy: So I just want to layer all this, this critique, with a deep sense of self-compassion for each of us around this. I mean, I was involved the first half of my life in building and actually starting a corporation that was part of this system of extraction exploitation. I Did a great job of getting people to take out more debt and get credit cards online and all that stuff. And it took me years, myself, to realise that I was part of something that was super destructive. And then, wow, what can I do about that? So I just want to put that out there as an invitation to people who might find themselves involved in that system, to look at their place in the system and not do it with a sense of, oh my God, I'm being judged for being so bad. But it's that openness to explore and inquire is the beginning of basically beginning to push back against that cultural hegemony?
Manda: Brilliant, right? Yes. Okay. So I'd like to I'd like to rest on that for a moment because I think this is really important. If we're listening to this podcast, we can speak English, we've got a computer and or a phone and we can listen to podcasts. We are integral to this system and we didn't expect to be. We didn't grow up desiring to be part of a system that is creating omnicide. I love the phrase omnicide. I don't love the fact that it's happening, but I think it's a clever phrase. Let's look into that. And so I think getting lost in shame and blame and guilt or deflecting it outwards, like you said, there are a lot of people who think a breakdown is a good thing. Or who want to wipe humanity off the face of the earth, or want to decide to blame the population is too great. They tend to be quite old and they've got 4 or 5 kids, but it's not their problem that the population is too great. It's people in the global majority who are having more children, and then we can blame them and then it's somebody else's problem.
Manda: And somehow it seems to me, doing the inner work of yes, I have been complicit and I did not have too many other options, but now I've seen it, what can I do then? How can I be part of the shift to a new system? This is what your book is offering people, is windows into a different world. So I want to get to your theory of change in a moment. But just before we get there, your Wendigo or Wetiko. You've got Wendigo's law and you've got what I would call the trauma culture, you are defining as the Wendigo culture or the Windigo culture. Tell us a little bit about that, because it feels like a useful metaphor and very similar to the hungry ghost concept that's often in Tibetan lore. So tell us a little bit about that and then let's go into Omnicide and then let's start looking at the theories of change.
Jeremy: Yeah. So this concept of Windigo, often referred to as Wetiko, same thing. Basically this is a sort of monster in the mythology of the Ojibwe people of the Great Lakes region. And when the Europeans first arrived in North America 500 years ago, the indigenous people there couldn't believe what they saw. They they realised that no matter what you gave to those white people, they wanted more and they wanted more and if they conquered something then they had to conquer further. There was nothing that would ever satisfy them. And they related this to this terrifying monster that used to terrify the little children around campfires. The Windigo monster, who is a ravenous ten foot giant with a heart made of ice, greedily sought all humans to devour, like little kids if they strayed too far from their families or whatever. But here's the thing; if you got bitten by a Windigo monster, you didn't just get consumed by them, but you became a Windigo yourself, and you're doomed forever to roam with this insatiable hunger. Because the terrible thing for a Windigo monster is the more they ate, the hungrier they were, so they could never, ever get that ravenous hunger satisfied.
Jeremy: So the indigenous people looked at these Europeans as the Windigo. They got bitten by the Windigo monster. And basically, that is a great definition of what capitalism is. That when you take a deep economic analysis of capitalism, it's this process by which capital has to always earn more returns. And the more you return and the more you get, the more you have to keep earning those returns, because otherwise you lose out, compared to the other sources of capital that are making more returns. And that's why, in a sort of little swerve I did in this book, was take this idea of Windigo, which is so core to this kind of cultural pathology that has become spread all around the world, but call it Windigo Incorporated. Because really, the corporate system is essentially the legal, economic manifestation of that Windigo virus, if you will, that has now taken over the world. And it's by recognising that once again we begin to empower ourselves to do something about it, once we see what is actually happening.
