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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.
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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 a future that we would be proud to leave as our legacy. This week's guest is someone who has made her main focus the ways that we can work together to leave that legacy. Jenny Grover is an author, a philosopher, a systems thinker, and a designer who joined us in episode 228, talking about the principles and practices of her generative and systems led design agency. At the time, she said she was writing a new book that would be out in the late summer, and here we are in the late summer and Jenny's book, Mothering Economy, is coming out at the end of this month. If you're listening later, this is August 2024. So we invited Jenny back for another wide, deep, generative, provocative conversation. Early in the book Jenny writes, are we (that's us in our weird, Western educated, industrial, rich, democratic culture) intelligent enough to be more generous than we have ever been throughout our history? And so we ask this: what might it take for us to have the courage to care deeply for ourselves, each other, and the more than human world? Later on, Jenny writes: 'the profound mothering amongst humans that I envision is not a burdensome technological revolution, but rather a simple way of being together. We have a vast number of examples. What we lack is the intention and commitment to raise awareness'.
Manda: And so here we are raising awareness, exploring the ideas deep in Jenny's book, and searching between us within our own beings for ways to show up with stronger, clearer, more open hearts. This is such an interesting conversation. At the time of recording I'm just back from Sheffield, where I was at the Social Enterprise Network conference, discovering how many people there are who are working right beneath the radar on total systemic change. There are genuinely so many networks of people who really get it. I was totally inspired up there to discover how much this is happening on the ground. And so when Jenny said that she too had been to a conference in Oslo, where people in quite hardcore economic business as usual thinking were beginning to reference the need for love in what we do, then we know that things are beginning to change. So we're about to head into this. But just before we do, because it has been brought to my attention that not everybody listens to the outros. So here in the introduction, I would like to tell you that we are holding a zoom reading group for Any Human Power. That's my book, not Jenny's book. Perhaps we'll do another later for Jenny. Anyway, the one for Any Human Power is on the 15th of September, 6 to 8 UK time, which is still British summertime at that point.
Manda: Anyone and everyone is welcome. It is free. We've put it on a page so that you have to sign up for it, just so that we don't end up with the zoom link out there in the troll infested waters of the net. But truly, if you've read the book and you want to talk about it, please come along. Writing coach Sally Shakti Willow will be there, and Maddy Harland, editor of Permaculture Magazine, and we'll have a bit of a conversation, but then we'll open it up to questions and ideas and ways that we can make the things that were fiction in the book become real in the outside world. So if you want to explore that, please do come along.
Manda: And then beyond that, the last thing to say is that Jenny and I mentioned the essay 'I, Pencil' in the conversation and neither of us could remember who wrote it. And now I've looked it up and put a link in the show notes, and it's by Leonard Read, so you can go and look at that afterwards too. But ahead of that, for a truly beautiful, thoughtful conversation, please welcome Jenny Grettve, author of Mothering Economy, all the way from her holiday in France.
Manda: Jenny, welcome back to the Accidental Gods podcast. It's an absolute delight to be with you again. How are you and where are you this lovely summer morning?
Jenny: Thank you. I'm in south of France, actually, with my whole family.
Manda: That's surprising. I was expecting you to say Sweden. Are you on holiday? Am I interrupting your holiday with this? Because we don't have to do it now.
Jenny: No, you're not interrupting. I'm on a holiday slash work kind of mix. Yeah, but I'm here for a full month.
Manda: Okay. Alright.
Jenny: Working, taking it easy, Resting, reading, cooking, spending time with my family.
Manda: Okay, promise me you're resting. Because otherwise, working holidays are a bad thing. My coach gets very cross when I do that.
Jenny: Yeah, I'm actually quite good at it. So I took a first full week off, did nothing. But I'm the type of person who actually enjoys working a little bit, so it's not a bad thing. I'm sitting here reading, thinking, pondering, writing. So this just fits perfectly.
Manda: All right, that's grand. And we're talking about your book, which is always a fun thing to do when one has written a book, is the chance to birth it out into the world in ways that aren't just the print on the page. So your book is The Mothering Economy. And there's a really, for me, beautiful paragraph in the early stages, in the prologue, which says: 'A thought lingers in my mind, though. If humans are capable of creating and innovating at a different level than most other living beings', and I'd like to look into that, 'then how could we innovate and increase our levels of shared global mothering? Are we intelligent enough to be more generous than we have ever been throughout our history?' And that seems to me such a beautiful concept and really keys into the ideas of Conscious Evolution. What does it take? And it takes bringing the best of ourselves and that means being big hearted and open hearted and clear hearted and full hearted and strong hearted. And all of those things come in under the rubric of mothering. So before we begin to dig into the weeds, how did you have the idea of writing this book? How long have you been incubating it?
Jenny: Mm. I think it's one of those books that I've been carrying with me, like the thought and the ideas, for many, many years. But the last year and a half maybe, I've been actively writing on this and it's a very personal take, I think on working with systems thinking, looking at the world, the global perspective, our meta crisis. But from, I wouldn't say like a simple point of view, but in my mind, it's both simple and complex. So to talk about care and generosity, it's something we all know what it means. We can all feel it, we know how to do it, but then at the same time it seems so impossible to do so. I was just intrigued, like, how can I dive into this and actually spend time reading, looking backwards, but also thinking about the future? And how can this be that we are so, so, so incapable of creating a kind society? And it was also a take on everything that we have been able to do. Like humans are amazing, that's a principle that I like to stand by. And we can we can do so many beautiful things, we have done so many interesting things. And if you just take AI, for example, I mean, I can't get into my mind how we have been able to create these things. But then at the same time we have wars. And I just sit there and I'm thinking like, how can this be? How can we live in a society where we are intelligent and smart, but then at the same time we're so stupid?
Manda: Right, right. Because the AI is being used to target missiles so that people don't have to do it, and yet at the same time it's also opening doorways to new ways of being that we otherwise wouldn't imagine.
Jenny: No, exactly.
Manda: Just before we dive into your structure of the book, in the quote we talked a little bit about humans doing things we've never done before. And you mentioned creating a human embryo without needing an ovum and a sperm. I mean, obviously that is really a thing. I had no idea.
Jenny: It's being tested. Yeah. We're doing so many interesting things and science, it's evolving so fast. And I'm really curious and I'm wondering how are we not spending time, then, on on creating different types of societies? And also inequality, as I see it, is such a base and the huge problem for the meta crisis that we sit with. Still, we're not really talking about it enough or in a way that actually changes things, or that we're actively working with it. Instead, we're so focussed on green transitions and electrifying society. I mean, there's so many things we're doing and they're good, I'm not against technology, but we are definitely missing another dialogue and another approach. And also I feel like in history we've been very focussed on the tech side, let's say. And I think we're living in a time where it's time to shift the focus. And I think we can do it. As I said, we're smart enough to do it, so it's just about time.
