In Conversation

Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the podcast where we do still believe that another world is possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for a future that we would be proud to leave as our legacy. The window may have got a little narrower in the very recent past, but it is still there. I am Manda Scott, I’m your host and your fellow traveller in this journey into possibility, and we’re recording this on the 7th of November, 48 hours after a pretty seismic election in the US. And so the question is, how are we going to respond to that election, specifically this week? We’re asking, how do those over 50 respond, and how would the younger generations like us to respond? As you’ll hear as we go through, Doctor John Izzo was once an ordained minister in a Presbyterian church, and now he’s a best selling author. I have linked to his books below. He’s a speaker, and he’s a deeply thoughtful thought leader who focuses on social responsibility, particularly for those of us who are over 50, basically the boomer generation. He’s a board member of the Elders Action Network and the Elders Climate Action Group, and he’s one of the co-hosts of a podcast called The Way Forward Regenerative Podcast, which is expressly aimed at people over 50 who want to explore what it means to be a genuine elder in this world. I met John on his podcast back in the summer, and was so impressed with his approach to the way the world works that we invited him on to here, and when we first thought about the timing, we just threw it into early November and I didn’t particularly think about it. And then in the last couple of weeks, we thought about it quite hard and decided that recording it on the day before the election, which is what we had originally scheduled, was not a clever idea, and that it would be better to wait until after.

Manda: And as you’ll hear, we both had different views of what ‘after’ was likely to mean. I was expecting it to be celebratory, and John, very wisely, was less inclined to see it that way. So here we are recording it on the Thursday after the election. You will hear it next Wednesday if you listen to it when it first comes out, and we are exploring how we feel and what else might be done, what routes forward might be possible. And particularly, what can we who are old enough to be elders, but not necessarily yet functioning as effective elders in the world, being elders in the truest sense of the word, how can we become that? How can we do what needs to be done to help birth a whole new paradigm? This felt like a really gritty conversation. We went quite deep at times. We have different views on some things, although actually in the end I don’t think we do. But we explored possibilities and in the end we came to a place of understanding of potential and of how we can step forward into agency that will be useful. So here we go. People of the podcast, please do welcome Doctor John Izzo of the Elders Action Network and the Way Forward Regenerative podcast.

Manda: John, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast in this very strange time. My usual opening question is how are you and where are you? Let’s start out with where are you and then let’s explore how you are feeling.

John: Well, first of all, Manda, it’s beautiful to be here, especially now in this what I think is a tender moment for many people across the world, really, not just in your country, in mine. Or countries, because I am currently in Southern California where I spend a good deal of time, and I also live in the mountains outside of Victoria, British Columbia in Canada. So I’m a dual citizen and we can get into that later. But a lot of my American friends send me notes about citizenship, which they always do, and then they never follow up on it. But so anyway, that’s where I am today. And how am I feeling? Probably two things. One is deeply reflective. Reflective about this moment in time and what is the work that needs to be done? That’s the that’s the question that I’m really living with right now. Given what’s happening, what is the work that most needs to be done? And of course, there’s also some despondency. And maybe that’s grief. Grief is maybe even a better word. There’s some grief for what’s happening in the world and what’s happened in the last 48 hours. So that’s what I’m feeling, reflective and in a bit of grief.

Manda: Thank you. So there was a point when you and I were going to record this ahead of the election. And I hang out in the Daily Kos and Hopium Chronicles and Emptywheel, which were all without question, going, hey guys, we can do this. Look, here’s evidence. I, random person posting a blog has been out in my community and you know, in 2016, even 2020, it was wall to wall Trump signs. And now there’s only one. And it’s wall to wall Harris signs. And and we are working so hard to get out the vote. There was a group called Hope Springs and Fields who started working in January of last year, going door to door knocking people, so that they would know who they were. So when they turned up and went, hey guys, have you voted? They they were welcomed as friends. And I thought, this is how you campaign. This is going to make it. So I went to bed on Tuesday night fully expecting to wake up to a blue map on Wednesday morning. And you were saying that you didn’t feel that. And I’m wondering before we go into what’s to be done, how did you know that it wasn’t going to be like that?

John: Well, there were two things. I didn’t know. I was hopeful, but I felt this was quite possible this would happen. And someone asked me a few days ago what did I think would happen? And I said, well, the one thing I’m pretty sure of is it won’t be as close as people think. Because I believe this election was a great deal like the 1980 election when Jimmy Carter ran for re-election against Ronald Reagan. Carter was besieged by a series of world events in the Middle East, including the oil embargo, the hostages in Iran. Reagan came with a kind of outsider perspective. He hadn’t been in Washington. You know, we need to blow this thing up. And until two weeks before the election, all the polls had them in a dead heat. And the night before the election, Carter’s main pollster came to him and privately said, Mr. President, you’re going to lose tomorrow, I’m certain of it. You need to be prepared. Because in the last two weeks, everything broke for Reagan. And I thought that was going to happen one way or the other.

John: Everything was going to break in one direction or another. And I think it broke in the direction of Trump. And it’s important to talk about why that might be so. But I had this feeling that it really resonated with the 1980 election. And the 1980 election actually had a profound impact on America and the world, because Carter was way ahead of time on things like climate change and the environment. And America having to have a different role in the world and less individual, more collective, more global, less insular. And in many ways, Reagan reignited American individualism and a focus on capitalism and money and me versus we. And one could argue that that has continued to some extent to this day. What we don’t know yet is whether this election is a portent of a similar shift or more an anomaly. And again, I think it’s worth talking about that. But that’s what I was afraid would happen and it’s what did happen. It all broke in his direction.

Manda: So let’s have a look at why. Because it seems to me that the difference between Carter-Reagan and now is the level of organisation on the right. And particularly the level of global organisation on the right. They’ve been testing proof of concept social media manipulations since Brexit, if not before. They’ve got the Russians on board. They’ve got a lot of very smart people in the big social media companies on board. Musk, clearly. But others much more under the radar. And it seemed to me that Netanyahu was very deliberately stoking up very overt violence in the Middle East, partly because he wants to do that, but also partly in order to push people. Scared people move to the right. That’s always a given. And that what we know from Steve Bannon, particularly his conversation with Michael Moore, is that Reagan was the start, but they really didn’t get themselves together until Obama was elected. And they know exactly what it is they want to get to. They want a world where the Spanish Inquisition, effectively, that as far as they’re concerned, that was the last time the world was right. And there are people I can’t remember the guy’s name again. I’ll look it up, can’t remember. But there’s a Russian weird Russian Orthodox ish Christian who’s Putin’s kind of spiritual advisor, which is an oxymoron in itself, but never mind.

