Peripheral Thinking

Richard Wain decided to become a mathematician instead of a rock 'n roll star. He made this decision on a whim with only a month or two of preparation, because it would bring him closer to his now wife. Later, he and his wife left behind stable jobs with guaranteed contracts. Richard became a primary school teacher before setting up a business with previous guest Marcus Link. These caterpillar-to-...

“Once you start looking under the lid of climate change, it's hard to deny what you've seen”. Dan Burgess discovered this in 2006, and it’s informed his work ever since. Dan is an activist and researcher who has been involved in the environmental and ecological movement for close to 20 years. His Spaceship Earth podcast explores our relationship with the living, more-than-human world, and how we c...

Casper ter Kuile went into divinity school as a gay atheist, and emerged with a rich spiritual life that is not anchored in a specific religious tradition. Casper is an author, podcaster and community leader who’s interested in the future of communion and religion and is passionate about understanding how people make meaning, experience beauty, and form relationships, in a time when traditional in...

Marcus Link, co-founder of New Foundation Farms and the Holos Project, speaks with Ben about his personal journey towards self-discovery and expression. Marcus shares his experience of learning to let go of the "doer" mentality and embracing being present and authentic in all aspects of life, even in uncomfortable situations like networking or business contexts. He discusses his transformative exp...

Danny didn’t fit in as a child. Nowadays he might be considered neurodivergent, but his parents never tried to change or “fix” him. He spent much of his youth with the nomadic Sawad people near Galilee. For Danny, the desert represents oneness on a cellular level – being a part of nature, not separate from it. But forty years spent in the desert came with a dramatic toll on Dany’s health, which to...

For community architect Claire Perry-Louise, the often overused and somewhat clichéd word “community” means connecting people through shared experiences, shared values, or shared identity. Claire doesn’t just advise others how to create community, she hosts her own. She founded Like Hearted Leaders so she and the people she’d met through a Do Lectures course could continue their conversations. Now...

Carol is a visionary and guiding light, seeding, teaching (although she'd challenge the idea!), pointing to genuinely regenerative thinking in the world. She is an author, activist and entrepreneur who has been living and learning her work for decades. Her questions and perspective will help you think about your work and place in the world in a completely different light. In her conversation with...

We believe that small is mighty, small is power. Our money, support and energy goes to David over Goliath every time... And there are few more inspiring David's, so to speak, than Ruth, co-founder of HiSBE, a plucky, fighting, challenger super market in Brighton and Worthing, UK. Our food system is broken- which includes much of how it's produced and where it's sold. Supermarkets have a crunch on...

This podcast is a home for the creative pioneer, the friendly problem child. Like Dashal Beevers. Dash left school at 13. Reading and writing not his friends. Constraint is the mother of all invention, said nobody ever, but maybe should have. Needing to create his own work and opportunity, Dash's work journey oozes creativity and entrepreneurial wizardry (and chips and dips). As yours can too (may...

Episode description Who doesn’t want a little peace and calm? In this episode of Peripheral Thinking, I speak to Martin Alyward. Martin is a long established Buddhist meditation teacher - my teacher, as it happens. As humans, we create drama - our needy, greedy, crazy, lazy minds need no invitation. We obsess about what we did or didn’t say, did or didn’t do. We wander around dreaming, lost in tho...

This week on Peripheral Thinking, I speak to George Thompson, film maker, teacher and wise Daoist explorer. Daoism was born in a time of war: in China’s Warring States period. What role for this ancient philosophy today? Is it a fast track to passively doing nothing or super power lending you strength, resilience and wise perspective? I know where my toast is buttered. Why not have a listen and le...

Marcus is an entrepreneur, researcher and writer, Chief Operating Officer of New Foundation Farms, a UK agri-food enterprise on a mission to disrupt the entire ‘farm to fork’ journey: yep, that’s breaking and remaking everything that’s wrong and harmful about how you get your food. In this episode, we talk regenerative business - work which creates life not destroys it - the travails of entreprene...

The decisions we make today are based on the world we think we’ll have tomorrow. But the world is changing so rapidly that the decisions we made even three weeks ago bear little relevance to today. In his discussion with Ben, Graham Boyd sets out the dangers of running a business in isolation, rather than in concert with others, and how success doesn’t have to be a zero sum game. Further reading R...

I enjoyed this conversation. Professor Sam North is a teacher and writer. In his words, he’s “developing a cross-disciplinary bite of education that has three components: religious stories as networks of growth and cooperation (Theology and Religion), mycelial (fungal) networks as prosecutors of growth and cooperation (Biology) and social networks as the new 'hearth' of identity and storytelling,...

What wisdom can Buddhism provide in today’s world? That’s the subject of Buddhist Economics, by UC Berkeley Professor of Economics, Clair Brown. Professor Brown’s book opens with three Buddhist teachings: that people are caring, people are interdependent with people and nature, and all life is impermanent. Clair believes that if we take those three basic assumptions, we can turn free market econom...

As an accountant and a “performance measurement guy”, Mark Anielski understands global economics and GDP, but is interested in how we measure happiness and wellbeing as opposed to measuring output in financial terms. In his conversation with Ben, he discusses The difficulty we all have in understanding where money actually comes from How money is created  ex nihilo  (”out of nothing”), a...

Jeremy Lent has been rightly described by Guardian journalist George Monbiot as “one of the greatest thinkers of our age”. His recent book, “The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom To Find Our Place In The Universe” is a richly researched and inspiring guide / call to arms, charting a route through and beyond the myriad ecological, social, environmental crises defining our t...