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How will they look in hindsight, these strange times we are living through? Is this a midlife crisis on humanity's road to the Star Trek future – or the point at which that story of the future unravelled and we came to see how much it had left out? What if our current crises are neither an obstacle to be overcome, nor the end of the world, but a necessary humbling? These are the kind of questions which we set out to explore in The Great Humbling. We hope you'll join us and let us know what y ...
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The Examined Life podcast explores the questions we should be asking ourselves with a range of leading thinkers. Each episode features a different interview, and appeals to those interested in wisdom, personal development, and what it might mean to live a good life. Topics vary from discussing the role of dopamine mining and status anxiety, to exploring the science of awe and attention.
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“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 E…
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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 h…
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This is a distilled version of last year's conversation with the writer Oliver Burkeman. In it, you'll hear Oliver talk about our troubled relationship with time and how to more fully inhabit it. Oliver believes our obsession with productivity and efficiency is no route to happiness, quite the opposite. In order to inhabit time more fully, we need …
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Phoebe Tickell is a biologist, systems thinker, and 'imagination activist'. Phoebe works across multiple contexts applying a complexity and systems thinking lens and engaging people in how to think differently about the planet and its problems. In 2020 Phoebe created 'Moral Imaginations', which researches and implements collective imagination exerc…
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Rebekah Berndt, writer, spiritual director and psychic reader, talks to us from Charleston, South Carolina about her love of weird and magical bookshops, their often eccentric owners, how she cares for her books and connects to their past owners through their notes and markings in the books. More on Rebekah’s Substack The Unfolding. (WPKN, Septembe…
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Steve Wick, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, journalist, formerly of Newsday and more recently editor of the Suffolk Times, talks about his earlier work, two new upcoming books, the importance of local journalism and emphasizes that, “if you want to get the present right, you have to get the past right” which means, he says, uncovering the […] The po…
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This episode features a conversation with Sara Jolena Wolcott, Josh Schrei, and Andrew Dunn about history and technology. It was originally part of the Embodied Ethics in The Age of A.I. course offered by the School of Wise Innovation. Links: Andrew Murray Dunn Andrewmurraydunn.com Substack Medium X Instagram Facebook Josh Schrei The Emerald Podcas…
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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/ Than…
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What do we lack when we lack religion? In this episode Alex Evans explores the role that religion has historically played in both collective and individual life, and the shape it leaves behind when it disappears. The stories that we locate ourselves within and the rituals they enshrine, are formative in the way we attend to the world. Religion has …
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Scottish writer, Academic, and Spiritual Activist Alastair McIntosh sits down with Sara Jolena Wolcott to talk about his work on land reform, waterways and housing; the importance of Community Gardens, and the current state of America amidst the coming US election. This includes reflections from the island from which Donald Trump's maternal family …
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Dr Jill Bolte-Taylor was a neuroanatomist at Harvard when she suffered a severe stroke on the left hemisphere of her brain. It was an experience which profoundly changed her life, and opened her up to the agency we all have in choosing our attention. She explores this in her TED talk back in 2008, which became one of the most popular TED talks ever…
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Nick Duffell, noted psychotherapist and author calls us from London to speak about the psychological impact of elite British boarding schools on not only the young mostly boy boarders, but on adult ex-boarders, their families and, as ”wounded leaders” on the nation itself. (WPKN July 10, 2024) More about Nick and boarding school syndrome in psychot…
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Show links: Todd's website - https://toddkashdan.com/ Todd's Substack - https://toddkashdan.substack.com/ Kenny's Substack - https://positivelymaladjusted.substack.com/ Examined Life youtube channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpKC6L_IJ2zvL6E6M8Ly1AA What if the most influential voices in our society are those often left unheard? In this epi…
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Iain McGilchrist is a rare polymath who draws on his background in literature, philosophy, medicine and the sciences to make a profound argument that the kind of attention we pay to the world determines not only the kind of people we become, but also the world we create. He argues that the brains left hemisphere has a disenchanted and mechanical vi…
