Accidental Gods

• Barefoot Economics in a world of Hobnailed Boots with storyteller Inze Aponte

  If we are to build systems that meet our real needs we have to first understand what those needs are and start growing the stuff that will allow us to thrive: good food from healthy soils, safe and supportive homes and communities, space to develop and express our creativity, opportunities to increase our capacity for co-operation and kindness.  As much as these, though, we need to understand what an economy is for - why it does what it does. And while we're all clear that the death cult of Predatory Capitalism exists to enrich the few at the expense of the rest of the living web, it's not always clear what a flourishing economy might look like.  So we're going to explore exactly this with our guest today. Inez Aponte is a self-described 'Dissident of Capitalism', she's an educator, storyteller, and consultant who's spent 15 years bridging mainstream economics with human-scale alternatives. Using the Human Scale Development Approach (Barefoot Economics), she helps professionals see the economic system itself, and imagine what comes next.Barefoot Economics (also known as Human Scale Development) was developed by Manfred Max-Neef and colleagues in Chile as a response to the predations of the colonial capital system. It reframes economic thinking away from endless wants and towards nine fundamental needs: Subsistence, Freedom, Participation, Understanding, Affection, Creation, Idleness, Protection and Identity.We are wealthy when our needs are satisfied, regardless of our income. This means we can also be poor in multiple ways, even when we have a ‘healthy’ bank balance.Inez has built this forward into a framework for the 21st century. Her 'Beautiful Economies Learning Lab' breaks people out of mainstream economic thinking to explore how we can build systems that meet real needs while healing ourselves, communities, and the Earth.So this is our deep dive.  Let's go. https://growinggoodlives.com/https://www.beautifuleconomies.com/https://library.uniteddiversity.coop/Money_and_Economics/The_Future_of_Money-Bernard_Lietaer.pdfWhat we offer: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass If you'd like to join our next Open Gathering offered by our Accidental Gods Programme it's  'Dreaming Your Year Awake' (you don't have to be a member) on Sunday 4th January 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are hereIf you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life. If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here. If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here

  --------  

  1:11:15

  --------

  1:11:15
• Roots to Health - building Food Resilience at all Scales with Daphne du Cros of the Shropshire Good Food Partnership

  We all know by now that plants grown in living, thriving, life-filled soil, give us living, thriving, life-filled food... but the steps to getting there in the face of a multinational industry devoted to toxic, nutritionally empty, addictive - and highly profitable - ultra-processed 'food-like substances' are harder to see.  This week's guest, Daphne du Cros, spends her life deep in the mycelial networks of food and farming systems, bringing both into genuinely regenerative balance. Daphne is a food policy researcher, educator, and farmer. She holds a PhD in Food Policy at the Centre for Food Policy at City St. George's University of London, and a Master's in Environmental Science and Management from Toronto Metropolitan University in Canada. She is Director and Coordinator at Shropshire Good Food Partnership; Director at Light Foot Enterprises; Project Lead at Food Forward BC (where BC stands for Bishop's Castle, not British Columbia or any of the other potential options) -   and she's co-owner of Little Woodbatch CIC, a farm just outside BC that hosts the Bishop's Castle Community Seed Bank. She is the author of the town's Community Food Resilience Strategy - the only such policy in Shropshire.Daphne and I are relatively near neighbours, we have swapped seeds - her more than me - and share ideas about systems thinking and how we might evolve our world. She's deeply involved at every level from actual growing up to governmental meetings trying to get those in power to find some wisdom when it comes to food resilience, food security and all the other things we say as we try to get them to move away from the corruption innate in our system towards something that actually works in service to life. Daphne on LinkedIn https://uk.linkedin.com/in/daphne-du-cros-743128332Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/littlewoodbatch/ Shropshire Good Food Partnership:  https://www.shropshiregoodfood.org/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shropshiregoodfood/ Soil Ed UK: https://www.instagram.com/soil_ed_uk/  Gaia Foundation Seed Sovereignty Network: https://www.seedsovereignty.info/Serving the Public https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/serving-the-public-the-good-food-revolution-in-schools-hospitals-and-prisons-kevin-morgan/7657661?ean=9781526180469&next=tCivil Food Resilience Report: https://nationalpreparednesscommission.uk/publications/just-in-case-7-steps-to-narrow-the-uk-civil-food-resilience-gap/  Little Woodbatch Farm https://www.littlewoodbatch.co.uk/What we offer: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass If you'd like to join our next Open Gathering offered by our Accidental Gods Programme it's  'Dreaming Your Year Awake' (you don't have to be a member) on Sunday 4th January 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are hereIf you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life. If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here. If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here