Manda: And he was talking to a lot of the christofascists in the US, and they’re very clear that’s what they want. That that level of white supremacist christofascism is their end goal, and they will do whatever it takes to get there. And it seems to me in the progressive movement, we’ve been kind of softer on the we don’t really know what we want; we just want things to be better for people. We want equality. We want decent governance systems, we want things to be nice. But we haven’t all sat down and done the horse trading that the evangelists did with the libertarians of, you know, from the evangelists point of view, we are going to control women’s sexuality and reproduction, and that’s not negotiable. And then the libertarians went, okay, you can have that one, because we want total freedom to sell anybody whatever we want to sell them and destroy the environment. You give us one thing, we’ll give you the other. And we haven’t done that because we don’t want to be like that. What do you think? What were the factors that you saw in play? Because I’m obviously watching from the other side of the world.

John: Well, let’s talk about what you talked about first. And by the way, anyone out there who’s thinking about an electric car, you have power in your hands. We need a global boycott of Tesla. Anyone who cares about climate change should buy an electric car from someone else.

Manda: Also, don’t use Amazon ever again.

John: No. Right. Stop. You know, full stop. You know you can’t support it. He made a choice. We can make a choice in the opposite direction. So there are two things going on. One, let’s start with the more meta plan that you’re talking about. It is no doubt that the conservative movement has been, certainly in United States and you could argue the autocracy movement across the world has been more organised, more clear on what they’re trying to accomplish. And have played the power game better than those of us who would like a kinder, gentler, you know, more sustainable world, for lack of a better way to put it. There’s no doubt about that. And, you know, shame on us. I think there’s a number of reasons why we don’t do it first. I think the nature of more liberal people is we entertain lots of different ideas. We tend not to be as singular. We tend not to be as monolithic in our belief system.

Manda: We don’t like power hierarchies and they’re predicated on power hierarchies.

John: Exactly. Right. And we tend not to like power hierarchies, so we don’t play play the game well. And one of the worrisome things about Trump this round in my mind is Trump 1.0 was an outsider without a lot of context, he really ran as himself. Almost no one paid for his campaign, he paid for it himself. You know, he was a renegade. And you could argue he did some damage, but not as much as maybe people feared he would. So it’s a big difference this time, because very powerful people are behind him. I think he’s easily manipulated because I don’t think he has a lot of core set of values himself. And I know from insiders in Washington that last time when he was president, a lot of things didn’t fall apart because he had decent people around him and he didn’t care about very many issues. So if it wasn’t one of the core things he cared about, he kind of let them do what they wanted to do. This time, he’s likely to surround himself with less competent loyalist people. And with more powerful people behind him, like Musk, like project 2025, etc. they are going to be a lot more, I think, active in terms of what they do. So that is part of what happened. But then there’s a really much more on the ground daily thing that happened. I think one of the things driving global nationalism and populism is middle class angst in the developed world.

John: In these last 20 to 30 years, the middle class in the developing world, their standard of living has improved, but the standard of living for the middle class in the developed world is actually less good. Houses are less affordable. Their kids are likely to have a less good life than they did. Less secure jobs, not going to have a pension like their parents did. And this middle class angst, I believe, is a large part of what drove the Trump presidency. He did not win with the MAGA base. He won with the people in the middle, as Joe Manchin said in an interview yesterday on CNN, it’s the people in the middle who are mostly thinking about the price of gasoline and eggs; aren’t really MAGA loyalists, they’re not a part of some global scheme to take us backward. They simply voted with the bread and butter issues, which they I think misguidedly thought that Trump would create a better world for them. So middle class angst is one of those things that’s driving populism across the globe. And I think we have to figure out a way to address that. And then finally, I think that those of us who think of ourselves as progressive, I don’t really like that label for myself.

Manda: What would you call yourself?

John: I don’t really like labels.

Manda: Okay, well, you’re an elder.

John: Elder. Yeah. I think of myself honestly as a, if I had to name what am I: I am a spiritual person who believes that everything is sacred, including all of nature and all of humanity. I want it to thrive. I want life to prosper. I believe that’s a part of our divine obligation. I believe in pragmatic common sense and let’s come together to solve problems. I tend not to be attracted to extremes because extremes always lead to extremism, whichever direction that you’re going. But I think one of the things we have not done as people who care about the planet, who care about equity, who care about decency, who care about international peace and stability; is we really haven’t done a good job of creating an alternative narrative. We really don’t have a story that people are are dying to be a part of. And I think we really have to do some soul searching about what is it about the narrative? They have a narrative now, and the narrative is, you know, an anti-immigrant narrative. It’s a narrative about nation over globalism. Which, by the way, never leads to good things. The last time this happened in the United States was in the 1920s, after World War one, and tariffs started springing up all over the world that helped lead to the Great Depression. And also that kind of isolationism and that kind of thinking in some ways set the stage for World War two. It’s more complex than that.

John: So it’s a very dangerous moment we’re in. But I think that’s what happened. Just like in 1980, people didn’t vote for a shift to individualism. They didn’t like the price of gas, they didn’t like America appearing weak and the hostages in Iran. I mean, the pollsters say that if the attempt to free the hostages had worked two weeks before the election, Carter would have won re-election. So I think there’s two dangers for us right now. One is to make too little of what just happened, and the other is to make too much of it. So if we make too much of it, we’ll think, My God, you know, the world is filled with evil people, 71 million Americans who want a MAGA world, America first, who don’t care about climate, who don’t care about decency, who don’t care about a woman’s right. That’s not the case, right? We can’t make too much of it, but we can’t make too little of it, because we’re losing the spiritual battle for the kind of future that we want and hope for. And we have to find a way to win that. And I don’t know what that is yet. I don’t know what that is yet, but I know we have to find a way to do that. And we have to play the power game too. Because I believe they didn’t win because of the power game, in the end, in large part we lost for a much more practical reasons.

John: The other thing is, and then I’ll be quiet, is I had a good friend who happens to be a really interesting friend because his wife is from Russia. They used to spend half of their time in Russia. So they have a really different view, even on Russia than I do. But he voted for Jill Stein. And he is not a MAGA guy, he knew that it would help Trump get elected. He lives in Wisconsin, and when I asked him why, he said because they’re all in on war. They’re all just on one degree of separation around oil. You know, more oil got taken out of the ground during the Biden administration than the Trump administration. And he said, until we start voting for what we really want and, you know, it’s never going to happen. So this is the complexity, is my point, of what we’re dealing with. And I think a lot of younger people especially are saying, I don’t see the way forward. I don’t see how we’re going to navigate. So it’s complex, that’s the point, it’s complex and and complexity requires a complex but simple response. And what I mean by that is, if you read the book The Signal and the Noise, how do we see the signal through all this noise? Of the lighthouse we have to navigate to change things. And I think we ought to be talking about that a lot now, instead of just trying to rerun and win the next time, we ought to be asking…

Manda: Well there isn’t going to be a next time.

John: What’s the signal through the noise that we need to somehow get to? And I’m not wise enough to know exactly what that is. I have some hints, but I don’t know if that’s helpful, but those are my rambling thoughts.

