Podcast appearances and mentions of George Monbiot

George Monbiot - the Guardian columnist with a penchant for lab-based protein and a farm-free future - recently wrote a scathing article damning two important livestock reports. The first was a report into three years of research into AMP grazing from FAI Farms, the Oxfordshire-based farm and food system consultancy - the second, Grazing Livestock, was by the Sustainable Food Trust.ffinlo Costain talks to Karl Williams, a director of FAI, and Science and Technical Lead, Amanda Deakin - and to Patrick Holden, chief Executive of the Sustainable Food Trust, and Senior Research Manager, Robert Barbour.Read the reports at 8point9.com:FAI AMP report: https://8point9.com/emissions-completely-offset-by-sequestration-in-mcdonalds-fai-amp-grazing-project-2/SFT Grazing Livestock report: https://8point9.com/new-report-aims-to-flip-the-script-on-meat-and-dairy/

For four four decades, George Monbiot has been one of Britain's strongest voices speaking out on the environment.After starting his career with the BBC, Monbiot is now best known for his books and his weekly column in The Guardian, winning a reputation as a tireless and passionate advocate for the natural world, as well as making plenty of enemies along the way. He joins James Fisher on this week's episode of the Country Life Podcast to talk about farming, development, nature and neoliberalism. Covering a huge amount of ground — from developers and corporations pushing their agenda on government, to how flawed farming practices have created monoculture deserts across huge swatches of Britain — it's a fascinating listen.• Listen to Country Life podcast on Apple Podcasts• Listen to Country Life podcast on Spotify• Listen to Country Life podcast on AudibleYou may not always agree with him, but his commitment to making the world a better place is fierce and unwavering. His passion isn't just directed towards the environment, but also society as a whole — something explored in his recent book on neoloberalism, The Invisible Doctrine, which he recently spoke about at the Cambridge Literary Festival.You can find out more about George and his work at monbiot.com.Episode creditsHost: James FisherGuest: George MonbiotEditor and producer: Toby KeelMusic: JuliusH via Pixabay Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The episode where we critique a human right, analyse humanities destructive nature and still manage to find hope.A conversation with one of the sharpest political commentators of this moment. Zoologist, journalist, and writer of many, many books – George Monbiot. If you like the podcast do consider giving it five stars. As I am fully independent and produce everything by myself, I don't make any money from this, so that would be the way to support me. Enjoy!!

World Earth Day is being marked across the globe today. Now in it's 55th year, this year's event comes at a critical time for the environment as the US once again pulls out of the Paris agreement on climate change…Joining Kieran to discuss the day is Journalist and Environmental Activist, George Monbiot.

RHLSTP Book Club 134 - The Invisible Doctrine - Recorded in front of an audience at the prestigious Royal Geographical Society, Richard talks to journalist George Monbiot about his very readable investigation into Neo-Liberalism (co-authored with Peter Hutchinson) The Invisible Doctrine. George does most of the talking, which is probably for the best and reveals what he considers to the be the starting point of capitalism, why capitalism and commerce are not the same thing, the roots of Neo Liberalism in the closing stages of World War II, why it took 30 years to come to prominence, conspiracy theories versus conspiracy fictions, why the left has missed opportunities to defeat Neo-liberalism, what happened when Liz Truss tried to institute its policies all in one go, why Starmer is wrong to try and legitimise Reform and whether there is hope for the future and what we can do to stand up to a political system that threatens our planet. Rousing and fascinating stuff.Event hosted by How To Academy - check out their podcast, the How To Academy Podcast, exploring big ideas with distinguished leaders, artists, and thinkers, available wherever you listen.Buy the book here - https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-invisible-doctrine-understanding-neoliberalism-peter-hutchinson/7402463Support our Kickstarter here https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/467836598/can-i-have-my-ball-backTo see Rich on tour head here http://richardherring.com/ballback/tour Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/rhlstp. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Forget Christianity, Judaism, New Age Spirituality, and Buddhism, a new type of religion drives 21st century Western thought. It goes by the shadowy name of Neoliberalism: the commodification of everything; Markets and the private sector ascendent; The deliberate attempt to reduce – especially through privatisation and austerity – state power, regulatory capacity, and government's ability to influence the economy. Over the past few decades, from Thatcher and Reagan, to Blair and Clinton, the whole world was incentivized to embrace neoliberal reforms. The result? Our public services are crumbling. Governments have lost the ability to build roads and hospitals. Governments are no longer driving cutting edge innovation. And a new class of super rich neoliberal oligarchs – Musk, the Koch brothers, Bezos, Zuckerburg, and the cryptobros – are spreading Disorder.    To help us find governmental Order amidst all this privatized Disorder, Jason is joined by George Monbiot -- Guardian columnist and co-author of ‘The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism (& How It Came to Control Your Life)'.    In their conversation, the duo chart the evolution of neoliberalism and how it has shifted core governance functions (like transport, health care, and security) from the public sector to private enterprises, leading to a new form of oligarchy. Plus: they look at the failures of centrist politicians to come up with compelling alternatives and they hypothesize about the psychological motivations of the wealthy elite.    Finally, as they Order the Disorder, they put forward the need for a new political narrative that emphasises community and solidarity - especially on a local level.    Producer: George McDonagh  Executive Producer: Neil Fearn    Subscribe to our Substack (for free, or get the PAID version to get a discount on our March 21st event with Bill Browder and Stephanie Baker at the Frontline Club): https://natoandtheged.substack.com/    Show Notes Links:  Get George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison's book The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism (& How It Came to Control Your Life) - https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/455534/the-invisible-doctrine-by-hutchison-george-monbiot-and-peter/9780241635902     For more on the New Books Network which runs lots of podcasts about every sort of topic - https://newbooksnetwork.com/     And for an NBN podcast on the historic origins of neo-liberalism check out: https://newbooksnetwork.com/neoliberalism       Read George's piece - Trump and Musk have launched a new class war. In the UK, we must prepare to defend ourselves - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/19/donald-trump-elon-musk-class-war-uk-us-oligarchies-democracy     Listen back to our episode with Harvey Whitehouse (start with P1) - https://pod.link/1706818264/episode/36cb340116979a4aa2dfdca524988d27     And buy his book out now in paperback: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/451443/inheritance-by-whitehouse-harvey/9781529159158   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Simon Holmes à Court will be in conversation with Rick Brazalle (pictured) at a Lighter Footprints event at Melbourne's Malvern Town Hall on Wednesday, March 5, discussing "Powering 2025: Driving Australia's Energy Transition"."What Would Real Energy Independence Look Like?";"This wind farm is retiring, so what happens to its tonnes of steel?";"Elon Musk's Tesla big battery tweets put Australia on road to green energy, now he might derail it";"A Simple Farming Trick That Could Remove CO₂ from the Atmosphere";"Trump Order Shifts the Financial Burden of Climate Change Onto Individuals";"How Trump could be derailing a major global climate report";"Waves are getting bigger. Is the world ready?";"Net zero emissions by 2050 is great for the fossil fuel industry";"Water Access in North Gaza, Rafah Down to 7 Percent of Pre-Genocide Levels";"An Economist's Dire Forecast About Just How Much Climate Change Will Impact GDP";"Trump Wants the Federal Government's Facilities Administration to Disconnect Its EV Charging Stations";"Here's how climate change fueled the Los Angeles fires";"Lethal Greed: How Corporate Manipulation of Science and Regulation Makes People Sick";"A Lawsuit Against Greenpeace Is Meant to Bankrupt It and Deter Public Protests, Environmental Groups Warn";"Doctors and Medical Schools Are Changing Treatments and Training to Respond to the Warming Climate";"Trump Team Plans Deep Cuts at Office That Funds Recovery From Big Disasters";"Even epic rainfall may not be enough to refill SoCal's aquifers";"States are moving forward with Buy Clean policies despite Trump reversal";"Climate change education can survive four more years of climate change denial";"Kore Power has a new plan after canceling $1.2B battery plant in Arizona";"Local Governments Can Achieve Texas-Sized Impacts from Distributed Energy Assets and Virtual Power Plants";"Broken Levers" - George Monbiot;"The climate crisis is a cost-of-living issue for Australia. My generation will be the first to pay for it";"Activist asks Supreme Court to keep climate case alive";"Tim Winton: Labor hasn't delivered on more effective nature laws. It's not just embarrassing, it's calamitous";"‘Serious concerns': national assessment reveals rivers flowing into the Great Barrier Reef are getting more polluted";"Why the death knell of a brutal 200km Dutch ice race signals trouble for Australia";"Households are burning plastic waste as fuel for cooking and heating in slums the world over";"Environmental Protection Agency Gives $20 Billion in ‘Green Bank' Grants";"The New Plutocracy";"Energy and Wildlife Conservation: A Two-Pronged Approach";"New Poll Finds Broad Support for Conservation and Action on Climate Change Across the West";"Trump's Friday Firings Leave EPA Chicago Office Down Dozens of Scientists, Staff";"Gradually, Then Suddenly";"Whale poop may have been a key fertilizer for oceans".

You might not be aware of it, with Elon Musk and Donald Trump taking virtually all the air out of the news lately, but the State of Wisconsin has one of the MOST important elections in the USA for 2025 coming up in just over a month! On Tuesday, April 1st, Wisconsin's GOP wants to pull the most cruel April Fool's joke ever by ripping control of our state's Supreme Court away from us after just two short years. With Ann Walsh Bradley retiring after 30 years of liberal rulings, the 4-3 liberal mix of the court would be put back in conservative hands if Scott Walker's former Attorney General Brad Schimel is allowed to beat Susan Crawford in this spring election. We go over what is at stake.Next, we review how the recent strategic firings at the National Labor Relations Board and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (The NLRB and the EEOC, respectively) hamstring those organizations' ability to act in any way, robbing them each of the quorum necessary to act on behalf of workers nationwide. Then we read, with permission, the writings of our UK friend George Monbiot, as he details how there, those who had been pointing out the ways in which their society needed to be improved to forestall calamity were pushed aside in a way that's all too familiar here in the United States. All this and more on TMI for Friday, February 21, 2025 – listen in for YOUR Cure for the Common Media!

