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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 still believe that another world is 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 behind. I'm Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And as you will know by now, pretty much everything that we do on this podcast and in the membership has a thrutopian base to it. Which is to say, we are trying to help build the route maps from where we are through to that future that we would be proud to leave behind. And the directions are many and the future is emergent. These things are true, but it's also true that there are certain values, qualities of being human that will be common to everything that is likely to work: integrity, compassion, generosity of spirit; clean air, clean water, clean soil. All of these are absolute baselines, I believe. But bringing all of these together are the stories that are powerful enough, moving enough, inspiring enough, and grounded enough to shift the trajectory of our culture onto a totally new pathway. Because nothing else will do now. And so crafting these stories and spreading them at scale and in time is one of the core questions of this moment.
Manda: And this week's guest, Matt Golding of Antidote, has spent his entire professional life exploring what it is that makes stories go viral. Along the way, he has gained some pretty impressive awards, some equally impressively big contracts, and a deep instinct for how to help people see the best in themselves in ways that can shape the new narratives that we need. Since the early days of the internet, Matt has been breaking rules and breaking new ground. He's a strategist, writer, and filmmaker. He uses story to excite people about the possible future that is already emerging around us, and that works better for the majority. He believes that the stories we share shape the culture we inhabit, and because he has a background in viral campaigns, he is fascinated by and an expert in the ways that we can use creativity, heart and humour to shape the stories that people will share and that can then unlock a more positive future. As the Director of impact and social change studio Rubber Republic, he was at the forefront of a movement that used sharable content campaigns to engage mass audiences with that better future. Historically, he worked with brands like Disney, eBay, channel four, BBC, Fiat and Yorkshire Tea. But since 2019, he has committed only to work with organisations that are 100% committed to creating the future that functions for us all.
Manda: He is also the founder of Antidote, a positive storytelling platform sharing stories of collective action by ordinary people that are changing our world for the better. Mat says that 'this is an experiment in reshaping how we find and tell collective action stories to see if we can get them more mainstream traction and appeal and make them more invitational, so we can get more people to be inspired into action'. Which is, I am sure you'll agree, as thrutopian as it gets. And then on top of all of this, he is co-host of the recently launched and utterly brilliant podcast called Screw This, Let's Try Something Else. In which he and his co-host share stories of ordinary communities creating extraordinary change. It's a genuinely wonderful listen, and it's young enough that if you start now, you can go back to the beginning and listen to it all without taking up years of your time. I absolutely encourage you to do just that. But meanwhile, here on Accidental Gods people of the podcast, please welcome Matt Golding of Antidote and Rubber Republic and so much more.
Manda: Matt Golding, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you? Out here, it's a seriously misty March morning. How is it with you?
Matt: I am in Bristol, which is similarly misty, with clouds going on as far as you can see. It's one of those properly grey days. And how am I? I am excited to speak to you. There's so much good stuff happening in the world and it's exciting to talk about it.
Manda: Yeah. Yes, really. And I have not bothered to look at the news this morning to find out about the slightly less good stuff that's happening in the world.
Matt: Yeah, I wouldn't recommend that as the place to find out about what's happening in the world.
Manda: No, no, because actually I spent the morning on the hill doing morning ceremony, and it's spring, everything is alive. And we're in a world where everything is changing. And that means anything is possible. The old system is so obviously crumbling now.
Matt: Absolutely.
Manda: Which it's not great, and it's not good for the people who are being caught in the rubble. But the system had to change. And you are with all of the stuff that you're doing, absolutely in there in the grassroots of the change that is happening. So with Antidote; do we call it Antidote Live or do we call it Antidote?
Matt: It's called Antidote, but the website is antidotelive.studio. And the social channels similarly are Antidote Live.
Manda: Okay. We'll call it Antidote. And are you still with Rubber Republic? Is that still a thing?
Matt: Yes, that is the studio through which I do everything. But antidote is the project that is consuming most of my time and attention at the moment.
Manda: Yeah, I bet it is. Okay, so Antidote and Rubber Republic have a really clear theory of change. Tell us what your theory of change is.
Matt: Well, I guess I could get to the story of how we got here, but the theory of change we're following at the moment is that we need to start talking about and bringing to life in all ways, the vision of the world we want to live in. And in terms of storytelling, we follow three steps to inspire people with what others around them, like them, are already doing to create a world that works. Then to help them understand how they're doing that. And embodied in that is the idea that these people who are creating the world we all could benefit from living in, are not doing it with abnormal means. Often they have no time, no money, no status, no knowledge. They are working it out using the common sense we all have. So we already all have the skills we need to do this. And so helping people understand that so they feel empowered. And then the third step is telling them where to get started, where to join in.
Manda: Brilliant. And this is basically the foundations of thrutopia. I ended up creating a four stage thing, which was: motivation, agency, direction and empowerment, which spells MADE, yes, made for a better future. But you're folding all of those in. The inspire is the motivation. And then the empowering has got agency and direction within it. And the started is: what's the next best step? Because if people can't see what to do now, it doesn't matter what a wonderful vision they have of the future, it's unattainable.
Matt: Absolutely.
Manda: And what I'm feeling for you with your podcast, which is the best named podcast I've come across in a long time. Actually, the best name is a dog training podcast called Drinking From the Toilet, but most people listening to this don't want that. Whereas everybody listening to this will want to come and listen to your podcast, which is called:
Matt: It's called Screw This, Let's Try Something Else. And in it, we tour UK communities, ordinary communities doing extraordinary things and ask them how they're doing it to create a world that works for the majority. And then talk to an expert about how the country could look if more of us joined in.
Manda: Yes. And you talked to Kate Raworth and other amazing people. And it's what I find really interesting is that almost universally, the people who are setting up these amazing things that we're going to talk about in a minute; They start because the current system is so broken that they've run up against brick walls that are impassable. And what you have is, I thought it was very interesting, you said 'no status'. Our system is so broken that we give status to people who are good at funnelling the money to the top of the system. And what we need to be doing is to create that sense of community cohesion where the community has the status. Thich Naht Han said that the next Buddha will be a sangha, which is the next Buddha will be a community. And somehow I think part of what you are doing and what a thrutopian vision would do is to create that sense that a community is a cohesive, like a hive of bees.
Matt: Absolutely.
Manda: And every person within it really, really matters. But the hive matters as a unified whole. So how do you find the communities that you go to?
Matt: Well, it's interesting. We started on this journey a few years ago, and the original idea was to tell positive stories, visioning a future that works. And I was aware of all this amazing community action happening around the country, and to start with we tested some storytelling out at the end of the pandemic. And that didn't work. I will be candid. We we were brought in by the National Lottery as part of the emerging futures work they do, to tell the stories of 49 other community projects, where communities were coming back to kind of bounce back from the pandemic, to pull together and build what they needed to cope with that moment. And there were amazing stories and there were loads of them. And we tried telling three of them because we couldn't tell all 49. And it did work. Like when I say it didn't work, we created some great stories and we shared them. But my background is in viral storytelling, so compared to what I knew was possible, we hit up against some blockers. And those blockers came from two main places, one of which was very pragmatic. We'd had three lockdowns and these communities were struggling from building amazing stuff to then having to stop building and then having to stop. And we couldn't really share the power of what they were doing until they'd kind of finished or at least reached some place towards what they were trying to do. And that took a long time, longer than anyone hoped. And so by the time they'd finished, the media, but also people were looking for other stories by that point.
Manda: Yes. We weren't a post-pandemic nation anymore. We were onto Trump being elected and other stuff.
Matt: Yeah. Well, we were all, you know, slightly traumatised and tired by the whole affair. But the thing that was much more interesting was the second reason that it didn't work, which was to do with belief. That we realised that because we, I guess this is reverse engineering some thoughts that we had as part of this, but because we live in this very individualised, competitive kind of dog eat dog, these are the narratives we're used to. And we have a media and a storytelling universe that kind of keeps encouraging us to aspire to those things. Like, you know, Dragon's Den, The Apprentice, all of these stories we surround ourselves with. You know, people trying to do start-ups and become millionaires. And when you tell people stories of community action that can start really small and can feel the prejudice that we all come to community action with, is that kind of woolly jumper, knitted yoghurt, community centre, parochial, small. And it doesn't feel world changing. And so you've got all this baggage that you're coming up against when you tell collective action stories. So we were getting pushback on the belief, not just the reach, but the belief that this could ever work. So people would say, oh, that's a nice story.
