Welcome to Accidental Gods – the podcast where we believe that another world is still possible, and that together, we can create a future we’d be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.
Our aim is to provide the tools we could ever need to understand the potential of this moment – and ourselves within it.
In a world where ideas grow faster than anything, we curate the cutting edge of neuroscience and psycho-technologies, connected spirituality and resilience, politics, philosophy and human creativity so that together, in all our diversity, we can choose a different future.
We’re giving voice to those at the leading edge of change so that we can all learn new ways to be, to live, to create community and to co-create world where people and planet flourish and we live as integral threads in the web of life.
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#320 What ought we be? Hope, despair and the resilience of life with Professor David Farrier
We live in an ever-changing world, but it is not always obvious what kinds of evolutionary change we are seeing in the broader web of life: in physiology, behaviour, language – and human responses to these. How plastic is the natural world? How resilient? How capable – or not – of adapting to the chaos of the climate emergency, the cascade of toxins in our air, soil and water, to the plastics, heavy metals and other detritus we throw out into the world as if the entire planet were one vast sewer for waste we forget about as soon as we’ve had the dopamine drip that acquiring it evoked?
How thin is the ice on which we are skating? And how can we change the ways we do things so we don’t fall into the void of extinction.
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#319 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 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.
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#Thoughts from the Edge: Navigating the turbulent seas of the incoming year with grace and courage (Manda solo)
In this solo episode, Manda reflects on the year just gone and looks ahead to the one that’s coming and lays out ideas for how we can be the change we need to see in the world. Join us for New Year’s eve and let’s find ways we can step into 2026 with grace, courage, bringing the best of ourselves in service to life.
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#318 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 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.
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#BONUS: December Solstice meditation – suitable for 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.
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#317 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?
This week’s guest, Ally Kingston, is a creative facilitator and strategy lead at Purpose Disruptors, 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.
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#Manda Bonus: Word Magic 2025 – Accidental Gods’ pick of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and podcasts through the year
Here’s Manda’s round up of (some of) the best books, poetry and podcasts she’s come across this year. Most of the links are to Bookshop.org in the UK where you can link to an independent bookshop of your choice. In some cases, we’ve linked to the authors’ website.
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#316 Barefoot Economics in a world of Hobnailed Boots with storyteller Inez Aponte
If we are to build systems that meet our real needs we have to first understand what those needs are and start growing the stuff that will allow us to thrive: good food from healthy soils, safe and supportive homes and communities, space to develop and express our creativity, opportunities to increase our capacity for co-operation and kindness. As much as these, though, we need to understand what an economy is for – why it does what it does. And while we’re all clear that the death cult of Predatory Capitalism exists to enrich the few at the expense of the rest of the living web, it’s not always clear what a flourishing economy might look like.
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