Manda: It’s really helpful. There are so many ways I want to take this. Let’s open up a slightly different angle, because then we’ll get into signal noise and young people. And your friend with the Russian wife. Bill Plotkin, talks quite a lot about our culture being locked in adolescence. That for thousands of years, probably at least 10,000, the Western educated, industrial rich, democratic, weird culture that has destroyed most of the planet and the ecosphere and countless cultures ground under its heel; is composed of people who are locked in the early stage of adolescence. Plotkin has an eight stage concept of human personal evolution through a lifetime. Two stages of infancy, two stages of adolescence, two stages of adulthood, two stages of elderhood, and there’s a social and an eco spiritual stage within each of the four sections. And that humanity broadly, not all of us are locked in early adolescence. Our power structures are early adolescent see, want, take power over, conceptual structures. And that until or unless a critical mass of us grows ourselves up into adulthood and elderhood, it doesn’t really matter what we do, because those power structures will obtain. And it seems to me that in a way, that’s what your friend was saying, except that he was trying to create growing upness within a political structure that only allowed for binary choices. A vote for Jill Stein was quite clearly not going to do anything useful except help get Donald Trump elected. And he isn’t even an adolescent, he’s just a giant toddler. I give him about three days in the white House before Vance invokes the 25th. And then we have President Vance, which is actually a more scary concept because he has a functioning brain and can construct entire sentences and does weird things with them.

Manda: So you were saying about spirituality and it being a spiritual war, and it seems to me that ‘spiritual war’ for me is an oxymoron. That it’s embedded in a power structure and that possibly you didn’t mean that, but it does seem to me that the only way forward is to acknowledge that we’re in a hyper complex system, and that our head minds that are very good at linear thinking, very good at power over hierarchical dominance games, that get hooked into tribal us versus them, we want to win – oh my God, we lost! Kind of narratives. That the capacity to step back unblended from those and connect to the web of life and ask, okay, so what do we need now? Is the work of the moment. That isn’t, however, necessarily going to change the nature of the fact that I think America will be very lucky to ever see another meaningful election. There’s no point. I don’t think there’s any point in gearing up for the next one, because I don’t think there’ll be a next one. Putin will show him how to hold elections that look good enough, but are nominative but not determinative. So that’s why I’m having conversations about secession with a bunch of friends on Facebook, because I think you’ve got two months with a president who who has been given immunity by the Supreme Court. Let’s use it. But that’s a separate conversation. Let’s have a look at the spiritual aspects first. We can look at secession later.

Manda: How does that land, that idea that it’s not a battle, it’s a being. It’s a growing up. How can we help a critical mass of people to grow up fast enough? Because, I’ll finish in a second, but I thought Harris and Waltz were a brilliant team. I was really impressed with their campaign. I was really quite fired up by the possibilities of what they offered. It was about 40 years too late. If they’d been offering that after a double Carter presidency, we might have turned the wheel. They were not going to create total systemic change. They were probably going to end up with more fossil fuels out of the ground than before, because we are bringing more fossil fuels out of the ground, because our culture is so addicted to power from whatever source. Turning the lights on power, as well as authoritative power. That we will carry on mining everything until it’s all gone and the climate’s gone with us, unless we make the spiritual changes and therefore the conceptual changes that we need to make. And Harris-Waltz, all good credit to them, were not going to do that. What seems to me now is that 75 million people voted for Trump. By my calculation, that’s 285 who didn’t. And the ones who didn’t, who were feeling desperate are the ones who are not going to reach for an automatic rifle, but who might be open to concepts of, okay, we need to fundamentally change the system and that the basis of that needs to be spiritual. Over to you for thoughts on that.

John: So first, at the human level, I had a younger friend of mine. She’s in her early 40s, but a tender soul who’s been involved in the sustainability movement for many years, who sent me a text early yesterday. John, I need to talk to you today because I can’t make sense of the world. And she was in tears and just feeling like all this work I’ve done all these years, and I just don’t understand how this could be happening. And I think a lot of us feel that way. And it just broke my heart, you know, to hear her in that place, you know? There’s no doubt that we’re in a stage of adolescence. You know, Carl Sagan talked about humanity as a whole is in adolescence and a very dangerous period of adolescence, because you can drive a car and you can launch nuclear weapons and you can destroy the environment, but you’re not mature enough that you ought to have the keys to the car. Right? And that’s kind of the situation that we’re in. And we have no practice as a species at collective consciousness raising. We’ve never had to do it. It’s just a slow evolutionary process.

Manda: Do you not think that indigenous cultures have that evolution built in? And therefore they do have the social technologies, but they have the elders and the adults and the connection to the web of life that is the holding of that.

John: Yeah, yeah. And we have no system for that. I referenced recently a time when I was with the tribe in northern Tanzania and with the Council of Elders, and they were saying the way the Council of Elders works here is after the age of 50, you automatically become an elder. Well, this guy’s in his 40s, but he’s like an old soul, so we let him in early. And the tribe comes to us. We don’t make decisions, they just come to us for advice. And then they asked us, how does it work in your society? And we said, well, this is exactly the way it works. And it led to my first book, The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die, where I interviewed all these people over 60 who had been identified as the wisest person, some older person, someone new. Anyway, I feel now and it’s an interesting thing, because the elders, as you know, one of my passions is trying to ignite the baby boomer generation of which I am a part of. To use this final bonus chapter that we have for generational legacy work. But sadly, my generation doubled down this week on selfishness, on what an adolescent would vote for, which is self-interest. We were not acting like elders. And I think that it has to begin, to me, because this is the stage that I’m at. I can preach to young people, but I’m now 67 years old. You know, I’m an elder, whether I like it or not. Because I’m old it doesn’t mean I’m an elder. We’re not acting like elders. Because elders think about the future, not just their future.

Manda: But you do. But I think one of the things to say clearly is that just because you’re old, in our culture doesn’t make you an elder. Donald Trump is the oldest person to be elected president, and nobody in the world is going to pretend he’s an elder.

John: So I think one of the journeys that I’m on is trying to create some kind of spiritual awakening from adolescence for my generation of elders. I’m working right now to fund a documentary on that subject, and I’m excited about that. I’m working on a book.

Manda: Tell us more about that briefly.

John: This is a really unique moment where we’re going to have the largest cohort of elders as a percentage of population in the developed world, in human history. And if these people act like elders, they have half the wealth in the United States, for example, they undoubtedly drove what happened yesterday. Baby boomers were the main drivers of what happened yesterday. Male, female, rich.

Manda: You mean as in they voted most or as in, they’ve created the chaos that caused everyone else to vote this way.