Manda: Yes. And it seems, Daniel Schmachtenberger has been saying for a while that if we're going to have the power and the technology of Gods, we need to have the wisdom of Gods to go with it. Which is essentially what you're saying, is we need to grow up. I'm not a great fan of Ken Wilber and that whole Spiral Dynamics thing, it feels very male and technocentric to me. But still, he's not wrong with the 'wake up, grow up, clean up, show up', provided it doesn't become a reason to judge ourselves into annihilation and becomes a rite of passage through which we can go. Alrighty. So let's step into... You've structured the book very beautifully. It it feels a lot like Donella Meadows' 12 levers of change and moving through them. But each one of these, because Donella Meadows was ascending efficacy and the early ones are just doing exactly what you said, creating a green transition, which is actually going to achieve completely nothing except make everybody feel a little bit better about themselves. Which is not necessarily what we need when we need to be doing more. Whereas each of yours feels like it's a major step. So let's go through them in order. The first is: Accept the Flux of Life. Tell us what you mean by that.
Jenny: Yeah. So these six principles are just what came out in the end as the six kind of most important things that I think can shift perspectives maybe more than actions, probably. But 'Accept the flux of life' is something that I've been working a lot with when it comes to systems thinking. I don't think we're talking enough about existential problems. I mean, we don't know why we live. We don't know why we die. But in our society, as I see it, I think we push those thoughts away and those dialogues away because they're painful. And through history, some religions have discussed these better or worse. But I mean, there's it's something that comes with being alive. And I also think it's heavily connected with the crisis that we see. I mean, we push those thoughts away and we're stuck in this machine, and we need to work we believe, or we need to have money. We need to buy things, we need to do all of these things, instead of actually sometimes just stopping and going, like, what am I doing this for? And I also don't believe that we need to find an answer, but I think we just need to be fine with not knowing, which I think we're not. Or most of us are not.
Manda: Because in our culture we are told that we need to know. I'm reading Tyson Yunkaporta's second book at the moment Right Story, Wrong Story and he's very clear that the indigenous way of thinking is not linear. It's not 'I will throw this rock and I know exactly what's going to happen when it lands'. It's I am part of a fluid, highly complex system and I move within it as it requires me to and as I require of it. And we're in constant negotiation.
Jenny: Exactly. But also we don't get to choose where we're born. And that's also something we never, ever talk about in politics or in solutions moving forward. I didn't decide to to be born in Sweden, but it gives us different responsibilities right now in this time.
Manda: We could have been born in Gaza or Yemen or anywhere in the global south.
Jenny: Exactly. On the border of climate disasters. Whereas I'm sitting in a very safe country and I mean that dialogue I'm also missing heavily. Like how are we supposed to deal with these things? And as we said in the beginning, that's also something that maybe in history we didn't have to talk about, but with the meta crisis that we are living with, I think these dialogues need to happen.
Manda: And are you seeing them happening at all? Have you, now that you've written the book, I realise it hasn't come out at the time we're talking, it will come out shortly after we publish, but sometimes simply analysing something and coming to a realisation feels to me changes the energy around something and then it begins to move forward. You're not seeing this?
Jenny: Not enough. I mean, maybe sometimes I see them in private settings, you know, I'll talk about these things with my friends, for example. But I would like to see them in politics or in business or in any type of stakeholder or at EU level, for example. What does that do to the dialogues if we start to talk about these things? Because then suddenly perspectives will shift. If we accept, okay, I'm just going to be here on this planet for a very short time, I didn't choose where I was going to be born. If we have that as a base and then we start talking about governance regulations, I am 100% sure the end result would be different.
Manda: Yes. To get to that, we would require everybody to have the emotional maturity to be able to find the space inside for the uncertainty that you're talking about. And I'm thinking that certainly in the UK, and I think pretty much in most of the global North, the nature of politics is that it elevates people...I don't wish to other, actually, because I've just had a very good friend who's been elected in the UK in the slightly weird elections we just had. And I was just talking to Jamie Bristow, who works with the Inner Development Goals and teaches a lot of mindfulness in Westminster and in other parliaments. So there are people. I was about to make a sweeping statement and my brain fell over it; it isn't true that in politics there is nobody who's capable of that inner spaciousness. But the nature of the media political cycle, where everybody is required to have soundbite answers and everything has to be cut and dried and 'we are right and they are wrong', does not lend itself to the kind of reflexivity that you're talking about. And I wonder if there are other routes in? If we stop expecting politics to do this because it can't, because that's the nature of its system, and whether we can normalise this kind of conversation at a human level such that it radiates out so that in the end, the politicians always follow, the politicians will have to catch up with it. Is that something that you could imagine happening and that we could begin to foster?
Jenny: Yeah. For many years I've talked about parallel systems. Just like you're saying, I'm not sure the political systems we see if they will be able to do this in the way that we need, or fast enough, or in the right way. So I do see a need for parallel systems. And maybe stronger parallel systems than just small nonprofits or smaller organisations, but more organised, larger. And also the idea that the construction of our political systems is something that we can change. It's not something that is fixed. I mean, it's so easy to end up with that thought that that's how it's set, and then we can do something on the side. But everything is always up for change.
Manda: Yes. As long as we accept. I think you're right. We've been told that first of all, there is no alternative. And second, our democracy is the best that is possible, and that's evidently untrue. Audrey Tang was recently in London and I was in Sheffield and didn't get to go, but I've heard a lot of people feeding back to me. And they forked the government in Taiwan and created a parallel government that addressed the same issues, but did so transparently and in a much more inclusive way. And as a result, they were invited to reverse mentor one of the ministers and became the Digital Minister of Taiwan. And between 2014 and 2024, they went from 20% approval of their government to 80%. Because they changed the way it was done and they just changed the whole nature of the governance system. And it seems to me if it can happen in Taiwan, you know. Everybody goes, oh, Taiwan special case, but everywhere is a special case. We can change it.
Jenny: No, I also think from the municipality's perspectives, for example, they can also see that as something positive. Like if you don't have money enough to do healthcare systems, for example, maybe someone can support or maybe some other organisations can do what you cannot do yourself. I see how these two systems or multiple systems can also collaborate stronger and not see each other as something bad or competition or even negative.
Manda: Yes, definitely. And I was just at a social enterprise network conference and exactly that. There's so many really vibrant people and organisations, some of them very, very small and some of them much bigger and more organised and it's way below the radar. So it's not in the public discourse, but they definitely understand systems thinking, and they definitely know that we need systems change and they're working to make it happen. There's going to be a tipping point at some point and then it will break into the public awareness and then I hope that it rolls forward fast.
Manda: Alrighty, so 'accepting the flux of life': we're here for a short length of time. We don't know why we're here, and accepting the uncertainty of that. It seems to me, reading your book, that to have that as our baseline of an emotional reality of it's okay to be with that. We need to be grown up enough for that to be a part of who we are, and to ignore the bits of ourselves that go, 'no, I want certainty. I want never to die'.
Manda: I think watching some of the movement in Silicon Valley, the Emerald Green podcast, said that the development of AI was a complete failure to understand the warnings behind The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Which is that you need the wise people to constrain the young people who think that they're never going to die and that they can create Gods. And you look at Silicon Valley and, and it seems there are a lot of people who are very, very good at coding but emotionally locked in pre-adolescence. And have decided that death is a bad thing, when for a lot of people it's a rite of passage. And yes, it's going to kill us, but we get to play with it first. Which isn't necessarily the views that you want going forward into the world. And if we could create that sense of internal spaciousness and being okay with uncertainty, the world would be a different place.