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Jeff Halper is an Israeli-American anthropologist, author, lecturer, and political activist has lived in Israel since 1973. He is the Director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions and a co-founder of The One Democratic State Campaign. A Jewish Israeli, Jeff speak to us from Jerusalem about Israel’s entrenched use of humiliation to con…
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As AI evolves and replaces different human functions, it raises questions about what it is that makes us distinctively human, and whether that distinctiveness can and should be programmed into AI. This is a question that Dr Eve Poole has thought and written a great deal about. Her recent book Robot Souls takes this question seriously, and explores …
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Are you optimistic about the future? Do you think we're heading in the right direction as a species? If not, you're in good company. In this episode the writer and speaker Dougald Hine explores what's gone wrong with 'modernity', and what it might mean to think generative thoughts about the future. Dougald speaks with wisdom and clarity about our c…
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Author, social entrepreneur and the co-founder of a School Called HOME and The Dark Mountain Project - and a long time friend - Dougald Hine sits down with Sara Jolena Wolcott to talk about (adult) education, which leads to so many other things, because education is connected to so many things. 1:27 - Introduction to Dougald Hine 5:04 - When you kn…
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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 Home…
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Dr. Yara Asi, author of How War Kills; The Overlooked Threats to our Health (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024) and New York Times guest essay, is assistant professor at the University of Central Florida, where she studies physical and mental health in conflict-affected and fragile populations. A Palestinian born in the occupied West Bank town […
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In this episode the writer and podcaster Elizabeth Oldfield explores the question ‘who is it that I want to be becoming?’ We discuss the pernicious forces that are shaping us, and what it means to be intentional about structuring our time attention around those practices that can deepen and shape our character.…
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How can we find meaning in life? In this episode we are joined by the celebrated psychologist Dacher Keltner where we explore where meaning comes from, and how the emotion of awe can help us find it. Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology at UCLA Berkley, where he teaches and researches in the area of positive psychology, and researches the em…
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Peacemaker, business consultant, and advisor Maija West joins us to talk about her former work as co-founding the Healing and Reconciliation Institute and her journey in honoring the land. 1:34 - Introduction to Maija West and her work at Healing and Reconciliation Institute 23:58 - Tools that help Majia in her work as a facilitator and peacemaker.…
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John Christian Phifer is executive director of Larkspur Conservation and president of the Conservation Burial Alliance. Speaking to us from Tennessee, he describes how, after 15 years in the funeral industry, he transformed his focus to natural burial practices and the protection and stewardship of land through conservation burial. (WPKN, April 10,…
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In this special easter episode, we look at the curious intersections of a Goddess of the Dawn, the turning point of the Christian calendar and cosmovision, and the way in which time itself was reconceptualized in early medieval Europe, with reverberations and implications for today. This is an audio essay, not a conversation, and it picks up on thr…
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Kimberly Coburn, writer, maker, founder of The Homestead Atlanta and leader in a movement seeking to remedy today’s “skills amnesia” by reclaiming pre-industrialization crafts and skills–such as fermentation–to support life in what many believe is widespread systems collapse or unravelling of the world as we have known it. (First broadcast on WPKN,…
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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…
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Some would question the wisdom, or the right, of someone like me--White, Mennonite, Christian--writing about the historic practices of torture among Indigenous cultures on Turtle Island. Hopefully, the work I have been doing on this podcast and in my book so far has helped me pull enough of the log out of my own eye that I can at least look at the …
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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 …
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Michelle Berry Lane, poet, writer and former science teacher, describes how human creatures in these times of late-stage capitalism and modernity have separated from and forgotten their relationship to the earth and all its other creatures. Citing Ivan Illich among others, she shows us how conviviality and mutuality can help use re-member ourselves…