  --------  

  1:03:04

  --------

  1:03:04
• Dance of the Spiritual Warrior: Balancing Love and Power with Jamie Bristow

  What does it mean to (re)orient our entire culture around the power of love?  To answer this, we have to understand the nature of love and of power and how both of these have many meanings in our culture, some of them essential to moving forward - and some of them so toxic they turn the entire concept into a poisoned cue. This week's guest is friend of the podcast, Jamie Bristow. We spoke to him back in episode #274, recorded at the start of this year, and there, we consider what it was to be a Spiritual Warrior in our times - a concept to which Jamie has given the past 16 years of his life. Jamie is someone who lives and breathes at the intersection between spirituality - specifically Buddhism - and international policy in the realm of what is still called sustainability but which must, now, be shifting towards systemic change. For eight years, he was clerk to the UK’s All Party Parliamentary Group on Mindfulness and director of the associated policy institute, the Mindfulness Initiative, where he helped to introduce mindfulness to a number of other parliaments around the world. In 2023, he joined the Inner Development Goals team to lead on public narrative and policy development, emphasising the inner skills and qualities needed for a sustainable transition. His work includes influential reports such as Reconnection: Meeting the Climate Crisis Inside Out and The System Within: Addressing the inner dimension of sustainability and systems transformation. He is an associate of Life Itself, The Climate Majority Project, Mind & Life Institute and Bangor University and now is working with Professor Rebecca Henderson on an initiative which is currently called the ReWeaving Project and it's in this area that we focussed our attention. There are many ways these conversations go. Often, I'm exploring a particular body of work and am asking questions to which, broadly, I have a sense of the answer - 'tell me about [x] that is squarely in your field'.  Sometimes, though, I'm talking with someone I know well enough, and where we share enough of a common grounding, that I can ask questions to which I don't know the answer. Where we can find the places where our Theories of Change meet but perhaps don't overlap, and explore the fertile, liminal spaces of uncertainty.  Jamie is one of these people and this was one of those conversations - where we explored love and power and game theory and how we get from where we are, through a nexus of power that is arrayed firmly around the Dark Triad of Narcissism, Psychopathy and Sadism (and I know that's slightly different to other Dark Triads that have Raw Cunning as the third one and sadism as an afterthought, but I think the cunning is in there with Psychopathy and the Sadism is, as we're seeing around the world, an essential part of the performative power-over that the wounded egos need to tell themselves they're safe). Anyway - we explored all the things that matter - and still only scratched the surface. So Jamie will definitely be coming back for another conversation, but in the meantime, here we are, delving deep into what it is to be human, and to be striving for emergence into a new, generative, kin-centric and flourishing system at this moment of total transformation. LinksRebecca Henderson https://rebeccahenderson.com/Jamie’s website Jamie’s substack Jamie on LinkedIn Mindfulness Initiative Mindfulness initiativeUN IDG Inner Development GoalsLife Guild lifeguild.earthJamie in Episode #274 https://accidentalgods.life/becoming-spiritual-warriors-exploring-a-politics-of-radical-compassion-with-jamie-bristow/What we offer: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass If you'd like to join our next Open Gathering offered by our Accidental Gods Programme it's  'Dreaming Your Year Awake' (you don't have to be a member) on Sunday 4th January 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are hereIf you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life. If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here. If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here

  --------  

  1:27:00

  --------

  1:27:00
• The Magic of Darkness: learning to love life in the night with author Leigh Ann Henion

  Do you love the dark?  Do you yearn for sunset and the amber glow of a fire with the night growing deeper, more inspiring all around you?  Most of us don't - though our ancestors through all of history have lived by firelight, moonlight, starlight... until the modern era of light at the flick of a switch.  But there's a world out there of sheer, unadulterated magic that is only revealed when we put aside the lights and the phones and the torches and step out into the night  - as this week's guest has done. Leigh Ann Henion is the New York Times bestselling author of Night Magic: Adventures Among Glowworms, Moon Gardens, and Other Marvels of the Dark and Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer’s Search for Wonder in the Natural World. Her writing has appeared in Smithsonian, National Geographic, The Washington Post, Backpacker, The American Scholar, and a variety of other publications. She is a former Alicia Patterson Fellow, and her work has been supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Henion lives in Boone, North Carolina.  Wall Street Journal says of this book. "Lovely…truly inspired…and very clever…An appreciation of nature’s nocturnal organisms can help us reset our relationship with the night…That’s the gift of Night Magic: It may make you think differently about the night."Leigh Ann's Website https://leighannhenion.com/Night Magic book (UK): https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/night-magic-leigh-ann-henion/7832118What we offer: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass If you'd like to join our next Open Gathering offered by our Accidental Gods Programme it's  'Dreaming Your Year Awake' (you don't have to be a member) on Sunday 4th January 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are hereIf you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life. If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here. If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here