Manda: Who from?
Matt: Well, this was what was so fascinating. You'd expect it from people whose ideology some of this work opposed. So you'd expect that people who liked that kind of bro culture, hustle culture, dog eat dog world who agreed with those values and ideologies, would oppose anything where people are coming together to create change. But that isn't where we got the pushback from. We got the pushback from people way closer to us, people within movements of social change and even people within some of our teams. We'd be on shoots, filming stories, and the crew would be between takes saying, yeah, this is great, but it's not going to work, is it? And they'd give reasons. And so it was a real eye opening experience to feel that pushback, that we have all been kind of hoodwinked is the way I see it, into believing that the power we hold when we come together is smaller than it really is. I made a video recently where I tried to use rice to visualise that. We feel that billionaires run the world. There's 3000 billionaires on earth, and 8.3 billion of the rest of us. And yet somehow we feel that we can't overcome these 3000 people.
Matt: And it's not just their fault. I'm not putting it all on billionaires, but I guess they are a symptom and a visualisation of the drive of inequality that's got to absurd levels and the power imbalance that has become absurd. But yet we still feel that we can't overcome that. So why? And I guess some of the early things we tried in doing these positive and collective action stories really revealed that a lot of that comes from inside all of our minds. That we have a propensity to not believe. We could call that cynicism, we could call that doubt. And there's something of being smart that we also associate with that. So it's kind of clever to point out the problems with something, and it's kind of naive to show the optimism. And I just fundamentally don't believe that. I'm like, you know, go back to that statistic; the majority of people on this planet are not served by the systems we live in. So what has gone wrong with our storytelling that we somehow can't Land the idea that we could totally turn this around if we all just came together and decided to build what we wanted?
Manda: Yes!
Matt: And so to answer your question, which was where do we find the stories? I went off and did other things for a bit. I did this project, it didn't quite go how I hoped and I thought, oh, well, you know, I tried. It was harder than I thought. And I've done lots of different kinds of work, some around trying to get businesses to come together around action for climate, nature, equality, mental health, and some trying to push for more political kind of angles on the same thing. And I did some work in both of those spheres in this gap. Helped with the amazing Charlotte Sewell and Business Declares to organise the Queue for Climate over Millennium Bridge. Did lots of things that, in inverted commas 'did work', but also hit up against these barriers that political and corporate action are fundamentally trapped by the system we live in; that you've got to, if you're in a corporate Land, drive profits going up while trying to turn a juggernaut around. And if you're in politics, you're dependent on the funding from those organisations. So both those places feel very trapped. Whatever I've tried to do, and I can only speak personally, but the barriers are big to creating the kind of visionary change we need in those spheres. And the barriers at community level are not. The limitations are huge. People don't have money, they don't have necessarily what they consider useful knowledge, although I would argue that that's not a helpful knowledge that they think they need, that they've already got everything they need. And they don't have status.
Matt: We can recognise there are limitations at community level, but there is no limitation on what we can come together and imagine and build as a different way to do things. We don't have to make profit keep going up all the time. We don't have to do any of the embedded things that hold back companies, corporations and politics for changing direction. So it really felt like we had to crack this question. Like, this is where change is going to come from. It's from people coming together in their communities at ground level, reimagining the fundamental, basic things they need every day to be created and delivered in a different way. So we have to get these stories to work. So we went back through and we looked at all of the reasons people had said they didn't believe in the collective action stories we told originally. And realised that the pushbacks weren't totally scattergun. The pushbacks were for a rational set of reasons and that you could group them. And so what we ended up doing was creating a filter for which collective action stories are more likely to pull us together and create belief that change is possible. And which ones are not? Which ones are going to divide us, or at least only appeal to subsets of people?
Matt: And we don't have the budget in any of the work I'm doing to target in in that granular way. So I needed stories that were going to be pretty bullet-proof, that you could almost tell to anyone, and they'd get inspired and excited about how we can change things together. And then we created a framework for how you could tell those stories to kind of pre address or pre bunk or however you want to say it, the most likely cynical pushbacks you knew you were going to get. And so we used that filter to find stories from across the country. In theory, you could do this anywhere. Like this action is happening everywhere around the world. We focus on the UK purely out of pragmatism and budget. Like we don't have a huge amount of funding. But yeah, we use that filter to identify the most unifying, powerful examples of collective action that are like the gateway drug to believing change is possible.
Matt: Because some of this is not to dismiss the stories we don't tell. It's just to say, well, if you exist in a culture that has falsely indoctrinated us all to believe that we don't have collective power, what are the most likely stories to tell to unseat that misbelief and lead us back into the truer kind of path, which is that together we can change the world.
Manda: Right. This is such clear, concise, thrutopian thinking. I am really happy that we're having this conversation, particularly that we're having it now, because the world is changing and we are not being bombed by the Americans yet. And it's going to be a lot harder to build the community cohesion that we want and need if our system begins to fall apart. Much worse than it is at the moment.
Matt: Yeah.
Manda: And so it seems to me that we have a window within which this kind of story can take root and hopefully begin to grow, so that when, for instance, we have rolling power cuts and only water for two hours a day, there's community cohesion. Helping people to build the systems that will be resilient enough to survive that. So let's take a little bit of a step back and a wider look. There's so much of this that I really want to go into. But you said that your background was in creating viral campaigns. I would really like to unpick first of all what that background is, but also what is the nature of virality and how do you see it? How can we harness it in the service of thrutopian ideals? Which is what you're doing, but let's unpick a little bit more the mechanics of narrative shift in terms of scale and scope and time. So this is based on my idea that we need to create shift at scale and in time. And at scale is an unknowable size because it will be a critical mass, but it's going to be a lot bigger than the theories of change that say 3.5% shift the whole world. Because 3.5% may shift the whole world when you're talking about increasing the franchise to people who don't look white, or increasing the franchise to people who aren't men, or increasing the capacity to get married to people who aren't straight. But we want to dismantle the entire system and build a whole new system. If we're looking at total systemic change, we're going to need a lot more than 3.5%. And things like gay marriage and ending slavery and women getting the vote did not have a biophysical time limit on them.
Matt: No.
Manda: Which we do have and we don't know exactly what it is, but it's not very long. And so we need at scale and in time, to create the virality of the belief that you are articulating over and again, that we could, if we all got together, create a world that we'd all really enjoy living in. So what is your understanding of how we create viral narrative shift? Take that anywhere you want to.
Matt: Okay, well, I'll explain my background to give context and also to kind of caveat what I can and can't kind of confidently say in answer to that big question. Okay. So my background; I started as a filmmaker straight out of university, with some friends. We didn't have much money, we didn't want to go and get a job, and we thought we'd try for a few months to see if we could make a go of making stuff. And at the beginning we had no real training. I subsequently went and learnt a lot of more traditional film narrative structure and things, but at the beginning we were really experimenting, playing, and we made some films that got shared around. We made some games and animations that got shared around right when the internet was so beautifully emergent, where it was literally a meritocracy. Make some stuff, put it out there. If people like it, they share it. And I guess an important thing to say is, looking back, my two driving fascinations are: how the stories we tell shape the culture and the world we live in, and why some stories get shared more than others. And I guess I fell into that just by following my nose from that stuff that we were creating, and it was literally trial and error to start with. There was us and other people around the world. You could just see each other on the internet like tiny clumps of people, like often just one, two, three people working, doing stuff and you'd see what somebody else did and you'd be inspired and you'd build some of those thoughts into what you did. And it was mimicking the approach, it wasn't ripping each other off. There was this idea of inspiration from seeing what others do that work, and then almost learning why that works from a human behaviour point of view, by kind of being on that journey, you're seeing it happen. And there's no textbook at this point. This was 20 years ago.
Manda: Long before the Stanford Digital Persuasion Labs was set up, for instance, which is now a whole course that you can do as a postdoc or at least post-grad, of how to make people change their mind digitally. And you were inferring it from an open source network, mycelial network of people who were trying to do good things, not trying to make you buy stuff, I guess.