Manda: Anyway. Let us move on. The second of your principles: See the Other. Talk to us a little bit about that while I find my place in my notes.
Jenny: Yeah. I think that's also such an important thing that we're lacking massively in society. To look at someone else, another human being, but also every single living thing on this planet and actually see them. And I'm just not meaning like, yeah, I can see you, but I do See You. And that's a very deep connection, which we have in so many places of the world lost. We've lost that knowledge completely. And until we actually do see every single living thing, we're not going to change a lot or transform enough, I believe. And through history, I mean, so many philosophers have written about this. It's not something new. It's not it's not a trend in systems thinking, you know, the entanglement and everything is alive.
Manda: That's just arisen in the last 20 years.
Jenny: No, exactly. It's been with us for thousands of years. We've just forgot about it in some parts of the world. And now we need to remember that again. And it's also like a muscle. I think we can practice, all of us, every single day. I mean, I can see the bus driver. I can actually see a flower outside my window. I mean, if you can think about these things, it will take you a few seconds a day so it's so, so, so easy to do, but massively important.
Manda: But it requires that we know that we need to. You know, I teach this kind of thing in Accidental Gods and we hit up against people the 'I'm too busy' and 'my head is too full'. And the fact that we live in an attention economy where our attention is being harvested and extracted for value makes it increasingly hard, I think. Yes, it takes a few seconds, but first of all we have to know how to turn our attention really fully onto something. I read a quote the other day that somebody asked The Buddha, what is it that you and your followers do? And he said, well we sit, we walk, we eat. And the person said, yes, but everybody sits and walks and eats. And the Buddha said, yes, but we know when we're sitting and we know when we're walking and we know when we're eating. And that was 2500 years ago. And so in the modern world, do you have strategies that people who don't necessarily see all of the bigger picture, can want to use? Because seeing the homeless person on the street or I don't know, the sheep on the hill or the red kite, or the fact that there are almost no bees this year. And seeing a bee and thinking, I haven't seen one of you for three days, and I used to see you all the time. It's going to break open our complacency, and we're going to find what Douglas Rushkoff calls the ocean of tears just beneath the surface. And that requires its own strength of heart, I think. What works for you and the people around you?
Jenny: Okay, so this is something that I've discussed a lot with people around me, with many that I know who work in the same field as I do. I mean, if you're trying to work with systems thinking or, you know, transform the world into something better, the last few years have been hell. I mean, it's been so hard. I have so many people around me who have been depressed, who have been enormously heavy because of this exact thinking or reasoning. How is this going to happen? How can you talk to billions of people and have them shift? Or how can we talk to just a few? It feels impossible. But I think where I have landed and a lot of my friends as well, is that even if I just affect one person around me or ten in my lifetime, maybe that's going to have to be enough. So I'm sitting with that thought that I'm just going to have to stay with what I think is important. Talk about that, spread that message if I feel that's something I want to, but also learn from others and have them influence me. Then maybe that's what I could do. So, yeah.
Manda: And you have kids who sound like they resist being influenced some of the time, but I'm guessing you really do influence them. There's a lovely bit in the book where you said you put things up on the wall, and they just kind of roll their eyes.
Jenny: I do, yeah.
Manda: Tell us a little bit about that because it was lovely.
Jenny: I try so hard. No, it's really I mean, you always want to do the opposite, I guess, of what your parents are doing. So every interesting article that I find on systems thinking or where the world is heading, I print them out and I put them up on the wall in my kitchen for the kids to read. And I'm like, here, kids, interesting read instead of TikTok on your phones. And they laugh at me every single time I do that. And they're like, mom, you're so annoying.
Manda: But do they read them do you think? Because even a sentence or two.
Jenny: They do not read them. Absolutely not.
Manda: They don't. They deliberately don't.
Jenny: I hope they see the headlines, passing through the Kitchen.
Manda: Okay. How old are they?
Jenny: They're 16, 15, 13 and seven.
Manda: That's quite a span. Of not necessarily pushing everything away.
Jenny: Yeah. it is a span. But I'm thinking, you know, it's also a phase when I mean, the teenagers especially, when maybe you're in your rabbit hole of being a teenager and then in the future they might end up doing the same thing for their kids. Who knows?
Manda: I've never been a parent, but I understand there is this phase that one goes through where one is a teenager in early 20s and knows absolutely certainly that one's parents were completely wrong about everything. And suddenly you become a parent and discover that actually your parents were generally speaking quite right about a few things.
Jenny: Exactly, exactly.
Manda: Coming back to the sense, that it seems to me, using slightly different language you're settling into what I would call heart mind, which is a different way of seeing the world than head mind. It's heart seeing. Do you have a personal practice that brings you to this on a regular basis?
Jenny: No. Or not in that specific sense.
Manda: You don't sit and meditate for 20 minutes every morning.
Jenny: No I don't. I have been trying to do that actually, but it's just something that doesn't really work for me. However, I have other things that I believe are doing that for me. So I'm also a musician, I play piano among many other instruments as well. But by sitting at that piano, I lock everything out. So I think that is a meditative state for me, but in a different way or a different being.
Manda: I think anything that gets you focussed on the moment, exactly on the moment.
Jenny: Exactly. Yeah. And I also swim, which is fantastic. If you have four kids, they cannot reach me. I don't have a phone on me. No one can talk to me. I'm underwater. It's just like my 45 minutes of just breathing rhythmically. So yeah. But I think everyone needs to find those small things, but it doesn't necessarily have to be, um...
Manda: Sitting on the cushion.
Jenny: Exactly. Yeah.
Manda: But I wonder, also, one of the things we teach the students is to set triggers in the world. So, I don't know, every time I see a blackbird or a red kite or every time I turn on the tap. Things that I do regularly or that happen regularly, these are my reminders to come back to myself. And gradually they bleed out and then they begin to overlap. And then it becomes regular. Have you got triggers? Looking at a flower you said, or seeing the bus driver? Triggers that help you to remember to come back into yourself?
Jenny: No, that's really interesting. I'm going to start now. That's such a such a nice way of doing it. No, I mean, I have weird little things. For example, my whole life I've put on music for my house, like my space, my room, for my things, which in a way has created a a relationship to what things are. Like that they mean something, that they're important, that they're not something you can just buy and throw away. Not that I'm creating people out of them, but that things are to be taken seriously. Who knows if they have a life or not? But I play music for my apartment.
Manda: And you relate to it. And you know, some people give their car a name. And I am fairly convinced that once your car has a name, you relate to it differently than it's just the thing that carries you from A to B, you care that its tires are okay. The car is problematic these days, but even so, it's a different way of relating. Beautiful. Alrighty. Thank you. So let's go to number three. We've begun to touch on this: 'rethink interdependent relationships'. So play music for your flat is part of that. But let's go into that more deeply.
Jenny: If you see another person or something else then you also need to then rethink your relationship with that being. Which again as I see it, it requires time, it requires a different type of thinking how we are related. A very easy example is the electric vehicles, for example, in Sweden. And how if you go back through the supply chain of all the materials and where and how it's constructed, how it's made; there's so many relationships to other human beings. You could say it's a type of modern Colonialism, shipments, nature that's been destroyed. There's such a long story of that. How are we relating to those things? How how do we relate to other human beings in other parts of the world that we might not know about, but that we should know about? So it's the importance of those things.