Manda: Yes, yes. Nate Hagens calls it superorganism, and I tend to call it the death cult of predatory capitalism. But it's that thing that is so voracious. And you said in the book that we're often afraid of AI growing sentience and taking over and destroying the whole world, the infinitely replicating paperclip model or whatever. And yet we've already got a system that is taking over the world because it has to grow and it is insatiable. And yet the narrative, as we've said, is this is the way the world is, there is no alternative. This is human nature. I think you unpick that quite neatly. That we tend to look at our own nature, or the nature of the system, or the nature of the people around us, and assume that this is the way humanity is and always has been. And quite clearly, there are other cultures, exactly as you said; when the Ojibwe met the white people, they couldn't understand why they kept having to have stuff. You had something, I think it was the Cree, where the Western people wanted more furs so they put the prices up. So the Cree brought them fewer furs because they didn't need any more money. And that totally did not compute. In the Western mindset if we offer you more money, why are you not bringing us more furs? Well, we don't need them. And so somehow understanding that because we think that everybody is a rational actor and everybody is selfish and everybody is out to destroy everything in their own service, doesn't mean that's the way it has to be, or the way it's always been, or the way that it could be. Because people also, given the chance, thrive most when they're feeling generous and when they're expressing their biggest meaning. And you talk about the two forms of happiness. Can we talk about that for a short bit? And then we'll go more into your theories of change.
Jeremy: Sure. Yeah, absolutely. And this is crucial, what you're saying, because it's another sort of almost like a false turn that caring people can make, looking at all this stuff. Is to look at everything we've just been talking about and say, yeah, human nature sucks, you know, this is terrible. And it's kind of hopeless because look at what's happened historically. And the good news that we discover, that I described in those earlier books, like The Web of Meaning and others, is that that's actually not the case. I mean, there's a reason why we want human nature to be filled with goodness and solidarity and caring, and those are values that mean something to us, because that's our evolved values. That's how we as humans evolved. And exactly like indigenous groupings for nomadic hunter gatherers, which is how we spent 95 or 99% of the human race, depending on how you define it, those groups actually lived according to solidarity, a sense of group identity, utterly different. So that when somebody acted like that Windigo kind of virus in those groups, they were considered pathological, like dangerous. And you try to work with them and show them their harm. And if they kept acting like that, you'd ostracise them. You'd get them out of your group because they didn't belong there. So that's something that really we need to understand. And so this is why the sense of happiness is a really important key thing that you were just asking about. Because the human place to actually achieve long term happiness is through being who we were evolved to be, and acting out in those ways. Not acting according to try to fix ourselves, to fit into this world that is so pathological right now. And it was all the way back to Aristotle who actually defined this difference between different forms of happiness. And he had these two words for it. One was hedonia and one was eudaimonia. And hedonia refers to the kind of sort of short term happiness, if you will.
Manda: Dopamine hits.
Jeremy: Exactly, exactly. Sort of hedonic happiness, right? But it was more subtle than we think of Hedonia as, you know, just like sex, drugs and rock and roll or whatever. But it was more subtle than that. To him hedonia happiness was almost happiness that came that was temporary and passing and came from external. So it might be even things like having financial security or having people respect you and saying good things about you, it's not like it's bad to enjoy elements of hedonic happiness. But his point was that's not what true happiness is about. True happiness was eudaimonia. And what eudaimonia literally means in Greek is like the good spirits. And what he means by that is what he saw as almost like an evolutionary process, that every entity that exists in this world is driven to actually fulfil its own inherent destiny. Now, he didn't know about DNA and stuff like that, but evolutionary biology now can really help to explain that. So DNA evolved in every species to be a certain kind of fulfilment. If you're a tree, an olive tree or a beech tree, or if you're a swallow or if you're a human being, there is an evolutionary drive to really fulfil the very possibilities that exist within you.
Jeremy: And so once we begin to recognise that then we begin to see, so in Aristotle's mind eudaimonia, for any entity, human or non-human, comes from when they are truly fulfilling their inherent nature. And our inherent nature is not to be on this hedonic treadmill of consumerism. Our inherent nature is actually to be in community. It's actually to feel love and be loved. It's actually to feel a sense of being valued by our community and contributing to our community, and for our community to be in harmony with the rest of what indigenous people call all our relatives, all our relations, the rest of the natural world. That actually leads to a sense of deep fulfilment. But that is absolutely against the desires of Windigo Inc. because if everyone felt that they wouldn't be having to go buy the next thing that came out and they wouldn't have to go and spend their time working just to get up on the status level. So the whole process of Windigo Inc is essentially to stop people from actually orienting towards fulfilling their true nature from that eudaimonic impulse and to stay on that hedonic treadmill.
