Accidental Gods

07/01/2026

If we ever had a genuine democracy (and I would argue we never have) then it is clearly disintegrating now, along with the entire system with which it was entwined. Everyone agrees we need something new, what we don’t necessarily agree on across the board is the design of this new thing. This week’s guests are two people who spend their lives imagining how things might be different, particularly in the US, where even the pretence of democracy has been abandoned.

Dr John Izzo is a friend of the podcast. Once an ordained Minister in a Presbyterian Church, he’s now a bestselling author, speaker, and thought leader focused on social responsibility and intergenerational integration. He’s a a Distinguished Fellow at The Stimson Center in Washington DC, and a Board Member of the Elders Action Network and the Elders Climate Action group. Most notably in terms of what we’re talking about here, he’s co-host of The Way Forward Regenerative Conversations Podcast on which I heard him speaking to our other guest, Suzette Brooks Masters.

Suzette describes herself as a sometime Cassandra who sees around the corner; a serial social entrepreneur, and a thought leader and strategist in the fields of democracy, governance and futures.
She has degrees in Economics from Amherst College and Cambridge University, and a Law degree from Harvard. She has spent much of her working life as a strategist working on immigration, inclusion and democracy. She is currently Senior Fellow and Director of Democracy Innovation at the Democracy Funders Network and Co-Founder of the Federal Foresight Advocacy Alliance.
So listen in for a 3-way conversation on the nature of power, community and change as we move into the new year.

https://accidentalgods.life/seeing-round-corners-upgrading-democracy-with-suzette-masters-and-dr-john-izzo/

If we ever had a genuine democracy (and I would argue we never have) then it is clearly disintegrating now, along with the entire system with which it was entwined. Everyone agrees we need something new, what we don't necessarily agree on across the board is the design of this new thing. This week's...

24/12/2025

At the end of a turbulent year that has seen the masks come off the death cult in ways that were probably predictable, but still shocking, we reconvene our December Solstice Traditional conversation. Manda is joined by Della Duncan of the Upstream Podcast and Nathalie Nahai of ‘Nathalie Nahai in Conversation’ to explore the things that have stood out for each of us in our explorations this year—and to look forward to the year about to begin for what will be our baselines.

Della Z Duncan is a Renegade Economist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a co-host of the Upstream Podcast, a Right Livelihood Coach, a faculty member at the California Institute of Integral Studies, a Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics, a founding member of the California Doughnut Economics Coalition, and the designer and co-facilitator of the Cultivating Regenerative Livelihood Course at Gaia Education.

Nathalie Nahai is an author, keynote speaker and host of the Nathalie Nahai in Conversation podcast enquires into our relationship with one another, with technology and with the living world. She’s author of the international best-sellers Webs Of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion and, more recently, Business Unusual: Values, Uncertainty and the Psychology of Brand Resilience which has been described as “One of the defining business books of our times”. She’s a consultant, artist and the founder of Flourishing Futures Salon, a project that offers curated gastronomical gatherings that explore how we can thrive in times of turbulence and change.

https://accidentalgods.life/change-is-coming-solstice-reflections-with-della-duncan-nathalie-nahai-and-manda-scott/

At the end of a turbulent year that has seen the masks come off the death cult in ways that were probably predictable, but still shocking, we reconvene our December Solstice Traditional conversation. Manda is joined by Della Duncan of the Upstream Podcast and Nathalie Nahai of 'Nathalie Nahai in Con...

20/12/2025

A meditation for this most transformational December solstice to help you connect to the web of life that is the foundation of all that we are and have been and will be.

Enjoy!

https://accidentalgods.life/december-solstice-meditation-suitable-northern-and-southern-hemispheres/

Here's our December Solstice Meditation for 2025 - please find a place and time where you can relax, take space for yourself, and build the connections to the web of life that will carry us forward.

17/12/2025

How do we create the stories that will bring a whole new generation back to the web of life, that will help people find hope again, and lean into their heart’s yearning for connection, relationship, being and belonging?

This week’s guest, Ally Kingston, is a creative facilitator and strategy lead at , where she co-developed the breakthrough Agency for Nature, a pop-up agency bringing nature into youth culture. A former advertising strategist, she is curious about how creativity intersects with myth, meaning, consumerism and desire, and how we might design new cultural infrastructures that seed fresh possibilities for how to live.

Equally committed to holding space for grief and loss in turbulent times, Ally has trained as a death doula and rites of passage holder and recently co-created the Tending to Endings card deck, a garden-inspired tool for engaging more meaningfully with loss. She is based in Somerset in the UK, where she lives with her partner, young son and lurcher.