Manda: Does that not apply to, in the modern world, absolutely everything? There's a very famous essay and I can't remember who wrote it. I think it's called 'I, Pencil'. And what he did was unpick the manufacturing process of a pencil, which is a really simple thing compared to an electric vehicle. And go back through the supply chains of all the bits that made the graphite and the wood and the eraser at the end and everything else. And this seems to me this is one of the core issues of those of us who live in what Francis Weller calls the trauma culture, the ones who see ourselves as separate from the world. We've constructed a reality predicated on that separation and the scarcity and the powerlessness that it gives us and the lack of connectedness. And if I were to sit and unpick the heritage and the harms of just the things in the room around me just now, I would probably never wake up again. The horror of it would be overwhelming.
Jenny: No exactly.
Manda: Where does that leave me? What do I then do? How do I, as a 21st century woman of privilege, how do I navigate a way of reconnecting to the web of life in a way that feels real and of continuing day on day? Because I could go and live in a yurt on the west edge of Wales and go completely off grid. I probably wouldn't survive very long, to be honest. And I would also then have no interactions with the world. And I'm not certain, if I really thought that would serve the world, I would probably do it. I interviewed a young man about a year ago who did step off the top of a tall building because he got to the point of my existence in the world is bad and I need to end it. And actually, he just smashed both his legs, so he now has two false legs and now he's living in the world wanting to change it. But absent mass suicide, which I don't think is going to happen and is not necessarily useful. How do we navigate the internal contradictions of being in the 21st century?
Jenny: Mm. It's back to what I said before, going through depression, anyone who works with systems thinking, I think we've all been there. Because once you start to see all of the things that are connected and how it's functioning. As you're saying,'I, Pencil' I actually just read it here in my holidays.
Manda: Can you remember who wrote it?
Jenny: Uh, no, no I can't. Sorry.
Manda: I'll put it in the show notes. Don't worry.
Jenny: I have a very bad memory, actually. But there's also a famous image of explaining systems thinking by showcasing how a cup of tea is connected and everything that comes with it. And it's such a small, easy thing, but it's an enormous system that sits behind making that cup of tea. But once you start seeing that, and then as you're saying, when you look around you, like your home or outside or your street or society even, I mean, it's so, so, so easy to get depressed, tired, sad. Thinking that how on earth are we going to make this, on earth? But I mean, it can feel impossible. And again, I think sometimes it's good to dive into those thoughts, but I also think we need to get out of it. We need to also not get stuck in those enormous scales of thinking, to then get back to like, okay, but what can I do? I also have a short life, and it needs to feel important or meaningful for me. So that what can I do?
Manda: Right. Yes, because it seems to me we we could become paralysed with the impact of what we're doing on the web of life. And we could get paralysed by our, particularly those of us who are white and live in the global north, could get paralysed by the implications of the history that got us here, and of the continuing colonialism that's happening in our names, without us appearing to have a huge amount of agency. And I get to the point of thinking I could use up all my bandwidth, spinning those wheels and feeling incredibly horrible about who I am and where I am and what has been done in my name and what is being done in my name. Or I could endeavour to do something useful. And I probably can't do both, although if anyone listening has an idea of how we could do both. I'm really interested.
Jenny: Yeah, yeah, maybe not at the same time, but I don't think it's a bad thing then to dip into that negative space because it can teach you something or it can give you a perspective that might be super important, but then don't stay down there.
Manda: Yeah, I think it stops me resting sometimes, which is also not necessarily a good thing, but it stops me coasting. Sometimes you just have to switch off. But it's always there. Back to Douglas Rushkoff and the Ocean of Tears beneath the surface, is it's just swelling. But your book is more hopeful than this. You're quoting poet, performance artist and activist Tricia Hersey, who captivated hundreds of thousands of people around the world when she said, our bodies want us to stop, the earth wants us to stop. And Hersey sees slowing down as something that is not frivolous, a luxury or a privilege, but a divine human right. And that really struck me that it's not just a privilege, it's a human right, and therefore also an essential part of being. Essential that we incorporate it in a world that's trying to get us to spin on the hamster wheels ever faster, that sense that slowing down is essential to who we are. Can you unpick that a little bit for us?
Jenny: She's such an amazing person, I'm following her from far away, but, it's such important work that she's doing. I mean, she's a black woman promoting other black women to say stop to everything that has happened to them and how hard they have been working not only for themselves and for their families, maybe having two jobs, but also all the way back to colonialism and to everything that happened to that community. So the work that she's doing, it's so important and it's so inspiring. And then that she just goes, stop, we need to rest. And she's doing these beautiful events. And she's inviting others to be part of this and just lay down and rest. But I also think that when you do slow down, that's when you get some really, really good ideas or that's when you can also be creative, come up with the solutions that maybe we need. So to just run and do things really, really fast as we're told we need to, if we are supposed to be progressive or smart, intelligent; that might not necessarily be the best thing.
Manda: Yeah.
Jenny: I also have in the book an image of Einstein when he's out in his sailing boat.
Manda: Yes, on almost the same page, actually.
Jenny: And I find it so interesting because he is seen as someone who influenced so much of what we know of science and intelligence. But he would spend hours, even like half a day or a day, out on that lake and just think by himself, just sit there and think. I mean, who does that nowadays?
Manda: Yeah. And it's not just sitting, thinking. It's sitting thinking in the midst of the web of life. You're on a body of water which has its own intelligence. You're under the sky. There's going to be life all around you and under you. And you're safe. It's a bit like you swimming; there were no mobile phones then, nobody was going to get to him that he didn't see coming from a very long way off, so he could know that he had the solitude. And I think it seems to me also that active solitude is a bit like active rest. Taking that time to just be alone in a way that is full of attention is also a human right. There was a wonderful book written I think, back in the 80s called Intimacy and Solitude and that we need both. It was lovely and I can't remember the name of the author, she was a really good woman, she'd set up Virago Press, so she knew about being very busy. And she said somewhere in the beginning that she was doing interviews about this and that someone had said, My God, I had no idea I needed to read this book. And she said, no I didn't know I needed to write it either until I did. I think there is something about the power of writing a book, as you've written with Mothering Economy that reorganises our DNA I think in a way. I want to come on to DNA in a bit, because that bit about the DNA was really interesting. So let's move on. You've got a section called Genderless Mothering and that leads us into Caring Selflessly. But mothering is still different to parenting. There's an essence of mothering that can only be mothering. Tell us a little bit about caring selflessly and mothering.
Jenny: Yeah, the semantics here and the wording. I mean, I've had so many dialogues with friends and people around me like, is mothering a good word to use here, actually? Because if you just read it briefly, you do cut off half of the population. But then parenting, first of all, it doesn't have the warmth does it?
Manda: It doesn't have nurturance built into it.
Jenny: Exactly. And there is a link between a mother and a child that is strong and then also mothering, for me it's the same. It's when you care about something unconditionally. So you're not asking for something back. You're giving, and then if you get something back, that is something that is just beautiful, but it's not something that you demand. Which is maybe the the base for the whole book that I think we need to reach that place as a society. How can we all just give without constantly demanding to have the same thing back?