Send us a textDo you contemplate topics like climate change, biodiversity loss, and the risk of civilizational collapse? If so, then you probably understand something about bargaining – a psychological defense mechanism that's one of the five stages of grief. With just a wee bit of embarrassment, Asher, Jason, and Rob reveal damning episodes of bargaining from their personal histories (involving green consumerism and cult-like devotion to technology). Having admitted their sins, they discuss the allure of false solutions to our environmental predicaments and how even veteran environmental journalists can be susceptible to it. Stay to the end for thoughts on how to avoid getting hoodwinked by the horde of ecomodernist tech bros who continuously shove unworkable "solutions" down our throats. Originally recorded on January 16, 2025.Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.Sources/Links/Notes:Julia Musto, "The end of the world as we know it? Theorist warns humanity is teetering between collapse and advancement," Independent, January 13, 2025 (about Nahfeez Ahmed's take on superabundance versus collapse).Rob Dietz, "Chris Smaje Vs. George Monbiot and the Debate on the Future of Farming," Resilience, October 27, 2023.Crazy Town episode 32 on cognitive biasMegan Phelps-Roper's six questionsCrazy Town episode 45 on feedback loops, featuring an interview with Beth SawinPost Carbon Institute's Deep Dive on building emotional resilienceSupport the show

In this episode, our guest, Jeremy Lent, discusses the profound global upheaval in early 2025. We explore themes of hope and grief amid political, cultural, and environmental crises. Lent provides deep insights into systems thinking, emphasizing the importance of interconnectedness and unpredictability in complex systems. The conversation also holds space for the impact of reductionist thinking, the power of technology, and the potential for societal transformation through integrated intelligence. The episode concludes with discussions on individual and systemic change, indigenous wisdom, and the need for a life-affirming future. Jeremy Lent is an author and speaker exploring the root causes of civilization's crises and pathways to a sustainable future. Described by The Guardian's George Monbiot as “one of the greatest thinkers of our age,” he is the author of The Patterning Instinct and The Web of Meaning, which integrate science and traditional wisdom to reimagine our place in the universe. He founded the Deep Transformation Network and Liology Institute to foster an ecological civilization and writes on cultural and political patterns at Patterns of Meaning. Topics 00:00 Introduction 00:52 Introducing Jeremy Lent 01:50 Navigating Hope and Grief 03:18 Systems Thinking and Interconnectedness 10:08 Cultural Narratives and Political Polarization 17:37 Technology's Role in Connection 26:10 Blockchain and Decentralization 27:43 Integrative Intelligence and Human Flourishing 32:32 Indigenous Wisdom and Reciprocity 49:42 Conclusion and Future Engagements Resources Jeremy Lent's Website Deep Transformation Network Patterns of Meaning Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters by Brian Klaas Sounds of SAND #108 Thrutopian Dreams: Manda Scott Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member

Why are are the rich getting richer? Why is prosperity moving further and further out of reach for most people? An iconoclast unafraid to speak truth to power, George Monbiot joins comedian Frankie Boyle to take on the fringe philosophy which the wealthy elite have hijacked to guard their fortunes and power. While neoliberalism permeates society, from our mental and economic wellbeing to the foundation of democracy itself, the fight to restore democracy to the people is far from over. George reveals how we can fight back. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Former B.C. premier Christy Clark, who is considering a run for federal Liberal leader, has walked back her claim that she'd never been a member of the Conservative party. The field of contenders for the Liberal leadership has narrowed with ministers Mélanie Joly, Anita Anand, and Dominic LeBlanc announcing they will not run. Research Co. pollster Mario Canseco joins the show as we ask viewers what they think the election is about, and we take audience calls to weigh in on the top contenders for the Liberal race.Next, raging wildfires in the Los Angeles area have local governments examining their climate disaster policies. George Monbiot, a climate activist and columnist with 'The Guardian', joins the show to discuss how governments should plan and respond to climate change. We take callers' questions for Mr. Monbiot, as well as comments on what needs to happen to mitigate climate-fueled disasters.

In the face of climate change and biodiversity loss, the solutions we hear the most are technological ones - many of which mirror the economic and philosophical approaches that precipitated these crises in the first place. But what if that vision is flawed? Chris Smaje, author of Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, challenges the dominant eco-modernist philosophy head-on. He critiques its reliance on techno-fixes—not just on technological grounds, but also economic, political, and spiritual ones.In this episode, Chris shares an alternative vision: a localist, agro-ecological approach to modern agriculture, rooted in self-provisioning for our basic needs and leveraging natural cycles instead of hyper-technological systems. It's a vision that reconnects us to the land, promotes food sovereignty, and rethinks what a feasible and fulfilling future could look like.In this episode, we dive into: Why he wrote Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, inspired by a critique of prominent environmental and agricultural thinker George Monbiot. What our environmental crises reveal about the deeper flaws in our econmic systems. How industrial agriculture's obsession with efficiency undermines ecological and social resilience. The ecological work of animals and why they're vital to sustainable farming systems. The drive toward urbanism and the assumptions—often misguided—about its benefits for the planet. Reimagining quality of life beyond financial measures. And much more…More about Chris:Chris Smaje helps run a small farm in Somerset, England and has worked as a commercial vegetable grower and an academic social scientist. He's recently published two books, A Small Farm Future (2020) and Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future (2023). He's currently at work on a third – Lights for a Dark Age – all published by Chelsea Green.Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song. This episode was edited by Drew O'Doherty.

The best of our guests from 2024! Part 2 features Arthur Smith, Maisie Adam, Rosie Holt, Toby Tarrant, Stephen Fry, David Mitchell, Major General Chip Chapman, Daliso Chapona, Madeline Smith, Nick Newman, Maria McErlane, Simon Brodkin, Tom Baldwin, George Monbiot, Stevie Martin, Jon Holmes, Sophie Duker, Suzi Perry and Jason Manford.Follow My Time Capsule on Instagram: @mytimecapsulepodcast & Twitter & Facebook: @MyTCpod .Follow Michael Fenton Stevens on Twitter: @fentonstevens & Instagram @mikefentonstevens .Produced and edited by John Fenton-Stevens for Cast Off Productions .Music by Pass The Peas Music .Artwork by matthewboxall.com .This podcast is proud to be associated with the charity Viva! Providing theatrical opportunities for hundreds of young people . Get bonus episodes and ad-free listening by becoming a team member with Acast+! Your support will help us to keep making My Time Capsule. Join our team now! https://plus.acast.com/s/mytimecapsule. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Co nas czeka? TOP 10 wyzwań na nadchodzące ćwierćwiecze. Rozmowa z Piotrem Wasylukiem, doktorem nauk humanistycznych, specjalistą projektowania z wykorzystaniem trendów. Postawiliśmy sobie wyzwanie, by wytypować swoje TOP 10 wyzwań społecznych na nadchodzące ćwierćwiecze. W pierwszym kroku przygotowaliśmy TOP 10 wyzwań na ćwierćwiecze samodzielnie, w drugim kroku o tym porozmawialiśmy. Piotr jest naukowcem, myślicielem i humanistą, ja inżynierem. Niby reprezentujemy oddzielne dziedziny nauki, a jednak znaleźliśmy wiele podobieństw w myśleniu. Zaczynamy od numeru 10 i w trakcie rozmowy kroczymy pod w górę, aż do 1. A teraz się zabawmy. Możesz teraz, bez słuchania tego odcinka spróbować zgadnąć, co jest na pierwszym miejscu? Wpisz to w komentarz, a potem posłuchaj, jak my do tego podeszliśmy. Zapraszamy do słuchania! Plan rozmowy: • 0:00 – start • 0:36 – zapowiedź • 0:47 – nasze wyzwanie TOP 10 na ćwierćwiecze • 1:18 – kryteria wyboru naszych zmian • 2:36 – numer 10 Piotra Wasyluka • 3:50 – numer 10 Kasi Michałowskiej • 6:54 – numer 9 Piotra Wasyluka • 8:02 – numer 9 Kasi Michałowskiej • 11:11 – numer 8 Piotra Wasyluka • 14:04 – numer 8 Kasi Michałowskiej • 17:48 – numer 7 Piotra Wasyluka • 24:20 – numer 7 Kasi Michałowskiej • 28:58 – numer 6 Piotra Wasyluka • 32:26 – numer 6 Kasi Michałowskiej • 35:03 – numer 5 Piotra Wasyluka • 37:03 – numer 5 Kasi Michałowskiej • 38:58 – numer 4 Piotra Wasyluka • 40:15 – numer 4 Kasi Michałowskiej • 43:20 – numer 3 Piotra Wasyluka • 44:35 – numer 3 Kasi Michałowskiej • 46:30 – numer 2 Piotra Wasyluka • 47:50 – numer 2 Kasi Michałowskiej • 52:00 – numer 1 Piotra Wasyluka • 54:25 – numer 1 Kasi Michałowskiej Więcej Piotra Wasyluka to publikacje na Dragonfly perspective: https://tiny.pl/g5c7xwbb Strona Piotra Wasyluka: https://wasylukprojektowaniekreatywne.pl/ Samotność młodych osób: https://tiny.pl/dg1kh - Instytut Pokolenia w opublikowanym raporcie na temat odczuwania samotności (nie jest teraz dostępny w sieci) pisze w podsumowaniu: „Z wyników uzyskanych na skali wynika, że to mężczyźni doświadczają większego poczucia samotności niż kobiety: 42,99 dla mężczyzn, 41,45 dla kobiet. Co więcej, okazuje się, że grupą doświadczającą samotności najczęściej są młodzi mężczyźni: 65% mężczyzn w wieku 25–34 lat oraz 57% mężczyzn do 24. roku życia uzyskało wynik na skali samotności wyższy od średniej (odpowiednio 46,09 i 47,29).” Piotr mówi o książce „Seksroboty. O pożądaniu, nauce i sztucznej inteligencji”: https://tiny.pl/hq16zdq4 Cancel culture, czyli kultura anulowania, cała różnorodność tego spojrzenia – https://tiny.pl/mmbdx9yh AI miała być skasowana, więc skasowała konkurencję – autonomia AI – dokument do analizy – https://tiny.pl/rzzw1010 Piotr mówi o książce „No logo : bez przestrzeni, bez wyboru, bez pracy” Naomi Klein – https://tiny.pl/6th7fpfs Przy punkcie piątym mamy kilka polecajek. Piotr mówi o książce „Nowe długie życie” Andrew J. Scott i Lynda Gratton Mówiłam o tej koncepcji w KTIPie – Nie daj się zaskoczyć przyszłości – polecam https://tiny.pl/bwybqr53 Piotr poleca jeszcze książki „Regenesis. Jak wyżywić świat nie pożerając planety” – George Monbiot oraz SITOPIA Jak jedzenie może ocalić świat – Carolyn Steel

The “cold chain” that delivers our food is inconspicuous but vast. The US alone boasts around 5.5 billion cubic feet of refrigerated space; that’s 150 Empire State Buildings’ worth of freezers. Now, the developing world is catching up. On Zero, Nicola Twilley, author of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves, discusses how refrigeration became so ubiquitous and what our reliance on it means for our palates and the planet. Explore further: Past episode with Stacey Abrams on how kitchen-table decisions can cut emissions Past episode with journalist George Monbiot on how the world’s food system needs a radical rethink Past episode with two vertical farming companies taking agriculture indoors Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Mythili Rao. Special thanks this week to Kira Bindrim, Aaron Rutkoff and Monique Mulima. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at zeropod@bloomberg.net. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit https://www.bloomberg.com/green.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode we look back at some of the highlights from previous podcasts we have made, focussing on some of the biggest names we have interviewed. You will hear from journalist and campaigner George Monbiot, the Green Party peer and former party leader Natalie Bennett, Olivia Ferdi who is co-founder of the drinks brand TRIP, and David Nabarro who is a member of the steering committee for the UN Global Crisis Response Group on Food, Energy, and Finance. Many of the conversations we re-visit focus on sustainability in the food industry, how are doing and some ideas on how we can improve things. The Food Matters Live podcast is taking a short break over Chrtistmas, but we will return in January with brand new content for 2025.

