Accidental Gods

What happens when someone who has trained for years in the Cartesian model of science, of medicine in particular  - who has been trained to look at bodies the way a mechanic looks at a car, to take them apart and fix one thing and put it back together and get it back on the road… what happens when that person begins to question everything? This week's guest has done just this.  Of all the people w...

We all know we need to wake up, grow up, show up, but how do we actually do the inner work of growing into interdependence and then the outer work of healing our relationships and holding whole, generative spaces for all parts of ourselves, ourselves and each other, ourselves and the web of life? That's this week's question and our guest on this episode has written a book that absolutely answers t...

From the Hostage Nation paper:  " The first and most fundamental duty of a civilised state is the safety of its people.  Not just safety from overseas adversaries, or crime in the street. Economic security. A bill you can pay without going overdrawn. A house you can afford before your children have children of their own. A job that lasts long enough to plan around.  Britain guarantees none of thes...

What are the actual, practical shifts in our political economy that we could do tomorrow, that would not require extra legislation and could transform our society?  This question applies to us all, wherever we are in the world and while there are many economists looking forward to an idealised system some way down the line, very few people - politicians or economists - are exploring what we could...

Here is an Autumn Equinox Meditation to help set you up for the shift from the long days to the long nights. For those in the Southern Hemisphere, there's a Spring Equinox Meditation here. — About Accidental Gods— We offer three strands all rooted in the same soil, drawing from the same river: Accidental Gods , Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass Our next Open Gathering offered as...

"When we build, we first remove the soil and replace it with rubble, concrete and tarmac. When we grow, we exclude all life from the land bar the one crop we want. Where we belatedly recognise our ultimate dependence on nature, we confine it to intensive ‘nature only’ areas such as rewilding zones, field margins and beetle banks." Michael Taite 2026 How do we reconcile our human need for shelter,...

"I know that a good book can move its reader. Writing a book also moves the author. That is how it was for me anyway, not least when I wrote Doubt, Hope, Action. The writing process not only made me see the world and my own life with clearer and more realistic eyes. It also set me free." Uffe Elbaek, author of DOUBT, HOPE, ACTION We talk a lot on this podcast about the need for a new system: polit...

What happens when the Fires in our Hearts become tsunamis of feeling that take us beyond the narrow imaginal cul de sacs our culture has created, and throw our doors wide open to the wonder of the past and the absolutely unknowable, glorious, constantly surprising possibilities of the future we haven't built yet? This week's guest, Clare Murphy, is an Irish Storyweaver, a storyteller who consults...

“Climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals. But the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels. Investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure is moral and economic madness.”   Antonio Guterres, UN General Secretary We know that the current system is not fit for purpose. We know that we're hurtling to the edge of the 6th mass ext...

In the midst of the polycrisis - or the meta crisis, depending on your point of view - what is the key to the inner change each of us can make that will help us shift our perspective so that we can begin to create the total systemic change we need? In this solo podcast, Manda explores the Three Pillars of the Heart Mind laid out in the Accidental Gods modules - Gratitude, Compassion and Joyful Cur...

"The ecological movement is the largest movement in human history, yet it is fragmented because it is using the "tools of the master" for coordination, resource sharing, and conflict resolution...While many technologists have created social networking technology, they have not succeeded in creating good coordination because social networking tools do not address enough of the primary coordination...

"The Possitopian approach to future thinking expands the cone of the possible future, draws on geophysical realities and data, and also applies imagination to help you imagine future scenarios which are potentially worse or better than you might allow yourself to think."  So says this week's guest, Bridget McKenzie. Bridget is an artist and regenerative thought leader working to engage people with...

How do we make a peaceful transition to a wholly new system when the old one is sustained by those who profit most from the self-terminating zombie of predatory capitalism? Our guest this week has spent the past decade devising an answer to this most central of our questions. Remzi Bajrami is co-founder of Common Planet Foundation and creator of Creditism, which is his answer to our dilemma.  In h...

If you listen to this podcast then you care about people and planet and how we make it through this potential crunch point when all our crises mash together. But what if you knew you were not alone? What if you knew that almost everyone in our culture cares about this, they just don't know what to do about it? They don't have what this week's guest, Dr Liam Kavanagh, calls the 'Victory Stories' to...

The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed. William Gibson We need to talk about Big Tech, and particularly AI - it's ubiquitous, it's powerful, and currently, it's unconstrained and this is not an ideal combination if we live in the real world of mass extinction where human and more-than-human communities are being destroyed to serve the death cult of predatory capitalism at it...

  As we (and everyone else) predicted a whole month ago in episode #341 , Andy Burnham won the Makerfield by-election for Labour and is going to be the next Prime Minister. So now the question is one we ask on this podcast all the time - how can we bring power to those with wisdom and wisdom to those with power?  Specifically, how can he deliver a future that repairs the ruptures within our nation...

How do we create healthy people, intimately enmeshed in a healthy biosphere so that, together, we can co-create routes to a healthy future? Health is such an astonishingly polarised and polarising field: everyone has their triggers and there's not a whole lot of self-regulation when they've been activated. But there are some truly astonishing people out there who are fully on board with the concep...

How do we think about systemic change? Specifically, how do four podcasters who spend their entire lives thinking about this think about systemic change - what it is and how we get there? Tim Logan of Future Learning Design podcast convened a conversation with Nathalie Nahai of her eponymous In Conversation podcast, Amit Paul of the World of Wisdom podcast . So you can know them better, Amit Paul...

How do we encourage human flourishing? How, in fact, do we make the thriving of all 8 billion humans and the More than Human World central to all that we are and do?  It's a core tenet of this podcast, that if each of us were able to discover what's ours to do - and, more importantly, to be - and were supported in the inter-becoming that would arise from bringing the best of ourselves to the table...

"We are a collective of artists making art to bring forth the second renaissance. We are alchemists. We create a new world through our work. We are the bridge between the dying past and the future unborn. Art is an expression of our consciousness and humanity, this is our path of transformation.  Life as an art. … Our work is to create a space to be with all of it. To be with the joy, the darkness...

"I have come to believe something that sounds simple and is anything but: if Mothering were the axis around which we revolved, we would liberate the world. By Mothering I do not mean the biological act of giving birth, or the domestic role that has been used to confine us. I mean the practice – available to all people, in all bodies – of tending to life with full presence: protecting it, nourishin...

We're at a pivotal moment in world geopolitics. Increasingly the masks and the gloves are both off - but it's not a binary choice any more between two sets of suits in slightly different coloured ties: now we have the right showing its true colours  - and a chance for the progressive majority in this country to find its feet and lead us towards a genuinely thoughtful, emotionally literate, high-ba...

Good podcasts are part of an ecosystem of ideas that have the potential to change the world - to shift us into the new system we so badly need.  For a long time, Farmerama Radio has been at the leading, radical edge where food, farming and activism meet. In the early days, it was all about fostering the voices of grassroots, small-scale farming with monthly episodes featuring stories from the fiel...

Life has been evolving on our planet for the past 3.8 billion years.  The ecosystems that thrive now have had a lot of practice at getting things right - particularly the complex web of inter-relations that allows us all to flourish. And yet, we're on the edge of the sixth mass extinction largely because we humans have forgotten how to inter-relate and inter-be with the rest of the web of life. At...

What are Thrutopian stories and why do we need them?  How do they work? And most importantly, how can we craft them to land most effectively with ourselves and each other at scale and in time? In this solo episode, Manda walks us through the middle way between the dystopia of now, towards the utopia of a future in which humanity flourishes as an integral part of a thriving planet.  What could it a...