Matt: Yeah. And at that point, I guess what we learned was the most important thing is you've got to give more than you take. Like that's a fundamental thing. You've got to offer people something and you have to respect and understand people. You can't just go in and take things from people. You have to understand the community. You have to understand what drives that community, what values they hold. You've got to listen. So the first thing we used to do when we started trying to do this a little more intentionally, because people started offering to pay us to do it. And initially that was charities. And then we did end up doing it for bigger organisations, partly because at some point along this journey, I had a child and had to pay for having a slightly bigger family. But the key things are empathy, listening and offering, and humour is often a thing that people associate. And my background was in comedy. The films I started out making that used to go to film festivals and things were all comedy. But comedy isn't the thing that makes something go viral. You know, the internet is full of the best stand up comedy and TV comedy and everything that has ever existed. So if you try and compete on that level by setting out to make 90s three minutes of world beating comedy, you're probably going to fail. Comedy can help open up people to ideas, and humour is definitely a kind of lubricator, but it's more fundamental.
Matt: You're offering people something that is entertaining, that validates them, that they want to become part of their identity. Like for somebody to pass something on, they want for it to become part of who others see them as; 'I found this, I think this is fun. I think this is good. I think you'd like this'. There's a communication there that is about identity and connecting with people over shared pieces of identity. And so you've got to kind of like people, like really value and love people in order to build those connections in ways that that energy flows. I mean, there's all the algorithms and all of that, and those evolve during this process. When we started, they didn't exist. So my fascination is in the human behavioural aspects of storytelling that transcend all of the algorithms and still work. Admittedly, they are now up against some more entrenched dogma built into the algorithms, but my fascination is the human bit. So in theory, the same thing works for a story to be passed on in a pub, as it does on the internet at one level, at the human level. The algorithms cloud and clutter that. But they're not my fascination. My fascination is how and why we share stories in the first place, and there has to be some benefit to hearing it, engaging with it and to passing it on. One thing that is fundamental from back then is for something to go viral, the ratio of people who hear it to then pass it on to somebody else has to be higher than one.
Manda: Right. We learned that with the pandemic, it was R was 3.0 and it spread around the world. Yeah. So it doesn't need to be hugely higher than one.
Matt: No, it could be 1.1.
Manda: But it just has to be consistently higher than one.
Matt: It's got to be more than one, otherwise it won't grow. And so fundamentally for a story to be shared, you're trying to find a story that for every person you tell it to, they want to tell at least one other person. And it's got to be a proportionate amount more.
Manda: Ideally.
Matt: Yeah, and that has to work. And that's how something gets shared. And for me it's that thing of what is the benefit to hearing, experiencing and passing on that story? That is the most fascinating thing. And so if you look at that in terms of now, and just kind of shortcut a load of stuff, I'm most interested now in thinking in terms of building a world that works, how we share stories of practical ways we can do that. Because the studio I ran started out working for charities, then worked for bigger and bigger organisations as I had to earn a living, and ended up working for Disney, eBay, Yorkshire Tea, big brands. And Cancer Research UK, like big charities. And we were having to make campaigns, films mostly, that at least a million people watched. That was what we got brought in for. So organic traffic of at least a million people. And there were lots of people along this way who said, that's impossible. And yet we did it repeatedly, with very few misses.
Matt: Because if you get into the pattern of understanding how to think, empathise with, have compassion for people, so that you're actually giving them something of value. You can kind of repeatedly do that. And once we realised we could do that, you start thinking, well, hang on, this is a lot of storytelling power. What should we be doing with this? Definitely not just selling stuff. And certainly there was an amount of seeing inside organisations and understanding the kind of benign destructiveness of capitalism. That lots of people within it are just doing their 9 to 5, trying to feed their family, do the things. They're not necessarily aware of the destructive capacity of the system.
Manda: They're not masters of the universe trying to destroy the whole world.
Matt: No. So I rebooted the organisation in 2019 to focus only on using the skills we learned in creating shareable stories to work for organisations that were 100% committed to building a more positive future. But then did that for two years, which itself was a whole challenge, because I had to restructure the whole business and all loads of stuff which I won't go into but could. But importantly, after that two years; the system had worked, like the challenge, could we use these storytelling tools to push more positive agendas, had worked. But I look back at the work we'd done and it felt like telling people off with jokes on. It felt like we'd made humorous, telling people what to legislate against, what to cut down on, what to not do. And fundamentally, it just became really obvious that's not going to work. Like you can't build a new future by telling people what not to do.
Manda: No, absolutely.
Matt: And so we had to start telling people what they could do. So how do you use that sense of gifting or generosity of spirit within storytelling to show more positive avenues, and especially in a culture where that can be seen as naive or utopian or kind of a bit trite. And so you're up against the entrenched kind of cynicism of us all, that nice storytelling is not as clever as spotting the problem. So we've really worked through that. Like, I fundamentally think that talking to each other about problems is not actually helpful. We have to acknowledge the problems, but we really need to be showing each other the way through and holding each other emotionally. So projecting negative emotion. A lot of activism. I was an activist for a very long time, so everything I say is with the compassion that is like I've learnt by failing. I've been an activist for 20 years, but a lot of activism, when I look at it now from an emotional perspective, like what can you use storytelling for? Is kind of projecting a half processed emotion. You're projecting fear, which is rational, but all us projecting fear at each other doesn't necessarily work. Just like in a relationship, if you were just to keep projecting the bad stuff at each other; like you're bad because of this, we're bad because of this, I'm frightened this is going to happen. You're not going to create a harmonious way out of a relationship tension or difficulty doing that. Or if you think about kids. Like if you if you were in a dangerous position and you projected your fear onto your kids, like, oh, we've got stuck in the snow and I'm really worried we might all die, that is not going to aid your children. So how do we bring together positive, emotionally nourishing and nurturing emotions in ways that are exciting, they still tick some of the boxes we have to within narrative of tension, drama, etc? And yeah, how do we do that and make that shareable in the same way that we made viral films that got shared?
Manda: Brilliant. So I want to unpick that last bit. There's so much in what you said, and I am remembering, when we talked before and I think it's worth just the listeners sharing, that you were quite often in the room, where it was you with this tiny little Start-Up that you had created and big ad agencies, and they had the 'we will do the campaign and it will tick all these boxes that we have decided are absolutely essential'. And you'd be going, no, that's not going to work. We're going to tell a completely different story this way. And you got the commissions because you were creatively different, and you weren't locked in old stories of what narrative was. Is that a fair reproducing of what you told me?
Matt: Totally. Yeah. Essentially because we built this system by working out what worked, we ended up realising when we got brought into these bigger organisations to try and work with them, there's a very siloed mentality there. You have different agencies who do different bits. You've got a research agency who goes out and understands the audience. Then you've got a strategy agency who works out what to do with that, and then a creative or branding agency who work out how to tell a story with that. And then a media agency who distribute that, and then a research agency at the other end who research how well it works. There's no collaboration really. If something's successful, everyone wants credit. And if something doesn't work, everyone blames each other down that pipeline. And we just looked at this and we were like, no, there's no shade on it. Like, I understand how it's evolved, but it doesn't work for what we were trying to do. Because you can't maintain the care for the narrative that connects people together and you with the person you're trying to reach, all the way down in that separated way. So the only way we could make this work was to do the whole thing. Like to go into Reddit or wherever and find out what people think, want, like, understand the people we were trying to reach, respect them, listen. And then to build ideas and tell them in ways that were going to engage people, through maintaining that sense of respect, understanding all the pushback you were going to get.
Matt: Like we had this thing, at least in my head, that you've got to really know your point when you're trying to communicate something, and you've also got to know where your pushback is going to be. So you have to be very self-aware about why somebody won't want to listen to a message, and then at least address that, at least acknowledge it and think, do I need to do anything to my storytelling to be aware that there are going to be reasons people will want to not listen to this? And try and prune off any sharp edges that are going to limit your story's ability to travel. And all of that is about care and compassion for your audience, like respecting them, understanding them. And then you've got to put it out there in a way that kind of kicks that off in a positive way. And so we got hired by a slightly brave and bold people, who brought us in alongside these massive organisations. Like literally, we were 15, 20 people at most, and we would be working alongside organisations that were thousands of people. Like global. And we got allowed, therefore, to sit at the big table, like the European team who were doing comms for big organisations. And it's from there that you see the fact that the people are good and the people are smart and kind and normal. You know, I fundamentally believe people are creative, collaborative, kind, amazing. But when you put them in a system where they have to perform according to certain crazy rules, you bring out the worst in each other.