This episode was originally published on July 11th, 2024. Climate change is disrupting food production and supply worldwide. Crops, fruit, livestock and transport are all affected. Permanently higher inflation may result, as well as food security threats. What are the implications for people around the world?In this episode: George Monbiot, Environmental and Political Activist. Carin Smaller, Executive Director, Shamba Centre for Food & Climate. Thin Lei Win, Food Systems and Climate Change Journalist. Host: Elizabeth Puranam Connect with us:@AJEPodcasts on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook At Al Jazeera Podcasts, we want to hear from you, our listeners. So, please head to https://www.aljazeera.com/survey and tell us your thoughts about this show and other Al Jazeera podcasts. It only takes a few minutes!

COP 29 wrapped up in Azerbaijan yesterday.Delegates at COP 29 reached a deal to provide developing countries with $300 billion a year to cope with the effects of extreme weather caused by climate change.But is COP useful? Or should we get rid of it all together?Environmentalist and Journalist, George Monbiot, joins Kieran to discuss.Image: United Nations

George Monbiot, Journalist and author of Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet

COP29 kicks off today with more than 100 world leaders expected to travel to Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. We look ahead to what COP29 might bring with George Monbiot, Environmental Journalist and Campaigner.

It's been a year of mixed fortunes for Green politicians. In the US, Jill Stein could be a deciding factor in the presidential race. But the Greens fared badly in European elections this year. So as the climate crisis worsens, are Greens winning or losing influence around the world? In this episode: Hans Noel, Georgetown University, Washington DC. George Monbiot, Author and environmental activist in the UK. Anne Marie Bihirabake, Pesident of the East Africa Green Federation, Burundi. Host: Sami Zeidan Connect with us:@AJEPodcasts on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook At Al Jazeera Podcasts, we want to hear from you, our listeners. So, please head to https://www.aljazeera.com/survey and tell us your thoughts about this show and other Al Jazeera podcasts. It only takes a few minutes!

Today, Bunny chats to George Monbiot, sadly not in his garden as it is a building site, but we hear all about his plans for the garden, which he is working on with his partner, Rebecca Wriggly. Rebecca is Chief Executive of Rewilding Britain.  Bunny and George  chat about why  George had an unhappy time at Oxford difficult, (he had an open scholarship) though enjoyed his course, his several near death experiences, his thoughts on whether Bunny should change her diesel car to electric and where he buys his clothes. Plus ideas, of course, on how we can hopefully save the planet. Bunny gives him a present of a Cambridge Gage tree from Frank Matthews. They are one of the largest tree growers in the UK with an extensive range of fruit and ornamental trees. Available as container grown or bare root in the winter, trees can be delivered to anywhere in the UK or you can visit their Tree Shop in Worcestershire. The delicious fruit have a  very short shelf life, so you can only enjoy them by growing your own. #equality #wildlife 

A conversation with Chris Smaje, farmer and author of Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, about manufactured food not being the solution to the food, agriculture, and climate crises, despite what George Monbiot portraits in Regenesis. Why don't we just grow food from thin air and all move to cities and have nature rewild the countryside? If this sounds dystopian to you, this conversation is perfect for you. We unpack the many issues with that worldview and how it most likely creates more problems than it solves. There are huge technical challenges with this kind of manufactured food, like energy costs and health. But this is about much more; this is also about the concentration of people, capital, and power in cities and the rural-urban divide.---------------------------------------------------Join our Gumroad community, discover the tiers and benefits on www.gumroad.com/investinginregenag. Support our work:Share itGive a 5-star ratingBuy us a coffee… or a meal! www.Ko-fi.com/regenerativeagriculture----------------------------------------------------More about this episode on https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/chris-smaje.Find our video course on https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/course.----------------------------------------------------The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message!https://foodhub.nl/en/opleidingen/your-path-forward-in-regenerative-food-and-agriculture/ Use KOEN10 for 10% offhttps://rfsi-forum.com/2024-rfsi-forum/ Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:https://gen-re.land/ https://www.freshventures.eu/https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/2023/02/21/bart-van-der-zande-2/https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/2024/03/22/chris-bloomfield-daniel-reisman/Support the showFeedback, ideas, suggestions? - Twitter @KoenvanSeijen - Get in touch www.investinginregenerativeagriculture.comJoin our newsletter on www.eepurl.com/cxU33P! Support the showThanks for listening and sharing!

In this episode Bunny talks to Bob  Flowerdew in his Norfolk garden.  They talk about his previous work before he started gardening professionally which include chicken giblet washer (advancing to chicken box counter), council care-home cleaner, dog impersonator, glass fibre laminator, houseboy & cook in house of ill repute, festival security lighting engineer, marine engineer, museum attendant, nude model, Parisian guide, theatrical gofer, vitreous enamel applicator, arcade mechanic & pinball wizard.  Bob though, is most at home performing.  He approached the producer of BBC Radio 4's Gardeners' Question Time some 28 years ago, where he had been in the audience and said he could do a better job, and was subsequently taken on by the producer. On the program, with its 2 million listeners a week, Bob has consistently promoted organic gardening  and had a big influence on the way people garden.  Hear why he was booed off stage at Glastonbury , why he is not a big fan of hedgehogs in his garden and why he disagrees with George Monbiot about growing pineapples in the UK. He also has boycotted Tesco's over their ‘Bags for Life'. For his present Bunny took him a fig, ‘Desert King' which is extremely cold tolerant with beautiful, large, melt in the mouth fruit. Not widely grown, but in Bunny's opinion superior to ‘Brown Turkey'. To see Bob in his garden watch Bunny's YouTube video ‘Bunny and Bob Flowerdew bicker in Bob's Norfolk Garden'. 

The “cold chain” that delivers our food is inconspicuous but vast. The US alone boasts around 5.5 billion cubic feet of refrigerated space; that's 150 Empire State Buildings' worth of freezers. Now, the developing world is catching up. On Zero, Nicola Twilley, author of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves, discusses how refrigeration became so ubiquitous and what our reliance on it means for our palates and the planet.  Explore further: Past episode with Stacey Abrams on how kitchen-table decisions can cut emissions Past episode with journalist George Monbiot on how the world's food system needs a radical rethink  Past episode with two vertical farming companies taking agriculture indoors Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Mythili Rao. Special thanks this week to Kira Bindrim, Aaron Rutkoff and Monique Mulima. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at zeropod@bloomberg.net. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit https://www.bloomberg.com/green.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the context of carbon emissions related to imported foods, increasing food insecurity, pollution from intensive farming and corporate monopolies, maybe it's time we reimagined the future of farming in the UK? Duncan Fisher eloquently describes how Our Food 1200 / Ein Bwyd 1200 are working to build a reliable and affordable supply of food for all, focusing on accessible and small scale agroecological farms. Your Hosts:Tom Constable: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-constable/Chloe Constable: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chloe-constable-24155821b/Grange Project Contact & Social Media:Email: hello@grangeproject.co.ukInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/grange.project/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/grangeprojectYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GrangeProjectLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-constable/Our Guest:Duncan Fisher is the Director and Co-Manager of Our Food 1200, he lives in Crickhowell and has a varied background, including extensive experience in child welfare and development and sustainable travel.LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/duncanfisher/?originalSubdomain=ukhttps://ourfood1200.wales/ to find out more about the work of Our Food 1200, including the application link for the Future Farms Partnership in Powys.Listen out for:[00:00:00] Tom and Chloe update on the project, sharing the love from our second community day and news of a recently awarded grant.[00:06:40] Our guest for today, Duncan Fisher, introduces himself and gives an overview of Our Food 1200.[00:12:05] Tom asks Duncan to elaborate on why we require a new approach to farming, specifically in relation to food security and the affordability of farmland.[00:16:50] Chloe questions Duncan about the environmental impacts of our current food system, including the carbon impact of imported food, and the profitability of growing fruit and vegetables. [00:23:14] We discuss the definition of agroecological and what you might expect from a small-scale future farm.[00:26:16] Duncan introduces their flagship project: The Future Farms Partnership.[00:31:22] We discuss the perspective of George Monbiot and his ‘protein factories', considering the importance of decentralisation. [00:35:58] Chloe reflects on the joy of community connections associated with local and small-scale farming. [00:39:25] Chloe and Tom reflect on the interview and what resonated most for them.

Warning - this episode was recorded remotely and there are moments when George sounds like he's in space. We apologise for the poor sound quality in those moments but he's so worth listening to hopefully substance makes up for styleGeorge Monbiot is a journalist, author, and environmental and political activist. He writes a regular column for The Guardian and has written several books. In 2023 he went viral on Question Time having finally been asked back after a long hiatus. Jemma and Marina kick the episode off with that barnstorming clip when George let us know what he really thought about the Rwanda policy. Spoiler alert - he wasn't keen. The Trawl ladies are fascinated to learn about his time at Oxford university and why the culture wasn't for him. He was there at the same time as some of the most infamous members of the Bullingdon Club…. say no more. It goes without saying there's climate conversation, politics chat and clips with a man Marina and Jemma could listen to all day. Thank you for sharing and do tweet us @MarinaPurkiss @jemmaforte @TheTrawlPodcastPatreonhttps://patreon.com/TheTrawlPodcastYoutubehttps://www.youtube.com/@TheTrawlTwitterhttps://twitter.com/TheTrawlPodcast