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Osprey Oreille Lake talks about her vast work at WECAN International alongside many Indigenous leaders and her newly released book The Story is in Our Bones: How Worldviews and Climate Justice Can Remake a World in Crisis. 0:26 - Introduction to Osprey and WECAN International 4:28 - How did you learn how to listen? 7:32 - Story that opened Osprey’s…
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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 ma…
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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 …
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Join us on a journey in and around and through the relationship between time and place. We cover circular calendars, the nature of time, progress, colonization, and consider the question, "What would a liturgical calendar for a regenerative economy look like?" We hear a lot about how people are separated from place. Much less discussed is how separ…
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This is a special summary episode with reflection points from 2023 to take forward into the year ahead. The episode pulls together one key idea from each conversation, accompanied by some thoughts on why I found it particularly helpful and interesting. In this episode you will hear extracts from Oliver Burkeman, Anna Lembke, Lisa Miller, Tim Ingold…
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Maya Lasker-Wallfisch Maya Lasker Wallfisch, London-based psychoanalytic psychologist and author talks to us in both personal and professional terms about the psychology of trans-generational transmission of trauma. The daughter of a Holocaust survivor, Maya bears the “wounds of history,” inheriting experiences she has not lived through herself. Sh…
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A horse-and-buggy Mennonite community has all of its children apprehended by agents of the state because of the use of corporal punishment in the community. What does this story expose about how we think about the legitimate use of force in our modern world? Girard and Illich offer some insight on the odd role of the Gospel in reshaping everything …
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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’…
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Social thinker, writer and speaker Dougald Hine talks about his new book At Work in the Ruins, Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics and All the Other Emergencies. Explaining why he believes the world as we know it is coming to an end, he proposes how we might live […] The post Dougald Hine: At Work in the Ruins appear…
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For our fourth and final conversation, around and beyond the legacy of Ivan Illich, we hear reflections and discussion from Katherine Bubel and Michelle Berry Lane before moving into an extended open discussion. Katherine discusses Illich's mythopoetics of Prometheus, Epimetheus, and Pandora, the latter a patriarchally diminished version of the Ear…
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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 tal…
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Gustavo Esteva coined the slogan "One No, Many Yeses" to communicate the way Illich's sense of "the vernacular" offers many small and winding exits off of the one big road of industrial "progress" that tries to gather up the whole globe into one great machine, one overriding system. In this conversation, Dougald Hine, Sam Ewell and friends colour i…
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Indigenous poet, scholar, musician, and community organizer Dr. Lyla June Johnston joins Sara Jolena to share about her dissertation, "Architects of abundance: indigenous regenerative food and land management systems and the excavation of hidden history". 1:33 - Introducing Dr. Lyla June 3:38 - Introducing Lyla's PhD dissertation - Architects of ab…
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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…
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Christian mission has gotten a bad name in our time, for good reason. Illich talked about the razor's edge walked by the missionary, between violating the world into which one has been sent (he used the word raping, actually) and betraying one's spiritual inheritance. Some have read Illich as anti-mission. In this conversation, both David Cayley an…
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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 the…
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Welcome to chapter 2 of Life at the End of Us Versus Them. This is where I give an introduction to the thought of Ivan Illich's sense of the way Christianity was perverted when it sought to impose the Gospel of Christ through state power and institutional administration. I could think of no clearer case example than the Indian Residential Schools p…
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Two Illichian thinkers dialogue on the legacy of Illich, in the light of our present times and predicaments. This is the first of four fortnightly conversations. David Cayley: friend and associate of Illich and the author of Ivan Illich, An Intellectual Journey. Dougald Hine: co-founder of The Dark Mountain Project, A School Called Home and the aut…
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Firing up the old podcast again! This is the first in a series of audiobook chapter releases. I never did figure out how to package and sell my book as an audiobook per se, but it feels like the right time to put this out into the world. The "expectant - and apocalyptic time" that was named on the back cover seems more vividly at hand now than in 2…
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