Matt: So we'd see not the best behaviour. And that's not just to each other, it's also just as the business, like the whole of the business is clearly doing something that is potentially holistically damaging. But there's nothing anyone inside it can do, or they don't even have the emotional capacity to recognise it, because it's just too traumatising to be like, I'm part of a system that's creating this much destruction. So it's hidden and tied up in there. But when you see it, you're like, yeah, but this is just a set of things that we could change. Like the people in the room could behave totally differently, but in this system, they can't. But they're all smart enough, like all of us, when we come together, to change that system. If you ask them how to make it better, they could tell you in 20 minutes how to make it better. They just don't feel the agency to make it better. And in many ways, they may not have that, if that system is owned and governed according to rules, that they can't change that easily. But often we can change things when we come together, even in small groups. Small groups putting their hand up and saying, hang on, I'm not okay with this, can fundamentally create massive shift. But the point is, we saw inside these systems and realised that they they weren't going to change, but they could be changed and they were benignly, massively harmful. And, better things were totally possible.
Manda: And this is exactly where we're at with the world. Very, very few people get up in the morning and want to destroy the biosphere and everything else and create the sixth mass extinction, but they're locked in systems which bring out the worst in them, exactly as you said. And they don't understand that individually they would have some agency. This is reminding me a lot of Audrey Tang, when they were minister in Taiwan and crowdsourcing ideas and finding a civil service that was full of ideas of how the entire civil service could be so much more flexible and resilient and move faster and move better. But not a single person in there had ever been offered any agency to offer up these ideas. There wasn't even a place where you could put these ideas forward, so they'd never been gathered, so they'd never changed. And so I'm wondering, I'm kind of intrigued that in 2019 you changed your business and you still had at least one child to support. Within the death cult of predatory capitalism, you still have to feed the egregore. And yet you managed to change, and you managed to find businesses that were oriented towards life. At some point I'd be interested in how you did that. However, where I would like to go at the moment is I was talking to somebody last week who is in one of the very, very big name financial institutions, who said that in the last six months, the big change that they have seen is that the people at the top now recognise that the system cannot continue.
Manda: This person is in sustainability. It's not that they shouldn't continue or that we don't want it to continue, it's that it actually can't. It is falling apart. And I'm thinking that this is the moment that people like you and I have been waiting for. Because if we're at the point where you understand that you're running head first at a brick wall that will not move, then you are more open to somebody coming in and going, you know what? Your entire system could change tomorrow if everybody agreed a few fundamental different principles. Every single one of you is a decent human being, who would like to be part of a system that's actually leading towards a flourishing world. And this is entirely possible. And that businesses are flexible in a way that politics is not, because politics as it stands at the moment (and clearly we need political change) but as it stands, it's in these 4 or 5 year locked in systems. Where, as you kind of alluded to, politicians are wholly owned by business. Zack Polanski this weekend was out somewhere in London and he said, I am not, never have and never will, take money from the arms industry or name of other things or big health businesses.
Manda: And he got a huge round of applause and he said, well, that's very kind. Thank you. But I would like to point out that it should not be normal that you applaud me for not being bought and owned by business. That should be the default for politicians, but it isn't. But businesses have the capacity to orient differently in quite short timeframes, if they drop the certainties that they have. Of this product line has to stay for the next five years because we've invested in the factories. If somebody points out that by five years from now, those factories will not function because collapse of system, what else could we be doing? Then we could get people being a lot more creative and resilient and flexible, and we could begin to harness the astonishing creativity of humanity in service to change instead of in service to maintaining the egregore. So I want to at some point come back to the grassroots organisations that you're looking at, but I'm really interested in the fact that you've sat in the room with the people who maintain the death cult and the slow rolling of the supertanker that is our system, over the edge of the cliff. If you were invited into any of these big rooms now, can you see a way forward to shifting the system in service to life in a way that would work?
Matt: Yeah, but I have to say, I guess part of the reason I'm doing the work I'm doing is because I fundamentally think we can already do this work, but it's easier for us to imagine it when we're outside of those systems. So an example, I'm not going to name names because I'm, you know, trying to be kind to people. But when I was pivoting the business in 2019, I had a meeting with a person I'd worked with for a long time. And I said what I was trying to do. I said, look, I think we can use the skills we've got to focus on pushing organisations that are doing things more ethically, more regeneratively. And I think people will want that. And they said, I don't think people are ready for that. And we kind of disagreed slightly, but Friendlily, because I'd known them for a long time. 20 minutes later in the same meal, because we were talking over lunch, the person said, it's really great that the food came in these cardboard containers, because my wife won't shop in Waitrose anymore because of all the plastic. And I was like, but you just said people weren't ready for change!
Matt: But I think we separate the knowledge and the skills and the status that comes alongside those that we do in our jobs. So inside all of those corporations and businesses, there is a tendency to value some of the wrong things. And it's that thinking and that value base that's hard to shift. When you see the examples that are being built from the ground up in communities, that all have new economic models, or at least all the ones we talk about do, that demonstrate different ways that finances could flow, that that power can be collaboratively harnessed, and that you can create a balance. Because you mentioned the word certainty. A huge amount of business is around building certainty into an uncertain system. So forcing a system to have predictable certainty when that's possibly not the wisest thing. It might be better that we learn to be resilient to change and adaptive to change, like nature is.
Manda: Also that certainty is falling apart now.
Matt: Totally. But I guess it takes courage. I used to look at people who ran oil industry, I've been a climate protester for many years, less so now because of the work I'm doing, which is more kind of creative and generative in it's focus. But I've been in those places, and I used to think people who ran oil companies were evil. I have, I guess, a more nuanced view now, which is when you have a team of thousands of people, and I've only ever managed at maximum 50 people, was the biggest my business ever got. And even at that point, we moved away, like we backed down and went smaller, because the responsibility that comes from being responsible for lots of people's lives is, if you have empathy, it's quite a thing to hold. And so it isn't easy to take those decisions on behalf of other people, in that kind of top down business system where everything is about having power over each other. But also responsibility to each other from being within that system. And so that's why I think a lot of the most exciting things that can show us a new way are happening outside of that system.
Matt: I guess fundamentally, I go to these events where you see people talking about doing things more sustainably. And often they're the head of some business sustainability department. And I'm like, that's not where we are going to invent a sustainable future. They are not the people we should be putting on stage. The people that we should be putting on stage to learn from, and the way I think business can change, is to look at what groups of humans are doing together as humans, with kinship to each other, not within a business, and saying, well, they're showing us the way. That's an economic model that can work. And if people within business are brave enough to look at those models that are being demonstrated in communities all around us and embrace some of those principles, then yes, I think companies and organisations could shift. But we have to be empathetic that that is a courageous thing to do when you also hold the responsibility for people's incomes, mortgages, salaries, etc..But I still think that's what we should be asking of people. Come on guys!
Manda: Yes. And it seems to me that what you're doing in foregrounding the community organisations that otherwise just are not hitting the radar yet. And we need to get them to hit the radar. I was really struck in your podcast on Civic Square in Birmingham, and you were talking about the fact that the National Health Service had grown out of the fact that Nye Bevan lived in Tregaron, I think in Wales, where they had had a system where you gave a penny of your income, your salary. It was a kind of local insurance system that then guaranteed that people got free health care. And I'm thinking a penny was actually probably quite a lot of your income in those days. I mean, you were probably earning shillings a week. But even so, Nye Bevan came out of that and created the National Health Service, because he'd lived to see how that worked at a community level. And he had the creative resilience and elasticity to imagine it at a national level. And I'm thinking that if, for instance, the sustainability officer of a huge mega company was to be living in the area where Civic Square is working in Birmingham, or where Fordhall Farm is in North Shropshire, or any of these. Living in a community that works has to then, if you've got the right person, be able to translate that into your business.