Manda: Right. And it seems to me that flow; one of the reasons I think that people get locked in the 'I can't give' is that I'm not receiving, and that there's a feeling I need to receive before I can give. And we live in scarcity, separation, powerlessness, and the whole zero sum self-terminating algorithm thing, that tells us that there's not enough coming in because we have that brokenness inside, that is empty and we keep trying to feed it with more Amazon boxes and it doesn't work. And therefore we can't give out. And yet not every mother on the planet, but most mothers on the planet give and give because that's what being a mother is. There was a wonderful statistic about the number of people that have been on the planet, and if each mother had given them a year of mothering. There's been more years of mothering than the entire history of the planet. That's fantastic. Glorious. Do you remember the numbers? Because I don't remember the numbers.
Jenny: I think it's 117 billion years of mothering. I mean, it's a very stupid example, but it was just a mind blowing thought.
Manda: It's fun, though, isn't it? That's more than the life of the entire universe.
Jenny: Exactly. And the energy that's been surrounding that mother and child, it's a lot of beauty.
Manda: And in such a tiny space of time because, it's 64 million years since the last mass extinction. We are all the descendants of the 3 to 5% of life that survived that mass extinction, and all the ones before it. But then it's 300,000 years of modern humans. So in that space of time, there's been 117 billion years of people really caring for the infant in their arms. And that feels to me, even if we think that by the time our trauma culture arose 10 to 12,000 years ago, and there were perhaps mothers who were so broken inside that the caring was not really very good; there's still 298,000 years of really good mothering. And mothering, if I've understood the initiation cultures, the indigenous cultures well enough, the whole tribe cared for the child.
Manda: Was a woman that I listened to who was a white woman who married into, I think, a maasai tribe, and she said it took her a long time to work out of the toddlers, which mother had given birth to which toddler, because they all, the kid's hungry and there's a mother who's got milk, they'll feed them. It doesn't matter. And it didn't matter who had actually produced this child, they were the child of the people, and they were the most precious resource. And we all love you and we cherish you. And if we could move to that sense. So you've been a mother of four amazing kids, even given the tantrum in the supermarket which as a non-mother sounds really scary. How do we help people to generalise that? Because I think we live in a culture where people feel as if they they have to keep trying to bandage over their own wounded internal parts, and that giving out is a step too far and it must not be. I'm absolutely hearing that we need to end up in that full hearted, open hearted, strong hearted place. Have you got strategies that work as a generalisation to help people come to that place of giving?
Jenny: Well, just first of all, I just want to add a little bit on the mothering, because as you were mentioning now, I mean, in my book, I'm very clear that it's not something I think only mothers can do or should do. So it's very broad. I'm expanding the words so that it incorporates everyone. So it's more the way of of caring. But I think every single human knows how to do this. It's not something you need to learn or something that we need to actively work with. We all know how to take care of each other. So it's more maybe to awaken a forgotten way of being. And again, as I mentioned, everything just has effects. So if I'm really nice and caring to people around me, I'm just hoping that they will be then, and then it will have this bigger effect on society. And the ones that can care, you might need to feel balanced or feel that you have the energy or the capacity to care, then you should do that. You should be the one to start. And if you're struggling or if you're in a bad space, maybe you're not the one who needs to do that at the time or at this moment. Which this is just normal, natural things. We know these things. Even kids know this. Like sometimes you can give, sometimes you cannot. But I also think it's the caring circularity that we need to just expand. And as I said in the beginning, I'm born in a safe space, in a safe country. I need to care more than maybe others can or have the capacity to.
Manda: Yes, because I'm remembering the psychological studies of two year old kids, preverbal kids, and that the triangle helps the circle and the square gets in the way. And they know that that people help each other and that the good people help each other, and that the things that get in the way are things that you want to avoid. And somehow we seem to be able to condition this out of people in our culture, and we need not to be. On the topic of that, I'm remembering last time we spoke, you said you were setting up a doughnut school, and it seemed to me that just bringing kids into a generative space where the generativity is integral to the space would be an amazing way to get this going. Is that moving forward? Tell us a little bit about that as a kind of a side.
Jenny: The project has been delivered and I think they just decided to move forward within the municipality and the politicians. So yeah, it's it's moving forward. Absolutely. But I often refer to that because sometimes people then ask me like, yeah, but this seems fluffy. Or the work you're doing, how are we going to change society? And you're just naive. But my reply then is, no, but we can work with kids and we can put funding into schools, or let's change daycares or let's change the system that we support mothers. That's very tangible. That's an act that we can do tomorrow or plan for or have proper reports on how to expand or change. So the fluffiness of this way of thinking can become very tangible.
Manda: Yeah. It doesn't feel fluffy to me at all. And it loops back to when we were at the first point and we were looking at what is the meaning of life. And I listen to quite a lot of Zak Stein, who says what happens is we are here in order to produce better people, which means we really cherish our children and give them the best opportunities to become the best of themselves. And in most cases, that doesn't mean putting them through the standard schooling system, which was basically training people to be good in a factory. We ring the bell, you get up and you go and you move somewhere else. You sit in a row, you do exactly what you're told. You don't try and be creative. It's designing factory workers. And what happens If the whole of a town is there to cherish the children, and everybody is passing on the skills that they can pass on to the kids who want to learn them, provided you've got safe boundaries for the people who aren't safe. But it seems to me your doughnut school sounded as if it was definitely moving on that kind of a wave. And this isn't fluffy at all. This is we cherish our children. Somebody else said recently, they're the R and D Department of Humanity. They're going to carry humanity forward. We need to treat them with respect and care and give them all the best opportunities. Is there Zak Stein thinking in the doughnut school, or have you both come to a similar conclusion from different directions?
Jenny: No, I mean, the school was mostly looking into the space, the architecture, the structure, the governance regulations, and we were not working with the actual teaching. Like, what are these kids going to learn in the school? But that turned out to be such an important topic. So we're now doing an extra smaller project on the side with that, because I think it's so important. Like the schooling system has not followed our modern kind of evolvement of society. We're teaching kids the exact same way. My kids are going through the school in the exact same way as I did.
Manda: It's interesting, isn't it? It's one of those things where evolutions in educational thinking seem not to get through. If science was as hidebound, we would still think that, I don't know, atoms moved like billiard balls, and quantum theory didn't exist. Quantum theory has been around for a century, and now people know it exists, but the similar thinking in education just hasn't filtered through. It's really weird. There's something I think there's something so traumatising about what we do to kids at school that when they grow into adults, they have to tell themselves that this was a good thing and that therefore the next generation is going to go through the same.
Jenny: No, exactly.
Manda: And that's part of the growing up, isn't it? Part of the opening our heart space and part of being generous is no, actually this was really damaging. It didn't actually serve me very well. And we could do better.
Jenny: No, definitely. And also going back to that principle of caring selflessly, I think schools are teaching the kids almost the opposite, like they're teaching kids competition. You have to be the best. You have to think about only you, even though they do have teamwork or something. But then in the end you have your grade. You need to be at the top to then get into university. And if you don't do that, your life is going to be miserable. So we're teaching them a way of being that is not aligned with what what we need and what type of grown ups we're going to need.
