Accidental Gods - The Thrutopian Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Power Station: Generating agency with Daniel Edelstyn and Leonie Rousham Nov 11, 2026

Show notes

How do we empower communities to help them step away from the extractive death cult of capitalism and the fossil fuels that underpin it, while keeping warm, saving money, and expanding their own agency?

Our guests this week have poured years of time, energy, passion, professional expertise - and a deep understanding of the flaws in the current system and how local people can be empowered to take change into their own hands - into making it happen.

Daniel Edelstyn is a documentary maker who worked with Channel 4 until he realised it wasn't helping him be part of the solution. When he left, the first film he made was BANK JOB, then POWER STATION of which he is co founder and director and which we're talking about in this episode. Now, as you'll hear, he's working on one called 'THIS MOVIE IS A HEDGE FUND'. Beyond this, he's a social entrepreneur focused on the technology of storytelling to provoke people powered change who believes in challenging economic narratives to build creative practices of abundance. Musician and mischief maker.

With Dan, we're speaking to Leonie Rousham who was the Assistant Director and Impact Producer of POWER STATION. She's an artist-filmmaker interested in storytelling for systems change and, in this respect is co-founder of collaborative artist practice Kneed. She is currently a funded PhD candidate on the Living Well With Water award, which promotes coastal heritage and creative practice the UK.

Power Station is one of those rare things - a film that documents change while helping us all understand both why it's necessary and how to make it happen in our own communities. It's a genuinely moving, inspiring film and I thoroughly encourage you to watch it. So, to inspire you to do just that, here we go:

Links

Power Station Films and books
Power Station free online screening

BANK JOB

SOLAR FOR SCHOOLS
Kneed
Art Politik

ENERGY LOCAL

HOWARD JOHNS - People Owned Power

—About Accidental Gods—

We offer three strands all rooted in the same soil, drawing from the same river: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass

Our next Open Gathering offered as part of our Accidental Gods Programme is 'DREAMING YOUR YEAR AWAKE' which will run on Sunday 3rd January from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - Details here. You don't have to be a member of Accidental Gods to come along, but if you are, all Gatherings are half price.

If you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life.
If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here.
If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here

Manda and Louise both offer one-to-one Mentoring Calls. Manda is writing a book just now, but if you'd like to contact Louise, details are here.

Jaguar Dreaming - Walking the Bridge of Perception with John Perkins of the Pachamama Alliance Nov 04, 2026

Show notes

How can the dream of a jaguar - or any dream - help us to overcome our own fears?

This week's guest, John Perkins has written a book about this. Touching the Jaguar is a memoir of an extraordinary life, and it's an invitation to walk across what he calls the Bridge of Perception to see the world differently - in his words to remember that we are a part of nature, not apart from nature. Which - with slightly different vocabulary, is exactly what we're about, and what we say every week. But John is not only a shamanic practitioner with many decades of training in Ecuador and elsewhere deep in the Amazon - he's a man of many often divergent parts.
If you're in the shamanic world, then you know him as the animating energy behind the Pachamama Alliance - and he describes its founding in Touching the Jaguar.
Then again, if you're in the world of heterodox - which is to say not-orthodox - economics, or regenerative economics, or renegade economics or any of the various ways we explore how money works in the world, you'll know him as the author of the book, 'Confessions of an Economic Hitman.' It's not an easy read, but if you ever want proof of the utter hypocrisy of the US and the UK - of all the western countries - of the appalling damage and absolutely unacceptable behaviour our governments have promoted around the world... it's an essential read. In the early decades of his professional life, John was exactly what he says - an economic hitman who went into sovereign nations, in his case mostly in central and south America, and he offered the carrot to the nation's leadership: take our bribes, let us develop our commercial and military outposts in your country, sell us your oil, your rare earths, your land at bargain basement prices... and we'll let you live. If they refused…two of the people John worked with closely did refuse. And both are now dead in 'accidents' where their planes crashed, leaving nobody on board alive. He believes they were assassinated by the CIA and when he first decided to write about it, his young daughter was threatened and then he was bribed with a half million dollar 'consultancy' the existence of which was predicated on his not-writing his book.
You can read that book today. Or you can watch the short animation of it, which covers the basics and which I watched when I was reading for the Masters in Regenerative Economics at Schumacher... so John's been a kind of a hero since then. I didn't know he'd been poisoned and half 70% of his bowel resected and nearly died. I didn't know about the death threats or the doors that had closed in his face. I also didn't know that, alongside his work for the US government, he was being trained by a series of indigenous shamans, whose prophecy of the Eagle and the Condor, required them to 'touch the jaguar' by connecting with that which they most feared - white people - and changing their perception.