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your hosts are Paul Marden and Oz Austwick.Fill in the Rubber Cheese 2024 Visitor Attraction Website Survey - the annual benchmark statistics for the attractions sector.If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcast.Competition ends on 21st August 2024. The winner will be contacted via Twitter. Show references: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenpriestnall/https://linktr.ee/oomphincStephen Priestnall founded oomph, now an accredited B Corp, in 2005, acquired Decision Juice in 2009 and is globally recognised as a specialist in CX driven transformation projects and digital innovation. He has advised at a senior level across public and private sector organisations in the UK, Americas, Asia and the Middle East and is an instigator of international research studies into behaviour change. He is a Board Trustee with Aneurin Leisure Trust, advising on CX and communications strategy and a founding Director at Wellbeing Economy Cymru, part of the global Wellbeing Economy Alliance, advocating for a new approach to economic sustainability for people and planet. Transcription:  Paul Marden: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in and working with Mister attractions. I'm your host, Paul Marden. On today's episode, I speak to Stephen Priestnall, the CEO of oomph, a CX focused agency based in the UK and UAE who help clients to understand people and design better experiences. We're going to go back to first principles and understand what customer experience is all about and understand what attractions can do better to serve the needs of their customers. Paul Marden: Hello, Oz. Oz Austwick: Hi, Paul. So this is the last episode of Season 5, right? Paul Marden: Yes, that is right. Can you believe after we took the reigns from. From young Ms. Molson not too long ago, that we would actually make it to the end of the season? Oz Austwick: Do you know, it's crazy, isn't it? I mean, five seasons of a podcast. Most podcasts don't get through to the end of one season. And I can remember listening to this podcast years ago and actually sending people links as an example of what a good podcast is. And now here we are, you and I, at the end of Season 5. It's crazy.. Paul Marden: Yay. Guardians of this little baby. Oz Austwick: Yeah. Yeah, no pressure. So today's quite an interesting one, right? Paul Marden: Yeah. I've got a guest who has been a friend of mine for some time, Stephen Priestnall of Oomph agency. And we're going to talk a little bit about customer experience. So nice little chat between Stephen and I, and then you and I will come together in a little while and talk a little bit about. Let's reminisce about season five and talk a little bit about what might happen in Season 6. Oz Austwick: Awesome. Great. I'm looking forward to it. Paul Marden: Let's get on with it then. Welcome to podcast, Stephen. Stephen Priestnall: Nice to be here, Paul. Thanks for inviting me. Paul Marden: Good to have you on. Longtime listeners will know that we always start the podcast with some icebreaker questions, which hopefully not too challenging, but we get to know you a little bit better before we start talking about work. So both of my icebreakers are all about visiting attractions this time. So how organised are you in advance? If you go to an attraction, do you take a picnic with you, or are you always partaking of a cup of tea and a slice of cake in the coffee shop? Stephen Priestnall: I think it would have to be a particularly kind of informal attraction for me to have thought about taking a picnic beforehand. So normally it's just the anticipation of going to the place, and then I'll utilise the services in the place. Paul Marden: I love a good slice of cake in the coffee shop afterwards. Scone, cream, tea and scone that would be me. Stephen Priestnall: No way. Maybe a bit of our breath or fruitcake. It's probably more me. Paul Marden: Oh, lovely. I was at the Roman Baths yesterday with my little girl and we had a lovely wander around and they had a brilliant self guided tour. So if you've got a choice, do you go for a self guided tour? Do you wander around and follow your nose? Or would you rather have a guide take you around and tell you the stories? Stephen Priestnall: I almost never have a guide to take me around. And then sometimes I even find the self guided tours a little bit invasive. If I'm in a different country where there is kind of a language barrier, a filter, then I might use it then. But you know what? I kind of like that the ability just to bump from one bit to another. Paul Marden: Yeah. Stephen Priestnall: And experience the experience through my own kind of filter. So that's what I would normally do. I haven't been able to wander around with the headphones on, almost never with a guy. Paul Marden: Yeah, they had a lovely one at the Roman Baths yesterday. So it had both adult interpretation and kids interpretation, and I found myself switching to the kids one so that I was experiencing what Millie was experiencing, because I was saying to her, “Oh, did they tell you what that was?” “Oh, no, that wasn't in the kids version.” So I swapped the kids one and it brought it to life. It was really. It became much more shared experience for us. Stephen Priestnall: Yeah, well, that's like that's like the horrible history stuff. Yeah. But actually, it's brilliant. Rattles that was what they were on about in the tudor period, then. I didn't get it until now. Paul Marden: Yeah, look, listeners, Stephen and I have known each other for quite some time. We've been working together a lot on different projects, and his agency, Oomph, does a lot of work in customer experience. And so today's episode is going to be a little bit more about a primer on what do we mean by customer experience? And really, what I'd like to get to the bottom of today is what can attractioners do better to serve the needs of their customers. Yeah. So, really, Stephen, what I want to do is pick your brains. Let's introduce this whole subject of CX and customer experience and help people to better understand a little bit about what does that mean and how can they bring that into their day to day work in running attractions and meeting customers. Paul Marden: So, before we start that, why don't you tell us a little bit more about you and a little bit more about Oomph. So that listeners can better understand the context. Stephen Priestnall: Yeah, thanks, Paul. We've positioned ourselves around the concept of customer experience for about ten years now, and customer experience ten years ago was a bit of an oddball place to be. It kind of grew out of the user experience, the UX world, with a little bit of event management thrown into it and a little bit of actually, you need to think about people in the middle of all of this. And we come from a background of combining digital and data quite successfully to kind of help devise communications campaigns, kind of brand engagements, that kind of thing. And what we could see was if you brought all these things together as data was getting more sophisticated, with digital interactions on the rise, that you could get yourself much more informed about the way in which people's customers were actually behaving. Stephen Priestnall: And not so much what they were actually how they were behaving, but also what their needs were that drove the behaviours. And so we have, we've grounded our work and customer experience around a very clear desire to understand the needs of our clients' customers, and then to hold that mirror up for our clients and say, “Look, I know you have these products and services to sell and to engage with, but what we're going to do is a job of letting you know at the point of engagement they're hitting your customers needs in this way. And if you then flip the lens around from the customer need first rather than the product or service first, you might determine a different way of building that service or designing that interaction, or maybe even changing the way in which you invite customers into a journey with you.”Stephen Priestnall: So a lot of data and digital inside are our space port that inform CX. And then in the last couple of years, AI has been another transformative technology that we've started to utilise. And we know we treat it as good AI. We know there's bad AI out there, but the good AI is really helpful. Paul Marden: That's really interesting. We know from the Rubber Cheese Survey this year that most attractions have dabbled. They've played with ChatGPT, or something like that. But there's still a large portion of attractions that have done nothing with AI. And then there's a couple that I would consider at the leading edge. So they're doing things beyond GPT. They're looking at AI enabled CRM or AI enabled workforce management solutions.Paul Marden:  So there's some interest in here, but it's definitely, there's a conversation that we've had on the podcast just recently with Oz and I talking about the idea that we can't quite figure out if we're in a bubble because a lot of people that we talk to talk a lot of good game about AI, but when we're talking to the businesses, the clients, they're only just getting into this in the most shallow way. Agencies like yours and ours are kind of. We're leading the conversation on this, I think. Stephen Priestnall: Well, I think it's really interesting you frame it like that, because one of the things that has informed our approach to CX is the idea of understanding behaviour change, which is a science in itself. So if any listeners are familiar with behaviour change, you'll know how long the tail of kind of investigation evaluation that is. We launched a study in 2020 which ended up over three years and three waves, 10,000 respondents looking at the impact of Covid-19 on people's behaviour and their interaction with organisations. That is part of our research centre which we call tide of events, which is now about to launch another study which is going to be looking at the impact of AI. Paul Marden: Oh really? Stephen Priestnall: As employees, as citizens, as customers, as service users, as members, as supporters. I'm expecting some very interesting things to come out of that study as well. Paul Marden: Yeah, very interesting. So there's this idea of kind of CX thinking and embedding that, embedding it the heart of your agency, but you then helping your clients to embed it into the business. So how can CX thinking help an attraction to improve its offering? And I think if we can look at that in two directions, because obviously most visitor attractions are an in person experience, there's lots of thinking around their interaction and the experience that they feel when they're in the attraction itself. But there's a lot of us looking at either side of that interaction. How do we use marketing to get more people to want to do stuff? And then how do we make sure that they got the best experience after they did and reengage with us. How can CX thinking offline and online help an attraction? Stephen Priestnall: The principles of customer experience thinking, certainly from our perspective, is to deal with the reality of that there are people involved. And I think you and I both know, Paul, in the digital world it's kind of quite easy to forget as a person we spend a lot of time in front of technology, trying to get technology to do stuff that we think is helpful. And then it's easy to lose sight of the goal, which is to help a person achieve a task or do something which they have, they enjoy doing. I think in the world of attractions, destinations, then when you're in a kind of physical world, that you're sat in that environment designing something, and you're a physical person yourself. Stephen Priestnall: And as a designer, looking in that environment, feeling that, okay, well, if I walk from here to here, it's going to feel like that. If I put this in the wrong place, if my member of staff is trained in the wrong way and uses the wrong language, that's going to have a direct impact. So you kind of get brought back to the people side of it quite a lot when you're in it in person. So I would say that the world of CX thinking is about bringing the importance of the human into the overall experience. So you don't treat the digital experience with kind of it in a different frame set than you treat the in real life, in person experience. Stephen Priestnall: And that's quite hard to do, because sometimes you're trying to drive the digital experiences as a kind of conversion funnel to get people to do something and buy something or consume some content. And you can kind of get hung up on the word optimisation and funnel management, and you then get drawn into, how can we push people through to the next phase? And push people through to the next phase? And imagine if you're in an attraction, and yeah, you might make certain parts, physical areas, a place where you would want people to go to, but you wouldn't have somebody walking up and nudging them in the back, pushing them down the aisle and stopping them from turning around and staying in one place. Paul Marden: Yeah. Stephen Priestnall: And yet, that's often what happens in the digital world. It becomes an optimisation process to kind of channel a particular behavior that we think is optimal for the organisation. So the world of CX stands back from that, identifies the needs that were satisfying, and looks at Paul and Stephen as two individuals who are unique as individuals, and can be defined by a set of age, gender, sociological, economic characteristics. But actually, Paul and I might have five or six relevant needs for the attraction of which two are consistent. And, you know, two or three are completely different. So we can't treat Paul as Paul and Stephen as Stephen. We have to understand the relationship between the needs that we have as individuals and the thing that we're doing, or the point of the point on the journey we're on. Stephen Priestnall: And I think that's tricky to kind of link the digital and the in real life worlds together. But that's the trick I like to think the kind of CX approach would bring. Paul Marden: Yeah. Just as you're saying that it can be hard to think about the person. But also many of the attractions that we work with have very different offerings. And so consequently they have very different audiences that have very different needs. And, you know, are you trying to serve online an audience that's never going to attend? How do you serve those people's needs? If you've got an educational remit, how do you serve those people's needs whilst at the same time serving the needs of the people that you want to bring in and spend money on site with you? If you're a historic house that also has a golf course and it has a hotel and it has some sort of kids attraction associated with it, there's so many different audiences. Paul Marden: So that kind of CX thinking can help you to step back. Stephen Priestnall: Absolutely. And actually just maybe think of a great triangulation process between three different clients that we've been working with recently that show that kind of breadth of differences. So we work with the saudi arabian government on a new, one of their giga projects on a new destination out in the desert near Rhea called Duria. And that is an amazing set of destination components. Golf courses, equestrian centres, hotels, business centres. And that's creating a destination for a country which has never had any tourism in it before. So with a whole bunch of high net worth individuals that you've got to think about, then also a challenge to get people who live in Saudi to not spend the $90 billion a year that they do going to visit the rest of the world and to actually visit somewhere in Saudi. Stephen Priestnall: So we've had a set of kind of challenges around how do you drive a customer journey, a visitor journey for that. And we've been working with an organisation called Marketing Manchester, helping them devise a new segmentation so they can, I'm going to use the term, attract the right kind of visitors to go to Manchester to hook in with their sustainability strategy. They don't just want people in the shopping malls and going to the football, sports events or shows, albeit they would like that. They also want to understand the community engagement, the cultural engagement and the environmental footprint that they leave behind. And then we're just in conversations with North York Moore's National Park. And then there's a whole different set of conversations about engagement with the local community, communities, a little bit arms folded about tourists. How do you make that come together? Stephen Priestnall: And all of this is about people and it's about understanding people's relationship with people and things. Paul Marden: Brilliant. So let's have a little think about given that those are the ideas behind CX thinking. If you were starting out down this road, what are the simple things that people can do to start to bed the customer at the heart of their thinking as they're planning their services? And I'm thinking in terms of, we've got very different types of attractions in this country, very small, up to, you know, big international attractions. Let's pick the small guys. Yeah. Imagine you're running a small town museum and, you know, you've got a handful of people working in the team. How can you start to embed the customer into your thinking to improve the service? Stephen Priestnall: So I think, I don't think the principles change with scale. I think that the executional methods will change with scale, but the principles. And you can have, you know, if you've got a small team of three or four people, you can have these three or four people working together in a room. You can support a research or not, if you can afford the research that great. If you can't, then you use. So we use a term called foundational intelligence. So before we start any research with a client which might go and look at their customers or prospective customers or visitors.Stephen Priestnall: We say, “Right, let's go all of the information in your organisation on the surface, first, because there's however many people around the room's years of experience, which is not necessarily formed in a cx way, but if we get that on the table, we've probably got a 60, 70, 80% starting point for what we're going to need to know in the end. I think that's the first thing I would say, is take confidence in the fact you've got some foundational intelligence about customer experience. But there might be a clever way of bringing that out through a little workshop. So you ask the right questions of each other. And one of the ways which I think is useful to do and quite practical is to think about three different ways of looking at people as individuals. Stephen Priestnall: So think about themselves as a, you know, a standard attribute based, if you like, cohort or segments, you know, age, demography, all those things that we talked about, but then move those to one side and then ask a relatively straightforward question, what needs are being satisfied by your services? So it's kind of, what's the point of what you do? Yeah, well, harsh question. Paul Marden: Yeah. Stephen Priestnall: But it's devoid from, if you like, knowing your customers at that point, devoid from any transaction based evaluation or business case to say, what's the point of what we do? Why do people turn up and then be quite hard about answering those questions. And when you get the first answer in your head, which is based on what you've always thought you've always done, just go right. Is that really why people turn up? Paul Marden: Is that right? Stephen Priestnall: Really why people walk through the door? Is that really why people tell their friends about us? Paul Marden: There's a little bit of lean thinking there, isn't there? You've got five whys, haven't you? You could go, but why? But why? But why? Just to keep pushing yourself to think that hard thought. Stephen Priestnall: Exactly. Whatever, you know, whatever little mental games you want to play with it, that's the kind of point. What's the point? And then the next lens to look at it is the journey your visitors are on in order to not just get to your destination, but get out of your destination and be reflecting on it to their I, peers, friends, colleagues, family. And that journey doesn't mean I book a ticket, I turn up, I walk around the attraction and then I go home. It means what are the component parts of that journey when they're in planning more just you asked me earlier on about whether I plan a picnic. What are they planning? How likely are they to plan? Do they not want to plan? Do they just want to turn up? Stephen Priestnall: You know, when they're getting to, when they're coming, when they're traveling to the destination, how are they traveling? What's their preferred method of travel? And then what are the different ways in which people engage with the attraction itself? And then what happens afterwards when they walk out? Do they walk out and go for a beer? Forget about it. Did they do that thing you do in a golf club where you spend the next 3 hours talking about what you did for the last 3 hours? And what's the version of that could be done in social media afterwards? And again, do that. Do that without necessarily worrying too much about who does what. So you end up these kind of journey components. Stephen Priestnall: Now all these things can be really heavily researched if you've got resources and the time to do that, but you can do it in a room with three or four people in 2 or 3 hours. And what you'll end up with is a set of right. The people who visit us look a bit like