John: All of the above. You know, we created the chaos that has led in many ways to this crisis that we’re in. And for the most part voted for Donald Trump yesterday in large enough numbers that he won. So we’re not acting like elders. So the documentary is really about talking about this moment in history and what will this generation be known for? This generation that started with activism and desire to create a different world, our parents named us the Me generation and it turns out that’s how we’ve lived our adult life. And now we have a bonus chapter our parents didn’t and what are we going to do with it? So it’s really to tell both the story of this generation, but to feature stories of people choosing to do generational legacy work at all levels with their elderhood. This is the opportunity. So I want to begin by talking to my generation and say, shame on us that were not acting like elders. Shame on us that we’re not making the connection that I may be helping fund my kids college, but if I create an unstable world with a deteriorating environment filled with nationalism and tariffs, my kids are not going to have a good life, and neither is the rest of the biosphere. I believe young people, of course, have to be a big part of this. But here’s the way I see it: I’m an elder, so I’m on the hook for elders. That’s where I want to spend my time. Because I want my generation to finally decide to act like elders, not like adolescents. And I think that’s going to require deep conversations. It’s going to require powerful storytelling.

John: In film, in a variety of ways. And I don’t know that that will make it happen. But my mission is to try to make that happen. So I guess for me, I have to begin with my own generation, because if we don’t act like elders, we’re in trouble. And we still can choose to do that. And I haven’t lost hope around that, though this week hasn’t given me a shot of optimism.

Manda: So my understanding of neurophysiology is that if we shame people, we close them down. And I’m thinking, how do we open up the possibility to something that we could look forward with pride, instead of being motivated by shame? Shame motivation seems quite hampering. So I’ve got Bill Plotkin open on the page just because it’s useful. Definition of how you become an adult is, and if you’re in adolescence, which basically we all are, we have to go through adulthood to get to elderhood. So moving into an adulthood requires that we “have the courage to face shadow parts such as greed, hunger for power, Narcissism. Make choices for the good of others and the more than human world. Responds rather than reacts to situations. In other words, is responsible. Delays gratification and makes meaningful sacrifices (Not currently obvious in our world), has a sense that our lives are part of something much larger than ourselves, and the courage to follow a calling, even if it means ostracism. We enlarge our perspectives with more information and experience. We’re unafraid to think critically, and we are aware of and responsive to our dysregulated emotions”. Which sounds to me like the work of quite a lot of therapy. That’s where good therapy takes us, although quite a lot of therapy hasn’t taken us there. It’s just taken us into sanitising our more respectable selves and pushing all the rest to the margins. But let’s assume we could do good therapy. Given that as the stage from adolescence to adulthood, what do you think would take us on to a productive, useful, valid elderhood that would then lay the foundations for a future that we would be proud to leave behind? Because it sounds to me what you’re planning with this film and everything else is very Thrutopian in my view.

John: First, I completely agree with you. I know I said shame on my generation. I do feel that. But it’s not the way we’ll motivate people. You’re right. Shame just leads to hiding and to withdrawing.

Manda: And resentment and…

John: And so it’s not about shame. It’s about opportunity. It’s about purpose. It’s about the feeling that one has done one’s calling. And I feel that first we need to start talking about elderhood again, because I think that for many older people in the developed world, unlike indigenous cultures, unlike that tribe in Tanzania, there’s no calling to be an elder. We don’t even talk about what it means to be an elder. And I think that’s part of the beginning of the conversation; what does it mean to be an elder? There’s some really interesting research around philanthropy, and you’ll see why I’m going there. A woman named Morella Hernandez at the University of Virginia has been studying what she calls stewardship behaviour, which is people acting in this moment in a way that will not benefit them but will benefit future generations. So stewardship behaviour. What motivates stewardship behaviour? And it turns out that philanthropy or the desire to do good is only a mild accelerator of stewardship behaviour. But the desire for legacy, what you will be known for, remembered for, is a much more powerful driver of stewardship behaviour.

John: So one of our intentions in the film and in our work is to really ask this generation of elders, what do you want your legacy to be? What do you want to be remembered for? What do you want to be known for? And in my Ted talk on this issue ten years ago, I used the parallel of my my stepfather, John Parisi, a beautiful man, simple man, who stormed the beaches of Normandy when he was 19 years old. The third day, you know, D-Day minus three. And the interesting thing is that it’s one of the few wars in human history where there actually was a good side. Most human wars, there’s no good side. It’s just about power. This is one of the few times there was a good side. There was a dictator who was trying to conquer and exterminate people because of their race. You know, we could go on and on. This was an evil person that had to be stopped. And until my stepfather died, he carried within him a deep sense of pride that in the one moment in his life when the world had needed him.

Manda: He stepped up.

John: He stepped up and done that. And I think for the baby boomer generation, this will turn out to be our legacy moment. So I think it begins with conversation of what does it mean to be an elder, not just an older person. That’s one of the things we hope to ask in the film. What will the legacy of this generation be? And it’s very individual. Generation is just a bunch of people, individuals who wind up being called a generation. So it’s very personal. And I believe we have to talk about legacy, because I believe most people do not want to leave a legacy like we’re leaving now? But we have to help them wake up to what we’re leaving and the opportunity to step in to do something about it. So anyway.

Manda: No, that’s crucial.

John: Because we don’t even have an idea for an elder. One of the things we’re talking about in the Elders Action Network, is maybe we need to start a tribe of people who identify as elders. You remember when Carter and Mandela, they had this small group of elite people as elders? We think it’s time to have a much broader tent to invite people, to choose to be an elder not just an older person, and to define what that is. Not in right-left terms, but in human terms, that you don’t have to choose a side to be an elder, if that makes sense. Because I think that’s also a danger that we can get into.

Manda: Totally. Having said that, if people continue to be adolescent, they may well decide to define themselves as elders while maintaining an adolescent mindset. I can easily think of people throughout history who our culture lauds as having been elders, who were quite clearly, by all the matrices that we would look at, were still firmly locked in our adolescent power over structure mindset that sees us as separate from the more than human world, and sees dominance and acquisition as the heights of being. And so I think this is really laudable. It seems to me two things. First of all, how do you help those who would like to identify as elders actually to grow into elderhood, which can be quite hard, I think. It seems to me that in any of the cultures that have genuine elders, I love that in Tanzania basically you got to 50 and you’re an elder, but I bet there were some steps along the way that everybody went through anyway, that they took for granted, that we just miss out. So I would imagine that there has to be some kind of filtering process of ‘has your soul been through the fire?’ in a way.  Have you had the dark night of the soul, whatever it is we call it, where you’ve stared into the depths of yourselves and thought the outer culture is not enough. I need to be different to this. I need to walk to the beat of a different drum.

Manda: I need to connect to the more than human world or whatever spiritual source I would refer to that isn’t just a projection of my ego, because goodness knows there’s a lot of that going on at the moment. That then defines my life. And when I meet people like that, and you are one of them, it’s really obvious. But you can’t tell someone who hasn’t done that why it’s obvious that they haven’t. It’s a bit like students who aren’t doing the work, frankly, and turn up year after year but are not doing anything in between. And they look at you like you’re some kind of weird mind reader. And it’s nothing to do with mind reading. It’s just you’re not doing the work because you’re you’re not any different, you haven’t engaged with the stuff. And so how do we do that? How do we identify the genuine elders and like you said, bring us into a network. And then for those on the edge who think Elderhood might be an interesting idea, but they’d actually also rather have another Mercedes or whatever. A bigger house, you know, take the grandkids skiing somewhere foreign. How do we create a vision of a future that isn’t predicated on whoever dies with the most toys wins?