Manda: Okay, in spite of the moral hazard of that. There was a phrase that I can't remember now, that somebody had defined the moral lifeboat, was it? That it's okay for the rich people to behave in a way that is guaranteed to destroy millions of people, because basically they deserve to be in the lifeboats and the other people don't. But let's not worry about that at the moment, because what I really want to get to, I think we're going to come back in about six months time when this book is about to launch, and we're really going to look into the detail of how you think we could step forward of the systems and the interlocking poly systemic change that we need. But what I'd like to do with the remaining time just now, is have a look at the theory of change, of the overarching concept. So we've established that the existing system is not broken, it's doing exactly what it was meant to do, which is make the rich very, very, very rich at the expense of everybody else. And it happens that we're up against biophysical limits. We're recording this a week after the first paper suggested that we'd passed a tipping point in terms of coral bleaching.
Manda: So we have got a very narrow window of time, which is good in a way, because it means that Steve Bannon and the others will not get their 10,000 year Reich, because you can't have that in the face of three degrees, five degrees, ten degrees of warming. And we've established that we have a narrow window that we could get through if we can establish total systemic change. So as an overarching concept, in your framework of the world, what are the stories that could lead us forward towards the total systemic change that we need? Because given that we're going to have to change our monetary system, our governance system, our food and farming system, our educational system, all of the things that you look at in the book; all of those have to change in quite a short space of time. Talk to us about the narrative shift that we will have to embrace and extend and ripple out in fractal phases, so that enough of us are heading for that. Does that make sense as a question?
Jeremy: It does. It does certainly. Well, I think maybe the fundamental essence of that narrative shift is the exact opposite of Tina, that says there is no alternative. And really, the narrative shift is actually there is an alternative, which of course, is so consistent with the very notion of thrutopia. Everything that you are devoting so much of your time to, which is what I love so much. And there's a basis for that; this is not wishful thinking, is the point. And the basis is what I was just describing, that actually our human evolved nature is to be pro-social, is to be in solidarity with others, is to actually want to contribute to others. And all the things that we are then trained to be in this modern society is against our nature. And what that means, basically, is every single human being born into this world, you know, all 8 billion of us so far, and everyone to be born in the future. And this system has to work to basically condition, basically destroy the core elements of what is evolved human nature and human needs in that person, and turn them into this sort of broken version of themselves in order to contribute to this system of Windigo Inc, to this omnicide, this destruction of everything. And that's where the possibility exists.
Jeremy: Because we don't need to get to some higher level of human consciousness. Sometimes people say, it's all screwed up, we've got to evolve to a higher level. And in some ways, I believe that and I live according to that. Yes, there is a certain higher level of connection with source, of connection with love and what is greater than us. That would be great for us all to get to. But before we even get to that point, it's almost like what we really need to do is reconnect with what is already in us. And and this is, I think, the practices available to us for ourselves and available to us in community. And by doing that, basically the story is we can actually set the conditions for us all to thrive. So really the ultimate notion of this vision of an ecological civilisation, what does an alternative look like? Is a simple concept of setting the conditions for all beings to thrive on a regenerated Earth. Right now, I will warrant you that if you say that idea to the vast bulk of people in the world, in every nation of every stripe in the world, and you say, what would you think about a world system that was based on that? They'd say, well, of course, that's obviously that's what it should be.