this. Typically, here's five or six types of people, here's a pool type, here's a Steven type, here's a whoever else type of. We've got ten or eleven needs. Well, who knew we had ten or eleven needs? That were satisfying. Paul Marden: Yeah. Stephen Priestnall: So you write those down. Oh, look, we got a journey which looks like planning, engagement, reflection. And I use those three terms because we use them all the time because they're nice and easy to get your head around. Planning, engagement, reflection, and within engagement here are all the different bits that are happening in engagement here. At the different bits that, all right, we might have a dozen, maybe even two dozen components underneath those kind of three big things. And you've then got a bit of a jigsaw. And it's also objective at that point as well. You've then got this objective jigsaw to say, which of those five or six groups of people have which of those needs do we think you might end up with that funny place where. Stephen Priestnall: Oh, actually that cohort doesn't have any of those needs, so we think they really like coming to us, but we're not doing anything to satisfy their needs or this other group that we don't get many of. Look how many needs we're satisfying in that group. Maybe we should be targeting that group. Paul Marden: Yeah. Stephen Priestnall: So whether you're. Whether you go outwards and change your segmentation, your targeting, or whether you come in with and change your service design, you've already got some things to think about. And then when you map the journey on top of that, and again, you know, nice. It could be a done on paper, it could be done. There's loads of tools online you can do this without getting too scientific. You've then got the points at which, all right, so if that need is being satisfied for those people at that point, we now have a design intervention to work out. So we now have, essentially, we have a brief, we have a specification now that might be a piece of digital interaction, it might be a piece of communications design, it might be a piece of signage in the attraction, it might be a follow up social media nudge. Stephen Priestnall: You're then not inventing what you think it is that you need to do for your attraction. We use a phrase which I think clients are pretty comfortable with in the end because it. It's a real reflection. It's completely normal for organisations to kind of end up with an inside and view of the world. Everything is all about the product and the service because that's where the investment goes, that's where the thinking goes. And what we try and do is just to persuade people to take an outside in view. So actually look at this from the point of view of the customer. And I think what the exercise I've just described does is help you take that outside in view. Paul Marden: I'm smiling for those listening. I'm smiling because I just, it reminds me of so many times where I can, you know, I can see observing in the projects that we do or just, you know, interacting with the outside world, where you can tell that people often take a very parochial internal view and they'll communicate with the outside world in their own internal language. They will try and, you know, influence people to do things rather than thinking, how does this appear outside? Stephen Priestnall: Yeah, and it's, it, but it's also, it's not a critique. It's normalised behaviour. If you just think about how organisations grow, you end up with an idea, you know, where often it is about the customers. You've got this entrepreneurial, innovative spark that kicks the idea off, satisfying the needs. And then you build up a bunch of teams who, by definition, have broken out into departments with different roles and responsibilities. And then, and then the sense of self of the people in those teams is derived from the departmental responsibility. Paul Marden: Yes. Stephen Priestnall: But as a consequence, you then are trained, naturally trained to be inside out. Paul Marden: Yeah. Stephen Priestnall: And so, it's normal. And then when that, then when the salesperson comes back and says, “Why did you build it like that?” You know, the designer, the product person says, “Well, because that's the best way of doing this thing.” And the salesperson says, “I can't sell that.” And that actually, and I don't know how much. In your podcast, Paul, you talked about agile, but this is when the concept of squads really can work. I think that you have to take real care with squads because they can end up creating rooms of people who don't understand each other. I think unless there's one other thing I would say about the human part of CX, you have to take this into the culture of the organisation as well. So you asked me earlier, how do you present a CX focus for an organisation? Stephen Priestnall: Well, you can't just drop the results of that little workshop on top of everybody, because it's the going through the process of looking at those three lenses that puts you in a different mindset. If you then just end up telling the product people or telling the sales people or telling the ops people, can you do it like this now? They'll just add that onto their list of things to do. It won't be a change. Paul Marden: But when you bring those people into the conversation, I think it brings a different perspective, doesn't it? And I think that's the one thing I've learned from you in the few years that we've known one another is that when you boil it down, everything is a CX project. And I don't think I ever really thought about that. That there can be something which to me seems so navel gazing, internally focused as a technical project to deliver in the business. But actually, when you think, when you apply the rigor of thinking about the client, the customer, then you find that it is a CX driven project, even if it is completely internally facing. It can be about the communication between two teams, but in the end, because they don't have good communication, it's resulting in this poor customer experience over here. Paul Marden: So when you think about it hard, then these projects have a CX focus, even when they are very kind of internally facing.Stephen Priestnall: And it's sometimes difficult. I mean, I think that's a really good articulation of it. It sometimes can be a challenge to make that process seem worthwhile, because what you end up doing is spending more time challenging what you think is right at the beginning of the process. And there's always a desire from somewhere to move things on. I think that there's a little value based model that I always apply in my head, which if we treat this kind of CX phase as the planning phase, and then you go through a design phase, then you go through a build phase. For every extra hour you spend in planning, without spending that, you would spend ten more hours in design and a hundred more hours in production. So if you leave that hour aside, you're going to have a tenfold in design phase. Stephen Priestnall: And if you don't deal with it in design phase, you'll have it 100 fold, then build phase. But choosing to do that extra hour, which is tension filled, it might be a bit of conflict, there might be a bit of defensiveness. It needs to be carefully managed and kind of cajoled, but the value of it is meant. Paul Marden: Yeah. So you've described this kind of approach to take, identifying who the customers are, trying to use a little bit of intuition to be all science if you've got the budget to go and do the research, but to understand those customers in more detail and what their needs are, and then driving down and finding out where, you know, the journey maps onto that and where the gaps are and starting to look to fill those gaps. Is there room in the world for a dirty bottom up approach where you can see a problem already and you want to address that problem? Can you attack this from both angles or do you need to start from a top down approach? Stephen Priestnall: I'm an arch pragmatist and if we know there's a problem to solve and it's screaming for a solution, then that's going to solve the problem. I would only cancel that try and stand back and look at the unintended consequences through a very objective lens. You don't need to spend long doing that. But I think the magnetism of solving a problem that's been a longstanding problem can also act as a set of blinkers. So that's the only thing I would say. Paul Marden: Yeah, you can be distracted by the screaming problem that turns out not to be the real root cause. If you take the bigger picture of you. Stephen Priestnall: If we got this horrendous problem just before checkout, whether that's a digital or at the attraction itself and queuing up going on, you know, there's a need to solve that through a piece of technology or extra stuff on the tills. But actually, it turns out that there's a funneling process going on in the start of the process that's causing everybody to end up at the checker at the same time. And that can be solved by a different distribution of products in the attraction itself, or bringing in some different content to inform people in the digital journey. That means they don't have to do task X and Y because they now know about it. You know, we've all had that before, which it looks like people can't get through this bit of the funnel. Let's try and make this bit of the funnel easier. Stephen Priestnall: Let's try and do more things. More buttons, more. Let's just try and make it easier. But actually, it turns out, if only we'd given that visitor to the digital journey more time to consume content and not push them through the first stage of the transaction process so quickly, they would have entered the second stage much better informed and relaxed about completing the overall thing. Paul Marden: It's just such a challenge, isn't it? Because I can just feel me even now with our fictitious scenario, all I want to do is squeeze them down the funnel. But you have to focus at the end about getting the right outcome, don't you? Stephen Priestnall:  There's another great metaphor I like to use, and we do this all the time because we talk about something called sustainable customer experience. And sustainable customer experience strategy isn't about a green CX strategy. It's about saying, if you get your CX strategy right, you will have to spend less money on acquiring new customers, so it's more economically sustainable and there's a really interesting kind of just different way of looking at it. So normally if you look at the typical retail conversion process, if you get 100 people on the top of a digital funnel, you might get five out the end as a conversion there's usually really simple numbers, five. So everybody works on how do we make five six? That's the big thing because that's like 20% improvement. If you get five to six, we've just put 20% on the bottom line. Stephen Priestnall: Meanwhile there's 95 people. Do you care? Are you interested? I came here for a reason and you don't like me anymore, so. Well, goodbye then. So what we do is we say, right, we want to put as much effort into understanding the 94. It's not wasted effort. I'm a pragmatist, as we do making the five six, because if out of that 94 we can get another 20 over the next twelve months to do the same thing. We've not spent any money on customer acquisition. We've built and engaged in a relationship. We've had opportunities to talk and engage them, which probably means they're going and talking to other people and checking about the experience. So they're probably doing some recruitment for us anyway, which we can also nudge behaviour. Stephen Priestnall: And then what that does, it changes the mentality inside the organisation to not just think about, we've got six out the other end. Yes. Celebrate. And actually think about. Because imagine if you did that physically. Imagine if physically you could see the hundred people in a queue and everybody went off celebrating the 6th that went through. And then you look back and you looked at these 94 people just milling around having a chat with each other and what just happened. Paul Marden: Yeah, that would feel pretty uncomfortable, wouldn't it? Stephen Priestnall: It will. Especially for an attraction. Paul Marden: Yeah, for sure. Look, this has been brilliant. It's nice. I think sometimes to take a step back and look at that kind of the 101 class, the intro to the subject. And I think this is a subject that we will come back to again and again. We've talked about taking it back to its first principles a little bit today, but this is embedded within the attraction sector. They know and understand the people that come through the door. This is something that they take really seriously, obviously. But I think there are ways in which we can take what we've learned today and use that as a springboard into some more deeper conversations. Paul Marden: Maybe in Season 6, which is coming up where we can talk a little bit more about, you know, your conversations about AI, the direction that you take these things in. How does AI help you in a world where you want to be cx centric? What does AI do for you? So thank you ever so much. This has been brilliant. Thank you. Stephen Priestnall: Really enjoyed it. Paul Marden: One last ask of you, though. We always ask our interviewees to come up with a book recommendation. And it can be fiction, it can be factual, it can be about the subject. But we will give this book away to the first person that retweets the show advert and says, I want Stephen's book. So what is the book that you'd like to share with the world? Stephen Priestnall: Well, so I'd love to say it was. It was a book I wrote in 1986 on expert systems in context. I was doing AI back in the 80's. That one is out of print. You definitely will get hold of it. Instead, it's a book that I think challenges, whatever your persuasions about understanding of the environment and climate, challenges your way of thinking about. It's a book by an activist called George Monbiot, and it's called Feral. And it's to do with the rewilding of Britain, the potential for rewilding Britain. And again, whether you're minded to think that's a good thing or not, it's a great book to just think, okay, that's my perceptions challenge. I hadn't thought of things like that. Paul Marden: Excellent. So, listeners, if you'd like to get a copy of Stephen's book, then head over to X, find the show tweet that we put out and say, I want Stephen's book. And the first person to do that will get a copy. Stephen, this has been wonderful. Thank you all so much. And hopefully we will talk more about this in Season 6. Stephen Priestnall: Thank you very much, Paul. Oz Austwick: He's a really interesting guy, isn't he? Paul Marden: He is indeed. I said to Stephen afterwards, it was such a nice conversation because we've been working together for years, and today I got to ask the questions I've been too embarrassed to ask for the last few years because I really should, at this point, know the answers to them. But today I was able to take the place of the listener and ask those questions without fear of embarrassment. Oz Austwick: Yeah, there does come a point where you kind of feel that you probably shouldn't be asking this question anymore. You should already know this. Yeah, I love that. I thought, it's really interesting. I love this concept of nudging that he talked about, and it's something I've been aware of online for years, but the kind of putting it in the context of happening in the real world, I thought was really interesting. It gives you a bit of insight into how weird it is that we try and force people into certain pathways online. When you'd never dream of doing that in the real world, just having somebody outside a room just pushing you into it. Yeah, you wouldn't do that. Paul Marden: You're in a queue for the log flume and you get poked in the back to say, “Do you want to buy your photo? Do you want to buy your photo? You really do want to buy the photo, don't you?”Oz Austwick: Well, I mean, that does kind of happen, doesn't it? It's usually my children that are doing it, if I'm being honest. But, yeah, really interesting stuff. Paul Marden: A nice way to round out some amazing interviews and fireside chats that we've had over Season 5 and look forward to Season 6. Oz Austwick: Yeah, I'm really excited about Season 6. Paul Marden: Yeah, we want to do something a little bit different, don't we? Oz Austwick: Yeah, well, I mean, firstly, I'll get to start the season of the podcast. Because I wasn't here at the start of Season 5. I've kind of just weaseled my way in halfway through the season and gone, “Yes, mine now.” Paul Marden: Tell listeners, what is it that we want to do differently? Oz Austwick: Well, it feels a bit weird to me that we're creating a podcast all about the visitor attraction sector, which is designed to get people out of their houses to a place and actually experience it in the real world. And yet you're sitting in exactly the same room, and I'm sitting in exactly the same room. And as we pointed out not long ago, I'm wearing the same t shirt as I seem. This appears to be my podcast t shirt. And yet, you know, we're not getting out. So we're gonna get out. We're gonna get in a car and go to a place and record a podcast in an attraction with a person. And I think that's amazing. Paul Marden: Yeah, I just can't wait. We've got a couple lined up. One's crazy, one's going to be a big event. It could be really fun, but we love listeners with attractions who would like two blokes and some cameras to turn up to invite us along. We would love to come and visit your venue. We would love to talk about whatever subject it is that you think our listeners would like to discuss, and we'll come along and we'll record it in real life at your place and see how amazing your venue is and talk more about the stuff that everybody's interested in. Oz Austwick: Absolutely. But it's not just that we're going to do a little bit differently, is it? We're kind of focusing a little bit more on different groups. Paul Marden: Yeah. There was some lovely feedback for those, for listeners that listened to Kelly's final episode, her swan song. When Ross from Drayton Manor came on and talked about his experience of being on the podcast and how influential it was for him to have his 15 minutes of fame for Skip the Queue, and how important that was to him in his stage, in his career, that prompted us to think about, can we use this platform now that so many people before us built to help to shine a light on new and emerging talent in the sector? So if you are in early stages of your career and you are doing something interesting in the attraction space, could be digital, it could be something customer focused in real life. Paul Marden: There's so many different ways where we could have an interesting conversation about what it is that you do and why other people would find it interesting. You know, invite us in. We would love to have that conversation with people. If you know someone, if there's someone in your team who, you know, you can see is doing amazing things and could grow in their career with the spotlight shone on them, and there's lots of people like that, then point them in our direction. Point us in their direction. We can definitely do something to help them to share their story and hopefully to benefit from that springboard, that stepping outside and talking to the outside world about what you do can really have on a career. Oz Austwick: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's lovely that hopefully now, after five seasons, the podcasts kind of mature enough that we don't need to lean on those famous, influential people in the industry quite as much. And hopefully that maybe we've got enough loyal listeners and enough of us standing as a podcast that we can tell stories just because they're interesting. Yeah, you already know the name of the person we're talking to, so, yeah, that's going to be really exciting. Paul Marden: But, you know, there are stories to be told that we don't know about yet that I'm sure will be going on inside listeners minds and, you know, hit us up, send us an email, send us a tweet, an X. I don't know what. I don't know. That's another story, isn't it? But send us a message by carrier Pigeon, if you can, that tells us what you think we should be talking about, the people we should be meeting and the stories that should be told. We would love to hear from you. Oz Austwick: Yeah, and in the meantime, enjoy your two or three weeks without Skip the Queue. Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. Hopefully you're all busy working in your attractions, being absolutely swamped. If the attractions I've been to are anything to go by, it is a rip roaring success of a summer. We've had some pretty good weather and yeah, we'll be looking back at this September October time thinking what an amazing summer it was after a disappointing start to the year. Oz Austwick: So yeah, well, fingers crossed. Absolutely. Paul Marden: Thank you, Oz. It's been delightful. I've enjoyed every minute of it. Oz Austwick: Yeah, me too. Here's to Season 6. Paul Marden: Yeah, see you on the other side. Paul Marden: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, SkiptheQueue.fm. The 2024 Visitor Attraction Website Survey is now LIVE! Help the entire sector:Dive into groundbreaking benchmarks for the industryGain a better understanding of how to achieve the highest conversion ratesExplore the "why" behind visitor attraction site performanceLearn the impact of website optimisation and visitor engagement on conversion ratesUncover key steps to enhance user experience for greater conversionsFill in your data now (opens in new tab)