Manda: No, it's another self-terminating algorithm and according to Zak Stein, there are entire schools in California where all the kids have gastric ulcers. And how have we done this? And he pointed out that we set up these testing systems and with the best will in the world, the testing system may be designed to explore what kids can do, but actually what it does is to explore how well the teachers can gain the system. Because the teachers also have to get their kids through on good scores or they're deemed to be shit as well. And the whole thing is just wholly toxic. You're right. I'm very glad that you're designing a doughnut school and that we can begin to move beyond this. I hope it spreads around the world. Because I am astonished that people tell you this as fluffy. It's radical transformation that is essential if we're going to survive. And extinction is not a fluffy threat.
Jenny: No, I think it's mostly out of fear. Like fear of, as we said again, like the unknown or fear of change or fear of not knowing how this is going to unfold, or in what way this will affect society at a larger scale.
Manda: Not being comfortable with complexity, which was the first one. So we've got to wrap around to how do we help people feel comfortable with complexity. Let's move on anyway because we've only got through four. So now we are at number five, which is embody knowledge, which you are doing very well. But talk to us a little bit about about how you came to this. Actually I'm quite interested in your explorations of embodying knowledge.
Jenny: I think, again, many of these principles are something that we've known for thousands of years. I think we have knowledge in our bodies. We just do not listen to our bodies. I'm often talking about my gut data, I like to trust my gut data.
Manda: As opposed to data data. I love that, yes, head data and gut data.
Jenny: Exactly. But there are other people talking about the same thing. I think we carry so much more knowledge in our bodies than we tend to believe, or maybe sometimes even want to know. I think often, like in Swedish society, for example, if I'm just talking about Sweden, we want to separate our bodies and then our minds or our knowledge and they're different things. And then we take care of our bodies, we go to a very Scandinavian doctor who will treat your body, and then you go to a psychologist or someone else. And it's like it's so separated. Your whole self is separated. And I think we need to pull those things together again and understand that it's way more complex. And also like accepting the flux of life. Accepting that you don't fully know who you are. Like, I can see my body, I know what I'm doing. I can see myself walking to my office or being with family. But then there's parts of me that I do not fully understand, and that's also okay. And that can even be exciting, living a full life exploring who you are and what your body can do and what you cannot do, or what my body can do together with others, or with the planet. Yeah, it's something in that tangible way of looking at ourselves.
Manda: Right. Because our body is what makes us alive. There's a whole body of work now on the survival of consciousness beyond death and near-death experiences. And perhaps our awareness moves on and it's hard to prove, and we'll only find out when we get there. But our body is the bit that we leave behind. And so it seems to me, cherishing it and embodying it is really, really important. And then learning to listen. I think you're right. In the shamanic world that I work with, we talk about head-mind, heart-mind, body-mind and in our culture our head-mind talks to itself all the time and ignores the other two. And then we get sick and wonder why. And our body mind has been telling us for quite a while that we needed to eat different things, or sleep differently, or work on the computer less. And we've been steadily ignoring it, because the only thing that we value of ourselves and each other is our heads. And yet, as you say, there's so much more body intelligence. And this is a time, I don't remember it was in here, but there was the exciting little factoid about DNA. That we carry the DNA of our children. I had to read that aloud to Faith last night and go, hey, listen to this. So tell us about that. Because I had no idea about that and it just blew my mind. And it's not necessarily exactly relevant to what we're talking about, but it was exciting. Tell us about it.
Jenny: Yes. I love this. It's so interesting that there are things that we as human beings just have known for thousands of years. Like, I know I'm connected to a child. And I'm thinking a mother, like before me in history, everyone has been thinking the same thing. But then sometimes in modern times we can actually prove it. So there's something called microchimerism, which is that DNA can travel between a mother and a child, like when you're pregnant, through the umbilical cord.
Manda: And through the placenta, I guess. But yes, yes, through the umbilical cord.
Jenny: So my DNA can travel into the baby that I'm carrying, or that child's DNA can travel back into me as well. So we're actually sharing the same DNA somehow.
Manda: And this isn't just the DNA that you gave it to make the child. This is little fragments of DNA that somehow got split off and are then sneaking their way in.
Jenny: Absolutely. And I also carry then some of my mum and maybe even her mum, because we still don't know exactly how this is functioning. It's quite new.
Manda: And probably generations upon generations. We won't know.
Jenny: Exactly. And then my kids are carrying parts of me. And then when I told them, they were like, oh, no, like it's too much. But I found it so interesting because we're talking so much about entanglement, for example, in systems thinking. Yes, we are entangled. Like it's not just something we think or something that we need to be, or like, I'm connected to a tree. I am actually biologically connected to another physical body that is not my body. And I find it so, so, so interesting. Interesting, but also sometimes a little bit sad that we need to prove these things.
Manda: Yes, to our head minds.
Jenny: Exactly. Before we're allowed to actually say that it's correct. Like what is knowledge and how are we allowed to trust things or prove things.
Manda: Yes. And there's so many sparkly things happening in my head at the moment. But I'm remembering reading Tyson Yunkaporta and he describes the story of making a canoe, and he says at the end of it I've written this as if it were one narrative thread, but actually it happened in many places and many different times, and I've knitted it together because you need linear narratives. Getting our heads around non-linear narratives seems to me quite important, but let's put that aside. At one point he's talking about the adults who are making the canoe, and the kids are all playing on the north bank of the river because it's safe. Tomorrow it won't be safe. And he just drops this in. And later on he says, we don't understand the Palaeolithic fight flight thing that you guys all have, because we know where the predators are, always. And I think that's a body mind knowing, because you're part of the web of life and therefore you know where every other node is. I remember once going out with the dogs many years ago, and I'd had no sleep for several days. I was being a vet. And I joined with them and I knew there were eight dogs and me.
Manda: I knew where every one of us was. And I was so tired that my head mind wasn't able to cut in and go, this isn't happening. And I then understood how when I went out with a large group of dogs, they would all move themselves around into the right places to be. We spend bloody months learning to teach a dog to walk to heel and then it goes out with a pack of eight dogs and they put themselves in exactly the right place to be. And the young ones are at the back, and the leaders are at the front and the guardians at the outside, and they know where everybody is. And what Tyson is saying is that for 300,000 years, minus a little bit of human evolution, we have shared that knowing. And I'm sure it's at a bodily sense. And again, reading your book, every time I come back to, okay, how do we help 21st century technocratic people who are locked into the scarcity, separation and powerlessness; how do we help them regain that knowing? Particularly in a culture now where most of the predators are other people.
Manda: How do we help people? I haven't got an answer for that, but it's becoming my really big inquiry. How do we make this happen? I need to talk to Tyson, I think because he bridges that world. Sorry. That was a complete aside.
Jenny: No, it's all connected. But I think also nowadays it's even our phones are becoming part of our bodies. I mean, just looking at my kids, I can see that that's almost the case. Like their body doesn't end where their physical body ends, it ends where their digital body ends. I'm scared of that. I don't know, back to my gut data. Something doesn't feel right in this. And, you know, there are different voices. But in Sweden now there are some new laws, that you're not allowed to use iPads in daycares anymore. So my kids probably will have gone through society when technology was at its peak. Now we're seeing that it might not be a good thing for kids to have this around them constantly, both at home and in schools.
Manda: That's very forward thinking. I don't think that's got to the UK yet, but maybe it will. That's really interesting. Is that because of the electromagnetic frequency impacts?