In this wide-ranging episode, we explore the nature of advertising and how an industry that has been so deeply embedded in the death cult of predatory capitalism can turn all the wild, creative magic in service of life; how the skills that push us to buy the pseudo-satisfiers can instead remind us of our original connections, and turn us towards co-creation, connection and belonging. We talk too, about grief and how learning to compost the old system is a key to the new growth we need and want. Ally is so multi-talented, it was a joy to explore so many ways we can bring our world back into love with life, into balance, into each of us being part of the solution and letting go of the parts of the problem.

https://accidentalgods.life/wild-new-stories-weaving-new-myths-for-a-new-way-of-being-with-ally-kingston-of-agency-for-nature/

How do we create the stories that will bring a whole new generation back to the web of life, that will help people find hope again, and lean into their heart's yearning for connection, relationship, being and belonging?

14/12/2025

Because traditions matter (even if they're only 6 year old) - here's my annual pre- round-up of the books, poetry, podcasts- and this year, the magazine (spoiler alert: It's Permaculture Magazine) that have really impacted my year.

Also note that I haven't included any of the many amazing books that we highlighted on the podcast and to whose authors we spoke - that would have filled the list. So these are all worth looking back at, but the ones on the list are new:

https://accidentalgods.life/word-magic-2025-accidental-gods-pick-of-fiction-non-fiction-poetry-and-podcasts-through-the-year/

Mandas' pick of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and podcasts through the year...

10/12/2025

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://accidentalgods.life/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 increa...

03/12/2025

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, , 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 .

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.

https://accidentalgods.life/roots-to-health-building-food-resilience-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 subst...

26/11/2025

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.

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 Sa**sm (and I know that’s slightly different to other Dark Triads that have Raw Cunning as the third one and sa**sm as an afterthought, but I think the cunning is in there with Psychopathy and the Sa**sm 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.

https://accidentalgods.life/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 concep...

19/11/2025

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.”

https://accidentalgods.life/the-magic-of-darkness-learning-to-love-life-in-the-night-with-author-leigh-ann-henion/

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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? 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 nig...

12/11/2025

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://accidentalgods.life/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.

06/11/2025

Indeed.

05/11/2025

What is the true vow of your life, the one it would kill you to break? This phrase comes from the poem ‘All The True Vows’ by David Whyte, but there can be no better introduction to this week’s guest, who knows how to help people – ordinary, every-day people from our culture – build true, heart-felt connections with the web of life such that we come to know what we are here for, our unique gift to the world, the promise is would kill us to break, what it feels like to be so heart-explodingly in love with the sheer wonder of being alive that we can step out of the world we thought we knew, into the world as it really is, alive with connection to all parts of ourselves, each other and the whole of the more than human world.

Bill Plotkin is one of those who has found what he’s here for. He’s been a Thrutopian activist and cultural catalyst since long before those were buzzwords in our firmament. Over the years, he has been a research psychologist, professor of psychology, psychotherapist, rock musician, and whitewater river guide. Now, I would say he is a visionary, a mystic and an elder. More importantly, he’s a map-maker, a way-breaker, a trail-leader of the routes we will have to take to walk out of this moment of dissolution, into a world of remembering and creating anew.
Back in the early 80s, Bill founded the Animas Valley Institute, whose central purpose is to assist people through the initiatory process that leads to visionary leadership and cultural artistry. Its primary work is with those ready to undergo the joys and challenges of the underworld descent to soul, which flowers into a life of meaningful service and abundant fulfilment — or a deepening for those already on the journey.

Bill offers maps and models for his work in depth and detail. He has four books to date and I encourage you to read them all in order from Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche, through Nature and the Human Soul, to Wild Mind and finally, The Journey of Soul Initiation. He writes a blog, Soulcraft Musings, which I also recommend, because we could have explored the basics of Bill’s models of human evolution and what it means for people of our culture, who have been subject to what he calls ‘systemic human developmental oppression’ for many hundreds of generations… and in the long conversation that follows, we did explore the basics of this, but in the days before recording, Bill shared the early draft of a paper called ‘A Map to the Next World’ and this lit all kinds of fires in my heart and mind and soul—because Bill’s capacity to write lucidly the things this podcast is all about is beautiful and sharp and perfect.

https://accidentalgods.life/walking-the-wild-mythic-edge-of-being-with-visionary-elder-and-soul-initiator-bill-plotkin/

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What is the true vow of your life, the one it would kill you to break? This phrase comes from the poem 'All The True Vows' by David Whyte, but there can be no better introduction to this week's guest, who knows how to help people - ordinary, every-day people from our culture - build true, heart-felt...