So - I came to this podcast thinking we'd explore Touching the Jaguar and his new book, The Art of the Steal which shows how the Trump administration brought all the old techniques that used to be used against other nations and operated them at home. But actually, this turned into something much more interesting. John spends a lot of time with indigenous peoples and they believe we're in the time between worlds, an inflection point where everything can shift. So we talked more about that. We did have some technical glitches for which I apologise - Caro and Lou have done their best with the audio and the video. In the hope that they succeed, please do enjoy this week's episode.

Links
John's Website
John's blog: Change the Dream
Confessions of an Economic Hitman (short animation version)
John's Latest Book - The Art of the Steal
John's previous book - Touching the Jaguar

Manda and Louise both offer one-to-one Mentoring Calls. Manda is writing a book just now, but if you'd like to contact Louise, details are here.

Crossing the Uncanny Chasm from where we are to where we need to be – Thoughts from the Edge #6 with Manda Scott Oct 28, 2026

Show notes

What are the actual steps we could take, from our dysfunctional political, economic, media systems and all they support - towards a future that would actually work in service to life?

We ask this question all the time on the podcast - and then I went away for a weekend's planning with the core team of our Thrutopian Convergence. We played a Solar Punk Futures game (thank you Natalia!) and Every Single One of us crafted a fictional character from a post-collapse semi-dystopian future in which we were all -
- not working a day job
- not paying rent/mortgage/power/water/food bills
- not trapped in the death cult of predatory capitalism
- everyone was working cooperatively for food, health, technology
- the bad guys were out there, but they were losing.

It was lovely - if you don't mind the fact that we were basically subsisting and not necessarily meeting our core needs.

and

It was blindingly depressing.

Because if I fall into this easy/lazy/safe way of thinking - if I, too, am unable to see past the fuzzy, hand-waving bits of detail that get us from here to there - the bit I'm calling the Uncanny Chasm - how can I expect anyone else to see them more clearly?

So this podcast is working past this Uncanny Chasm - starting the hard work of figuring out the details.

There will be more. This is just a start. All thoughts welcome.

Links

Democracy in Chains my Nancy MacLean
Hostage Nation by Jamie Driscoll
Richard Murphy's YouTube

Our next Open Gathering offered as part of our Accidental Gods Programme is 'DREAMING YOUR DEATH AWAKE' which will run on Sunday 1st November 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT (NOTE THE TIME! - We'll be out of summertime then) - details are here. You don't have to be a member of Accidental Gods to come along, but if you are, all Gatherings are half price.

If you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life.
If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here.
If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here

Manda and Louise both offer one-to-one Mentoring Calls. Manda is writing a book just now, but if you'd like to contact Louise, details are here.

Climate Popularism - Launch of the new report by Rupert Read and Caroline Lucas, interviewed by Jon Alexander Oct 21, 2026

Show notes

This week sees the launch of the Climate Popularism Report written for the Climate Majority Project by friend of the podcast Professor Rupert Read, co-Director of the Climate Majority Project, and Caroline Lucas, former Leader of the Green Party of England and Wales and for a long time, the sole Green party member of the UK's Parliament.

We were supposed to record a podcast together earlier this week, but I had to cancel and so we are instead bringing you a rather wonderful conversation in which TED speaker, pro-democracy activist and author of the book Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us, Jon Alexander, talked to Rupert and Caroline about their report - what it is, why now is the crucial moment and how they hope it will reshape politics in the UK and beyond.