John: So lots of important questions there. One important question that I don’t have an answer to, but I agree with you, is how do we take people on an inner journey from adolescence to adulthood to elderhood? It’s a really important question. Because we know how to do that perhaps at the individual level, but we haven’t cracked the code on how to do that at a collective level. And I think we ought to be having that conversation. That’s a conversation a lot of us ought to be having.

Manda: Yes, please let’s have that conversation a lot. How do we? Because you can’t drag them. You can’t make people go through that. They have to want to. And so how do we inspire the people to want to? That’s a pretty basic question too. Sorry, I interrupted. Go on.

John: No. Right. And so, in our own vision of the work we want to do with elders, we are starting to create that process and experimenting with how do you take people to that journey to Elderhood?  And so there’s inner work there. I don’t know how you do that at scale, but in the age of the internet, it’s amazing what one might be able to do at scale, but it has to begin by figuring out how we do it anyway. How do we take someone to that?

Manda: Yes and where are you getting with that? Because Facebook is full of self-help stuff. Of do this particular self-help thing and you will be able to have the biggest car, the biggest house, the biggest partner you ever wanted. And that is all adolescent stuff. We’ve got to move people beyond the I just want more stuff, and I want the perfect love and I want the perfect everything, and then the world will be fine. How do we do that? What are your answers to that?

John: So the first thing I think is for humans stories are always very important. That’s why things like films and storytelling are so important, because we’re attracted to attractive stories. So we need role models of people who have chosen to be elders and taken that journey. The second thing is we can’t preach people into change. We have to invite them in. And that’s through questions, through authentic journeys of asking questions with others. And that’s a lot of our work around regenerative elders is really getting people to ask these questions about their life, about their journey, about their purpose, about what they want to be known for and who they want to be in the world. People ask me, why do I care about this stuff? Sometimes I ask myself, why don’t I just want more toys? I mean, it’s a really interesting question for people like you and I, because maybe it gives us a hint of why other people might care. So I asked myself, why do I care? And the best answer I can come up with in my case is, first, I think as a young person, because of my religious background, I really thought everything is sacred. And if you think everything is sacred, whether that comes from a divine perspective or humanistic perspective, everything is sacred. Every creature, every human life, the earth itself, life itself is sacred.

John: If everything is sacred, you’re going to act differently. So secularism is a problem, but not in the way like I’d say let’s go back to being religious, because religions cause all kinds of problems. But it’s not generally because of the founders of the religion. It’s because of how the power structure co-opt it. So like Jesus would hardly recognise the modern evangelical movement. He would be in the temple overturning the tables, right? What are you doing about the poor? What are you doing to this beautiful thing that God created? Why are you at war with each other? So there is a spiritual dimension to this, but with a little s, which is leading people through this series of questions to ask themselves. And I think I have a pretty good idea of how you do that with the individual, but how do you get a whole society to ask those kinds of questions? And that’s something I think we ought to really be thinking about. But Manda, we still have to play the power game.

Manda: Do you reckon?

John: Like you said earlier, hey, you know, they played the power game better than those of us who want a different kind of world. We’re going to have to also not be afraid of power. Because power is not an evil word, power is about claiming your power to influence things.

Manda: Okay.

John: And the misuse of power for bad ends is evil. But power isn’t evil. Power is stepping up to say, how can I influence something in the most thoughtful and strategic way I can? You know, Jesus said, you must be as gentle as a dove and as wise as a serpent. I’m not so much a Christian anymore, but I’m sure a fan of Jesus. I think it’s pretty good advice for this moment. Be gentle as a dove. Our inner life must mirror what we want to see in the world, but we must be as wise as serpents in terms of how we approach this. We can’t just leave it to chance and hope. That’s what we’ve kind of done. That’s what you said, while they were playing chess…

Manda: We’re still in a pillow fight. That’s exactly what Bannon said to Moore. He said, we’re going for headshots and you guys are still in a pillow fight. What struck me when I read that, and this was way back 2011 or so, was we will never win their game because they genuinely don’t care what they do. There is no cost too great, no amount of bodies or kids stripped from their parents and locked up. We will always lose that, because we have scruples in the end. That’s  essentially what Bannon said is you guys still have scruples and we have none. And therefore it seemed to me there are two answers. One is to create an entirely different game, and the other is just to walk away and not play anything. So what I think I’m hearing from you is that we create of power something else, because my whole focus is on an emergent future that is predicated on a different value set, that is much more like an indigenous value set. And the thing that I understood from reading Graeber and Wengrow’s Dawn of everything and various other things since; Tyson Yunkaporta’s Right Story, Wrong Story, and a whole bunch of others, is that indigenous peoples don’t play power games.

Manda: They experience the power of the all that is and they empower themselves. But in social interactions there are social technologies that are designed to make sure that nobody gets power over anybody else. And if they do, you just all walk away. I think that was one of the keys that Graeber and Wengrow said was there were three fundamental baselines, and one of them was the freedom to leave, and the other was the freedom to believe what you want. And there was a third one that I always forget. I can look it up. But the freedom to leave; if somebody is starting to impose on you, you just get up and you walk away. Because you have the geographic freedom to do that. You’re not locked to a piece of land. And so I’m not saying you’re wrong at all, but let’s unpick what you mean by playing the power game. And then let’s look at what that might look like, because I’m still on the secession concept as a holding action.

John: Well, that’s a form of power, isn’t it?

Manda: Well, it is, and I see it as a holding action, but I also see it as a potential way of creating a very different form of governance. Because our governance system is broken, or at least it’s not broken it’s doing exactly what it was meant to do, which is to keep a very small number of straight white men in power. But it’s not fit for purpose if our purpose is the continuation of human life on a flourishing planet. So how do we form a completely different governance system? But that’s a separate question. Let’s look at power, empowerment, what you mean by playing the power game. Because I might be wrong and I really would value your input.

John: Yeah. Well first I double down on what you said about indigenous cultures. When the Western Europeans encountered the indigenous people of the Americas, they saw them as savages. When in fact, they had much more evolved cultures that were more equal, where power was shared, where wealth was shared. And they didn’t understand this obsession with possession and with power that we brought, and we need to look at that. By power, I mean…I want to be careful how I say this…well, let me back up and give you an example for me what I mean by that. One thing I disagree with you with, I hope I’m right, is I do believe there will be another election in two years in the United States and another one in 4 years.

Manda: So we’ve put some money on that to go to our favourite charity? We’ll sort that out after.

John: I would bet my net worth if someone said, can you bet your net worth there will be another election? I would do it.

Manda: Oh well, let’s discuss that in a bit. But let’s carry on with where we’re going. And then you can explain to me why you think that.