“We are often told we are materialistic. It seems to me, we are not materialistic enough. We have a disrespect for materials. We use it quickly and carelessly.” George Monbiot I am thrilled to announce that our new book, the Kindness Daily Reader: Season One, is now available on Amazon. (See Link Below)  Secondly, we are embarking on a new chapter with Season Three of the One Kind Moment podcast. In Season One, we primarily focused on broad topics of kindness and compassion, while in Season Two, we explored areas such as self-compassion, self-help, and self-care. Now, in Season Three, we're shifting our focus to a specific area of self-care that we call Practical Spirituality for Everyone. We'll be delving into topics like spirituality in nature, spiritual intelligence, everyday mindfulness, the science of consciousness, the mystery of life, the science of awe, and managing uncertainty. We're excited to take this new direction and are grateful for your continued support and interest in the One Kind Moment podcast. EXPLORE OUR NEW BOOK! Kindness Daily Reader: Season One https://a.co/d/04RvXldy #onekindmoment #spirituality Yesterday by John Hobart - Music Design by Jason Inc. https://brucewaynemclellan.com/  

George Monbiot, Journalist and Author

Are the super wealthy actually a bit dead inside? Sean was joined by George Monbiot, Journalist and activist to discuss this...

Last week, five supporters of the Just Stop Oil climate campaign who conspired to cause gridlock on London's orbital motorway were sentenced to lengthy jail terms by a judge who told them they had ‘crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic'. Columnist and campaigner George Monbiot tells Ian Sample why the sentences are so significant, how they fit into a crackdown on protest in the UK in recent years, and what impact they could have on future climate activism in the UK. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/sciencepod

Is nuclear power the key to a carbon-neutral future or an accident waiting to happen? Non-hydro renewables such as wind and solar are predicted to play a major role in the future. However, one of these energy solutions has divided public opinion more than others. To mention the name "nuclear" is to conjure up the boogie man or "he who must not be named". By 2050, some 10 billion people will need some form of energy to eat, travel, work and protect themselves from the weather. McKinsey's Energy 2050 research report predicts that demand for electricity will grow twice as fast as demand for transport, while at the same time fossil fuels will decline. So how will we power the future?In this episode of 2050 Investors, Kokou Agbo-Bloua delves into the controversial topic of nuclear power, exploring its history, potential benefits and risks in the context of the global energy transition. He also highlights the dual nature of nuclear energy as both a powerful source of clean energy and a potentially catastrophic force capable of altering life at the atomic level. To explore the issue further, Kokou orchestrates a virtual Oxford-style debate between experts for and against nuclear power. The pro-nuclear side includes Bill Gates, Ernest Moniz, George Monbiot and James Hansen, advocating for nuclear power as a necessary tool to combat climate change. The anti-nuclear side includes Tom Steyer and Mark Jacobson, who criticise its economic feasibility and safety concerns. Each expert presents their opening statement, outlining their position and the key matters surrounding nuclear power.This episode will help you understand the fears, facts, and fission, so that you can make up your own mind about nuclear power.About this showWelcome to 2050 Investors, your monthly guide to understanding the intricate connections between finance, globalisation, and ESG.Join host Kokou Agbo-Bloua, Head of Economics, Cross-Asset & Quant Research at Societe Generale, for an exploration of the economic and market megatrends shaping the present and future, and how these trends might influence our progress to meeting 2050's challenging global sustainability targets.In each episode, Kokou deep-dives into the events impacting the economy, financial markets, the planet, and society. Through a magical blend of personal anecdotes, in-depth research and narratives overlaid with music, sound effects, and pop culture references, there's certainly something for everyone.Kokou also interviews industry-leading experts, personalities, entrepreneurs and even Nobel prize winners! You will learn from the best on a wide range of subjects on current affairs, market shifts, and economic developments.If you like 2050 Investors, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Your support will help us spread the word and reach new audiences. If you're seeking a brief and entertaining overview of market-related topics and their business and societal implications, subscribe now to stay informed!Previous episodes of 2050 Investors have explored ESG, climate change, AI, greenflation, globalization, plastic pollution, food, healthcare, biodiversity and more.CreditsPresenter & Writer: Kokou Agbo-Bloua. Editors: Vincent Nickelsen, Jovaney Ashman, Linda Isker & Jennifer Krumm. Production Designer: Emmanuel Minelle, Radio K7 Creative. Executive Producer : Fanny Giniès. Sound Director: Marc Valenduc. Music: Rone. Graphic Design: Cédric Cazaly.Whilst the following podcast discusses the financial markets, it does not recommend any particular investment decision. If you are unsure of the merits of any investment decision, please seek professional advice.Hosted by Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

“Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions that sustain life.” George Monbiot I am thrilled to announce that our new book, the Kindness Daily Reader: Season One, will be available from July 1, 2024. Secondly, we are embarking on a new chapter with Season Three of the One Kind Moment podcast. In Season One, we primarily focused on broad topics of kindness and compassion, while in Season Two, we explored areas such as self-compassion, self-help, and self-care. Now, in Season Three, we're shifting our focus to a specific area of self-care that we call Practical Spirituality for Everyone. We'll be delving into topics like spirituality in nature, spiritual intelligence, everyday mindfulness, the science of consciousness, the mystery of life, the science of awe, and managing uncertainty. We're excited to take this new direction and are grateful for your continued support and interest in the One Kind Moment podcast. #onekindmoment #spirituality Yesterday by John Hobart - Music Design by Jason Inc. https://brucewaynemclellan.com/    

We live under an invisible ideology. It tells us that we are not citizens but consumers. That intervening in the free market compromises our freedom. That we are all millionaires-in-waiting - and if we are struggling to make ends meet, then we only have ourselves to blame. This is capitalism on steroids. But few of us can even identify the doctrine we live under. It's called “neoliberalism”, and it's been the dominant economic ideology for the past four decades. So what does this ideology have to tell us about the world? How is neoliberalism shaping our democracy? And what has almost half a century of neoliberalism done to our lives? Ayeisha Thomas-Smith is joined by George Monbiot, journalist and co-author of the new book The Invisible Doctrine: the secret history of neoliberalism, to discuss: how do we tell a new story about neoliberalism? ....... Music by Inaequalis is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ Produced by Amy Clancy, Margaret Welsh and James Rush. The New Economics Podcast is brought to you by the New Economics Foundation. Find out more about becoming a NEF supporter at: neweconomics.org/donate/build-a-better-future The views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities they represent or NEF. New Economics Foundation is a registered charity in England and Wales. Charity No. 1055254

In this episode, Daniel and Philipa are joined by award-winning permaculture teacher and designer, Morag Gamble, and best-selling author and integrator, Jeremy Lent. Together, they discuss the urgent need to realign our patterns of meaning with the life-sustaining patterns of our planet to create thriving, regenerative cultures. An award-winning permaculture teacher and designer, Morag Gamble has been at the forefront of the permaculture revolution for over 30 years. She is the founder of the Permaculture Education Institute and the Executive Director of Ethos Foundation, a permaculture education charity for refugees. She hosts the Sense-Making in a Changing World podcast, exploring what a thriving one-planet way of life lookd like with leading ecological thinkers, activists, authors, designers and practitioners.Jeremy Lent is the best-selling author of The Patterning Instinct and The Web of Meaning. His work investigates the underlying causes of our civilization's existential crisis, and explores pathways toward a life-affirming future. He has been described by Guardian journalist George Monbiot as “one of the greatest thinkers of our age,”Explore links and resources, and find out more at  https://www.thersa.org/oceania/regeneration-rising-podcast  Join the Re-generation: https://www.thersa.org/regenerative-futuresReduced Fellowship offer: In celebration of the launch of Regeneration Rising, we're offering a special promotion for listeners to join our global community of RSA Fellows. Our Fellowship is a network of over 31,000 innovators, educators, and entrepreneurs committed to finding better ways of thinking, acting, and delivering change. To receive a 25% discount off your first year of membership and waived registration fee, visit thersa.org and use the discount code RSAPOD on your application form. Note, cannot be used in conjunction with other discount offers, such as Youth Fellowship. For more information  email fellowship@rsa.org.uk.

An iconoclast unafraid to speak truth to power, George Monbiot has been fighting for a better future for our planet for decades. In this episode, he joins comedian and podcaster Nish Kumar to share his insights into the ideology that preys on every aspect of our lives – neoliberalism. Revealing how the network of neoliberalism 'kicks down and kisses up', George shows us how this fringe philosophy was adopted by wealthy elites and came to dominate our society and our economy. But nothing is inevitable. Although we may believe that a better world is an impossible fantasy, George and Nish show us that this could not be further from the truth - and deliver a rallying cry for all of us to fight back. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Following the recent announcement of a general election in the UK, we revisit our debate from 2018 in which key politicians debated the merits of Left vs Right politics. The political Left often purports that it has society's best interests at heart and that it works for the good of all. Yet according to conservatives, it is precisely that self-regard, that attempt to monopolise virtue, which exposes the hypocrisy of left-wing ideology. In this archive debate from 2018, we gathered Labour MP Stella Creasy, environmental campaigner, journalist and author, George Monbiot, Conservative MP Kwasi Kwarteng, and the leading philosopher of conservative thought, the late Roger Scruton, who sadly passed away in 2020, to discuss the issue of right vs left. Our host for the discussion was the journalist, broadcaster, and John L Weinberg visiting professor at Princeton University in the School of Public and International Affairs, Razia Iqbal. We are sponsored by Indeed. Go to Indeed.com/IS for £100 sponsored credit. This is the second instalment of a two-part conversation. If you'd like to become a Member and get access to all of our longer form interviews and Members-only content, just visit intelligencesquared.com/membership to find out more. For £4.99 per month you'll also receive: - Full-length and ad-free Intelligence Squared episodes, wherever you get your podcasts - Bonus Intelligence Squared podcasts, curated feeds and members exclusive series - 15% discount on livestreams and in-person tickets for all Intelligence Squared events - Our member-only newsletter The Monthly Read, sent straight to your inbox ... Or Subscribe on Apple for £4.99: - Full-length and ad-free Intelligence Squared podcasts - Bonus Intelligence Squared podcasts, curated feeds and members exclusive series ... Already a subscriber? Thank you for supporting our mission to foster honest debate and compelling conversations! Visit intelligencesquared.com to explore all your benefits including ad-free podcasts, exclusive bonus content and early access. ... Subscribe to our newsletter here to hear about our latest events, discounts and much more. https://www.intelligencesquared.com/newsletter-signup/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

An incredible explanation of 'neoliberalism' and what it really means.Check out his new book with Peter Hutchison: The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism (& How It Came to Control Your Life).Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/the-owen-jones-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

 “Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions that sustain life.” George Monbiot I am thrilled to announce that our new book, the Kindness Daily Reader: Season One, will be available from July 1, 2024. Secondly, we are embarking on a new chapter with Season Three of the One Kind Moment podcast. In Season One, we primarily focused on broad topics of kindness and compassion, while in Season Two, we explored areas such as self-compassion, self-help, and self-care. Now, in Season Three, we're shifting our focus to a specific area of self-care that we call Practical Spirituality for Everyone. We'll be delving into topics like spirituality in nature, spiritual intelligence, everyday mindfulness, the science of consciousness, the mystery of life, the science of awe, and managing uncertainty. We're excited to take this new direction and are grateful for your continued support and interest in the One Kind Moment podcast. #onekindmoment #practicalspirituality #rewilding Yesterday by John Hobart - Music Design by Jason Inc. https://brucewaynemclellan.com/    

What's informing Keir Starmer's policy?From the NHS to water, why are Britain's services failing?And, why is Britain the second-most mentally unwell country in the world?Journalist and activist George Monbiot believes he knows the answer: neoliberalism. Oli spoke to him about his new book, The Invisible Doctrine, which locates Britain's perma-crises in the abstract ideology. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The UK is officially out of recession - Rishi Sunak and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt have been banging the drum of the 0.6% GDP growth in the Jan-March quarter, but are things actually getting better?George Monbiot drops into the studio to demystify Neoliberalism - the invisible economic doctrine that has influenced UK politics and policy since the Thatcher years. George also brings some fresh ideas for how citizens can move away from being consumers and recapture our democracy. Finally, Nish and Coco eviscerate Esther McVey's campaign to ban that most dreadful example of civil service impropriety - the rainbow lanyard. Pod Save the UK is a Reduced Listening production for Crooked Media. Contact us via email: PSUK@reducedlistening.co.ukWhatsApp: 07494 933 444 (UK) or + 44 7494 933 444 (internationally)Insta: https://instagram.com/podsavetheukTwitter: https://twitter.com/podsavetheukTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@podsavetheukFacebook: https://facebook.com/podsavetheukYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/podsavetheworld Guest:George Monbiot, activist and writer Audio credits:BBC LBC The Guardian  Useful links:Come to see Pod Save the UK live at Edinburgh Fringe!The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism (& How It Came to Control Your Life) by George Monbiot and Peter HutchisonThe Guardian - Latest GDP figures offer some better news – but boom-boom Britain it ain't