Jeremy: I mean, with very rare exceptions, this is such common sense. And then when you realise the gulf between what our current system does and that, that is the opportunity that exists. And the other sort of message, the other sort of story about this, to understand, is these are not utopian ideas. Like you make this distinction between utopia and thrutopia. These are ideas that are already in practice. For the most part, people have thought them through. Whether it's in economics or greater wealth equality or governance or true democracy, or how you redesign technology or anything like that. People have thought it through. They're actually doing it in small islands that we call 'islands of coherence in a sea of chaos'. And this is the great opportunity. It's already happening. It's happening in the margins. It's not being talked about in the mainstream media because of that cultural hegemony that we talked about earlier, but it's there. And when we can begin to weave those strands together, they begin to form a different fabric. So ultimately, as our current society unravels because of its internal contradictions, we can be taking those strands that are unravelling and reweaving them into a fabric that could actually work for all our future generations.
Manda: Yeah. Okay, so in the last few minutes, I would like to talk a little bit about what you're seeing around the world. I was listening to Nate Hagens relatively recently, and he was talking to someone in the AI world, tech world, tech world who said that five years ago, if he'd gone to a dinner party and told people that he meditated, they would have all looked at him like he had horns. And now, if he went to the same dinner party and told people that he didn't meditate, they would look at him like he had horns. And so something is shifting and and we are all aware that simply sitting on a cushion, observing your breath does not necessarily turn you into a decent human being. And there's a lot of other inner work to be done, but at least it's a step on the way. And it seems to me that there's an accelerating pace of change. Clearly, the old system is being dismantled in real time by the sociopaths who have stolen control. But it had to be dismantled. I was, as I'm sure you are, devastated when Trump alleged that he won in November. Pretty certain that Musk put a thumb on the scales, but there we go. And yet, if Kamala Harris had won, she could not have dismantled the system.
Jeremy: No.
Manda: And and he is just simply taking it apart. You know, laws are what I make them to be and I choose to ignore them. And you suddenly discover that international treaties don't actually exist unless everybody agrees that they do, which is great if we're talking about ISDS, International State Dispute Settlement, which is a total, utter disaster at every level except for the people who own the companies that are going to get it. And if it's that easy to dismantle international law, then the world is a very different place. So the cracks are where the light gets in, is a cliche, but I'm seeing very big cracks. And I wonder what sources of light you are seeing that might have arisen since you finished writing the book, which I realise is relatively recently, but the world is changing very fast. What sources of hope are you seeing other than 8.1 million people marching on the streets of the US on a NO Kings day, which was huge.
Jeremy: Which is huge, definitely. I think really the source of hope to me comes in community. It comes in just connecting with others. And as you connect with others, even people who might have different views from you, you begin to realise, sort of like I was saying earlier, that the deepest heart, what almost all people, with the exception of that very small minority who are true sociopaths and don't actually have access to these core evolved, sensitive, empathic and compassionate experience. But the vast bulk of people, they want a decent life for themselves, for their loved ones and for others around them. They don't get joy in seeing suffering. They don't get joy in seeing genocide taking place in Gaza and people being massacred. Innocent little children. It hurts people and they want to do something about it. And this, I think, is the core. That basically every new generation now that arises in this 21st century, in the society that unravels, is going to be asking more and more, what can we do? They're not going to take for granted that cultural hegemony, those preconceived ideas. That they're told this is how society works while they're watching society not working and they're looking for alternatives.
Jeremy: And right now, the vast bulk of the alternatives being offered to them are being offered by authoritarian ball rackets who basically say, yeah, this is all screwed up. Like, trust us, believe in us, because look what those technocrats and those intellectual elites have been telling you. Because those intellectual elites essentially, over the last couple of generations, have sold their soul to the neoliberal hegemony. That's why in most cases, the moderate left, whether it's the Democrats or the Labour Party in the UK or so many other parts of the world, they are intellectually and morally bankrupt for the most part, because they've given themselves up to that Tina notion that there is no alternative. They're trying to just make the alternative just that little bit better for a few people on the side. This is where the great opportunity comes for all of us, is to just recognise actually we can do something different. And that is what gives our human heart that ability to come alive. And that is what living in community with others around us and sharing those ideas and getting energised from our connection with others is where the opportunity exists.