So this is a star-studded cast and I hope you enjoy their conversation and head off and read the report. Then do whatever you can to become engaged in the new wave of citizen popularism.

Links

Rupert Read Website

Caroline Lucas Website

Jon Alexander Website

Manda and Louise both offer one-to-one Mentoring Calls. Manda is writing a book just now, but if you'd like to contact Louise, details are here.

New Earth Dawning: Biological Elegance, the health of humanity and OriginEarth with Zach Bush, MD Oct 14, 2026

Show notes

What happens when someone who has trained for years in the Cartesian model of science, of medicine in particular - who has been trained to look at bodies the way a mechanic looks at a car, to take them apart and fix one thing and put it back together and get it back on the road… what happens when that person begins to question everything?

This week's guest has done just this. Of all the people we've been asked to invite onto the podcast, Zach Bush, MD, is top of the list. For those of you who know him, he needs no introduction. For the rest, here's the short version of a very long CV.

Zach Bush, MD, trained in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism, as well as Hospice Care. He is an internationally recognised scientist and industry pioneer, innovating solutions at the intersection of human and planetary health. He is Founder and CEO of Waveform Inc, and Board Chair of Project Biome and the Origin global event series. He delights in working with teams around the world to realise the alignment of human nature with the emerging rebirth cycle of the earth.

Today, we're exploring both the Origin event and his new book, Biological Elegance, a conversation with AI that generated what he believes is the clearest articulation of the worldview beneath it all: health is not something we manufacture. It is something we participate in.

And key to all this is that Zach is part of a global unity event taking place on October 17th online and in person in South Africa. It's called Origin and Zach talks about it at the end of the podcast, but if you're listening to this the day it comes out, then you have 3 days to click the link in the show notes and head over and explore what's on offer. If you're in South Africa, you can go in person. If you're online, the core work, the one that the Heart Math Institute will be measuring, is at 21:00 South Africa time. So work out when that is for you and if you can be there, then please do.

We did have some technical issues with the sound and it's not quite as easy on your ears as usual - for which we all apologise, but I think the content is well worth it. So for a wide, deep dive into health at all its fractal levels, please welcome this week's guest, Zach Bush, MD. Enjoy!

Links
Zach's Website - Join the Journey to read his book
Origin Event Trailer
Origin Festival and Live Connection
OurOrigin.earth Substack

Manda and Louise both offer one-to-one Mentoring Calls. Manda is writing a book just now, but if you'd like to contact Louise, details are here.

Dignity, Confidence and Care: The Matriarch Effect transforming lives with Dr Robyn Short Oct 07, 2026

Show notes

We all know we need to wake up, grow up, show up, but how do we actually do the inner work of growing into interdependence and then the outer work of healing our relationships and holding whole, generative spaces for all parts of ourselves, ourselves and each other, ourselves and the web of life?

That's this week's question and our guest on this episode has written a book that absolutely answers this, and more.

Dr. Robyn Short is an organization systems design consultant, peace-building trainer, and mediator who works with individuals, corporations, and nonprofit organizations in discovering the root causes of conflicts, so they may transform their relationships and create new and productive paths forward individually, as teams, and ultimate as an organization. She also works with community leaders and political and governmental leaders to develop initiatives for building sustainable peace in areas of historic conflict. In this capacity, she has been featured in news outlets internationally.

She is founder and CEO of The Workplace Peace Institute, responsible for its mission, vision and values - and those values are explicitly generative: equity, diversity, empathy, courage and curiosity.

She is the author of four books, the latest of which is 'The Matriarch Effect: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Organizations and the New Logic of Power' and it's this we'll be talking about today - what it is, and how it can transform our worlds of work—and life.

Links

Book Link
The Matriarch Effect
The Workplace Peace Institute
Dr Short on LinkedIn

Manda and Louise both offer one-to-one Mentoring Calls. Manda is writing a book just now, but if you'd like to contact Louise, details are here.

Hostage Nation Part 2 - Anything we can do, we can afford - with Jamie Driscoll of Majority Sep 30, 2026

Show notes

From the Hostage Nation paper:

" The first and most fundamental duty of a civilised state is the safety of its people.

Not just safety from overseas adversaries, or crime in the street. Economic security. A bill you can pay without going overdrawn. A house you can afford before your children have children of their own. A job that lasts long enough to plan around.

Britain guarantees none of these. Not for want of money, or land, or people who know how to build. Our nation has all of that.

For forty years we have outsourced that security to the global marketplace. We locked ourselves in a room and posted the key to a trading desk in New York. British government policy subservient to global winds.

They call it living within our means. We call it Hostage Nation."

This is the second part of our conversation with Jamie Driscoll, former Mayor of Newcastle city region, founder of Majority and now Green Council for his old Monument ward. He's also one of the authors of the Hostage Nation paper quoted above that lays out how we can shift our current economy from one that's in hock to the Vigilante Bond Markets to one that supports people and planet.

Jamie's website
Majority
Hostage Nation

Manda and Louise both offer one-to-one Mentoring Calls. Manda is writing a book just now, but if you'd like to contact Louise, details are here.

How not to be a hostage to the vigilante Bond Markets: with Jamie Driscoll of Majority Sep 23, 2026

Show notes

What are the actual, practical shifts in our political economy that we could do tomorrow, that would not require extra legislation and could transform our society? This question applies to us all, wherever we are in the world and while there are many economists looking forward to an idealised system some way down the line, very few people - politicians or economists - are exploring what we could do now, today, within the guiderails of the existing system, with the politicians we have and the economy we have and the constraints of a world undergoing rapid geopolitical as well as geophysical change.

Jamie Driscoll grew up in the north east of England, with a dad who drove a tank in the army and a mum who was a youth worker, trade unionist, and set up the first Women’s Refuge from Domestic Violence in Middlesbrough. He left school at 16, and returned to education as a mature student, gaining a degree in Engineering at Northumbria University. He went on to run his own business as a software developer and then, when kids came along, and he was married to a GP, he wound back his business and became the main carer for the children.

He was 48 when he became a politician and he clearly brought the clear thought of an engineer, the empathy of a parent and the basic common sense of his upbringing to his various roles. He was elected Mayor of the Newcastle city region in May 2019, a position he served in until 2024, turning Newcastle into what the Guardian called “the capital of a new radical British politics”. In his five years in office he had to work around four different Prime Ministers, six different Chancellors, a global pandemic, Britain leaving the EU, energy price shocks, a cost of living crisis and the start of a ground war in Europe. He's one of a tiny handful of democratic socialists – as opposed to social democrats – who have experience running an arm of government in Britain. He smashed his job creation target by over 300 percent; built affordable homes to high-eco standards; ran child poverty prevention programmes; delivered skills training to thousands of people to enable them to increase earnings. For every £1 I invested, his team returned over £3 to the Treasury in increased payroll taxes from job creation. He even had a successful venture capital programme that generated profits for the team to spend on other programmes, rather than them being funnelled off into tax havens by private investors.

So, of course, in 2024, the Labour party changed its own internal rules to block him from standing in what was a new Mayoral area: he was too good, too effective - too socialist for them to let him continue when their entire reason for existence was to crush the left in the party. He ran as an independent in that election and came second after the official Labour candidate, polling the second highest independent vote in British political history, and built an organizational infrastructure that has become the progressive movement called Majority.

In amongst all this, he is one of the sharpest, most deeply thoughtful people I've come across in electoral politics - easily up there with Mamdani, AOC and El-Sayed in the US. And he's here today because he's brought out a new paper - 'Hostage Nation' which does something quite remarkable: it takes the existing system in the UK and with only a few well-placed tweaks - almost all of which require no new legislation - it creates a new system that works for people and planet.

I cannot emphasise too highly how innovative and necessary this is. It's the beginning step to a future that works for everyone - whoever you are, if you're listening to this in the UK, it would make your life measurably better within a year, significantly better in four years and utterly transformed in a decade. If you're outside the UK, bringing the principles of this into your own nation would do the same.