Oxford University economist Kate Raworth has been described by the author and environmentalist George Monbiot as, "The John Maynard Keynes of the 21st century." In 2018, she came to Intelligence Squared to talk through the set of ideas that has seen her influential book, Donut Economics, find fans in audiences ranging from members of the UN General Assembly to Pope Francis and Extinction Rebellion. Hosting the discussion was Matthew Taylor, at the time of the interview Chief Executive of the RSA and latterly Chief Executive of the NHS Confederation. We are sponsored by Indeed. Go to Indeed.com/IS for £100 sponsored credit. If you'd like to become a Member and get access to all of our longer form interviews and Members-only content, just visit intelligencesquared.com/membership to find out more. For £4.99 per month you'll also receive: - Full-length and ad-free Intelligence Squared episodes, wherever you get your podcasts - Bonus Intelligence Squared podcasts, curated feeds and members exclusive series - 15% discount on livestreams and in-person tickets for all Intelligence Squared events - Our member-only newsletter The Monthly Read, sent straight to your inbox ... Or Subscribe on Apple for £4.99: - Full-length and ad-free Intelligence Squared podcasts - Bonus Intelligence Squared podcasts, curated feeds and members exclusive series ... Already a subscriber? Thank you for supporting our mission to foster honest debate and compelling conversations! Visit intelligencesquared.com to explore all your benefits including ad-free podcasts, exclusive bonus content and early access. ... Subscribe to our newsletter here to hear about our latest events, discounts and much more. https://www.intelligencesquared.com/newsletter-signup/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's the future of food?Last year, two of my former podcast guests had a long and very public disagreement about the politics of food, locking horns over the utility of farming in a densely-populated world. Activist and writer George Monbiot has written extensively about lab-grown food and the need to revolutionise our food systems with technology so that we can better feed everyone. Farmer and academic Chris Smaje has argued that farming is a critical component of community autonomy, and wrote a book in response to George's own, Regenesis, criticising the vision as “eco-modernist”. George hit back that Chris' proposal is a “cruel fantasy”.I watched this unfold online, worried to see two experts disagree so deeply on something fundamental to how we organise society, and invited Chris back to talk about this second book, Saying No To A Farm-Free Future. Chris explains how our food production systems are emblematic of our crisis of relationship to the earth. He argues that de-materialising our food supply plays into the colonial history of uprooting people from the land and denigrating agriculture. This leads us to discuss land, language, and culture, decentralising power, and the political binaries that could be dissolved by grounding our thinking in the land.Correction: The previous version of this interview stated that the debate between George Monbiot and Chris Smaje was around lab grown meat instead of lab grown food. Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

Adam and British writer, journalist, and environmental activist George Monbiot go for a walk around the parks and woodland of Bristol and talk about the harmful aspects of farming, what George does for a good time, why being sent away to boarding school was a disaster, responding to criticism of his work, why he changed his mind about nuclear power, and what gives him hope.This conversation was recorded on 26th April, 2023Thanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for production support and conversation editing.Podcast artwork by Helen GreenRELATED LINKSINVISIBLE DOCTRINE - THE SECRET HISTORY OF NEOLIBERALISM (PRE-ORDER) - 2024 (PENGUIN)THE LAND IS OURSARTICLES, BOOKS, ETC by GEORGE MONBIOT (MONBIOT.COM)GEORGE MONBIOT - RIVERCIDE - 2022 (YOUTUBE)REVIEW OF REGENESIS by Gaia Vince - 2022 (GUARDIAN)GEORGE MONBIOT'S FARMING FANTASIES by John Lewis-Stempel - 2023 (UNHERD)GEORGE MONBIOT AND EWAN McLENNAN - BREAKING THE SPELL OF LONELINESS (Short video about the musical collaboration) - 2016 (YOUTUBE)THE AGE OF LONELINESS IS KILLING US by George Monbiot - 2016 9THE GUARDIAN)GEORGE MONBIOT EXPLAINS RUSSELL BRAND'S DANGEROUS GAME WITH THE FAR RIGHT (ON POLITICS JOE) - 2023 (YOUTUBE)BOARDING SCHOOLS WARP OUR POLITICAL CLASS by George Monbiot - 2019 (GUARDIAN)PRIVATE SCHOOLS ARE TRAUMA FACTORIES - ASH SARKAR MEETS RICHARD BEARD (NOVARA MEDIA) - 2023 (YOUTUBE)WHY THE US WAS LUCKY TO GET DONALD TRUMP (DOUBLE DOWN NEWS) - 2020 (YOUTUBE)THE PROMISED LAND (TRAILER) - 2023 (YOUTUBE) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Journalist and author George Monbiot has a radical idea for fixing farming's environmental devastation — but can a post-agricultural world feed the planet? Once a social scientist and now a farmer, Chris Smaje offers a defense of small-scale farming and a robust critique of industrialized food production. The Ecology Center is a blue dot in a red sea. How did Evan Marks come to run this 28-acre regenerative farm in Orange County? Reporter Alexander Sammon visits Cherán, where armed militias guard the area to prevent rogue avocado farming.

Episode #295. Set yourself up for success in 2024 with the next instalment of The Proof's 2023 highlights. Recap key points for physical and mental health success, from aging and exercise to climate change and psychology. This episode offers a comprehensive rundown from some of the best scientists and experts in the game. You'll hear from Dr Matt Kaeberlein, Dr Andrew Steele, Dr Charles Brenner, Dr Inigo San Millan, Drew Harrisberg, Dr Susanna Soeberg, Dr Stacy Sims, Chris MacAskill, George Monbiot, Jillian Turecki and Dr Judson Brewer. Specifically, we discuss: Intro (00:00) Understanding Aging: Definitions and Key Hallmarks (01:21) Introduction to Senolytics: What You Need to Know (15:18) The Science of Cellular Aging: Causes and Effects (29:14) Decoding Energy Zones: Insights and Implications (41:36) Effective Workout Strategies: Using Target Heart Rate (53:56) Tailored Training: Menstrual Cycle Considerations for 30-Year-Old Women (1:09:53) Beginner's Guide to Cold Water Immersion: Techniques and Benefits (1:41:00) The Subtleties of Hydration: What Matters Most (1:49:50) Electrolytes and Hydration: Understanding Their Role (1:52:47) Food and Environment: Analyzing the Impact (1:57:50 ) Beef Consumption: Health Implications and Facts (2:04:06) Carbon Opportunity Costs: Debunking Common Misconceptions (2:08:22) Cultivating Self-Love: Practical Approaches (2:15:22) Navigating Romantic Relationships and Loneliness: A Comprehensive Look (2:20:22) The Human Brain Explored: Comparing Old and New Perspectives (2:24:32) Habit Change Strategies: Effective Techniques (2:28:55) Outro (2:40:16) Learn more about today's guests and listen to previous episodes via the full show notes. Sponsors: If you want to improve your health, you need to measure where you're currently at. InsideTracker analyses up to 48 blood biomarkers including ApoB, LDL, HDL, A1C, and more before giving you advice to optimise your health. Get a 20% discount on your first order at insidetracker.com/simon. Eimele Essential 8 is a comprehensive multivitamin that is scientifically formulated to complement your plant-rich diet, increase and sustain your energy, support the immune system, as well as heart and brain health. Head to Eimele.com and use code SIMON at checkout for 10% off your first order. Whoop, the most advanced fitness and health wearable available. Your personalised fitness and health coach to recover faster, sleep better, and train smarter. Claim your first month free on join.whoop.com/simon. Want to support the show? The best way to support the show is to use the products and services offered by our sponsors. To check them out, and enjoy great savings, visit theproof.com/friends. You can also show your support by leaving a review on the Apple Podcast app and/or sharing your favourite episodes with your friends and family. Simon Hill, MSc, BSc (Hons) Creator of theproof.com and host of The Proof with Simon Hill Author of The Proof is in the Plants Watch the episodes on YouTube or listen on Apple/Spotify Connect with me on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook Nourish your gut with my Plant-Based Ferments Guide Download my complimentary Two-Week Meal Plan and high protein Plant Performance recipe book

Episode #284. Is grass-fed beef truly the eco-friendly choice? Join me as I sit down with George Monbiot, acclaimed environmental activist and author, to challenge popular beliefs about regenerative agriculture. Discover the debate on carbon offsetting, the global impact of cattle ranching, and uncover why George believes that our current understanding might just be the world's most significant greenwash. Specifically, we discuss: Introduction (00:00) Who is Allan Savory? Exploring the "Is Livestock Grazing Vital for Climate Change Mitigation?" Debate (01:22) The Environmental Impact of Beef Consumption: Allan Savory's Claims and Evidence (05:39) The Flaws in Allan Savory's Supporting Studies (13:26) Soil Carbon Saturation and Greenhouse Gas Emissions (18:05) The Distinction Between Carbon Storage and Carbon Sequestration (21:04) Misunderstandings Surrounding Carbon Credit Schemes (26:17) Identifying Genuine Carbon Offset Programmes (33:04) Overlooking Carbon Opportunity Costs: Common Misconceptions (34:28) Debunking the Myth: Is Carbon Opportunity Cost a Grand Deception? (41:26) Is It Too Late for Climate Change Reversal? (52:03) Allan Savory's Assertions in Light of Contrary Evidence (57:54) George Monbiot Reflects on the Calibre of His Debate with Allan Savory (1:09:20) Livestock Farming and Farmer Revenues: Dispelling Myths (1:12:21) George Monbiot Shares His Sentiments on the Degradation of the Natural World (1:20:15) Why It Matters: The Imperative to Care (1:22:50) Outro (1:24:27) You can find a comprehensive database of George Monbiot's work on his website, https://www.monbiot.com/, which encompasses his journalistic work and books. Get his book ‘Regenesis' here. Connect with him on Twitter/X, Instagram, and Threads. Search “George Monbiot” on YouTube to find a wealth of videos like his short film with Greta Thunberg, this TED Talk, and this fascinating video about wolves and the balance of nature. If you missed George Monbiot's first episode on The Proof, addressing food, politics, and the environment, make sure to listen to it here. Optimise your health with InsideTracker's biomarker analysis. Get exclusive access to InsideTracker's new ApoB test, and a significant discount at insidetracker.com/simon. Enjoy, friends. Simon Want to support the show? The best way to support the show is to use the products and services offered by our sponsors. To check them out, and enjoy great savings, visit theproof.com/friends. You can also show your support by leaving a review on the Apple Podcast app and/or sharing your favourite episodes with your friends and family. Simon Hill, MSc, BSc (Hons) Creator of theproof.com and host of The Proof with Simon Hill Author of The Proof is in the Plants Watch the episodes on YouTube or listen on Apple/Spotify Connect with me on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook Nourish your gut with my Plant-Based Ferments Guide Download my complimentary Two-Week Meal Plan and high protein Plant Performance recipe book

This is the second instalment of our two-part debate, with George Monbiot, Guardian columnist, environmental campaigner and author of Regenesis: Feeding the World without Devouring the Planet, arguing for the motion We Should All Go Vegan. Patrick Holden, Founder and chief executive of the Sustainable Food Trust, argues against it. Our chair is Alice Thomson, Columnist and interviewer at The Times. Livestock farming contributes 14.5% of human-produced greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Farm animals belch out massive amounts of methane, one of the most harmful greenhouse gases. They are also extremely wasteful of resources, using up 83% of farmland worldwide while providing only 18% of our calories, guzzling soya and grain that could feed humans more efficiently, and requiring vast amounts of water. As for our health, vegan sports stars such as Venus and Serena Williams and Lewis Hamilton prove that you can be superfit on a plant-based diet, and research has linked vegan diets to lower rates of some diseases. That's the argument made by the vegan lobby. But there are many experts who disagree on all counts. Take the environment. Few people realise the high carbon cost of growing crops – some 15-20% of the world's CO2 output comes from ploughing – and that plants grown for food require vast amounts of fertiliser and pesticides that are derived from fossil fuels. Who's right and who's wrong?  We'd love to hear your feedback and what you think we should talk about next, who we should have on and what our future debates should be.  Send us an email or voice note with your thoughts to podcasts@intelligencesquared.com or Tweet us @intelligence2.  And if you'd like to support our mission to foster honest debate and compelling conversations, as well as ad-free podcasts, exclusive bonus content, early access and much more, become a supporter of Intelligence Squared. Just visit intelligencesquared.com/membership to find out more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices