Homeward Bound (including The Great Humbling)

Welcome back to The Great Humbling with Dougald Hine and Ed Gillespie . It’s been a while. And there’s… a lot happening in the world. When the two of us sat down a couple of weeks ago to record a new episode, it was developments in UK politics that were on the top of our minds – and particularly the Gorton and Denton by-election, where Green Party candidate Hannah “the plumber” Spencer achieved a...

After a long summer of counselling to recover from the sight of Sean Connery’s red mankini , Ed and Dougald are reunited to talk about green populism, why the world isn’t a giant Amazon store, hospicing dance music and the political language of love. (Or was that the love language of politics?) Shownotes What have we been up to? Ed’s been thinking about “bystander leadership” : how interventions b...

In our first episode of 2025, we get inspired by Anthony Galluzzo ’s Against the Vortex to watch the cult 1974 movie Zardoz , featuring Sean Connery in what appears to be a prototype for the mankini. In Galluzzo’s book, Zardoz features as a surprisingly prescient story for thinking about techno-utopias (or dystopias), degrowth and deceleration in the 21st century, as well as bringing into view an...

This episode is the podcast version of a live event a few weeks ago , hosted by the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective, where I joined Vanessa Andreotti – who some of you will know as Vanessa Machado de Oliveira – to wonder about what she is up to with AI. To say it came as a surprise when Vanessa mentioned that she had co-written a book with an AI bot called Aiden Cinnamon Tea… well,...

As Ed says at the end of our final episode of 2024, “Have yourself a mythic little Christmas!” We close the year with a wandering conversation about folklore, myth, modernity as being “away with the fairies” and hopefully bringing back something of worth from the journey. Show Notes * Ed’s new book of poetry, The Father’s Road , is available now through Etsy. * Roger Deakin, Wildwood: A Journey Th...

My guest in this episode is Jay Cousins , an inventor, recovering entrepreneur and carrier of questions, an old friend from my Sheffield days, who has been based for the past ten years or so in Dahab, Egypt. This conversation came about because Jay wrote to me with a set of thoughts that build on the unfinished list of “Four Tasks for a Time of Endings” from the closing pages of At Work in the Rui...

In this episode, we chew on a question that’s been on Dougald’s mind since a recent event in London, where Brian Eno wondered what is the difference between an analysis which says we cannot save or make sustainable the trajectories of industrial modernity and technological progress, and an accelerationist position which says we need to bring about collapse in order to release the possibilities to...

In this episode of Homeward Bound, I’m talking to Isabelle Drury , author of the Substack Finding Sanity . I wanted to talk to Isabelle because of a post she wrote back in July, describing a moment in her relationship, shaped by the way she had been dwelling on thoughts of climate catastrophe and societal collapse: I was discussing with my partner what our plans were for the next few years of our...

Remember, remember, the 5th of November, Gunpowder, treason and plot. I see no reason Why gunpowder treason Should ever be forgot. This episode starts with the traditional nursery rhyme commemorating the events of 5 November, 1605, when Catholic plotters attempted to blow up the British parliament. While we’re on the theme of memory and maps, a reminder that Dougald’s new online series, Pockets, P...

“Maybe what we’re looking for is fewer robot vacuum cleaners and more compost toilets.” We stumble into a new series of The Great Humbling with an episode that revolves around s**t and technology. This is also our first video episode, so you can watch our beardy faces on Substack or YouTube. Shownotes * Ed’s been reading The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey, alongside How to Blow Up a Pipeline b...

Midway through last month’s North American tour, the filmmaker Katie Teague sat me down to record an interview. Sometimes an interview happens at just the right moment, when all the work you’re carrying is on the top of your tongue. That’s what happened here – so with Katie’s permission, we’re releasing an audio version of her edit of what I told her that morning. The result is more or less a solo...

In this episode, my guest is Dr Ashley Colby for a joint episode with her Doomer Optimism podcast . Ashley is hosting a weekend retreat around my work in Chicago as part of next month’s North American tour. * Read more & register for the Chicago Retreat: https://bit.ly/dougald-retreat * The rest of the American tour: https://dougald.nu/america/ Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! Subscribe for free...

As the fifth season of The Great Humbling came to an end, we recognised that what we’ve been doing is letting you listen in on a conversation that we would want to have anyway – and this inspired us to expand the podcast, to bring you overheard conversations with other friends, co-conspirators and people who get us thinking. We’re calling this Homeward Bound, a title that started off as the name o...