John: So let’s assume if there is going to be another election, even now, we must begin to think about how do we influence that next election? How do we organise people? How do we have conversations about what just happened? How do we begin to engage the disengaged, who chose not to have their voice heard at all? How do we talk about how we can use our power as consumers? I gave an example earlier around Tesla. Deciding to have a global boycott of Tesla is a use of power.  There’s nothing evil about that. Power is collectively coming together and making choices to use our… I’m trying to think of another word for power… use our influence, use our resourcefulness, use our capability to change the game. So I think you would agree with me, that’s a good use of power, right? To come together and say, okay, Elon Musk chose to double down on authoritarianism and even though he says he’s trying to free the world from climate change, he basically helped elect a climate denier and set us back.

John: So there’s a price to pay for that, in the world of power. If this is a chess game, we say, well, how do we get him in a corner? Well, we have a global boycott of Tesla. So I’m only using that as one example. Because surely the people who want a less sustainable, equal democratic world, trust me, they are using power. The Chinese, the Russians are using power to think how can we undermine democracy? So we have to use that same, maybe strategy is the better way to put it; we have to be strategic in the use of our influence and our capabilities. And again, I use the Tesla one as a simple example of how you claim your power. Okay, what power do we have? We have the power not to buy his products ever again. That will hit him hard if we could actually do it. But are we willing to do it? To use strategy to play chess, not have a pillow fight? So that would be an example for me. Does that help?

Manda: Okay, it does help. And I think you’ve got other examples, but I want to unpick that slightly because I worry about the energetics of that. I would really like to know why you think there’s ever going to be another election that matters. I think there’ll be nominative elections, but I don’t think they’ll be determinative because project 2025 is pretty clear about that. As is, if you ever want something to really depress you at night, you read Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean and work out how far along the road of that they’ve got. And yes, it’s very straightforward to go, okay, just never buy another Tesla. Tesla gave Musk $56 billion bonus recently. If he invests that, Tesla could go bust tomorrow and he wouldn’t notice. And I worry it’s a bit like people that I know, and I’m sure there are others who are not like this, but they’ve chosen to be vegan, it’s quite hard and that’s their input to the world and now we can go skiing three times a year. And continue to consume. And so I think we have to be clear that there are strategies that are holding actions, and they will be of limited viability because they exist within the system. And that most of our energy needs to go on systemic change, rather than trying to play chess within a system that is disintegrating around our ears.

Manda: I think part of what we’re seeing in terms of the shift to the right is the dying scream of the old paradigm. It may destroy us all in its dying death throes, but if we’re going to survive, it has to be because we who have the freedom of space and time and agency, which is is our generation, mostly; have created the visions and started the paths of a new system. Does that make sense as a potential? I know you well enough and I’m feeling I can critique this. I think your ideas are grand, but I’m just trying to dig a little deeper into when we stop this call and put it out in the world, what are we actually going to do? And yes, don’t ever touch anything that Musk has ever been near, but I don’t think that’s enough I think is what I’m saying.

John: Yeah, it’s not enough. And there is no one thing that will be enough. And the nature of the complexity that we’re in, this is complexity geometrically squared, trying for humanity to make a change. You know what I mean?

Manda: Yes, yes. It’s way beyond what our heads can get around.

John: Yeah. Exactly. So I don’t think one thing will change it, even though I like to think of change is like a spider web and some strands, if you pull them, the whole web comes unravelled and some, you know, nothing much happens.

Manda: Yeah, but you never know in advance which one is the one.

John: Yeah, you never know, right? You pull a string. Right. And so let’s use the Tesla thing as an example. And I do agree with you, right. So that the danger is if you play that game, are you energetically feeding the very thing you don’t want to feed? I understand that danger. Yet at the same time, we live in a world of consequences. People respond to consequences. So maybe it doesn’t hurt Elon Musk. But other businesses say that’s interesting, he chose to support a non-democratic climate denier and the company paid a price. So maybe it’s risky to go in that direction. But it’s not enough, you’re right. And I don’t pretend to have the answer. I know that spirituality must be at the heart of the change, and we do have to reimagine the system. But we’re so far from being able to create a new system. You know, like in the United States, for example, first past the post and two parties, all of this need to change, right?

Manda: This is why secession works. You can create a whole new governance system as you start your new federal, whatever it is.

John: Yeah, right. But if someone said, I’ll bet on secession and I’ll bet on the next election, then I’d definitely win.

Manda: Yeah you’d probably win that one. I’m working on it, though. It doesn’t hurt to work on it.

John: But maybe the threat of secession has its own power, right? In Canada, when the Quebec threatened to leave, it changed the game. They got some power, right. So, there’s nothing wrong with floating the idea of secession, because it starts people thinking, well, I don’t want them to leave. What would the consequences be, right? So sometimes provocative things lead to to good things.

Manda: I think there’s a very tight time frame within which you could get away with it, because one of the generals, I can’t remember his name, but one of the really hard right generals said this will be peaceful as long as the left lets it be. In terms of the imposition of project 2025. Why do you, this is a genuine question, it seems to me that there is no route towards a future democracy in the US. It just ended. Unless groups of people step aside and say we are no longer part of the US and we want to create a generative democracy that actually works. To give people agency and accountability and a sense of being and belonging. And I think that would be quite interesting and it could be done, but it would require a lot of people pulling together in a very short time frame. And therefore it is very unlikely. Because the cost, if you get it wrong, is like storming the beach at Normandy on day one. The chances of coming out of it in one piece are not great. Why do you think there’s going to be an election in two years? What gives you that belief?

John: Well, first, because I’m an optimist. Not a blind optimist. But my oldest daughter always says, you know that good is winning because we’re still here. It’s an interesting perspective, like, we’re still here. Life is still here. And she doesn’t mean like winning, meaning when things aren’t deteriorating, but so far we’re still hanging in there, right? Because we could have blown ourselves up, we have had the power to destroy the planet in 30 minutes for 50 years. And we haven’t done it, touch wood. So I’m just saying. And also, I go back to this looks like a landslide this week, but it wasn’t a landslide. As Joe Manchin again said it was all the people in the middle; they broke to Trump. But they didn’t break to Trump because they want an authoritarian future for America, because they want the planet to be destroyed. They broke because of the price of eggs and nostalgia about the Trump economic years. And they didn’t know who Harris was and anger about Biden and wars that were in. So the point is, what I meant about we make too much of it, we think my God, the democracy is about to fall apart. I predict they could easily do so many bad things in the next two years that they get slaughtered in the next congressional election, two years from now. I could make a cogent case for that. So I think the system is more robust, but the citizens are more robust. See, I don’t believe, and I live in America a lot of the time right.

Manda: You do and I don’t. Yes.

John: I don’t believe the American people are going to want a dictator. I don’t believe they want the democracy to fall apart. And I don’t think ultimately they’ll let it happen.