Manda: What I noticed, though, is that the heads of Shell and Unilever, there was a point when each of them were actually trying to move their businesses in a slightly more regenerative direction, and both of them are no longer in their positions. And Unilever particularly seems to me to be backtracking quite fast up that track. And shell is also, there was a point where they were looking as if they were heading slightly more regenerative and slightly less fossil fuel based, and they've totally given that up. And it may be that Trump starting World War three and basically cancelling all shipping through the Strait of Hormuz will flip them back again. But how do we help the people who might live in a community that is achieving thrutopian shift, and they want to take it into their business, how do we help them? Can we help them to spread that through the business? Does that make sense as a question that you could address?
Matt: It does, but I guess what I'm really trying to do is learn how we share the stories of collective action that can give us all agency and power, to create the future we want to live in through whatever mechanisms. But I'm not sure that trying to leverage that straight back into business is the most direct way. I keep mentioning these words, but a key driver and this addresses a lot of the things you've asked, you've asked about virality, you've asked about how we shift people. To me, compassion and empathy in storytelling are some of the key things we have to rigorously bake in. The systems we need to survive are collapsing, as you've acknowledged, and that includes all of the rules we baked into what I kind of slightly derisively call our economic rules, which are obviously completely insane, and the rules that we baked into how you run a corporation. So some of those things are so antithetical to the way that we could make things work, that you've got to ask, like, do you try and shift those or do you just build something else? And I think that could sound really crazy, but to give some examples. Like you can see what's happening in politics; political parties are emerging that are building from scratch. Not totally, but Reform and the Green Party didn't fully exist in the way they are now three years ago, two years ago, even six months ago, to the same level. It's also, if you look back through history, we often think we need to transform industries. And it's not really proven. Like Nokia and Motorola are not the main people making smartphones now. They got unseated by people with different ideas.
Matt: Blockbuster got killed by Netflix. And what did Netflix, when they started, know about media? You could have made an argument that, well, we need blockbuster to transform the future of media, because they're such a big player. But you didn't. And you could say the same thing now about oil companies. Like the biggest frustration I have from a storytelling perspective, with regard to like the fossil fuel industry, is that we keep inviting them onto stages. Less so now, but still to an extent, to ask them. Because the feeling is they're such a big player that they must be involved in the transition. That's not what history shows. Going back to the NHS example, things come out of the places where people have the greatest creative capacity to imagine a different way, and that is not normally from inside the system that is currently running everything. Because if you have empathy for your employees, the responsibility that comes from changing direction really fundamentally. And if you don't, just the fact that you probably learn a lot of unhelpful 'rules' mean that it's very difficult for those changes to come from those places. Change comes, and it always has, from groups of people coming together to imagine something that they want to work. And then other people look at that and go, that looks legit, that looks cool. Let's do that. And you grow that from there. And fundamentally now everybody I know doing great work in the collective space of building localised pieces of a world that could work, is not looking to take on the responsibility to scale that globally. Nobody is going, oh, look, here's Civic Square. Let's now make Civic Square 10.0 where we run...
Manda: Run the world.
Matt: All of the other neighbourhoods. The idea is you build a thing that works, and then you can share knowledge and information between people. So a cooperative structure or a much more collective system. And there are examples, as in your book, like Mondragon. And there are examples that we can look to, but some of those systems would be easier to build up from groups of people coming together to demonstrate. You know, Audrey Tang's language, demonstrate rather than protest; demonstrate pieces of the world you want to create. Bring them into being and then allow other people to be inspired by and mimic those in their own way rather than to scale it, which is what a traditional business would be looking to try and do. So I guess fundamentally, I always feel when I speak to people inside big corporate structures, when they come and ask me questions about how they could do this inside their job, there's a bit of me, and I may be wrong, but it's like, well, when the penny drops enough of what works, you will have to leave. Because the system you're in is a top down hierarchical control system that's trying to scale ideas. And that is not how this works. So if you want to change that boat, change the direction of that boat, it's very hard. Leave and build a different boat.
Manda: Right. Okay. And this is what we find again and again in the shamanic world or the animist nature-connected, whatever you like to call it, world. Is you take people for a week or a couple of weeks and you really get them embedded to the point where who they are shifts as a human being. And they go back to work on Monday morning and there's three routes; they either leave because it's untenable or they get sacked because they tried to change the system and the system wasn't up for changing, or they revert back to exactly who they were. And of the three, the 'this is not tenable, I'm going to go and do something different where I'm actually connecting to the web of life and offering myself in service to life instead of in service to the aggregate' feels like a much better way forward. Alrighty, so I have a new question which is emerging. So compassion and empathy are the core of our storytelling. You said earlier, you've been an activist and a lot of the activist narrative, coming from the best of intentions for at least the last 40 years, has been you need to stop doing stuff. You need to stop flying, you need to give up meat, you need to give up stuff. Without necessarily then the world will look and feel so much more exciting. It's just you're going to end up feeling like you're wearing a hair shirt and living in a straw bale hut off the west edge of Wales, which is not necessarily... Straw bale huts are lovely.
Manda: However, we also want to be in a world where the kinds of people who are doing the yes buts, your camera people who presumably really cared about what you're doing, but still had an internal part that danced to the narrative of the old system. And so what I am feeling a lot, and I really want to run this past you and see how you feel, is that we need to do the inner work. Dick Schwartz says, I've said this on the podcast so often that people can recite it in their sleep; almost all of us, almost all of the time, are walking around in a state of internal civil war. And there's the part that wants to do the good stuff, and there's a part going that's a waste of time, right? And a lot of our narrative seems to me, the activist you have to give everything up narrative, comes from a really core place of being ashamed of being human. And that's really hard because we are human. It's not something that we can change. And being ashamed of the core of who you are is a deeply deadening, demoralising, anti-creative state to be.
Matt: I agree.
Manda: And we need to get to a point where we are proud of being human again. And that that as a narrative, with compassion and empathy and generosity of spirit and integrity, all woven in, could be a key to the speed and the scale of the narrative shift that we need. And I just want to see how that lands.
Matt: Yeah, absolutely. I fundamentally agree. And I think this really gets into the core of what I'm trying to explore. That storytelling is a really fundamental part of that. Like my belief, absolute belief, is that people are kind, creative, they're amazing. They are collaborative. People are pro-social. And you can see examples of that everywhere you look. Like everywhere. We just normalise stories that don't do that. And those stories come through systems that built them intentionally. Like there is intent behind the storytelling that has dominated our culture and driven our culture. During the pandemic, there was a news agent at the end of the road I was living on when we had to lock down the first time, that went and bought up toilet paper and hand sanitiser at the beginning of the pandemic, and then defiantly did not mark it up, for the whole of the pandemic. Because they were like, ain't nobody gouging our people. Like that is normal. I have run a business my whole life and in the thousands of people I've met who run businesses, I don't know a normalised set of people who intentionally go out to gouge other people, this dog eat dog mentality. That is not true. There is a minority and we give them hugely disproportionate airtime. But there are millions of small to medium sized businesses run by decent people according to decent human values that are normal. That we are brilliant, collective, creative creatures. I mean, we would literally not be here if we weren't more creative than we were destructive. Like, you know, I'm not saying that we're not about to enter a moment of really testing what I'm saying.
Manda: But again, it's a very small number of crazies at the top and everybody else going, you can't do this, guys!
Matt: Totally. And so we need to tell stories that help us see that in each other. That validate the truth of our humanity, which is that we are collaborative, we are here for each other. And that that is evident everywhere you look, and that we're all keeping that quiet because we exist in a culture that doesn't value that. And our stories are where we get a lot of what we value from. So we need our stories to really shine a light on that truth, to value that reality of being a human, which is that we are compassionate, kind, pro-social. We would rather do something that helped us and helped other people than something that just helped us. That doesn't bring us joy. Going back to your question of what makes virality; people will share stories that have some good in them more easily than they will those that don't. Like, you build something in that scaffolds the part of us that is brilliant. And so I really agree with you that we have to recognise that we are being kidded by the stories we tell into thinking the worst of ourselves.