This is common sense politics - worked out in detail and I totally recommend that you read the website, sign up for more details and read as much of the paper as you can. Figure out what you can embrace and then tell people about it. This is how we make change.

Jamie and I were scheduled to have an hour's conversation. At the end of the first hour, it became obvious that there was at least another hour - actually, closer to two. So we split the conversation: the episode is broadly about politics and how we might change it. The second focuses more deeply on the Hostage Nation paper. So here we go - please enjoy Jamie Driscoll of Majority, the Green Party and author of Hostage Nation.

Jamie's website
Majority
Hostage Nation

Manda and Louise both offer one-to-one Mentoring Calls. Manda is writing a book just now, but if you'd like to contact Louise, details are here.

Autumn Equinox Meditation Sep 22, 2026

Show notes

Here is an Autumn Equinox Meditation to help set you up for the shift from the long days to the long nights.

For those in the Southern Hemisphere, there's a Spring Equinox Meditation here.

Manda and Louise both offer one-to-one Mentoring Calls. Manda is writing a book just now, but if you'd like to contact Louise, details are here.

The Stewardship Freehold Village - an idea whose time has come - with Michael Taite Sep 16, 2026

Show notes

"When we build, we first remove the soil and replace it with rubble, concrete and tarmac. When we grow, we exclude all life from the land bar the one crop we want. Where we belatedly recognise our ultimate dependence on nature, we confine it to intensive ‘nature only’ areas such as rewilding zones, field margins and beetle banks." Michael Taite 2026

How do we reconcile our human need for shelter, autonomy, a sense of safety in our own homes…with the wider need for us to collaborate with the Animate Earth, to become the self conscious nodes in the Web of Life, so that we can each find what's ours to do, that only we can do and that we can do best? How can we create more homes in a Thrutopian process that shifts us from the dysfunction of our current system to something that works for people and planet?

Our guest this week has just completed a Masters at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and has written his thesis addressing this very problem and today, he comes to talk to us about his concept of the 'Stewardship Freehold Village', which feels like one of those ideas that is so obvious, it's amazing nobody thought of it before - but nobody did, or at least, if they did, it is lost in the toxic chaos of a trust-less planning system that rewards the most predatory of predatory capitalists.

Michael Taite started his professional life working for a huge London developer - now long gone - and towards the end was responsible for a portfolio of thirteen developments with big residential schemes in Docklands and other sites in London, Manchester and the north east of England. While there, he passed over a dozen professional exams, which, amongst other things, gave him insights into the arcane depths of planning law. Since 1996, he has been self-employed and has split his time between his business, environmental and local community concerns. So, for instance, he served 19 years as the lead operational trustee for the Environmental Law Foundation, a UK national charity which secures free legal help for communities under threat. He has also served as a parish councillor and as a trustee of his local village hall and, with his wife Gail, ran their small brand strategy agency whose signature process was a system for consulting whole organisations to secure genuine, broad stakeholder support when radical change was scary but necessary. The agency’s slogan was BRAVE = SAFE which feels genuinely Thrutopian.

Having attained his Masters from SOAS, Michael is now working on progressing the concepts which emerged from that process, in the hope that they might contribute to averting some of the worst aspects of the intertwined global catastrophes that we address all the time on this podcast.

Links

Michael's Substack on SFV
Michael general Substack

Michael on LinkedIn

Michael on YouTube

Environmental Law Foundation

Elinor Ostrom’s 8 Rules for Managing the Commons -

Williams, Jeremy. The Earthbound Report, 15 Jan. 2018

Eﬃcient public transport for semi-rural areas

New homes industry profitabilty and problems - 1
Foyle, C. and Shepherd, E. (2023). Why have the volume housebuilders been so

profitable? Glasgow: UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence

New homes industry profitabilty and problems - 2
Carmona, M., Alwarea, A., Giordano, V., Gusseinova, A. and Olaleye, F. (2021). A

Housing Design Audit for England. [online] London WC1: UCL Place Alliance. Available