Manda: Do you think they care that much? The people? Okay, so he stood on a stage and said, if you vote for me this time, you’ll never have to vote again. Project 2025 and Democracy in Chains are both really clear of the structures that they will impose to ensure that elections may happen, but there is no chance at all that somebody they haven’t selected will be elected. And then, yes, you might have an election, but I think exactly as happens in Russia, it will be nominative but not determinative. If somebody actually stood a chance of winning and looked like they were not going to do what they were told, they would vanish. And most people in all the countries where this has happened, I have a number of friends in Hungary, and Hungary is basically a dictatorship now, and they haven’t gone out with guns against the people they don’t like. They’ve just discovered problems with their tax returns time and time and time again. Or they’ve been locked up for you know, we’ve caught you in some administrative thing and sorry, you’re in prison. And and it’s not enough to create martyrdom. It’s not enough to get people out in the streets. But it is enough that everybody else keeps their head down and shuts up. And I wonder why the US would be any different. I wonder why the UK would be any different. Because where you go, we’re going to go. They’ve got their proof of concept. This is something else I’d like to talk about is I think, I think our social media feeds and the social media feeds of the people who just voted for Trump were entirely different. And we’re never going to see them, but there’s are not going to change. Why would America be different to, say, Hungary or even even Russia?

John: Well, and you know I’ve had this thought, Manda, in the last couple of weeks, I said this to a friend, you know, this is how it happens, this is how it begins. And I agree with you that this is how it begins, that you control the information that people get. You manipulate power. Suddenly before you know it you’ve lost the democracy. So I’m not saying that it is impossible for that to happen, because to believe that that couldn’t happen is the very thing that will allow it to happen. You have to know that it could happen, right? So we have to stay involved. We have to be vigilant. And, you know, they tried it in Ukraine and look what happened. The people took to the streets and they overturned the government. And I do not believe that the American people will let that happen. Maybe I’m being naive, but I don’t believe we will let it happen. I think to do that, you would have to control the military in the United States. At the moment, I don’t believe that any president would be able to convince the military to do the kinds of things you would have to do to take over the place.

John: Now, I said there’s going to be an election in two years, in four years. I think it’s possible if we went down the path you’re talking about that in ten years or 12 years, we might not have a legitimate election. So we have to be vigilant. I’m just saying right now, I don’t see that in the cards as an immediate future, but we have to stay engaged to make sure that that doesn’t happen. So I’m not naive that this is how it begins. I just don’t think it’s going to happen in these next 2 or 4 years. It could happen if we’re not vigilant and we need people to be vigilant. And remember, the country did not sign up for that. So we have to harness that. See what I mean? You have to harness the fact that a very small percentage of people want that. Even some of his MAGA supporters don’t want that.

Manda: Okay. They don’t want autocracy.

John: They may want no abortion, they may want no immigration, but they don’t want a dictator. So I think the hunger for a dictator in America isn’t there. I believe that’s our greatest shield is I believe the American people ultimately do not want that. And this is where the America founders were really wise. Because one reason they gave all this power to the states, including the capacity that the National Guard is under the command of the governor, not the president, is because they saw the possibility of a centralised power taking control, and they did everything they could to make it as difficult as possible for them to do it.

Manda: Yes. And that still stands. And there are enough Democratic governors that I’m still betting my house on secession.

John: Trust me, Governor Newsom would have the National Guard at the borders of California if he had to, and I’d sign up at 67.

Manda: There you go. Well, I also think that that’s our generation. You know, if we go down in the first wave, we’ve had a really good life. And I don’t think it would be a particularly useful way to go, but it’s not impossible. I’m remembering the Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk, and there’s lots of reasons that book wasn’t my favourite book. It had some interesting ideas, but what really upset me about it was that at the end, in California, the good guys are walking into the guns saying I love you, and eventually the bad guys stop shooting. And there has not been a war in the world where that happened. And I don’t think it’s likely now. And the more we develop AI weapons and the more the people actually pressing the buttons are ten, 100, 1000 miles away, the less likely it is to happen. So I think there are better ways to spend our lives than throwing them onto the guns of somebody who’s trying to take somewhere.

John: And I’m one of those people I turned 18 when they stopped the draft in the US, and I had already told my mother I’m going to be a conscientious objector, and I’m not going to go, because I don’t think war is the way to solve problems. And I never had to make that choice, but I know I would have made that choice. I wouldn’t have gone to Canada. I said, if they call me, I’m going to be a conscientious objector and they’ll do what they need to do with me.

Manda: Wow. Well done. And they didn’t. So double well done. Thank you.

John: So I’m not naive Manda about the possibilities and the challenges that that we face. But I do believe as so many people, you know, Martin Luther King Jr. Talked about this. Mandela talked about this. I do believe, and maybe this is my spiritual upbringing, I believe in the arc of history bends towards justice. And I do believe that life, as my friend Janine Benyus says, when you ask her, the famous biologist, what’s the purpose of nature? She said, well, nature acts as if its purpose is to preserve and improve life.

Manda: Yes. And increase complexity.

John: So I do believe that it is in us, including us as humans, to want life to extend and be better. And that’s what gives me hope, is I believe that is in us, and we just have to find a way to harness it, and we have to move it forward. And I think if we can get through this critical window, I’m still optimistic that we will turn the tide, but there are a lot of dark clouds right now and we can’t be naive about them. So we have to be as gentle as a dove in our inner life, and we have to live the life we want the world to live, which is not an angry, warlike, selfish life. A loving life. And we have to be, as you know, cunning as serpents. Meaning we have to use the power that we have. Not with guns and violence. As you said, the means does not justify the ends. We must use our legitimate power to influence things. And we have that power. Whether it’s going to the streets or choosing what we buy, or doing our inner work, or making sure in the next election things go differently. We have that power. Will we claim it? That’s our choice.

Manda: Brilliant. Or building a whole network of elders who have stepped into elderhood. That strikes me as one of the best possible things anybody could do. And that’s what you’re doing. And I am hugely, hugely grateful and in deep respect of that.

John: Thank you. And if people are interested, as you know, you were on our podcast, The Way Forward regenerative conversations, where we talk about these very issues around elderhood. And I’m quite serious we need to create this movement of elders around the world. And as you said, it’s a journey, a psychological and spiritual journey to elderhood that then leads to action. And I’m going to do my best in whatever time I have left to help make that happen. That’s the that’s the part I think I can play in the spider web.

Manda: Yes. And so valuable. And I have got links in the show notes already to the Elders Action Network and the Elders Climate Action and to your podcast. So anybody who’s interested can go and visit those. And perhaps we will build an unstoppable global elder network. That would be such an extraordinary legacy to leave the world.

John: And, you know, Manda it’s so important for us to remember. We don’t need all of us. That’s the interesting thing. You never need everyone, but you need critical mass. You need critical mass.

Manda: Yes. And we don’t know what that critical mass is.