Matt: And really importantly, a thing that I feel, having done this work for the last ten years, is that we need to be clear that we are not trying to embed new values, we are trying to shine a light on existing values. The pilot light of brilliance is on inside everyone. And even after 50 years of individualistic extractive capitalism, people are still brilliant, deep down. They just get told that those things aren't useful, aren't valuable, aren't clever, aren't smart, aren't wise. And that is utter bollocks. Sorry to swear. But our job as storytellers is to blow fuel onto that pilot light that's already there. We are not bringing new values to the table. We are pointing at the values that are already there in everyone, that are the majority of values in the majority of people. And we are telling stories that value those and that validate that that is normal. That is what people are, and that these psychopaths that we look at and that are being destructive, that is not normal. That is the minority.
Manda: Brilliant, brilliant. We could end on that because that was a manifesto for a change. It was glorious. Thank you. But I'd really like one last step, which is let's imagine that we really do manage to bring these stories to the world, and people hear them and are really inspired to respond. Leaving aside the chaos that the psychopaths are creating, let's pretend that's not happening, or at least it somehow fizzles out. If we were to look ten years down the line, what does your sense of a future look and feel like? Have you got a thrutopian future in your head of how how people are moving and changing and what the world looks and feels like?
Matt: Well, yes and no. I mean, partly because everything I've done leads me to not be prescriptive. People coming together to share their brilliance. There's this great story I always think is really helpful about the foundation of Jeff Bezos's company. Jeff Bezos had a rule at the beginning of setting up Amazon, which was that you had to run teams that could be fed with two pizzas. And one of the things that I think is really powerful is that the reason that works is because individually, we don't have the brilliance to change the world. Like, I'm not a genius, I'm just a person. And neither is anyone else really a genius in the way that we need right now. That is a flawed route, that we're looking for some kind of messianic hero that knows all the answers. And that's part of the problem of the old system, like the hero's journey, I could go on a whole tangent, but the hero's journey is a fundamentally unhelpful and destructive narrative structure to be basing our culture on. It's a violent, extractive form, and we need to kind of find ways to learn other narrative structures. That's part of what I'm trying to do with the work I'm doing, to kind of give us other routes forward. But we sometimes build the idea of change to make it feel like we need loads and loads of people. Like you need a petition with a thousand a million signatures. Like when we when there was a march for nature two years ago with a million signatures and that's a huge amount of people. But change normally comes from a handful of people. That's where the two pizza thing is coming together. Because what you need, the brilliance comes from the different perspectives, the diversity of ideas that kind of add additive in their brilliance and kind of complementary in rubbing the corners of where everyone's got a weakness in their thinking.
Manda: And so you get a sigmoid curve.
Matt: With 10 to 12 people, you get magic happening. And you've got everything you need in a small group to create an alternative way. You don't need all the economists on earth to invent a new economy, you need a handful of economists to think of one and then somebody to demonstrate how it could work. And between you, you work out the strengths and weaknesses and you kind of evolve the thing that can be better.
Manda: And I understand that it's an emergent thing, but I just wonder even how it feels to shine a light at the end of the tunnel, for people listening, to have a sense of where we could get to if everybody really got on board.
Matt: Well, I think what we see going around the country telling these stories is that there are similarities. That we know that the majority of people are driven globally, by a shared set of things; the desire to have a safe, stable, secure life. And really what they mean by that is safe, stable access to the essential things they need to live: water, food, energy, housing, a voice in decision making. And that they want to create those in ways that allow others to have the same things and nature and more than human life. Like that's what people want. So together it is possible to create. And there wouldn't be one way, but multiple ways that that could be done. The money that flows through the systems we have, it's easy to look at it and think, well, that money has to flow that way. But it doesn't. There are so many other ways it could flow. And the important thing I see is us having the excitement, the vision, the creativity and the ambition to think, well, we could just rewire that. And I'm not saying there aren't limitations. There will be difficult questions within that. But fundamentally for people to build a more community driven future, where they know that not only do they have less negative impact, but they also have all the things they need. And they have some things that we've lost. They have community, the sense of having each other's back, that's what I interpret community really as meaning. Because community is a very hard word to sell when you've lost it. Do you want more community in your life? Well, it's hard. I can't remember what that's like.
Manda: And I need my own space and I need not to be infringed on. As soon as you mention community, people start telling you what they can't have, I find, until it's there.
Matt: But we've got to relearn the pros and cons of that. And one of the major pros is that people have your back. That's part of what I interpret as that meaning. So I don't need to buffer myself against so many chaotic dramas down the line, because there are people around me who've got my back, and we do have to relearn that. But I think the vision of a future, wherever you are, and it will be different wherever you are, but what we can aim towards and orientate ourselves towards, is a world in which we have everything we need, and we are co-creating that with each other around us. And we're doing that in ways that are respectful of future generations, for the more than human world, nature. And that that will feel really good. And it might be different everywhere, but that is what we should be aiming for. And that will feel a lot more fun and a lot more joyous, and give us a lot more emotional richness than what we are currently experiencing, which is a easier, comfortable life but that is increasingly evident to have visible negative externalities, that we either turn a blind eye to and try and kind of pretend aren't happening, or do acknowledge are happening and feel increasingly bad about.
Manda: Brilliant. We could go on talking for another couple of hours. I would really like to explore the hero's journey with you, or the heroic journey. But, because this is really important, Matt, you are creating thrutopian stories and you are spreading them virally as well as you can. Is it working and how do we know if it's working?
Matt: Well, the quick answer is, yeah. And I think it's important to share that positivity that we're kind of in this moment where we're surrounded with stories of what's not working and it can feel really difficult. And what we're doing is starting to cut through. And it's important to contextualise that as well. Changing these stories is a big thing, but how we can see it's working is when we started, as I've mentioned, belief was the key thing that we were struggling to overcome. And whilst we have not, and we've almost intentionally not tried to go viral with this yet, we are starting to crack that belief piece. And we're also starting to crack the mainstreaming piece. So part of what we've been trying to explore is if we reshape the way we tell stories of collective action, can we make them more invitational, exciting and appealing to mainstream audiences? And therefore, can we get them into more mainstream places? And that is starting to work.
Manda: Okay.
Matt: So some of the things I could share that show us that's working. Firstly, we've been doing this on social media for a year and a bit. So we launched channels on Instagram and TikTok. At first, when we used to tell these stories, we'd get pushback, as I've mentioned. That people didn't believe the change was possible. Now what we get is people saying, but if we all do this, they're going to ban it. And that is a fundamentally different thing. Because what we're hearing from that, we're not going out asking people, do you believe we can change the world? But it's inferred in the feedback we're getting, which is very different than what we used to get. Because people are implying through their response that they believe this could create big change, but that then some systemic pushback would happen. And that, you know, may be true, but the storytelling is landing in a different way. But then on top of that, we're reaching places that we couldn't get before. So through the social media channels, Immediate, who are a mainstream media company who make titles like Radio Times, Gardeners World, Good Food, Top Gear, they reached out to us and asked if if we could collaborate with them, because they thought their audiences would like these kind of stories. As positive ways to give people a sense of practical hope in this moment. And so that's where the podcast we made came from. That they make podcasts for those titles, and we came to an agreement that we'd collaborate with them on making one to put in front of the audiences of those existing titles, to see how those audiences respond. And then on top of that, that podcast has then managed to get featured in the Daily Mirror, The Daily Star, The Daily Express, The Guardian, The Radio Times and been featured by Apple as a recommended new podcast in the UK, Ireland and Canada six weeks in a row. So these are small things.
Manda: They're huge, Matt.
Matt: But given what the experiment is, it is to show or to find that if we tell these stories in a different way, can we reach further than the bubble of people interested in traditional kind of collective action based change? The answer that we're finding so far is yes. That if we can tell these stories in ways that pull people together around things, we all get that we need, we can get much further with them.
Manda: Wow. This is a whole new podcast, actually, I wasn't expecting it to go in so many different directions. I had a question which was, does the cameraman who used to go yes, but this isn't really going to work, have they changed? Or the camera person. Have They changed?
Matt: To be honest, I haven't actually gone back to them and asked them, but I can do that.
Manda: Right. That would be really interesting.
Matt: And it wasn't just one person, but there was one person that was, you know, there were lots of pieces of feedback. But yeah, it's a good question.
Manda: There's always a 'yes, but' in the room. And sometimes holding the 'yes, but' for the rest of the collective is somebody's job, and it isn't necessarily who they really are, but it's a useful place to come from. I am really intrigued by the fact that the people who make Top Gear. You did say that, didn't you?