  --------  

  1:06:31

  --------

  1:06:31
• Starting in the Ruins: Of Lions and Games with Crypto-Advocate and Changemaker Andrea Leiter

  This week's guest, Andrea Leiter, is one of those polymaths who brings not just breadth, but astonishing depth to the work of bridging the worlds of technology, biodiversity and international law; bringing them together in service of a new way of being built from the ruins of collapse. Andrea works at the intersection of law, digital transformation, and economic innovation. Director of Amsterdam Center for International Law, she's deeply aware of, and involved in, Transnational Law, Digital Economies & Institutional Innovation, all things crypto - as well as being a Social Justice Entrepreneur. She holds a jointly awarded PhD in Law from the University of Melbourne and the University of Vienna, where her dissertation examined the historical foundations of international investment law and the legal architectures of global capital. Her resulting manuscript titled ‘Making the World Safe for Investment: The Protection of Foreign Property 1922-1959’ was published with Cambridge University Press. She is a junior faculty member at the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School. As legal scholar and strategist, her expertise lies in transnational law, private ordering, the governance of digital economies, and the design of new institutional forms for just and sustainable futures.  I came across her when she was a guest on the Blockchain Socialist podcast - one of my must-listens - and heard that she was co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of the Sovereign Nature Initiative (SNI), a venture which aimed to 'merge nature with digital ecosystems and introduce online communities to ecological stewardship whilst developing novel funding mechanisms for vital biodiversity protection and restoration'.  you'll hear more about this in the conversation that follows, but I want to emphasise that the SNI team designed and implemented the Decentralised Ecological Economics Protocol (DEEP), which demonstrated how blockchain infrastructure can serve biodiversity goals. Over two years, SNI developed and distributed more than one million digital collectibles, activating new models of ecological value creation.Currently, Andrea leads a Dutch Research Council-funded VENI project on Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) and their potential to reshape economic governance from below. She also serves as Acting Director of Research at the Amsterdam Center for International Law, where she guides strategic research planning and foster interdisciplinary collaboration. She also co-developed and launched an Advanced LLM in Technology Governance with a public purpose orientation, an effort that included curriculum design, funding acquisition, and stakeholder engagement.One of Andrea's superpowers is the ability to take complex concepts and make them comprehensible to ordinary people: blockchain, cryptocurrency, the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum, the potential for technology to be used to heal as well as the many ways it is already being used to harm, so we spent the first half of our conversation exploring the baselines of where we are and what's happening in the world. I refer to Andrea's blog post, 'Who gets to bet on the future?' which first appeared on her Transformative Private Law Blog and is linked in the show notes. She mentioned several books and I've linked those in the show notes too, because they were new to me, and completely mind blowing.  I found ExoCapitalism as a pdf where you decide what you pay - this is the value of small presses that actually get what their books are discussing - and Protocols for Post Capitalist Expression is open source - you can read it and engage in the process with others in the Economic Space Agency. Links Sovereign Nature Initiative https://sovereignnature.com/Andrea on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrea-leiter/Amsterdam Centre for Intenational Law https://acil.uva.nl/VENI project https://www.nwo.nl/en/researchprogrammes/nwo-talent-programme/projects-veniTransformative Private Law Blog "Who gets to bet on the future?" https://transformativeprivatelaw.com/who-gets-to-bet-on-the-future/Andrea on Blockchain Socialist Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-blockchain-socialist/id1501607045?i=1000660699306Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism by Elizabeth A. Povinelli https://dukeupress.edu/between-gaia-and-groundExoCapitalism: Economies with Absolutely No Limits by Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo https://goodpress.co.uk/products/exocapitalism-economies-with-absolutely-no-limits-by-marek-poliks-roberto-alonso-trilloPROTOCOLS FOR POST CAPITALIST EXPRESSION by Dick Bryan, Jorge López & Akseli Virtanen https://postcapitalist.agency/What we offer: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass If you'd like to join our next Open Gathering offered by our Accidental Gods Programme it's  'Dreaming Your Year Awake' (you don't have to be a member) on Sunday 4th January 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are hereIf you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life. If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here. If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here

  --------  

  1:29:28

  --------

  1:29:28

Weitere Religion und Spiritualität Podcasts

Trending Religion und Spiritualität Podcasts

Über Accidental Gods