Speaker3: We don’t know what it is. It’s the seventh monkey or whatever it is. 100th monkey, right? It’s 100th, not the seventh, seven is not enough. We don’t know, but we’ll get there, right? There’s a beautiful documentary a few years ago that National Geographic did about why herds move, like zebra and wildebeest. Because they always thought there was like a head zebra or something.

Speaker3: Hierarchies.

John: But it’s not hierarchical at all. What happens is one zebra starts to look over this way, and then another zebra. And then eventually, almost in this beautiful serendipity, they all go.

Manda: Yeah. The energy has tipped because.

John: Because they’ve reached the hundredth monkey. It’s tipped. And if this change happens, that’s how it will ultimately change. And yet, let’s not be fooled, there are people in high places in autocracies and democracies who would like to keep the hundredth monkey from emerging. But you know what? I believe that the herd will turn. We may have a lot of pain before then. And that’s one last thing we do have to talk about before we go. Is, you know, I said to someone the other day, this may be like you said, this is an old paradigm that is dying. It must die. And just like an alcoholic or an addict, maybe not enough bad things have happened yet where we finally wake up and say, this water hole is not working. It’s not working. We can’t stay here. And we may have to have more pain. And that’s hard for those of us with tender hearts and compassionate hearts. We don’t want to go through pain, and we don’t want to see other species and people go through pain. But there may have to be more pain. As the pain body that Eckhart Tolle talks about, before we can let the new world emerge, because individually, that’s often how we finally change, is there’s so much pain that we say, I can’t do this anymore.

Manda: One of my very early teachers said, you will learn through pain until you learn to learn through love. And once you realise that’s a choice, it doesn’t mean the pain goes away, but it means there are other ways of learning, which is an incredibly enlivening and empowering understanding, I think. And I think the corollary to that is a lot of the pain is being felt by other species and the more than human world, and the thing that we can do is see how many it takes to be the hundredth monkey, or the extra zebra that makes the turn. Any one of us choosing to step into this place, choosing to do the growing up, could be the one that takes it to the tipping point. We have no idea, but it’s worth trying. And you have got the beginnings of that network. So definitely, if anybody’s listening, they can come along and find you.

John: Here’s why I think optimism is so important. I grew up in a very religious home and I had an atheist roommate in university. He was Jewish, but he was a confirmed atheist. And he was always asking me, how can you believe in this hocus pocus stuff? At that time I was going to be going to seminary and studying for the ministry, which I did, and then left to do other things. But he said, you’re on your dying bed 60 years from now, and someone gives you incontrovertible Evidence that there is no God, it’s just like all by accident, Jesus never existed, etc. how do you feel? And I said, Bob, I don’t feel any differently. Because I believe by following the teachings of Jesus, by choosing love over hate, by choosing to be compassionate rather than not compassionate, by choosing to serve rather than be served, and I went on and on. I would have had a more beautiful, purposeful, contributory life than if I had not done that. So, Bob, it’s like it wouldn’t matter at all. I’m not going to be depressed if someone gave me that evidence.

Manda: Yes. It’s not contingent. You’re not doing it because some parent structure in the sky is going to give you a pat on the head and another gold star.

John: So maybe we don’t make it. Maybe the earth gets set back and has to re-evolve. But you know what? We still have to choose to be who we want to be. That is its own gift. We can’t control the outcome. Here I’m very Buddhist; we can’t control the outcome we can only control how we are, how we choose to be. And as my friend Rex Weiler, one of the Greenpeace founders said, when I said, are you worried about the earth? He said, no, I’m worried about humanity because the earth has dealt with bigger crap than us and come back. So he said, I’m not worried about the earth, but I am worried about us. And so my point is, again, the arc of history. All we can do is be who we want to be, and that’s its own end. And the outcome, you know, I think we’ll get there but even if we don’t, on our dying beds, we can say we were who we wanted to be. And that’s its own gift.

Manda: Fantastic. That’s an amazing place to stop. Thank you so much. I have put links in the show notes. Anyone wanting to follow up with John, there’s lots of space there. And yeah, if we can all be the best we can possibly be, as heart connected and heart open and heart full and heart clear, the world will already be a different place.

John: The moment one person chooses to be different, the world is a different place than it was yesterday. So thank you, Manda, for the good work that you’re doing.

Manda: Thank you.

John: Please, folks, I know it’s a dark time, but we can choose not to give into it or surrender to it. It’s a time for us to have courage and have heart and have compassion and love for each other.

Manda: Well, there we go. That definitely took me to places I wasn’t expecting, but it was so worthwhile. I am genuinely, enormously impressed with everything that John is and does. And absolutely. If you’re in our age group, if you’re over 50, Please do come and explore the Elders Action Network and see what we can do. We need somehow to connect to each other in spite of all of the misinformation and misuse of social media that’s happening, we can still begin to use things wisely. Or continue to use things wisely. John and I will remain in conversation, and I have no doubt he will be coming back for another conversation, potentially in about a year, when we might have more of a view of whether there is going to be a free and fair election at the midterms. And similarly, whether there is any likelihood at all of there being anything approaching a free and fair election in four years time in the United States. And if you’re not in the United States, this is a wave. The proof of concept that the right has, has been proved and is in action. So I don’t think any of us are free of what’s coming, though I would say that the one thing that leaves me with some hope that Bannon’s 10,000 year Reich is not actually going to happen, is the fact that climate denialism is built into the ideology.

Manda: And as far as I know, biophysics trumps ideology every single time. Pun fully intended. So there we go. Things are changing. The world will never be what it was. We need to adapt to the change. And if you’re listening to this podcast, let’s figure out how we can all adapt, hey? Figure out what’s ours to do and do it. We will be holding some gatherings within the auspices of Accidental Gods next summer, looking at exactly this; how to figure out our soul’s path, and then how to be the best ancestor we can be, which is an extension of figuring out our soul’s path. You absolutely don’t have to be a member of Accidental Gods to come on those, although you do get them half price if you are. Because the basis is that if you join Accidental Gods, it will pay for itself if you want to come to various of the other things that we do. So they’ll be up on the website quite soon. Possibly not by the time you hear this podcast, but by the new year for sure.

Manda: So there we go. Enormous thanks to John for all that he is and does. I put a link to all of his books. There are seven of them. And to the Elders Action Network, both online, on Facebook, on YouTube. However you source things, please do head off and see what you can do. See if you can join us. See what it takes really to step into Elderhood. I don’t know the answer to that, but I think it really, really matters to try. And if you’re of the younger age group and there are things you specifically need of us, then please do let us know. All right, that’s it for this week.

Manda: All that apart. Huge thanks to Caro C for the music at the head and Foot and for this week’s production. Thanks to Lou Mayor for the video, to Anne Thomas for the transcripts, to Faith Tilleray for wrestling with all of the tech and for the conversations that keep us moving forward. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for caring, for listening, for being there. We can still change the world. Just that the roots to that change potentially changed themselves in the last week or so. But if you know of anybody else who is really striving to understand what’s theirs to do and how they can do it, then please do send them this link. And that’s it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.

You may also like these recent podcasts