The end of this fifth series of The Great Humbling finds us looking back over the loose ends from earlier episodes, exploring the wider field of “Humility Studies” and asking who exactly we think we’re talking to, anyway? We start with Ed reporting back from The Fête of Britain , the inaugural festival of the Hard Art collective, which took place in Manchester last week, where he found himself hos...

In our latest episode, Ed and Dougald compare notes on the experience of being founders – or co-founders – of organisations. What did we learn along the way? And what do humble forms of leadership look like? We were recording on Shrove Tuesday, so the episode kicks off with a discussion of seasonal customs, including the Swedish semla … On a recent Danish tour, Dougald returned to teach at the Kao...

This is the episode where we finally left Skype, which we’ve for some reason been using to record these conversations for four and a half series. Switching off the lights as we go, Ed wonders about other examples of old systems and technologies that are still in use, such as Windows Submarine. Dougald reports back on his trip to Gothenburg – and makes an appeal for help in locating a copy of Helen...

Here's a rundown of references from this episode... Leah Rampy, Earth & Soul: Reconnecting Amid Climate Chaos Bill Drummond, 45 David Mitchell, Unruly   David Graeber & David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything Jay LeSoleil, 'Green' Elites vs Green Left Populism Avtryck/Imprint – a documentary from the Swedish Transition Towns movement Chris Smaje (from 2016), 'Why I'm still a populist despite Donald...

Our final episode of 2023 finds Dougald already in his Christmas jumper, as the tiredness of a busy year catches up with the pair of us.  Ed opens a window on Sophie Howarth’s Lighting the Dark: An Advent Calendar . We share the Benjamin Zephaniah poems that have been going round in our heads, since the news of his death was announced, ‘To Do Wid Me’ and ‘Rong Radio Station’ and ‘Luv Song’ . Ed’s...

We take a different route into our conversation this time around, in what turns out to be the first in a two-parter woven around John Higgs’s book, The KLF: Chaos, Magic & the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds , which Ed has been reading. It’s the kind of book that detonates in the mind, sparking a million connections. First, though, we start out talking about humbling moments, great and small, pro...

We recorded this episode  on Dougald’s birthday – and Ed starts with the image of him wearing Anna’s family’s Coyote coat , triggering unsettling flashbacks to the QAnon shaman, who is apparently now running for Congress. Welcome to the dark weirdness of 2023. Ed quotes from Paul Mason’s ‘Gaza: Time for Restraint’ , a story brought to our attention by listener Richard Brophy, about a conversation...

Welcome back to Season 5 of The Great Humbling! Here are some show notes... The Regrowing a Living Culture series at a school called HOME starts on 7 & 8 November. Ed has been reading Dougie Strang’s book, The Bone Cave . Dougald mentions the cluster of authors who were part of the first decade of Dark Mountain who are stepping out with books of their own, finding their voice and getting the atten...

In February this year, we took The Great Humbling into a new format, a live conversation on stage at Norwich Arts Centre as part of the UK tour that Dougald made to launch his book, At Work in the Ruins . It's taken us rather a long time to get the recording edited, but here it is at last. For this live show, Ed and Dougald were joined by two special guests. Charlotte Du Cann is a writer, editor,...

  We reach the end of Season 4 of The Great Humbling, though Ed and Dougald start the show with an invitation to a one-off live recording of a special episode with guests Rupert Read and Charlotte Du Cann for those who can join us in Norwich on 20 February . As always, we start off by talking about what we've been reading, listening to, watching, imbibing, or otherwise taking on board in ways that...

  So, here's what happened – after a long break, we sat down in early October to record the seventh episode of this series, but life got in the way and by the time we got around to editing it six weeks later, the world had changed so much that it felt like a historical document. Britain has (yet) another prime minister, Sweden has a government over which the far-right have an unprecedented influen...

  After twenty-nine episodes recorded through screens and cameras, Ed and Dougald find themselves meeting for the first time and sit down for a conversation beside the mill pond in Loddon, in the garden of the Mill of Impermanence. We hear the unlikely tale of how Dougald found Ed’s fiftieth birthday present, a copy of Uriah Heep’s fifth album, The Magician’s Birthday , while en route to a holiday...