Matt: Yeah. Their podcast and the magazine. Yeah.
Manda: Their audience is going to be interested in this. Because that feels like a very different audience than the socially aware people whose interest is in social justice and equity, and then they are climate aware because everything is intersectional. Top Gear, I may be projecting here, but the Top Gear audience did not strike me as that.
Matt: Well, and to be fair, they're probably one of the more peripheral of those bunch of titles I said. But I think the important thing is that part of the way we're changing the way we're telling these stories, is to tell them around uniting needs we all have. So we are framing them around energy, food, housing, decision making. Those are the four fundamental things that we're pulling the stories together around. And when I said we aim to bring compassion and empathy, we recognise that we exist in a moment where a lot of people are struggling and suffering. And so we want to help people see how coming together can fundamentally change our ability to get the things we all need. And that becomes an a-political message. That the thing that's driving people towards the far right or towards any method of offering change that at the moment is trying to respond to people's actual needs. And what doesn't work is telling people what to do or telling people how we should fix things. So by showing people what ordinary people are doing and allowing them to narrate in their own words, the benefit it's bringing them, around things we all need, we break through some of the traditional limitations of political silos. And so things become appealing to people in a much more uniting and fundamental way.
Manda: Right. And this is going straight back to Rebecca Solnit and Paradise Made in Hell. Her book, which, you know, as soon as there is something like Hurricane Katrina or an earthquake or tsunami, it doesn't matter that your neighbour has a different bumper sticker or votes in a different way. You're there to help because your houses are being swept away and you need to do something. And so being able to bring that into play before people's houses are being swept away feels like a really good thing.
Matt: Well, there's an important thing that we are responding to, which is that there is a uniting upside to the massive rise in inequality that we're all suffering from, in that if you went back five years and said, do you think some of the systems we depend on are broken? You'd have reached some people, but not all of them, because people still hadn't maybe felt that. But if you go to people now, everybody, including people who are relatively well off, like upper middle class people who shop in the nicer supermarkets, if you say, are you worried about your rising food bill? They will still feel that pressure. We don't tend to move ourselves between social classes that easily. We don't kind of go, oh, I'm like upper middle class, but now I'm just going to change my expectations of life. Everybody is feeling that pressure. And in a way, from a storytelling perspective, that is helpful, because people are all united around recognising their vulnerability around essential needs. Their mortgage has gone up, their house rent has gone up, or their food bill has gone up. And while that affects disproportionately people right on the breadline more than others, it's not like everybody can't feel that pain in some way. So you start to be able to appeal to people and it stops being a political message. It stops being an ideological message. It just starts being 'should we all come together and make sure we can eat in the future, in ways that we can afford?' And that we could have homes in the future that we can afford. And that breaks through some of those traditional kind of ideological boundaries.
Manda: Yeah. And community power and Fordhall Farm where we can talk about regenerative farming, and we're doing it so we know that it works. I think that's the amazing thing, is you go and you speak to the people who are actually doing the thing, whatever the thing is. So nobody can say this isn't working. They can get to, oh, well, the government will shut it down because it's working. But then you've already moved the narrative on. It'd be so interesting to come back in a year and see where that, because we've gone from 'that can't work' to 'they won't let it work' because it might work. And I would really be curious to see where that goes next, which I guess is why you're running that experiment in real time. We will find out.
Matt: Yeah. Well, so this is what we're trying to learn. But I guess the main thing is, and I guess it's important to maybe mention some of those stories. So some of the examples we talk about are Lawrence Weston, a Community on the outskirts of Bristol, working class community who came together initially to extract themselves from a food desert, by trying to get a supermarket. They knocked on 3500 doors, asked what people wanted. They wanted to be able to get access to affordable food, so they lobbied to get a supermarket. There's some stories in the podcast about how they did that, it's quite cool. But once they'd built that muscle that they could create change, they then rewrote their local housing policy. So it's now illegal to build gas boiler powered houses, houses without electric car charging points or without top notch insulation, because they want local people to have access to affordable homes that are affordable to live in. And they wrote policies that mean that some of those homes have to be rented or sold at rates that are affordable to local people, so they don't force people to come in and drive out the local residents. And then they went on and built the biggest community owned wind turbine in the country, that makes them 100 grand a year to keep this kind of change going.
Matt: Civic Square in Birmingham are developing a diversely powered community fit for the future we actually face, that acknowledges these challenges, but builds the power to respond into the hands of the people living there. And Fordhall farm, where 8000 people collectively bought a farm run without chemicals for 20 years, proves the economic model can work and now are looking to expand that model to take more farms into collective ownership nationally, so that people get to reconnect with the way the food is grown locally and can build that sense of community, so farms and farming can become reconnected with the local communities.
Manda: Yeah, we all connect around food, but we also, as your podcast shows, all connect around where we get our power from and how we build our houses. I loved that the Civic Square, they've got an experimental bit where they're testing straw and wool, and I think plastic bags, something weird as cavity insulation just to see what works. And how could we do things that are actually regenerative while having warmer, not damp homes that don't cost a fortune to heat? And given in the week of recording, gas prices and oil prices are going absolutely through the roof. The curve is now in its exponential rise. At the singularity that becomes increasingly important. And I think you're right, that's going to cross class boundaries and then ideological boundaries, because you can have the far right who are screaming that everything is broken and they're going to fix it, but none of their ways of fixing it stack up. Whereas this stacks up and you're not doing it as a political thing, you're just going here, look, somebody's doing something that works, you could do this too, which is a really different offer.
Matt: Yeah. And importantly, I guess one of the things that is exciting now is we've tested this approach, and there's a filter and a framework for how we do this that's repeatable. So once we've got the things that are working, we can kind of repeat, repeat, repeat; we can find more examples, tell more stories. But we now are looking to start to build that virality. Because what we learn early on was when you do this the other way around, when you go viral with examples that people don't believe, you almost erode the trust that collective action can work. People have been told that we can change the world for the better so many times they're kind of weary of hearing we can make change. So if you go in with an offer, hey, together we can change the world, and then tell them a story they don't believe, you're kind of another person failing to deliver on a thing. Now we've got an approach that seems to be working. Now we want to spread and grow that ability to get that in front of people. Because if we can spread belief that together we can change the world, that's a very different thing than spreading hope, but without the pragmatic ability to back it up.
Manda: Right. And then we get to that point where hope becomes a verb with its sleeves rolled up instead of the hopium of 'hey guys, we can change the world'.
Matt: Yeah. This is practical, active, real, tangible stuff that can benefit us all.
Manda: And it seems to me that as well as going viral on the net, you're breaking into the mainstream. Because in the conversations we've been having around a project that we're doing, the bigger broadcasters seemed to be, or the people from within them, saying you need to prove to us that there's a story to be told and an appetite to hear that story. Otherwise, we cannot engage because our entire remit is to get viewers, and we have to prove that that's possible. And you are proving that there are stories to be told and that there is an appetite to hear those stories. And then the people in the BBC and channel four and ITV and Netflix and all of the others who want these things, will have a good reason to go to the Commissures and go, hey, this is going to be viewed by millions, so let us put it on. Does that feel accurate?
Matt: Absolutely. And we're talking to some of those people at the moment and actively trying to do that. And I think an important thing that it's important to acknowledge, I said earlier that stories with positive messages do travel. I am aware, from the background I've got, that the algorithms are also baiting divisiveness. So what we are trying to do is recognise that. And there's also, you know, we know from research that the amygdala baiting stories will always like, you only die once. You can build a better world all day long, but you need to not get eaten by the lion once. So we are always going to respond viscerally to stories of threat, of death and violence. And we see that what bleeds, leads, like we are aware of all of that. We are also aware that the, the way we've been telling change based stories and collective action stories has not been working. And now we've looked through why, it's really evident why, like the filter and the framework we've built help overcome entrenched problems. Like if we go around telling stories of the problems of the world and analysing problems ad infinitum, that doesn't really increase our agency.
Matt: Like you can't understand the problems of the world into a new future. You have to just build a new future. So there are things we've been doing wrong, but just fixing those still doesn't mean we're not up against these kind of entrenched issues of amygdala baiting stories and a divisive set of algorithms. But what we can do, and this is, I guess what I learned doing viral films, is whatever you're up against, you can still make your story as good as possible. We need to offer a really exciting version of this story that plays to things people understand they need, that plays to basic uniting forces that we all share, and that makes that story feel compelling and exciting and like something you want to be part of. Like a train that's already moving, you want to be on. And when we start doing that, it becomes easier to get these stories out there. And people do want it. They're crying out right now.
Manda: That's what I was thinking. The kind of race to the bottom of the brainstem surely at some point that's saturated and people are just like, I just don't need any more clickbait horror. I actually want something that gives me a sense that I have agency.
Matt: Totally. And, you know, I started out making satire and comedy and, you know, I've been on a journey through this too. I got to a point where I just thought, well, yeah, it's very clever, mate, to be like smart aleck about your comedy and like always being wry. And now I'm just like, no, we've got to tell stories about how we can practically change the world. And we've got to be unashamedly positive, because people want that. There's a part of me that still likes satire, and there's another part of me that's like, that's just reinforcing this cynical view of the world. Like, I need somebody to show me how we're actually going to fix this and that to be transparently, unapologetically visionary and positive and practical. Like, what can I do on Saturday to help? Because I not only need to know the steps, like, where are we going? How are we getting there? Who's showing me the way? But how do I get involved, soon? Like, how do I begin my journey to helping? So that's what we're trying to do with these stories. And that makes them more invitational. That makes them something that you want to become part of, not something you witness from afar. So some of the things embedded in the filter, we don't tell any stories that you cannot actively take part in this Saturday.
Manda: Because there's no point.
Matt: Well, yeah. And there's a danger that seeing positive stories of things happening a long way away that you can't participate in, actually could be pacifying. You just look at them and think, well, great, somebody's on it. I don't need to help. I can just dial down the fear that nobody was on it.
Manda: But also, I can't help so my sense of urgency is thus diminished. And it seems to me that one of the things from cognitive neuroscience, every sentient organism thrives with a sense of agency. The fact that we often don't give it to our domestic animals is our problem. It doesn't mean they don't need it. And humans, above all, that sense of agency is what empowers people more than anything.
Matt: Yeah, absolutely. And that's a really important guiding light as storytellers. And it makes life so much easier. Like this journey I've been on, we're up against so much but the more I learn about what works, the more I'm like, hang on, that just makes it easier. And then easier. So, you know, as an example, we share stories of things ordinary people are already doing to make a better world. And we let them narrate. They tell us, and we just feed on either directly in their words, with their footage or narrate, like parroting what they've told us, why it benefits them. As a storyteller. I'm like, oh my God, I don't have to tell anyone anything to do anymore. Like I just tell people what other people are doing.
Manda: You just have to find the people who are happy to talk to your microphone, which is slightly easier.
Matt: Yeah. And I have to understand the way to maximise the feeling of agency, but I get out of the way more and more, and that is actually really liberating. I don't have to solve the world's problems and then tell people how to solve them. I just have to find people already solving them and show them to people.
Manda: Right, right.
Matt: But that's just one example. There are so many ways that I think when we learn to be better at this, we can get further and faster and further and faster. These are stories people want to hear. There is increasingly a demand and space for them in people's lives, and we can get them out there.
Manda: We should probably finish there. But I have one last question, which is, you know this. Your team knows this. Are you seeing again, uptake in the mainstream media of people who are going to let go of 'if it bleeds, it leads' and, let's have another cop drama. Or let's have a confrontational show like Dragon's Den. Are they moving more towards let's create shows and things, anything that people can consume, that are more agentic?
Matt: The quick answer is they seem to be curious about it, yes. But I guess we've only just started. Like the podcast that we've released this January and only finished last week, it's a short run series one, six episodes. That is the first long form demonstration of the approach we've developed. And off the back of that, those conversations are starting to happen. And whilst there are some things people can't change, there are lots of things people can. Like people want to try new things within those worlds. And so yes, in broadcasters and in the press, they're the two places we're looking at at the moment. People are curious to try this. And that is as far as we've got.
Manda: Okay. Brilliant. That'll do. That door is beginning to open, that's pretty darn good. Right. Thank you so much. Is there anything else of the things that we talked about that you thought would be really good to bring to the audience?
Matt: I guess if people are interested in some of the theory behind this, then get in touch. Like we are looking at how we can share what we've learned so far. There's a huge part of me that doesn't want to tell people things that I haven't tested work. So there's lots of theory that I've mentioned some of the detail of. But if people do want to kind of learn the approach we're we've developed, we're looking at how we can share that. It does require some narration, which is why I've not gone into lots of detail in this episode, but we aren't trying to be closed about that. We want to share it. So if people do want to learn how what we're doing works and that we can share that, then get in touch.
Manda: I can feel a whole new segment of the thrutopian masterclass coming on. That'd be really useful, but that takes some organising and we're not going to do it tomorrow. But that would be really interesting because I think there are a lot of people who want to write thrutopian stuff and don't know what works and what doesn't. And you're working out some of the things that work, and then we can go out and write a whole stream of short stories and short fiction and poems and songs and little videos that go out on TikTok and, and test them and see what works.
Matt: Yes, absolutely. So that is where we're at. Like, we know some things that work. And if people want to find some things to try and we actively want to test things. We know some of the stuff and now we want to keep pushing forward. How do we try things? How do we A/B test things? On our channel or on other people's channels. So yeah, there's a whole world of experimentation that we can really build on from where we're at.
Manda: Right. If Cambridge Analytica and all of those people can do it ahead of Brexit, we can do it ahead of making the world a better place.
Matt: Absolutely.
Manda: All right. So how do people find you? And everything's in the show notes.
Matt: antidotelive.studio is the web address. So if you go there you can find most other stuff, but antidotelive on Instagram, antidote_live on TikTok. And Screw This, Let's Try Something Else is the name of our podcast, which is on Apple and Spotify. And then yeah, we've shared a survey. So if people listened to that podcast, we actively want to know, how did it make you feel? So much of the thinking behind this is there's this phrase I have in my head, which is 'pull me from the heart, don't push me from the head'. Like we are trying to appeal to people's emotions. And so telling us how you feel is what we want to know. Like this is fundamentally building a flow of emotion into the future we want to create. And how story as an engine for emotion can work in that space, to connect from where we're at to where we want to be. And so we want to know how it makes you feel.
Manda: Okay. And that link is in the show notes. So people go listen to Matt's podcast and then fill in the poll and we'll make the world a better place. Fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast.
Matt: Thank you, Manda, I really appreciate it.
Manda: There we go. That's it for another week. Enormous thanks to Matt for turning up and for recognising that we had managed to outline the problem without really going into the depths to which he is finding solutions. And I am realising that we need to do this more in the podcast too, to really begin to find the solutions as well as outlining the things that are not working in our current system. We do try to do this, but I think we can probably do it better. But in the meantime, please go and listen to Matt's podcast. I hadn't realised it had ended the season. So there you are, only six episodes, and they are completely compelling. And then please do fill in the poll because we need to know what works. From around the world, wherever you are, whatever demographic you fit into, we need to reach everybody with stories that are believable. And this, I think is one, and it certainly seems to be opening doors. So there we go. Head off to listen to other podcasts. I don't often send you elsewhere in the podcast first, but this time we are.
Manda: We will be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot. To Alan Lowells of Airtight Studios for the production, complex as it was this week. To Lou Mayor for the equally complex video on YouTube. To Anne Thomas for what I hope will be a relatively straightforward transcript. To Faith Tilleray for the website and the never simple tech, and more importantly, for the conversations that last us long into the night and keep us growing and evolving and imagining what we can do better. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else who wants to explore the stories of how we can make it through, then please do send them this link.
Manda: And just before we go, I want to remind you that we have another gathering coming up on the 22nd of March, 4:00pm till 8:00pm UK time. We'll still be on GMT at that point. Online on Zoom. It's called Finding Your Soul's Purpose, which I am sincerely hoping is self-explanatory. So if you want to explore that, come along and join us. And for those of you who sent emails on the solo podcast that I did in the wake of Honouring Fear as your Mentor, thank you. I really appreciate knowing what's landed and how it's landed. And even the fact that you had the time to write, I am enormously grateful. So there we go. Thanks to all of you for being there. We will see you next week. Take care and goodbye.