Jenny: No, I think it's more psychological.
Manda: Like you need to be connecting to your kid instead of staring at your phone.
Jenny: They've seen that this doesn't bring positive things into day-care. And I mean, it's small kids, like 1 to 6 year olds.
Manda: Oh! The kids were on the iPads. Yes, dear goodness.
Speaker3: Yes, the kids are on iPads. And that was actually something these daycares in Sweden had to do. It was a national kind of law that you have to teach kids how to use technology.
Manda: Right. And now we can wait until they're a bit older.
Jenny: Yes but I'm hoping that that will extend into older kids as well. I mean, my kids don't have books anymore in schools.
Manda: Everything's electronic.
Jenny: Every single child has a laptop, which I think is going to backfire, and I think we're going to see more books again.
Manda: Well, it backfires up to the point, this is another of Zak Stein's big points, is we're within months now of AI tutors being the things that know your kids so well that the child cannot not learn. The tutor will present them with the information in a way that is hand-tailored to be exciting and interesting and probably gives you huge dopamine hits and neuro serotonin. But you want to do this and you do it. At which point their personal interaction is with a screen, and they're learning from an elder is from the screen and not from the people around them. And he says, at that point, we have created a new species. And 2 or 3 or 5 or 10 years down the line, the kid goes to the screen: who are these weird old people around? And it goes, oh, yeah, they're the older generation. They're the ones who made all the problems, get rid of them! And we don't know what the screen is going to say. But once a child is socialising with the screen, the person who's coding the screen has total control over the kids being the R&D of the planet, of what that R&D is being fed. And I find that quite disturbing. And the capacity to break that...there's a lot, I don't know about in Sweden, but over here there's a lot of nature connection work being done where the kids have to put their phones in a bag and they'll get them back at the end of the weekend, and we take them out into places where they they learn who they are without the screen. Which seems really quite important.
Jenny: So, yeah, I mean, when talking about embodying knowledge, it's also a question of what are our bodies right now?
Manda: Yeah. And Musk says we're quite close to the point where we're going to inject something which will then attach itself to our neurones, and then we're attached to the cloud. And then we have access to a lot of data, but we don't have access to heart wisdom or body wisdom. It's exactly what you're saying. So somehow, in whatever the gap we have between today and the 'okay, let's have a nanobot in our skull'... I'm not volunteering for that. Certainly not for me but somebody will. And at that point, people will need to make individual decisions.
Jenny: Yeah. Absolutely.
Manda: Learning the wisdom of heart and body seems to be really, really crucial. So again, as with all of the other things, how do you listen to your body's wisdom? What do you do that brings you into embodiment? Swimming, I guess.
Jenny: Yeah, but I think it connects to what we've said before. I think we need time. If you do not stop and give yourself space and time to think, you cannot do any of these things. I mean, if you are to learn more about your body or your knowledge or what you sit with or expand that way of thinking as well, you need some time to get away from technology, from work, from data, from digital worlds, all of those things. But also to be brave, curious, adventurous, exploring things. We sit in our offices with our computers, and then we tend to do the exact same things all the time. So I think it's also important to test your body. Later in life, can I learn something that I didn't know before? Can I do a handstand? I mean, it doesn't have to be that, but that way of being with your body and understanding that you're larger than just your mind and your way of thinking.
Manda: Yes. And as we get older, discovering that I can't necessarily do all of the capoeira moves that I could do in my 20s or climb rocks in the way that I used to, is also a discovery. But then finding what are the current limitations and what can I do and what still feels fun. Yeah. Alrighty, let's move on to number six, which seemed to me absolutely to map onto the top of Donella Meadows' levers of change. Your number six is 'amend value systems', and hers is 'the power to transcend paradigms'. And that's all about value systems. So talk to us about amending value systems because it seems to me this is the core of where we're going.
Jenny: Yeah. This is probably where it ties stronger into economy or the way that we look at economy. My view of economy is not necessarily only the monetary transaction of things. So it's how we are behaving with the planet, like how we're transacting materials or time or emotions. I mean, that's also an economy. But how we value things, I mean, we're valuing profit, we're valuing personal gains, we're valuing safety. We're valuing so many things that have put us in a place that is not functioning for the whole planet. So we desperately need to talk about what we value, what is important, as I mean, everything that we've talked about? Rest. How can we value rest more than work. How can we we value care, mothering, love, for example? Is that more important than something else? Is that more important than owning a car? There are so many of these dialogues. And time for this, that we need to desperately sit down and talk about. But I see it more and more, and I see it also when I'm working with municipalities, for example. Now as you mentioned before, the doughnut school, there are municipalities, there are governments that are starting somewhat to kind of unlock this, or at least open up something, a dialogue of what it means to live. I mean, the main question is maybe what does it mean to be a human being right now?
Manda: Yeah, what do we value? So tell me a little bit about governments unpicking this, because we know about Bhutan and the Gross National Happiness Index, which was lovely, but it's been around for a long time and it hasn't spread. What do you know about other, probably more global North countries, that are beginning to look at human value and human flourishing? Seriously are they taking it on board?
Jenny: In Scandinavia it's more municipality level, I would say, rather than national levels, unfortunately. But there are hints. I mean, we did in Sweden, vote quite left for the EU Parliament, which was a little bit of a surprise since the actual government that we have is quite far right. So I mean, I can see energies, can just see that things are maybe moving forward, or maybe when we're getting scared when there's like a 'okay, this is getting close. Now it's actually important'. I'm just hoping that humanity will lean a little bit kinder towards these things. I think it's just important to talk about it. Like to raise this, to flag it. Every single conference that I go to, I hear words like love, for example, more and more. So I was at a conference in Oslo a couple of months ago, and it was mentioned at least 3 or 4 times, and it was a conference on investing and funding and the future. It was quite economy based. But to hear those words, I think. So I think something is going on. It's not enormous, but things are moving a little bit.
Manda: I think you're right.
Jenny: I was just going to say that it's also, because I think more and more women are invited into these rooms.
Manda: Until they're not. I looked at what happened in Scotland and New Zealand, where we had women who actually got things, and I don't know what's happened to both of them, but it didn't seem good to me. But I was just talking a couple of podcasts ago to Georgia Cameron of Dark Matter Labs, who's involved in the Net Zero Cities initiative, which is going way beyond just carbon. And she was talking about a city in Greece where their primary question was, what does it take to feel pride in your place? And then how do we help you do that? And that is another of the reward centres, genuine pride, that's part of the serotonin mesh rather than the dopamine flips. And the fact that it seems to me, particularly cities, have huge impact on large numbers of people, and they can act much more swiftly than governments or some businesses. I think some businesses can act fast. And it seems to me as if cities are some of those mother trees of a new network that is potentially transformative. Because if you lived in a city whose primary question is, how can we help you feel pride in living here? That's going to help you be more heart open, I would think, to feel safer. You said earlier everybody wants to feel safe. I think feeling safe is crucial to human existence. But it's how do we define our safety? And if we define it by I'm Elon Musk and I'm the wealthiest man on the planet, and I still don't feel safe. Money isn't the answer. What helps us feel safe is connectedness and human relationship. And once that is built into what the city is looking for, then we begin to become more imaginative, I think.