Manda: Beautiful. Thank you. You have a brilliant quote from Lynn Margolis who said: Life did not take over the world by combat, but by networking' and that really does feel like exactly as you say, one of the best things that our generation could offer future generations, are social technologies that build communities of place, purpose and passion, that actually work. Because we haven't grown up in community in the way that indigenous peoples have. We don't know how to make communities that actually function, but we can work it out. It can't be that hard. Because, as you said, it's part of our nature. So we can definitely do it. Okay, we're we're way over time. Again, I don't know where the time goes to. Jeremy, that was amazing. Thank you. I am so looking forward to part two, when we will discuss in detail the structures and the concepts and the the thrutopian steps that you can see that would take us to an eco civilisation where humanity thrives as an integral part of a flourishing web of life. Which has got to be our future. And wouldn't that be an exciting future? To wake up in the morning and know that your life had meaning, and that meaning was the welfare of everything else that lived? It's got to be worth trying for.
Jeremy: What a future! Yeah, it's available to us. Manda, thank you so much.
Manda: Thank you.
Jeremy: I so enjoyed it. Thank you.
Manda: We'll talk in April, soon enough. Thank you.
Jeremy: Love it. Thank you.
Manda: And that's it for another week. Enormous thanks to Jeremy for everything that he is and does. He has so much energy and such a striking capacity to take incredibly complicated ideas and render them not just straightforward, but obvious. Once you have read his critique of the existing system, you will never believe there is no alternative ever again. Not just that you won't believe it at an intellectual level. You will know it to be untrue when you encounter it out in the world. And I think this is really important; in order to change the system, as we said, we need to have ready at hand solid and obvious critiques of the existing system, as well as unfolding ways of bringing the new one into being. This is what Zack Polanski is doing so well in the UK and Zoran Mamdani in New York. They are offering absolutely unassailable critiques of the obvious corruption in the existing system. And they are going on to offer change that is also equally obvious. It doesn't go nearly far enough. But we have to start somewhere and we need the next most obvious step. And what politicians are doing who get it, and what Jeremy is doing in his book, is offering a route through from where we are to where we need to be, with the premise that we need to have that sense of the possibility of well-being for all life at the heart of everything that we do.
Manda: It's really hard to argue against, but we need to come up against the people who say it's not realistic. Because in their worldview, it is realistic to march us over the edge of the sixth mass extinction, because they cannot see alternative ways to act. So part of what we need to do is to internalise all of the ways that we could do things differently, and the routes to get there, and how they will work as we dismantle the existing system. So I genuinely recommend that you read The Patterning Instinct and The Web of Meaning again, or go and hang out at the Deep Transformation Network or whatever it takes, so that you've got the foundation. And, that you pre-order Jeremy's book so that when it comes out, you can go through it all and have a sense of how we get from where we are towards where we need to be.
Manda: So there we go. That's it for this week. We'll be back next week with another conversation. And in the meantime, thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot to Alan Lowles of Airtight Studios for the production, to Lou Mayor for the video, Anne Thomas for the transcript, and Faith Tillaray for the website and the tech and all of the conversations that keep us moving forward. And for putting up with me turning our lives over with a new puppy, and for looking after me when I was not well with Covid. And as ever, at the end of all of that, an enormous thanks to you for listening.
Manda: If you know of anybody else who wants to understand some of the ways in which the current system does not function and never has functioned for the wellbeing of all life, then please do send them this link. And if you or anybody else that you know wants to come and join us for a gathering, we are meeting online on zoom to explore Dreaming your Death Awake, on Sunday the 2nd of November. It runs from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. UK time, GMT. I live in a world where I believe we need to fall in love with the process of living, and we cannot do that until we have also fallen in love with the inevitability of our own death. And so, once a year, pretty close to Samhain, we get together and we explore what death is and how we feel about it, and how we could transform the ways that we feel about it. You don't have to have worked with us before. This is open to anybody and everybody who wants to come and really delve deeply into that. I have put a link in the show notes, along with links to everything else that we do. So come along if it feels like a good thing to you. And that's it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.