Jenny: Absolutely. And also all of those initiatives and that way of thinking is disconnected from carbon emissions.
Manda: Yeah. And all our other pollutants.
Jenny: All of that type of work is often just work that is social. That you need to meet, you need to do things together. But often the negative side is that they also come without money and without profit, which is, in my opinion, why we don't work with it enough.
Manda: Right, and a lot of women are doing it because women are prepared to do the caring work that doesn't have as much income, because the blokes decide that being a hedge fund manager is far more important than being a nurse. I still don't understand how that ever got to happen. Anyway. So towards the end of that chapter, you say 'there is a tremendous power within humans, the power of living with Earth rather than on Earth. There is an equally large power to shift collectively. This is not work to be done by just a few'. Which absolutely sounded to me like a really grand call to action. So your book isn't out yet, so I can't say how is it landing and how many people are coming on board. But you've obviously done a lot of talking to people while you've been writing it.
Jenny: Yeah, I have.
Manda: In the time of writing, have you noticed a shift in the people that you've been talking to?
Jenny: Yeah. Also I do lecture quite a bit. So I have tested maybe some of these thoughts, uh, and often I get people who walk up to me afterwards who'll say things like, finally, someone is honest. Or, you know, it's so good to hear someone say these words out loud, because we're thinking it, but no one is actually just vocalising it. I also have people come up to me crying and like just giving me a hug, which I don't know how to ...um, is that a good or a bad thing? I want to think that it is good, that we need we need to talk about these things in a way that actually matters. I just think we've done enough with the whole let's talk about safe things where we don't have to show emotions, where we don't have to be vulnerable, where we don't have to say, I don't know how to do this, or I'm feeling scared, or can we do this together because I don't want to be alone anymore. I mean, we never talk about it in that way. So I hope that it's going to affect at least a few and that we can work together or share inspiration or help each other. As I said before, when you're feeling low, when you're like, I can't do this anymore, I'm feeling depressed. I need to zoom out for a bit. To just know that other people are also there, that we can do this together.
Manda: Yeah. And that there are people around you who will pick up the things that you've been doing and carry them on so that when you're up again, it's not that the entire scaffolding has fallen over.
Jenny: That's also something I'm a bit against. The belief that you're so important in society that if you're removed, everything is going to fall apart. I'm not that important at all. Like we're important together. That idea of having one person rule everything, it's also something we need to move away from, I believe.
Manda: Yeah, totally. And it's something that whatever traumatised our culture, it set us on a track to putting the dark triad of narcissism, psychopathy and basic low cunning at the top. And everybody takes that as a good thing. And yes, you're right. I think in healthy cultures everybody does what they're good at in the moment and everything flows between. And if you are at a point where somebody needs to go, okay, we all need to go over here, you trust that person to be the right person to say that. And you all follow. But once you've all gone to wherever here is, somebody else is building the fire or making the shelter or finding the water. It's a different way of being.
Manda: All right, my lovely. We've come to the end of your six parts. Is there anything else? I thought your epilogue 'to change the world we need to change ourselves and to lead the world differently will require different skills'. But it feels to me we've really talked through that. Was there anything towards the end that you wanted to say in closing?
Jenny: No, but just to build on that very sentence. I think what we value. I mean, what skills do we value right now and what skills do we actually need? I mean, is it good to be a generalist, for example? That's something that's been valued quite, you know, not negatively but not necessarily good. What type of skills do we need? Creativity, philosophy. Do we need a lot more philosophy in our societies or how how do we value those guys compared to an investment banker. So yeah, the skill sets and values, I think is something we should move forward with.
Manda: Okay. Brilliant. And so that people can read your book, where would you like them to go to find it? Because I'm guessing it will be on the giant vampire squid otherwise known as Amazon. Which would be lovely and we definitely put our reviews on there, because the number of reviews on Amazon makes a huge difference to how it is found in the world, and we do still live in the capital system.
Jenny: Exactly.
Manda: But that apart, where where would you like people to go to find it?
Jenny: I always support local bookshops. And I'm guessing that they will not have my book, but you can always go in there and then ask for it, and then support your local bookshop so that they can order it for you. Otherwise you can also find small web shops that will sell the book through my own website, just to kind of promote the smaller shops and the smaller stores. But if you're based in the UK, you will find it in Waterstones and as you're saying, the big Giants. I'm trying to avoid having my books there actually. So if you if you do spend a little bit of time and support smaller stores, I think that's the way to do it.
Manda: Okay. If it's not going to be on Amazon at all, then we can't put reviews on Amazon. Reviews on Amazon do help sales. But then if you don't want it there, I completely get why you might not. So yes. But okay. So in the UK Waterstones, but anywhere around the world I will put the link to your website and people can go and read about the book and then you can go into your local bookshop and go, I really want to read this book, please get it. And with any luck, they'll get half a dozen copies and other people will find it too.
Jenny: But also from my website there are links where you can buy it online but from smaller bookshops. Yes.
Manda: Fantastic. Well done that woman. All right, in that case, I think we're done. Unless there were any closing remarks? But I think we've done closing of closings, so we're probably okay.
Jenny: No. It was lovely to talk to you.
Manda: Thank you so much. I hope you have a wonderful holiday. I'm feeling bad about leaping into it, but thank you.
Jenny: Thank you so much.
Manda: And that's it for another week. Enormous thanks to Jenny for taking time out of her holiday, and for having the time and the depth of thought to write what is a genuinely inspiring book. It flows really easily, and yet it's full of really interesting, thought provoking, deeply inspiring ideas. And the fact that this is beginning to gain traction does give me great hope. If each of us can read this, if each of us can internalise the ideas and begin to act them out in the world, if we can be more connected, if we can be open hearted, clear hearted, strong hearted in the way that Jenny is suggesting, if we can really see the people that we interact with and all of the beings in the more than human world; if we can share the ideas that the value system underpinning our existing predatory capital system are no longer fit for purpose, and that there are other, better value systems already embodied within us, then I think we can make it. Being in Sheffield, listening to Jenny, exploring the ideas that are gaining bigger and wider traction is a source of hope. And we are the people and now is the time. So please do get Jenny's book, read it, give it to other people and then see how you can begin to live this in the world. If we are all in a bus barrelling towards the edge of a cliff, it is going to take every single one of us to turn it away.
Manda: And if we look down the generations, seven generations of our descendants, and ask them, 'did we do everything that we could?', you want them to look back and say, yes, we believe you did. So go for it. Get the book, read it, live it in the world.
Manda: And we will see you next week for another conversation. Thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot. To Alan Lowell's of Airtight Studios for wrestling with my somewhat creative attempts at scheduling and for the sound. To Anne Thomas for the transcripts. To Lou Mayor for the videos. And even if you don't get this on YouTube, please could you go and subscribe? It does seem to make a difference to the algorithms. In fact, subscribe everywhere on every kind of podcast. That would be good. Thanks to Faith Tilleray for all of the work behind the scenes and for the conversations that keep us open hearted, clear hearted, strong hearted. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for caring enough to give us the time for listening, for engaging, for embodying all that is the best that we can be. And if you know of anybody else who wants to explore the different values on which we could base our whole way of being, then please do send this link. And that's it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.